Join us for an eye-opening discussion with Redeemed Zoomer about the Reconquista Project, a movement aimed at reclaiming mainline Protestant denominations from progressive influences. We dive deep into the state of Christianity in America, the challenges faced by conservative believers, and strategies for revitalizing traditional faith in a rapidly changing cultural landscape.
Key topics covered:
The goals and strategies of the Reconquista Project
How progressives have influenced mainstream churches
The importance of institutional continuity in Christianity
Gen Z's relationship with faith and conservative values
The dating landscape for conservative young adults
Strategies for raising children in a secular world
The potential conservative turn in Gen Alpha
The impact of progressive Christianity on church attendance
Tactics for engaging in church politics and reform
Whether you're a concerned Christian, a culture war enthusiast, or simply interested in the evolving religious landscape of America, this video offers valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities facing traditional faith in the modern world.
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: There was like a time in my life where I realized that the churches were to the left of like atheism at that point. And I was like, how, how did they pull off this heist?
Redeemed Zoomer: Conservatives always give up and run away from institutions, and we make fun of liberals as being snowflakes, but in the past hundred years, progressives have been much more crusader
I've actually noticed that like my, my progressive lady pastor would talk about how she did interfaith dialogues with, like, progressive rabbis and progressive Muslim imams. And what I was thinking is, that's not an interfaith dialogue. You all have the same exact faith, which is just Unitarian Universalist progressivism.
A real interfaith dialogue would be like a Christian Fundamentalist Baptist debating, like a Fundamentalist Muslim. debating an Orthodox Jew. That would be an actual interfaith dialogue. A bunch of progressive atheists LARPing as the different, the different religions. That's not an interfaith dialogue.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: [00:01:00] Hello! I am so excited to be here with you guys today. It was ReformZoomer. I know fans have been asking for us to chat with him. And I actually watch his content. It's a really good source.
If you are interested in what different forms of Christianity believe and their history. They are videos that I would feel like called to create if he wasn't creating them. But he does such a good job of it. I'd really suggest it. And he does a fairly good job with staying unbiased in this. But he has this project I wanted to talk with him about, because it's something that I've been thinking about, and I've seen other people think about, And you call it the Reconquista Project.
So can you outline the goals of the project and who is invited to it?
Redeemed Zoomer: Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. It's an honor to be here. By the way, my name is redeemed zoomer not reformed zoomer
Simone Collins: every day
Redeemed Zoomer: There's like the 10th podcast i've been on where people have said that it's fine it's like the mandela effect everyone It's don't worry [00:02:00] about it.
So yeah, i'm redeemed zoomer. I'm not a pastor. I don't have credentials I just try to be like a gateway drug to point people towards real churches Because the church is something I'm really focused on. I am focused on trying to revive the institutional mainline churches. Those are the churches that matter culturally.
Because the progressives in our culture have hijacked every major cultural institution. The mainstream universities, the Boy Scouts, the cities, and most importantly, the churches. The progressives have recognized the impact of the church on society and they were very careful to hijack it. That's why the historic mainline Protestant churches, including the Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church USA, have mostly been hijacked by progressivism.
So a couple years ago, really just a year ago, I started Operation Reconquista, which is trying to retake the mainline Protestant denominations and make them return to the Orthodox Christian beliefs that they were founded upon. So I am a [00:03:00] confessional Calvinist. I'm a Presbyterian. I'm part of that.
Presbyterian Church USA, and I'm dedicated to restoring the Presbyterian Church USA, but Reconquista is an alliance of Christians of all different denominations with the Grecian Christianity dedicated to restoring their denominations too. So we're allied with Methodists, and with Episcopalians, and with Lutherans, and with Baptists, and with the Dutch Reformed.
So that's the basic outline of Reconquista. He's stuck. A big misunderstanding is some people think we're trying to send people into liberal churches. We're not trying to do that. Every mainline denomination is a big tent with liberal and conservative churches. So we're trying to set, trying to send people into conservative churches within mainline denominations, knowing that in 30 years, they're going to be the only ones left.
Malcolm Collins: Ooh, why do you believe that's the case?
Redeemed Zoomer: I believe that's the case because, well there's like a spiritual reason and just a statistical reason. Spiritually people only have a desire to go to church if the church is preaching something that they can't get anywhere else. Progressive [00:04:00] churches just echo whatever the culture says, so there's no reason anyone should go to a progressive church.
The only people who still go to those churches are boomers who grew up in an age when church was a social obligation, but now it's not. Nowadays, the only reason people would go to church is if the church is actually preaching anything. So that's just the logical reason, but Statistically, we also see that the progressive congregations and mainline denominations are in demographic freefall and the conservative ones less so.
That is true. And the progressives know it's true, which is why they are trying to discriminate against the conservatives in the denomination as hard as possible.
Malcolm Collins: So I'm wondering if you could talk, maybe focusing on one church or one example that you're aware of. How the progressives pulled this off, and I will say this is for me who grew up secular, who grew up an atheist.
There was like a time in my life where I realized that the churches were to the left of like atheism at that point. And I was like, how, how did they pull off this heist? Can you go into that?
Redeemed Zoomer: [00:05:00] Yeah, it's very simple. They didn't give up. Conservatives always give up and run away from institutions, and we make fun of liberals as being snowflakes, but in the past hundred years, progressives have been much more comfortable leaving their comfort zones.
They've been much more crusader minded. And here's the best example. In the United Methodist Church, there was a big struggle between the progressives who wanted to have gay marriage and the conservatives who didn't want to have gay marriage. In 2019, they had a vote. The conservatives won the vote, and they said all the churches have to stop doing in the United Methodist Church.
Sounds like good news for conservatives. Well, the progressives doubled down. They didn't give up. They kept just disobeying and breaking the rules as hard as possible. And within about a year, the conservatives got so fed up, they left the denomination and formed the Global Methodist Church. They won the dang vote, and they left the dang church.
Conservatives over the past hundred years have been complete cowards and the leftists have been really strong willed conquistadors, and that's why the left has [00:06:00] taken over every major institution. Now you could say the left is funded by people like George Soros, that's absolutely true, but it's also just the mindset.
The left has an activist mindset, the conservatives have a retreatist mindset, and that's why they always lose. That's why conservatives have lost every single major institution, it's why rates of Christianity go down every single year, it's why rates of LGBT acceptance increase in the institutions every single year.
Malcolm Collins: Can you talk about how you could inspire this within conservatives? Like, what would it look like to approach this differently as a conservative? And, and, and do you think that conservatives can out The, what's the word here? Can Keith the door or crusade, the progressives or the progressives always gonna win on this front.
Redeemed Zoomer: They can, they're just not willing to, they're just too lazy. They'd rather not focus on this. A lot of conservatives would just rather move to a form in the middle of nowhere and. Do homesteading and raise kids. It's like, that's honorable, but that's not what the early Christians did. That that's not how the early Christians conquered the Roman empire.
The early Christians went to the cities and they were fed to the lions for it. But over the centuries, they rose in the [00:07:00] ranks of the Roman empire and they took it over from the inside. But right now it's the left that's doing this. It's the left. That's going to the cities and rising the ranks. It's the conservatives that are retreating to the rural areas.
I believe, and I think most conservatives believe conservatives are inherently stronger people than progressives. They're much more mentally stable. I think they're much more sane. They have a lot more common sense. I do like to think that conservative men are tougher than liberal men. I think that's pretty obvious, but it sure doesn't seem like it.
They sure ain't acting like it. They're acting like a bunch of, a bunch of wimps when it comes to the culture war. So I think once conservatives just realize that running away has been the only strategy conservatives have employed the past hundred years and it keeps not working, I think once they realize that they will start to have more of a reconquista mindset as opposed to a retreatist mindset.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, but I, I'd frame this a little differently here. I, I think that this has been happening because I was thinking through my mind, like where in history has the more, in my mind, conservative [00:08:00] faction been like, nope, we're out. And I'm like, oh, that's how America was founded. Right? Like they were a bunch of different actionable, like Bible readers were like, nope, we're out.
We're not playing this game anymore. And they ended up building this This, this, this great institution, and then over time, it's sort of corrupted. And we, we personally have this model of the way that like religions grow and that you have these reformational periods where you get to like a, a purer strain of the religion.
And then you have this explosion of culture and technology, and then that creates bureaucracy. And then the bureaucracy allows for the progressives to gain power. I don't know if in a historic example, I think you're right about the Roman Empire. That is a historic example of where conservatives beat progressives within a bureaucracy.
But I, I, I wonder if the Christians of the Roman time period weren't the progressives. Well,
Simone Collins: Malcolm, are you saying that we need to build our city upon a hill in space? Like, is that your Reconquista? [00:09:00] Well,
Malcolm Collins: no, yeah, build, build it on another planet. I don't know. But what are your, what are your thoughts on this, this framing of like the U.
S. is like,
Redeemed Zoomer: yeah. Yeah. So one of my most watched videos is I graphed denominations on the church compass. You've heard of the political compass. Well, there's also the church. I
Malcolm Collins: watch these videos. They're great.
Redeemed Zoomer: The church compass. Yeah. So you would know that there are two axes. The thing with America, with the Puritans leaving England, that was not a left versus right issue.
Both sides of that debate were far right extremists by today's standards, right? It's high church versus a low church issue. The Episcopal Anglicans of the Church of England were high church. Mm-Hmm. and the congregationalists were low church. Mm-Hmm, . So I don't think this model of retreat and Reconquista really applies to high church and low church debates.
I think it does apply to progressive versus conservative debates. to right and left. So I just don't think the Puritan model is really relevant to this.
Simone Collins: I don't
Redeemed Zoomer: think there's ever an example of conservatives leaving a left wing institution [00:10:00] and it becoming, and the conservatives succeeding more as a result of that.
I don't think there's a single example of that.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, here's a question I have for you. Do you think more, because high church versus low church is in part about the way the bureaucracies are structured, do you think that one is more susceptible to this progressive sort of memetic virus than the other?
Redeemed Zoomer: No because in, Across the denominational spectrum, progressivism has sort of equally hijacked both high church and low church denominations. With progressivism, it's really a trade off, because in denominations with a low church structure, with very little bureaucracy, it's a lot easier for the progressives to hijack it, because there's not much of an authority to keep them out.
But when they do hijack, it's a lot easier for conservatives to resist. That's why in the United Church of Christ, the successors of the Puritan Congregationalists in New England, yeah, it's very, very progressive. It's very low church, it's very progressive. But there's no apparatus to enforce that [00:11:00] progressivism, so conservative congregational conservative congregations are able to resist no problem.
Then look at the Episcopal Church, very high church, very bureaucratic. It was, it is harder for the progressives to hijack that. It's, it's slower to make change in the Episcopal church, but once the change is made, it is almost impossible for conservatives to resist. I know an Episcopal priest who tried to resist and he got forced out of the Episcopal church due to that.
Same with Bishop Love of Albany. So,
Malcolm Collins: this is, hold on, Simone, before you go, I was just going to say that I, this is a concept that we would call institutional inertia, that he's describing, that they have higher institutional inertia. It takes more force to get the ball rolling, but it also takes more force to stop the ball.
Anyway, Simone, you were going to say something?
Simone Collins: You described the, the first step of this, the, the of, of, we have to recognize that basically conservative Christians need to grow a pair and like fight Yes. Not retreat. Yes. What are the, the logistical next steps, the concrete things that you see happening?
Are people forming [00:12:00] new? Congregations, are they like, I mean, to a certain extent, I don't know how the bureaucracies could be retaken. Are they like dissolving what exists?
Malcolm Collins: He referenced one win that they've already had. Can you talk about that?
Redeemed Zoomer: Did I in this video?
Malcolm Collins: No, not in this video, but in some of your videos, but you just didn't explain it.
Redeemed Zoomer: So to answer your question, no, we're not going to try and create new congregations. We're trying to strengthen the existing conservative congregations in the Presbyterian church, USA, only 10 percent of the congregations are conservative, but that's still a hundred congregations all over the country.
It's still quite a few, and those are going to be the only ones left if we strengthen them. Also, there's a lot of moderate congregations. I'd say about 30 percent of the denomination is moderate and most of their inhabitants are conservative. 10 boomers basically. It is so easy to influence a mainline Protestant church because they give out leadership positions like free candy.
I was one of the Sunday school teachers when I was 15. It took my dad like two years to become an elder at our church. It is so easy for lay people to have an [00:13:00] impact, especially because there's a severe pastor shortage. There's a severe pastor shortage. Over half of PCUSA churches are without a pastor, so that means it's run entirely by lay people, which means anyone could join the church and influence it.
So those are some practical strategies for how to influence the individual congregations, but what about the denominational bureaucracy? Well, last year is when the Reconquista movement started. It started with just an Instagram group chat of 12 people, and then it expanded to a Discord server of about 3, 000 people, including a lot of pastors.
And then within the incubator of that Discord server, we started the Non profit Presbyterians for the Kingdom, dedicated to retaking the PCUSA. And, simultaneously, for this summer's General Assembly, there was an overture, an overture is like a bill, like a congressional bill, an overture to require new pastors to be gay affirming.
And that would basically kill all the conservative churches. But thanks to our organization, the president of our organization, who's not me, it's a guy named David Yancey, but the president of our [00:14:00] organization. Visited the General Assembly, put together a coalition of conservative pastors, and amended that overture so it would no longer examine new pastoral candidates according to principles of non discrimination against LGBT folks, but instead according to historic principles of the church.
So he basically neutered that amendment and protected all the conservatives. So if a bunch of kids on Discord were able to stop the denomination from kicking out all the conservatives, imagine what pastors who actually have a footing in the denomination could do.
Malcolm Collins: How did they get that language in the build to, like, what logic were they using?
Do they, do they have to explain this or they can just like put a bill like that out?
Redeemed Zoomer: Well, the way the, it works is that presbyteries in the denomination can send an overture that the rest of them vote on. It was a very progressive presbytery that wrote this and because the majority of the denomination is progressive, basically any progressive overture that gets written will most likely be approved.
But, There was nothing stopping us from trying to amend the [00:15:00] overture, and my friend David, who's the president of the organization we started last year, he was able to actually get that done.
Malcolm Collins: So I want to highlight what you're saying here, because it's actually really important. We've had people in our Discord who have told me Just get involved.
One of the mainline churches. You're, you know, they are desperate for, for people like this. And I think for our audience who are maybe less theologically weird than us there, there is not a lot of competition as it seems like you're saying for moving up within these organizations. If you're really passionate about it, especially if you're young and, and this, if you've been thinking about it, but like, think you might not be qualified or think you might be It's probably worth doing because there are a lot of people who seem to have this predominantly progressive religion.
We're like their religion actually is far progressivism and they'll just go into other institutions. They see it as their calling, whether or not they're competent, whether or not they know anything about the Bible to get into churches and start voting on stuff. So I absolutely love that message.
[00:16:00] A question I'd have, because I actually wonder about this. Now, I can see, if we were talking about, like, a church with, like, a lot of money, and where, like, the central body is, like, laying out a doctrine like you might have with a Catholic church or something like this, why this would be really important.
I'm a little, like, what's the value of institutional continuity? Like, like, what, what, what core good thing are you getting by taking the time to win this fight instead of just starting something new? What's the value in recapturing these old institutions?
Redeemed Zoomer: Because every time the church has transformed culture, it's been through the institutions.
The church didn't transform Roman society until it became institutional and established with Constantine. It was the church that founded the modern hospital system, that founded the university system, is the church that made Western civilization what it is, and it wasn't able to do that without being strong, established, and institutional.
You know, Jesus said, heal the sick. How did Christians do that [00:17:00] historically? By building hospitals. There's a reason you never see non denominational churches building hospitals. They don't have the resources to do that. They're not established. They don't inherit generational wealth. It's important for the church to be the kingdom of God.
And a kingdom is not just a gathering of individuals. It's organized. It's developed. It builds beautiful things for the king. So, there are I, I can't even list all the benefits of having a strong, established institutional church. That is what all Christians had between the years like 321 and 1960.
Between those two years, for the greater part of church history, every Christian was part of an established institutional denomination. And the only reason that's declining was, is because of the rise of non denominationalism and conservative offshoot denominations. Because like, like I just said with the Methodists, every denomination split in recent years has not been a split.
It's been the denominations splitting into original [00:18:00] and conservative. It's been the conservatives leaving the original thing and making their own thing, which does not inherit the denominational structures, universities, hospitals, buildings, all that.
Malcolm Collins: So it's, it's, it's as much about the institutional continuity and the maintenance of the assets as like a, but what's even the point of splitting off if you have now lost this large structure that you need to do all of these big acts, which is a very strong argument that I hadn't considered.
Redeemed Zoomer: What's, what's the point of, what's the point of splitting off if you lose all that? Yep, I know, that's the point that you're making. That's what I'm asking. Now, what they would say is, we want a pure denomination. We want a denomination where we don't have to battle liberalism. But two things. If you split off and your denomination actually grows into something, the liberals will just hijack that too.
Because right now, even the, the poor evangelical offshoots are now getting hijacked by liberalism. Not to the same extent, but the liberals will hijack everything. They just hijack the more powerful [00:19:00] things first and then move on to the less powerful things. It's the same reason there's no red states, because Gen Z of every state is, is completely progressive.
But another thing I would say is purity is. a spiral. There's like purity spiraling. No two fundamentalists have the same set of fundamentals. So if you split off because not everything's going your way, people are going to split off from you because not everything's going their way. It's an endless cycle.
A lot of Catholics will say Protestantism leads to endless schism. No, I think retreatism leads to endless schism, because if you split off from your denomination because they're not doing everything the way you want. Someone's going to split off from you because you're not doing everything the way they want.
That's why sorry, that's why in every tradition, like Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, you'll have one mainline denomination and like 20 conservative offshoot denominations because the conservatives can't agree with each other on what they need to conserve.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I think for people who aren't involved in church politics, like me [00:20:00] putting on my old hat, I would have assumed that when the church was splitting, it would have been the progressives who were splitting off from the conservatives but it's, it's the progressives that inherit, and when the conservatives split off, another thing to remember that I hadn't considered before it's okay.
So you have a big institution and you create a conservative offshoot. Now, what you've done is you've drawn all the voting power that used to be in that institution that now moves to your conservative offshoot out of the original institution, giving the progressives even a firmer grip than they had before.
Redeemed Zoomer: Yes. I forgot to mention that when I first saw all the progressivism in my denomination, the PC USA, I told my mentor who was still conservative. I told him I wanted to leave and he said, don't leave. The reason it got this bad is because the conservatives kept running away. They need to fix it. So it's like, whenever the PCA, the PCA is the conservative counterpart to the PCUSA.
And they are a lot more doctrinally sound, I'll give them that. But they didn't inherit all the institutions and they're poor. So whenever they say, [00:21:00] Oh, your denomination is super liberal. I'm like, yeah, cause you ran away from it. You ran away when push came to shove. And now I have to deal with all the liberals.
Malcolm Collins: A funny thing that I'm thinking about is once progressives begin to go extinct, you know, because of fertility rates and, and, and their ability to speak to people, is there going to be an opportunity for conservatives to go into institutions like the UUs and try to take over their apparatus? I would love to see that.
Redeemed Zoomer: Now, Re Conquista, the Re in Re Conquista means turning things back into the way they originally were. I'm not interested in hijacking heretical denominations because I don't want to make the Unitarian Universalists go back to traditional Unitarian doctrine because that's heresy. Same with the Mormon Church, same with Islam, even though Islam is experiencing no progressive hijack.
Same with Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm only really interested in retaking the, the historic Trinitarian denominations. But answer your question. If we, if [00:22:00] the progressives go extinct, that'll be great. Yeah, then we could take back anything. But the problem is, I don't think they're going to go extinct because yeah, they have low birth rates, but they make up for it in indoctrination and even conservatives who try to shelter their kids.
If you own the cultural institutions like the Left does, you will always be able to influence the masses and convert the masses. The Left does so much more evangelism than Christians, because Christians evangelize individuals, but the Left evangelizes institutions. So they just pollute the waters with Leftism, and that reaches the masses without them having to talk to a single individual.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, we always talk about this. I mean, as we call it, the urban monoculture can only survive by parasitizing children from demographically healthy cultural groups or importing children. I mean, that's exactly what we're seeing, which is, there was something else you said that I wanted to you to expand on because I thought it was such a good point.
You were saying one of the reasons why The progressive churches are going to die is what you will hear at a progressive church isn't differentiated from what you hear within [00:23:00] generic media within online spaces within, well, anywhere you go for an urban monoculture message, but what you hear in a conservative church is unique and you can only get it in that venue.
Can you talk a bit more to this? Because I found this really profound.
Redeemed Zoomer: Yeah, well, when I was in my local PCUSA church, at first we had a normal pastor, but then he retired, so we had a progressive interim lady pastor, and she was my first introduction to progressive Christianity, and because I came from a secular, liberal background, I considered it.
She recommended that I go to progressivechristianity. com and become a progressive Christian, basically. I considered it, because, you know, I come from a progressive background. What if I could make progressivism compatible with Christianity? That sounds great to me at first. But what I realized is, these people don't believe in anything at all.
All they believe in is whatever the secular culture believes. They don't believe in the supernatural. Progressive Christians don't believe Jesus rose from the dead. Progressive Christians don't think of God as something that's actually real. They think of God as a [00:24:00] nice way to inspire people to do love and social justice.
The only difference between them and hardcore atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens is they believe that the idea of God can inspire people to be woke. They believe God, they believe the concept of God can be used as a tool for oppression. When in the hands of the white man, but can also be used as a tool for liberation when in the hands of oppressed POCs.
Malcolm Collins: That is, I love, by the way, I had to Google this website that you mentioned here to see if this was a real thing, and I am going to be diving into this. This is fantastic. But I think that you're really right, and it's a concept that we talk about on the show pretty frequently which, when we're talking about the, the, the urban monoculture, that it allows you, or this progressive culture it allows you to join it and maintain, like, Your church and your church identity.
You just have to change your entire internal ideology. Like it keeps very, very little of the original ideology. And it's actually interesting when contrasted with a point that you [00:25:00] made earlier, which is to say that all of the conservatives, because they actually really believe stuff, they have much more.
Like more different theology between them than the progressives do between them where if I get to like an extremist conservative Of one denomination of christianity They will have more differences with another extreme conservative of the same denomination than like a progressive christian will from a progressive muscle
Redeemed Zoomer: Exactly.
I've actually noticed that like my, my progressive lady pastor would talk about how she did interfaith dialogues with, like, progressive rabbis and progressive Muslim imams. And what I was thinking is, that's not an interfaith dialogue. You all have the same exact faith, which is just Unitarian Universalist progressivism.
A real interfaith dialogue would be like a Christian Fundamentalist Baptist debating, like a Fundamentalist Muslim. debating an Orthodox Jew. That would be an actual interfaith dialogue. A bunch of progressive atheists LARPing as the different, the different religions. That's not an interfaith [00:26:00] dialogue.
Malcolm Collins: That is such a good way to put it. Is there LARPing as Christians really to gain access to the Christian bureaucracies and the resources those bureaucracies have, as well as the wills of these idiot doomers who don't realize that this isn't the 90s anymore. Which, as a Zoomer, must be so hard for you, like, how do you, how do you wake up the older generation?
I'm wondering what trends are you seeing in your generation right now in terms of faith and the way they're relating to it?
Redeemed Zoomer: Okay, so there's a lot of bad, and there's a little bit of good, but the little bit of good is still kind of bad. So, a lot of bad. Gen Z is the least religious generation in history, statistically.
It's also the most depressed generation in history. What a coincidence. If you ask boomers why Gen Z is so depressed, they're all like, it's those dang phones, that's why. No, it's not those dang phones. If you ask the mainstream media, it's like, oh, well, the economy's kind of bad. No, people lived through the Great Depression, the Black Death.
They were not as [00:27:00] depressed as people are today. It's because they abandoned God. That's why. That's why they're depressed. But there is a segment of Gen Z that is very trad. It's like the trad movement reacting against that. So that is a good thing. It's got a lot of good potential. We are seeing a bunch of young men.
reacting against this. Young men grew up in public schools where they were basically told that they're bad for being straight white men. I'm a Calvinist. I think we are bad. I am a bad but it's not because I'm a straight white man. It's because I'm a totally depraved sinner. But black women are also totally depraved sinners.
So a lot of young men are reacting against this leftism. But a lot of the trad movement is not directing people into traditional confessional Protestant churches. A lot of people are part of this, you know, trad aesthetic without actually, like, going to church. A lot of people are LARPing as, like, trad Catholic or trad Eastern Orthodox, not realizing that Eastern Orthodoxy did not build Western civilization.
If you go to an Eastern Orthodox country, it's a craphole. [00:28:00] Protestantism and Calvinism built the West.
Malcolm Collins: It's We, we talk about this a lot. I don't want, I don't want to, like, we don't want to get too in it for our Catholic audience, but we have this meme where we do the scene in Indiana Jones where they're trying to choose the correct Holy Grail.
And I always overlay it with pictures of the different churches.
Redeemed Zoomer: Yeah, no it, Protestantism is what built Western civilization, maybe Catholicism, not Eastern Orthodoxy people are trying to move towards what they think has not been hijacked by leftism, and I will grant that Eastern Orthodoxy has not been hijacked by leftism, but it's the same reason Islam has not been hijacked by leftism, it's the same reason Somalia has not been hijacked by leftism.
The leftism hijacks what's good and powerful. Well, Protestantism was successful and powerful. That's why the leftists hijacked it. The leftists don't hijack, you know, poor countries. The leftists don't hijack religions that are not a threat to them, like Islam or Jehovah's Witnessism. The leftists hijacked Calvinism because that's what's the biggest threat to them.
So, a lot of the trad movement is, has [00:29:00] good intentions and a lot of good potential, but it's still directing people in the wrong directions. It's also directing people towards, like, Andrew Tate and the red pill movement, which is, like, actually, Very disrespectful towards women. It does not create gentlemen.
It creates a bunch of jerks on twitter And it does not create anything. That's actually productive for society.
Malcolm Collins: I I love this No, I I agree with everything you're saying here one of the And I had a few lines of questions that I wanted to go in from here One of the things that we've noted before on this show and I was wondering your thoughts on this is When society started to become more secular You many of the men and the women broke off from the church but many of the men are returning because the way they broke off was different.
And I think that this is also true as in the younger generations whereas the men mostly became atheists and then just logically they went back to the church, whereas the women became like pagans and Wiccans and spiritualists, and it's much harder to reconvert to that. The spiritualist than the [00:30:00] the atheist and so the example that i'd use here is like well first I'd be like, how do you how do you think that we can win the women back or what's the yeah?
Redeemed Zoomer: I think men need to act more mature. Jordan cooper talks about this Jordan cooper is one of the best theologians online He's a lutheran pastor and he talks about actually being Trad in a real sense, not just in a LARPing sense, and he says that a lot of the Ways in which men are trad is actually not very trad because they'll like insult women on the internet Traditional men would never insult random stranger women.
They would be very respectful They'd be gentlemen. So a lot of women see see the whole ben shapiro owning the libs type conservatism as immature so the way to make women Women like this conservative movement more is for the men to grow up more and to be more respectful and chivalrous And that'll make them actually like it because men are the leaders of society whether we like it or not
Simone Collins: I'm not
Redeemed Zoomer: saying women [00:31:00] can't be leaders I'm saying naturally if men go a certain way and they succeed in that way women will follow So I think we mainly need to target young men while also promoting female influencers like ali beth stuckey who contradict the mainstream leftist narrative about self love and self care and self obsession, all that.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, before I go with the next question here, I want to hear your two questions. One is do you have a partner and what is dating like for conservative Zoomers of your generation?
Redeemed Zoomer: Yes, I have a fiancee. I'm getting married in a couple months. Congratulations. Thank you. And she is a based trad Calvinist, just like me, but unlike me, she's from Kansas.
I couldn't find. Any Christian girls where I was, I had to go over a thousand miles away to find her. I found her on an online Bible study that she started during COVID. So what it's dating like for Gen Z, it's a nightmare. I hit the jackpot. I'm weird. For most men, they can't find any girls at all, [00:32:00] let alone Christian girls.
They can't find any girls at all because hookup culture has just caused, you know, most women to have hookups with a bunch of. popular guys who will use them. So it's not good for men. It's not good for women either. Because most women can only find men who are total slobs, men who just want to use their bodies and will dump them like they're a piece of garbage who won't value them at all.
So yeah, dating is more of a nightmare for Gen Z than for any other generation. I think the only safe haven for dating is in the church. And that's why I was only able to really find a decent woman through the church, but of course not my church. I had to it was from a Presbyterian church over a thousand miles away, but still the church is a bit of a safe haven.
And I think that can be an evangelistic tactic. Because when people see that relationships are more stable in the Christian church, they will maybe see that Christianity helps stabilize society and there might be some truth to it. Of course, I don't think Christianity is true because it's useful. It's useful because it's true, but go on.
Malcolm Collins: Well, so I [00:33:00] make two notes here. One is, you know, from your fruits, you'll know them. I see a lot of influencers out there. When I look at these red pill adjacent people, they're never engaged. They're almost never married. When I look at the young Catholic influencers, like almost never married. So like clearly when he's saying you don't need to be this ultra masculine, whatever thing to, to secure a good partner.
I think you're showing like by your own win that that's true. But I was second question I had about your partner, because I was thinking, like, where are all the conservative, sane women I know, and they're all sort of autists, or on the spectrum? Is that your wife, or is that not?
Redeemed Zoomer: No, I mean, she does, she has very high IQ.
She's a classical musician, but she's relatively normal. I will say that you are right that most women who are, like, really conservative and active about it are, you know, Maybe a little bit on the spectrum, but not exclusively. I know, okay, get this for some reason, for whatever reason up until college, most of my friends were just female.
Now it's kind of 50 [00:34:00] 50. I know I have so many male friends who are like, there are no Christian girls. And I have so many female friends who are like, there are no Christian guys. Something isn't adding up mathematically. People just have to meet each other, and most of these ladies I'm friends with, or guys I'm friends with, are not like autistic or anything.
People are just anti social. They don't put themselves out there. They don't see any people at their own local church, and they just give up. It's like, for the secular world, there is no hope. But for Christians, if they put themselves out there enough, they can meet people. And I think the internet might be okay with that.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, I think I think you make a good point there. And I look at the sacrifices you made to find your partner dating someone 1000 miles away, you know whenever somebody's like, Oh, I don't have a part. I'm like, Are you doing your five days a week? And they're like, What a week? Like, I'm like, Yeah, it's hard.
You gotta be doing a lot. Another thing I wanted to ask for your generation, because I think this is the big thing that has switched between the generations. When I was growing up, but I mean, I think [00:35:00] perceptionally, it must be very different for you. When I was growing up you had the Christian, like, fuddy duddies, and then the secularists and the secularists were like, come join us, like we're having fun.
Like you can have sex whenever you want with whoever you want. You can do whatever you want and look at how much fun secular society is. And now, in your generation, They, I think it's very clear that the secular society is like breaking down and like having mental breakdowns every other day and like barely holding their lives together.
And just the draw of the other isn't as big anymore. I'm wondering, do you think that this will help you in terms of like your raising your kids? How are you thinking about as you raise your kids to keep them from falling?
Redeemed Zoomer: I think we need to give them atheism vaccines. So many times I've seen Christian parents try to shelter their kids so much and hide them away from society.
And the second they get the slightest bit of exposure to atheism and leftism, they go all in. So I am not planning to raise my kids in a [00:36:00] farm in rural Idaho. I'm a Yankee. I could never do farming anyway. I'm planning to live in a major city. I'm planning to let my kids see how much, Idiots. How much, how much of idiots secular people can be and have them know what it is from an early age.
And I'm not totally against public school either because a lot of people are like, oh, you have to send your kids to Christian schools. Most people associate school with the worst times of their lives. I don't want people to associate God with school. Ha! Fair point. I'm okay with people associating secular progressivism with school.
I'm okay with that. It's hard to survive public school as a Christian, but if you do, which I did, you'll be basically a Christian Navy Seal. Nothing will change. The most jaded people to Christianity, I I've ever met are people who are raised in like dumb evangelical schools where like the janitor is the science teacher and science classes watching.
God's not dead. Episode 57. If you're going to do Christianity, don't do low [00:37:00] IQ Christianity, but I think the worst thing you can do to keep kids in the faith is shelter them in low IQ, you know, fundamentalist Baptist Christianity. The best thing you can do is catechize them well and raise them in the faith, but also give them exposure to secularism from the time they're babies.
Oh,
Malcolm Collins: that's great. I, I, I completely agree with you. And it's something that we often talk about on the show is that one of the core ways that the progressive urban monoculture will peel out your kid is in the areas where you haven't built solid mimetic structures for them. The most common one they use here is gender and sexual identity stuff.
And that means that you need to teach them this stuff, Before the schools do and you need to teach them. It was outstrawment. Like if you teach it to them and you're like, all these people are evil. And then they meet one in this person doesn't feel evil to them immediately. You're like, Oh, maybe my parents were lying about that.
I'm open to hearing what you have to say. And this is why it's really important to not go with the, their evil mindset, but a, you know, they're trying to do what they think is right, but they fall in for the path and that. You know the, the, [00:38:00] the, this stuff isn't going to come looking evil. It's gonna come looking like a friend trying to help you.
And I think that you, you've done a very good job with, with how you'll handle that.
Redeemed Zoomer: They're not evil. They're not evil. I mean, we're all evil. They're not evil. They're just depressed. I've never seen a mentally stable trans person. They don't exist. What, I was a leftist. I was fully supportive of all this LGBT nonsense.
What convinced me was I kept seeing young women who were perfectly happy and healthy, much more happy and healthy than me, perfectly happy and healthy, develop some LGBT identity, usually like the first stage is bisexual, and then they move from bisexual to she slash they, then to they them, and then their lives would completely fall apart, they would attempt self harm, they would go to the mental institution, and then they would just die.
They would look different. They would make themselves look ugly on purpose. So it doesn't take a genius to sense that something is wrong with this LGBT movement. I've actually made memes about the stages of an Emily. It's like she starts off being a happy, [00:39:00] healthy girl, then she gets into left wing activism, then she becomes bisexual, then she attempts self harm, then she's a she slash they, and then she runs away from home and hates her parents who did nothing but love her.
Malcolm Collins: Did you know that 89 percent of trans people regularly think about and that around 40 to 50 percent depending on the study you're looking about have tried.
Redeemed Zoomer: So if you want to love your neighbor, if you want to love your trans neighbor, you got, you have to help them with this. It's clearly not healthy.
The vast majority of them, I think every single one of them has severe mental issues. It's not good for them.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and we're not going to, we're going to do a future episode on this, but this is something that I'd note is there are other solutions to this. For example, there was a study that showed that anti psychotics remove feelings of gender dysphoria.
So, you know, it's, it's more just that we're not allowed to say that there are other potential solutions that don't lead to a 40 percent unaliving themselves rate. And I will say that. For me on this topic, very similar to you, I used to be totally open to it, and the core thing that has moved me [00:40:00] progressively against it is knowing trans people over time, where at first, I was like, this seems to be working for them, everything is good, and then over time, I'm just like, of the ones I know, I'm like, ooh, this did not work out as well.
It was the same with polyamory, I used to be like, much more pro polyamory. But then now knowing lots of polyamorous couples over time, there are very, very few that have worked out that I've seen when contrasted with the monogamous couples, I know but yeah, any final question, Simone?
Simone Collins: Yeah, I wanted to ask.
I mean, you mentioned that Gen Z is not doing so well by most measures. Sometimes I get the intuition that Gen Alpha. Is starting to turn around like Gen Alpha is taking a hard conservative turn in many ways because they're seeing Gen Z crash and burn. They're seeing how miserable millennials are.
They're seeing that a lot of the stuff that boomers preached is like ruining the world. Are you seeing that? And do you think that this is a matter of like a groundswell from Gen Alpha really fueling the Reconquista? Or do you think [00:41:00] it's more just that in the end, kind of similar to perinatalism, this isn't about winning everyone over.
It's about. A very small number of people in the end, ultimately inheriting the future because they're the ones that just show up. What, which way is it going to go?
Redeemed Zoomer: That's a good question, Simone. I agree that even if we get a bunch of numbers, it won't matter if they're not elite and in the institutions.
But it is true that we are seeing an even stronger reaction in Gen Alpha. You know, many times I'll get messages. From people saying like, oh your videos converted me to christianity. Thank you so much. And i'm like, i'm like, oh great do you need help finding a church? They're like, oh, I can't go to church Why because i'm 13 and my parents won't let me and i'm like seriously And I in my discord server, you know I, I interact with a lot of Gen Alpha people.
That's why I know all the Gen Alpha memes and stuff. There are so many Gen Alpha people who want to be Christians. Unfortunately, it's often Eastern Orthodox, but still, it's good there for a lot of Gen Alpha people who want to be Christians and their liberal millennial parents won't let them. So it's like the first case I've seen where it's, [00:42:00] Frequent that young people are more conservative and right wing than their parents So for all the gen alpha people watching I have skibbity ohio riz
Malcolm Collins: Skibbity ohio riz.
I love that you're gonna be old too. You have no idea. I wonder I already am
Redeemed Zoomer: old. I'm, I'm, I'm the next generation on the chopping block.
Malcolm Collins: Right? Well, it has been great to have you on. I really hope our fans who are watchers, I mean, maybe who knows how many hot watchers, we get like 96 percent of votes.
I don't think we get that many hate watchers, but I imagine that we do like in my head. I always expect half our watchers are hate watchers, but anyway, go check out his channel. Go check out the Reconquista movement. I think it's a really important movement. And it's something that I, before this video, I had not thought about trying to get involved in any traditional churches.
And now I'm like, maybe it's worth the effort.
Redeemed Zoomer: I have a map of 2 million people see the map. You can find traditional churches all over the country. If you're in America, you can find a traditional church. [00:43:00]
Malcolm Collins: Can you send me the the map? No, and I, I should note that our theology is pretty weird, but it's less weird than like women preachers.
You know, I, I, I, I, I, our theology is off the rails, but then when I consider what's taking over these churches, I'm like, well, that's even more off the rails than us. So, you know.
Redeemed Zoomer: Cool. I sent the map in the private chat.
Malcolm Collins: All right. I'll put it in the description here for, for viewers. We'll have an absolutely spectacular day.
And please have lots of kids.
Redeemed Zoomer: Great.
Redeemed Zoomer: Is it Worth Trying to Save the Mainline Churches Anymore?