Did Christianity Give Us Western Values?
Inside This Episode
Author Glen Scrivener (@SpeakLifeMedia) joins Maybe God to unpack the surprising Christian roots of Western culture—from human rights and equality to sex, progress, and politics—and why some skeptics are taking a fresh look at Jesus. Plus, Glen shares the story of his own journey from skepticism to faith.
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Transcript
Glen Scrivener: I think it's worthwhile that people recognize that the beliefs that they have are not natural, obvious universe. They've come from a place, and that place is Christianity.
Eric Huffman: But it seems like recently your star is on the rise or something. You're even debating Alex O'Connor?
Glen Scrivener: Did Christian faith give us our belief in kindness, equality, freedom, and consent? If you think we would have gotten here without our modern Western liberal values, that is so untestable. They say they believe in a godless universe, and they live as though Jesus is Lord.
Eric Huffman: That's great. Jesus was great. The ideals that you're talking about are great, but great, beautiful, wonderful wisdom exists outside of Christianity. What makes the Christian version of those ideals in any way unique or special?
Glen Scrivener: Everybody's got a morality. It's usually that most people's morality is...
Eric Huffman: This feels like a good place to ask the question: what is at stake without the Christian moral foundation?
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Eric Huffman: Glenn Scrivener, welcome to Maybe God.
Glen Scrivener: Hey, thanks for having me.
Eric Huffman: Of course. I've been wanting to talk to you. I'm thrilled to have you on the show. I want to talk to you about so many things, but let's start here. I've heard you say on several platforms and conversations that people believe things all the time that can't be proven logically or scientifically, that everybody believes. What do you mean by that?
Glen Scrivener: I had a friend at university, you'd say college, I guess, and she never had a church background. I remember she once said to me, "Of course you realize, Glen, I could never be a believer." It led to actually years of conversation about that line because my friend, I'll call her Sally, she believes in all kinds of things. She believes in human rights, and she believes in dignity, and she believes in compassion, and she believes in sacrificing herself for the good of others, even though it brings her no material gain.
She gives herself to these ideals in ways that put me to shame as a so-called believer. She thinks she's not a believer. She thinks I am a believer, and sometimes she looks at my belief and she thinks I hit the jackpot, and sometimes she looks at my belief and thinks she dodged a bullet.
She is ambivalent about what being a believer means, but what is so often invisible to her is the fact that she believes in all kinds of things that cannot be proved in a laboratory. You cannot prove human rights. You can't kind of look under a microscope and map the genome of a human and discover that somewhere in the message of the DNA is this thing called human rights, and yet she believes in these things very much.
I've got a lot of friends like Sally. You've probably got a lot of friends like Sally. What I want to do with the Sallies of this world is to reveal to them the cognitive dissonance they're living with. They don't think they have cognitive dissonance, and so I've got to introduce to them the fact that they say they believe in a godless universe, and they live as though Jesus is Lord in this area of their lives. Because I think the human rights ideals, I think they have an intellectual genealogy to them. I think you can trace them back to the Jesus story. I think you can trace them right back to the first page of the Bible, actually.
My friend Sally has inherited some very Christian-ish kind of beliefs. And so on the one hand, she leans into these moral values that shape her life. On the other hand, she's telling me that this is a godless universe, and she's just a survival machine. Which one? Which one is it, Sally? Choose. Pick.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Glen Scrivener: You're a secular humanist, and I always want to say secular humanist, pick one. I don't think you can have both.
Eric Huffman: Hey there. If you've made it this far, you're probably somebody who cares deeply about the big questions of life, questions around truth, morality, and purpose, and you don't have to agree with what you're hearing today to be a part of this conversation. In fact, if you're skeptical or if you have strong objections to what you're hearing from my guest and I, that's exactly why this podcast exists. So be sure to leave us a comment down below in the comment section and tell us what's on your mind, and I'll try to engage with those comments as they come in. And if you want more conversations like this one, be sure to hit the subscribe button. We would love for you to be a part of the Maybe God community. So thank you so much for listening and subscribing. Now let's get back to the conversation.
What is the utility in having those conversations with the Sallys of the world? Are you hoping to open her eyes to see the disconnect? Have you seen good fruit from that kind of conversation where somebody opens their eyes and sees they are a believer and have been all along? What are you aiming at there?
Glen Scrivener: I'm seeing that everywhere... With Sally herself, well, she's still a work in progress, as we all are, but I'm seeing a lot of Sallys out there. Louise Perry, for instance, is a really interesting writer, feminist author who wrote The Case Against the Sexual Revolution a few years ago, and I've been in contact with her for years now. And it's just been so interesting... when she read Tom Holland's book called Dominion that basically sets out this argument over about 600 pages, tells the history of the last 2,000 years as the history of Christianization that has really shaped the moral sensibilities of the West. She was a massive fan of Tom Holland's book, and she started to see that her beliefs in gender equality have come from somewhere in particular.
He had thought that those beliefs were natural and obvious and universal, and yet she'd done an anthropology degree, and she knew that actually such beliefs in gender equality are not human universals by any stretch of the imagination. And why is it that us peculiar Westerners think in peculiar ways about gender and sex and equality and those things? And she started to pull at those threads, and she started going to church, and she started recognizing that Christianity, in her words, is sociologically true. And that's a way of saying it kind of works. It's built a very functioning civilization.
Her whole process was to go to church and give herself to hearing the Gospel and putting herself in the way of Christian friendships, so that she might consider not only is Christianity sociologically true, but perhaps it's supernaturally true. And the saying as she was walking this path was, if it were supernaturally true, you would expect it to be sociologically true. And it is sociologically true, so maybe. That was a slam-dunk argument, but it was enough to get her to church. It was enough to get her to open the scriptures and befriend Christians and take that journey.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, it's a clue. It's a strong clue. It's not a silver bullet answer for every question, but it is an interesting clue. And certainly a conversation starter. I know that's a big part of your life and your work, whether it's through your YouTube channel, Speak Life, which is awesome. I hope everybody checks it out. We'll put a link in the description of this episode. Tell us briefly here about how you got into this work and how long you've been doing this. Are you an ordained clergy? A little bit of a background, please.
Glen Scrivener: I am an ordained clergyman. I was ordained back in 2007. That's what brought me down to the south coast of England. I'm from Australia originally, but I've lived more than half my life in the UK now, give or take the odd deportation. I've mainly been in the UK this century, but I've been working for this ministry that's now called Speak Life for the last 16 years and doing a lot of speaking, some writing, and getting into YouTubing in more recent years. And so that's what I'm spending more and more of my time doing. I guess YouTube is 3 billion monthly users.
Eric Huffman: It's crazy.
Glen Scrivener: If it was a country, it's the biggest country on earth. And who are the missionaries to this particular platform? So I'm trying my hand at being a missionary, trying to learn the language and not worship the local gods. That's what missionaries do. You got to learn the local languages, you got to not worship the local gods. And every day it's a challenge on this platform, as I'm sure you know.
Eric Huffman: Indeed.
Glen Scrivener: You got to learn the language of YouTube. You got to learn the thumbnail language and the title language, and getting a hook and calls to action.
Eric Huffman: Oh man, it's so crazy and silly how you have to follow all those rules without worshiping the gods of clicks and dollars.
Glen Scrivener: Yeah, clickbait and all that. So we're both missionaries. We both resonate with this.
Eric Huffman: I confess I envy the accent. I think there's accent privilege component to this world we're in. And I think you're winning in that regard. Everybody thinks you're brilliant because of the accent.
Glen Scrivener: Well, yeah, I mean, your bass tones are just incredible. So I need to get baritone like you.
Eric Huffman: I tell people I'm not masculine. I'm just tired. That's the truth. Anyway, so Glenn, you have a lot of writing as well, in particular, a book that came out a few years ago called The Air We Breathe, which has done quite well as far as I can tell. I can't imagine what writing that book took out of you. You say in that book we're all breathing Christian air in the West. Just for those who might not be familiar with your work, what does that mean we're breathing Christian air?
Glen Scrivener: In the sense that we don't notice the air that we breathe. I think it's interesting that spiritual practices around the world quite often involve asking people to notice their breathing, because most of the time we don't notice our breathing. And what I want to do with the Sallys of this world, in particular, is to have them notice the things that they take for granted. And they take for granted things like, and I go through in the book, seven values. I talk about equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, progress.
So equality, you know, every human being is the moral equal of every other human being, no matter their race, their sexuality, their gender, their class. Whatever it is, everybody's equal. We all believe that. We all believe in compassion, that a society is best that treats its weakest members best, right? Or consent. You know, elite men do not have the right to the bodies of their so-called inferiors. We believe that.
We believe in enlightenment, that we should forward our ends in this world by education and persuasion and not by force or violence. We believe in science. We believe that science can be done, which is an extraordinary thing to think that, you know, a member of the species Homo sapiens has any kind of purchase on the deep mysteries of the cosmos, and that this three pounds of gray matter can plumb the depths of the mysteries of the universe. That's an extraordinary thing to think. But we do. We do believe in science.
We believe in freedom, that people are not property. And we believe in progress, that tomorrow can be better than today, that we can reform the evils of the past and march towards a better tomorrow. We kind of believe in these things like they are the air that we breathe.
And so I kind of go through the book and show how we just very naturally think in these terms, and that it's been the Christian revolution that has shaped these sorts of beliefs. Now, this is not to say that there aren't anti-Christian and post-Christian kind of ideas that are also very current in the West, and we can think about all sorts of those. But I think as Christians, we're used to thinking about the culture is a place that is just full of non-Christian ideas. And what I want to say in the book is, let's notice the air that everybody's breathing, and let's notice how Christian-ish so many of these values are.
Eric Huffman: What do you say to someone who might just not have that historical perspective to even know that the air we're breathing is any different than the air that people have always breathed? What's different about the here and now or modern times versus the way the world's always been? Haven't human beings always aspired for more knowledge and more equality and those things?
Glen Scrivener: Well, it's just worth pointing out that no, no, they haven't. That's also what the air we breathe analogy does for us. I grew up in Australia, I've been living in the UK. When I go back to Sydney and I fly in there, you smell the sweetness of Australian air, because we've got so many eucalyptus trees, we've got all these gum trees that are just mentholating the air, and it smells like a cough syrup carried upon the breeze. And it's so sweet.
But when I was growing up in Australia, I didn't know that Australia had sweet air. I had no idea. I had to leave that atmosphere and go into another atmosphere before coming back. And there's an old saying... Rudyard Kipling used to say, "He knows not England who only England knows." You've got to go out of your atmosphere in order to actually appreciate your atmosphere.
One encouragement to actually figure out the historical peculiarity of our time and space is that you don't really know your time and space without being taken out of your time and space. I mean, you don't have to enroll in a History 101 at the local community college in order to do this. You could do it by reading a Bible, by opening up a Gospel, and just imagining yourself into the sandals of that centurion who is standing at the foot of the cross and looking upon Jesus being crucified.
Think yourself into the sandals of a Roman, for instance, from the classical world. What you are doing in that moment, if you are that centurion, is you are enforcing the glory of Rome. And the glory of Rome is expressed in dominance. And Jesus is a troublemaker. He's claiming to be another king like Caesar. He is threatening the peace of Rome, and you need to come and crush this interloper, and you need to give Him the slave's death. And it is utterly fitting to give Him the slave's death, because there are some people who you are allowed to crucify, and there are other people who you are not allowed to crucify.
There are classes of people who could never be given capital punishment, and there are classes of people that would be punished in one way and not another way, because ancient peoples and peoples around the world, even today, believe in a caste system. It's not just Hinduism today that is the outlier that believes in a caste system. That's normal. The caste system is totally normal. The weirdos are Westerners who say, "You and I are equals." It's the most nuts thing that anybody could ever say, "You and I are equals."
If you take any two people and you judge them by any one metric, you are going to discover difference, because this guy is richer than that guy, this guy is smarter than that guy, this guy is faster than that guy, this guy is more economically valuable than this guy, this guy might be a citizen, this guy might be a barbarian, this guy might be a master, this guy might be a slave. If you say, "These two guys are equal," the ancient person is like, "Are you a moron?"
Eric Huffman: It's absurd.
Glen Scrivener: "I just told you, he's richer, he's more powerful, he's more economically valuable, he's faster. How are they equal? What is this magic pixie dust you believe in called equality?" An ancient person would look at the way we believe in equality kind of like the way Sally looks at me as a believer in God. It's like, "Are you kidding me?" It's something you cannot see, touch, taste, or feel. The historical locatedness of all of us is just really useful for pointing out that Sally is a believer. Because it's not that equality is a natural, obvious, universal, or self-evident value. If it were, then it would be a lot more widespread. It's not widespread, which goes to show it's come to us from a certain place. And once you show people it's come to us from Jesus, I think they start to get interested.
Eric Huffman: Well, that's the rub, right? I'm sure you face a lot of criticism. I've seen some of that in the comment sections of your videos and things, people who say, "Fine, that's all well and good, the world's a better place than it used to be, at least some parts of the world. But what evidence do you have to prove that the source of the ideal of equality, for instance, is rooted in Scripture or in Jesus, rather than pick your Greek philosopher or evolution itself?"
Glen Scrivener: Okay, let's pick our Greek philosophers and let's pick evolution. Both Aristotle and Plato believed in a steep hierarchy of being. Plato had your golden humans, your silver humans, your bronze humans. Aristotle talked about, "Does not nature itself teach you that some are born to rule and some are born to be ruled over?" And at that point, both Aristotle and Plato are noticing what nature is like. And so, let's go across to the evolutionary view of things, which is, of course, within nature, there is the survival of the fittest and the sacrifice of the weakest.
Of course, there is a hierarchy, a really quite steep hierarchy. And of course, those who reflect merely upon nature are going to conclude that if this guy is richer and faster and more powerful and of a different social status, then of course, he is the superior in every way to that guy.
I think the ancient philosophers are very correctly assessing nature, if nature is all there is. At which point, you then say, "Okay, what is it that has taught us this equality belief?" Because this equality belief seems to stand above nature. It seems to be, you might say, supernatural. Where has this come from? And it seems very obvious to me, and it seems very obvious to atheists that it has come from Jesus.
So, I might think of Nietzsche, one of the great skeptics of Christianity down through history, 19th-century German philosopher, he saw that absolutely our belief in equality and compassion has come from the God of the cross. And when he uses the phrase "the God of the cross," you can sort of imagine the spittle flicking his beard as he says it, as he spits it out, right? "The God of the cross." Nowhere has there been such a disgusting idea. And he calls it the inversion of all natural ideas, because the way of nature is the sacrifice of the least fit, the weakest, and the survival of the fittest.
And yet, the reason why he thinks the God of the cross is so awful is because it's the sacrifice of the fittest, right? It's God on the cross for the sake of the survival of the weakest. And he called it the transvaluation of all values, the inversion of all values, the turning of the world upside down. And it injected this thing called pity into the intellectual tradition of the West as this interloper. Pity is this... because he says that nature teaches you the law of selection, which is the law of nature. And the cross teaches you utterly the opposite of that.
And so atheists like Nietzsche is just going to say, well, obviously it's Christianity that's given us our ideas of human rights and human value and equality and compassion. Or you might look at Peter Singer, who's another modern-day critic of Christianity. And he's like, our idea of like the sanctity of life and all that kind of stuff is just a hangover from Christianity. He just thinks that that's a bad thing. Or you might think of... Yeah, go on.
Eric Huffman: Would those guys hold in contempt the ideas of Christianity and they think that it's bad for us or bad for society to...?
Glen Scrivener: Christianity is humanity's nausea.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Glen Scrivener: He's such an enjoyable read.
Eric Huffman: Sounds like a fun guy.
Glen Scrivener: Yeah. Well, it didn't end well for him. He went quite crazy.
Eric Huffman: What's wild to me is that the early Christians knew that it was exactly this way. I mean, the first Christians described the Gospel as a scandal to religious people and foolishness to the Gentiles or to the Greeks. Like it would just be seen as absurd from the jump.
Glen Scrivener: Right. We are in an interesting place where some of the values of the cross are now... we've imbibed a version of them that would be inexplicable to a classical person, to a Greek or a Roman. So, we're in a quite different place as we unpack the Gospel to people. What people find to be a stumbling stone and what people find to be foolishness is a little bit different now.
Eric Huffman: Talk more about that, because I think the Genesis 1 kind of case has been made that Judeo-Christian ideals hold that all people are created in the image of God and that's the source of equality. What do you find specifically, though, in the teachings of Jesus, beyond the sacrifice of the fittest at the cross, what else did He say and represent during His time on earth that gives some grounding for your arguments?
Glen Scrivener: Well, first of all, the very person of Christ. God the Son became God our brother at Christmas, that the eternal Son of God adopts humanity into the life of God by becoming man, right? It's quite extraordinary. He didn't become any other kind of creature, and He did become a kind of creature. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And so there could not be a higher dignity given to humanity than that God became one. And became one forevermore.
The history of the early church, theologically, has been to reflect on the person of Christ. That's been sort of the heart of all theology and really getting to grips with who is Jesus, both fully God and fully man. For century after century after century after century, all the intellectual firepower of Christendom was kind of really focused on that one question, the person of Christ, who is man and man forever. Humanity has a future, god's, right? It's really quite stunning.
And like my humanist friends who are secular humanist friends, they think they've got an exalted view of humanity. It's got nothing on the Christian view of humanity. For my secular humanist friends, the human is the top of the evolutionary pile. For a Christian, a man sits on the throne of the universe. So that view of the human person, you could not have a higher view of the human person than the view of the human person.
And then when Jesus comes, I mean, the compassion that He shows, pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel, as we sing at Christmas. Then the idea that in that famous sort of gotcha moment that His enemies, they come and they say, "Should we pay taxes to Caesar or should we not?" A very controversial question for the day, because if Jesus says, "Sure, pay taxes to Caesar," then all the religionists, all the Jewish leaders of His day would say, "Ah, He's a collaborator with the Romans." But if He says, "Don't pay taxes to Caesar," then all of a sudden He's signing His death warrant that afternoon, because He's being seditious against Rome. So, they're trapping Him on the horns of a dilemma.
And then just brilliantly, what does Jesus do? He says, "Has anyone got a denarius?" Like a coin. And of course, anybody who then procured such a denarius, and He gets it from one of the Jewish leaders, well, they've already shown that they're very to have Roman money on them. So, if they're trying to trap Him as a collaborator, what about that guy who's just produced the coin? It's a genius move. And it also goes to show He's a penniless preacher.
Eric Huffman: He didn't have one.
Glen Scrivener: He didn't have two denarii to rub together. And so, He asked for a denarius. And then He says, "Whose image is on this coin?" And then they all sort of grudgingly mutter, "Caesar's." And then Jesus utters the immortal line, "Well, then give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God what is God's," right? So, give to Caesar what is Caesar's. Okay, you've already got Roman money, so pay the taxes, all right? But then He says, "And you guys, you religious leaders, give to God what is God's image." And what is God's image?
Eric Huffman: Us.
Glen Scrivener: Us. So, be a good citizen. Be a good citizen in the state that you find yourself in, but give to God your very self, your very person. And just that idea that He's reaffirming the image of God in all people in that moment is kind of cool. If I'm giving a talk on us being in God's image, I'll take Jesus' story there, and I'll take out like a 10-pound note, "Here in the Empire, we've got pictures of the sovereign on the back of our money." Both in Australia and in England, I can show them pictures of King Charles, and it's like, "Whose image is on it?" And King Charles' image is on it. And then you crumple up the 10-pound note and you stamp on it, make it dirty and grubby and all that kind of stuff. And then you say, "Who still wants this 10-pound note?" And of course, everybody still wants the 10-pound note because it still has the image of the sovereign.
And then you just say, "Look, I know what you might've gone through in life. And you might feel utterly torn apart in this world. You might feel utterly crushed underfoot, but you bear the image of the sovereign and you are valuable to that degree." Because if you bear the value of the sovereign, then it's not about the quality of how much money you've got in the bank. It's not about the quality of, are you economically viable? Are you strong? Any of those things. Are you a man, a woman? Whatever it is, you bear the sovereign and therefore you have a value that goes far beyond anything in this world. And that really comes home to people.
Eric Huffman: It's profound. I'm trying to analyze the case you're making through the lens or with the mind of a skeptic. And I'm thinking there are people watching right now and probably thinking, That's great. Jesus was great. The ideals that you're talking about are great, but who can really know if these ideals are in any exclusive sense rooted in Christianity versus you could make the case that great, beautiful, wonderful wisdom exists outside of Christianity, outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. There are Proverbs and wonderful teachings and all sacred texts and things. And so who's to say that Christianity has cornered the market on equality and consent and the other ideals you lift up? What makes the Christian version of those ideals in any way unique or special?
Glen Scrivener: I think there are such teachings in the philosophies and religions around the world and down through history. And that is to be celebrated. And wherever we see examples of these things, we are to celebrate them and be challenged by them. So, perhaps the most famous story Jesus ever told is the story of the Good Samaritan, in which there is a guy who falls among thieves. He's left for dead by the side of the road. And the most holy-looking people you've ever seen walk on by on the other side of the road and do not help this guy who is left for dead. And a priest goes by who works in the temple, a Levite goes by who again works in the temple. And these are the holiest-looking men on the planet, and they are not showing compassion at all.
And then the third guy who goes past is a Samaritan. And the Samaritans were this nation to the north of Israel, who, according to every Jew, were the wrong religion, the wrong nationality, they are enemies. You would not have anything to do with the Samaritan. And Jesus chooses this Samaritan to be the hero of the story. A guy who is the wrong nationality, the wrong religion is the guy who shows such Christlike compassion.
And everything the Good Samaritan does in the story is a very Jesus-y thing to do. He comes, and he's filled with compassion, and that's the word that is most associated with Jesus. The word most associated with Jesus' emotional life throughout the Gospels is this word for compassion. It's this gut-wrenching pity, stomach-churning love that He feels. And He pours out oil and wine onto the wounds of the man, and that's very resonant with spirit and blood in the Bible and these sorts of things.
It's just a very Jesus-y thing. This beautiful stranger comes from outside the system to raise up a guy who is basically dead. He raises him up and then says, "Now go and do likewise." So it's a story of very Christ-like compassion where the hero is a Samaritan.
Therefore, I think when we say that non-Christians can be better at compassion than Christians, and when we say that there can be sources of moral teaching outside of biblical religion that are noteworthy and that ought to challenge us, when we say that, we're actually being very Christian. We're actually following the words of Jesus. I do think it is a sign of how deeply the revolution of Jesus has pervaded Western culture, that that comes naturally to all of us, whether we're Christians or not. We want to look around us and find Good Samaritans. We want to look around us and say that there are definitely examples of and teachings of compassion that outshine Christian examples.
Eric Huffman: Sorry to interrupt you. The impulse to even look elsewhere and say that there are non-Christian cultures that are out-Christianing Christians, even that is indicative of what you're advocating for.
Glen Scrivener: Yes. Then the next move is to say, "Well, of course, I can get amazing advice and teaching within Buddhism or Islam, or you can find examples of great teaching anywhere you look." But here is what I would say is distinctive. Who actually has been the Good Samaritan? Because Allah has not been the Good Samaritan. Muhammad has not been the Good Samaritan. Or coming across to Buddhism, the Buddha did not enter into our death and pain and struggle for all people, and on that cross take it to the death that it deserves and then rise up again to offer us the survival of the weakest. Who has actually done the thing? There's all sorts of brilliant advice that says you go and do the thing, and we should be challenged by that wherever we find it. But can you find a story in which God Himself comes and does that?
What is unimprovable, I think, is the Jesus story in which God has actually descended right down to the depths of our sin and death and even hell in order to rise up again and offer compassion to all of us. There are resonances and echoes of that in all the cultures of the world, but I think that they are echoes of an original. And I think when we're looking at the Jesus story, we're looking at the original.
Eric Huffman: Boy, that's beautiful. I think that's so important to keep in mind for anybody watching this interview or listening to this interview, because it's so easy to conflate that ideal, the beautiful, perfect story of God becoming one of us, with Christian failing to live that out. I think a corollary argument to what we've been talking about, which is that there are other virtuous cultures and ideals in the world outside of Christianity, the other corollary to that is that in Christian cultures historically and today, we have failed miserably to aspire to the ideals set before us by the perfect story of God that we find in the Gospel.
An example of that would be slavery and how the abolitionist movement was obviously fueled by Christian thought, but there were also many Christians in the day that were defending the institution of slavery with Bibles in their hands. So what do you say to that kind of attack or criticism to your work that you no doubt have heard?
Glen Scrivener: Oh, well, we are to own the Christian evils. And precisely because Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, like He's doing both things at once, isn't He? He's both saying, "You know what? Samaritans can so outshine the people of the Bible."
Eric Huffman: Yeah, that's the point.
Glen Scrivener: "But hey, people of the Bible..." the whole point is to point the finger at the believers and call them to a consistency with what they say they believe. And Christians fall woefully short of all the values: compassion, equality, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, progress. Our sins in these areas stink to high heaven. They really do.
In my book, The Air We Breathe, I talk about there are three areas you want to think about as you respond to people raising areas like Christian complicity in slavery or the Inquisitions or the Crusades or sexual abuse scandals or any number of absolutely wicked evils that the church has been complicit in. You want to do at least three things. I think one of them is to bust the myths, because some of the myths that exist around these stories of Christian evils are just not historically accurate.
At some point it is worth pointing out that the abolitionist movement was a profoundly biblical, preacher-led Christian movement. At some point you want to mention that. At some point you want to mention that slavery has been a human universal around the world and down through history, and that Christians are not uniquely enslaving when you look at world history. I think actually the unique thing about Christian civilizations has been that is where abolition has come from.
So at some point you do want to bust some myths around this thing. That's not the only note that you want to strike, though. You also want to own what is crooked. And I'm using the phrase "crooked" because in Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talks about how he became a believer in God. He became a believer in God because he saw evil in the world. He started to figure out, "Well, if I think that there is evil with a capital E, there must be goodness with a capital G in the same way that if I see a crooked line, the reason I know it's crooked is because I've got some idea of a straight line."
Eric Huffman: Correct.
Glen Scrivener: If you had no idea of a straight line, then crooked lines are not crooked. If there's no such thing as a straight line, then crooked lines are just lines. What do you expect from lines? It's all a mess, right? The ability to see crookedness depends on the straight line. And you can do that with Christian history. And you can say with great confidence that Christian complicity with things like slavery was an egregious evil, evil with a capital E. And you can actually dive into, check out what Frederick Douglass's slave master did and said, and now check out what Frederick Douglass said about his slave master. And just the evil that curdles your stomach just to read it. And I think it's a profoundly Christian thing to do to own that.
So you bust some myths, you own what's crooked, and then you insist on the straight line. Because what is it that judges that slave master to be so egregiously evil? It is a truth about humans that stands above human civilization, that stands above culture, and that says that people are not property, even if the other side won the Civil War in America, even if slavery would still be wrong, right?
Eric Huffman: Right. Yeah.
Glen Scrivener: Right?
Eric Huffman: Yeah. But I think there would be people that say, again, playing devil's advocate a little, that say, "Well, the Bible itself regulates it." I don't believe the Bible never outlaws slavery. I think there's plenty of passages we could point to and make the case that the thrust of morality in Scripture is anti-slavery through and through. You've got the Apostle Paul, who's often derided for excusing slavery, calling slave trading basically a mortal sin on par with like murdering your mom or something in 1 Timothy 1. And there's the book of Philemon and others that we could point to, but there would be people that say, "Look, there are passages in the Bible that seem to cozy up to slavery." What do you say to the skeptics you talk to that raise that kind of objection?
Glen Scrivener: We'll get to the Bible in 60 seconds, but before you get to the Bible itself, I just think it's worth doing the history lesson of... It is the people of the Book that are the people who abolished it. So we might be reading the Book incorrectly if we see it as a celebration of slavery. It's just historically interesting. And for those who say, "Oh, like the Enlightenment got rid of slavery," oh my goodness, if we waited for the Enlightenment to get rid of slavery, I think we'd still be waiting. Historically, that is not true. So it should at least make you approach the Bible with curiosity to know that it is the people of this Book that ended the practice.
Now, we come to the Book, and it is true that in the Old Testament that there was a practice of slavery that puts a lump in all our throats. It puts a lump in all our throats, Christian and non-Christian, because...
Eric Huffman: The straight line.
Glen Scrivener: Because of the straight line. Exactly. The Book has a shape to it. The Bible has a shape to it. And Jesus tells us what that shape is most clearly, I think, in Matthew Chapter 19, where the topic of the day was actually about marriage and divorce, but the principle still holds. He was asked questions about marriage and divorce, and Jesus says, "Ah, but what was there in the Old Testament was not what God's intention was in the beginning." He says, "In the beginning, God made them male and female," and there was this perfection of the beginning, and He's talking about Genesis 1 and 2. And then He says, "But your hearts were hardened, and Moses gave you laws because your hearts were hardened, and regulated something that was very non-ideal."
Then Jesus presents Himself as the fulfillment of everything that Genesis had kind of promised. So there is a shape to the Bible that... you know, the Old Testament is a fall from an ideal and the regulation of that which is utterly non-ideal that is then fulfilled in Christ. And so what a Christian is reading in the Old Testament is not instructions for, for how we can be slave holders or how we, you know, ought to plant our crops or how we ought to not wear garments of two, fives you know, work together and all that kind of stuff.
From the get go, the way Christians have read the Bible has been, there's the sweep of a story that goes down and up and is fulfilled in Christ who moves us to a position that we were not in beforehand. And when Jesus arrives, He declares himself to be the Jubilee, which is kind of the day of liberation for all slaves. He is the embodiment of emancipation. Like, He is the Liberator Himself.
And then the New Testament kind of deals with this missionary situation in which, in the church, everybody's free, and there are no masters except Christ Himself and all His brothers and sisters. And then it kind of works its way out from the church out into the culture, and abolition kind of comes from there. But you've got to do the shape of the story. That's what orients you when you read those Old Testament passages.
Eric Huffman: Hmm. That's good. I feel like I've been watching you share the Gospel and talk to skeptics for a long time now, but it seems like recently your star is on the rise or something. I don't know if it's the book or just the handsome face or the accent. What is it, Glen? But it's great to see. It's great to see. Lately I've seen you even debating Alex O'Connor, who is maybe the world's most famous sort of atheist spokesman. Although his atheism is somewhat in question at this point. He called himself a believer the other day, kind of in the same vein as we talked about earlier: everybody believes in something. Did a great job in that debate. By the way, congratulations on that. It's incredible watching God use you. What'd you learn in talking to a man like Alex O'Connor?
Glen Scrivener: I think he's a consummate debater. I mean, he went onto the Jubilee channel and did those 25 versus one kind of debates. So here's a guy who can take on 25 people at once and still win. So he's going to put your ideas to the test. He's going to put you through your paces. I didn't know exactly which Alex O'Connor I was going to get on the day.
Justin Brierley, who is great, he sort of hosts these conversations, and... the series is called Uncommon Ground, where he's trying to get people to sort of find common ground together. I don't think Alex came with that in mind.
Eric Huffman: It's not what he thinks.
Glen Scrivener: So within the first five minutes of the debate, of what turned into a debate, I was like, "Oh, okay, this is... I need to change my tactics up a little bit." But I mean, getting to know him, getting to know some of his friends who he brought along to the debate, starting a relationship with him. I think you never change the mind of the person you're debating while the cameras are rolling, you know, in the next hour or, turned out to be, two and a half hours. You're doing it for the sake of the audience. You don't hold out hope in the next hour that you're going to change their mind, but you do hold out hope that there's a relationship that begins. And we've had lots of great conversations.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, sure. He is-
Glen Scrivener: The Gospel lasts... you know, go.
Eric Huffman: He seemed to want to come making the point that your arguments in your book, The Air We Breathe, are not falsifiable perhaps, or maybe they're not testable. What do you say to that as you've been breathing this air for a few years now? What do you say to the claim that it's impossible to prove what you're saying?
Glen Scrivener: I think, well, with history, falsifiability is something that belongs in the realm of science. You come up with a scientific hypothesis and you then try your best to disprove your hypothesis. And you design a whole bunch of experiments in order to disconfirm your hypothesis. You can't do that in the realm of history because you cannot test past timeline A versus past timeline B, and you cannot test the proposition that we might've got to a notion of human rights if Buddhism had taken over the West.
Eric Huffman: True.
Glen Scrivener: I mean, cool story, bro, but how are you going to test the... at which point I think it's Alex O'Connor's position that is unfalsifiable in a sense that you would not expect. So if Alex's position is, and he stated it a number of times in the two and a half hours, if he thinks we would have gotten to our modern Western liberal values without Christianity, if he thinks we would have gotten here without our modern Western liberal values, that is so untestable. That is so "cool story, bro," but possibly, you know...
I gave the example, I think Arsenal, at the time of recording of this interview, Arsenal are top of the English Premier League when it comes to soccer in England. I could tell a story in which Arsenal would definitely be top of the English Premier League whether the manager was the same, whether their star striker was the same, whether their defender was the same, whether... you know, we could have swapped out the goalkeeper, we could have swapped out the striker, we could have swapped out the manager of the team, and we would definitely still be top of the league. Cool story, bro, how are you going to test that? But I think it's even worse than that.
I think basically to say that we would have gotten the idea of human rights without like 19 centuries of Christianization, the idea that we've got to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights without 19 centuries of Christianization is akin to saying Arsenal would be top of the league even if the sport was basketball.
Eric Huffman: It's a category error.
Glen Scrivener: It's just so beyond testability, and it's so beyond plausibility.
Eric Huffman: I want to talk about why is it-
Glen Scrivener: Well, 2026, I think our Lord has something to do with why we got where we got.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, sure.
Glen Scrivener: I think that should be the default setting. And then, you know, you might want to try some other hypothesis. But I think the default kind of understanding of how we got to where we got to, it should have a massive part... you should give a massive part of that answer to 20 centuries of Christianization.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. I mean, given where we are in this historical moment, how could you not? But I think it remains to be asked, why is it theoretically implausible that things like morality can be explained through, as Alex O'Connor might claim, through evolution or social development, you know, modern Enlightenment? Why can't it be explained that way possibly?
Glen Scrivener: All sorts of, all sorts of moralities can be explained that way. It's just the survival of the weakest because of the sacrifice of the fittest. That that is a bonkers morality. So I'm not saying that only Christians can be moral. I think we are inescapably religious and we are inescapably moral. We always have some kind of object of worship, whether it's Jesus or not. And we always have some kind of morality, whether it's the way of Jesus or not.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Glen Scrivener: But what I think is inconsistent is thinking that we could have a morality that is kind of roughly the way of Jesus without Jesus. Because Jesus really is quite peculiar, and the way of Jesus really is quite peculiar. The whole idea of love for enemies and, you know... Bart Ehrman, the great New Testament scholar and skeptic of Christianity, who is a sort of an agnostic atheist and has written many bestsellers against the Bible and against Christianity, his latest book is called Love Thy Stranger as an encapsulation of the Jesus ethic that He teaches in the Gospels, which is kind of a Good Samaritan kind of an ethic, love thy stranger. Don't just love your neighbor, don't just love your kith and kin, love the person who might even be an enemy.
Everybody's got a morality. It's usually that most people's morality is love those who are nearest to you, sure, and oppose those who are your enemies. And that makes perfect sense. You want in-group amity, you want out-group enmity. And that explains the morality of so many people. And I do not deny that everyone on planet Earth has a morality. Everyone on planet Earth is moral. What I deny is that love thy stranger or love thy enemy is in any sense a natural, obvious, universal, self-evident kind of truth that we would have arrived at without Jesus.
Eric Huffman: No, it's got Jesus's fingerprints all over it. That's the only explanation.
Glen Scrivener: It does. And Bart Ehrman knows it, too, which is very interesting.
Eric Huffman: What'd you say at the end?
Glen Scrivener: And Bart Ehrman knows that it's got Jesus's fingerprints all over it as well, which I think is very interesting.
Eric Huffman: There seems to be a rise in popular atheist or secular thinkers that are coming out as culturally Christian, you know, the Richard Dawkins, Alex O'Connor to a lesser extent, that value what Christianity has brought to the table in terms of human advancement and Western ideals, but just think the faith part is we should just move on from that and leave that at the altar, as it were. What's your response? I mean, as a clergyman and as an apologist, what do you say to that approach? Do you appreciate it? Do you say, "Well, yeah, let's meet halfway, and that's enough for you to start with"? Or do you say that that's entirely a wrongheaded approach?
Glen Scrivener: Oh man, it depends. It's a thorny issue. I mean, the Richard Dawkins position has been his position the whole time. I mean, he never denied that there has been an Anglican tradition to his upbringing that had formed him and shaped him. He's never kind of denied that. But I think when he said it in conjunction with saying, "Of course, I think it's all utter nonsense, but I really want Christian culture, and I'm worried about Islam, and I'm worried about competitors to the Jesus story taking over our culture." And you're like, "Okay, so you want Christian culture, but you don't want Christian faith." It is a little bit like saying, "I really like apples, but I want to burn down all the orchards. I really like wine, I want to burn down all the vineyards." He doesn't want Christian faith, but he does want the fruits of Christian faith. There's an inconsistency there.
There's an opportunity there, as well. I think it's worthwhile that people recognize that the beliefs that they have and the moral intuitions that guide them are not natural, obvious, universal. They're not self-evident. They've come from a place, and that place is Christianity. It's helpful that people are pointing that out, because if they want more of that stuff, then they might go to church, and they might want to pull at those threads.
The Louise Perry story that I gave at the start of the interview, I think, is an example of somebody who recognizes that Christianity is sociologically true, and then she goes to church to figure out whether it's supernaturally true. And that's a journey that lots of people are taking. And it's very different now. I think there is a bit of a vibe shift, spiritually speaking, in which Christianity used to be the bogeyman. We used to be the bad guys. We used to be the last place that people would look to kind of scratch their spiritual itch.
As people are waking up to just how Christianized we have been, it's starting not to be the last place that people look. It's started to be the first place that people look. And people are showing up in churches. I think since the calendar year 2025, a lot of my evangelistic conversations have begun with me thinking I'm talking to a Christian. And it turns out that I'm not talking to a Christian. I'm just talking to somebody who's using language of, "I want to work on my faith," or "I need to learn how to pray," or "I want to get close to God." And initially, I'm thinking, "Oh, this is a Christian. I'll give a Christian answer." And then I sort of say, "And where do you go to church?" Oh, they don't go to church, but they want to work on their faith.
That's happening more and more. And there is an opportunity to that... I mean, it's double-edged. On one side, there are people who want to use Christianity for cultural ends, and they want to use Jesus for their political gain. I don't like that.
Eric Huffman: We don't do that in America, Glen. I don't know what you're talking about. It must be a UK thing.
Glen Scrivener: I don't like that. But at the same time, I recognize the complexity, because here's something I'm constantly thinking, is that nobody shows up to church for the right reason, ever. If somebody shows up to a UK church and they think, "Well, you know, Christianity has built Britain, and I don't know the first thing about it, and so I want to learn about it," there are positives and negatives to that. But the fact that they have come not for the right reason is no reason to dismiss them, because nobody comes to church for the right reason.
I mean, people will come to church because their girlfriend just dumped them, and they're feeling a bit glum. People will come to church because their daughter has anorexia and they are just at the end of themselves and feeling impotent. They come to church because their neighbor just asked them, and, you know, they're going to go out for lunch afterwards, and why not? They go to church because their boyfriend is dragging them. Nobody comes to church for the right reason.
Eric Huffman: What's the right reason?
Glen Scrivener: To worship the living God. I don't go to church for the right reason. I get paid.
Eric Huffman: You have to. It's in your job description.
Glen Scrivener: In a sense, everybody needs to get converted to the right reason. Like, even lifelong churchgoers, even heartfelt believers in Jesus. At the beginning of the church service, I don't have the right motives either, and I need to be converted to the right reason for being where I am.
Eric Huffman: I think that's really helpful to hear you talk about, because I wonder if there are people who hear this case you're making as a Christian pastor, an apologist, and it feels to them like, "Well, these Christians are... it's like a philosophical win or it's spiking the football." We have a different football over here than you. We spike it and all that. It sort of feels like Christians want to be thanked for creating this great civilization or something. And what I'm hearing you say, and I hope you'll say more about this, is your true motivation is much deeper than that superficial stuff.
Glen Scrivener: Yeah. I think I want to wake everybody up to the fact that we are all already inhabiting a story. And like I say, we're all religious and we're all moral. And if you happen to be in the Anglosphere, then you've probably been shaped by a very Christian-ish, Protestant-ish story that prizes the Good Samaritan and prizes the sorts of morality that has Jesus's fingerprints all over them. But it's actually gotten so diluted, and it's been so mixed in with other stories about self-expression and expressive individualism and all these other sort of stories, and the romantic ideals that we live by as well that aren't exactly the Christian ideals. And we're all this kind of mixed.
And all of us are in this world navigating the world not by reason and evidence, not by logical syllogisms. We're all people of faith. And as you wake people up to the fact that, "Hey, it's kind of bonkers, isn't it, to believe in compassion and human rights and progress and freedom? It's kind of bonkers to believe that." As you awaken people up to the fact that they are not the logical, rational people they had been led to believe that they were, you are chipping away at the Enlightenment myth. The sort of post-Christian Enlightenment myth is that the church is back in the past, and those are the bad old days, the Dark Ages. We have now evolved beyond the Dark Ages of faith into the sunny uplands of reason and progress and Enlightenment. And now we're just people of reason and not people of faith anymore.
And what I'm saying in my book and in all this stuff is that's nuts. That's bonkers. That's a fairy tale. That Enlightenment myth is a myth. It's stupid. It's moronic. It's imbecilic. It does not pay attention to how history has worked. It does not pay attention to how you work. You are this believer, you're navigating according to these Christian-ish kind of beliefs, and it's forming you in this sort of kind of way. But as I awaken you to the Christian origins of these things, what I then want you to do is to deliberately now pay attention to the pure Jesus story, and deliberately now give yourself to formation in a true spiritual community in which the actual Jesus gospel actually grabs hold of your heart and actually grabs hold of your life and you can walk it out in faithfulness in church, right?
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Glen Scrivener: So it's just helping people to pay attention to that. I'm already a believer and I'm already flexing this muscle, but in this direction. Wouldn't it be better to go to the source and go to Jesus Himself and check Him out and give yourself fully to the pure Jesus story?
Eric Huffman: I love hearing you talk about how the Enlightenment philosophy or the Enlightenment approaches is itself a myth, because that's typically what Enlightenment thinking said about Christianity and other religions, is that it was myth-making and it was... That was part of my story. I thought that Christianity that I was raised with was the mythological, made-up fairy tale, and I felt duped by it when I was led out of it by this Enlightenment modernity or post-modernity. And then I realized that was the myth. I was duped by that. And I was so angry when I finally saw it, but relieved at the same time. I just think it's helpful for people to hear your heart behind what it is you're doing, because it's not what some skeptics who have become hardened in their hearts to Christianity, it's not what they might expect.
One part of your book, and I know we're almost out of time, I'm going to try to move us along here because there's a couple more things I want to talk about for sure, is one part of the book that stood out to me more than any other was your chapter on consent. I expected every other heading in a book like yours, I expected to hear about progress and the advent of the scientific method and equality but consent was an interesting addition. It obviously has to do with, at least in part, with sexual ethics and things like that, and it's not what people might expect to hear from Christians, that consent was a God idea from the start, because they've heard the Bible is cool with, you know, rape victims being forced to marry their assailants and wives being subject to their husbands. Where did the idea of consent take root in and from the Christian worldview?
Glen Scrivener: There is a profoundly egalitarian impetus to the Jesus sexual revolution. When we say the word sexual revolution, we probably think of about the 1960s. But I think that the sexual revolution that has even more shaped our moral intuitions about sex happened 19 centuries before the swinging '60s. I think when Jesus, in Matthew 19, which I've already referenced, basically says to men, He says to red-blooded men who are following Him that they are to be united to their wives for life. The doors are locked. No one gets out of this thing alive.
What He's basically doing is He is restricting men to the same kinds of restrictions that women had always been expected to observe when it comes to sex and sexuality. Women had always been expected to be virgins on their wedding night and utterly faithful within marriage. Men have not been expected to be that at all in most of the cultures around the world. And this lifelong monogamy is actually a way of bringing about the equality of the sexes that's really quite radical. And it means the curtailing of the assumed freedoms that men had always considered themselves to have, such that a man is to be like Christ to his bride and therefore to play the part of the sacrifice of the fittest, right? He is to play the part of this cruciform human sacrifice, giving himself utterly for his bride. And his wife is to be the pure, spotless bride of Christ. The dignity that they gave to wives and the discipline that it demanded of husbands was utterly radical.
Eric Huffman: Counter-cultural.
Glen Scrivener: In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul kind of speaks to husbands and wives and he says, the wife's body belongs to the husband. And everybody reading that will go, "Oh, yeah, no, we know that, obviously."
Eric Huffman: High-fiving each other.
Glen Scrivener: That's how ancient societies kind of worked. But then he flips it around, and this is what happens. Christian sexual ethics is like mirror image in terms of what is expected of men is expected of women, what's expected of women is expected of men, which is unheard of. So in 1 Corinthians 7, he goes on, and the husband's body likewise belongs to his wife. Like, "What? Who thinks that?" Christians think that. They think of this profound oneness, this unity of husband and wife. And the Bible talks about the difference between the sexes as well as the equality, and we can get into that. There's all sorts of ways that that can strike the modern ear as problematic, but I think when you press into it, you'll see that men and women are different. They are different but equal. Nature and roles of men and women is for our blessing, I think.
Eric Huffman: I think generally the idea in the world today is that the Christian sexual ethic is outdated, it is restrictive, it is unfair to women somehow, and that ideals like consent were very much secular in invention and in origin. What do you say to someone who says, "I don't want to live my sexual life according to the Bible because it's, you know, whatever." What do you say to someone in defense of biblical sexual ethics?
Glen Scrivener: I don't think it's regressive at all. I do think it's very restrictive. But I think the restrictions are progressive in the best sense of the word. I think the restrictions... Joseph Henrich looked at the marriage and family program of Jesus... I think he might describe himself as an atheist. He's definitely an agnostic Harvard biologist. He said, you know, what is it that has led to the peculiarity of the prosperity of the West? And he boils it down to the marriage and family program of Jesus that's laid out in Matthew chapter 19 and 1 Corinthians 7.
What he says is the church kind of reaches down and restricts men, and says, "You, man, are now tied to your offspring and tied to the mother of your children in ways that biology does not tie you." Biology does not tie a man to his children. Biology doesn't do that. Biology does tie a woman to her children in lots of ways. Biology doesn't tie a man to his woman. Covenant needs to come in and tie a man to his woman and to his children. Something supernatural needs to come in to tie a man to his woman and his children.
And Joseph Henrich kind of says, "Look, what has built the West is utterly being that restriction of your sexual freedoms, as it were," that has been utterly for the blessing of the world and it has... it doesn't serve anyone if elite men just grab all the women and have all the sex. That's never served very many people. It certainly doesn't suit the children, doesn't suit the women, it doesn't suit the non-elite men. But the Christian marriage and family program has always been a restriction for a greater blessing.
And the Christian sexual ethic is that, you know, sex is... it's holy fire. It's dangerous, wild, powerful. And there is one place in my house where you can light a fire safely, and if you light a fire anywhere else other than my fireplace, you'll burn my house down. Sex, according to the Bible, belongs in marriage between a man and a woman, and apart from that, it is too dangerous, too wild, too powerful not to be held by that kind of covenant union. That's very restrictive, but I think there are extra-biblical voices saying, and there are certainly biblical voices saying that this for the benefit of the world. It's restrictive, but it's not regressive.
Eric Huffman: This feels like a good place to ask the question. What is at stake for people and for societies if the Christian influence fades in our, let's say our Western societies? What do societies look like without the Christian moral foundation in your mind?
Glen Scrivener: Wow, we've been running the experiment for some time now.
Eric Huffman: We have. Fast-tracking that thing warp speed.
Glen Scrivener: I think what is happening is it is a fracture in lots of different directions all at once. I think there are some who are happily living with the Enlightenment myth that's everything progressive in the world is, "No thanks to Christianity," and we would do far better if we jettisoned Christianity even further and kept going with a progressive liberationist kind of view of humanity that's stripped of anything Christian.
I think some people are wanting to run in that direction. I think a lot of other people... very skeptical of whether such progressive liberationists are indeed the progressives that they think themselves to be. And at this stage, the second group of people, they call themselves the anti-woke because, you know, they've identified that first group as woke and they are the anti-woke. The second group, the anti-woke, are very skeptical of the virtue signaling that they see in those progressive liberationists. But they can be so skeptical of virtue signaling they become skeptical of virtue itself.
Eric Huffman: Dang.
Glen Scrivener: And then they're tempted towards the Nietzsche thing. Nietzsche looked at the Christian way, "Oh, weakness," right? The privileging of the victim, gross, disgusting. And what Nietzsche wanted instead of the way of Christian ethics is Nietzsche just wanted the way of power and the will to power. There are some alarming moves in that direction from-
Eric Huffman: Is that from the Christian nationalism conversations and things? Is that what you're referring to?
Glen Scrivener: There's definitely overlap there. I mean, when you look at the likes of an Andrew Tate, for instance, there's a sort of a raw power kind of... Andrew Tate, to go back to the Christian sexual ethic thing, he doesn't want to be a gentleman, right? He doesn't believe the people who've got #MeToo in their bios. He also doesn't like the Christian sexual ethic.
Eric Huffman: No, it's weak.
Glen Scrivener: It's weak, and he goes to the will to power thing. And then that overlaps with this Islam, because Andrew Tate is notionally a Muslim. And within Islam, that power story sits a lot more readily.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Glen Scrivener: Islam meaning submission, Allah being the great power who has the will over you. I think the power story fits a lot better with Islam. And so there's a third kind of issue, especially with more immigration into the West that's happening. So, you've got the so-called woke, the anti-woke, Islam, and you've got, I think, a movement of people who are willing to give the Jesus thing a shot. And they're showing up in churches, and maybe some of them only think it's sociologically true, and they don't yet think it's supernaturally true. But I have great hope that in the midst of this storm that is happening that a lot of people will notice the sinking sand that they're on and will take refuge in the rock of Jesus. That's what I'm kind of banking on, and that's why I'm kind of preaching the way I'm preaching, because I'm starting to see people becoming refugees from this kind of storm, and I think Jesus is the rock to take refuge in.
Eric Huffman: Amen. Was there a point at which you realized, maybe in some unique way, that Christianity is more than just sociologically true, that it was spiritually, supernaturally true for you? What was it that got you over the edge?
Glen Scrivener: I guess the sociologically true thing for me was seeing in the life of my mother how Christian faith had kind of shaped her. That was very attractive, not knowing Jesus for myself. And I guess that the moment for me was opening up the Gospels and a friend challenging me to read the Gospels as an adult, because I guess I'd sort of read them in Sunday school and I'd gone along to youth group as well until a certain point. And then I sort of checked out of youth group and I checked out of church and didn't go for years. And then a friend said, "Have you picked up a Gospel since becoming an adult?" And no, I hadn't.
So, getting to meet Jesus in the pages of Scripture was just... that was transformative. And I remember getting halfway through Luke's Gospel, you just see the towering personality of Jesus and His stooping love, and you just think, "There is the source. There is the source of everything I've seen in my mother. There is the source of everything that I prize in terms of love." I was doing a philosophy degree at the time, and I was sort of noticing that all the greats in terms of philosophy, they didn't have anywhere near as much emotional intelligence as John Belushi when he sings, "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love." I remember sort of listening to that song on repeat and sort of comparing him with the philosophy degree that I was doing, and you know, we've got your Plato and your Aristotle and you've got your Descartes and your Kant, but John Belushi's got a lot more wisdom than any of these guys, like, "Everybody needs somebody to love." Oh, yeah, love.
And then reading Jesus, and here is just love covered over, covered over in flesh, and I'm just thinking, "Here is love incarnate, and He is the source of these things that I privilege." And I just remember getting halfway through Luke's Gospel and thinking, "If this is what God's like, I'm in," and I jumped in with both feet 25 years ago.
Eric Huffman: Beautiful. Beautiful story. Thank you, Glen, for sharing that and everything you share with us today. That seems like a great place to wrap. We're grateful for you and for your time. I hope everybody watching will check out your work on YouTube and your book, of course. I can't wait to see what's next for you, Glen. God's doing great things through you.
Glen Scrivener: Oh, it's just fun to lift up the name of Jesus. So, yeah, thank you for all that you do.
Eric Huffman: Amen. There's nothing like it. Thanks, Glen. God bless you.
Glen Scrivener: Bless you.