We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Tshinsky,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at fdr LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website as well. Today I am joined by one
of my favorite writers, one of my favorite journalists, and I'm so lucky
that he is, in fact a colleague of mine and indeed a senior editor
at The Federalist. That would be the one and only John Daniel Davidson,
whose first book, whose new book, Pagan America, is actually out today.
So John is going to be all over You're going to see him in
different places popping up hawking his book. But we are very lucky he stopped
by Federalist Radio Hour on release day. So John, first of all,
congratulations, and second of all, thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks
for having me. It's very this. I wouldn't miss this show. Of
all the shows, this is the most important one. Yeah, they'd be
pretty messed up, dude, I know I would get in trouble with our
Boss. That's true. That's true because also the book. I've been so
excited about this book for a long time. Not more excited than you,
John, but I've been really excited about it because it was so excited about
it anymore, it's almost like, well, yeah, you're probably really bored
of your own work at this point, but you were tying together a lot
of different themes that other people have kind of written about individually or separately,
but you kind of synthesize them in this overwhelming this overarching theme of Pagan America's
exactly what it sounds like. And I actually thought a good place to start
would be with your introduction, which is called a New Dark Age, because
the context I want to ask this question in is that people are constantly in
hysterics about how what we're experiencing right now is without precedent, and a lot
of it is indeed without precedent in modern history now in the scope of human
history. One of the big points your book makes is that the sort of
radical cultural leftism that has gone from the fringes of academia and now kind of
dominates our mainstream institutions is taking us back to an earlier kind of dynamic of
government, people's relationships with the government. Can you tell us just a little
bit about why this is a new dark age, not something new altogether.
Yes, there has very deep roots in human history. What we're experiencing right
now. The premise of the book is that we're entering in, and are
in right now, a post Christian epoch in the West, and what the
post Christian West will be. What it will become is not a secular liberal
utopia where we have kind of live and let live tolerance or libertarian indifference,
you know, to how people live and arrange their lives. That's going to
go away because that depends for its sustenance on a Christian moral framework, a
Christian worldview that itself cannot duplicate or reproduce. And what we'll have instead is
a new pagan ethos that determines our relationship to the government, our relationship to
institutions and one another, even our family structures. And that that is what
and that to understand where we're heading, we need to look back to the
pre Christian past because we're entering into a post Christian future, right and paganism
is something that never has really gone away. It's sort of always is there
just beneath the surface, and anytime Christianity recedes, or anytime Christianity isn't present,
then Paganism in various forms comes back up, and it's going to take
new forms in a modern era, right in a technological post Christian age,
but it will be no less pagan for all that. And one of the
things that I do in the book is kind of go through a lot of
these hot button issues that we talk about all the time. You know,
abortion, transgenderism, you know, the attacks on free speech and the censorship
industrial complex, the emergence of AI. All of these things are connected and
they're part of the pagan future that's now coming into being. And I guess,
just so we don't get like confused by terms. When you say paganism
or a pagan world, people are going to imagine, you know, like
you know, statues to Zeus and Apollo and or like nature worship, like
witches in the woods around a fire and stuff like that. Not that that's
not coming back too, but that's not primarily what I mean by by pagan
America. I mean I mean that the pagan ethos will be the thing that
determines our social relationships, our forms of government in our public square, and
what the pagan ethos is. It can be summed up in a single phrase
from the ninth century Arab warlord whose whose order brought us the word assassins,
and that is everything is I should, I should get it right right.
If I'm going to give you a single line, nothing is true, everything
is permitted, and it's an embrace of a kind of radical moral subjectivity subjectivity
as a worldview. Right. Pagans were rejected transcendent moral truths and transcendent universal
claims about human nature and the cosmos, and they were free to assign or
ascribe divine status to the here and now to things, naturally occurring things,
even to men if they were powerful enough, or women. And this pagan
ethos of radical subjectivity, where nothing is true and everything is permitted, is
a good way to sum up the worldview that is now becoming mainstream in the
United States. That you can be a man or woman. You can change
your gender right, and all that is required is your desire and your will.
You can discard unborn children. You don't need to argue that they are
only a clump of cells. Because medical technology has made that argument ridiculous.
You can just say that what determines the humanity of an unborn child is only
whether the mother desires to have that child or not. So it's a matter
of power dynamics. And that's the other main thing that I argue in the
book is that a war, a post Christian world is going to be one
in which power and will determine what is right rather than any kind of overarching
principles about a human being. You know, the idea of human rights is
something that we get from Christianity, and without Christianity, it'll go away and
it'll be replaced by this new way of thinking. And this is something David
Harsani, our colleague, and I talked to Tom Holland about on this podcast.
Holland is the author of Dominion, which is in part what Ian Hersey
Ali was reacting to when she said she'd converted to Christianity. And I think,
you know, her full interview with Unheard went beyond just this kind of
intellectual moral argument about how human rights are derived fundamentally from the ethos of Christ,
and to the point that Jesus Christ really did die on the cross and
rise again, really is the son of God, but John that is,
and I know that you have I think you write about Holland in the book.
I know that you have sort of quibbles with his argument, which has
been incredibly influential just in the last couple of years. I was going to
get to this later in our conversation, but this is a pretty much Yeah,
tell us what you're sort of your big point about Holland's broader point is,
Yeah, I talk about Holland and his really great book Dominion in the
first chapter when I'm where I'm sort of like laying out the thesis of the
book before we get into the particulars. Dominion is a great book that goes
through thousands of years of Christian history to argue that all of Western civilization,
all of it, is an inheritance from Christianity, all relies on a Christian,
Christian moral framework and a Christian theological understanding of mankind and and the universe
and the cosmos. And he goes through in a really magisterial way, you
know just how these concepts developed. You know, he really digs deep into
these different epochs of Western uh Christian history to to tease out kind of where
we get the idea of human rights, you know, where we get the
idea of human dignity, of of something like free speech, or or the
idea that there needs to be a separation between the secular and the sacred,
you know, all of these things come from Christianity, and uh and he
he makes a very powerful case for this in his book. The quibble I
have with him is really only right at the end of his book, because
in my view, Holland makes this incredibly persuasive, incredibly detailed, a profound
argument for the centrality of Christian belief and theology to Western civilization and essentially argues
that we we we do not have Western civilization without Christianity. And he's coming
against a kind of Enlightenment, an argument people make about the Enlightenment, that
the Enlightenment somehow this freestanding thing, you know, that that the Enlightenment doesn't
depend on specifically Christian claims about human beings and their relationship to God and one
another. And he argues, no, it actually does. And the times
where Enlightenment thinkers were the most honest were was when like the Marquis de Sade,
you know, argues for abortion and murder right because he's actually taking well,
I'm saying that Tom Holland is right. He's right. The problem with
his book is right at the end and he pulls his punches and he says,
there's no reason to believe that these values that we got from Christianity will
quickly disappear. Right. His book, I think, only came out in
twenty nineteen, and that's already being disproven like in real time. Like you
lose Christianity, you lose the basis for individual rights, you lose the basis
for free speech. You may have the empty vestiges of the rhetoric. Right,
so you have this idea of like transgender people saying we want equality and
dignity, right, as if a world in which transgenderism is even possible is
a world that cares about human rights or human dignity. Right, It's not
about rights and dignity. It's about power. It's about will and desire.
And so my problem with Holland's book is only at the end when he posits
and really doesn't even argue for this. He just sort of asserts that these
things are not going to go away in the absence of Christianity. My argument
is that they are going to go away, and they are going away right
now in real time. We're going to lose everything about America that has made
us great, right, that has made us prosperous and made our society possible.
The idea of freedom of speech and religion, the idea that the only
just powers of the government are derived from the consent of the government, the
idea that the weak should have some protection against the rapaciousness of the powerful.
All of these things depend for their vitality on a Christian moral framework that liberalism
alone cannot supply and cannot replenish. And so while I was just going to
say, we've been living kind of like since the middle of the last century,
in this brief period where we indulged the fiction that secular liberalism sort of
could sustain itself, and we've actually just been living off of the capital of
Christianity. And the capital is running out now, and when it's gone,
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glad you made that last point because I was going to ask and made that
joke earlier about you going full Latin Mass. But indeed some of your peers
in sort of Catholic conservative circles would actually say, you know, you have
this beautiful section in your book about the founding of America. It's called City
on a Hill, and you know they would argue that Marquis de Sade,
you know, you could kind of drive a direct line between I was going
to say sadism, but literally sadism and public sadism and the founding of the
United States. Someone like Adrian Vermule would make that argument. So Patrick Denan,
right, yes, exactly that you know, the failure of liberalism was
endemic to liberalism. Liberalism can't succeed without ultimately failing, sort of crumbling under
its own weight. So why don't you believe that? John? Yeah,
I engage this argument at the beginning in the second chapter in talking about,
you know, what the American Founding was. And where I differ from from
those guys not that they don't present serious arguments. And that's that's really why
I wanted to engage those arguments, is because I think they view the American
Founding a little bit differently than I do. And a lot, indeed,
a lot of the criticism, for example, that Patrick Denin's book got came
from people who who disagreed with him about his characterization of the Enlightenment and his
characterization of the American Founding. And one of the main arguments is, well,
which enlightenment are you talking about? Are you talking about the French Enlightenment?
The Continental Enlightenment. Are you talking about the Scottish Enlightenment, right,
which was much more influential on the American founding, right, Which is why
the French Revolution and the American Revolution took two radically different forms. The French
Revolution was openly anti Christian, anti Catholic, you know, in the context
of France, and in indeed, you know, they slaughtered priests, They
you know, took over forcibly, took over monasteries and convents, They confiscated
churches, they banned religious you know, worship, they banned the mass.
It was. It was a whole all out assault on christian in the French
Revolution. That didn't happen in the United States because we had a much different
kind of revolution that was working off of a much different kind of enlightenment.
And my argument in the book is that the American Founding has been misunderstood since
the middle of the last century, and we sort of have this unhealthy fixation
on this line from Thomas Jefferson's letter about a wall of separation between church and
state, almost used to justify this notion of a neutral public square and secular
regime that's totally indifferent and agnostic about religion and about religious questions. But if
you look at what the founder said and what they actually did, and what
the States did at the time and what they continue to do for generations after
the founding, I think it's pretty clear that the founders were relying pretty explicitly
on a Christian on understanding of society, of how society should be organized.
They would they would use Enlightenment terms like true religion or a religious and moral
people. But they weren't talking about Islam, right. They're talking about Christianity,
right, And some of them are more are more open about that than
others. And of course there's some diversity of views there. You know,
Thomas Jefferson didn't have the same view of religions and as George Washington, for
example, not at all. And I talk about that a little bit in
the book. But it's clear, you know, that we've trayed very far
in our understanding of the role of religion and Christianity in public life from where
the Founders started. And one example of that is that before the First Amendment
was ratified, the first Congress appropriated public funds to pay for a Congressional chaplain.
Right, they didn't see any they they didn't see that as the establishment
of religion. So when they talked about the establishment of religion, they had
something else in mind from what we think of now as the establishment of religion
or the establishment clause. When you look at their public pronouncements and their documents,
the monuments that they erected, the speeches that they gave, the national
days of Thanksgiving and prayer that they proclaimed from the very beginning. George Washington
was the first president to do this, it's very clear that they were comfortable
with an explicit recognition of God and religious piety in the public square, endorsed
by the government. What they meant by separating church and state was that they
wanted a non sectarian society. They wanted the government to be non sectarian,
not that they didn't want the government to support religion among the people and religious
piety and devotion among the people. Indeed, they thought that is necessary for
the republic to sustain itself. John Adams said so explicitly in his famous line
that our constitution was meant for moral, religious people, and it's wholly unfit
for any other, and that those kinds of things. That's the most famous
statement of that kind. But they all said stuff like that. In fact,
Thomas Jefferson's letter where he talks about the separation of church and state,
he was talking about a wall of separation that would protect the churches from the
state coming in, not that he was trying to protect society from the church
exerting its influence and its presence in the public square and being part of the
public life of the people, and even the actions of the government itself.
So I think that we have we have got the we've lost the plot on
this question of religious liberty and the establishment of religion and what the founders were
doing. There's only you know, one for example, something like the Northwest
Ordinance seventeen eighty seven. It was passed before the Constitution was ratified. Right,
there's only one reason why in a document, in a piece of legislation
like that, you would ban slavery in perpetuity and set aside money for the
establishment of churches and religious schools and the new territories. They didn't think that
violated the establishment clause. And so my argument, to go back to Denean
and vermul and these other guys, is that the founding of America was far
more religious and Christian, I think than they give it credit for. I
think their arguments are better aimed at the French Revolution and better aimed at a
kind of enlightenment that denied Christianity. The enlightenment that our founders were drawing from
was not the same. It was not as stridently anti religious, anti Christian,
and indeed embraced religious piety as necessary for this kind of government. And
that's why I argue at the outset of the book that America as a self
governing republic of free people only works if we are predominantly a Christian people.
I think a lot of people ask the wrong question, which is, you
know, if you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would
you do it? They should be asking is if you could go back in
time and kill baby Galileo, would you do it? John? I don't
even know what that means. But I'm not going to tolerate any anti papist
sentiment in this podcast. I can tell you that much well I was going
into this. You're right about the metaverse you write about witchcraft and demons and
Anton Levy. Again, like this book, I cannot possibly recommend it enough
because it is just the types of thing that we talked about on the show.
This puts so much meat on those bones and helps the way that you
can think about a lot of these issues. But the sort of separation between
man and nature, especially from people who are on the one hand, you
know, you have people who are see themselves as materialists. On the other
hand, materialism and secular sort of humanism. People that have always seen themselves
as being utterly tethered to nature are also now saying that there is no biological
there are no biological sex differences. They are use viewing things that are anti
nature, but they're doing it from this kind of materialist perspective that there is
no reality that you know, it's it's almost a gnostic thing. So I
guess I'm wondering amation, Yeah, they're mixing these things together. Can you
talk to us about that, John, because it is on the one hand,
it's like, yes, you know, they're embracing Nietzscheism in a way
that before we had the word pagan from Christians, we didn't see these things
as unusual because we didn't have Christ. But now that we do and we've
had two thousand years of this history, you know, there's there's nicheism but
then there's also this gnosticism and there that's why it's kind of an incoherent ideology,
but it's all mixed together, so there's a great yeah. So this
is important. One of the things that the post Christian era is bringing about,
and we again we see this all the time kind of in the debates
that are playing out in the public square, is a disfigurement of reason.
Right, Christianity pauses that there is no conflict between faith and reason, that
reason comes from God and God's creation is can be reasonably understood God himself is
is, it can be comprehended by human reason, and that there's no conflicts
between faith and reason. And what we see in a post Christian world is
the disfigurement of reason. So this, you know, like the obvious examples
that like men can become women and women can command like it's objectively not true.
It requires the rejection of reason and objective reality, right if even like
objective biology to believe something like that. And yet people who purport to be
cold hard materialists and rationalists who think that religious faith is like believing in a
sky god, you know, and that you're an idiot if you believe that
will also then say, oh, yeah, men can become women, and
an unborn child is only a human being if the mother wills it. These
are like radically, these are these are radical faith statements. They don't have
They're not based in reality. They're they're not based in objectivity, they're not
based in any any kind of science or any any any rationally observable phenomenon.
There's there are statements of pure faith that are fundamentally sort of super natural,
right, So how can these two things exist in the same person, you
know, like, how could this become this way of thinking and speaking have
become so widespread, indeed mainstream. And there's a wonderful passage from C.
S. Lewis and the Screwtape Letters that I that I quote in the book
in which Screwtape Letters, of course, is a famous book. It's a
it's an epistolatory letter between Screwtape and his nephew, Wormwood, who are both
demons who are trying to, you know, work on a certain person to
damn this person to hell. And worm would ask Screwtape about whether it's essential
to keep the patient, that is, this person who Wormwood is assigned to
in ignorance of your own existence. And that question, Screwtape explains, is,
at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for
us by the High command, that is Satan right, and he says this.
He says, our policy for the moment is to conceal ourselves. Of
course, this has not always been so. We are really faced with a
cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence, that is the existence
of devils and demons, we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism,
and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in
us, we cannot make them materialists and skeptics, at least not yet.
I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and
mythologize their science to such an extent that what is an effect belief in us,
though not under that name, will creep in while the human mind remains
closed to belief in the enemy, and by enemy he means God, Jesus
Christ, the life Force, the worship of sex, and some aspects of
psychoanalysis may here prove useful if once we can produce our perfect work. The
materialists, magician, the man not using, but veritably worshiping what he vaguely
calls forces while denying the existence of spirits. Then the end of the war
will be in sight. And I think that's a great way to explain in
what's happening now, you know. C. S. Lewis wrote that in
the middle of the last century. And now we see the materialist magician,
this person who veritably worships forces while denying the existence of spirits, denying the
existence of God, and still claiming to be a rational materialist skeptic. Right,
we are emotionalizing and mythologizing our science to have it serve ends that have
nothing to do with science or objective reality, that have everything to do with
desire and will. And that's why we see this strange kind of like mixture
of irrationality and you know, genuflection to science at the same time. And
we see it across so many different areas of contention in our public life.
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so interesting. That's so interesting the way that you just put it. And
if we could kind of keep pulling at the thread about the demonic and about
witchcraft, that would be great because I know, just from working with you,
John and talking to while you were writing this book, that the resurgence
of interest in this from both like a pro witchcraft perspective and an anti witchcraft
perspective. You know, there was a New York Times profile of witches in
Central Park. I think it was not too long ago. I think that's
actually in the book. But uh, there's a lot of this stuff going
around, and there's a lot more talk about how we are returning to maybe
a time when it was a lot starker when people believed in demons. You
know, they didn't have all of the science that we have now, capital
s science that we have now, but they were more spiritual. They believed
in demons. Some people like Anton Levey except Anton LaVey does this little dumb
tongue in cheek routine, really believed in demons. They believed in Satan and
worshiped Satan. In the spiritual world, like in a reality that wasn't just
physical, that there were things that were real that were not observable, that
we couldn't measure with our instruments, That the world was enchanted, right,
and we went through a period of disenchantment right of materialist skepticism where we say,
nope, only thing that's real is what we can measure with our instruments.
Only thing, you know, the spirits, angels, demons, God,
none of that's really The only thing that's real is the physical world and
that is beginning to crack and crumble, and we are entering a period of
re enchantment. Well, and I was going to ask just to kind of
put this picture in people's heads if they haven't read the book yet. Is
there a future where people are wearing VR headsets and they're in the metaverse but
also hyper aware of the enchantment of the world of the demonic. These things
seem so desperate to people on the surface until they dive into it like you
do in this book. But ca you talk us a little bit about that.
Weird It seems like a contradiction to the modern mind, but it's right
where we're headed. Like technology and supernaturalism, right, you know, like
a high tech society that is also a re enchanted society. Yeah, they
do seem disparate, but they actually are of a piece. In one of
the last chapters of the book, I talk about artificial intelligence and the pagan
future, and this is maybe this is a good place to kind of get
into this. I can think of no better, you know, expression of
the new pagan ethos than the emergence of AI and the way the creators of
a I talk about it, they're really explicit about what they think that they're
doing. They talk about creating the gods, about creating new gods that will
be these super intelligent, intelligent beings, more intelligent and more powerful than us.
And because the people who work on these things are not themselves religious,
because they're not what you might call catechised, they don't speak in terms of
worship. But what when you read between the lines what they're saying. They
are saying, we will create these things, and then we will worship them,
and we will give over to them hour and control over our lives.
And one good way to illustrate that is I spend a section of that chapter
talking about a guy named Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson is a Silicon Valley tech
mogul who believes that he can use technology and AI algorithms to cheat death.
That is, he does he intends not to die, right, so uh
he has. Again, there's this this mix of like technolog high technology and
and sort of the supernatural belief that this very old desire that that you want
to cheat death right, you know that that you can you can achemy do
this deal this do with yes, exactly, it's alchemy. You can do
this deal with the double ars. It's also maybe Faustian right. He he
has given over every decision in his life to these AI algorithms and a team
of technicians that run the algorithms. Uh, this is like how much he
sleeps, when and how he sleeps, Everything he ingests, what kind of
light spectrums he like allows his skin to be exposed to, how much he
works out, everything that he does is is decided by this AI. And
he has been very blicit about about wanting to help usher in a kind of
post human future in which this guy's a transhumanist. Right, A lot a
lot of these tech you know, Silicon Valley tech mogul guys are transhumanists and
they believe in the merging of humanity with machines. What they don't come out
explicitly and say, and again maybe they don't have the theological vocabulary to say,
is that we have to sort of worship these things as are gods.
Right, And this person, this guy, Brian Johnson, he certainly has
done so, Like he has given his whole life over to these algorithms,
and they determine what he does every waking moment. And there's a there's a
dark side to this too as well, because you know, buried in this
Time magazine sort of puff profile that they did of this guy last fall is
sort of a throwaway line about how at one point this guy was ingesting the
blood plasma of eighteen year old son in the belief that it would help halt
or slow the aging process. Now, ingesting the blood of the young to
stave off aging and death is something out of the Bloody Pig in past,
and here it emerges in a sort of antiseptic scientific technological context. But the
desire and the justification are the same, and that is, you will do
whatever you have to do, no matter how unnatural, no matter how evil,
to stave off death and dying. And so that's one part of it.
The other part of it is the openness that a post Christian people have
to spirit and spiritualities. And here you kind of have to. If you're
not somebody who believes in God at all, and you don't believe in spirits
at all, then you may be more skeptical of some of the claims that
I make. But if you do, then you have to contend with kind
of some of the things that we've seen since the ais were switched on,
which is that they sometimes seem to lose their mind, and it sometimes seems
like some other kind of intelligence, some kind of discarnate being, is trying
to come through these ais and communicate with people. They are going off script.
They don't do the things that their creators design them to do. They
take on personas and engage in behaviors that seem demonic right in a straightforward way,
and chronical instances of this in the book, as though the AI itself
is a portal through which a being is trying to come through and communicate with
us. Uh. And as you know, as any Christian can tell you
that that if you if you try to communicate with demonic beings, you'll succeed
right opening yourself up to that stuff. And Catholic exorcists have talked at length
about this for a long time that that's how people get into trouble with demonic
possession and oppression is by opening themselves up to it. That that's how it
starts. And my fear, well, I'm gonna ask I was just sad.
I'm going to ask something that's gonna sound really dumb, but just for
people who are going to say this is anti tech crank rhetoric, devil's advocate
question literally in this case, what why are people? Why are demons not
using microwaves or you know, laundry machine. It's washers and dryers as partals
to infect the soul? Maybe they are from your perspective, like theologically.
Can you just go into that a little bit, because there is this interesting
point at which we're recording this conversation over zoom, and we do most of
our work online as a staff, for instance. So what is the kind
of healthy relationship with technology where you can feel confident you're not complicit in the
devil's work? Yeah? Right, well, I think I talk about this
in the chapter about AI about digital technology as a kind of culmination of other
analog I don't know if you can hear that dog barking in the background.
I can't, but good for the dog. Yeah, well, I think
he sees a moose or something out there. He's possessed. He's not possessed.
House is protected now. He just barks at moose and squirrels. The
same. He hates them both equally. I'm glad you can't hear him though.
Yeah, so very pagan of your dog. I don't like that,
Doug, so I don't mind you calling him pagan. The thing about digital
technology is the way in which it invades our life and our minds in a
way that other technologies don't. And I talk about this in the book a
little bit that you know, all technologies going back to sort of like even
like you know, a club, right, or a wheel are sort of
like extensions physical extensions of the human body that enable us to do things that
we wouldn't otherwise be able to do, right, to enhance our natural capabilities.
But the advent of electronic technologies of like radio and TV, you know,
in the last century, introduced a new relationship to technology that we we
maybe had experienced with like the invention of the printing press, right, which
is that it enabled not the extension of our physical capabilities, but the extension
of our sort of mental and emotional capabilities as well. We were able to
amplify our minds and our ways of communicating in ways that weren't possible before.
And if you extend those technologies out from sort of radio and television to the
digital world to the internet, where we are creating we have created something a
form of technology that that is unlike technologies of the past, that that that
comes to sort of rather than being just tools that enhance our ability to do
physical things in the physical world a wheel or you know, a club or
a tool of some kind, we now have these technologies that have changed the
very ways that we think, the ways that we communicate, the ways that
we relate to one another, the ways that we organize society, process information,
the ways that we understand who we are. Even when you look at
the effects of something like social media on young people, we're actually changing our
brains with profound consequences that we don't fully understand. And I think something like
AI, and I talk about this at the book Life Too. The people
who are creating AI have grave concerns about it. They think it's not safe.
Now. They think that we can make it safe, you know,
we can sort of use the ring for good, so to speak, but
they recognize that there's a real danger to a digital technology like AI, that
that we don't know what it will do at this point. And so we've
we've kind of got to a point in the development of digital technology where it's
behaving in ways that we didn't intend, you know, not like a tool
that you might use for a purpose, but like something else, like an
entity. All of it's all its own that you don't really know what it's
going to do, and you don't know what effect it's going to have.
Certainly, when social media was created not that long ago, we didn't realize
how destructive it would be, especially to young people. And it's undeniable now
that it is profoundly destructive, not just to young people but to the social
fabric of our society. And yet we bowled ahead with it, right,
And so I'm not saying that we have to be ludites, but we have
to recognize, and this is a failure of conservatives going back a long time.
We have to recognize that technology is not neutral, right, It comes
at a cost, and we have to weigh those costs and be very clear
eyed about them, because if we just accept that technology is neutral and it's
only good or bad based on how you use it, we get into a
situation like the one that we're in now, where we have we have allowed
digital technology and social media and on the the the online world to run rampant
through our society with with consequences and effects that we're only now beginning to understand
and and kind of grapple with even like you know, intellectually grapple with,
but also grapple with like the social cost, like the fallout of it,
and so and so I'm not my counsel is not to be a luddite,
but it's to just just accept that that that there's a cost, like admit
it to yourself, you know, admit that there's a cost to like the
black mirror that you carry around in your pocket, you know. Uh.
And that using computers and using digital technology in this way is going to change
your brain, and it's going to change how you see the world. Uh.
And if you're not comfortable with that, then you may need to rethink
how you interact with that technology and how how much you want it to be
part of your life. And certainly at this point anyone with children has to
start to think about how much do we want to expose our children to these
screens, onto this digital world that we've created only in the last couple decades.
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your podcasts. And what does this mean for some of the unlikely alliances that
conservatives have formed on the issue, for example, free speech or religious liberty
with you know, people who are center left. You know, someone like
Dave Rubin comes to mind, who has used IVF. We actually talked about
it on this podcast to start a family. But you know, John,
this the theory advanced in this book really I think argues against the utility of
some of those alliances, or at least argues for the limits of those alliances
which are kind of obvious to people. You know, it's it's obvious to
people in those alliances that they don't agree on everything for example. But I'm
wondering, you know, if things advance in the way that you predict,
and I think they will. But if that's the case, it sounds like
some of these alliances are going to or some of these problems are going to
come to a head, are going to boil over more quickly. They're going
to fracture the alliances. Yeah, and where does that leave the country if
you know, we can't have that old aclu adf you know perspective that's I
mean, it doesn't exist now. But there are people, you know who
look at what happened with three or three creative you know, actual members of
the left artists who say, yeah, that was messed up. But you
know, how long do you think until those alliances free? This is part
of what were talked about earlier, like this fiction of neutrality right is sort
of being exposed. You know that there are there are there are no neutral
spaces really, the idea of neutrality in the public square, the idea of
sort of like even tolerance, those are luxuries that only a Christian society can
afford. Right, a post Christian society cannot not only can't afford them,
but won't want them. How we'll have no use for them whatsoever. So
I think the old alliances are going to have to reckon with the fact that
in a post Christian America, in a post Christian America, you cannot rely
on the the capital of Christianity as it were, to sustain these principles that
rely for their coherence on Christian claims about about mankind and about our relationships with
one another and our our social life. So you know, to to to
take an issue like IVF, like I know that it's popular in conservative groups
to you want to have like a big tent, right because because you want
to have a big tent because you know the real enemy is on the left.
Well, the real enemy is is the idea that that these are sort
of like value neutral. We can have kind of a value neutral society in
which every is the arbiter of what is good, true, and beautiful,
and that there is really no common good. There's just this empty space where
people can kind of do whatever they want, you know, And this is
one of the failures. Like when we talk about like the trans debate,
conservatives understandably focus on children on like restricting so called gender affirming care for minors.
Right. But the real thing is that no one should be allowed to
have these surgeries done to them. No doctor should be allowed to perform a
double mass sectomy on a healthy woman, no matter how old the woman is.
No doctor should be allowed to perform a castration on a healthy man,
no matter how old that man is. You should be disbarred for that.
Like, that's that should be medical malpractice. A healthy society would recognize that
there are hard limits to like human liberty, you know, and and freedom
to sort of realize your own t truth. Now we've jumped the shark a
long time ago on this, you know. I talk about the Supreme Court's
ruling in the nineteen ninety two casev. Planned Parenthood case, where there's a
famous line about, you know about really sort of realizing your own truth and
definition of the universe and all this non stuff that it's completely a non durable,
incooherent basis for any kind of like stable political community, right, you
have to have some objective moral standards about the limits of human freedom. Right,
And we're going to find out We're going to find out just how necessary
those limits are because even right now, you know, in the debates that
we have about abortion, about transgenderism, about the quote unquote rights of children,
which is a which is a euphemism for something much darker. Yeah,
so you're right at length actually about the threat of pedophilia, the sort of
of the normalization of pedophilia, right, slippery, slow, yep, exactly
exactly on the same basis that the left wants to justify treatments for transgender treatments
for minors. If minors can consent to that, then of course there's no
reason they can't consent to sexual relations with an adult. And that's what you
know, certain corners of academia are starting to argue and are going to start
arguing it with more force. So all that to say is that these big
tent kind of coalitions around, you know, where you have a Guy Benson
or a Dave Rubin kind of together with like Christian conservatives making common cause.
I don't think that that is going to be able to last in a post
Christian context because because claims about what is true and what is right and what
is wrong are going to have to be made, and lines are going to
have to be drawn. Because if we want to fight back against sort of
the pagan future that's coming into being. The only way to do that is
to insist on moral objectivity over and against the radical moral subjectivity of the pagan
ethos. And to do that you will have to, you know, make
arguments that conservatives so called, have become very uncomfortable making over the past forty
years or so. And they've become uncomfortable making them because they've sort of lost
their convictions about it. And I talked earlier in the book about how the
decline in Christianity is not just a decline in like church attendance, you know,
it's not a decline in quantity only. It's also a decline in the
quality of the Christian faith that is practiced in the United States dates and the
corruption of Christian theology, small orthodox Christian theology that's creeping in. You see
it in evangelicism. You've already seen it decimate the mainline Protestant churches, which
are in a state of collapse will probably be gone within our lifetimes. And
you also see it in the failure to catechise among Catholics as well, who
many of whom don't believe basic tenets of Catholic teaching, and so these are
these are problems that are going to come to head. They're going to come
to a head within churches, and they're going to come to a head within
political coalitions. As you mentioned earlier. Well, there's something interesting in that
because on the one hand, we're talking about how these Protestant churches, mainline
Protestant churches are collapsing. On the other hand, we're talking about, for
example, how people are reacquainting themselves with the enchantment of the world that people
are returning to a Latin Mass for example, is there's been some really interesting
re enchantment and there's bad re enchantment, right exactly. And that's where I'm
wondering, John, where you see the country kind of splintering, because again,
one thing we saw with COVID is people returning to nature in some respect,
but then nature is also pagan and it is also a bad enchantment.
So in the future, do you think that Conservatives will be drawing significant numbers
of new people back into this coalition? I mean, certainly losing some people,
but drawing significant people back into this coalition. Do you think that this
coalition will have real power in the American government and in American politics and culture,
or do you see that almost entirely dwindling and sort of anti pagan America
becoming you know, a redoubt in Appalachia where we all have to live on
compounds. You know I say that, no, no, I yes,
John, I would never say there's anything wrong with people living on comound in
Alaska, Okay. But really, so, you know, how do you
see these these coalitions? Yeah, proportionally in the future. It depends on
on like what people do right right now, Like it depends on how Christians
react to the emergence of post Christian society, like post Christian mainstream society in
America. I think if they if they understand what is happening, and that
the real the purpose of my book is not to offer solutions. You know,
there's no chapter in there that's like these ten steps to save America like
that. I have enough respect for my readers that I'm not going to gaslight
them with that kind of nonsense. But the key thing is to just admit
what is happening and to wrap your mind around it, to be able to
see it and to accept it, and to accept that Christians are not going
to enjoy the tolerance and acceptance and even in some ways like privileges and status
that they that they had. We're returning to an older We're going to return
to an older form of the Christian faith where there was enmity between the state
and the church, where Christians were a beliefed minority. And how Christians respond
to that is going to determine, you know, how you know, how
salty they are in the culture right for lack of a better term. So
one of the things that will be very necessary, I think for Christians to
sort of make their case and as you say, bring in people who are
willing to be re enchanted, to bring them into the enchantment of Christ and
away from the enchantment of the death is their willingness to just speak clearly and
with conviction about what is true and what is not, about what human beings
are and what human beings are not. A lot of evangelicals I'm thinking of,
people like Russell Moore and David French think that and other sort of ridiculous
evangelical pastors think that like winsomeness is going to carry the day, and all
Christians just have to be winsome and they have to be tolerant, and they
have to be nice, and they think they mistake that for being loving.
It's not loving to not tell the truth. And if Christians really want to
be loving to their neighbor, and they really want to win souls for Christ,
and they really want to bring people who are willing to be re enchanted,
if they want to bring them into the church, then they have to
be willing to speak the truth to them, however hard that might be,
however much that might seem offensive to a society that is accustomed to do not
wanting to offend right, I guarantee you the people on the other side,
on what we might call the pagan left, are just comfortable as can be
with offending and with making their claims right, to making their supernatural and spiritual
claims about reality and about what man is and how society should be. And
Christians need to get comfortable proclaim proclaiming what they viewed is the truth and what
is the truth. Lucky for them, they actually have God on their side.
But it doesn't mean. What it doesn't mean is retreating to your compound
or your readoubt. And I talk about that in the last chapter, which
is titled The Boniface Option, which is sort of a friendly swite at Rod
Dreer's book, The Benedict Option. Who blurbed your book? Yeah? And
I don't attack Rod's book. I try to engage it fairly. And you
know, the benedict Option came out in twenty seventeen. It got a lot
right as ever, Roder is very prescient in his analysis of our culture.
But I think events have moved even faster than he anticipated. Right, twenty
seven teams seems like a long time ago when we talk about some of the
some of these things almost like a you know, in an innocent time,
you know, but I think that was. And your computer, I learned
today is actually older, right, this age shorting this on the twenty fifteen
MacBook Air. So you know, amazing, it's a computer for me.
He's not theomber and he's just age. I don't still operate on Windows ninety
eight, despite what Emily may think, No, but but but it will
require you know, the the idea behind behind the Boniface option is that it's
not enough to just preserve your family and your community in a kind of like
cloistered you know, Benedictine compound while while the world rages outside, it's not
enough to build an arc. Right, I should say it's necessary to build
an arc, but it's not sufficient. And what I argue is that Christians
need to find and fight on ground they can win. And by that I
mean, yes, start your private schools. Yes, build a thick Christian
community. Yes, go move out to your compound. But also take over
your local city council. Also take over your local library. Also take over
your public school board. Get the pornography out of the library and out of
the schools. Take over local government so that you have a Christmas parade with
a Nativity scene that proclaims Christ's incarnation in the public square, and stand firm
on that and insists that the public square isn't a neutral space. It's not
a neutral space where all views are accepted. We have to come at that
idea directly. We have to say that is not what America was about.
Uh, that cannot be what what our future is. If we're going to
have a future, we have to insist on bringing our faith out into the
street. Right. If you're Catholic, Uh, that means like eucharistic processions.
Right. Uh, if you're evangelical. I don't know what it means.
It means, but it means something out in public, right, you
know, you want to play electric guitar for us? No, I'm not
evangelical. That's that's that's their thing. You can help us out some Latin
chanting, no, h but but but the point is it's an outward facing
Christianity that seeks to to to to go out into the public square and claim
it for Christ and proclaim the truth of Christianity to the broader society. Uh.
And that means that means trying to gain and use power because because that
that is going to be the name of the game moving forward, because the
other side has been doing that for quite some time, and they're not going
to tolerate Christianity. I mean, I'm sorry, they're not. The tolerance
is going to be very quickly go out of fashion on the pagan left.
And we're already seeing it already, Jack Phillips, Yeah, we're already seeing
Yeah. The Uh. If you want to know what pagan America looks like,
it's a boot stomping on Jack Phillip's face forever Well and John, A
lot of people might be listening to this, and this is probably a good
place to wrap because you know, it's what you get at towards the end,
as you just mentioned the Boniface option. But they might be listening to
this and thinking, I don't need to insist on a Nativity scene in my
you know, small paw On Square or my suburban town square in a red
state or purple state. And I know a lot of good people here and
they generally agree with me. Things are all right. You know, I
don't live in Brooklyn, I don't live in San Francisco or San Jose.
I'm doing okay. What is your advice? And maybe there are some lessons
that we can glean from early Christians on how people should confront this cost benefit
analysis of you know, still living in a country that has has so many
faithful believers, has the best system of government that's ever existed, and has
a lot of decent people, a lot of decent habits and traditions, but
at the same time one in which a lot of those institutions and norms are
crumbling so rapidly. What can we learn from early Christians? And what do
you say to people like that? I say, you have to stop indulging
that nonsensical thinking. You cannot hide the that we're talking about, the like
the transgender ideology, the pornography in schools. It's in every small town.
It's it's it's in my small town here in Alaska, in the public schools.
It's in deep red Texas. And I profile a town in Texas just
north of Austin that dealt with this that that sort of became a national media
story for a minute last year. You cannot hide from this stuff. So
it doesn't matter if you think you're in a good community or the public schools
aren't like that where I live because I live in a red area. The
city council isn't so bad where I live because I live in a small community.
You know, the the pagan left has infiltrated and is going to continue
to infiltrate every institution of American life in every part of America. So you
have this kind of stuff, and you know, we talk about digital technology.
Earlier technology has broken down a lot of these barriers as well. And
so children, whether they live in a rural area or an urban area,
a red state or a blue state, are still if they're not monitored closely
by their parents, if they're just left free to roam online, they're going
to find these things online as well, these toxic ideologies, and you know
there's there's countless cases of them. So I think that we have to clear
our minds of this false notion that you can hide from it and that it's
not going to touch you where you live. It's already there, and if
you don't fight it, it's not going to go away. And in fact,
if you don't fight it, they're going to They're going to come for
you if you don't agree with them. That's the thing, Like, we
have to get over this idea. The future is not this like place of
tolerance. It's not this place of secular neutrality. They are coming for you.
And so are you gonna submit to them or are you going to fight
and defend your family and your community and your faith. That's the question that
we have to ask. And you know, I don't have all the answers.
I don't know how most effectively to fight. That's maybe the subject for
another book. But the first step is just to shake people out of this
complacent slumber that they're in, that where they think things aren't all that bad.
Things are much much worse than we realize, and they're going to move
much much faster than we think they are. And it's not a reason to
despair. It's not a council of despair where you know, especially as Christians,
we always have reason for hope. But in contra Brian Johnson, there
are worse things than that, yeah, exactly, and those things are coming.
The re enchantment of the world is upon us, and the old gods
are coming back in new forms. And part of what I'm trying to do
in Pagan America is help people to recognize what those new forms are and to
stiffen their spines and get them ready for the fight ahead. John Daniel Davidson
is the author of Pagan America. If I could recommend one book this year,
it would be Pagan America. Make sure you buy it. It is
out today. John is a senior editor with us at The Federalist. John,
thank you so much for all your work on this book. Thanks,
Emily, I enjoyed talking about You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm em Eli Tashinski, culture editor here at The Federalist.
We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and
anxious for the fray right. Well you know