Welcome to episode 58 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Dr. John West about his new book “Stockholm Syndrome Christianity”. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome Vice President of the Discovery Institute Dr. John West to discuss his new book “Stockholm Syndrome Christianity”. He discusses how Christians are influenced by non-Christian ideas, key figures in the Stockholm Syndrome movement, how Christian institutions are captured by secular left, and strategies to combat the spread of Stockholm Syndrome Christianity.

Outline and transcript

Here is a transcript of the show (with timestamps) provided by TurboScribe AI. TurboScribe AI allows you to translate the transcript into many, many different languages. You can also export the transcript into many different formats, with optional timestamps.

Episode 58:

Speaker biographies

Dr. John West is Vice President of the Discovery Institute, and Managing Director of the Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, which he co-founded with Dr. Stephen C. Meyer in 1996. Dr. West was previously an Associate Professor of Political Science at Seattle Pacific University where he chaired the Department of Political Science and Geography. He earned his PhD in Government from Claremont Graduate University and BA in Communications from the University of Washington. Dr. West has written or edited twelve books, including “Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science”. His newest book is “Stockholm Syndrome Christianity: Why America’s Christian Leaders Are Failing — and What We Can Do About It”.

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

Videos:

• Socrates in the City: C. S. Lewis and Scientism with Dr. John West and Eric Metaxas
• Bad Policies, Bad Leadership, Bad Theology: John West Interview – The Becket Cook Show
• “Darwin’s Corrosive Idea” John West at Dallas Science Faith Conference 2020
• Biola University: Dr. John West – Evolution and C.S. Lewis: What Did He Really Believe?
• Heritage Foundation: John West on Scientism in the Age of Obama

Links:

• Articles by Dr. John G. West
• Articles at Evolution News by John West

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Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I found a wonderful series of articles by someone I really trust on origins issues: Dr. Casey Luskin. He has a long history with the intelligent design movement, starting from when he was a college student. He has a BS and MS in Earth Sciences from the University of California, San Diego, a PhD in Geology from the University of Johannesburg, and a JD from the University of San Diego.

He has a series of articles up at Evolution News, about Dr. William Lane Craig’s new book “In Quest of the Historical Adam”. I’m not sure if he is done with the series, but I thought that it was a good time to look over what he’s already written.

In the first article he notes that “Craig convincingly argues that mainstream science can be reconciled with a traditional view of Adam and Eve” and “argues that Adam and Eve were real people who could have been members of Homo heidelbergensis”. Craig’s conclusion is that “it’s not scientifically problematic to take a truly “traditional” view of Adam and Eve”.

But Luskin has criticisms of Craig’s views on rival interpretations of Genesis, “As an old earther myself, I was concerned that Craig did not adequately engage with old earth interpretations” and “I believe that young earth creationists will feel that Craig badly misrepresents the scientific claims of their models”.

Craig’s handling of the science:

Craig’s book provides highly informed discussions of the paleoanthropological, archaeological, neurological, and genetic evidence regarding human origins, but his arguments often incorporate evolutionary assumptions which are doubtful. For example, Craig is too credulous towards evolutionary explanations of the origin of the human mind which amount to miracle mutations, as well as common evolutionary notions that pseudogenes are “junk DNA” that support common ancestry. He misses a key deficiency in evolutionary explanations: a conspicuous gap between the genus Homo and our supposed ape-like australopithecine ancestors in the hominid fossil record. Although Craig does not recognize it, key neurogenetic evidence raised in his book actually suggests a potent mathematical challenge to the Darwinian evolution of humans. I also believe he sells Homo erectus short as a potential candidate for Adam and Eve.

[…]Craig continues to rely upon BioLogos arguments that pseudogenes are “broken” and non-functional junk DNA that we share with apes, thereby demonstrating our common ancestry. Those arguments are increasingly contradicted by evidence presented in highly authoritative scientific papers which find that pseudogenes are commonly functional, and they ought not be assumed to be genetic “junk.” In relying upon dubious evolutionary arguments that are increasingly refuted by the technical literature, Craig may be repeating the very mistake that led previous evangelicals to think Adam and Eve did not exist.

There are 6 parts to the review. Here are the links to parts 2 through 6:

• Is Genesis “Mytho-History”? As a Guide to Scripture, William Lane Craig’s Book Falls Short
• Missed Opportunity: Passing over Scientific Problems with Human Evolution
• Traditional or Not? Assessing William Lane Craig’s Model on Adam and Eve
• Lessons from the Evangelical Debate About Adam and Eve
• Lessons Not Learned from the Evangelical Debate over Adam and Eve

If you’re interested in the topics of Christianity and science, this is a great series to read. I love when someone trustworthy reads through a lot of stuff I don’t have time for (I have a day job as a software engineer!) and gives me an accurate summary of the strengths and weaknesses.

It’s hard to to make a ranking of which actions are the best for Christians and conservatives. There have been so many. But this one really draws a line between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. The most common complaint I heard from Trump supporters after his first term was that he didn’t do enough to drain the swamp. Well, this new Trump action is the most Swamp-Draining one yet.

This is from Daily Signal:

The Trump administration is putting a stick of dynamite under the deep state, and Democrats are apoplectic.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump put nearly all District of Columbia-based employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave. According to Politico, this amounts to about 1,400 people in addition to 600 employees who were put on leave starting Sunday.

This comes after the Trump administration put a 90-day freeze on all foreign assistance.

New Secretary of State Marco Rubio “noted that embassies around the world complain that USAID is not only uncooperative but that it undermines the governments the U.S. wants to work with. Rubio said that the agency operates as if its master is the “globe” and not the U.S., which is a departure from the intent of the original statute that created it.”

And this is just crazy:

Rubio, who is putting the operation of USAID under his authority, said the goal has been to reform the agency, but right now, there is “rank insubordination.” The attitude of the employees, Rubio said, is that they work for themselves, not the American people or their elected officials.

This is why the administration had to take dramatic steps to temporarily freeze the agency, Rubio explained.

[…]Organizations like USAID became enlisted in what can be described as no less than the creation of a global leftist empire… a conduit to siphon U.S. taxpayer dollars to various leftist projects, many of which are deeply resented by other nations.

It became, at minimum, a jobs program for hordes of American left-wing activists.

The Democrats are not going to take this one lying down, as this is their whole global secular leftist network. But, all that Trump has to do to beat them is to show the American public what USAID has been spending their money on.

Here are some examples:

For instance, The Washington Free Beacon reported that in 2023 under President Joe Biden, USAID spent $1 million “on a project to help disabled people in the Central Asian country of Tajikistan become ‘climate leaders.’”

For instance, according to The Wall Street Journal, the State Department was funding “culture grants” to promote drag queen performances in Ecuador. Meanwhile, China was investing heavily in the country’s copper mining production.

The Free Beacon also reported that USAID spent millions of dollars on various diversity, equity, and inclusion projects, including a program created to “engage with indigenous-led institutions to implement an indigenous language technology program” in Guatemala where over 95% of people speak Spanish.

[…]“In November 2022, USAID sent $78,000 to the Community Development and Continuing Education Institute (CDCEI), a Palestinian activist group based in the West Bank. Its leaders praised a terrorist who murdered a U.S. military attaché as a ‘hero fighter,’” the Free Beacon reported.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., sent a letter to USAID in October 2024 saying that some of the more than a billion dollars being used for humanitarian relief in Gaza was likely being funneled to terrorists.

[…]Under Biden, USAID even spent money funding abortions in Africa through programs billed as AIDS relief, Fox News reported.

This is what happens when you give secular leftists access to taxpayer money. They just go crazy with it, and that’s why they shouldn’t have any money at all.

And if that’s not enough for you, check out this story from Breitbart, about how the Trump administration wants to tackle corruption in the FBI and DOJ:

FBI officials acknowledged over 5,000 employees worked on investigations related to January 6, CNN reported Tuesday.

The numbers reveal for the first time the scope of the federal government’s resources devoted to the J6 investigations, which took place while violent crime in urban America soared 40 percent from 2019 to 2023 under the Biden administration, according to the federal government’s own numbers.

The Department of Justice asked the FBI Friday to provide by Tuesday at noon the details of all its employees who worked on January 6 investigations.

But of course these agents don’t want to be held accountable for their actions under the previous (fascist) administration:

FBI employees have fought to hide their roles in J6 investigations.

Just fire them all right now! Or ship them to prisons in El Salvador if they resist.