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Just go to harvest.org. So, I'm speaking with Andrew Clavin. Andrew, it's hard to describe you.
You know, I listen to you all the time, watch your podcasts, love all the work that you do, but you're sort of unique among all the folks over there at The Daily Wire and just commentators in general because you are a political commentator and a very good one. You're also a humorist. You're also a prolific author. You're a screenwriter. You're kind of a Renaissance man, aren't you? I mean, you do a lot of things and you do them all very well.
Well, thank you. I really only have one talent is that I'm a good writer. I think I'm an exceptional writer and I use that like the Indians use the buffalo, you know. I use every bit of it I can. So, if I, you know, I never ever pictured myself in front of a camera.
I mean, writers are usually hermits and I'm one of them. And I only started talking about this because I felt the country, I left the country for seven years. So, I came back and I was shocked. Where did you go? I went to England for, I lived in England for seven years.
Boy, has that changed dramatically over in England? I hit it at a beautiful moment because it was the moment when it sort of opened up a little. There was still Thatcher's, you know, it was after Thatcher, but there was still that atmosphere going on. And yet it opened up, the food got better and all that stuff. So, it was great. And it very quickly went downhill afterwards. But when you come back, you know, you notice things that people who are there don't see because it's like the frog in the frying pan.
It all happened so slowly. And you come back after seven years, I was shocked at the way the culture had been gutted by bad ideas. And when 9-11 happened, and people were on TV saying, why do they hate us? And I thought, they're supposed to hate us. They're terrible people.
You know, you want fascists to hate you. That's why I started talking about it. And I was working in Hollywood. And they started making movies about how bad we were. They started making movies where the American soldiers were the bad guys.
And the Islamists were, you know, kind of misunderstood. Movie after movie after movie, they all bombed, but they wouldn't stop making them. And I started talking about that and writing about it. That ended my Hollywood career.
I'm convinced. I mean, the phone stopped ringing like that. But it just, I just thought, no, you have to say something, right? I mean, and because it was a cultural thing, it really was never political. Like, I talk about politics because I'm at the Daily Wire, and that's what everybody wants to hear about. But what I'm interested in is the ideas that flow through the culture, that flow through literature and movies and comedy and all the ways that ideas permeate a society, because that really controls more than we think it does.
It controls almost everything. And a lot has changed. I mean, we see the woke ideology permeating the UK, Europe, certainly Canada. But yet here in the United States, we saw it here as well. But it seemed like there's been a big push back, and it's been dramatic. And it just happened with the election, not just of our president, but it seems like a cultural shift because it wasn't just, OK, we're going to elect Donald Trump to be the president. But it was a rejection not only of the woke ideology and all that, but of many of Hollywood elites, of mainstream everything. It was like a huge swath of Americans said, we don't want this. Like I read recently that like 76 percent of Americans or something like that oppose all the trans focus. And yet it seemed like in the Democratic Party, they were putting that front and center. But I think this is a good thing.
And I know you think the same thing. So as you look at this new administration, new president with a new team around him, what are your hopes? What would you like to see happen? What needs to happen in America? The phenomenon that you just described is the reason I felt genuine joy when Trump was elected. You know, the administration will be either good or bad or probably it'll be a little bit of both.
But it was a symbol for me of the defeat of what I termed in a novel the empire of lies. You know, this idea, you know, America should not be a place where you are afraid to say what a woman is, where you are afraid to debate the morality of sexual behavior, where you're afraid to speak up and say that, you know, abortion is an atrocity. You know, whenever and this has happened at the Daily Wire, but it's happened at other places, whenever people sort of got nervous about the reaction of the left to something we would say, I would say people who kill babies don't have a say in my moral makeup, you know, and we just shouldn't be afraid. I want there to be other sides.
I want there to be debates and arguments, but we shouldn't be afraid to argue. And so what I look for in this administration, I mean, look, there are things that Trump has to do politically, he has to restore the military, he has to restore the economy, make a, create an aggressive economy as opposed to a defensive economy. But the most important thing is to uproot this system of intimidation that has gone, it's corrupted the Justice Department, you know, so that people who are Catholics are under investigation by the FBI, parents who say they don't want porn in their children's school are called terrorists. But it goes beyond that. And this is something that the media doesn't see, because the media, even the conservative media is largely protected by the First Amendment.
So in the same way, they make a lot of money, so they don't see the ravages of inflation, and they live on the coast, so they don't see how the Midwest was gutted by Obama's economic policies. In the same way, they do not see how frightening it is for a guy who just wants to go to work and support his family to get called down to HR, because maybe he made a joke in the cafeteria. That should not be, that should never be. And it should never be that the FBI shows up at your house at three o'clock in the morning because you peacefully protested abortion. These things should never be in this country, and they shouldn't be for the other side either. I don't want, you know, there are plenty of people on the left I'd love to shut up, but I don't want them to shut up.
I want them to speak, and I want to beat them in the open field. You know, it's funny, people will sometimes describe people that I think are just Christian patriots as Christian nationalists. And I'll say, we'll define a Christian nationalist, because one view is that we want to impose our views on the country, force people to believe.
I don't know of any Christian leader that believes that. We want, but we want to have dialogue, and we want to talk about it, and we want to seek to convince, but I would never want to, even if I could, impose or force someone to believe what I believe, but I don't want to be stopped from stating my opinions. And you know, because I'm a pastor, and so I speak, and I speak on many topics, and I don't want someone editing what I say or telling me I can or can't say that. We want the freedom to discuss these things, and we'd like to have the disagreement, because we think we have the better argument to start with. Exactly, because we're describing reality, and that is, you know, these ideas are everything, and if ideas are silenced, then you are cut off from finding out about reality. So one of the things that I've continually tried to explain to people is a lot of the stuff that has been so offensive, this transgender idea that you can change your sex, but that you should be afraid to stand up against that idea, or you're afraid you'll lose your business, those ideas actually make sense if there's no God.
If we live in a material world, why aren't you a woman when you rearrange your body parts, if the world is all material? And a lot of times, because we are afraid to argue from a position of spirituality and from actual creation, we have no argument. So you'll hear right-wingers saying things, well, it's not natural. Well, air conditioning is not natural. Plenty of things are not natural that I love, you know. Nature is not our God, you know. But men and women are actually spiritual designations.
There's an idea in medieval Christian theology, which actually comes from a great Muslim thinker, that there are certain ideas that are primary ideas, that we don't have words for them. We just know them when you see them. You know what a woman is, and not just what her body is, not just the functions of her body or her genes or anything like that. We know that there's something about a woman's nature that's different from a man's nature that we respect when we meet a woman.
My wife, a very feminine woman, only has to walk into a room to have people sort of straighten up a little bit, especially me, because I'm terrified. But we know when a military guy who's brave and in battle, we know that there's something about him that is expressing manhood, which another man might express by being a scientist or just being a fearless speaker. But we understand that that represents something. Those are spiritual ideas. And the idea behind it is that creation is essentially good. It may be ruined.
It may be fallen. But the core of creation, the original creation, is essentially good. You can't make those arguments by saying, this is unnatural, or this hurts. The operations are disgusting.
They are disgusting, and they're horrifying. But that's not really our argument. Our argument is that male and female is how we were made in the image of God. And if we can't make those arguments, we lose. And that's why I think just things going back to prayer and school have been implanted to keep our arguments silent. So you always hear people making these practical arguments. Religion makes you happy. I don't care.
Drugs can make you happy. That's not why I believe. I believe because I'm absolutely certain that it's true. I can see that life makes more sense when you believe. And it's just like gravity.
I can't see it. But if you don't believe in it, things don't go that well. And I think that that's the same thing with essentially Christianity, but just theism in general.
So that's a reoccurring theme in pretty much everything you say. If you're talking about literature, culture, politics, you always come back to these beliefs. And you are almost like the last person one would expect to become a Christian. I mean, you came to faith at the age of 49. Most people come to faith before the age of 18.
So you took your sweet time. And your background is so interesting. Tell us a little bit about who you were before you became a believer and what prompted you to become one. Well, you know, I described my life a little bit like outward bound, like some people are born in their faith.
But I was like thrown out in the desert with a paperclip and a piece of string and had to make my way to where I actually believed I knew the truth. But I was raised a Jew. It was very important to my, I was in a suburban Jewish, you know, east coaster. And it was very important to my father that we learn about the Jewish faith. So we went to Hebrew school.
I was bar mitzvahed. But there was no God in our house. You know, like nobody ever discussed what God might want from you. Nobody ever prayed. We celebrated high holidays, a couple, like maybe two of them.
But nobody prayed so that the Hebrew school and the religion just seemed very empty to me. And by the time I was bar mitzvahed, I was quite convinced that I was a hypocrite when I stood up and said I threw away all the gifts that I got. Yeah, you received a lot of gifts and put it literally in the trash.
I did. I got like gold watches and pen sets and savings bonds and things like that. And about six months after, and at first I was thrilled. I'd never had anything before, you know, a little, you're 13, you don't have anything. So what were you saying there? You're saying I reject all of this or? I was saying I lied and I got paid for it. You know, I knew when I was, I didn't want to be bar mitzvahed, but I couldn't.
How interesting. I didn't have the wherewithal to stand up against my father again at 13. So I stood up in front of people and said this stuff. I never even told this story to anyone until I was talking to a friend of mine who was an Episcopal priest in my thirties.
He never even encouraged me to tell the story. And he said to me, that's an amazing story. And I thought, you know, he's right. It is a good story. And here I'm, by that time, a professional storyteller. And I didn't really realize that it was that. That's in your book, The Great Good Thing.
Yeah. So, you know, over time through reading and through thinking, it did occur to me that none of the things that I really believed in were true if there were no God. The problem was I had a very difficult relationship with my father and it wasn't just his fault. It was a clash of personalities.
And so I was very unhappy. He was a radio broadcaster. He was a famous New York radio broadcaster. Yeah.
He was kind of Howard Stern before there was Howard Stern. I went crazy. I slowly went insane. I was deeply depressed. And by the time I was 28, I just cracked up. And truly, Greg, a miracle happened.
And I'm absolutely convinced of this. I found a shrink who was not a believer. And I went to him once a week. I didn't take any drugs or anything like that. And within about two years, I went from being suicidal, like literally sitting in a room thinking, I got it. And what age were you at this point?
I'm still about 20, between 28 and 30 is where it was kind of the dark place. And I went from that to just being a happy, kind of well-adjusted person. And when I look back on it, I mean, it was kind of a sort of Freudian experience. And then afterwards I realized that I didn't believe in Freud very much.
There's certain things he said that were true. And I realized just the love between me and this guy. He became my only mentor. He's the only mentor I ever had. Was he older?
Yeah. He was about 15 years old. It's almost like a father figure. We sometimes joke that he was like an older brother, but it was just a wiser, older man who could just say, what you're doing is stupid. And he did. He was not like one of those guys who doesn't say anything.
He would just say, yeah, don't do that. I respected him. It was miraculously transformative. And then all the logic that had gone into my saying, you know, there really must be a God for me to believe. Then I could accept it because before that I thought, it's just a crutch for this miserable guy. And that's how stubborn I was. I thought like, don't reach out to God when you need him because that would be just a crutch. That's the way my mind works.
Now I'm happy and the logic still works. And I started to think, well, let me try prayer, you know? And so I wasn't praying to Jesus. I was just praying to sort of an amorphous idea of God. And that was also transformative. That transformed my life.
Isn't that interesting? God will meet us where we are. I think people think we have to check all the boxes. There's so many people that to me are a work in progress and people want to evaluate, judge and condemn them and they're making their way in. What happened ultimately was after five years of prayer and I was experimenting, I had no idea how to pray.
So I was thinking, can I ask for a new car? How does this work exactly? And five years of prayer, I realized that I had been utterly transformed and I had been transformed by prayer. And I had been transformed because the information coming in was not coming from within.
It was obviously coming from without. And so I was trying, I'm at this point, a screenwriter and I'm driving a convertible BMW in the Hills of Santa Barbara. And I'm saying to God, you know, you've changed my life, but what do I, I'm a little schmuck, you know?
How do I say thank you to the King of the universe? And it wasn't a voice in my ear, but it was an absolutely certain thought you should be baptized. And at that point I was very- What did that come from?
Cause that wouldn't be from your Jewish background. Well, that's the funny thing. It was very early on I realized that the gospels were at the center of all the literature that I loved. So you saw, and you probably addressed that in your new book, I would say. I have written about, yes, I've written about it. I was writing about it then. I wrote an entire novel about Jesus that never got published. It was a materialist novel. It's not a novel about the son of God.
It was a novel about this guy. And it was my kind of materialist explanation of why he was so important to the culture. So I knew a lot, you know? I mean, but I never expected that. When that came to me, I was driving my car and I said out loud, you've got to be kidding me, you know?
Because my father had told me as a young man, if I ever converted, he would disown me. And we never really got along, the two of us, but we made a separate piece. You know, he was a good grandfather and we tried to be nice to one another. And I thought, this is going to blow that up. I'm working in Hollywood.
I'm making really great money. And I thought, well, this is going to ruin that. I just thought, this is a disaster. It took me five months to come to terms with it, which is what The Great Good Thing is about. It's what I thought about those five months. And I just went through my whole life.
I did. I went through every stage of my intellectual development and spiritual development, and I couldn't find a flaw in the logic of it. And so then I went back. I'd read the Bible then maybe five times, all straight through. And I thought, but I've never, I've always read it as literature to understand its place in literature.
I'm just going to go back and read it as if it's true. And I just, I'm just going to put that part of my- Where did you start? I read the Gospels. I thought I'm going to start with the New Testament, just read this as if it's a true story.
Good place to start. Well, because God was saying you should be baptized. And I'm thinking like, that's really strange. And it was the, I suddenly realized, oh, it's a true story.
Even if you think, well, there are legendary parts in it or something like that, or metaphors or poetry in it, it's basically a true story. And then you think, now I get it. And so it was very difficult. And I was going to, I knew because I get interviewed, I knew I was going to say something and my parents would see it. So I thought, I'm going to have to tell my father about this before he reads it in the newspaper. And before I could tell him, he developed what turned out to be his last illness. And so I was living in California. He was living in New York. The priest that I was going to, to have me baptized, Episcopal priest, was living in New York. So I would go back to New York and visit my increasingly ailing father, and then leave there and go and see this priest for instruction. But it was quite sad. He died on Holy Week, on Holy Week. And I remember going home to celebrate Easter and this tremendous sense that, you know, I'd lost my father, but I'd found my father. It was a very, very dramatic event.
Let me come back, if you don't mind, to what we started to talk about, which is, okay, so you came to this realization. Something very similar happened to me when I was 17 years old, very different background than you, not raised in any religion. My mom was an alcoholic, married and divorced seven times.
So I had to grow up really fast and fend for myself, and in many ways be a parent almost to my mother. I'm on my high school campus, and there's the Christians that would sit out in the front lawn singing songs about God. And I always thought they were crazy. But I did know a couple of them who had changed quite dramatically. So I knew they weren't crazy.
So one day I sat down close enough to eavesdrop on their conversation, but not close enough where people would think I'm joining, because this is the front lawn of my high school campus at lunchtime. And as I watched them singing their songs about Jesus, I just, the thought came to me I'd never considered. What if it's all true? And I thought, can't be.
No, because, and I was very cynical, Andrew, because of my upbringing. It can't be. I know what life's all about. It's not true.
Too good to be true. But they came back to me, what if it's true? And before I knew it, that was, I was up there praying, and that was the day I asked Christ to come into my life. So that's happening in our culture right now with some unexpected people. Is something triggering this?
What do you think it is? Well, you talk about ideas, and one of the things that's so powerful about ideas, when ideas come into a culture, and the culture embraces them, they have to work themselves out to their logical conclusion. People didn't start losing faith, you know what Nietzsche called the death of God, which took centuries to happen. It didn't just happen. It happened because a new idea come into the world, which was the idea of the scientific worldview.
There were other ideas that played into it, but the scientific worldview, you know, people talk about, oh, is there evolution, or is there not evolution? That's not the point. The point is that it used to be when lightning struck that people thought the demons were hurling the lightning bolts, and the monks would go up in the tower and ring the bells to chase the demons away.
This is true. Being up in the tower ringing a metal bell, they'd get hit by lightning, right? So you put, you know, Franklin comes along and makes the lightning rod, and they put that on top of the church, and that works a lot better.
And it also is a symbol of which thing is on top and which is underneath. And once you realize that science, you know, there is a clockwork world. There is a material world that works in this kind of explanatory way, a way that can be explained. And so that started to, you know, sap the easy faith.
I won't call it easy, but the wholeness of faith, the holistic faith. And so that idea played itself out. And when we start talking about men can become women and morality is relative and all those, all those things make sense in that worldview. Morality is relative. There's no central morality. I questioned Jonathan Haidt about this, the evolutionary guy. And you should listen to the interview because he was kind of made nervous when I said to him, you know, if I land on a planet full of Nazis and I'm the only not Nazi, I'm right. And they're wrong.
It doesn't, you know, morality is not, you can't vote about it. And so that idea played itself out. And at the same time, science changed.
The Newtonian clockwork world turned out not to be the world at all. And the new, let's call it quantum world, turns out to be a world in which consciousness actually seems to shape creation. And when these first quantum scientists got together, they would say, you know, in order for the universe to have started, there must have been an observing entity. And as my son Spencer wrote a whole book about this said, he said, it was like, you want to say, shake them and say, yes, there's a book about this that you might want to read, you know? And they just didn't know.
They didn't have the language for it. So the science has changed and the materialist idea has worked itself through absurdity at the same time. And so a lot of people are starting to think, you know, I've been predicting this for years because I knew when I could see the ideas playing out. And a lot of people are starting to think, you know, you'll hear even Richard Dawkins say I'm a cultural Christian. And for a while, there were things like there was a guy, a philosopher in Italy, Marcello Pera, who said we should call ourselves Christians.
I don't believe I'm an atheist, but we should call ourselves Christian because it's important. Douglas Murray, another one, great guy, wrote those books about the depth of Europe, says only religion can save us. So I asked him, do you believe?
No, I'm an atheist, you know. My favorite is Jordan Peterson, a wonderful, wonderful person. He's kind of immersed in this Jungian idea that still makes us God's creator.
I mean, Jung tries to get around it a little bit by making consciousness general, but still it makes us. I was on his podcast and I told him afterwards, I said, so Jordan, I'm going to be honest with you, I didn't understand what you were saying some of the time, but I just sort of nodded like, and I thought, I don't know what he's talking about at this moment. I didn't understand some of it, but I didn't understand all of it. You know, he's so interesting the way he's coming around to the right conclusion. And I feel he's so very close and I really liked him personally. Afterwards, he said, would you like to go with me and listen to country music? We're in Nashville. And I said, well, okay.
So we ended up at some little honky tonk and they play this old school country music. And he was just having a great old time. And he's very personable, very friendly, and just a delightful guy. And I think in his way, I don't know if it's intentional or not, he's getting probably more young people to read the Bible for the first time than any preacher out there right now. You know, I asked him about this.
I've cheesed him about this a lot. And he said to me, you know, I think my struggle with this, this was him talking. He said he thought his struggle was helpful to other people who were struggling. And I think that's true. And again, you know, I think that that's what God is looking at. He's looking at what we're doing in the world and what we're bringing into the world.
And I share with you a frustration with Christians who jumped down people's throats the minute they don't have some detail of their personal theology right. I think that that's not what God is. I don't think it's a quiz at the end. I don't think that you go before the throne of God.
And he says, here's the short answer quiz. You know, do you believe in this? You know, I think it's really much more like, you know, you fed this guy, you didn't even know it was me, but it was me. And so I think there's happening all over, you know, I and Hersey Lee, who has every reason to hate religion, to hate God. It's an amazing story, isn't it?
Yes, absolutely. And it's amazing, but it's not surprising because these ideas, the idea of Newtonian science, predicting the material world turned out to be false. And all the things that grew out of that idea, you know, the leftist panoply of nonsense that they've had to force down people's throats because no one can believe it.
That has just played out to the point of being insane. And so when I say that you can't make an argument for femininity or masculinity through nature, you make it through the spirit. People respond because we all know we're spirits.
You don't think like, you know, God forbid you should ever lose your hand, but you wouldn't think you would stop being Greg if you lost your head. And so we all know we're something more than our bodies. And these are things that people just know, you know.
And we've been talked out of. You know, when I look at Jesus in the Bible, forget about the theology, he actually upends theology. You know, he's always saying things like, these are things that the religious people of his time and his religion believe deeply, like in the Sabbath. And he says the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
I mean, that's like throwing a hand grenade into a synagogue. And I think when we reduce him to a theology, it can be helpful. It can be a guide, you know, but he's so much bigger than that because the truth does not fit into any philosophy ever.
And so I find that frustrating. But at the same time, I believe in orthodoxies because they lead you in the right direction. I go to a very orthodox, you know, church and we have rituals and things like that. But I know that the spirit is beyond that. And so when somebody is advancing that spirit, I started this big controversy because I said on the air, I don't worry about Ben Shapiro. God has got Ben Shapiro. I'll be fine, you know.
No, Ben Shapiro must say this and he must say that and he must believe this. And I thought, you know what, you know, you think God is fooled? You think God is confused? It's like, so I let God do the judging part. God does the converting part too. And the converting part. You know, our job as Christians, I think, is to be a witness for Christ, you know, be a representation, be something that someone would see and say, like Paul the Apostle said, follow me as I follow Christ.
Hopefully, not that we'll do it perfectly, we'll all mess up. But I just saw Mel Gibson on with Joe Rogan. And I know Mel and, you know, and by his own admission, he's not a perfect Christian, okay? But in his way, I thought he so effectively conveyed his faith because it was rock solid.
It was unshakable. And he wasn't giving intellectual arguments. He wasn't speaking as an apologist. He's speaking as a man who believes this and knows it's true.
And his, with his flaws and everything else. And I thought that to me is one of the most powerful presentations of it. You have to, you know, there's five Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and you. You're the only gospel some people will ever read. So we want to be a witness, you know, be a good representative, pray for people, build bridges to them, and keep praying for them, because they're a work in progress. And we pray that one day that light will go on for them.
I can make that light go on for someone else. And this is the world we're meant to love. You know, this is a world, it's so full of evil.
One of the things you pass through, I find believing Christians pass through a moment, when you suddenly realize how dark the world is. You know, we sit here and we're comfortable and we're having a good life, but babies are being killed, you know, aborted at this unbelievable level, you know. And it's almost like we're, like that movie, the Zone of Interest, where the Nazis are living right outside the death camp. And you know, it's kind of, we kind of are living in that way to some point. But this is the world we're supposed to love. And this is the world we're supposed to walk through in a loving way, even when we condemn things, even when we speak out against things.
And that's a big thing. You know, I've seen a lot of Christians reach that point of darkness and not really make it through, you know. They kind of become bitter after that. They think the end of days are coming and, you know, maybe they're right, but we're not, we don't know, right. And they think, they become pessimistic.
They don't invest money because they think the world is going to end and they don't get an education because they think the world is going to end. And no, I think, you know, God knows all that, you know, this is the world we're supposed to love. And I think this, it's a journey, you know, it's a way of seeing, it's a way of seeing the world. And it's very beautiful and very joyful.
But it also has its dark side to it. We touched on it briefly, femininity, masculinity, maybe just kind of quick definition. What is true and proper masculinity?
Well, I think because these things are a spiritual whole, I think that no words actually capture them. If I had to use words, knowing that they were flawed, the first things that would come to mind are integrity and courage. And courage is what I call an amoral virtue. There are plenty of bad people who have lots of courage. You know, I don't think the guys who flew the planes into the World Trade Center, I don't think they were cowards. But without courage, you can't have integrity, because at some point they're going to come to you, they're going to say, we won't pay you any money if you do that, we won't like you if you do that, we're going to lose your job, you're going to lose your dreams.
All of those, all of which has happened to me along the way. That's what manhood is. It's actually just planting yourself where you know you're right and refusing to move.
And, you know, you might say, Love that definition right there. Well, you know, I think you might say, well, you know, a woman can do that. I don't care whether a woman does it or not. The world depends on men doing it. It doesn't depend on women. It seems like the younger generation of men are struggling with this right now.
Why is that? Is it the lack of fathers in their home maybe or what? Well, I'm an anti feminist. And by that, I don't mean that women should be enslaved, you know, or anything like that, because that's what they tell you that those are your choices. But I believe that women should have the choice to do whatever they want.
I think they've been told to make the wrong choice. I think to live in a society where homemaking, which is to me, the center of all life, and, and motherhood, I hear these women say, I'm just a mom. You think like that phrase shouldn't exist. It's a silly phrase, you know. And I think that without understanding that this is a high calling, that the motherhood, homemaking is a high calling.
I mean, maybe the highest calling in some ways. Men have nothing to be men about, you know, we are one flesh, men and women are one flesh. And when the state of women is degraded, as I believe it has been degraded by feminism, by, you know, obviously, feminism is really leftism in a skirt, you know, it's really not feminism. But let's call it that. The state of womanhood has been degraded and debased.
So manhood becomes debased. We're actually here for each other, you know. And I'm in a weird position with this because I have a supernatural, bizarrely happy marriage. I mean, I have a... How long have you been married? We've been together 50 years, but we've been married for 46, I think it is.
Yeah. And we've had one argument, one fight. I mean, we disagree about all kinds of things, but there's only one time we lost each other. Our temperatures with each other is like 35 years ago, lasted 15 seconds.
And I had no sleep for days. Yeah, we just adore each other, or at least she pretends to adore me. I openly adore her. And so I always feel a little bit like privileged, as the left would say. And I know people have much more difficult marriages, and I don't want to pitch it as like the be all and end all. But love is the be all and end all. And if you can bring that love into a creative marriage that brings children into the world, your manhood and your womanhood will take care of itself. I wrote a book called The Truth and Beauty, and there's a chapter in it about the novel Frankenstein, and why feminism grew up out of the Industrial Revolution. And so I think it's not a question of stay in the home and don't do anything else.
It's a question, when you look at Proverbs, is it Proverbs 31? You look at that, that woman is not, she's an economic- She's industrious, she's a creative entrepreneur. An entrepreneur, she's all those things. She's the field and buys it.
Exactly. Makes plants, the orchard, it's amazing stuff. Drinks into her arms.
Drinks into her arms. So it's not like this trad wife idea of Donna Reed and all this, but it is centered in home and creation and family. And I think that without that, all of this other stuff is meaningless. We're not Vikings, we're not looking out to go pillage other societies. We're looking to build something beautiful and creative.
Life, I'm an artist, so all of life looks like a work of art to me. But that is the center, that act of creation is our contribution to God's creation. That's why we're here. Do you see the effect of spirituality, the Christian faith in culture and in film in particular, since this is your background, a lot of Christian films have done very well at the box office. And I'm the first to say that a lot of Christian films are not well done.
But there are some exceptions. And we're seeing changes. I have a friend, John Irwin, he directed the film about our life, Jesus Revolution. He's working on this epic series for Amazon, being funded by Amazon called The House of David. It's on the scale of any of these big things you see on streaming channels. And it's cast well, it's shot well, it's lit well, the dialogue is great, it's moving. You're watching biblical stories, but they're done so well. I mean, even though I've spoken on these stories so many times, I just found myself riveted by examples of David and Goliath, when Samuel anoints David, the way that he visualized that and showed it. So I think there's something of a renaissance, maybe, in Christian film. And I hope to see more of that.
Do you see any of that? Or just even maybe what we would call a mainstream film, that's not what we would call Christian, but there's sort of a Christian theme if they're trying to put it in there or not. My ideas on this have changed. I hated those Christian, those happy talk Christian films so much that I was just condemning them. I was just saying, it's kind of like rom-coms. They're just like, if that's your idea of love, you're going to be very disappointed. And then I started to think about the fact that a lot of art forms start as just popular entertainment. And then artists come along, because that's where the audience is. They want the money and the love. Artists work for love more than anything else, and they want that. Absolutely. They want you to love it. Look, I made this thing.
It's beautiful. And so for instance, the novel, when the novel first became popular, it was basically looked at as a sort of way for ladies to waste their time. It was just romantic.
It was mostly about virgins being chased around the room by evil, sinister landlords and things like that. And then Jane Austen came along and took that story. And she was a genius. So she turned it into an art form. And now suddenly, you get Dickens, and you get Trollope, and you get these incredible artists making art. I think the Christians have done the same thing. I think they proved that there's an audience. Now, I've told you this before, but I have sat in rooms in Hollywood where people will say, you know, the Christian films are making a lot of money. Maybe we should do some of that.
Oh, no, no, no. We don't want to do that, because that's not where the Oscars are. That's not where the girls are. That's not where the awards and the money is. And so they're afraid to do that.
They're afraid that the left, who owns the culture, will condemn them. But that's going away. And what I want to see is just what you were talking about. I want to see films that aren't about religion, that are filled with Christ. I'm rereading one of my favorite old mystery novels, Tiger in the Smoke.
And it's a Christian parable, but it's about a serial killer being hunted by the police. I want to see movies about everyday life where the presence is implied. And I think that that will happen over time. And when it happens, we're going to look back and sort of thank the people who made all these movies that I didn't like, these sentimental movies. And so, you know, Mel Gibson is a really good example.
Because of his troubles, because of the darkness inside him, which he has admitted and talked about, his depiction of the cruelty that was heaped on Jesus, a blameless person, is so intense that that film drew criticism from the Christians before it was a big hit, where they were saying, oh, this is ugly. And it is ugly. And so I want to see more reality.
It doesn't have to be ugliness. There's all kinds of reality in the world that, you know, it's not bloodshed and sex, sexual or whatever. But I just want to see ordinary life infused with the spirit, because that's the way I think it is. It's all about the story, isn't it?
People, I think, are tired of all the CG and special effects and of the superhero genre. And they just love a story, you know. And one movie I watched recently, I like to rewatch movies I love, and I rewatched Chariots of Fire. And I mean, that was not a Christian film meaning made by Christians, produced by Christians.
But I thought it was one of the finest depictions of the Christian faith in the most positive light through the example of Eric Little and contrasting him with the other runner. And I just thought it just so made the point, you know. Now, you've done a lot of interviews over the years. I know that doing interviews, some are easy. Like talking to you is easy, because I feel like I know you already, because I listen to you all the time. You don't listen to me, but I listen to you. So I, you know, it's easy to just talk with you. But I've done some interviews for people, they just clam up on you.
And they don't. And then others are, you know, it's like one of my favorite interviews they did of all time, of all people, Alice Cooper, because he's a storyteller. And he's a very strong believer.
But he has the most amazing stories from the world of rock and roll. And, you know, and I went in with all this prep. And I didn't even look at my notes, pretty much like I did with you, because he just went and I just followed his breadcrumbs, you know, because, well, tell me more about that. You walked into a room and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were in that room. What happened? I mean, I'm curious.
But who stands out to you? Probably shouldn't ask you to say your worst interview. But maybe someone you interviewed that, wow, it went surprisingly well. And it was easier than I thought it would be. An interview like this is always a delight.
You know, we're talking about things we both love. So this is your favorite interview? This is my favorite interview.
Okay, let's mark that in time right now. And the interviews that I, I'm not a debater. And the reason I'm not a debater is because I'm a novelist. I actually want to know what you think. And so I'll take your ideas and I'll wear them for a day. You're a good listener. Yeah. And also, I'll believe in your ideas for a day until they fall apart.
I just pry them out, you know. And so I'm not a good debater. And I really hate it when people are dishonest, maybe too harsh a word, but disingenuous, because they want to win a debate.
Yes. So that when I've invited, I try to invite people who disagree with me on, and sometimes they'll come, but mostly not. And when they do come a lot of times, they just want to score points. And I'm just like, there's no game. You know, there's nothing to win.
There's no prize. And so that's, that's what I hate. Yeah. I hate dishonest things where they can pull out some fact that you could not, never possibly have heard of. And you waste your time discussing that when the principle remains the same, you know.
And that is really dull. If you can interview any person across history. Well, let's take Jesus out of it. Everyone, Jesus. Yes, obviously. But anybody else, historical figure, Winston Churchill, someone from the distant past, someone in the present even. Who would it be?
And what would you like to talk to them about? Shakespeare. Oh, interesting. I mean, when people say to me, how can you believe in this Jesus right, resurrecting from the dead? It's far easier to believe than that Shakespeare was a human being. I mean, everything is in Shakespeare.
You can, every thought you have, you can find him there. His understanding of, he's writing about the world that he's in and yet he's writing about this world. And what I would like to know was his process. You know, in other words, he's he's always saying, I'm just here to entertain you.
I just, you know, my, my idea is to please you and all this stuff. I'd just like to know what he's thinking about. I suspect he was a Catholic. And one of the, Stephen Greenblast was supposed to be the great Shakespeare maven and who's a wonderful writer, but a stone atheist. And when I read him, it is amazing the things that I think he gets wrong. And I say this as not a Shakespeare expert.
He's like at Harvard or something like that. And, and I love reading him, but he said that Shakespeare is one of the most secular artists ever. And I thought Shakespeare stories are not only filled with the supernatural, but they're filled with the moral order. People kill people and then their conscience tears them apart. Like in Dostoevsky, you know, he's very aware of that. He's also aware that there are people whose conscience doesn't tear them apart. And he shows what that is like, but just would like to know what he was thinking. You know, I mean, was he just thinking like, oh, this will kill him in London.
They're going to love this. Or was he thinking, no, I have this vision. I want to talk about my faith, but if I talk about it directly, they'll set me up, they'll burn me at the stake. You know, I just, nobody knows where he was coming from. But there's probably one of the secrets of his success. You know, he wanted to entertain people. So he's conveying a message, but he wants to do it in an entertaining way, an engaging way. The worst thing you can do as a communicator, certainly as a pastor, is be boring. And I'm shocked that people can take the action-packed, powerful, living Word of God and make it boring. And listening to them speak is like watching paint dry. Like how do you even do that?
It's almost a skill, but if it is, it's the worst skill ever. You know, but you make it, even when you read it, you make it sound dull. And I think that, you know, I saw a funny interview with Bob Dylan. There's a lot of talk about Dylan because of the new movie with Timothée Chalamet, which I saw, which that was pretty good.
And I wrote a book about Dylan, Alice Cooper, and John Lennon, kind of the spiritual quest of rock stars. And, you know, Dylan had his conversion. And I've never seen him deny that outright. But anyway, in an interview, when he was just starting to blow up, someone asked him, how would you define what you do?
Because he was supposed to be the voice of a generation, the great philosopher. He says, I just think of myself as a song and dance man. And I thought that was funny because he's, I'm an entertainer, but I have something to say. And I think you do that so beautifully, Andrew, is you write great literature.
You communicate so well. You're entertaining. I'm entertained when I listen to you, but I'm also educated. Sometimes I listen to people.
I listen to a lot of different podcasts and it educates me. It informs me, but I don't laugh out loud. And I think humor is a huge thing in communicating truth. And you have a great natural sense of humor.
Well, that's very clear. Well, you know, I really feel like, I feel that laughter, strange to say, it was almost an obligation, you know, like it's, you should, I mean, I always say, my wife told me once never to say this in public, but I've said it in public a number of times, that I find corruption very funny. And I'll watch, like politicians, do these terrible things.
And I just crack up. And it's a terrible thing because corruption really is harmful and people really get hurt. And I frequently think that comedy is just life with the pain taken out of it. Corruption is a good statement. You know, corruption is funny because we're meant to be close to the angels above the angels. You say laughing through Armageddon.
What does that phrase mean? Laughing through the fall of the Republic. And sometimes laughing through Armageddon. But it is true that we were supposed to be like unto the angels, if not greater than the angels.
And we're so much less than that, that it is like a man in a top hat falling into a puddle, which is funny. But being Jewish, I love Jewish humor. I've always liked it.
I've always been drawn to it. I mean, obviously the earliest comedians, the great ones that we remember, well, most of them were Jewish, of course. And then we have modern Jewish comedians, but one guy I really liked was Jackie Mason. Oh, he was really funny. He was.
I said, Kathy and I were in New York once. We sat at a table and he was seated right next to me. I mean, his table, like I'm here, he's here. And the whole time he's talking like this, he's just like, he never stops me, Jackie. And we're not eavesdropping. It's like, he's telling us the stories, but everything he said was so entertaining.
But I loved his insights. But how would you define Jewish humor? It seems to be sarcastic, self-deflating, perhaps. What is unique about the Jewish wit that helped Jewish people survive all that they've gone through?
I think that's got to be some of it. It's got to be the being excluded and abused. You know, people do not know, and because America is such a great country where people are really fairly nice to everybody, despite the fact that we're always being called racist as a person, it is the least racist country on earth. People don't understand what the Jews went through in Europe. And it's amazing that any Jew ever becomes a Christian because they've been so abused. But it does make you funny. You do sort of have this idea that the injustice of life has a certain comic edge and it helps you survive and it keeps you sane.
That's kind of the standard explanation. It may just be, you know, that like when you see, you know, the Bible, if you just take the Old Testament, it really is the entire story of a people from beginning to end, you know, told in terms of their relationship with God. And that would make anybody laugh. God was looking at us sometimes and just think like, you know, who would have thought, you know?
And I think that it may just be built into the history, but it is true. The Jews are hilarious. Blacks are hilarious, you know, and you know, cops are hilarious. Cops are some of the funniest people I've ever met.
So maybe it is the darkness. Well, dealing with that pressure and the stress they're under. Well, thank you for all you do. And just keep doing it in your unneeded voice and our culture today. A unique voice.
I don't know if anyone quite like you. And thank you for taking time to speak with me today. I think you do a great job. And I love your podcast. Not only do I love your content, but I even like the way it's structured and built, you know, with your little breaks and things like that and kind of shift gears into different topics and claving clapbacks. And we all know how to spell your name now.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N because there are no claves. It's a pleasure. I'm honored and delighted. And remember, I'm your favorite guest you've ever had. My favorite interview. Absolutely. Thank you. Hey, everybody.
Thanks for listening to my podcast. Before you go, I wanted to let you know about the important work we're doing here at Harvest. You know, we've had the same goal these last 50 years, which is simply this. We want to know God and we want to make him known. And we do that in a lot of ways. Documentary films, animation, radio, television, large-scale evangelistic events and more. If you want to be a part of what we're doing to fulfill the great commission, you can support us with whatever you can give at harvest.org slash donate. Again, that's harvest.org slash donate. And thanks so much.
