The Politically Incorrect Guide to Christendom

A few decades before the birth of Christ , this affluent region became home to Rome's first heated swimming pool , which was constructed on the Esquiland Hill . Eventually , this area would become home to some of the wealthiest people in the world , an immense expanse of luxury villas and parks .

Yet , paradoxically , from the earliest days of Rome and for many centuries , this area outside the gate had become a place where the bodies of executed criminals and slaves were dumped . Vultures flocked overhead in massive numbers , feeding on the rotting flesh of the bodies , piled high in a lengthy ditch .

So prominent were these scavengers that they even had a name the birds of the Esquiland . The area remained so foul and stench from years of rotting corpses that when the Romans sought to build their gardens and heated pools , many years later , laborers choked on the fumes .

Rome for decades after the reclamation began , fragrant gardens were constructed in an attempt to mask the deeply settled odor . The world's most exotic and aromatic plants were imported to mask this nauseating scent . For the Romans , one of the most prominent forms of execution at places like the Esquiland Gate was crucifixion . Of crucifixion , author Tom Holland writes .

Even as seedlings imported from exotic lands began to be planted across the emerging parkland of the Esquiland , these bare trees remained as a token of its sinister past . No death was more excruciating , more contemptible than crucifixion .

To be hung naked , long in agony , swelling with ugly wheels on the shoulders and chest , helpless to beat away the clamorous birds , such a fate , roman intellectuals agreed , was the worst imaginable .

This , in turn , was what rendered it so suitable a punishment for slaves , criminals broken on implements of torture , who were such filth to concern men of breeding and civility .

Some deaths were so vile and so squalid that it was best to draw a veil across them entirely After they died a horrendous death on crosses , the corpses of these criminals and slaves were flung into a common grave .

Oblivion would entomb them In Italy , undertakers dressed in red and would ring bells as they went , dragging lifeless bodies on hooks to be tossed into ditches . From the ancient world we have few , if any , detailed accounts of crucifixions . But there are four detailed accounts of crucifixion that remain .

They are contained in the four Gospels Matthew , mark , luke and John . It is hard for moderns to understand just how debasing , dishonorable and scandalous it was for a criminal to be executed in the manner of crucifixion , let alone for one claiming to be the Son of God , the Anointed One , the King of Kings and the Lord of the Cosmos .

To meet such a fate , divinity , author Tom Holland writes , was for the greatest of the great , for victors and heroes and kings" . Shocking , then , that a crucified enemy of both the Jewish people and the Roman state , who claimed divinity , would be the central figure in a religion that saw their hero executed on a cross at Golgotha .

This was hardly the type of origin story of a religion anyone expected to take over the world , and yet that is exactly what it did . Jesus' followers , who came to be known as Christians , suffered much the same fate as their master . The chief among them , peter , was crucified upside down . Paul the apostle was beheaded under the cruel reign of Emperor Nero .

The other apostles met similar cruel fates . Like Jesus , his followers suffered deaths of great dishonor and ignominy , persecuted and martyred . For centuries , it seemed the early church was doomed to fail , and yet it did not .

Shockingly , just a few centuries after the death of Christ , even the Caesars would bow the knee to Jesus Under a recently converted Constantine . In 313 AD , christianity became a protected religion . Under the edict of Milan , the same church leaders who bore the marks of persecution were invited into the Council of the Emperor With a major status upgrade .

Christianity would continue to spread across Europe so that in a thousand years , virtually every kingdom in the land was Christian . Politically , ecclesiastically and culturally , christianity was the dominant force that shaped every single aspect of all of life . In 1250 AD , grand Duke Medingus of Lithuania was baptized into the Christian religion .

He was the last non-Christian ruling line of any relevance within the European landscape . So complete was the transformation of Europe and so thoroughly had its soul been reshaped by Christianity that the European West became synonymous with Christendom , which literally means the area where Christianity rules .

Historian Peter Heather writes , quote A thousand years after Constantine , all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers . Christendom , the part of the world where official Christianity exercised a dominant hold on the totality of the population , lords and commons , rulers and ruled all had come into existence , and that was that under the realm of Christendom .

In this telling of the Christian story , the rest of European religious history figured as little more than a footnote , a defining coincidence between the boundaries of Europe and the region .

Overwhelming Christian domination had been born in the Middle Ages , and from there the religion spread triumphantly over much of the rest of the planet in the great eras of European colonization and imperialism .

How was it , tom Holland wondered , that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world ?

So significant was Christianity's influence on the world across the centuries that at the surrender of Japan in 1945 , a world leader would quote Psalm 9 and give thanks to the mercy of Christ for defeating such evil . Thou hast rebuked the nations , thou hast destroyed the wicked , thou hast blotted out their name forever and ever .

That world leader was not Harry Truman , it wasn't Winston Churchill and it wasn't Charles de Gaulle . No , it was the Chinese leader Schenkyshak .

Though many have said that the world is de-Christianizing rapidly since the end of World War II , we failed to recognize the ways in which every presupposition we have about society , humanity , the world and all of life , even today , has been bequeathed to us as an inheritance of Christendom .

Of this phenomenon , tom Holland writes , quote the relationship of Christianity to the world that gave birth to it is , then , paradoxical . The faith is at once the most enduring legacy of classical antiquity and the index of its utter transformation .

Formed of a great confluence of traditions Persian and Jewish , greek and Roman it has long survived the collapse of the empire from which it first emerged to become , in the words of one Jewish scholar , the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history of the world .

In the Middle Ages , no civilization in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin West with its own distinctive form of Christianity . Rome had seen the subversive prevail In medieval Christendom . The bones of martyrs were treasured , and it was the church that patrolled belief .

To be human was to be Christian , and to be Christian was to believe . Well , might the Roman church have termed itself Catholic , for it truly was universal . There was barely a rhythm of life that it did not define .

From dawn to dusk , from mid-summer to the depths of winter , from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath , the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions into their bones . How did a small group of relatively unknown and low status men , with their crucified Lord , capture the entire civilized world of Rome .

How did Christianity get down into the marrow of the European soul ? In this season of the King's Hall , we will be telling the breathtaking story of Christendom and its heroes . We will relive the epic bath battles that saved the West and charted its course into the future .

We will tell the story of the resistance Europe mounted against the demonic forces of Islam and why Islam was so central to European identity for centuries . We will relive the epic lives and feats of men like El Sidd and Charles Martel , richard the Lionheart , vlad Dragula and more .

We will also talk about the darker days of downfall and of despair , from the song of Roland and Charlemagne's time to the bloody murders of the Tsar , nicholas and Romanov families by the Bolsheviks in Russia , to the many brutalities suffered at the hands of the Saracens , moors and Turks throughout the centuries .

There have always been moments in which all hope seemed lost , and we'll learn from those too . For it is as Chesterton once said the one perfectly divine thing , the one glimpse of God's paradise given on earth , is to fight a losing battle and not to lose it . We'll consider these turning points in Western history and why they still matter for us today .

We also want to ask a series of simple but profound questions along the way . What was Christendom in all of its glory ? Who were the men that shaped it most profoundly ? What ideas served as foundation stones for the most expansive and magnificent culture building project in human history ?

What myths and outright lives have we been told today about the world that our forefathers built ? And , perhaps more importantly , why have we been told these lies ?

Finally , we want to understand the foundations and the pillars and the blueprints of the first Christendom so that we might glean practical insights for the work set before us of constructing Christendom 2.0 . Today , many claim the West is dying .

We have been told by many a worm tongue that the post-millennial vision for a world swallowing reign of Christ ended with the close of World War II . We have been told that there is no hope of reawakening . We have been told that it was a death blow for Christendom when Christian Europe fell , and the secular humanists do have a point .

After all , the numbers really are staggering . The Europe that Christendom built is being overrun yes , perhaps intentionally flooded by immigrants , many of them Muslim . Both rates are not at replacement levels and they haven't been for a long time . Christianity is having less of an influence in the world than it once did .

The pews in many countries are empty , halls of parliament are filled with purple-haired she-hers , health departments are run by men pretending to be women . The rule of law is perverted . The same is happening in America . Muslims are literally invading Europe , burning down cathedrals and killing priests .

Our leaders allow it , which is why the death of the West is tragically more of a suicide than a homicide . So much of the modern hatred of Christendom is embedded in the myths we have swallowed about the past In high school and college courses across America .

For decades , students have been indoctrinated with the insidious lie that our fathers were ignorant , brutal and wicked . We are cataclyzed to feel embarrassment about our cultural heritage . We have been told that there was a thing such as the Dark Ages , a hideously drab era from which Enlightenment thinkers had to save us .

We have been told that the Crusades were despotic , pre-colonial attempts to enslave and pillage otherwise peaceful Muslims . Our greatest legacy in the West apparently so , we are told is one of bloody carnage and oppression and enslavement . Indeed , a dark spell lays over the West .

We have been trained to instinctually despise the Western canon of literature , its authors and the great men who filled its pages , from Milton and Shakespeare and Dante and Kipling to Homer and St Augustine .

But what if the great explorers , we might ask in this season , what if the great explorers from Columbus to Cortez weren't actually godless genocidal maniacs but Christian heroes ? We have been encouraged to decolonize our bookshelves .

We have been robbed of a great and rich cultural heritage so that for many the cultural fate of the West seems like those slaves cast into the Roman ditch to rot . We are doomed to face a sort of multicultural oblivion , and we are told this is inevitable , while here at the King's Hall , in season 3 , we believe it is not .

And so our work is to rediscover the great principles and truths in men who made Christendom great .

We will be doing the work of history in the style of Henry Cabot Lodge , who said modern social and political agendas which are ferociously alien to the founding principles of the West have been forced down our throats as a poisonous brew of radical revisionist history . Telling the stories of our past , as it turns out , is in order of first importance .

It is also intensely practical , for history provides us with myriad lessons for living faithfully today in light of Christ's reign and the expectations scripture provides .

It is that same history that teaches us the long-plotting work of artisans and craftsmen , grand visions fueling extraordinary works of art and architecture , of literature and church renewal , carried out over many , many generations .

Henry Cabot Lodge once wrote , quote "nearly all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in the English language is the work of shoveling off heaps of rubbish inherited from the immediate past" . And so that is our task in season three we are clearing away the rubbish of historical revisionism .

George Grant wrote about Lodge's style of history by saying that his aim , quote , "was to preserve the practical lessons and profound legacies of Christendom without the petty prejudices of humanistic fashion or the parsimonious preference of enlightenment innovations" .

He goes on to say , quote "Cabot Lodge believed that history was a series of lively adventure stories and thus should be told without the cumbersome intrusion of arcane academic rhetoric or truckloads of extraneous footnotes .

In fact , he believed that history was a romantic , moral drama in a world gone , impersonally scientific , and thus should be told with passion and unction and verve . He understood only too well that the past is ever present , giving shape and focus to all of our lives , simply because the past , like the future , is part and parcel of the Christian faith" .

End quote . And so this is our task . We are going to retell the story of Christendom in a way that is meant to re-enchant , to fill Christians with a vision for glory that inspires a holy ambition for rebuilding the walls of Christendom in our own time . In this episode , we'll be talking about the scope and the meaning of Christendom .

Consider this our politically incorrect guide to Christendom From Constantine to Charlemagne and the Crusades to Gothic cathedrals . In this episode , we want to start by talking about what Christendom was when did it start and when did it end and we want to explode some of the most common lies and myths that are told about Christendom today .

We in the West , like Thayed and King of Rohan , have been under the dark spell long enough . It is time that we found our courage and again began fighting like brave men against the dark powers of the enemy , which always begins by defeating his lies .

We will have peace when you and all your works have perished , and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us . You are a liar , saruman , and a corruptor of men's hearts . You hold out your hand to me and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor , cruel and cold .

Even if your war on me was just as it was not , for were you ten times as wise , you would have no right to rule me in mind for your own profit , as you desired . Even so , what will you say of your torches in the Westfold and the children that lie dead there ? And they hewed Hamas' body before the gates of the Hornburg after he was dead .

When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows , I will have peace with you and orthink so much for the house of Aorl . A lesser son of greater sires am I , but I do not need to lick your fingers . Turn else wither , but I fear your voice has lost its charm .

The Kings Hall podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well and win the world .

That guy , the horse died , the horse died .

But as you read it , you realize the depths of the lie that they and the things I've been trying to cover up from you about how amazing your history is , and so as I discover these truths for the first time , it just gives me further hunger to find more about my past .

Do you have a sense of that as you read the histories , that you think there were some great men in our bloodlines .

But when you read the stories of the greatness and the glory and the heights and also just the circumstances that our forefathers lived through that were I can't even imagine being a husband , a father , a man of God in these circumstances that they lived through it's hard to even get your mind to contemplate a little bit of what it would have been like to be

fighting for your life and for your people's lives and for the very border of your realm to not be conquered by a demon god and his hordes right Islam . Spoiler . Look I don't wanna name names . I don't wanna name names . I don't wanna name names here , but it was the Muslims it was the . Muslims .

Yeah , you just walk away with a deep respect for these men and also for the type of humility that is still lacking in modern history and historiography , that modern historians have begun with these assumptions , begun with assumptions that are born of being colonized by secular humanism .

They've been colonized already , their minds have been , and so when they approach these stories , they come at them from this position of a sneering , arrogant , deconstructing , just worldview of hell , and then they just , they fling fill all over the images of your forefathers .

Look , we wanna tell this as a grand drama , and so there'll be a lot of storytelling and a lot of drama , hopefully , and a lot of cool things like punching horses and faces and even cooler stuff than that , Dan but at the same time , what we have to do is we have to scoop the rubbish off of the histories that we've been told , and so that's gonna be a

big part of this . I do wanna encourage people as well . We've got a patron exclusive show that we're starting for this season , and the name of this , Brian , is to me .

So , first of all , for those who don't know , we'll get into this , but with the Crusades , Pope Urban II says we need to have a crusade , and Godfrey Bouillon and others say day was vault , so that's day was vault meaning the Lord wills it .

And Dan . We also interviewed one of our favorite authors of two of our favorite new books , raymond Ibrahim . That was a really an incredible interview , I thought . So you'll get early access to these through the day use vault . We're also one of the big things that people ask a lot for book lists .

So one of the things that's gonna be on Patreon is book lists and then some more in-depth book reviews that are gonna be specific to and germane to the subject matters that we cover in each of the episodes and sort of . The other thing is we're going more in-depth with historical events and people in the day use vault .

So , for example , in this show , in the main episode , we'll be talking about the Notre Dame Cathedral . How do you say that , brian ?

Some dead people found buried in the floor .

But I kind of want to ask just a foundational question about this whole project Do you actually think , do you actually think , that Christendom could be rebuilt ? We're talking about Christendom 2.0 . We're going back to the foundations and blueprints . But , come on , you guys aren't really that audacious . Have you seen the purple-haired man-eaters in the Taylor Swifties ?

Have you seen them ? Do you actually think ?

I mean , look at the low points , the point at which the stone strikes the statue and topples all the empires and then becomes a mountain that covers the world . It's a point when the people , the covenant people of God , are in rampant apostasy , tons of demons covering the land , enslaved by a pagan people and seemingly powerless .

And that's the moment when the kingdom of God invades the world in the person of Christ and establishes this kingdom . And Isaiah says that of the increase of that government and of peace there'll be no end . So to me , that's just one passage .

To me , when you look at the way that God has written the story post acts of the apostles into what we now call like church history , post biblical church history , there's other , this continuation of the story God's telling . It has all of the marks of some early acts in a really good play . But that's what it says to me .

So when I look back at these things .

I think that God did a similar thing in history to what he did in scripture , which is , he gave us many glorious examples , many examples of what not to do Like horrific examples of what not to do and many examples of how to go and , in the face of seemingly insurmountable foes and odds , to fight the good fight of the faith and , even if we die , to still

win . So to me , I think that Christianity , christian expansion , christendom , I think it's inevitable because I believe that Christ's kingdom is inexorable .

But then when you think about like again , we talked about in the cold open a man-lord who was crucified and discarded basically by everyone in that day , except for 12 guys and some other disciples who went and spread a message , within 300 years that religion would consume the world and within a thousand years every ruler in Europe would be a Christian .

Yeah , we're blind , and so we're gonna delve into that . Dan , I wanna ask you a question . We're starting to define what is Christendom . So in all of your vast reading , in all of that big , large brain underneath the bald head , can you just start to unpack for us ? Just begin to unpack for us , like , what is Christendom ? We talk about it .

It's not just the church . So what is it ?

That was the defining characteristics of Christendom throughout the ages is that everything was explicitly Christian and influenced by Christianity . Now I know that there's objections out there to like , well , christian government , like theocracy , something like that , like the churches , the churches in control of everything , like the churches in control of the government .

Actually , that was not the case in Christendom . The church was not like the ruler behind the ruler , you know , behind the emperor , but the government was assumed to have Christian standards , christian laws and to have accountability with the church . So that's what I would say . I don't know if you have anything to add to that .

So the first thing that Jesus says is the kingdom of God is at hand , or the kingdom of heaven is at hand . And then people would say , you know that , argue against this idea of Christendom . That well , he also says this kingdom is not of this world , his kingdom is not of this world .

Jesus , what he did in that moment is he's calling his shot of the invasion of the kingdom of heaven into earth to the colonization of the entire globe for his glory . And so you start to see that's the seed form . And it takes 300 years , not quite 300 years for Christianity to become a legal religion Like in the Roman world .

That was really important because it meant you had representation , it meant you could be at court and also that you wouldn't be , you know , murdered for your faith .

There was a definite destruction of Christian kingdoms . We'll talk about in this season the Romanovs , tsar Nicholas , the British Empire , the British Empire All those things did definitely come crashing down in one form . But then as you start to think about it , it's like , well , we've seen these cycles before .

Yeah , also , what you saw in the 20th century is Christianity eventually would outlast and topple the Soviet Union , which looked like a giant ravenous beast that was gonna destroy the church and then it didn't .

One of the things that I would encourage is we're thinking about Christendom .

I was reading in Judges three recently and it said the Lord left enemies in the land because the people who had not known war needed to learn how to fight and so , like a mercy from our father , that like we have a target , rich environment and there's huge fights in front of us , and that's a good thing we need to learn how to trust the Lord , how to

fight , how to build all at the same time .

It's easy to , at points of defeat or decline , to try and arbitrarily draw an ending point . But one of the things you learn if you study just the raw nature of history is that history is full of endings . It's full of moments where everything seems lost . It's full of reversals , it's full of conflict .

It's full of disunity amongst the church and infighting that's weakening us All . Of the lessons that you would need to be a good Christian today , waging the good fight of the faith today , you can learn by looking back through these histories and finding that , oh , this is not new .

This isn't the story of this great long decline where , if you could just go back to the 800s , everything was great and perfect and everyone was on the same page in the 800s , I'm sorry , no , they weren't .

Like we're still here in the , we're in chapter four or what . I don't know if the book God's writing , but here we are , early on , we're still setting up the foreshadowing for the big thing that's gonna happen in chapter 17 . Like that's our job right now .

When you look back through the history , you find that it's historians love to make clean , cut eras and times and be like on this date , all of a sudden , everything was in sepia , and then you move past this date and then it was all color , or you know that's not how history works , though it's even the whole fall of the Roman Empire . What do you mean ?

That wasn't a date . There wasn't like a moment when all of a sudden , y2k style , rome was just over and that was it . It's like history's not that clean .

So what's good to remember about that , or the lesson to learn , is that we're not just needing to prepare for one calamitous battle where it will all be decided . That's not how history almost ever plays out .

There's key moments , like tours and all these other key moments , but what you learn from looking back over this is like , most of the time , most of the time , the things that led to our downfall were some small sins that built up some infighting , some things for a couple hundred years and then a century of decline .

And then you turn around and you're like , wow , look what happened . But I love the complexity of history . I just love it . I think it's so encouraging because when I look at our day , I think it's very complicated and there's so many different battles and factions and you can be so discouraged by that and think like , wow , look how far we've fallen .

But then you look back and you go to the 800s , to the 1200s , to the 1100s . You're like these are our people . This is what we've been doing the whole time . The Lord's still with us .

And you know , blackpilling is not one of them . And so we have this whole range where we can say like we're doing .

I think you can look back at Christendom and you can say , okay , one of the episodes , lord willing , that we'll get to is how the Irish saved civilization , how Irish monasteries saved Christianity , and so we may be in one of those seasons where we build communities that preserve the faith in Christian culture .

That may be what we're doing , and if that's it , then you know , full send .

Even today , when we're talking about Christian nationalism , which is , I think , way too small of a concept for what Christendom actually is , it's just one small part .

But what's interesting here is ideas like just war theory , the idea behind Christendom and what medieval Christendom would become , rulers who are subservient to Christ and working alongside the church , the fact that magistrates should be titty fathers under the law of Christ All of this is found in Augustine and really he gets a lot of it from Ambrose .

So it really struck me that you have really a theory and one of the great church leaders outside the apostle Paul Augustine is probably the greatest church leader of that early period , maybe any period in church history . His ideas shape what the church will become . But it's just fascinating to me that it took a long time for that to be realized .

Arguments aside , but this friend of Augustine was on his deathbed and he's baptized and he comes back , he gets better and Augustine is like hey , the Christians , they baptize you . And it was like the Manichees would make fun of the sacraments and he was going to have a good laugh about it and his friend's like that's not funny , I'm a Christian .

And then the guy later died .

So one of the things that's interesting here is we talk about this today Again in the pietist versus Christian nationalist camp , but it's really interesting because this stuff is not new at all . That's one of the things we find when we read history is that Augustine dealt with all of this even long before we get to this point .

One of Augustine's big projects is to figure out the way that Christian faith relates to the learning of the past and the pagans and of the rhetoricians and of Cicero , and he's writing the book on Christian teaching , where he gives the famous analogy of plundering the Egyptians , basically like as the an exodus , the people of God plunder the Egyptians gold when they

went into the land of promise . We can go and read Cicero and we can read these great works of Roman and Greek philosophy and their culture even , and take what they stole from the Bible anyway , from God's truth and God's world , and we don't have to be scared of their learning . We can actually approach it critically , plunder it and use it in our own .

That whole idea , like Augustine writing that people miss it , like people miss how hugely important that concept is to the success of Christianity in that era , in the Christianization of Rome and the Romanization of Christianity , because what Christianity had to do was not try to convert the entire Roman empire , to be like the Jesus movement in the first few hundred

years of Christianity which was more organic . It actually took over many of Rome's methods of governance , methods of hierarchy , converted many Roman elites and then used Rome's government as a vehicle for a globalizing Christianity , for bringing the Christian faith to the whole known world .

So Augustine's instincts there deeply important for us to understand both how those instincts shaped early Christendom , but also for us to understand the entire project of Christianity as a colonizing project .

He's steeped in , like every major culture group that's intersecting , and is able to speak to each of them in such a profound way that , like you said , you'll see historians debating this like well , was Christianity Romanized or was Rome Christianized ? And it's a little bit of both .

But if you read about him today , he invented Christianity it was . I read one historical work , obviously from a secular pagan , but they said the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity was Constantine .

This is such an important instinct for us to understand as Christians looking at history , a big point of the season is that , a lot of the time , I think what many Christians have , this instinct to forget God's providential hand and ruling history , and so they kind of want to reject in totality everything that wasn't perfect , oh big , because you can come up for

literally any Christian figure . You can be like , well , they shouldn't have did that , and you're like you can fall . In the other ditch , we were like , no , everything they did was perfect , you're just not based enough , which it's a real ditch , guys .

So therefore they're basically an archvillain of history and they must have been a fraud and they must have been fake and everything about it must be suspect , it's like . But we know that's not how people are .

Everything he did was wicked , and when you actually look at the situation Dan we mentioned some of the things that flowed after Constantine you have some councils that really institutionalized Christianity . There were also .

He was regularly causing problems for , you know , christians by changing who was like in office , basically of the church , and then they'd persecut I mean , for example , with the Arrhenianism controversy . Just thinking about that , it was such a mess because the emperors got involved . But it was also but it's also , it got sorted out because of them .

We should probably get together and figure this out . And so he gets the bishops together like pays for all of it . Yeah , he pays for all of it . And then he observes and he's like , yeah , I'll submit to whatever you guys say , but that's the guy that invented this .

And we get the Nicaean Creed from that , by the way which and some accounts say he wasn't exactly pleased with the Nicaean Creed but , that's where the messy part comes in .

Power hungry , poly there's all that stuff there , because that's human life under the sun , but that doesn't mean that there are not also great heroes that we can learn from , emulate and should not give over to this revisionism of history through one of the secular , I think one of the best ways we can avoid believing the revisionist lies and to remove the rubbish

from the you know that moderns have put on our Christian heroes and on our own personal history is by reading through a lens of charity .

But if you read through the lens of charity , you go why would that guy do that ? Why would he lead that way ?

And actually ask the questions why would Constantine have these issues with Arianism and why would he call Nicaea and why would he do this or that Is actually trying to get into the time period and into the minds of the great men and show them some charity . That's a good way to honor your spiritual forefathers .

If a city surrenders and gives terms of surrenders instead of making the enemy force besiege it and lose their force in an all-out assault , then they will be given favorable terms . If you make them attack the wall and lose many of their men , then a lot of you will get killed and enslaved , and that was whether you like it or not .

We can analyze that in terms of just worth , theologically and practically and politically now , but those were the rules of engagement . Everybody played the game that way .

Your enemy was going to play the game that way , whether you did or not , and so you have to just understand these things , that you're not stepping into the 12th , 11th , 8th , 9th , 7th century and just going to arbitrarily be able to import your sensibilities as a 21st century American and just assume that you're correct about all that .

No voting , nobody got to vote .

So well , I mean , hey , you are gay .

That's what it is Subjugating , if you practice it correctly which many Muslims don't today then you will try to conquer your neighbors by violence , force of violence . You will be permitted to sexually enslave women . You will be permitted to do virtually anything you want to your enemies , and that's what you will do .

That's what the religion is fundamentally on a theological level , and most of the surahs and the statements from their holy texts that are used to say that it's a religion of peace are straightforwardly abrogated by over 100 later statements in the Quran and the surahs , in history and theological tradition of their religious leaders and theologians .

So what we're looking at in the Islamic faith is a religion that will either completely take over the world or eventually be eradicated . It's built into the DNA of the thing , unless it fundamentally changes into something that is essentially a new religion altogether from its founding . That's what it is . You see , this played out across the Crusades .

We're going to get into a lot of that and you will learn to be sympathetic to even the intense violence that Christians undertook in some of these eras , because of what they faced .

Yeah , and then by the year 700 , 704 , 705 , I can't remember Yarmulke's , one of those right in there it's all of a sudden they're like and we're now going to conquer the Christian world , basically the seeds of that . Yes , that's how different the Christian faith is from the Islamic faith . You see it right there in the history .

Yet today , most of us would unhesitantly condemn the crusades as un-Christian . Why are you kidding ? After all , Jesus told his followers to love their enemies , not to exterminate them . He was a pacifist and had more in common with Gandhi , perhaps , than with Pope .

You've been successfully lied to in a way that was calculated this was intentional in a way that was calculated to make you easily conquerable .

One of the things , end quote , one of the things that I said in the cold open it's not so much the death of the West as the suicide of the West .

So people are shaped by their ideas of the narrative they're living in . We act as the characters we believe ourselves to be in the stories we believe ourselves to be in .

If you can control what people think about , what kind of story they're in and what character they're playing and who the main characters are , well then obviously you can manipulate most people to do whatever you want .

Basically we need to die .

slightly worse . Okay , every other race it was comical was like Asians . The Asians were like oh we , awesome , white devil bad . And it was like everybody sucks . We're amazing , they have pride . Everybody does that right . I'm not saying this is virtuous , I was actually . I'm saying that .

I'm not actually saying that this is a brute virtuous thing , but I am saying what it shows is that we've been Discipled .

We've talked about this in previous first season of Kings Hall that a lot of the war on whiteness is a proxy war on Christianity because of the Western Christendom and the history of Western Christendom in Europe and Also the Protestant founding of America , many of the things in the way , standing in the way between globalism , secular humanism and world domination are

white Christian Europeans and their descendants right . So what a chart like that shows you , if it's , if it's true , if it's actually a real chart , I believe it is the way that the narrative has been shaped to teach people who the villain and who the hero is and what the end goal is .

So if you can control that , if you can convince Christians , for example , to believe that virtually everything Christians did until the Enlightenment came along and fixed everything was evil , you're not gonna have Christians in three generations of that .

One of the areas moving on from the crusades to another Wide period here is the Middle Ages , so from 476 AD to 1450 . Again , some of these time periods are really hard to exactly say . These are the exact dates , but Somewhere in the middle of that Dan episode We'll be doing upcoming shortly . 871 to 899 , the king of all kings in the medieval period .

Okay , king , alfred , yeah , king . Al under Jesus . Yeah but King Alfred .

He was talking about the Middle Ages and he said he said something that was really profound . He said most of us , if we are imported into that time in the Middle Ages , we would be uncomfortable with the amount of light and Flourishing and beauty that you would find there .

strong ? Yeah how did they make this thing , yeah ?

And they did it with , like a guy with a chisel , yeah , in the woods . Oh , unbelievable .

No , when you look at the medieval time period and you look at the culture , the art , the literature , the poetry , the stuff that was coming out of there , and particularly architecture , dan , we get into the 12th to 16th centuries , particularly with Gothic architecture , of which Notre Dame , yeah , is one that we'll look at in just a moment , but I mean ,

breathtaking , beautiful , amazing , was supposed to be just at the forefront of what Western Christendom was . Yeah , and the myth , I think , is that architecture today is Better . I've seen Dallas . I rest my case .

Dallas is just a picture of everything else that was built in like 1960 to 1980 in America . Yeah yeah so I mean , what's going on with that ?

And Look at your local mega church . I guarantee you it costs tens of millions , if not more . Yeah in some cases to build , and you could have built something actually beautiful . Sure of the monstrosity Exists .

So in today's money I mean with inflation that's about 11 billion .

Because , yeah , a lot of people were saying , okay , notre Dame burns down Muslims probably , and not like legitimately , stay tuned , but Notre Dame burns down , they have to repair part of it , mm-hmm , and the repair cost is almost a billion dollars .

Yeah , if people say , wow , that's crazy , I think it's just we and we put our money in the things that we love .

Cathedrals were built as centerpieces of cities to portray the centrality of the church and Christ's reign across the city . Just as the temple in Ezekiel , so culture flowed out of this ecclesiastical center and touched every sphere of life . The building project began in 1163 AD , during the reign of King Louis the 7th , and was completed around 1345 .

The cathedrals construction involved multiple phases and contributions from various architects and builders over the years . Notre Dame stands out for its pipe organs , massive rose windows , flying buttresses and its immense church bells . It's the pinnacle of French Gothic architecture .

Maurice de Sully , the Bishop of Paris at the time , envisioned a grand cathedral that would surpass the existing structures in Paris . Sully envisioned the cathedral as a representation of the church's authority in Paris and beyond .

Its towering presence and intricate design were meant to signify the glorious reign of Christ on earth and to raise men's gaze heavenward with awe . Sully's ambition was to create a cathedral that showcased the magnificence of God's creation through human craftsmanship .

Notre Dame's Gothic design , with its soaring heights , intricate details and beautiful stained glass windows , was a testament to the faith and devotion of its builders and an awe-inspiring embodiment of divine beauty . The construction process was intricate and required Significant effort that took hundreds of years to complete .

The builders used innovative techniques for that time , such as employing flying buttresses to support the wall and allow for taller and thinner walls , creating more space for stained glass windows and Structures that looked almost impossibly light and airy , yet completely made out of stone .

The cornerstone was laid in 1163 by Pope Alexander the third , in the presence of King Louis the seventh . The construction began with the choir section and proceeded to the nave and transept . Skilled stone masons , carpenters and laborers worked tirelessly for decades , passing on their knowledge and expertise to subsequent generations of workers .

The cathedrals design incorporated elements of Gothic architecture , characterized by its pointed arches , ribbed vaults and Expansive stained glass windows . The rose windows in particular are renowned for their intricate beauty and craftsmanship .

The Notre Dame Cathedral faced several challenges through its construction , including interruptions due to political and financial issues , wars , and alterations and architectural plans .

Despite these challenges , the builders kept up the work and the cathedral gradually took shape as one of the most magnificent Examples of Gothic architecture in the power of Christendom in the West over the centuries . No , so don't . Cathedral underwent renovations , additions and restorations to maintain its structural integrity and preserve its beauty .

Tragically , a devastating fire broke out on the 15th of April , just a few years ago , 2019 , causing significant damage to the roof spire and interior of the cathedral . Was it an accident ? The official story is that bad electrical wiring in one of the spires could have caused the fire .

Oddly enough , al Jazeera reported that a Rwandan refugee intentionally burned down another French cathedral in 2020 , destroying a pipe organ that was constructed in the 1600s . The same man murdered a priest in cold blood . Those several news outlets reported that the man was a Rwandan refugee . They refused to use the word Muslim .

Whatever happened to the Notre Dame Cathedral and however the fire started , it came at an interesting point in French and European history . The influx of Muslims has created a heated cultural clash between Islam in the West , something that is anything but new .

The Franks , dating back to Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours and 732 AD , had long sought to repel the Muslim invaders . Following the fire , an extensive restoration and 865 million dollar Reconstruction effort was initiated to rebuild and restore Notre Dame to its former glory .

The restoration project aimed not only to repair the damage , but also to ensure the preservation of this iconic symbol of Paris and Western civilization . During restoration efforts at Notre Dame , archaeologists discovered two mysterious sarcophagi buried under the church's nave . After months of research , they now know more about who was entombed in them .

One contained the remains of a priest who died in 1710 , and to learn more about that priest in his strange burial , check out our patreon exclusive show . The deus vault . Yes , that is the real name .

The Notre Dame Cathedral stands as a testament to the dedication , craftsmanship and artistic vision of the architects , builders and artisans who contributed to its creation , making it a cherished symbol of Western Christendom , france's cultural heritage , and a marvel of architectural excellence . Is it better than a strip mall in Dallas ?

We'll let you decide , and if you decide that Dallas is better than Notre Dame , then we can't help you . You should probably listen to another podcast I would look up . Whatever the Obamas are doing , that would probably be a good one , wow . But there's another element of glory here that we're gonna explore this season . I think is important as well .

We've talked now a lot about some great , developed Christian civilizations when heroes have built great cities and cathedrals and defended them with the blood of their young men and with their heroes , with swords and glory and all of that Inspiring scenes like Phaedon's fight on the Palinor fields kind of glory .

But there's another kind of glory that Christians also ought to have that is often stolen from us , and it's the glory of the great explorers , who were Christians , who went and explored far off lands , found new worlds . Some things happened with some of the inhabitants of those worlds . It gets a little fuzzy . We'll talk about that Later . But this is the .

Everything they did was just . I have no . The myth is that that they weren't explorers , who are great men , but they were genocidal maniacs who stole the indigenous lands of these highly developed and cultured civilizations , and so we should change , like Columbus Day , to indigenous peoples day . That's right . What ? And it's interesting , we'll talk about Columbus .

They would instantly expel you from the university . Oh yes , yeah . I read one headline about this .

Not probably not the originals , the original , I mean , I choose to believe it was the originals , but he had read through them and he was like , yeah , no , his , his goal with Ferdinand and Isabella Was to find a route to outflank the Muslims so that they could finish the crusades . And , of course , 1492 . So this is late .

A lot again people are like wait , was there still conflict with Islam in 1492 ?

Like Thomas Jefferson's report , by the way , back to Congress .

Just saying we're not gonna say that , but I think , yeah , just seeing what you know , brian , we've talked about this before . You have a very storied Ancestry with indigenous peoples . Yeah , I do , and so it's right and proper that their culture remained . How wrong you are . No .

It was primitive , and primitive culture is extremely blood thirsty , not a place you would want to live . It's not idyllic . It was absolutely horrible . It was . It needed to be conquered and replaced with a better culture , which was Christianity , and that's just . There's no question .

They literally changed one of the sentences so it no longer said that the , the Jews , were the principal Ancestors of these Native Americans . But we're actually just like one of them . So they give you , like , if there's any percentage well , that was a huge derailment in man .

It really does bring into question though we get into this time period , it's very significant the end of yeah the end of Christen or at least , as we've said before , like definitely a downturn . So our Nicholas and his family brutally killed by Bolsheviks and you see sort of the .

You know many people said it's like fall of empires , the end of Christendom , world War one . Yeah , you have this really strange thing with the king of England . The Kaiser and Zara Nicholas are all cousins , mm-hmm , and they're all going to war . Millions of people died stupid , stupid .

Yes , and then what comes in afterwards are Stalin , hitler , mussolini , the dismanselling of Christian Empire and the replacement of it with secular , humanist globalism , with communism , with all sorts of other isms that are really what we're dealing here , yeah , what we're facing today , and so in many ways , whether it's an end or you know we're , I think we're too

close . We're too close to it in history . We need a couple more centuries before we can make some analysis like that , but certainly a Watershed moment in in the history of Christendom .

But then we look at events that happened at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and we're like , oh , that was ancient history Five minutes ago , five minutes , like five minutes ago , which shows you how fast culture can turn if you own the narrative . That's why this season is so important . But the King's Hall that's right .

We're gonna be talking about Multiculturalism how great it is really .

Dan , I turn things over to you for the charge for episode one , season three and this masterpiece of a season that we're Undertaking all right , all right , I'll give it my best shot .

You play a small part in the growing of the mustard seed into a tree that covers the earth , and part of your responsibility is to know the great deeds of your spiritual forefathers , of the , of the kings and the priests and the bishops and the great men and women that came before you , and to uncover that history to encourage you , to strengthen you on the

mission forward . And so there is a great work set before us to rebuild the walls of Christendom against the secular Pagans and the Muhammedin's and all other demonic religions , for the love of the people , to spread the good news of Jesus Christ and to protect those that you're responsible for . So be inspired , start building day , use vault .