 This is Carbon Mike. Richard Dellingpole is an artist, a graphic designer, and a Christian. Some time ago, in his native Great Britain, he took it upon himself to bring back the ancient concept of Christian society, slowly, from the ground up, one meeting at a time. We spoke about this and other matters recently on Dangerous Space. Dick Dellingpole, thank you for joining me on Dangerous Space. Well, thanks for having me, Mike. So, I guess the first and maybe most interesting question is, what do you do? Oh, God, that's such a big question, isn't it? That's why I asked that first. I've got a day job, but that's all I want to say about that. It does not define me in any way. It's everything else I do in my life, but the day job does mean that everything else I do has to be crammed into those evenings and weekends, just like a normal person, and keeps me grounded. But among those other things, I've got hobbies and obsessions. I trained as a fine artist, so I'm a painter. I like to paint in the evenings. For the last 20 years, I've been doing reenactment. I dress up as a historical soldier. There's weekends that take me around the world doing that. And the last two or three years, I've gone really quite political as well in setting up a couple of now quite active groups. One of them purely political, the other one religious. So in a nutshell, that is me. That is Dick Dellingpole. Let's talk about the religious group that you set up first and then the political one. What's the religious group? Well, this is almost working backwards because the religious group is the most recent thing I've set up. It's been going a little over a year now. As a result of my, as my brother would put it, going down the rabbit hole, and this particular rabbit hole was the God-shaped rabbit hole. I've never considered myself to be an atheist, but I've always been what I used to refer to as a lukewarm Christian. You might find me in a church at Christmas, Easter, if you're lucky. I knew the Lord's Prayer. I knew a good few hymns and carols. But that was about it. I was kind of covering my options, you know, just in case God exists. Right up until about two or three years ago when I started to think, you know what? There is definitely evil afoot in the world. Therefore, there is the opposite of evil. And it became blindingly clear to me that God does exist. Everything they told me in my religious education turns out to be true and way more besides. And I'd better start, better start learning and putting my house in order. So I started looking around for friends who could help me on this journey, and among them was a chap who was part of my, well, let's call it the political group, Third Wednesday, happens to be a vicar, also called Richard. And he was, in the pub one evening, he made this statement. It was mid-lockdown. Everyone was panicking about, oh my God, we're all going to die. And Richard made the statement, everyone is so worried about their life, but they're not considering the fate of their immortal souls. And I had to think about that one for a few days. And I thought, well, that is the whole point of Christianity, isn't it? That this life is just a precursor to what we're meant to be experiencing after. And you're really barking up the wrong tree if you're so obsessed with your life here on Earth. And not thinking about your soul. So that sent me on a sort of really, really interesting journey. And I started to surround myself with those friends who I knew had a slight or even quite strong religious leaning. And between us we started a group in a vacant room above a pub, part of the pub, but a room that wasn't used that often. And initially I think it was just eight of us. We sat around a table and the friendly vicar was part of it. And we just started talking about things. We talked about how little we knew about our faith and the Bible, and we were asking the vicar questions. And it's just grown and grown from there. Now the group is called Thursday Circle. We meet on the fourth Thursday of every month. And we haven't always got the vicar with us. Sometimes it's just a few of us who know a little bit more about the Bible than others. And it's named after a Bonhoeffer group. He was the chap, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the chap who fought the Nazis. He ultimately paid the price. He was executed by the Nazis towards the end of the Second World War. He was a Christian who was horrified at the way the Christian church caved in to the Nazis during in Germany in World War II. And he had started this group of sort of rebel Christians and he'd named it Thursday Circle. So it's a nod to him. It's basically rebel Christians meeting in a pub because for some of us the church is not for us. That is really cool. I have to say, we have to come back to this of course because there's so much there. But first I want to put what you've just said in some kind of context because it seems like talking about having gone down the rabbit hole. I mean, it's probably the same set of events which sent you down the rabbit hole. It sent me and a whole lot of people down the rabbit hole. And many of us found different things down there. But it sounds like if I'm not mistaken that it was your government's response to the great viral freak out. We're talking 2019 going into 2020. COVID-19 emerges on the scene and people promptly, well actually not promptly, they are prompted to freak the fuck out. Exactly so, exactly so. And the response of the church and certainly the church of England and even the Catholic church over here was not just to do everything the government asked it to do but to pretty much gold plate those regulations. So there were restrictions put in place but the church said, no, no, we're closing the churches. Now, we didn't even do that in the wars. It's unprecedented that the church was turning people away right at the time when they could have really done some good. And if you go for the standard, what would Jesus have done? He would not have shut the door and turned people away. And I've been talking to a lot of vickers since then. And though some of them didn't shut the church quite as much as they were supposed to have done, some of them are simply ashamed that they did what they were told. Now, people are talking about a schism approaching within the church. There's traditionalist versus the new wave of wokesters who are kind of, you know, like blue-haired lesbian vickers and such like. I mean, this is all part of it. There is a surge of revolutionary spirit going on within the faith and the church isn't going to come out of it the same church as it was when the shit really does hit the fan. This is going to change the face of worship in this country and probably across the world because I'm guessing that whatever is happening over here is happening over there too. Yes, you know, I wanted to I wanted to get to that because thinking about it. I mean, going back to the great viral panic, right? This was a time when people were confronted with matters that we had thought we could safely, if not forget about, put in the back of our minds. Okay, suffering and death, right? We live in a modern civilization. In many ways, it's become a victim of its own success. It's big and powerful and there's, you know, computer networks and indoor plumbing and internal combustion engines and factories and automation and, you know, indoor lighting and all these things, right? And it seems to me that at some point we thought we could, we didn't really have to confront these things. In your society and mine, I noticed this in mine a great deal is that people seem to avoid confronting the specter of aging by tucking most of the old people out of sight somewhere so we don't have to think about them. That's an unusual thing in human history, right? Typically the old people are supposed to be in amongst everyone everywhere and part of the family and what have you. So we don't take care of our old people really in the family. And we've evolved this way of thinking about disease and about suffering and about all these things as if they are merely bad outcomes that once again, as per our decades long habit, we can turn to the government and ask the government to kind of intervene on our behalf, right? So I think it's, you and I probably had a similar reaction at the beginning of this thing. Like, well, what are you, I mean, I personally because of what I do for a living, I know how to run the numbers. And so when I started looking at the actual numbers and they're looking at how people were responding, my immediate response was, well, okay, this is bad, but it's not the end of the world. Why are you people freaking out? Well, you were talking presumably quite early on to the same guy who helped wake me up right at the beginning of the pandemic. And that was Hector Drummond, who was similarly on to those figures. Yes. Now I'd met Hector through setting up my third Wednesday group. That was that's just the political drinking group. Now he came along to that because he had previously set up a group called Skeptics in the Pub, which is pretty much doing the same sort of thing. So he was interested to see someone else doing that thing. So I'd made this connection with Hector. I got on great with him. He's a lovely guy. And so he was already a friend when the so-called pandemic hit. Now I was on to his tweets and in message groups with him and he was saying, you know, there's this guy, Neil Ferguson, who has got a track record of never having been right. He is Mr. Wrong. Now these are his numbers. These are the numbers. They don't match up. He's using dodgy software, dodgy methods. He is dodgy through and through. And I think if you trace it back, both the US lockdown and our own were based on this one guy's figures. Now why he was listened to at all is anybody's guess. But I've got nothing to offer on that front, but I know it's not going to be good. But it could all be traced to this one guy, you know, Mr. Wrong. So Hector put me on to that really early on. And I didn't have to wake up to this pandemic being a scam. I was on to it right from the word go. So I wasn't scared and there was no way I was going to have the facts right now right from the beginning. Yeah, one of the earliest podcasts I did was with Hector. Yeah, he's wonderful. And we're on the same page about a lot of this stuff. So Ferguson. Look, especially around around the the viral freak out. I mean, the man is a physicist. That is his PhD. That's his training. He's not trained in biological systems. So you can say, well, why was he wrong? That's one question. The real fact, the real question I think is why did people respond to government prompting in this way? Why did people why did it take so little to cause people to do frankly unreasonable things in response to government agents running around with their hair on fire? And that's a deeper question than merely the errors of a single jumped up bureaucrat. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. I mean, the answers for that one became quite clear early on that the government bought and paid for and owned the media. They owned the television. I mean, over here, you know how bad the BBC is every other channel falls into line behind the BBC. But the government had they paid for front page wraparounds for every single newspaper, you know, the sort of stuff that any corporate advertiser could only dream of doing. And every single paper because they were keeping all the newspapers afloat by paying over the odds for their ad placement. And basically, if there was a journalist who wanted to speak out about it, they couldn't do so without jeopardizing that the cash flow to their paper. So there's the government owning all of TV and printed news and radio, of course. And there was a feedback loop going on with the papers. The printing stories about this is terrible. You're all going to die. What do you think the government should do? By the way, you think they should lock us down. And the people are going, why isn't the government doing more? Why aren't we locking down? Because the public don't know. They get their information from the press, which is their first mistake. So there's this feedback loop going on. The public are pushing the government to do something. The government are feeding the newspapers a story to scare the public. And this feedback loop just got more and more intense. Until it got to the point where there are only two questions, not whether we should lock down, but whether we'd done it soon enough or hard enough. And the voices of sanity that were saying, you know what, doing nothing might be the best thing. They weren't heard, except perhaps in Sweden. Now this is, now we're going a layer deeper. I agree with what you've said. But again, I think there's something even deeper. In other words, it seems to me that much of what we saw with this managed, with this engineered panic, is the result of something rushing to fill a vacuum. That's when you see things moving very fast. Sometimes it's because they have a lot of thrust behind them. Sometimes it's because they're rushing to fill a vacuum. And we're coming back to your whole kind of theological pilgrimage. I think that the vacuum was in us. And that's why all these terrible ideas were able to rush in and fill that hole, so to speak. I think that, and I'd like to get your take on this. I think that a nation that had not systematically destroyed its own value system had not systematically gone about divesting itself from its religion would not have responded in this way to that provocation. It might have responded badly, but not this badly. This is something else. This is a wave of propaganda operating, in my opinion, against a population that has no native immune system to reject that propaganda. Now what do you think about that? I think you're right, and it is a multi-layered thing. It's an onion. It's got layer within layer within layer, and obviously it goes beyond governments. But I think what you're alluding to with the breakdown of the church and its influence in society, this has been a long game. It's been the old slow march through the institutions, and it's not just the church, it's the legal system, it's the education system and the church. And let's not call them left, because you and I know this is not a left-right thing. Let's just say the forces of evil in this respect have been playing a very long game. They already own both sides of both of our political parties. We talk in terms of not a cigarette paper between Labour and the Conservatives over here, but I know you have the same problem with Republicans and Democrats over there. They're all owned by the same people. You're allowed the illusion of a choice, but you've got only a choice between the two terrible offerings that they give you. So they've done this with the church over many years, whereby little by little the church no longer stands for the things we know it should stand for, which is quite clearly laid out in the Gospels. It's no longer preaching the Gospel. You might have heard James' podcast about mine and my sister's experience of trying out our local churches, and we end up getting opinion pieces from the resident vicar on a reinterpretation of the Bible. Quite comical in some respects, and they're so off the mark for even an amateur like myself. I'm early days into discovering my faith, but even I know enough Bible to know that some of the stuff they're preaching from the pulpit is completely off-piste. They're making it up as they go along, so the church fell a long time ago, and it's place in society with it. When we go back to, say, my father's generation, he's still with us, incidentally. He's Hale and Hardy, and we walk with him on the Molven Hills every weekend. But he would tell me how there were one or two people in the village, and village life you would doff your cap to, or you'd touch your forelock. One was the vicar, another would be a schoolteacher, and there were people who had a really important place in society. The vicar now is a nobody in society. Church attendance is what, the churches I've been to have been like a dozen people attending a service on a Sunday. That's a tiny, tiny percentage of the population. And with it has gone the morality, the whole of what built Western society has just fallen by the wayside, leaving what you were describing earlier as the void. But it's not just a church. The legal system had to be in place as well. Because when you look to them to put things right, they're also lacking. They've also fallen. Even the medical system, the NHS over here has pretty much taken the place of the church. We worship the health service. I don't know if you ever saw the ridiculous performance that we went through over here. I think it was every Thursday. Going outside to clap. Going outside and clapping and bashing pans. They made out that this was a grassroots thing, that some nurse had come up with it or something like that. It's bullshit. It was government propaganda that was orchestrated at the highest level, being passed off as a grassroots thing. But people were out there like performing seals, clapping. I'm proud to say that I never took part in it. But everyone fell for it. This void of not having their Christian faith as their moral compass, they're looking elsewhere for their moral compass and it is whatever the government gives them. It was more than just the fact that the church had fallen. It was the moral void that was left quite deliberately over many, many years. What's interesting about this is the first time I heard someone try to address this in historical terms, I think it was Peter Hitchens. And what he said was that World War I was the beginning of the end for the Christian church in the West because the clergy around the time of that conflict, as Europe was kind of sleepwalking or sleep marching into World War I, came out thoroughly on the side of the war for the most part. All the clergy were in favor of it and some of them even painted it as a religious duty to go and fight this war. And this was going to be the last war, the war to end all wars and what have you. And what happened in Europe, certainly what happened in the UK was that many of your best people went out there and died. They went into the meat grinder. They ended up in the mud in Flanders and choking on gas at that EEPR or whatever. And those were your bravest people, your most patriotic people. The people who would have been most likely, as Hitchens points out, to have come back and started families and been schoolteachers and pastors and vicars and attorneys and what have you, you got rid of the best of yourself. And then the whole pretense of it being the war to end all wars vanished in short order because after a brief intermission, you all did the whole damn thing again. Here, the story is a little bit different because of course World War One was not as devastating to us as it was to you all and certainly not to the continental Europeans we got in near the end of it. So I'm not sure how that applies to us here but what I do know, talking about society's relationship to its core hierarchy of values. I should back up a minute and say that I'm very much in favor of thinking about religion as a hierarchy of values, values that are in a fixed relationship to each other, loves which are in a fixed relationship to each other with a moral absolute at the top. Now, whatever that absolute is, whatever those values are, you have to have that structure. If you just have values and they're mutable or you can shuffle them like playing cards, that's not going to work. If you don't have fixed points by which to navigate, then you're done when it comes time to reason about right and wrong and good and evil. You can certainly do good things in the world. You can be a quote unquote good person when everything is fine. But the moment you have to actually balance things against each other, the moment you have to think in a higher order way about what is right and what is wrong, the moment you have to challenge a law, you obviously can't use the law to reason about whether a law is unjust. So that's out, right? You can't use your political system to reason about whether your political system is just or not. That's out. So really the only thing you have has to be from outside of all those systems and of course our ability to reason about right and wrong can't come from nature itself because you just look at the way nature operates and it can be infinitely cruel. So that's out. So you have to have some kind of system that is essentially extra natural or supernatural that you use to reason about these things. We have a lot of militant atheists who get very up in their feelings whenever you talk about religion, when you talk about the supernatural, but the fact is it is not unreasonable. In fact, it makes perfect sense to root these things outside of what is mutable. When you're navigating in an ocean-going vessel, you can't chart your course according to things you see floating in the water. You have to chart your course and you do chart your course based on things that are not of this world, based on fixed stars. So going back to what you were saying, you have Great Britain is in a kind of a moral vacuum. It's a kind of a moral void. Europe passed on to a moral void. And I'm still trying to figure out where we in the United States went wrong. I can tell you that certainly in the 80s, our kind of national, we don't really have a national brand of Christianity, but our relationship as a nation with our Christian roots took a turn for the worst when many of our churches decided to throw their lot in with one political party. And you might have remembered people talking about the moral majority and what have you, and separate from whatever values they espoused or did not espouse, I think this was a terrible idea, because what it meant was that all the grimy things that the U.S. government was doing, the church was essentially co-signing. And this was in the middle of the Cold War, or rather more toward the end of the Cold War, but nonetheless, we did a lot of horrific things in our hemisphere and elsewhere. And the church co-signed these things. So over there and over here, it seems to me, and I'd like to get your take on this, it seems to me that you have a problem of scale fundamentally. You get a church, an organization that has grown too big on government largesse. It's come up in an environment where the government is friendly to it, or at least not hostile to it. And in such an environment, I think it's very easy for a church and especially the Christian church to forget its roots. The roots are, of course, in exactly what you're doing, meeting upstairs of a tavern or somewhere in a hidden room. The early Christians, they hid in the catacombs underneath the Rome. What's your take on the idea that Christianity has lost its rebel spirit over the years? This is exactly the feel that we get in the Thursday Circle group. We feel like early Christians. Quite often recently, we've sat around a table, all of us around one table, and I do a quick head count. And quite often there's been 12 or 13 of us in a room above a tavern. It's almost sort of, almost corny. But we do feel like, you know, we use the analogy of early Christians scratching a fish icon in the sand to indicate to a stranger that they are Christian that can quickly be scuffed out if they don't get the message. We're almost back to that sort of level, and it's exciting and it's very real. We've stripped away everything unnecessary. We are just friends meeting, and we've got Catholics and Protestants and High Church and Low Church. We've got the full gamut of the Christian faith within our group, and it makes not one jot of difference. We get on very, very well. But going back to your other point about church and state and the separation thereof, which has been kind of a fundamental fact of life throughout British history, that the two kind of have a relationship that the two should be separate, but there is a connection. The reigning monarch is the nominal head of the church, and also technically of the state, although they have no real power in either. Right at the beginning of the formation of our group, there's a lady who helped me form the group, and she gave me a book which has hear me out on this one. It's quite a relevant story. It was about a vicar who became an army padre in World War I, and he's a local hero in Worcester where I live in the Midlands here in England. And he was known as Woodbine Willie because when he was out in the western front serving with his troops, he would hand out packets of woodbind, which is a brand of cigarettes. He'd hand out packets of woodbinds along with the little Bible that was issued to troops. When he was with his men, unlike a lot of army padre's who would hang back with the officers at HQ, he would insist on going over the top. He'd accompany them on raids. He'd be waist deep in water in the forward trenches. He'd come under fire, of course never carrying a weapon himself. But he knew that gaining the trust of his men involved taking the same risks that they took, and he would swear with them, he'd drink with them, he would smoke with them, and he became a beloved figure. But he just happened to be the most amazing preacher. Now back in his church in Worcester, he could pack them in standing room only in his church because of how hypnotic his sermons were. So the church had this pro-war vicar who was already a celebrity at home and very fast becoming a national figure. The church latched on to him along with the state to use him pretty much as a recruiting tool for the war. He had no doubt that our boys, we should be in this war, it's a fight of good against evil, despite the fact that the Germans had belt buckles with Gott mit uns. God is with us. God happened to be on both sides, but a strange thing happened and that was that during the war, Woodbine Willie, actual name Jeffrey Studd at Kennedy, he started to completely turn against it. I suppose it's not a strange thing, I mean he's a man of the cloth, a man of God. He saw this death and destruction all around him, he became horrified at what he was involved in. So by the time he got back after the war, he was a thoroughly anti-war vicar and was preaching as such for the rest of his life. But he was also pretty much what we would know today as an out and out socialist. So the Labour Party wanted to get him on board with them, they wanted to get him to commit to being a member of their party so that they could use his fame to further their own ends, but very cleverly he refused to do so. He said, if I align myself with one party I'm going to alienate the other, I'm going to alienate half my congregation. I don't want to do that, I do believe that a lot of the things that the church has to handle are political questions, questions of poverty and questions of injustice and he was there for the poor. But he wasn't going to align himself to a particular party and I think that gels in very firmly with what you were saying about how the church had been essentially owned by the politicians and wasn't therefore able to be its own independent fighting force for what was right. Correct. So yeah, I commend Woodbine Willey to all your listeners but do some research on him, he's a fascinating chap and an example to us all really. Yes, that is fascinating, I hadn't known about that guy. Yes, you know, there is a sense in which this is a problem that there is no formula for contending with. The only thing we can do is be watchful, eternally be vigilant all the time. That is to say it's always going, any church that gets large enough, any human institution, first of all all human institutions are subject to corruption because that's the nature of human beings. But then any human institution that gets large enough is going to be inclined towards self-dealing and the temptation to cozy up to the state, especially when the state is powerful enough to ensure a certain baseline level of comfort and of well-being I should say for the bulk of its citizens. I think the temptation for the two to get in bed with each other I think is always going to be a problem. Let me say, well, why can't we have a monarchy? Well, a better historian than I would have to check me on this but I don't see that as far as the European nations are concerned. Being monarchies necessarily inoculated them against moral error or needless conflict or anything else. Quite the opposite if you look at European history. Would we be better off as a monarchy thing is an interesting one because a good monarchy is a wonderful thing. It's also the same with a benevolent dictator counter-intuitive as it sounds. Benevolent dictators can exist. You can have a guy that no one voted for him but he's doing a bloody good job of running the country. I think we can all think of examples but it's the same applies to monarchs. Now Queen Elizabeth I think was pretty much universally loved over here because she had the gift of keeping her mouth shut on issues that didn't necessarily concern her. Now she would make all the right noises and she'd work with every government that was voted into place. She did her duty as a constitutional monarch but you are never quite sure what she actually thought about anyone. And we could project. We could say when Trump came over those who hated Trump were saying clearly that the Queen doesn't like him. Isn't that wonderful? And those of us who rather like Trump were saying you know what she seems to be getting on really well with him. She's laughing with him and she seems to be very respectful of him and the feeling seems to be mutual. Those two facts can exist side by side but our new monarch, not so much, he's always worn his heart on his sleeve. We know what he believes because he never tires of telling us. We know he's green through and through. He's liberal through and through. He's meant to swear into being defender of the faith which is meant to be the Christian faith. But he decided I don't know if he went through with it but to say he was going to be the defender of faith just in general. And that's something. Wow. And so you know because he doesn't want to upset our Muslim friends and our Hindu friends and our Jewish friends. It's sort of like well you know what you're kind of missing the point there. So I think the monarchy worked well under Liz but not so much under Chuck. I'm not a fan I must say. Well you know the other thing is certainly a monarchy with teeth is one that you would hope could step in when necessary and thwart government decisions that people don't like. If we're talking about a monarchy that operates in concert with some kind of parliament right? Which is what we're supposed to have. We're supposed to have a constitutional monarch who is there as a sort of like a last resort if things get really bad. It came about from our own civil war which has a nice tie in with my reenactment because I started the reenactment. Reenacting what is known as round heads and cavaliers which is a Victorian term for parliamentarians and royalists. Now I was in a parliamentarian regiment and we'd go off and do big battles just like your own American civil war reenactment societies over there. And funnily enough we have them over here too. But big battles with matchlock muskets and pikes and it was Morian helmets and leather tabards and all this is all very jolly. But that was the part of history where we came up with the idea that a monarch should not be absolute because that leads to the corruption and megalomania that we experienced through Charles at the first. But also parliament needs to have checks and measures in the form of a monarch. So the two were supposed to be kind of like an upper house, a lower house and then one beyond it. So we had the House of Lords, we had the House of Commons and then we have the monarch. And between the three of them you think that would be the whole thing nailed down but no. Gradually the one loses power, the other becomes too strong, corruption creeps in and before you know it even that system didn't work. And this system is supposedly the envy of the world. Right, because you think about it there was no one including I don't mean to speak ill of the dead but I mean your monarch did not step in and say, hang on a second, why is my government, because technically it is her government that's how they talk about it. Why is my government trampling on the ancient liberties of my subjects? Well she brought into the whole thing, she had the same people whispering in her ear that were whispering in the ears of governments. They have their advisors and a monarch is only as good as the people advising them. I mean how else are they going to be in touch with what's really going on in the world? This is why I think the problem of scale, our friends who call themselves Christian nationalists online and so on and so forth, I think they're correct in thinking that a limited government can only properly govern a self-governing people, which is to say in one sense or another a moral and religious people. That is true I think. But the question of scale always comes back to bite you. I also think that. And so because governments are human institutions, you know kings and queens and their retinues they're human institutions, churches are human institutions. And so I don't have a formula for how we deal with that. It's just, I think maybe we just have to get right with the fact that there is no formula. We have to keep our eyes open all the time. And when we see things getting too big, when these institutions getting too big and too comfortable and too happy and too fat, we know that there's a problem. And here by the way is where Christianity itself gives you some great archetypes, right? Earlier you mentioned, you said something about rebel Christians and I thought, rebel Christianity and I thought that's almost redundant to say rebel. You're almost repeating yourself when you say rebel Christianity. Christianity is the ultimate rebel religion, right? I get you. And so I think that it's I think it's great to see people doing that. I was talking with Father Jamie Franklin a while ago about what I was calling roots Christianity because he was very upset about what he saw going on in the country. And I said, yeah, we need Christians to make Christianity weird again to make it to make it dissident again. And I think that's exactly what those are Reverend boys are doing. Yes, yes. They strike just the right note of fun, rebelliousness, coolness. I mean, when the church tries to make itself cool, it's just so cringe. Oh my God, it's the worst, yeah. Buttock clenchingly embarrassing. Wow. And it's not going to bring anyone on board. If anything, it's going to scare away those who are already there. And there's this whole thing about trying to bring in young people like young people are the answer to everything. You know what, they're not interested and we've discussed this a lot. And as you may know, I've been in regular contact with those Reverend boys and met them in person. I love all three of them and that they are doing amazing things for faith in this country. And they won't be recognized for it for quite a while to come because they are the rebels. Now they are bringing people on board to Christianity who wouldn't have given it a second look. And they're doing it not by making it easy. They are presenting faith as it is. It is a difficult thing. It should be difficult. Nothing worthwhile is easy. You know, anything worthwhile has got to be strived for. And I mean, for me, the difficult thing with Christianity is forgiveness. It's a really tough thing to forgive people that you hate and you shouldn't have hate in your heart. And all of these things are brushed aside when the church is trying to attract people and saying, look, it's really easy. Bring your pets in, bring your motorbikes in. Have a great time. Let's have a messy church, bring the kids, let them do their coloring. They can scream and shout. We'll have a DJ during the liturgy. Oh, yes, all of it. I've heard of Vickers sitting on the altar swinging their legs. Oh, come on. Let's hang the rainbow flags around. Bring a gay partner along. In fact, let's marry you. It's this whole thing about taking away everything that is difficult about the church in desperation to get bums on pews. And in the process, they are killing the church. And what those are Reverend boys are doing is actually presenting old fashioned grassroots gospel preaching, praying, psalm reading, Christianity. And it's not difficult because it's been practiced for hundreds of years. But it's radical thinking to look back to the Bible, to pray regularly, to look after your fellow man, to put others before yourself. And yet that's what these guys are doing. Yeah. I mean, it's very encouraging to watch them work. And that's the kind of thing I think we need to see more of. You were talking about these kind of ham-handed attempts to get young people interested in Christianity. I think one of the best ways probably to get young people interested in these kinds of things is to show them for what they are, which is a kind of adventure. Figuring out your fundamental philosophy of things, trying to understand this kind of enormous mystery that we're kind of embedded in. That's almost the ultimate adventure, certainly if you're interested in the life of the mind. You all especially do have a tradition of Christian pilgrimage, which I really kind of cottoned on to when I started reading certain books and what have you. And that's what I think of myself. I think of myself as a pilgrim. I had been kind of reasoning my way back to faith slowly over a few years. And then I think probably the great Bible freakout was probably a tipping point for me. Because I saw how even people who styled themselves as avatars of rationality and how rationality was all you needed. And what is you stupid backward Christians with your weird myths and your books and your kind of troubling verses and so on and so forth in the Bible. We don't need any of that. We're modern people here. We have rationality. We're not like you primitive people cowering from things you can't see and what have you. And then what happened? What happened? A couple of governments clapped their hands a couple of times. And these avatars of rationality, these modern people started cowering like cavemen at things they couldn't see. It was extraordinary. Wow, okay. Really, okay. Because five minutes ago... They can't see the irony in the eye of the canvane. Well, that's right. Yeah, yeah. And I'm thinking well, five minutes ago you people were talking as if you had all the answers. Now look at you. You're telling me to be afraid of air. Are you listening to yourself? You know, and we can go back. I mean, someone needs to download all these articles before they get memory hold. We can go back where these people have said, you know, well, I think we're just going to have to wear masks everywhere forever. You know, and we're just, we're just never going to shake hands with anyone ever again. The new normal. The new normal, exactly. Now, you're probably familiar with Zubi, who's a great chap in his own right over here, and DJ and international man of mystery. Now he put out a tweet the other day that was inviting people to contribute the silliest rules that we had to put up with under lockdown. And this tweet just took off. It went nuts. My own contribution was point reminding people that the government reserved the right to take down, burn to the ground, destroy any building. Yes, I remember that. Now, you were talking about memory holding. I can't find an article about it in the newspaper about this. Interesting. I've got a feeling they're taking stuff away even now. Now we need to keep receipts as they say. We need to remind. Someone's got to, as you say, someone's got to take all this down because these journalists will reemerge as like, yeah, well, I was always an anti lockdowner. And we'll be able to hold up a piece of paper and say, really? But aren't you the guy who wrote this? Correct. They were vaccinating animals in zoos and the animals were dying. And it's some of the madness that we endured. And those of us on the awake side of things were just, we had our heads in our hands. We couldn't believe it. We couldn't work out why people weren't waking up to it. But you've got to remember that whatever applies to how awake we were about lockdown, it's the same thing with faith on a different level. We've got to remember what it was like, how we may have once looked at Christians and you were saying, you know, with your crazy books and your men in dresses. And it's all smiles in the church and singing songs and your sky fairy and all of this sort of stuff. It's easy to forget how we look to non-Christians, to non-believers. We just look like weirdos. If we're presenting the answers, we've got to come across as someone you can trust in the first place. Which is why I think it's really nice to take the faith bit out of the church and bring it into a pub. And the response that when I was hanging out with the irreverent guys in, they did an event in London. I was invited to go down and talk at it, which was a fantastic do. But being in a pub with a vicar and a dogcaller, that they get quite a weird reaction. People want to come and talk to them. People want to come and ask them questions. My vicar friend Richard, he's bombarded when he goes to his local pub in his dogcaller. He might just be passing through. He doesn't go out of his way to do it. But he ended up one time being asked to bless the pub. A couple would come up to him to discuss their marriage. Their forthcoming marriage that they were thinking of having in the church. This sort of stuff, if you take this to people, you'll find that there is a real thirst for it. People do respect the church, even those who don't believe. Which means that they appreciate the part that Christianity has played in the creation of society as we know it. They know that even if they don't self-identify as Christians, they on some level appreciate that these guys represent good. And maybe they are worth listening to. Yes, I think that's exactly right. I think another thing that's very important about that is I've heard Christians describe it as kind of winsomeness. That is to say, not that you're supposed to drape difficult truths in happy talk. But more like you are supposed to be, you're supposed to show a face to the world as Christians. That is the very least encouraging. That is, let's just say, these people are not just complaining, in other words, about how bad everything is. They seem to be looking at something that's beautiful. And one of the problems is many of the people I've seen for myself online who are talking about these things. If I imagine that if you could see their faces, their faces would be in kind of perpetual scowls. That's a problem. That's a problem. I think that one of the things that your approach and the approach of the Reverend guys is so good with is kind of bringing kind of earthly joy and humor and all these things back into the mix. And it seems to me that those things were in the mix in the first place. I've been obsessed lately with the Sermon on the Mount as an example of something that, when it happened, probably was even more interesting than it's painted in the literature. What I mean is this, Christ was kind of a scruffy Palestinian, hanging out with scruffy Palestinians, often in the worst parts of town. He was hanging out with low-lifes and, you know, rough types. Publicans and criminals, I think it says that at one point. But they've only had publicans get put. That's the same translation. Which implies that he's hanging out in bars. Well, that's what I'm saying. And look, there was at least one prostitute in the squad. We know this, right? We do indeed. Sermon on the Mount. I try to kind of imagine when I go in and read that piece, I think about, well, what does that mean? It was up on a mountain. So you imagine this kind of ancient, dusty, grimy city. And at ground level, especially around the docks, maybe everything smells bad and what have you. And it's, you know, there's people in this crowd and there's dust and there's smells and all this. And then you go up on the mountain where the air is clearer. And so you imagine this weird rabbi with his ragtag band of people up on a mountain and he's just talking with them. And if you know anything about working-class people, you know, they're always joking around and goofing off. And they always like to have a good laugh. And this is true of Palestinian working-class people just as much as anyone else. They're going to have been heckling him, aren't they? Well, this is the thing. I specifically thought about that line where it's the beam and the moat. Why do you point out the moat or the splinter in your brother's eye when there's a beam in your eye? Now, this is hilarious. Like, I make furniture, I work with dimensional lumber. I know what a beam is, right? The idea that, you know, to say, yeah, you've literally got a beam in your eye is absolutely hilarious. It is comical. It's comical. And, you know, the humor and the mirth in this is something that is necessarily going to have been bleached out by centuries of scholarship. And that's understandable. We know that humor and laughter is a gift from God. Exactly. You can so easily strip it out of the Bible. But if you read the Bible, you imagine a cheeky grin on Jesus' face, a writhe smile, maybe a little wink. That's right. And you can imagine the disciples hearing that and they're laughing. They're like, you know, I see you Simon, what are you going to do with that beam in your eye? You're going to make a table? What are you making a table today? What's going on? So this is something that people can bring back without descending into kind of moral, therapeutic deism. You know, God wants you to be happy. God wants you to make a lot of money. You don't have to do all that. But that's something we can bring back. And that also can be a gateway drug for people where we can start to talk about more difficult things. But fundamentally, this means that, again, this question of scale and we have to scale down from these grand, serious institutions. You know, big institutions don't have a sense of humor. That's just how it is, right? Big, well-mutted institutions do not have a sense of humor about anything. And that's a problem. So again, I think it's great work that you all are doing and I hope that there's more of that. I hope that we see more of these ragtag groups of people meeting in basements and above tap rooms. The way I've set it up is that I've, with Third Wednesday, the political group, I sell it as libertarian drinks. And libertarians hate being defined as libertarians. So it's for want of a better expression, but essentially they're meeting once a month in a pub and there's no rules. It's just people who are like yourself are going to be there. Now with the Thursday circle thing, I've done the same thing. I've set up a website. There's a map with dots on it. And where there is a dot, there is a meeting going on. So if you want a pub for your Wednesday, then it's on the one website. But for Thursday circle, I want people to see if there is one near them. And what I say with both groups is, look, if there isn't one near you, how do you consider setting one up? And this is how it's happening. I'm not going down to any of these and telling them how to run things. I say, look, the way we doing it in Worcester that works really well for us is this. Now, this is part of my libertarianism. I hate telling people what to do and how to do things because things sort themselves out. People find their own way of making things work. And we've got a system whereby only one person is talking at any given point. There's no talking stick as such. We just try to be a little bit more respectful than you might be in any average pub meetup and let someone say their part. And then someone else will take up and say, but how do you consider this? It's very civilized and it works really nicely. But far be it from me to go to other groups and say, no, no, you're doing it all wrong. So there's a libertarian me that doesn't want to govern these things. But there's the almost evangelical me that wants these things to happen so badly across the country. Because I want people to get from it what I've been getting from it. That I'm almost getting ahead of myself in my eagerness to try and make this thing happen elsewhere. But it's a slow burner. But it is happening. The groups that have taken off have really worked well and people are saying they've made some amazing new friends. And people are coming out of the woodwork who have really been thirsting for this sort of thing, you know, sort of a church outside the church. Our friendly local vicar who comes along was telling us, look, don't let the church anywhere near this. They will try to own it. They'll try to make it their own. Grassroots has to come from grassroots. You can't decide to create a grassroots organization from above. People have tried and people have failed. And it can't be owned by any particular church this thing. This is people. And as we know, people are the church. Yes, yes. I think this is the right time for something like this. The large institutions, again, they're just too big. Many of them have been corrupted as simply as a consequence of their scale. I don't make that indictment only of the church. Governments seem to be quite obviously even more corrupt, again, partly as a consequence of their scale. But in terms of solutions to these things, scaling it down is a thing. I mean, you hear Catholics talk about this. They talk about subsidiarity. How can we push decision making down to the lowest possible point where the information is, where the decisions have to be made, where people can see what's going on. You know, street level Christianity, roots Christianity. To me, it's just hearing you talk about it is wonderful. This seems like something that can start to create something, to grow something in that void that's been created for one reason or another. And into which all kinds of terrible ideas are flowing right now. This seems to be, this is a great thing that you all are doing, I think. Well, the other, as you say, terrible things are flowing into that void. Let's not beat about the bush. This is the work of Satan. He is having a great time out there right now. He is filling the void in a lot of cases. And it's through all the things that they warned us about that back before I was a half decent Christian, I just laugh at them. Them telling me that rock music is a root to Satan. It just seemed like a ridiculous thing to say, but the more I find out about the music industry, the more I find out that was totally right. It's only even scratching the surface of how right that is. But yeah, it's sort of learning everything I've already been told, which is quite an eye-opener. But just reading the Bible a little every day because I want to, not because I feel I should. But I actually look forward to, and I'm simultaneously reading Old Testament and New Testament, one in the afternoon and one in the morning. And it's become a great comfort to me, saying prayers three times a day, just as my brother is learning Psalms. There's things you can do to improve yourself while you're helping others and just little by little trying to make sense of the world, make it a better place, help those who want to come on board. And I really do feel like I'm doing something, and that is hugely satisfying. Yes, yes, I think so. You know, people listening to this, I know there's some people listening to this who will think, who will say, well, there isn't all that much theological rigor in meeting in a tavern or above a tavern or what have you. And maybe there's not, but I would say this. It strikes me that, well, I'm always going back to this talk that Roger Scruton gave, late Roger Scruton. It was about beauty, and he was taking questions from the audience. And someone asked him, how do you get young people who were raised on pop music, you know, so less pop music, Lady Gaga and so on. How do you get them to be interested in things like Bach? And what he said was, you don't, not directly. What you have to get them to embrace is silence first. Get them to where they're at least comfortable with silence. And then it's out of that silence that the appreciation for things like Bach can grow. A few of the theological thinkers and the Christian apologists I respect have said something the same, something like the same thing about Christianity. Is that how do you get an atheistic society or nihilistic society to declare for Christ, so to speak. And I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, who thought that even, he thought that even embracing paganism was certainly not as good as embracing Christianity, but it was better than nihilistic materialism. In other words, if you can get people away from nihilistic materialism, if you can get them to start thinking that the world is alive and it's thinking, you know, and that you are a part of it. If you can get them to see that everyone around them is not simply meat, right? Then that could well be a gateway drug into okay, then what's the plan behind that? What's the schema behind that? And I think many of us who are impatient, I have a lot of Christian friends who are impatient for this kind of reawakening because they see what's going on. And they see quite correctly that we're in a bad state and they understand again correctly in my opinion that this is a spiritual war. It's not going to be one on political grounds, even though politics matters to a certain extent. It's not going to be one on informational grounds, although information of course matters. It's got to be one or lost on spiritual grounds. And so there are a lot of people who are anxious for this kind of reawakening. But there's nothing for it, but just to understand that the first thing is you've got to kind of meet people where they are. And if you're going to challenge them, you've got to challenge them where they are. But I think this is a beautiful challenge. It's a beautiful challenge. Come talk with us. Come reason with us. Well, it comes back to the vicar in the pub bit. People are comfortable in the pub. I mean, you must know the part that the pub plays in British society and life. It is the public forum. It's the meeting place. It's the exchanging of ideas. I always gravitate towards an old fashioned pub without a jukebox or any sport on the television where they've got real ale behind the bar. It's normally full of old men, but they describe it as old man pubs. But there's a liveliness there and it's familiar and it's comfortable. Now, take people when they're in a comfortable, familiar place and then challenge them with ideas rather than getting them to step into an alien environment, which is the church, which might be cold and weird and, you know, we're all vaguely familiar with it, but it's not the comfortable place. And you're already on someone else's turf. But if the ideas come to you on your home turf, or at least neutral turf, it's a great place for exchanging ideas and challenging people's preconceptions. It really does work. Yes, yes. Speaking of place, you know, I was, as you've been speaking, I've been thinking about kind of, well, about foundationism, about our, the kind of archetypes we like to think about in the foundationist society and how that would map on to this kind of thing. I mean, in foundationism we have, there are 10 precepts. I've read that before we came online and I've got them written down in front of me. Oh, beautiful. I had a feeling, I mean, they're beautiful. Thank you. There's nothing, I love a good succinct manifesto. Well, thank you. It really lays it out. Well, thank you very much. Yeah, I tried to make it as succinct as possible. I was tired of these political groups with their, you know, 50-page manifestos and like none of that. Very simple, very inward and all inwardly directed. We're in a world of tilde, aren't we? Too long didn't read. That's right. You don't want a tilde manifesto. That's right, that's right. We're from the 10 points in the manifesto, which by the way, anyone who's listening to this right now should go to the Infinite Jigsaw podcast that's run by my buddy, Danny Duran, who's also a foundationist. I've done one with Danny. We talked about Break New World together. Exactly, that was a great episode. So yeah, the Infinite Jigsaw podcast is great in its own right and Danny's talked to a lot of great people and he and I did a 10-part series where we simply went through the points of the manifesto one by one. He'd ask me questions about them, great conversations. But then we have the archetypes as well. So we think about things in terms of three archetypes, the forge, the library and the tower. And so the forge is the locus of kind of work and practical application. The library is the locus of study and research and historical investigation and documentation. And the tower is the locus of theology and religious feeling and the moral law. And so you could see right away that these things have to be kind of in balance in one's life. If you're always in the forge but you're never in the library, you're blind to history and you're not writing things down. If you're always in the library but never in the forge, then you're book smart but you don't do enough practical application. And if you're either in the forge or the library but you never go to the tower, then what you do is not infused with meaning. You're kind of flying blind, there is no moral law. So now I'm thinking about your kind of impromptu societies and how... Certainly I think about how masculine society often used to involve, for example, going to someone's house who had a garage and you guys would wrench on cars together. Or reading groups. Or going on a retreat in the woods and just lighting a fire and sitting around and talking about whatever. So there's the forge spirit. People can start their own societies where they discuss things and they can kind of base them around some place that represents the forge where men get together and actually do work together. Or again, reading groups, libraries, reading rooms, so on and so forth. Or silent retreats or quiet retreats or going somewhere off in nature where you can't hear anyone else. And it's just a bunch of men sitting around the fire. There's so much... This is such a broad template that it's exciting to hear you talk about it and to try to think about how people can make that happen where they are. And the only... The only requirement for this is that it not be on social media, that it be actually in a place with real people who you can sit down and talk with. IRL is everything. I've realized that... In fact, this is almost paraphrasing a speech my brother James was making recently. Everyone, whether they know it or not, has a particular superpower. And it turns out that mine has been to bring people together. And I somehow... I was never really comfortable socially growing up. I wasn't very outgoing. I was always the clown. I would always be the jester. But it turns out that kind of matured into being comfortable around all sorts of people and really getting a kick out of bringing people together. And this seems to be my superpower. And God's got hold of it now. And he's hopefully working through me to make this thing happen. And if that's what I bring to the world and if that's what I end up achieving, I'm completely content with that. That's amazing. I wanted to ask you, had you already been aligning with faith more closely and then the kind of great vowel freak out just tipped you into it? Yes, I think I was like... I'd been starting to wonder about what that kind of void in my life was. And you mentioned paganism earlier. I'd even tinkered with the idea of maybe I should be looking back at ancient British history and seeing what they worshipped. There was something looking for spiritualism, which you also hinted on earlier. And there was something that needed to be filled. And ultimately it was Christianity that arrived in time to prevent me going down any of those other routes. Which is not to say I disrespect those who have chosen a more spiritual route. But accepting that there is something beyond the obvious in life. Something we can't quite understand. Is the first step to any of this increasing your own awareness? Accepting you know nothing is the first stage, isn't it? Yes, that's right. Well, what's interesting I think as I read about the history of Christianity is that the ancient pagans were successfully evangelized. I was just reading about this guy and I can't remember his name, but it's the guy who evangelized the Picts over and over in your country. I've got to learn up on this stuff because I don't know. I know it was St. Patrick over in Ireland. Yeah, there was another one down in England. The early saints. Yeah, the early saints and then there was another one who evangelized the Slavs. I believe that was St. Cyril. And even now they write in an alphabet that has his name Cyrillic. And so it's very interesting to hear about the paths that people took. Like a lot of men, I also took in my fair share of Jordan Peterson. And he just hearing him, for example, fill up auditoriums and talk about Genesis was fascinating. I had never really heard someone who wasn't specifically asked you to declare for Christ, but just talking about these stories as if they mattered. And that's another thing I mean about the way we approach this thing, the way we approach young people. The adversary is clever and knows how to paint a picture and knows how to kind of bait our side. So it's very easy to fall into this kind of back and forth. And then you just get end up getting very shouty as you defend things that need to be defended. But the problem is that that's not always that's not always the right approach. Well, talking about these things as if the investigation of theology is really an adventure, because of course that's exactly what it is. It's an intellectual adventure. Now that adventure has moral purpose. It matters what you find and how you find it. But the fact is it's a kind of a journey. And I think more of us could do a lot more to get young people interested in at least asking those questions. I think it's not for me to prescribe answers necessarily for young people who I don't know and who don't know me. But at the very least you can prescribe questions. And let's face it, the culture we're living in now, mainstream culture, it never minded not having good answers. It doesn't even have good questions to be honest. And that's really the thing a friend of mine told me. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, it doesn't matter what the answer is. And so that's where we are. We're a society, we're a civilization that is asking the wrong questions. And so it doesn't matter what the answer is. You were asking what it was that when someone has recently discovered their faith, finding out what it was that triggered them, because it's really significant. Is it something I can use to work on other people? It's the same about waking up to the lies, the pandemic, the other big questions in life, the more political ones, as to why people wake up to the fact that they've been lied to. It's really, really difficult to put your finger on the thing that woke people up. But there's always, I was liken it to a tapestry, there's always one thread that's loose. And if you pull that out, the whole thing comes apart. But it is finding that one thread. And this is as true of discovering your faith as it is of waking up politically, finding that thread. And it's going to be different in everyone. If it was a simple matter of it being the apex thread in each of us that was always in the same place, it would be so easy to just go up and you tug that thing. But you've got to find that point in everyone. And it's, again, why Christianity is difficult, not easy, and long may it be that way. I wouldn't want it any other way. Well, that's right. Listen, if it were easy, it would probably be worthless. And that's another thing I'm always saying. One of the precepts, as you know, is deny the self. That's the one that really resonated with me because all those others are sort of like, I don't understand that, but denying the self, that's actually counterintuitive and that's a challenge. Yes, sir. Exactly. And that's the thing. If you give in to the part of yourself that doesn't really want to put the work in, then you can always find some low quality solution. But it's a low quality solution. Anything that doesn't cost you something, anything that doesn't demand anything of you is almost guaranteed to be worthless. I recently gave up a quite bad video game habit. I was playing an online game at one of these city building things free to play. And I was just seeing myself turn into someone I didn't respect. It was like, you are spending much too much time on this thing. It's like, oh, I just got to open it up and collect the resources for the day and collect my daily bonus. An hour later, I'm still building a new, I don't know what it was, a tree factory thing. So my wife was similarly playing another game and we both agreed. We said, look, this is not good. We're spending too much of our time doing this. And we both agreed we were going to ditch it that day. And it was almost like, well, I just want to finish the... She said, no, no, you can't even think like that. If you're going to do it, whatever it was you were saving up for within that game doesn't matter. You do it now. And I did it and it's such a weight on myself. This is giving up something on you was not good for me. And you know what I'm doing instead? I'm reading the Bible a bit more. I mean, there's the payoff. There you go. Yeah. It's so great to talk to you. I've been wanting to talk to you for a while and even more after I listened to the talk that you and Danny did. On Infinite Jigsaw about Brave New World. And then, of course, I've known about your art for a while. Actually, before we go any further, the website or websites people can go to to find out about your gatherings. What are those websites? Okay, so they're quite easy URLs. The third Wednesday, which meets on the third Wednesday of every month. The website for that is libertariandrinks.com. Thursday Circle is a similarly easy one. Let me just make sure it's .com and not to toad at UK. Yeah, Thursdaycircle.com. And my own website is delingpolstudio.co.uk. And that's where my paintings are. Nothing to do with my faith or anything like that. It's just my my obsession with military uniforms, which is a conversation for another day. Yeah, and I have to say that it's it's worth anyone's listening to this. It is worth your time to visit delingpolstudio's website. You really do some some some great work. I remember seeing I think I think Danny had bought some of these. These cigarette cards that yeah, I turn them into cigarette cards at the end. And they sell better than the prints. I mean, I don't do it for the money. It's nice to earn a bit of money, but it's a form of meditation for me after an hour of intense watercolour with a bit of music in the background. I'm in a much better place. That is great. Do you do any do you do any teaching or do you work with young people? You know what? Someone said, oh, I could get you some teaching at the local university. And I said, you do realize I'm considered to be quite right wing. I don't even mean I don't even with universities. I mean, just informally in the community, tutoring, what have you? It's quite a tricky. It's quite a tricky thing. I'd be more than happy to do so. But the point was with this university thing was they would say, oh, there's no way they'd let you through the door. If they knew you were vaguely right wing. The whole the whole of the educational establishment and nearly all my artist friends are robustly left wing. And it's it's laughable really. But you know, to be honest, I've got enough things going on. I haven't got enough time to do that. And I do spread myself very thinly already. But for me, it's kind of a person. It's almost like doing an illuminated manuscript for a month. It's there making something beautiful that I enjoy doing. It's a little bit of a little bit of me time in a way. But it's something I like to share with people. Yeah, it's just another one of those things that I do that there's far too many of. Yeah. Yeah, it does sound like you've got a you've got a full calendar most most weeks, but that's a that's a kind of like it that way. Yeah, that's a very good thing. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. You've been you've been so generous with your time. Again, I've wanted to talk with you for a long time. And I'd known about Third Wednesdays for a while. But the other circle is at least as interesting as Third Wednesdays and might even be more fruitful in the end. What do you see? I mean, I'm in the U.S. I follow U.S. politics. And I know that that you all are not in a good way right now. Worst by the week. Worst by the week. Yeah. Are you optimistic or pessimistic? Or are you guardedly optimistic? Or do you do you feel we're just at the beginning of this thing? What's your when you think about the months and the years to come? What do you see as a Christian? I'm optimistic. Politically, I'm pessimistic because I don't see people waking up quickly enough to do anything about it. And by the time they do, they're going to have to take part in a broken democratic system. Democracy is dead. They've corrupted the voting system to a point whereby it's almost meaningless. And the people you've got the opportunity of voting for are all rogues anyway. So you've kind of got the situation where even if you did wake up, it would be too late to do anything about it. And I think the answer doesn't lie in traditional politics. And I think people growing in their rediscovery of faith will inevitably happen. And I think there will come a point where there's such a groundswell of normal people who have worked out that they don't need that system anymore. That I think some form of revolution will take place. Not a traditional revolution, but I think things unexpected things will happen. I know that's a real cop out because of course unexpected things will happen. But I think there's going to be factors that aren't in play as yet are going to come into play. And they are ultimately what's going to sort this out because it's coming to a head whether that's in 10 years or a month. Things are going to come to a head. I think that's right. Well, certainly if you look at Christianity itself, we have to remember that this is a faith that was born in the shadow of a giant, cruel, immensely powerful pagan empire with the Roman Empire. And a couple thousand years later, you still had Christianity, but you didn't have any Roman Empire. So it's early days yet. If you were to say to the early Christians, how do you see this panning out? Would the Roman Empire adopting Christianity and then ultimately being overrun by barbarians? Do you think that would have been on the list of options? I don't think so. That's right. Well, that's a good way to round this out. Thank you again. Well, it's flown by this time. It has. I really do enjoy talking to you, Mike, and we'll have to do it again sometime in the not too distant future. We've got to do it again. Absolutely. So all the best to you and to your circles, you know, and we'll talk again soon. Cheers there, Mike. All right. Take care.