An Orthodox Perspective on Zionism w/ Rev. Fr. Emmanuel Lemelson: Ep. 475

see Orthodoxy around the world. It's been a real privilege. I'm a married priest. Most of our clergy and the Northox Church are married. I have a wonderful wife we say petes viteta in Greek, which is the wife of a priest, and I have four beautiful children.

like me would start to notice. But for you in New England, which you know I've spent a good amount of time, there seems to be less of a cultural feature. How did you become interested in it?

Puritan community. But how I became interested in it? And by the way, when you talk about your roots in the South, for some reason, I think of the great movie Oh Brother, Where art thou with George Clooney. Are you familiar with it? You get this, you know, the Bible salesman and the John Goodman. I guess it always comes to mind as a sort of image of you know, Christian Zionism, Christian nationalism in that epoch in America, which is still I guess there's still vermicial culturally alive in

the South. But I think what sort of brought my attention back to it a couple of years ago, was the onset of the hostilities in Gaza and just seeing the whole cell liquidation of a people and our most contemporary and vivid and high definition version of genocide in our modern world. It's the stain on our society. It's it's the shame for all of us in humanity that

had happened. It's not I'm not justifying the poor innocent people lost their lives in Israel on that fateful day when they were attacked, but there is no justification for what happened in Gaza, and now with generally what's happening in the former Palestinian territories and now we see happening in Lebanon. So a couple of years ago we decided to address it in an early podcast that was I

think it was our episode eleven. It was right when we got started with our podcast, so if you were to go back and watch it, you'd have to forgive the production quality a little. But I was entitled the Criminalization of Christianity, which at first you would think, well, what has happened with Christian Zionism, But as we work through it and then we'd later did an episode on

the atrocities in Gaza. You know, it was pretty evident to us that the political form of I guess they call it Christianity, Christianity is ju dais and two Days was going to be incredibly not only incredibly politicized, but incredibly destructive and violent and lead to a lot of bloodshed. And I just saw the writing on the wall maybe two and a half years ago, and so we started

producing these podcasts. So now we did those two elipisodes, one on the Conversation in Christianity, which talked about Jewish lobby during the Palestinian protests and college campuses back in twenty twenty four, which you might recall, and the repeated efforts to institute new legislation that would essentially make certain passages in Holy Scripture legal, and looking at where that was going and sort of the connections with what's happening in Israel and what really is a lobbying arm for

the state of Israel as far as I'm concerned to the United States, and then just seeing that the loss of innocent life. The numbers are even if you want on the conservative side, to the numbers of what happened in Gaza, the loss of life to women and children,

which we've been conditioned to normalize. I guess now the leadership in Israel, you know, it's sort of friendly refers to, you know, the Gaza strategy in Lebanon, Now, these are Christian lands, formerly Christian landesmic Arabs and Christians both occupy these areas, and so we see the destruction of historically important and incredibly important sites in Syria, Palestine and now Lebanon.

It's really the extinction of Christianity in that region. And ironically via the conduit, the political conduit for that is very often the Christian Zionists in America, which are really leading to the spilling of that blood.

sort of this wide coalition. Sure there were a lot of kind of you know, crazy lefty types, but also the kind of more traditional what we would call either paleo conservatives, the tea party crowd, right, the good normal Americans who basically said, look, I want to be a country again. And you know, just due to changes in the news cycle or whatever, that sort of died out for ten years plus or minus. War wasn't big in

the news. But the combination of and I don't mean to get into a detailed discussion of every one of these, but you know, sort of one scandal after another. You know, the Epstein scandal, which has a, to put it mildly, a heavily ethnic component to it, the situation in Gaza and the dramatic reaction in the US, which is certainly something to mention. And then this absolutely disastrous war in Iran.

It's become almost impossible to hide from it. And you see topics that were ten to fifteen years ago completely and totally vote the sort of thing that you know, if you muttered them in a bar, you'd get beat

up and thrown out. Now I have friends over who are not particularly political, who go to church have wives and kids and don't care about this sort of in depth things that people who listen to this podcast do are saying things casually that even now, you know, as someone who's been on the internet forever, I still have a hard time wrapping my head around this being normal conversation.

And I say that not to you know, inject a personal anecdote, but to say it has become undeniable that the Israel lobby effectively seems to control a large part of allegedly the most powerful nation in the world. And so you look at this and you say, well, wait a minute, I was naive enough to assume that America

was country run by and for Americans. And I say that not to you know, make some nativist point, not to beat my chest and say, you know, immigrants go home or anything, but to say, at a very fundamental level, I think that a lot of people are disgusted by this because you mentioned the genocide and Gaza, and I think for a lot of people, if this were simply a tragedy happening somewhere that we were in no way involved in, it would be regrettable. But what can you do?

But I think what rankles many people myself included is that it's my money. I am required to fund this, and I am required to fund the extermination of Christians, and if I object to that, as you mentioned earlier, in states like Florida or others, may well be thrown in jail. And I think that the theological issues are

very real. We will get into it, but this ground, the sort of upswelling of objection, I think is on a much much more basic level of I'm getting shaken down so that people like me that I have something in common with can be exterminated. And it's no shock that people are upset by this. But Father, I want

to get into the roots of American Zionists. You mentioned the Puritans and my friend Bagbee, who I mentioned to you earlier, and I have done a number of episodes sort of chronicling the different groups which made up early America, including the Puritans, and one of the most interesting conclusions of that is that the Puritans burned through religion. They didn't necessarily keep their faith in the Triune God, but many of their instincts towards these kind of utopian social plans.

Those state that culture is still alive even if it is not necessarily interested in God per se. But I'll throw it back to you after this rant on what's supposed to be an interview show. Can you trace that line of American Zionism from the Puritans?

British author. And if you really think about it, you have the Protestant Reformation right in the sixteenth century, and they're really miffed at abuses in the Catholic Church, and they eventually come to this concept of solo scriptura, right, which everyone knows and they associate with the Protestants, But it really goes back to solo scriptura, the idea that sort of the Word of God, the literal interpretation of

the Holy Scriptures is everything. It's the alpha and the omega. Well, by that understanding of scripture, and if you don't have a concept of an old and a new Testament is being delineated the sort of as Christ would say, you can't put new wine and old Wineskins, as these prestants had presence, did not understand and not conceive of that.

Then for them this idea began to emerge, and without the benefit of a hierarchy and authority of tradition in the Church, that you had to have a restoration of Israel and the Jewish people to the Holy Lands for the second Coming of Christ. It's that simple. It actually goes right back to sol Scripture, and a lot of people don't think about that, but that is actually the

genesis of it. So if you look at early figures like Thomas Brightman or Francis Katt, and this was I think in the fifteen eighties, I want to say, you know, that's really where it began. And Kat at least for his part, was ultimately I think he was burned at the steak, I want to say. I mean, he was definitely put to death. So you know, the Church at that time understood the seriousness of this jew days and carriers. I'm not saying that they should have put them to death.

That shouldn't be the penishment bunch friends, shouldn't be the consequence of by any means. But that is the genesis of it though, and that gets right to the heart of it. And then once this became mainstream, and then you had these early sort of Jewish thinkers who were you know, the roots of Zionism began as a political

movement in the early nineteenth century. You know they It's kind of ironic that it was really these this Christian we call it a cult almost the Puritans, that gave them the fodder, that gave them the tools to take what originally was thought of as a religious idea or concept, idea of a promised land, and turned into a secular political movement, which is Zionism. So it's sort of ironic.

And then of course with the Protestant information itself being blowback from the corruption of Rome and its own its own we can say theological errors, ecclesiogological errors that put this emphasis on worldly power and authority, which is a sort of Pelagianism. You could say even that is ironic, because then ultimately, even in later centuries, the Catholic Church itself would be infiltrated by Zionists, and it is to

this day a lot of Catholics don't realize that. So you have this pervasive novel theology in Christian Zionism, and you've got this underlying sort of ethnophilitism and Zionism that has really just become a secular political movement for the re establishment of Israel and of course not a Greater Israel project. And ironically it is infected. It's very core and roots. So it's become, like I say, almost a

political conduit. It's become and it is even now. I mean, I think secular Israel, the secular Israeli leadership in the Kinesset must be laughing this whole time that you have these cohortive Americans funding with very large dollar amounts this political ambitions of another kind of and then you have very zealous Catholics who are very vocal and well organized administratively, who are completely blind to the fact that their own organization is completely zion not completely, but a large part

infiltrated by Zionism as well. So it's it's a total mess.

after what they call the Modernist Crisis. Basically, what happened is that more than about one hundred and twenty years ago rough dates here, that there was sort of an unbroken chain of American institutions, from local churches to at the top end things like the Ivy's right, Harvard produced ministers. They would go down and sort of form an American clergy class. And what had happened in kind of the early twentieth century, late nineteenth is that Modernism is sort

of run them up through these institutions. You would see the sort of outgrowth of this in the so called like Scopes Monkey Trial, but basically those institutions had completely

and totally secularized. There's a bunch of great cartoons from the time right where it's like walking down the steps, and the steps are, you know, denying the Trinity, and then you go all the way down to the bottom and it's Sodom and Gomora and you're like, all right, okay, maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. But point is, this created a break between the sort

of traditional chain that defined American church life. And so so you had a number of a large number of small town churches that had been used to receiving their priests, their preachers whatever they called them, from institutions like Harvard, any university you can name, and all of a sudden they're coming back and they're saying, oh, you know, the virgin Birth didn't happen. Christ didn't really rise from the dead. And so they're like, well, we're not taking pastors from

you anymore. You don't believe anything. And so this is where we see the birth of the Bible College. Right, these sort of low church institutions predominantly in the American South, where you are training lay people to preach. And roughly the same time we see the proliferation of the Schofield reference Bible. And the Schofield Reference Bible was unique in the sense that it was a commentary and the King James Bible one next to the other, and also had

basically pre made servants. So if you were a guy who was not all trained and all of a sudden, we need a new preacher, well, this book is ready made for you. Schofield is an interesting character in his own right. He was disbarred, he was sort of a known con man. But the really interesting thing is this is really where we see explicit American Zionism become very

very popular in Low Church Protestantism. It was one of those things that it was an academic belief but just not spoken about much, because if you live in Tupelo, Mississippi, what do you care, right, it is not relevant to you at all, until all of a sudden, this ready made sort of preacher in a box kit comes with extremely explicit support for the re establishment of the of a Jewish state in Israel, this kind of John Hagy esque view of the end times, right, that there needs

to be re establishment of a Jewish state so that the Battle of Armageddon can have and all that kind of crazy stuff. And basically that is where it becomes. It starts spreading like a wildfire. If you are conspiratorially minded. You can read that book. Found out where he got the idea or the money to publish such a thing. His members got to come, yeah, you don't have to be I I didn't mention.

Cape million views. But yeah, it's like the making of an American snake oil salesman, you know, like you said by the loan of box rated go, you know, no real academic training or formation in a seminary, no involvement with spiritual father, none of the traditional formative process. They go into the making of a real elder of the church, not presbyter of a priest. You know, these are cheap imitations. They're pastors. And you know, if you want I'm sorry ex me no, no.

his university. They gave him a personal private jet, and d Netanyahu would come visit him before the President. He'd fly into this tiny, little regional airport, then drive up to DC. So the reason I bring that up Friars is not to you know this, but just for context for the audience. Of course, this is not simply I mean, there is theology to it, right, We're not going to deny that, but to say there's a deliberate operation to sort of recruit these people as part of a foreign

influence campaign. Sorry, I'll kick it back to you.

So the money comes in from Israel and it's expanded, Let's say in the balance sheet of these makeup church pastors, all of whom are as far as I'm concerned, judas like figures because they have their hand on the treasury. They're quite wealthy, many of them. They have their mansions and so forth. And I'm not criticizing the wealthy. I'm only criticizing the wealthy when their wealth comes from selling

christ that I don't agree with. But if you look at John Hagy's operation, for example, just Christian United for Israel CUFI, it's the largest organization. I want to say, it's in the millions of members, and I think they have sent over one hundred million back to Israel, so

they may be receiving it. We could say sort of an initial investment coming from those sources, and then the investee is these you know, Christian nationalists and Christian Zionist groups who then expanded greatly and the money goes right back. So it's a when we call it around ship transaction. So it's it's a it's a good return on investment for Israel. And these are there, they're spokesperson these are their their marketers, their market makers, let's say, in the language of finance.

as a sort of chosen people. Right. That's and philotism just means the love of like philosophia is the same word as the etymological root in Greek. So ethnophilitism is condemned as a heresy in the Church, first in the Council of Constantinople, which I think was eighteen seventy two, and then more recently in the Pan Orthodox Synod in Crete. So we could just say that Zionism is a form of ethnophilitism, that this idea that the Kingdom of God

believed belongs to an ethnic group. It's not universal, right, which we understand Christ's reign to be universal. It's the city of God, not a city on earth, although don't tell Rome that. And then you could look at Christian Zionism, which is sort of its natural outgrowth is where it comes back and manifests of Christians, and it's sort of a reincarnation of the heresy of Helianism, which the automological

root in Greek Helia just means a thousand. So many in the early Church believe that Christ would reign only for a thousand years, that the period of the epoch of the Church would be temporal, and it'd be a restoration of the Jewish people and their God's promises through the Prophet to the Jewish people that Christ and his Church were not the new Israel. And so that was condemned quite early in the history of the Church in

three eighty one AD. And so we see this in Christian nationalism because they have an idea that if only they can restore Israel, they'll be the rapture and that's sort of their eschatology, and they will be secretly taken up it's almost neo Gnostic, into the sky and reunited with Christ and that will then usher in finally this new era, the restoration of Israel. So it's really Helioonism,

it's not new. And then finally, if we look at Christian nationalism, it's really Palagianism, which I mentioned earlier, which is this idea that through our will we can bring out about a perfect world on earth. It's not through God's grace or through the really putting down our own ego and our own will in favor of Gods, but through our own will to power, if you will. And that idea of Plagianism was condemned also fairly early in the Church's history and the Council of Carthage in forty one.

So if you look at what's going on today, you see the Christian nationalists or so the neoplagonists. You see that the Christian Zionists are really the modern day neo Helianism, and if you look at Zionism, it's just another form of Ethnophelitism. And interestingly enough, each of these groups, to the extent, well not Zionists, but Christian Zionist and Christian Nationalists see themselves as needing to bring about this s catological event, which is the restoration at Israel. You really

can't call them Christian at all. I mean, they're just Judaizers actually. So it's a curious thing that they've co opted the language. I suppose, like any political movement that seeks to impose an agenda, the first thing they do is they hijack the language. So it's really a thin veneer of Noba glintur using the word Christian, but it has nothing to do with Christianity, the early Church, or its history. It's actually heresy through and through from beginning

to end, and it's all been seen before. But the average commentaty. We began this conversation with you pointing out that so many people are interested in these things now, and honestly, I never thought of my LIFETI might see it raging debates online, people discussing heresy, but unfortunately most people just don't have the words to explain it clearly,

or the education or the knowledge in the background. And so we're the very few people over the last twenty or thirty years went to a university and you know, got a degree in theology. It was almost university, the smallest school in every university campus. But now we have a sort of almost global interest in it, and it's really good. Actually, it's a good thing that people asking questions and talking about it as we are today. But

there's really nothing new under the sun. All of this has been seen before in the early Church, and the role of the early Church and it's Creedle statements which came out of the early ecumenical Synods, was to combat heresy. And what we must do today is we must combat these heresies and call them what they are. You know, John Hagy, you mentioned his name is Christians United for Israel. It should just be called snake oil salesman United for Israel.

It's a big operation, it's a business, and it's a heresy, plain and simple, and it's leading to the loss of life, the identification for all of these elderly Americans who have this American brand of Christianity completely bifurcated from traditional Christianity. We're raking in millions and tens of millions of dollars while calling for war, even nuclear war against I ran associated with Magog. It's not Christian at all. It's nothing

to do with Christianity zero. And there people, you have to understand, Jay, people are were wired for religion, so people want religion. They and after what we've been through in our country in the last three or four days of I'm sorry, three or four decades, not days, decades of cultural erosion and societal erosion, people are starving for Christ. They're starving for a spiritual life. And these guys have

large platforms. Hagy has over ten million followers. And you know the the as you pointed out, the APAC, the Jewish lobby is really entrenched in DC. So you have all these Americans who have sort of almost like a latent memory of having a Christian identity, but they have no real connection to any sort of traditional Christianity, which is correct, and its teaching then falls for these as I say, Snake Oil sales Paulo Whites another one of them.

you got even the justification for a holy war. So it's ironic, you know, we say of the current regime and it ran that the religious zealots, and but look at how they're acting in DC. I wonder sometimes if the Muslims and I ran in Tehran are sitting back watching TV and laughing, you know, laughing at the folks in DC saying, look of that religious elots leading the world into a holy war. But none of that has

anything to do with Christ's message. So Doug Wilson's of the world and the Pete hegseeths, it turns into the beating of the drums for war. And then once you have a holy war on your hand, it's like, if you think that this is going to bring about the second Coming of Christ, Genocide's okay, right, You wipe out a girls' school with a cruise missile and a few hundred young girls die, Well, it's just collateral damage.

on for a long time. Maybe awareness in America is growing of it, but Orthodox Jews and Jerusalem have been spitting on clergy and nuns and churches for a long time. You know, you see these images and videos on social media emerging of an IDF soldier, You know, hammering a statue of Christ and everyone gets shocked and eventually now comes out and mix the statements as not that's that's ridiculous.

They've been trying to make it illegal. I think it actually is already illegal in Israel to do any sort of prosalization or to speak to people about the Holy Gospel. It's very naive for Americans to think that Israel is a country religious freedom. They say that sort of on the surface because they unders and the sensitivity politically on global level. But it has long been a country that aimed to eliminate not just the Arab and Muslim contingent,

but the Christian contingent as well. And we see that in the shrinking over the last what has it been about, maybe I think for the last seventy five years or something, that's declined from ten percent to just under two percent the Christian population. So I find it hard to believe, with today's technology that these shells from tanks and so or they're just errant and just happen to keep hitting churches.

I find that very hard to believe. If you look what the settlers are doing, and you can see these videos that make their way online of idea of soldiers in Orthodox churches mocking the Holy services, mocking the icons and so forth. And the leadership in Israel has consistently said that Israel is a country for the Jews and the Jews only. They're very open about that. I think it's naive for people to think that, oh, it's multicultural

and religiously diverse and respects als. That's just projecting American political propaganda and hopes and beliefs onto a country that doesn't believe that. So would they be content if all the Christians and Muslims were extinguished from the hilly lines, of course?

this is anything but an isolated incident. This is decades or decades of what seems to be deliberate targeting, and so at a certain point, to quote George Bush, you know, fool me once, but once we've gotten to know four decades of this, at a certain point, it's like well, I'm the idiot for taking the other side of that bark, for saying, yes, I believe you that this was an

isolated incident, that just one soldier who went crazy. You mentioned the attacks on clergy, and it wasn't too long ago that I believe a Catholic nun was pretty savagely beaten by a reservist as far as I understand. And the thing that makes this so monstrous is that the most explicit supporters of this regime in America are not Jewish.

I mean, there certainly are. You can look at you know, Dershowitz and Randy Fines, and that is wrong but at least explainable, right, you can imagine why a Jewish person would root for the Jewish homeland. But when it is you know, a white, middle class American, a nominal Christian, right, someone who is has really no genetic or cultural tie to the current modern nation state of Israel whatsoever. It's without this kind of nexus of money and theology almost inexplicable.

And it goes to show that, you know, look, theology can be seen as this sort of airy person suit of academics, but it does matter. And you mentioned earlier worship religion, faith, whatever term you want to use, is core to the human experience. We do it one way or another. We may delude ourselves, we may say, well, it's not explicitly theistic, but it is the way in which we interact with the world, and what values occupy that space, what icons I might say, produces radically different results.

And his idolatry of the nation of Israel has produced one of the nastiest conflicts in human memory. Right, this kind of like horrible genocide funded with money from my pocket anyway.

you might hear what orthodonic? Orthopedics just means correct And if there's any doubt on the importance of correct teachings, this must be it. Because when you get Charlatan's like Doug Wilson or John Hagey or Paula White, exploiting the naivete of the people for profit, for political ends, for worldly power. This is what happens. And the closer a I don't want to call them churches, but we can say a church comes to political power, the more corrupt

it becomes. The church should never be corrupt by worldly political power. And so yeah, that's what you get. You get a large number of people who have no clue what they're doing. I have a friend, an old friend, and he's Greek Orthodox and at the bottom of his emails he's have Greek half American and he doesn't have a Greek flag or an American flag. Isn't as really flag at the bottom of his emails. And I never really confront him on it because he's an older guy.

I don't want to make him feel bad or anything. But the fact I used Raeli. You know, why do you have an Israeli flag there? They've been conditioned for decades. It's it's a type of social control and conditioning, you know. I had another acquaintance where I was I tell this story sometime I was sitting in this cafe one time and in Legano, Switzerland, and our kids went to school together, and we're watching the TV screen the first drone footage

coming out of Gaza on. It just looks dystopian, right, So something only George Orwell could think of. I looked at TV. I said, look at that. That's incredible. I've never seen thing like that in my life. And this nice woman, she's a mother, she's a wife, she's a Christian from the South, probably a Christian Zionis, and she goes good. You know, that's what they deserve. And I just thought, how many women and children died there? Do

you think? And I thought, what would make a mother or and a wife speak that way about the destruction and loss of life. I don't care if they're a Muslim or Jewish or Chinese. It's wrong, the loss of life, innocent life. And so you look at that, and these are people who can tell you the most basic tenets. If you asked one of these Christian Zionists, I would guess ninety nine point nine night percent the time, what is it required to be called a Christian? What is

a Christian? They couldn't answer that question. So they're highly, highly manipulated with like almost like KGB type tactics. You know, we'll call most SAD tactics better yet, and you know, by the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement had figured out that they could co opt this this puritan heresy and use it for political means and secular means, and they've

done it really quite effectively. If the leadership in Israel deserves credit for anything, it's got to be that that they turned America into a vassal state while most Americans believed that Israel was the vassal state. That's quite an accomplishment. And you know, religion is one of the ways you can really manipulate people. It's so so incredibly important to get those teachings right. I mean, I often been very hard on the Catholic Church, for example, as one of

the largest in doctrinators of people. I mean, their propaganda and their ideological indoctrination is intense to the point where they're faithful or like horses with blinders on, they literally cannot see left or right. And you point out things like, for example, clergy sex abuse in the Catholic Church four hundred thousand victims in fifty years, sixty years, and like they'll they'll just won't even talk about it, won't even acknowledge it. They'll talk about Epstein all day long. A

thousand victims. You say, well, your own institution had four hundred times as many victims. You know, there's only four hundred thousand clergy of a clergy to sex abuse victim ratio of one to one, and they just blank it out like it doesn't even exist. You know, the orthodox et cetera. Really sets it apart is the fidelity in the adherence to correct teachings of the one undivided Church. That's where it really sets wholly Orthodoxic a part. And you see it in the fruit that the tree bears,

because like we have almost no sex abuse gout. We have some scandals here and there, but in the same period of time. We just recently did a study on this, since nineteen fifty the total number of documented sex abuse cases and the authors eight hundred. The Catholic Church is four hundred thousand, and we don't have Zionist I never met anyone who had a Zionist idea in the author Church. Maybe they exist, I certainly never met them in my

entire life in the church. But we see that the Vatican councils themselves were authored like Vatican two, so it's key authors. We're actually you know, gay Jewish men, like no Strata Tata for example. So it's kind of funny because you see these prominent neo Catholic commentators online, like a Canvas Owens. I don't mean to judge her by the way, or a Carrie Pergene Bowler also I don't need to judge either. I think they're both, you know, probably very fine women and so forth. But they're very

loud and vocal and really against Zionism. But their own institution is pretty much show a Zionist institution and its core beliefs. So it's you know, it's really like the madness of crowds. You see, this is the total insanity. And I say it's a mess. It's a real mess. But I've consistently maintained and we've tried to communicate this on our podcast that try to find those errors in

Holy Orthodoxy. The Undivided Church, the unchanged Church for two thousand years, which is held steadfast to the early ecumenical councils and teachings of the Church which were designed to prevent people falling victim to these heresies and the fallout from it. So by maintaining that fidelity to the early seven Ecumenical Councils and making sure that the faith and its holy traditions remained unchanged, the faithful we don't fall

into those area. I don't see anyone in North Arch churches running to fund death and destruction and war in Israel and the orth Arch Church. And for a reason, because they're not falling prey. They're faithful. The flock is protected, the sheep are protected by their shepherds. These are false shepherds. The other ones, these Christian nationalists, Doug Wilson's and John Hagees and Paulo Whites like I say, there's snake oil salesmen.

But the average American just doesn't know the difference. Fortunately, what used to be the center of Christian education the university system, like if you go to most like you mentioned Harvard earlier, if you go to any of the original institutions of higher learning New England, the center of those insuans was always a church, and they are very often were set up to educate clergy. You're right, but by the time I was at least going to the university,

nobody studied theology. In fact, it was the major that would earn you the lowest salary. And being a capitalist society, most young people were basically led to believe that when they went to the university, they should choose a field of study which would earn them the most money, which resulted in no real education at all. It resulted just in technicians, which of course is what Plato had declaimed

against in his academy. So we produced generations of technicians, people who could tell you, you know, quadratic formula, or you know, talk to you about molectua structure biology, which is good to know, but it doesn't lead to wisdom. A real education is knowing and loving God. And as Western Christian European people, we under stood that for two millennia, except in the last one hundred years it really got bad,

maybe we say the post Enlightenment era. We started to create technicians, and they know all the knowledge in the world, and they have precisely zero wisdom. And that is room for anyone, any Charlatan, to exploit that. They don't say, they simply don't have the categories. They have the desire. It's written on their heart for God, for life in Christ. But they fall prey to and they succumb to, you know, blind guides. Let's say.

there was a risk though too. But I mean, once you hit the sixteenth century with the era of Thomas Aquinas just on the you know, on the cusp of the protest Reformation, this idea that faith becomes intellectualized or purely scholastic, open up a whole other back of worms, because then a life in Christ could have been purely an intellectual or academic pursuit which led to a whole other side of problems. Wouldn't have to necessarily get into.

But the idea that you know, we are faithful Christians, that our life is oriented towards God, was removed very much so from the idea of learning well.

deeper than that. And I think that in many people it has become sort of the core tenet of faith, not necessarily well expressed or well, you know, laid out, but that is simply what you do. If you are a conservative Christian, you must also then support Israel.

any one subject, well you're off the plantation. And we this is a area where I am not an expert, but the use of you know, tax exempt status for churches is very much weaponized in America. For instance, in the US context, you know, there's this idea that you're not allowed to preach politics from the pulpit. That standard is not fairly applied. To put it mild laser. I

think that was repealed though, wasn't it all right? It may well have been, But I'm speaking about the last several decades right where you have had this sort of standard, And yes, you're right it has. It was what a year and a half, two years ago. The point is this immense pressure from both the legal apparatus as well as the kind of cultural apparatus to keep American Christianity very narrowly focused on certain issues and not others.

but better to watch it visually. I think we're also on Rumble, but probably YouTube. If you really want to watch these episodes, we can send you that three part series and so for the me some of the earlier episodes. If you're at audience is interested, and definitely follow us on substack because you'll hear from us, you know, usually weekly we'll have something out talking about these sorts of things. And you know, it was really really great joining your show today. Really enjoyed it.