Daniel Craig: I got married last year, and the day before I got married, the Supreme Court said that what I was about to do the next day wasn't exactly what God intended. They said, "Actually, what God intended... What you read in the Bible and that's kind of old school. That's not how we're gonna define marriage anymore." I'm married in a brave new world, if you will. This is not your grandma's America. And I sometimes... I'm 27 and I'm thinking to myself, "How did we get here? And what is the outlook for my family, my generation, and my kids?"
Kevin Swanson: I think a lot of people are asking, "What in the world happened to the Western world?" This is not 1950's America, this is not the 1880's anymore. This is the 21st century and something happened. I think everybody wants to know what happened, don't you think?
Daniel Craig: And that's the question you try to address in this book, Apostate: The Men who Destroyed the Christian West.
Kevin Swanson: This is the story. I tell the story. I think everybody wants to know the story. How in the world did we lose the influence of Christian culture in the Western world? To the point where 6,000 years of God's ordinance of marriage reversed by a Supreme Court decision just last year, incredible, incredible. Our religious liberties now being attacked. Christians who once did just fine attending churches for 300 years in this nation's history will have a hard time in the future. Christian businesses, Christian lawyers, Christian accountants, Christian pastors, Christian evangelists, and these people may be in prison, but why?
Isaac Botkin: How did it happen?
Kevin Swanson: And it's really an incredible story of how the Western world turned away from God and turned towards humanism.
Isaac Botkin: It was not that many people that pushed that envelope.
Kevin Swanson: That's right, that's right. It was a very select few of very intellectual, very important, very influential people that did this on a philosophical level, on a literary level, and then eventually they worked it out in the mass culture. And I traced the roots of this entire thing over the last 300, 400 years in the book Apostate.
Daniel Craig: The men who destroyed the Christian West, who are they? "The Bible is a compendium of blood drenched history, a wealth of obscenity and upwards of 1,000 lies." Who said that?
Kevin Swanson: Mark Twain.
Daniel Craig: No.
Kevin Swanson: Yeah.
Daniel Craig: Huck Finn?
Kevin Swanson: Yeah.
Isaac Botkin: Tom Sawyer? Frog jumping?
Kevin Swanson: Yeah. Mark Twain said that, Mark Twain. And everybody said, "Well, he's like America. He's Chevrolet apple pie." And Mark Twain, he's always saying...
Daniel Craig: They didn't have Chevrolets back then.
Kevin Swanson: They didn't have Chevrolets back then, but Mark Twain is one of the best loved authors of all time. In fact, the most influential American author of all time.
Isaac Botkin: And most American conservatives today would be like, "Those were the good old days. Mark Twain days."
Kevin Swanson: Yeah. But he was planting the seeds. He was planting a lot of seeds of the destruction of the Christian faith in the Western world. Now those are fighting words, but man, if we're not engaged in this battle now, we'll never engage the battle of the world views.