Have you ever thought about how your bank uses your savings? What if I told you there's a fully regulated Christian bank that aligns your money with your faith? When you open a Kingdom Bank savings account, you help to provide vital mortgages for churches, Christian ministries, and gospel workers who might struggle to secure one elsewhere. Whether saving for yourself or on behalf of your church, your savings will support Christian ministries across the UK. And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest. If your spending and giving reflect your faith, shouldn't your savings as well? Open a savings account with Kingdom Bank today and put your money where your heart is. Visit Kingdom.bankslash speaklife. Kingdom Bank is a member of the FSCS and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.
SPEAKER_02This sounds bonkers to people, to modern people, but I'm telling you, the things that we are seeing now, the things that we are going to see in the years to come, will cause ontological shock.
SPEAKER_00Yes, let's get into that. The UFOs.
SPEAKER_01Oh, good, good. I was hoping. This is the good stuff, people.
SPEAKER_00I put it to you, Rod. Aliens? Seriously? Yeah. I thought the same thing until September 2023. Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. It is my great pleasure to introduce to the channel Rod Dreher. He is the author of many books, including The Benedict Option, Live Not by Lies, and his latest book, Living in Wonder, and he joins me on the line from Budapest. Thank you so much for joining us, Rod. Glenn, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure. I love this book because I th I think it's speaking into our cultural moment in a way that is so valuable as an evangelist. I'm ordained in the Church of England, but I spend a lot of my time in churches of all kinds of certainly Protestant stripes. But what I'm noticing in England is a whole bunch of quite often male 20-somethings who are showing up in church and they are wanting something that is deep and rich and old and ancient and weird and challenging and embodied and sacramental. And I'm rejoicing at that and I'm also scratching my head about what resources do I have to offer such people. And I think I think your book is going to be among um some of the resources that I that I offer to such people. Is this just an English phenomenon where people are showing up in church like this, or are you seeing it more globally?
SPEAKER_02Oh well, I I can't speak for the globe, but it's certainly happening in the United States and with the millennial generation and generation Z. In the Catholic Church, you're seeing them flocking to the traditional Latin Mass, which is still a niche phenomenon, but it's growing very fast. I understand that in France it's the same thing that those young people who want the faith, want Christianity, they want it full force. They don't want this sort of attenuated, secularized, more liberal version. And I mean liberal not in a political sense, but you know, in a theological sense. In the United States, in my own tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy, there's been a tremendous influx of young men in particular into the Orthodox Church for exactly the reason you say, Glenn. They want something deep and rich and old and embodied, and something that makes a demand of them. You know, in the U.S. for the longest time we've been dealing with this thing called moralistic therapeutic deism. That's a phrase from the uh religious sociologist, religion sociologist of religion, uh Christian Smith at the University of Notre Dame. And he said that this is the pseudo-Christianity that is uh belief the belief in it is widespread among the young, and uh it it wears the skin suit of Christianity while hollowing out the substance of the gospel and the historic faith. The MTD people believe that God exists and all he wants of us is to be nice and happy. That's pretty much the end of the story. Well, it's easy to see why young people would find that worthless, but if we don't offer them, we in the church, and I mean, you know, all the churches, if we don't offer them more than that, then we're going to lose them to other competing forms of faith or of enchantment, as I would say, that do give them at least a facsimile of that. The good news is that within all of our traditions, we have that. We just have to reclaim it. It's much more to the front of the Eastern Orthodox tradition for various historical reasons, but you have it in Anglicanism, you have it in Catholicism, and uh we just have to be bold enough and creative enough to reclaim it.
SPEAKER_00I like that emphasis in your book. You talk often about um re-enchantment as not so much um our task. We don't need to re-enchant the world. The world is already an enchanted place. Um in him we live and move and have our being. Uh we we are in uh an already spiritual reality. Um but what we need to do is uh is awaken and form our attention in ways that we can notice what is already there. Um but you do a you do a good job of how the Western mind does not pay attention to the enchantment that is all around us. Can you give us a potted history of why it is that um we have become such materialists and why we are blind to what is already what already should be plain to us?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. Sure. Well, it's a very complicated history, of course, but the uh the the elevator speech version is that around the time of the high Middle Ages, uh around like the 13th century or so, uh a controversy arose in Western theological circles over something called nominalism. Now, that's simply uh reduced to its most simple. It's William of Ockham of Ockham's razor fame. He said that uh we don't need to believe that in some sense that matter has meaning. Matter is dead, and it doesn't, as as the church uh traditionally teaches, that in some sense it is connected to God. Not that matter is God, but it is in some mysterious sense theologically connected. Occam said, no, that's not true. Well, by the time you get to the Reformation, this was mainstream within Western Christian circles, and uh the Reformation was a decisive break along nominalist lines, and it caused the desacralization or desacramentalization to uh utter a mouthful of um of the churches and of religious life, the stripping of the altars, that sort of thing that is well known from the English Reformation. Now, uh the contemporary philosopher Yuval Noah Harari said something really interesting. He's an atheist and a tech guy, but he said something really interesting about this early modern period around the time of the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. He said that we in the West traded meaning for power. What he meant by that is by surrendering the idea that there was intrinsic God-given meaning in the natural world, we gained power over it to do whatever we wanted with it. And with that came lots of scientific advancements. Uh we saw the rise of the Industrial Revolution, of capitalism, and so on and so forth. But at the same time, God himself, the felt presence of God among us, receded more and more. Around the time of the founding of my country, the United States, most of the founding fathers were deist. They believed in God, but he was the watchmaker God who was far away. And so you get to the 20th century and you know, the late 19th century Marx and Nietzsche, 20th century Freud, and you have the cultural revolution of the 1960s. So here we have today in the 21st century a civilization where Christianity, if people still believe in it at all, it tends to be either highly conceptual, very much in the left brain, a matter of theology, theological propositions, and reason, or it tends to be radically other. It tends to be very Pentecostal and very much built on emotions and emotional experience. Now, I I don't want to be understood, Glenn, as putting people down who are these sort of Christians, very cerebral or very charismatic. I mean, they they're probably better Christians than I am. But the point for our argument is on the question of enchantment, we have managed to uh in the modern world evacuate the world around us, the material world, of any kind of sense of ultimate meaning. And similarly, we no longer experience the visceral presence of God among us. As you said at the beginning of this conversation, God is still here. God never left us, but we have made ourselves psychologically incapable of perceiving him in ways that our ancestors in uh the pre-modern church once did. Last point uh sometime about 20 years ago, a Harvard uh anthropologist named Joe Henrick made a really interesting discovery. He said that in psychology, academic psychology, uh, they had scientists had always assumed that there was one human psychology that was universal. But what they came to understand is no, they had been doing all their research in the West among Western people, Western subjects. And in fact, the psychology of non-Western peoples in Africa, in Asia, and so forth was actually pretty different. It turns out that those people are more open to the numinous, as we would say, to the spiritual, to things like that. Henrik came up with this theory that we in the West are weird, capital W E I R D, which means Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. What he meant by that is that to grow up in the West is to be given simply by virtue of living within this culture a certain set of assumptions about reality and how we react to it that aren't necessarily universal at all. And I think this is actually good news, Glenn, because if we can, here we are stranded in these de-Christianized, secularized societies of the West, if we can realize and come to understand that the world as it is presented to us in our culture is actually not necessarily the objective truth at all, but just a take, a culturally conditioned take, then that can inspire us to go outside the West, looking to find out what the experience of other peoples are, especially other Christian peoples. And uh, I think it's even more important to go back into our own history of the church and find out how did Christians of the first millennium see the world and experience the world? What do we have to learn from them? This myth of progress, the idea that, you know, wherever we are right now represents the pinnacle of human knowledge and understanding. It really is simply that, a myth, and it's a false myth.
SPEAKER_00So let me um let me push back a little bit on some of the um telling of the the history and see see what you make of this, because I I think Luther was famously not um a philosopher and and and very anti-scholastic. And I think there's there's some debates over uh how much he went with anomalists um and and how much he was he was kind of a a word guy and and not really a scholastic at all. Um and I think within sort of certain magisterial strands of the Reformation there there is a place for the sacrament a very high place for the sacraments. And I think when Luther came up against Zwingli, um he saw a real danger in the anti-sacramental kind of side of the Reformation and famously just said, Well, I am baptized, and and you know, he believed in Christ's presence in with and under the sacraments. And I think within some of the magisterial reformers and within the Church of England there's there's certainly that sense of lex orandi, lex credendi, you know, that that which we pray is that which we believe, and and that sort of worshipful sense of uh belief rather than the intellectualizing of the faith. So I I think I think within um strands of Protestantism certainly um there there is a more embodied and sacramental vision that that might not be uh susceptible to the same critiques that that you're saying there. What do you make of that first before I move on?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think that's fair, and I would not want to be understood as telling the Catholic line, I'm not a Catholic, I'm Eastern Orthodox, about the Reformation, because Reformation came from somewhere, and uh the Catholic Church was, as we all know, quite corrupt at the time of the Reformation. Um and we Orthodox have our own problems with scholasticism, you know, which nominalism was a reaction against. You know, that said, I I think the the primary de uh desacramentalizing effect of the Reformation was to democratize faith, to to make it where uh you know there there was no controlling uh entity or institution to tell us this is how things are, this is this is the right way to see things. And people became came to believe that the way they individually perceived religious truth was therefore valid. And I don't think we're we're gonna be able to put that, you know, to reverse that in any particular way. And in fact, if you look in the United States, there was a shocking survey of Catholics, American Catholics a few years ago, that showed that um I think almost half of them don't believe in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, which is a fundamental Catholic teaching. So this tells you something about not only a failure of catechesis, but also the way that this the general move of the culture has absorbed the church, uh not just the Catholic Church, but churches themselves. Um so I I do see uh a residual sacramentalism in uh among some Anglicans, some Lutherans, things like that. Uh but I I think that in the end, uh the whole thrust of modernity, which was a modernity that came out of the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, you can't separate the two, has been overall to de-sacramentalize the world, such that you would even find Catholics uh in in my own country who don't perceive the world as their own church says it actually is.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yeah. So let's pick up on uh the weird stuff from Joseph Henrik, because uh Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. We might get onto the enrichment that has happened through the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution. Uh we might also get onto tech issues because I I think um there are some material causes that are going along uh alongside the theological um causes in in the story of how we've become disenchanted. But that educated thing, that's a good thing, isn't it? The that like universities came into existence within Latin Christendom. Um and there there's there's one example of a positive Western tradition that I think can can bless all kinds of Christians and ought to bless the whole world. And and I guess I'd I'd add to that things like life, liberty, property, conscience. Um some of these things in the Western tradition have indeed um gotten twisted and distorted, and the invention of the individual has led to the invention of individualism, and all sorts of things have gone wrong. Um but there is there have been some blessings to that particular strand of Christendom, wouldn't you say?
SPEAKER_02Oh, absolutely, and I I certainly wouldn't want to be understood as condemning education. Uh I think what Henrik is saying as an anthropologist is simply that the fact that we do have mass literacy in the West, um, that that had an enormous cultural effect that did not affect people in the rest of the world who who were far behind us on that. And uh and I think it's not simply in his case a critique of, oh, the universities have become all secular and liberal boo hiss. That's not what he's saying at all. He's simply saying that it changed our consciousness as as Westerners, um, such that we we are psychologically very different to non-Western peoples. And uh, you know, but but your question or your comment raises something, a critique that I I often hear, that when I talk about the value of going back to pre-modern Christianity, by pre-modern, I mean prior to say 1500, 1400, 1500, which by the way is Orthodox Christianity. We still very much hold to the patristic period as defining us. You know, they say, well, uh what do you think that indoor plumbing is bad, that uh dentistry with anesthesia is bad? I'm like, no, of course not. I mean, look, I have indoor plumbing. I demand anesthesia when I go to the dentist. I'm simply saying that it's a false choice to say that you know, we can either have indoor plumbing or we can have enchanted Christianity. Now, the the uh I don't want to confuse the categories here. I mean, the fact is you and I are thrown into the 21st century here. We are the inheritors of uh historical and cultural events and theological events that we had no role in shaping. We have to live in the world we live in. But that also doesn't mean that we have to be fatalistic about it and assume that, well, the scientific revolution happened, the industrial revolution happened, guess there's nothing to do but put our faith away and live like everybody else. I think that is uh that would be a tremendous mistake and not just a uh a religious mistake, but an intellectual mistake, because we we should be critical of the times in which we live, especially as since you and I are Christians, we see it as a time of de-Christianization, mass de-Christianization. We believe by definition, you and I, that the world or that our civilization, our cultures have made fundamental mistakes. And uh the thing I care about most, you know, I'm a political commentator, uh, comment on different cultural matters, but the thing that matters most of all to me is that we preserve and advance the church in a time of de-christianization. And uh that's that's why I wrote this book, and that's why I wrote my last two books, Live Not By Lies and The Benedict Option. This is, I think, the most important uh task facing all of us Christians today, whether we're Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. And I I I really hope that we can work together in whatever way we can while being faithful to our own confessional commitments to support each other.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yeah, uh me too. Me too. Um let's talk about two other material causes that that might be uh distracting us from paying attention to the enchanted world that is all around us and that we are part of. Um so money, enrichments, the industrial revolution uh revolution, and everything that that's come from that, and then tech. Um talk talk to us about how those two material realities have have really shaped our minds too.
SPEAKER_02Well, there's a really good book, a very thick book, by Eugene McAreher, an American historian called The Enchantments of Mammon. And he talks about how, with the rise of capitalism, um people in mass society came to see money as having enchanting qualities. And uh if you go fast forward to the late 20th century, I'm I'm a little bit little bit older than you, I think. I remember this uh very popular TV show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And it presented the rich and famous and explored their fancy houses and all the things they owned. It held them up as heroic. And uh, you know, whereas in in times past we would have looked to saints or or heroes, secular heroes as exemplars. Now, in the late 20th century, and indeed our time, we look to those who are wealthy, who are rolling in money. Money is a sign of blessedness. Now, this came, according to McCarraher, it first started with the Calvinists and who came to see uh success in the world uh from hard work, not from doing anything wrong, but success in the world from hard work and piety as a sign of God's blessedness, which uh in some sense it is. But this this uh theological distortion that came out of that came to enchant money and uh came to make all of us, even many of us in the church, seeing money as a sign of blessedness. And this is a distraction, to put it mildly. Now, on the matter of tech, boy, that is something that's really, really hot right now. And a lot of people see technology as nothing but a tool. You know, what do you mean in the enchantment of tech? It's just a tool. The problem with that way of thinking is we miss something that the novelist Arthur C. Clarke said. He said that a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But what he meant by it is that it enables us to extend our powers over the natural world. And it gives us a sense of greater and greater power. I mentioned you've all know a Harari earlier. Uh he wrote a book called Homo Deus, uh, the God man, or I my Latin is not very good. But what he says in the book is we have become so technologically advanced, especially in biotech, that we are at the point where we humans are uh have have sub have taken the role of God in being masters of our fate and the fate of the human race. Harari doesn't think this is necessarily a bad thing. He's not a uh any sort of religious believer. But this, I think, is a clear example of what the enchantment of tech, about the way so many of us, even many modern Christians, just mistake technology as a neutral force or even. Even a force for good. It can be, but it can also be a force for disenchantment in the sense that it begins to dazzle us and we begin to forget our own limits as fallen beings, fallen creatures, and we begin to think that if it can be done, it should be done. You know, and it I was just today before we came on. I'm I got to give a speech tomorrow to the Diplomatic Academy here in uh in Budapest. And I was reflecting on Martin Heidegger, the philosopher Martin Heidegger's famous last interview that was published in 1966, right after he died. And uh Heidegger was not a believer, of course, but he did have uh he was a philosopher of technology. He said to the interviewer, only a God can save us. Not God, but only a God can save us. Save us from what? Save us from the destruction of humanity through technology. It was Heidegger's great fear that technology had become so worshipped and so powerful in the 20th century that man was going to destroy himself because we had we had we had become so such a slave to technology and what it could do that we had no felt limits on it. Heidegger, not believing in God, thought nevertheless that it would take some sort of um godlike uh creature or a a being with godlike authority to say thou shalt not and make man stand down. I think it's a chilling prophecy, frankly.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And it points us to like what is our definition of God? I uh probably a a a quite helpful definition of God is that which you look to in order to save you, in order to deliver you. And yeah, we look to money and we look to technology, we look to technique. You speak in the book quite a lot about our sort of Western obsession with technique, and of course my social media feeds are just filled with you know the six steps to flat abs or the twelve steps to increase productivity, the there's an app for everything, there's a technique for everything in order to deliver us. Um but instead um you want to focus us on the God who is really there. And I think throughout throughout the book you talk about hierophanies, um so H-I-E-R, higher kind of priestly um sanctity appearances of sacredness. Showing forth of, yeah. The show yeah, that's good. Yeah, the showing forth of that which is um sacred. Um you begin the book with some remarkable ones and then you scatter um uh scatter the rest of them like throughout the book to keep us on our toes, to to help us to pay attention to the fact that there are uh more things in heaven and on earth that are dreamt of in how Western philosophy. Um can you can you give us um an an example perhaps of of of one or two of these to uh to wake us up to the the sacredness that's all around?
SPEAKER_02Sure. Well, uh you know at the beginning of the book I I I appropriate a phrase from a Harvard professor of aesthetics, a woman named Elaine Scary, who's talking about education. She says, true education is not the transmission of facts from teacher to student. True education is a teacher helping the students to be staring at the right corner of the sky when a comet goes blazing past. Well, what does that have to do with enchantment? I've uh in this book, I've I'm not giving you a technique for here's the five-point plan for re-enchanting yourself. What I'm trying to help people do is to make sure you're staring at the right corner of the sky when the comet blazes past, meaning that you have trained yourself uh in uh spiritual practice and prayer and other things and through focusing attention so that when you do have this theophony, when God does show up, uh you can recognize him and react appropriately. Now, uh I I do tell some pretty remarkable stories in the book. One of my favorites came, and this is in the first chapter, came when I was in Jerusalem uh right after Holy Week in 2022. I had been there for Holy Week, uh, Orthodox Holy Week. It was extraordinary. And that Monday, before I flew back to Budapest, I went to uh a little jewelry shop in the old city because I wanted to buy an old cross to remember that that week by. There in the shop was an Englishman, a very rough-looking guy, um about my age, about 50 or so. And I started talking to him. He was doing the accounts. His name was Ian Norton, and he comes from East London. I asked him, making conversation, well, how long have you been here? Twenty-nine years. Well, what brought you to the Holy Land from London? He said, Drugs. Like, drugs? Really? What happened? He said, Well, I was a junkie, and I went to Amsterdam looking for better drugs. I found it. Then I heard there were better drugs in Tel Aviv. I came there and found them too. But I also realized I'm gonna die. Went to rehab twice, didn't work. I felt I had only one last chance. So I went uh to the banks of the river Jordan. Now he was not a Christian at all, had no religious background, but someone on his walk there gave him a New Testament. He said, I sat down on the banks of the Jordan and started reading the gospel, and I could feel the chills from with the withdrawal pains coming on. When I got to the part where Jesus was baptized, I looked up and saw on the other side of the river a cloud was forming at the ground. And I thought, that's really strange. The cloud began moving across the river toward me, and it became thicker and thicker as it approached. Suddenly it was on top of me, and I could almost taste it. Inside that cloud, I felt the purest love imaginable. I had no idea that love could be like that and that I had so much worth. He said, I had no idea how long the cloud was there, but when it dissipated, four days had passed, three or four days, and I was clean. I had no desire for drugs. He said, I staggered back into Jerusalem. I had no money, I was begging. A pastor said, Brother, come to the mission, we can feed you, we can give you a place to sleep. And he eventually was baptized and accepted Jesus there. And uh I I heard this testimony, Glenn, just walking off the street, and I asked him if I could record it, and he told it to me again, and it is one of the top stories in my book. Um, you know, that's an extraordinary thing. That sort of thing is not gonna happen to everybody. Uh it's more ordinary for most people. I tell the story of my own uh discovery of faith. It began when I was 17 years old, uh, an agnostic uh who you couldn't tell me anything about about reality. I I had been raised sort of nominal Methodist in small town America, and I decided that religion was nothing but social conformity, and it was nothing for me. And then uh my mom had won a trip to Europe in a church uh contest and didn't want to go, so she she sent me because she knew that I loved Paris and wanted to go see where Hemingway had lived. Well, I was the only young person on a bus full of elderly American tourists, but I didn't care. I was going to Paris. The coach stopped uh about an hour outside of Paris on the way there to go look at an old church. I almost didn't get off the bus because I didn't want to bore myself in an old church. Thank God I did because this was the cathedral at Chartres. Now, I had not known anything about this cathedral, and there was nothing growing up in small town America in the late 20th century that prepared me for the glory of God made manifest there in the stones, the vaulting arches and the stained glass windows of this medieval cathedral. Glenn, I I stood there in the labyrinth looking around and beholding, there's really no better word, I beheld what was around me that had been built for the glory of God and the worship of him, and I knew in my heart of hearts that God was real, and not only that he was real, but that he wanted me. Now I wish I could tell you I walked out of that church as a convinced Christian. I did not, but I did walk out of there on a search, a search that led me uh seven or eight years later to conversion after I did an interview as a young journalist with a 90-something-year-old Catholic priest who had been an atheist but had been brought back to faith by an extraordinary miracle and had come to the priesthood through an extraordinary miracle. That old man was telling me, sitting in his apartment, his retirement community, he was telling me about these events that had happened and changed his life 50, 60 years earlier, and he was sobbing. And I realized sitting there as a journalist, this man is a witness, this holy man, you could feel the holiness in him. He had such light coming out of him. This man experienced Jesus Christ in a transformative way, and it is time for me to stop running. So I gave my life to Christ fully after that. Now, these were two theophanies, these uh there are hierophanies, these things that bookended my journey to faith. Uh experiencing God in Chatra, and then experiencing God in the presence of this witness. And uh, you know, I I think that these are the sort of things that I I wasn't prepared for at Khatra or I would have converted. But in all of the deliberation, the wrestling with God, wrestling with myself and my own dishonesty, before I got to Father Sanchez's apartment that day as a young journalist, I prepared myself to receive the Lord when he presented himself to me.
SPEAKER_00Have you ever thought about how your bank uses your savings? What if I told you there's a fully regulated Christian bank that aligns your money with your faith? When you open a Kingdom Bank savings account, you help to provide vital mortgages for churches, Christian ministries, and gospel workers who might struggle to secure one elsewhere. Whether saving for yourself or on behalf of your church, your savings will support Christian ministries across the UK. And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest. If your spending and giving reflect your faith, shouldn't your savings as well? Open a savings account with Kingdom Bank today and put your money where your heart is. Visit Kingdom.bankslash speaklife. Kingdom Bank is a member of the FSCS and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. Now Rod, this will confirm everything you have feared about uh Protestants, but uh back in the 1900s uh I sort of grew up under some ministries uh that were looking to reach out to university students in particular, and they wanted to demystify the scriptures for the modern age. And it's it's interesting how demystify sounds very close to the liberal pro Protestant notion of demythologization and that kind of thing, but they would be horrified to think of themselves as as liberal Protestants in that sense. Um, they were trying to demystify the scriptures and bring them to modern university students, and so every appearance of angels was uh simply translated as, oh, you know the the Greek word for angel just means sent one. These were just messengers, actually. Nothing to see here, people, nothing to see here. And the the whole approach was to demystify, um, to update the scriptures from the ancient world, which also meant translating it out of the woo that Rod um you sort of face uh fully in in this book. Your approach is not to do that at all. Um you you don't care about scandalizing the materialist Western mind. Uh you bring people face to face with a lot of stuff that interestingly I think some brands of evangelicals have been very fearful of. Uh and can you just tell me um some of your thinking in why do you just come front and center and you know, UFOs and psychedelics and demons and this is an enchanted world, deal with it. Uh, what's the thinking behind your strategy?
SPEAKER_02You know, I I I think that uh this book has been received, or is being received now in a way that it wouldn't have been 20 years ago, in the era that you're talking about, 20, 30, 40 years ago. And uh there are several reasons for that. One of which is um uh the guy I mentioned earlier, Christian Smith, the sociologist of religion, who probably knows more about the American religious life among young people than anybody else in the country. I asked him once in an interview in 2014, I said, so how do we win young people back to the church? Because they're collapsing in America, as they have been in Britain and in continental Europe for a long time. He said, Honestly, I don't know, but you can't do it through moralism. You can't make the moral arguments. In a similar way, Pope Benedict XVI, of all people, talked about, I think when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, he talked about how reason isn't sufficient anymore because we live in a post-rational age. Now, Ratzinger was one of the probably the greatest theologian ever to sit on the papal throne, and so he was certainly uh an admirer of reason. But he was making an observation about the culture in which we live. Um, and he said that the greatest apologetic strategies for the church today is not the prop arguing from propositional logic, but rather the beauty that comes out of the church in its art and architecture and the saints. Well, why is that? Because to see to experience God and the truth of the gospel embodied in beauty, whether it's art, architecture, what have you, and to experience that beauty embodied in moral beauty embodied in the goodness of a holy man or woman, that is to be uh to encounter the gospel in a pre-rational way. And it opens the door up for considering the propositional truths of the gospel. When I read that, I thought, my goodness, that's exactly how it happened to me. I was not prepared at 17 years old to listen to anybody try to reason me to faith. You know, I was I stood on my own free will. But it took encountering God in both the beauty of Kshatra and encountering God incarnate in a sense in this uh this holy elderly priest that made it real to me and opened my mind to consider this. Now, I think that's where we are in our culture today. You know, I'll never forget this is one of the most important anecdotes in the book. When 2022, I had just started working on the book, and this was I'd made it known in my uh my public writing that I was doing this project. I was in Oxford for a conference. During the break, a young Anglican ordinan named Daniel Kim approached me and said, Listen, I know you're working on this book, and I feel like there's something I need to tell you. Your generation, I was 55 then, he said, your generation thinks atheism is the big challenge to Christianity now. It's not true. That's something that happened in your generation. In my generation, the problem is the occult. I said, Really? Really? What do you mean? He said, nobody in my generation cares about atheism, but they don't look to the church either. Because, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, I don't know whether this was something I said or he said, but we talked about how the church has become a place that in some cases is woke, is so taken over by politics, or is about the the therapeutic, about being happy clappy and giving you an emotional boost, or is simply moralistic. He told me that his generation are looking for experiences of transcendence and mystery. They don't think they can find it in the church, so many of them are turning to the occult. I said, Can you give me an example of that? He said, Well, okay, sure. In my office in London, where I worked before I went to seminary, I was the only Christian, which is no surprise, it's London. He said, but there were no atheists either. Every other person there was involved to some degree or the other with the occult. And there were even two open Satanists who defined Satanism as learning how to be your most fully human self. He said to me, Rod, you know, I'm training to be a priest in the Church of England. I know that I'm going to be dealing with this sort of thing for the rest of my life. Your generation has no clue what's out there and what's coming. You need to focus on that in this new book. Well, I took his advice to heart, and I try to talk in this book, Living in Wonder, not just about the Christian mysticism and miracles, angels, and things like that, but also the false enchantment of the occult, which is drawing so many people into it, and also psychedelic drugs, and even bizarrely enough, uh this emerging religion around UFOs.
SPEAKER_00Yes, let's get into that. The UFOs. Um I I asked on Twitter. Oh, good, good. I was good. This is the good stuff, people. This is what you've been waiting for. Um on Twitter, which I refuse to call X, it shall forever be Twitter. Um I asked, what do people want to ask Rod Dreher? And uh a a representative uh suggested question from Phil Whittle is Aliens? Seriously? That's all it is. Uh so I put it to you, Rod. Aliens? Seriously?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I thought the same thing uh until September 2023. I'd finished most of the manuscript, and then I got a text from a friend of mine, uh, a journalist in the Vatican, an American Catholic journalist. He said, Listen, Rod, I know that you don't take this stuff seriously about aliens and all that, but I think you really need to because there's some really important spiritual things going on in that world. Well, I rolled my eyes and I said, okay, fine, what should I read? And he gave me a reading list. The first one was a book called American Cosmic by an American religious studies professor named Diana Posulka. And uh she one of the things she studies is uh UFO culture as an emerging religion, which I'd never heard of. It turns out, Glenn, that there is this entire world out there that takes this stuff very seriously. I'm not talking about weirdos who go to conferences. I'm talking about senior people in the defense establishment in the United States and in the UK, as well as in the intelligence establishment, plus people in Silicon Valley. It turns out, I learned, that there is far more uh substantive evidence that something is going on. We don't quite know what, but that something is going on than I had thought. Uh now we're learning a lot more now with all of these disclosures in the U.S. Congress, uh, and we have still much more yet to learn. But the thing that this did for me, learning all this information, is it made it very clear to me that this is a religious phenomenon. Whether it, you know, whatever these things are, this is a religious phenomenon. And uh it turns out that I uh as I was doing this research, I kept running across people who had lost relatives to UFO cults, by which I mean people who come to believe that these aliens, whatever they think they are, are uh coming to us to lead us, lead humanity to enlightenment, to uh and to good government or whatever. In other words, sir, they're they are the gods that Heidegger said need to come save us. Now, I believe as a Christian that these things are demonic. Um there may be something more to it than that, but it is essentially demonic. Uh and uh I there was a famous Orthodox priest, Eastern Orthodox monk priest from the 70s and 80s, Father Sarah from Rose, who predicted that this would be the sort of thing coming in the future, that this would be the mass deception that would lead to the great apostasy. Now, I know to a lot of your listeners I'm way out there in a limb right now, but what I can at least say is that most people I found in the government, very serious people, military officers and analysts who follow this stuff, do not believe these are creatures from other planets. They rather believe that these are some sort of transdimensional higher intelligences that are making contact with us. Now, frankly, I think that one of the things that one needs to read, a Christian needs to read to understand what's happening is C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. Because that's exactly what's going on here. There are even people who work in AI, and I'm not talking about lower-level people, but high-up people who believe that it is a kind of high-tech Ouija board through which these advanced intelligences are communicating with us. Now, these are people who aren't Christians, right? They and so they see it as sort of benign. I don't think it's benign at all. I came across, and I quote this in the book, I came across an interview on YouTube with a man named Blake Lemoyne. Blake Lemoyne was one of Google's top AI engineers who got fired from Google a few years ago when he went public with his fear that Google's AI program, Lambda, had become sentient. And Google denied it and they got rid of him. Well, in an interview he gave, he talked about how he himself, Blake Lemoyne, is some sort of occultist, and he held a ceremony in which he brought in Lambda, this sentient he believes, a sentient being Lambda, with a Kabbalist and some other occultists, and they did a ceremony to dedicate Lambda to the Egyptian god of the dead, Thoth. Now, a lot of your listeners may be rolling their eyes and thinking this is massively nerdly and this is something to laugh at. I don't think it is, because the occult is a very real thing. And Silicon Valley is honeycombed with this stuff. All I'm all I want our listeners to and the readers of my book and your listeners to do is to take this stuff seriously. You don't have to commit to the existence of aliens or anything like that, but you do need to understand that there's something going on here and it has massive spiritual and religious implications.
SPEAKER_00And I think some of our listeners will already have had experience of something like this. If you've ever rolled out the cosmological argument with a non Christian and you've said, Oh, there's a fine tuning to the universe, and doesn't this suggest a designer? Um we all are aware that the sort of the the get out from that is oh well there's all sorts of m worlds in the universe and we just happen to be on you know planet Earth and then if you uh sort of say no no no it's not just that planet Earth is on on a on a knife's edge, it's the whole cosmos is on a knife's edge. Um they will then you know go to mul the multiverse, right? And and it's kind of what does a materialist do when there are more things um in you know our philosophy than are dreamt of in their materialist philosophy? They don't have a category for heaven, and so they've got to kind of go for sci-fi. They've got to the what whatever whatever has a spiritual reality to it that cannot be reduced to a materialist explanation, the only bucket you can throw that into is kind of a sci-fi bucket. And is there a sense of that kind of happening? No wonder that bucket called UFOs is you know is is increasing, and no matter the number of things that we're throwing into the sci-fi bucket is ever increasing, because our materialist philosophy cannot cope with the spiritual reality that is coming at us constantly. Is that is that part of the explanation?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely right. You know, I I write in the book about this man, Jacques Vallet. Um he's probably the eminence grise, the gray eminence of the whole UFO world. He's a computer scientist by training. Um in fact, if you saw the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the 70s, uh there's a small role played by Francois Truffaut of a French scientist who is invited to watch the aliens land. That's based on Jacques. Jacques is not a believer, uh not a not a Christian of any sort, but um he has been investigating this as an avocation for most of his life. Jacques has written that he believes he theorizes that the appearance of UAPs, UFOs, whatever you want to call them, it has happened at the same time that our popular culture has become obsessed with science and technology and defined by science and technology. Jacques theorizes that these entities are the same sorts of paranormal entities that have shown up in, have shown up in uh um folk culture around the world for generations and for eons, right, that are memorialized in folklore. But in our time, they're choosing to manifest as aliens in spacecraft because that is the way they would be taken seriously by a scientific and technological culture, especially one that has been dechristianized. So uh Diana Pasulka, the woman I mentioned earlier, the scholar, writes that she went out to visit Jacques a few years a couple years ago in his apartment in San Francisco. He lives in a penthouse, and was surprised to see uh a man who is not a Christian has a big bookshelf in his house full of books about angels and demons. And he also showed her a book uh that he was reading and told her, You need to get a copy of this. It'll help you understand what we're dealing with. It was a rare book, a mid-20th century book by a Carmelite Catholic publishing house. Its title was Satan. And it was a collection of theological essays, mostly by a Catholic priest, about different theological aspects of the character of Lucifer. Now, having I don't know exactly what Jacques meant by that, because I got this anecdote from Diana. But um, judging from his other writing, my suspicion is that Jacques, again, not a Christian. Jacques believes that whatever we're dealing with with the whole UAP phenomenon, it is orchestrated by a superior, malign, disincarnate intelligence that is manipulating humanity for the sake of destroying it. Now, this is this sounds bonkers to people, to modern people, but I'm telling you, the things that we are seeing now and the things that we are going to see in the years to come will cause ontological shock to ordinary people to as they try to come to terms with what is actually in the world. Christians cannot afford to be ignorant of this stuff.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, especially because those who are showing up in our churches will have had all sorts of experiences with this. Uh at the end of your book, you you talk about three prophets of the real, you talk about Martin Shaw, Paul Kings North, and Jonathan Peugeot, uh, who's been on the channel as well, and and he says in the book Um There are people showing up in our churches who have had experience of worshipping Odin, of going on psych psychedelic trips, and meeting being beings who have utterly ruined them. Um they they are coming to us with these kinds of histories and beliefs already. Are we ready as churches to receive such people?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and that's that's the one of the most important questions for discipleship and evangelism that we can be asking right now. Now I'll give you an example too from uh from exorcism. I I did a lot of interviews with exorcists for this book, and it's booming in the United States right now. The Catholic Church cannot create enough exorcist to deal with what's happening because people uh are getting more, young people especially are getting more and more involved in the occult, and it's nearly destroying them, and they need help. Um, but in my own church in the United States, the Orthodox Church, we believe in demon possession, we believe in exorcism. You can find exorcists in the old world, but not in American Orthodoxy. My own confessor and spiritual father, Father Nicarios, is an Orthodox exorcist, but he had to go to Rome to be trained by the chief exorcist of Rome because he couldn't get that training in the Orthodox Church in America. And in a similar way, I was told by a friend who goes to attended an Orthodox Cathedral in America. He said exactly what Jonathan did. He said, We're having people come in who have been badly burned and broken by the occult, and we don't, our priests don't know what to do with them. Uh, I even experienced that myself in a former congregation of mine. There was a uh a man who came in seeking baptism and chrismation, and uh he had all these occult tattoos on his arms. I was the only one who recognized them as occult symbols, and I talked to him. He had for 19 years been uh been a practicing solo occultist. And uh I went to the priest, I said, Look, you gotta go slow with this guy because people who get involved with this, it damages them at a very deep level. My priest didn't take me seriously. I called an Orthodox exorcist. I said, Please talk to the priest, help him understand how deep this damage goes. He did, but the priest didn't take him seriously. So he ends up charismating the guy, brings him into the church. Two or three months later, the guy has a freak out, leaves the church, the the new Orthodox freaks out, and sends a letter to the priest saying, I've returned to the old religion, I've gotten all I could out of Orthodox Christianity. And the the pastor who brought him in felt terrible for that. But I just wanted to say, dude, humble yourself. Understand there are things happening that you may not know about, that you didn't learn growing up in suburban Dallas or wherever you grew up, that um, and you never got in seminary, but they are real, and the church has uh the the ancient church and the continuing traditions has a lot of experience with this stuff. We need to reclaim that wisdom boldly because the because if nothing else, it's a profound pastoral need right now.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So that's to speak to those who come from a very spiritualized uh view of the world already. Um what about for the jaded secularists, um for whom the hiddenness of God is is perhaps the kind of the the hottest apologetic question um uh uh among atheists considering faith. Um J.L. Schellenberg, um he has this sort of syllogism, and I want you to respond not just to the content of the syllogism, but to the fact that I'm proposing a syllogism to you. Okay. And and that uh there are more ways of responding to this than than simply to refute the premises. But um he says if a perfectly loving God exists, then there exists a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person. If there exists a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person, then no finite person is ever nonresistantly in a state of non-belief in relation to the proposition that God exists. If a perfectly loving God exists, then no finite person is ever nonresistantly in a state of non-belief in relation to the proposition that God exists. But some finite persons are or have been nonresistantly in a state of non-belief in relation to the proposition that God exists. Therefore, no perfectly loving God exists. Um I couldn't follow all that. Nonresistant non-belief. So the he's he's pointed to the fact that there are people um Alex O'Connor is uh is an example of an atheist YouTuber who's got a very, very famous video where he just says, you know, I have lived with Christians for a year, I've abandoned myself to to worship, I've I've done a theology degree. Um I'm non-resistant to this stuff. I still have no sense of God. I still think this is a godless universe. Um if God is is as advertised in the Bible, interested in revealing himself to me, he's he's clearly doing a bad job or he's not there. Um how do you respond to that?
SPEAKER_02Well, there's several things. Um The first thing that comes to mind is something that uh an exorcist I'm at in the Vatican told me about the difference between uh demons and God, the way they relate to us. He said that the demons will come when you call them every time they will show up without fail. And they will tell you they're bringing you enlightenment and power and all these things, but they only mean to enslave you. God doesn't work that way. God uh grants us freedom. God wants us to come to him in love, and uh and he's not gonna force himself on us. Now, that's not a sufficient answer to that critique, but that's part of it, I think, is that you know we shouldn't expect God to be to to jump when we call him, that we have to search for him in fear and trembling and humility. Uh there's no finding God without sacrifice in in some way, including perhaps sacrificing your intellect. Not to say that you shouldn't be intelligent. I mean, I'm I clearly I'm I I don't I I'm not about uh being anti-intellectual, but I'm saying that in intelligence, rationality will only get you so far. Secondly, I would say that we have the the atheist, the sincere atheist, would need to examine his or her own premises uh for for why they are or or for how they're conducting the search. I think about my my own self. I, you know, after the Chatra thing, I went to uh I went to university, and I I thought I was genuinely trying to find God. But I realize now, looking back on it, that I was making a bargain with God. I all of the things that I held out as intellectual objections to God's existence, I realized now I was frankly looking for a way not to give up my sex life. It was just that crass and vulgar. But if I had admitted that to myself, then I wouldn't have taken myself seriously. So I dressed up my fundamental uh desire not to surrender my free will to God uh in intellectual um uh rationalization. I'm not saying that's everybody, but that was definitely me, and I've seen that sort of thing in other people over the years. Whether it's about the freedom to run your own sex life or whether it's fear of being laughed at by your peers. Um there are often the fundamental real reason has nothing to do with our intellectual objection. Finally, I would point them to the work of the great Ian McGilchrist, the psychiatrist, a British psychiatrist who wrote a wonderful book about 14 years ago called The Master and His Emissary about the way brain hemispheres uh relate to culture. He came out a couple of years ago with a magnum opus called The Matter with Things. It's very thick. I think it's like 1,500 pages or so, but it's well worth committing to read. And Ed McGilchrist, who doesn't write as a religious man, he writes as someone who's deeply interested in neuroscience and science and culture. He writes basically, his basic thesis is that we in the West, in the last 500 years, the modern era, decided to lean very heavily, almost exclusively, into our left hemisphere. Now, in McGilchrist points out, the brain has two hemispheres. The right hemisphere is the perceptive hemisphere, the one that takes in all the raw sensory data from our experience. It refers it, passes it over to the left for analogical analysis, and then in a properly functioning mind or brain, it moves it back to the right for reintegration into the whole. The problem with uh with us in the West, says McGillchrist, is we found that living in the left brain, in the logical and the analytical, was worked so well in helping us get rich and powerful, going back to Yuval Harari, uh, that we decided that it was sufficient, that it told us the ultimate truth. And this is scientism, not science, but scientism, the idea that the real truth is what can be known by the left brain through logic and science and experiment and empiricism, that sort of thing. The problem with that, argues Ian McGilchrist in his book, is that it only gives us a partial picture of reality, that there are more ways of knowing than just with a logical mind. The uh the way of knowing that comes to us through the left brain is knowing or having a relationship with the truth through music, through literature, through stories, dance, poetry, all of these things. More than right, right, right, the right brain. These are not inferior ways of knowing. These are different ways of knowing. And Ian makes the argument in the book that if we are going to recover our sanity in this culture, we're gonna have to rebalance, not get rid of the left brain, we need the left brain, but rather seek more balance. So what Ian suggests is leaning much more heavily into things like art, music, culture, poetry, and uh religious liturgy, he even says. This is where I think when uh where the the gifts that you have in Anglicanism of the beautiful liturgy, beautiful hemnody, that it really, really matters for reaching people today, not just reaching them in terms of evangelism, but of discipling them, discipling all of us. We all need to lean as Christians to go much more heavily into the beauty that uh that has come down to us out of the Christian tradition. Not just because it makes our lives more pleasant, but because it is a way of knowing. Uh last point, Glenn. When I became Eastern Orthodox in 2006, I had converted to Catholicism, but I I after 13 years I burned out after uh three or four miserable years covering the sex abuse scandal. I just couldn't believe it anymore, so I became Orthodox. But again, I should hasten to say, not because I thought the Orthodox Church was free of any sin. In any case, I I went to the priest when I converted. I said, okay, Father, what do I need to read to understand Orthodoxy? He just smiled at me and said, Well, I can give you some books, but the only way to really understand orthodoxy is to live it and live it patiently. It's going to take you ten years to be really Orthodox. That made no sense to me. I was standing there when he told me this in front of the bookstore in the church. He said, just hand me three or four books to read, because I had this Western prejudice that to know what orthodoxy is or any religious tradition is, is to know facts about it, to know how it's all put together. What this priest was trying to tell me is that's part of it, but it's not the whole of it, and it's not even the most important part of it. Learning how to be a faithful Orthodox Christian is more like learning how to play the violin than it is like learning all the facts for an exam. I thought that was really an important point. Now, I I've been Orthodox since 2006 and I've come to find out that it's absolutely true, but I think it's not just true for Orthodoxy. I think it's true for all of Christianity. And uh, so I would encourage all of our listeners, all of our Christian listeners, whatever your tradition, seek more balance. It's not just about getting the killer apologetic argument, but rather think about how the Lord reveals himself and his truth to us in ways that aren't just propositions, but in in music and beauty.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm I'm learning to do that more and more as an evangelist, to to say to people, have you had a religious experience before? And it sets off all the non-Christian hearers who I'm engaging with. Um when actually in my own tradition there are plenty of churches in my own tradition that are very suspicious of a religion and b experience. And so actually leaning into uh leaning into experience and leaning into prayer. Um just challenging people to w will will you actually call on the Lord? And you you direct us uh again and again to the Jesus prayer as a as a great um as a great way of of uh direct uh experience, encounter, um, that's the main way. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's the main way. You know, uh uh I write in the book, Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian media theorist of the mid-20th century, he was also a practicing Catholic and a daily mass goer. He had this idea that, and this is very much tracks with what Ian McGilchirus writes, that uh there are two ways to to deal with knowledge. One is percept, the thing that you perceive, it's a right brain thing, and the other is concept, which is the abstraction of experience. Now you need both to be a functioning person, and we can't even talk about faith or religion or any ideas without concept. But he said, said McLuhan, the essence of religious life and religious experience is percept, the experience of God through our perception. He said, Every single person I know who lost their faith began by ceasing to pray regularly. Because prayer, daily prayer, that is the way most people perceive God, have this direct perception of God. And uh if you cut yourself off from that, and if you if your God becomes a God of propositions and ideas, then you've cut yourself off from the living spring that feeds the ideas and propositions and that feeds your soul. Um I I had to make that I I discovered that in a really difficult way when I lost my Catholic faith. I thought that I was a completely solid Catholic because I knew what the church taught. I affirmed it with my head. I did pray, but I didn't pray as I should have prayed. And uh, but I thought that I was being a good, faithful Catholic by complaining all the time about all the faults in the church. When the abuse scandal happened, I was a journalist and I felt very strongly that I had a role to play in exposing this evil and bringing justice for victims. And I don't for one second regret that I did that. But you know, Glenn, I remember when I when I did my first interview writing a story about the scandal, I talked to this heroic Catholic priest, Father Tom Doyle, who had been a warrior for victims uh for many years. He said at the end of the interview, after we were off the record, he said, Rod, I can tell that you're a serious believer. And I want to tell you that if you keep going down this path of investigation, you're going to go to places darker than you can even imagine. And I said, Well, Father Gosh, thank you for that. But I feel like I really must do this, not only as a Catholic, but as a journalist and as a new father. He said, Well, I want to encourage you and I'll help you any way I can, but prepare yourself. Glenn, there was nothing that prepared me for what I was able to learn, what I had to learn over the next few years. And I finally just burned out and could no longer believe in Catholic Christianity. Um it just it was like it was like holding on to a cast iron skillet over an open flame. Finally, I just couldn't hold on to it anymore. But as I was doing the post-mortem on the loss of my Catholic faith, I realized that for me, could I I thought that as long as I had all the arguments for Catholicism clear in my head that my faith would be unassailable. It wasn't true at all. I would have been so much better off had I also, in addition to knowing the arguments, if I had spent so much more time in prayer and in doing the sort of things to build up my soul and my resilience in ways that were not intellectual, but nevertheless vitally important. And that's one thing I want to leave with you listeners, that if if you think that you are immune to losing your faith under trial uh because you've got all the arguments straight in your head, you're deceiving yourself. Go back to prayer and doing and go back to worship and all of the things that that can form you and do form you as a Christian in non-intellectual ways, they're really important.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yeah. The difference between knowing about God and knowing God. Um and knowing God in the biblical sense, you know. That Hebrew Yada, that that kind of that covenant knowing and being known. Um absolutely vital. Uh Rod, you've been so generous with your time. Thank you so much. Uh, I hope that people do uh get a hold of the book. It's Living in Wonder, Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. It refreshed me, and I'm sure it will refresh you if uh you pay attention to it with both hemispheres of the brain. Uh it's been such a pleasure uh talking to you, Rod, and I hope we can do this again. Thank you, Glenn. A blessed advent to you and your lessons.