How MAGA is Using Religion to Go to War

Speaker 1: Hello everyone. Welcome back to Fighting Matters. Today's just an episode between myself, Stefan Kesting, from Grapplers.com and Jeff Shaw from Bellingham BJJ. How are you, Jeff? Speaker 2: I'm doing great, Steph. How are you doing? Speaker 1: Well, doing all right. I'm really interested today to get to the topic. I I think we should start this by reading something that was reported to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation recently. In the very early days of this war on Iran. Basically, there were hundreds of reports of combat units being told that this was a religious war. And the quote that stuck out to me was, President Trump has been appointed by Jesus to light a signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth. So this ties in a whole lot of things from modern evangelical end times theology to uh going all the way back to the apocalyptic literature of the Old Testament and the New Testament and the stuff that's in, you know, the Apocrypha as well as in your KJV. Speaker 2: Mm. Speaker 1: So, I thought there was nobody better to discuss this with than than you, a reformed seminary student. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm I'm fascinated by all of of the historical stuff and the uh the way that scripture developed and informed society and was informed by it. And one thing I that I think is really important to identify right off the top is that my perspective is most of the people deploying scripture in this context are absolutely insincere and do not believe this. The there are, of course, fundamentalists that do believe this signal flare end times stuff. My my my perspective on most of the administration is that this is a rhetorical tool that they are using to do things that they want to do anyway. And um, which is reprehensible, but is also something just to keep in mind that this these are not folks who think deeply about biblical Hebrew and Aramaic and what uh the authors of the Old and New Testament scriptures were intending when they wrote them low those thousands of years ago. These are not people that inquire deeply about like the the original author's intent or what was being what was being said. These are people that know they want to commit violence and are going to find a a version of scripture that allows them to do it. Speaker 1: Well, keeping in mind that we want to I think move and talk about the modern day implications of this and talk about how end times theology is being used to drive this current war, even if it's not sincere. Let can we start at the beginning? Can we start with apocalyptic literature in the Old Testament, your Enoch and your your Book of Revelation. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And then the various other apocalyptic literature. What is what is the Book of Revelation? Speaker 2: The Book of Revelation is something that I think a lot of modern scholars would wish had never been put into the canon. But it is a piece of apocalyptic literature that is ascribed to John, um, and the the actual authorship is something that is very much in doubt. Speaker 1: Disputed. Speaker 2: Yeah, and very very much disputed. But it is it is apocalyptic literature that is very much rooted in the time. And it's important to recognize too that nothing in these like people are people are going to of religious faith are always going to find meaning and value in scriptures for how to guide their own lives. But it's a huge mistake to think that any of this stuff is meant to predict today. There is no modern equivalent. Very few of these like it the vast majority of the of uh the biblical authors didn't expect human society to last much longer. The and so you see that in this tradition of we don't know when, but it's going to be soon. And we're using these metaphorical images in some ways, in in some in some senses they would correspond to uh uh ancient leaders at the time that were oppressing people of faith. And so shining one son of the dawn was not used to describe Lucifer, it was used to describe an ancient leader. Um, and in some cases it was just, you know, their suppositions about the way that the world would end. Speaker 1: Yeah. So for people who don't know what the Book of Revelation is, it's basically the last book in the Bible. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Speaker 1: It is it describes a a vision of the future when there's seven-headed beasts and there's seven bowls and there's seven nations and there's seven churches and basically Jesus comes back and there's a whole lot of suffering. Uh, people get thrown into burning pits of flame and the the non-believers suffer incredibly and eventually the Jews convert to Christianity or believe in Jesus. And then the few, the happy few live on uh in in the afterlife and everyone else is kindling. And you were saying that modern scholars wish that uh this book hadn't or many modern scholars wish that this book hadn't been included in the Bible. I'm going to uh add people like Luther. So, again, for people who don't know, the big division in Christianity or one of the big divisions occurred in the early 1500s with Protestantism, which is the root of all of the evangelical Christian, well, most of the evangelical Christianity around today, split off from Catholicism. So Martin Luther, uh, Luther was quite dubious that the Book of Revelation should be included in the Bible. And then there were other Protestant figures like Zwingli in Switzerland and even Calvin. Like Calvin who wrote and pontificated about everything, didn't say a single word. It's the only, I believe it's the only book of the Bible that Calvin didn't say anything about. So there was a lot of doubt right from the beginning, and I think part of that is because there's so many bloody different versions of like this is a huge genre. It's kind of like the the every every once in a while there's a bunch of movies come out, right? There was a year that uh like multiple movies came out about meteors meteor strikes on Earth and like showing basically how society deals with it and or then there's a bunch of movies about earthquakes hitting the West Coast and you've got The Rock jumping between collapsing buildings. This was that sort of disaster movie of the time. And that's why, you know, you've got the Book of Revelation, which is supposedly by John, but you've also got like not in the Bible itself, you've got the Apocalypse of Peter, you've got the Apocalypse of Paul, Stephen, Thomas, Samuel, Amos, you've got in the Old Testament and you mentioned it before we got started, the Book of Enoch. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So one thing I think is really important to understand is there is your point about Luther is super valid here and it goes back thousands of years of religious history and that there is no one stable version of the Bible. And I'm not talking about different translations even. I mean, what books are included, what books are not included, what books are considered canon and central, what books are considered either apocryphal, which comes from a Greek word meaning hidden or deuterocanonical, which is they're not in the canon, but they're adjacent. And these are all things that are negotiated from generation to generation and year to year. And so the reason that I don't think a lot of there are a lot of people that make their lives of this and they're very sincere and it is fascinating research. When political figures get involved, it's almost never let's look at the actual way these texts developed in their historical and cultural context and how they changed. Political figures will almost always say there's one interpretation and coincidentally it happens to serve my interest and how I structure power. And when we look at this, I would I do want to talk about the Book of Enoch because it's one of those that isn't even included in the Apocrypha in most versions, but it was critically important to early people of this period and we and I can say why we know that. But the thing that I think is most important though, um, is that none of this should have any bearing on like how we structure power today because these societies were completely different. Um, and we'll we'll talk about some of the implications uh of of that. I think I'm sure as we get on as people try to deploy these things to harm other people. Uh it is really interesting how um the people that are most interested in in sort of using these texts as cudgels to beat their opponents with are the ones that are least interested in how the text developed or what the actual intent of the authors was. One thing I said to you off the air, I believe that current political leadership is much more fundamentalist than any of the actual authors of these scriptures. Speaker 1: If you look back at What what do you mean by that? Speaker 2: I mean two things. I mean, these folks were a lot more comfortable with nuance and disagreement and uncertainty. There are differences in even the way the canonical stories are portrayed among the New Testament authors. Uh Paul's sexual ethic is different than the sexual ethic that is developed by other church leaders. And the and an example that is one of my favorites, it it is the way that well, I I'll get to that in a moment. Is the Book of Jeremiah uh that we see um in the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran. So we we find that people that I I think that the people of faith that I respect the most are the people that think of faith as a as a struggle, as a daily practice, as a dialogue, as a there's not an answer on a scratch-off ticket that says yes or no. It's a thing that you have to continue to apply with the fundamental principles being the ones you find in the Beatitudes of loving your neighbor as yourself and blessed are the peacemakers. Um, the one thing that that one to the topic of fundamentalism. There are multiple not only are there books that are canonical, deuterocanonical, apocryphal, and non-canonical. And these were all texts that were circulating at the time. And we have just sort of picked and chosen which ones to include in our particular holy books. There are also, of course, different translations of each of those uh over periods of time and different languages. And when so for those of you that and by the way, I apologize for not for not explaining the Book of John or the Book of the Book of Revelation as well because I I I may be assuming too much knowledge. but uh the the um so so the Dead Sea Scrolls. Uh they found this treasure trove of ancient manuscripts at Qumran, which was this site where people were transcribing these books. And this is really a a rich and what's one of the most important finds ever. One of the things you find is there are two different versions of the Book of Jeremiah. And they are both being reproduced. So if you were a scribe, you would hand me your book. And of course, over the time there were little annotations and people made their own little changes. But what we found at Qumran is that it's not just that, you know, Jeff put in a little detail or Stefan put in a little detail. It's there are two different ways the book goes and both are being reproduced, which I think is really beautiful and is really and really in keeping with sort of Jewish religious tradition of dialogue and questioning. But it's not like there was and so when we look back, if we are honestly interested in looking back at, okay, what did these people believe? What was their original intent? How did they view these texts? It wasn't a God said it in this language and it is true for all time and history and we believe it. It's, hey, these are texts that we consider sacred and holy and we're going to continue to reproduce them and we're kind of going to figure it out along the way in dialogue with other humans. Speaker 1: Well, if I may be permitted to editorialize, I I think the most, one of the most toxic aspects of fundamentalism is this idea of biblical inerrancy. That the Bible, especially for most of these people, the King James version translated 400 years ago-ish, uh, is the actual word of God. God said these words and he he meant every punctuation mark and every word and every translation has been approved. And what you're saying is that the Dead Sea Scrolls show that this isn't the way that this topic was handled thousands of years ago. This is before the time of Christ, mostly. And that uh and now this idea that there's only one set of books that make up the Bible, which, you know, different Christian traditions, especially once you get into the Eastern Orthodox stuff or the the Coptic stuff of Egypt and Ethiopia, which split off from the mainstream way long ago, mostly in the 4, 5, 600s. They have different books. They include different books in their Bible. Their Bible will have different books. Their translations will be completely different. It was trans I mean, it was basically transmitted in ancient Egyptian for thousands for a thousand years. And so, you know, this idea that there's only one proper version, there's only one proper collection of books, there's only one proper way to look at this is is a pretty toxic uh pretty toxic thing and leads to an awful lot of I'm right and only my little church of 50 people, of 100 people, we're right and everyone else is wrong. Speaker 2: 100%. And you're you're right about the toxic element. It's also just unjustifiable. There is no way to justify every every every generation has had to negotiate with these texts because there are things that are demonstrably in error. Some of these are demonstrably literary literary creations, which isn't to denigrate them. It's just some of these things are not historical. And there are tons of things where the Bible disagrees with itself, like the Bible that most of us grew up with. And that doesn't mean that it's wrong or valueless. It means it's multivocal, which to me makes it more interesting and that not just because you have to think about every creator's rhetorical goals. You have to think about what was going on in society at the time and you have to think about like how you would deploy this type of discourse in a way that would make the would structure meaning for you. And I I think that's a much more interesting and it's much it's more the way humans live anyway. Speaker 1: Yeah. But the trouble is, Jeff, the standard retort when you talk about this with biblical literalists is they say, well, God wouldn't have allowed the translation to not be correct. God wouldn't have allowed us to pick the wrong books. God was there guiding every single step leading from the original scrolls and the original oral traditions to this. Speaker 2: And my answer to that is I and my answer to that because I've I've heard and and there are many there are actual biblical scholars like Dan McLellan is great if you don't follow him on social media that do well to, you know, get the history and the language and the cognitive science and talk about how that's unjustifiable. Here here's what I always say to my to to my friends, which is um, I've met people of literally every religious faith who are smart, who are people of conscience, who believe their way is the way. And these people all disagree with each other. And I'm talking about internal dispute between various Christian sects, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and you know, obviously, those are very big umbrellas with many different sets of belief that fall under them. And these people all can't be and I and these are people I know personally. These are people that I know to be people of conscience, people of kindness that have come to different conclusions. And it strikes me as the possibility of one of them being right and everyone else being wrong is vanishingly small. And the the and I think living that way is just no way to live. Um, and I I think it and if you think of it in a way because really we're creatures of story and story we use stories to explain the world. You see some of this in Bible stories. You see this in the way we tell stories to each other. And from my perspective, it's a much easier story for me to believe that there are a few people that crave power and crave money and crave ego and authority and that they are going to pick something out of that and it's coincidentally just going to benefit them. I always say one of the funniest things about this era is watching Donald Trump pretend to be a Christian and watch a bunch of Christians pretend to believe him. Speaker 1: Talking about uh Corinthians 2. Speaker 2: 2 Corinthians? Yeah. Couldn't even pull John 3:16 when he was asked about his favorite Bible verse. This is and you know, look, not everybody we're a secular society or we are a multi-ethnic society and that's that's for me the main thing that I'm concerned with because I have an academic interest in I love language, I love culture, I love religion, I love studying those things and how they evolved. But we've all got to live together. And America has never been a unitary religious nation and was never designed to be one and I know Canada wasn't either. And we have to be everyone is entitled to believe as they choose. And in any religious or political sect, you're going to have outliers, you're going to have extremists. And as long and those folks are entitled to their belief as long as they don't force those beliefs on others in a way that harms other people. And that's the thing that I see that most concerns me about our current political moment. Speaker 1: I do want to spend the majority of this episode on our current political moment. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: But can we first just talk a little bit more about apocalyptic literature? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: What's so what is you mentioned uh first Enoch. Uh so there's the Book of Revelation, then there's first Enoch, which isn't uh canonical in most Judeo-Christian traditions. And then there's a whole host of other apocalyptic literature. Can you talk a little bit about which most of which again isn't canonical, is not part of the official doctrine. Can you talk a little bit about the similarities and differences between these different uh strains of apocalyptic literature in the Bible and sort of adjacent to the Bible? Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. And I think that the critical piece that we have to think about and I and if you're listening to this and you grew up in a religious tradition, no matter what, I think this will resonate with you. I think that more so belief being driven by the text, belief is driven by cultural norms and belief is by by the community agreements and decisions. And so, you know, people that for instance, one of the things that we think about, when you think about a Christian eschatology, you think about at the end of the world, the good people go to heaven, the bad people go to hell. They are cast into this lake of fire of eternal divine punishment. And pretty much that's not in the Bible. The lake of fire is in Revelation, but you can interpret it in many ways from the lake of fire killing death itself to annihilationism, okay, if you're bad, you just end. But postmodern divine punishment isn't really there unless you really read into it. A lot of our but and yet, you know, I grew up in a religious tradition where that was very much like this is what happens. And I think a lot of that is passed down orally and culturally and passed down from generate like over thousands of years. And so when you ask where did that come from, a lot of that understanding came from the Book of Enoch, which is paradoxically not at all in the biblical canon unless you're in the Ethiopic uh Orthodox Tawahedo Church, which I believe still has it in the canon. And we we know this. So Enoch is an is a fascinating piece of apocalyptic literature. It's extremely strange. Um and there's a great translation that just came out in the last 10 years that I'm happy to recommend. But uh I should have brought it so I could hold it up like you did. But this is where we see a lot of our like the the the angels rebelled against God and they came down and they had sex and made babies with human women and this resulted in the giants and the Nephilim. And these things that you can kind of see echoes of in the Old in the biblical text. But these are the things that a lot of us were told like, hey, this is the end of the world. And this is why and there's angels chained under the Euphrates River. And when the Euphrates River dries up, then these angels are going to get let loose and they're going to kill millions of people. And these things that are sort of told in community agreements come from a thing that's not in the Bible, but was still really important literature at the time. And I mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls before. Uh and I may I may I'm going to get the actual number wrong, but they found manuscripts of all of the different not all of the different, but many, many different texts that are in the biblical canon and are out. And Enoch was one of the top five manuscripts they found and was only after a few of like the synoptic gospels. And so I think I think it was top five. I should check. But this was an immensely important and influential book at the time. And you can see that in the way that ideas that were included in it have sort of come down to us. And yet, it is not considered canonical or, you know, authoritative. Um, so Speaker 1: But you do see little hints of it in the in the current Bible itself and you see little hints of it in sort of I want to say the stuff that's adjacent to Christianity, like there's in the Filipino martial arts, there's a tax series based on the angels. Speaker 2: Mm. Speaker 1: And you know, those angels aren't all mentioned in the KJV. So where this is echoes of the stuff that was in circulation and kind of the um kind of the interpretive literature or the the folk mythology around it. It's it's fascinating. Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of those angels are named in the Book of Enoch. And like some of the some of the angels that you think of, that's where their names come from. And to your point about biblical inerrancy. So Enoch is not canonical, it is not considered authoritative. It's not you know, in the mainline Christian Church. The Book of Jude, which is canonical, which is in the Bible, literally quotes first Enoch. So there's a passage from Enoch that is quoted in Jude, which is not uncommon, right? It's how the way you get different variations of texts. But so it's just and and to me, like I am a I'm a believer that thinks there are a lot of different ways to interpret data. But the one way you can interpret it is this is the one absolutely incorrect and infallible thing that quotes this other thing that is not incorrect and infallible, but didn't make it into the canon. And so it's just not something you can justify logically. Speaker 1: Okay. Well, let's start dragging this into the more modern era. Why is the Book of Revelation relevant to today and why is it relevant to the war in Iran for the Christian fundamentalists who are mostly, for the most part, the like 70% uh approximation supporting the Trump regime. Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'm going to answer that in two ways. And you know, Shakespeare said things are neither good nor bad, it's thinking makes them so. And the real answer to your question is it's absolutely not relevant. There is no Iran, there is no China, there is no Russia in this biblical literature. But the second way I'm going to answer the question is, it's because people are going to read into it what they want to do what they want to do anyway. And so you have real fundamentalists. Speaker 1: But but steel man the argument. Pretend you're on the on the pulpit. Pretend you're explaining to me an idiot why you make the best case you can for the end times theology case. Speaker 2: Yeah, you're putting me you're putting me in a position I'm not comfortable in, man, but but I understand. The idea is that there is going to be a final war of good versus evil and that this is why the nation of Israel is very important to many Christians that I would consider anti-Semitic, but are still like Israel's going to play this role in the end times. And essentially, we're going to fight the great kings from the East. And this is not in the actual text. As I mentioned, you see, I can't even do it. I can't even get to the pulpit just because you know, but but but the uh if you squint really hard, you can say, all right, these kings in the East happen to correspond to the religion that is our primarily religious rival that we consider heretical and and evil, which is Islam. And so people like Doug Wilson, who I know we're going to talk about a lot. And people like Pete Hegseth, right? Wilson is Pete Hegseth's pastor and he had Wilson come and uh give a prayer breakfast at, you know, in in at the Pentagon, right? And and uh so this is um so this is a thing where they they see themselves like to the extent that these folks are sincere. And I think some of these folks are sincere, true believers that believe in this very narrow, diminutionist theology. But I think they're very rare. I think that there are other people that are opportunists that see that they can lead into the Bible lean into the Bible to justify this war that they want anyway. Speaker 1: Yeah. And I and I guess I mean, I just recently reread uh the Book of Revelation. And if you're looking for, you know, kind of the involved like that you need to I'll I'll step back. There's been a long-standing Christian tradition in Christianity that the Jews should have a homeland in Israel. It goes back to like the 1500s, 1600s, but it really gained steam in the 1800s and then the 1900s and obviously, uh the Second World War and the Holocaust was it it it became a thing. But if you're looking for a biblical and and the idea is that the Jews have to have a state in Israel in order to fulfill the conditions for the end times to begin. The apocalypse, which is what they're hoping for, because the apocalypse is Jesus coming back and the bad people getting thrown into a lake of fire and the the believers, the the few, the lucky few getting elevated. You need to have the Jews in the Holy Land as a precondition. The biblical evidence for this is pretty slim. Like in one verse, I think it's uh chapter 11, it mentions that the the temple, basically the temple is rebuilt in Jerusalem. So presumably that's, you know, a Jewish temple being rebuilt in Jerusalem. It's not really clear, but who else would it be? And so this explains what you were saying is that many fundamentalists are simultaneously anti-Semitic but pro-Israel. They don't like the Jews. The Jews, they think, murdered Jesus Christ or actually the Romans did, but whatever. They're responsible for the murder of Jesus Christ. And they want the Jews to convert to Christianity. And they want the state of Israel to exist at the same time because they see it as a precondition for basically it's going to pop it off. And if that's a nuclear war, well, that's just a price you got to pay. Is that more or less correct? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's more or less correct. And if it sounds incongruous and logically indefensible to you, that's that's because it is. One of the things that I think that is uh a tactic that a lot of these folks use is to um drop conflicting arguments. And knowing that and what I mean by that is if you think about just the current political leadership and think about the things that Donald Trump has said that then later he has said the opposite of. You'll want to have a war in Iran under me. Oh wait, just kidding, right? And one thing I notice when I talk to Speaker 1: That actually goes back further a step because in the 1980s, he was very pro-war against Iran. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And very pro-war against Iraq. Or sorry, not in the 80s. In the 80s, he was pro-war against Iran. Later he was pro-war against Iraq. Then he walked it back. I'm the anti-war president. If you elect Kamala Harris, for sure there's going to be a war in Iran, for sure. Uh there's always a tweet in Trump's case, there's like 20 tweets saying, you know, if you don't elect me, there will be a war in Iran. Well, and now there's a war in Iran. So he's actually flip-flopped on this multiple times and I think it's just bloody sad that the older you get, the less new ideas you have. And everything from tariffs to bomber on are old ideas. These are ideas he had in his 40s and 50s and now that he's in his dotage, he's just going back to the old ideas. But that's that's a huge digression. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's okay. No, it's actually I'm going to bring it back because I I think the the the politics and the theology, it's the things that the Trump circle have in common is it's not about the ideas. The ideas are not only secondary, tertiary, ancillary. The I think it's part of I I think it's more about rhetoric and the rhetorical strategy. And I go back and forth between this is a happy accident for them and this is entirely their intent is to say a bunch of stuff that contradicts the other stuff, knowing that the loyalists will latch onto the stuff that they would like to hear. Like I still have people telling me that Trump wants to release the Epstein files. Because they heard that and in their and cognitively, they're like, this is my guy. I want this. He said this. Look, he said it. You can't deny that he said it. Checkmate. And even though he's said and done many different things, they latch on to the contradictory thing. It's also why it's really hard to debate these people because he both believes that we should attack Iran and not attack Iran and also be their friend and make great deals. And if you can't make a deal, that's your loser unless you attack them, in which case you didn't have to make a deal, which and and and I know we're not going to talk necessarily about the politics on this, but this is what I see in theology too, where it is not what the authentic original theology was to the extent that such a thing existed or even what the authentic intent of the church uh community over the years believes and has led us to. It's not not about that at all. It's what is useful. And and I think that if you look at it through that lens, I think it really explains a lot where we're going to just find what we need. For example, the the the rapture, right? We've all heard about the rapture. We grew up. Those of us that grew up in churches heard about Speaker 1: What's the rapture? Speaker 2: So the rapture is at the end times and the tribulations, the faithful will be called up into the clouds to meet Jesus at the end. The people will be left behind. This is also the name of the left behind series of books and the movies starring the fundamentalist Kirk Cameron, where the unfaithful will get left on essentially a destroyed Earth at the end. And not only is this nowhere in the Bible, it's nowhere in the Apocrypha. This was invented in the early 1830s by a guy named John Nelson Darby. And this is one of the things about stories that make them powerful. Is that you can reinterpret stories. And you can and and this is both a beautiful thing and a dangerous thing and also a value neutral thing because sometimes reinterpreting stories can very be very powerful. Think about Hamilton, where which remixes American history into a multicultural immigrant story. And we're going to tell it this way. And the moral of the story is this. Um, and sometimes it's just it's just really dangerous where if you want to cast yourself in the role of the faithful and the people that are going to be here at the end. And you look at you can find in sort of literary created texts that are not specific and were written thousands of years ago and you you can read into it most most whatever you want, which is why it's all about the those community agreements that we make in our churches, in our communities. And um, and that's very dangerous when you have an authoritarian. It's dangerous generally, but it's especially dangerous when you have a functionally authoritarian government. Speaker 1: Now, I agree that one of the funniest things if there is any humor in this at all is watching Trump scramble to recast himself as a good Christian. A guy who's, you know, holding the Bible upside down while gassing protesters, unable to name a single verse of the Bible because it's way too personal. It's just way, way, way too personal. Uh, fucking up on naming, you know, the the basic books of the Bible. Uh, 2 Corinthians, like there was actually laughed when he was talking about 2 Corinthians at Liberty University, which is a fundamentalist uh university. I can't put too many air quotes around that word. And it's actually linked to Jerry Falwell Jr., who's, you know, basically got busted for uh being blackmailed by the pool boy who was cucking his wife. And then Michael Cohen got called in to like this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's pretty much been like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Liberty University are the reason that Trump captured the evangelical vote because Trump's fixer, Michael Cohen, cleaned up a mess when the pool boy who was uh cucking uh Jerry Falwell's wife, Jerry Falwell, sorry, Jerry Falwell Jr.'s wife, uh decided to blackmail them. It's so incredibly sordid and it's so incredibly hypocritical. If if you want to if you're in a cuckoldry, fine. Mazel tov. Fill your boots. But then don't run a university where I can't shake hands with a woman because that would involve bare flesh touching bare flesh. Like, fuck off. Anyhow, uh, I I have to drag it down to my level of of visceral hatred for some of these people. But but let's before we get too sidetracked, because I seem to be king of doing that today. Uh, Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, is a has had, as you mentioned, well, he's led prayer breakfast at the Pentagon during work hours. He's brought Doug Wilson in to be to give talks at the Pentagon. Who's Doug Wilson? Speaker 2: So Doug Wilson is what's called a dominionist, um, and Christian nationalist preacher and he uses those terms. He has embraced the terms Christian nationalism. And uh, he has a lot of retrograde beliefs. Um, and essentially believes America should be a white Christian ethno state. And if you think that's and if you think that's an exaggeration, I urge you to look at the man's writings. His perhaps most controversial belief, although I'm not sure like he has many controversial beliefs, but one of them is he is opposed to the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in America. And he supports women's women not voting in America and going to what's called household voting where the the men of the head of the household. And regardless of where we get to in America right now, the fact that that has become an idea that is mainstreamed and that this is a pastor that can come to an the American center of government is terrifying. Like think of anybody who um and and you know, he has other beliefs that I would consider abhorrent as well. But like things that you never thought would be back on the table in America are very much back on the table. And Speaker 1: He's also described himself as quote a paleo confederate. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh, he's also said and actually I kind of agree with him, but emphasizing this is a huge red flag that the idea of slavery is well supported by scripture. And so he really is advocating for a pyramid at which the white Christian male is at the top and everybody else, women, right? Women, I think he describes them as the type of person out of whom babies come. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Uh, women who don't get to vote, presumably, if he's a paleo confederate, black people don't get to vote. White Christian male at the top and everybody else below that. And this isn't this isn't controversial. Right? This he's saying these things. He's writing these things. Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 1: He's giving fucking prayer breakfast at the Pentagon. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's insane. It's um I remember when um so Obama used to go to Jeremiah Wright's church. And one time Jeremiah Wright gave a fiery sermon where he commented on the evils of the sins that America had created. And he used the phrase instead of God bless America, in this context, we should say God damn America. And this was, look, that's an inflammatory thing. And I understand why people were upset. This was like primary news rotation in America for a year because he a stem winding preacher got it got wound up and said a thing. It's extremely different from somebody with the official sanction of the Secretary of Defense, still not calling him Secretary of War. Sorry, Pete. Also that bench press wasn't real. But like the had this Speaker 1: And those pull-ups sucked. And those kettlebell swings, you've never done a kettlebell swing before. Speaker 2: The one thing I will say in Pete's defense is that like not really, which is you know, a bunch of my friends are are Pete Hegseth bench press truthers as well. And I basically am too. I think that was a work. On the other hand, Hegseth is totally the kind of guy that you could see only ever doing a bench press from like the time he was 16 years old. Just all that other stuff, whatever, functional strength, leg day, just going to bench. That being said, still wasn't real. Uh, but but yeah, like the the the we have gone from someone who is associated with a presidential candidate then, who had gone to this guy's church back in the day. To the official pastor of the official Secretary of War, uh, saying women shouldn't vote and being invited to official government functions. We also shouldn't be having like this is not a Christian nation. It never has been. And like and Speaker 1: And make the case for this for the United States not being a Christian nation because Pete Hegseth would disagree with you. Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Pete Hegseth should read a book. Like most of the founders were not like and look, there is no sanctioning body for who gets to call themselves a Christian. If you think of the Christians, you know, and you can think of a whole lot of different folks that have a whole lot of different beliefs. And and so but the point is, America's never been an official Christian nation. And so even if the majority of people in America identify as Christians, which is still true, it's still not a Christian nation because we have a Constitution that explicitly uh has an establishment clause that says we will not establish a religion. And that and that enough is full stop. But if you look back at like the writings of the founders themselves, the Treaty of Tripoli explicitly says, because we're talking to well, yeah, what were the people in modern day Libya, we say in that treaty, the United States is not a Christian nation and we are not hostile to what were then called the Mohammedans, we would call Muslims or people of the Islamic faith today. And these were things that were written like contemporaneously to the founding fathers. Like Jefferson was around and Jefferson himself was very much a deist. Now, there were Christians among the founding fathers. Uh, certainly. Um, but that doesn't mean America is a Christian nation anymore than, you know, than than Gordon Ryan being an ADCC competitor means that everyone in ADCC endorses what Gordon says and it is official ADCC policy. Um, and and I mean there are that's the thing. Like people I think mistake something that is culturally Christian, which you could you could you could argue and I might even agree that, you know, certainly Christianity has richly informed the culture of America in many different ways, through many different, you know, many different cultures and ethnicities and not just white Christians either, by the way. Um, but that's very different than saying we are a Christian nation because explicitly we are a nation that cannot establish an official religion. It's in the Constitution. Speaker 1: Okay. So, uh, how does that then make you feel that biblical theology is being used to frame and to justify foreign policy and launching wars? Speaker 2: It's disgraceful and honestly, it's heretical. You know, you're talking like if these folks took scripture seriously, they would also see that when you pray, you're supposed to do it in the closet in your own house. You're not supposed to do it for Speaker 1: In the marketplace. Speaker 2: Yeah, you're not supposed to do it for for clout, right? And that's what this is. This is virtue signaling to borrow a term. This is a or it's it's like it's signaling that we like to other people who achieve the same identity or who are obsessed by or to the same identity. It's drawing a circle of them and a circle of us. And I think that like the true message, particularly of the Beatitudes, certainly, the synoptic gospels, uh the sayings of Jesus himself. By the way, if you next time you think that we talked about Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson produced his own version of the Bible, the Jefferson Bible, which is basically just the sayings of Jesus. And if you look at that Speaker 1: And he cut out all the supernatural stuff. Basically, he took a pair of scissors to it and cut out anything that could be vaguely perceived as supernatural. Speaker 2: Yeah, and and and I think however one feels theologically or culturally, it is an incredible intellectual exercise to read a Bible and just read the red letter stuff. And if you read that Speaker 1: What's the red letter stuff? Speaker 2: Oh, that's in in many not although not all, many versions of the Bible put the the words Jesus literally spoke in red. So there are the the other things that and you can just skim through the red letter stuff and it's there there's some that it's Speaker 1: Yeah. And some of this is red. There we go. We can see it. Speaker 2: But yeah, it's it's um it's it's it's interesting in that the the people that crave power, one of the worst things that has happened to Christianity is it went from being a religion of the oppressed to a religion of the oppressor. And of course, I'm not talking about all forms of Christianity here, right? There's no sanctioning body for who gets to Speaker 1: #notallchristians. Speaker 2: Yeah, word. And look, look, I I know so many, you know, great, I know so many Christian people of all different Christian denominations, right? From Pentecostals to Baptists, to Methodists, to Mormons that are utterly disgusted by the way this administration, this regime deploys faith as a weapon. It's not supposed to be its function. Speaker 1: I am very glad that my mother, who was a very devout Christian, walked the walk. She walked the red letter walk. She invited refugees into her home, Muslim refugees and basically adopted them as members of the family. Speaker 2: Amen. Speaker 1: She raised money for, you know, actual aid being shipped to Africa as opposed to evangelical missions where you build a church in Africa. Uh, she didn't have a racist bone in her body. And she really did walk that walk. And when I see, so Doug Wilson is uh is essentially the part of the reform movement. I would argue that the reform movement is one of the most regressive sects of Christianity. It's right up there. It's it's actually probably further than Southern Baptist. Uh, and at the same time as I'm remembering my mother, who who really did walk the, you know, the Beatitudes, the uh, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Turn the other cheek. Uh, use love. Uh, the basically the sermon on the mount in the Book of Matthew. She walked that as best as she could. And at the same time, we've got this reform movement, which produces the Doug Wilsons of the world. It produces the Pete Hegseths of the world. It produces some of the most viciously racist and hateful people that I know personally. You know, this this I'm seeing this this spectrum from uh people who somehow managed to to twist the the fact that Texas wants to put the Ten Commandments on the wall. Speaker 2: Which ones? Speaker 1: But there's two. Oh, yeah. Uh, for my argument, that doesn't matter which of the two versions of the Ten Commandments get put up on the wall. They want to put something from the Old Testament where God is busy smiting people and plague of locusting people and uh where uh people are rejoicing about smashing the skulls of babies upon the rock and how happy that makes them. That's Old Testament shit. And they don't want to put the Beatitudes, the sermon on the mount on the wall. I would actually not have that much trouble living in a society where the sermon on the mount was put on the wall of classrooms. I've got a massive problem with living in a society where they pick uh another part where they pick basically any part of the Old Testament and put it on the wall. Speaker 2: I will say there's plenty of messed up stuff in the New Testament too. But uh, but Speaker 1: Sure, you can make a very strong defense for slavery based on the New Testament. I mean, Philemon is a great example of, you know, if we want to get real technical, and I don't agree with slavery, obviously, but in the Civil War, the pro-slavery forces, both sides quoted the Bible. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And I would argue that the pro like both of them claimed that they were following God, both of them claimed they were following biblical verses. And I would make an an argument that the pro-slavery Confederate South actually had a better claim to be biblically supported, both Old Testament and New Testament. But that's a whole separate digression for another day. Speaker 2: That is a can of worms. Uh and so here's the thing, like there is faith and then there's the application thereof. And you can, you know, you just mentioned two people like one of the most two sides on maybe the most central moral question of the last 200 years, the question of owning other human beings and you had religious people on different sides. And you mentioned your mom and God bless your mom. Um like we need more like her. I want to mention two different stories of faith that as we get closer to the end of this, because for me, it's like if you show me what you do, I will show you who you are. And I don't particularly care about the justification that you deploy, right? Like you can and so I'm going to tell you about one Christian and I'm going to tell you about one Muslim. I I'm sure you're aware of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. So Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Christian theologian, uh and a German living uh during the time of the Nazis. And Bonhoeffer was a believer like in every respect. You know, he was a seminarian, was uh and someone who authentically believed in that which you do unto the least, you do unto me and that which you do not do unto the least, you do not do unto me. And so although Bonhoeffer believed in the literal biblical truth of hell and eternal damnation for those who had committed mortal sins, he was still part of a plot to kill Hitler. And he was jailed and ultimately murdered by the Nazi regime for resisting that regime based purely in his faith as a Christian. And when you think about service and sacrifice, you're talking about a man who literally believed that his immortal soul would be condemned forever if he did a thing. And he still believed it was the right thing to do. Um, we haven't talked much about Islam and you know, I'm not as knowledgeable about the Quran. But like I said, I'm much more about acts, like in the Book of James, faith without works is dead. And uh, you know, you you can you can talk about faith all you want, but show me what you do and I'll show you what matters to you. Speaker 1: It's not very reformed church of you. Because it's I mean, it's beliefs not acts. Speaker 2: We we don't we don't agree on much. And I like I don't agree with Donald with Donald Trump on much, but I do agree with him that he is going to hell. Uh, which which he has said multiple times and like some remarkable aspect display of self-awareness. But here's a story you might not know, which is about Abdelkader and the Massacre of Damascus. Um, and so Abdelkader was the Algerian George Washington. He was a Muslim who resisted French colonialism and, you know, however you feel about the religious stuff involved, you know, you can understand how someone will want to resist colonialism. And he won respect from not only his countrymen, but from the French. He behaved with honor, fought bravely, ultimately lost. But still had a a good deal of respect and cachet. And there's and fundamentalism is dangerous in all its forms. I talk about this in jujitsu all the time. And there were some Islamic fundamentalists at the time that knew that there were Christians in Damascus, because Syriac Christianity, some of the most ancient branches of the faith. And so there was a a riot and they wanted to go get the Christians. And Abdelkader mustered his men and hid all the Christians in his house. And as all of these folks mobbed up around and tried to to murder these folks, he said, if you come, you will learn how well my soldiers can fight. And he quoted his faith about how if you destroy one innocent life, it's as if you've destroyed all of humanity. So for me, like we can discuss and debate and I find this stuff really fascinating about the original intent of the authors or what this passage means. And I think those are important conversations to have. But a more important conversation for me is, what are the motivations of the person that is deploying this? Because if you are an evil person that craves your own power, you're going to find that in your holy book. And if you're a decent person that doesn't want to see uh innocent people harmed, you can find that there too. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's it's the the lens because when you have a million words put together and you go on a fishing expedition, you can find anything you want, really. I mean, you could look at the Lord of the Rings trilogy and if you baked it enough, you could find predictions about the stock market. You could find commentary on, I don't know, uh ADCC judging and you could interpret it to uh to tell you about, I don't know, your immortal soul. Speaker 2: Well, I'm so glad you brought up Lord of the Rings because to Tolkien, who was a devout Christian, Lord of the Rings was a Christian work. Because what saved what saves the world in the end is Frodo's act of mercy, not killing Gollum when he has the chance. Because Frodo, being a fallen human, cannot find the strength to give up the power of the ring. And it's just the fact that he was merciful and did not murder Gollum when he had the chance to save the world. He also made fun of his good friend C.S. Lewis for uh the Chronicles of Narnia where he's like, wait, I don't get it. Is the lion Jesus? I don't get it. Could you make it more obvious? Uh I'm paraphrasing. He was a lot nicer to C.S. Lewis, but uh yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, Jeff, I know you've got a whole lot of history, you know, we've been talking a lot about history here. I know you've got a whole lot of history material online, especially the history of martial arts and jujitsu. How do people get a hold of that? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I have a history class online at BJJmentalmodels.com/fight. It's interesting about the early history of jujitsu in America. But if anybody wants to get at me and talk about any of this stuff, you can just email Jeff@bellinghambjj.com. Speaker 1: All right. Thanks so much, Jeff, and uh I always love talking to you. Speaker 2: Love talking to you too, Stefan. Thanks for the conversation.