Tucker Carlson interviews his lifelong friend Rev Billy Cerveny on faith, spiritual warfare, marriage, addiction, and the dangers of hallucinogens
Tucker Carlson speaks with his close friend of nearly 40 years, the Reverend Billy Cerveny, an Episcopal priest and son of a bishop.
Summary
Tucker Carlson sits down with Rev. Billy Cerveny, a longtime friend and Episcopal priest, for a wide-ranging conversation about faith, spiritual warfare, fatherhood, male friendship, marriage, addiction, and the supernatural. Cerveny describes his unlikely path to the priesthood — through journalism, the music business, and a pivotal spiritual awakening in a converted greenhouse apartment in Atlanta — and reflects on following in the footsteps of his late father, a bishop of Florida. The conversation includes an extended reflection on the father-son relationship and the deep human need for a father's blessing, drawing on the biblical story of Jacob wrestling the angel of the Lord as a picture of the heart's longing to be affirmed. Cerveny and Carlson also reflect on their nearly 40-year friendship with a close group of men, arguing that covenant male friendship is one of the most undervalued spiritual disciplines and a foundation for healthy marriages and fatherhood.
The conversation covers the practical manifestations of spiritual warfare in everyday life, including the assault on marriage, the pervasiveness of pornography, and the destruction wrought by addiction, with Cerveny arguing that Satan's most effective tool is isolation and shame. He makes a pointed theological case that transgenderism represents a direct attack on God's design as described in Genesis, while insisting that individuals struggling with gender confusion deserve compassion rather than argument. The conversation closes with Cerveny issuing a strong warning against the use of hallucinogens such as DMT and ibogaine, arguing that these substances do not produce imaginary experiences but rather open users to genuine and dangerous encounters with the demonic realm.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Billy Cerveny's unlikely path to the priesthood
Tucker Carlson: We've been close friends for almost 40 years — 39 years since the mid-'80s. And I would say I didn't imagine you as a priest.
Rev Billy Cerveny: That makes two of us.
Tucker Carlson: Then about a month ago, you godfathered one of my children. You performed the wedding ceremony for that child. One of the great moments of my life. How did you get here? I don't really know anybody who's had more jobs or more varied visions. I thought you were going to be a philosopher, a country music star.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Well, brother, if you had told me when we met and we first started hanging out that I'd end up doing what I'm doing now, I'd have told you you got hit in the head.
Tucker Carlson: I'm aware of that.
Rev Billy Cerveny: But God has a sense of humor and a profound sense of irony.
Tucker Carlson: Profound sense of irony.
Rev Billy Cerveny: It's true, though. And it's a picture of his grace. I spent a lot of my years as a journalist, and most of my professional life in the music business. I was living in Atlanta years ago when I just started playing music. You remember those years? I was living in this sort of converted greenhouse — a 400 square foot apartment where the floor was still slanted to where they'd water the plants and the water would still run out. I had just gone into the music business. I had given up a lot to do it. And I was not in a good place, really asking a lot of questions like, "God, what is this? Who am I? What is this supposed to be?"
I remember that room became a monastery in my life. God sort of grabbed me by the throat, as I like to say, and just kind of peeled back the curtain and began to reveal things to me about who he was and who Jesus was — things I had heard my whole life, but they just never made sense. I mean, I grew up in the church. My father was a priest.
Tucker Carlson: He was a bishop. He was a bishop of Florida.
Rev Billy Cerveny: And it's like walking around your parents' house and you see fine pieces of furniture that you just walk by so many times you don't notice them anymore. That's kind of what faith became to me as a young person — at least the language of faith. Words like grace and forgiveness. I had just heard it so much I couldn't understand the implications of them until I went off to college. And that's where we met. And those were the prodigal years, man.
Tucker Carlson: Fair. Very fair. The prodigal was a wimp — we really went for it.
Rev Billy Cerveny: We really did. But God was faithful through all that time — through the journalism and back up to Atlanta. I remember living in that apartment and falling on my knees and just saying, "Lord, either you are who you say you are, or this is the biggest lie perpetrated on humanity, and I'm going to go with you are who you say you are." And he began to teach me the truth of forgiveness and the truth of grace — what it meant to walk in Jesus, what it meant to be saved, what it meant to have a relationship with him, and to have a soul that was worth far more than trying to satisfy it with success in music or success in whatever field it was.
I remember sitting there thinking to myself, "God, you're this good? Are you this good?" And just feeling him in my heart nodding silently. And I knew in that moment my life was different. I didn't know what it was going to look like. When I moved to Nashville, I played music for a bunch of years after that. But during that time the Lord just kept taking me deeper and deeper. I started getting involved, using the music to go into ministry. I did a lot of work with a ministry called Young Life. I did a lot of summers talking to kids about the gospel. During that time I met my wife out in Colorado, and it was obviously a life-changing experience. She's wonderful. And we began asking the question, "What does God have for us? Where is he taking us?" The concept of seminary for me — I mean, as I said, you knew me — that was completely not in the cards.
Tucker Carlson: No. And the context is even bigger from an outside point of view. You are the son of a great man, a well-known man, a big figure. I was at his funeral this winter and it was a packed cathedral. A guy who's a big, big man. You look exactly like your dad, which is also kind of weird.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I hear that.
Tucker Carlson: And now you are dressed exactly like him. So it's like — that's kind of a — I don't know, it's weird to be the son of someone like that and not think you're going to wind up being that thing.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Yeah. He was a great man. But that is part of it — to grow up in that and to watch my dad. He was a bishop, so I'd watch my dad process wearing a miter and all that, but he was just my dad. People say, "What was it like growing up under that?" I don't know. I didn't know any different. But I do know that spiritually, as I grew, my father — like any son, the cobbler's son has no shoes, right? You think you'll figure it out on your own and you leave. But as I do what I do now and I look back, I'm humbled by the life he lived and the wisdom he had. I love my dad. As you mentioned, he died a number of months ago, and I have such tremendous respect for what he went through. Now that I'm in ministry, I look back and I'm like, "How did you do it? How did you pull this off? How did you hold a family together? How did you sit in the chair that you sat in and lead a church in the way that you led a church with all the things pulling on you?" When you have an adult perspective, it brings a lot of humility.
Tucker Carlson: Have you retroactively assessed your childhood and said, "Oh, I wish I'd been more grateful"?
Rev Billy Cerveny: My father was an Episcopal bishop and the Episcopal church is very eclectic. My house was this revolving door of different people. One weekend we'd have a monk come stay at our house, another week we'd have some high church bells-and-smells Anglican, another week we'd have some charismatics praying in tongues on our floor. I remember getting older and becoming a little self-aware and asking, "What are we, man? What is this?" But it was this beautiful picture in hindsight of the family of God and just how diverse it was and how many expressions there were. That was an invaluable experience. My dad loved people very well in that way. He led people very well.
There are many times in my life I would be somewhere and introduce myself to someone, and it was not uncommon for someone to come to me and say, "Your last name is Cerveny?" — and they'd pull me aside and tell me something my dad had done for them. I'd be in some random state. And my mother, who was a partner in ministry with him, is an exceptional woman.
Tucker Carlson: Exceptional. One of the rare people in the world.
Rev Billy Cerveny: This is true. And that really impacted me — thinking from my own lens that we want to live lives that are impactful. We don't want to just accumulate. We don't want to just try to attain whatever mental picture of success is. What does it mean to leave an impact where you leave a place or a person and say, "Hey, these people are impacted with the gospel"? My dad did that for sure.
Tucker Carlson: How would you ever wake up and put on your collar and think, "Wow, I've become my dad"? I mean, you literally have.
Rev Billy Cerveny: There are a lot of times where it's surreal. I think being a priest — I think he probably had the same experience — there's never a moment where you're not struck by the irony of it. You put your collar on and you think to yourself, "Lord, you really are calling me to do this, because I know me. I know the way I am. I know the internal realities for me. I know where I've been." But that's, much like my dad, I think that was very much in front of him most of his life too. He would always say that what he did and where he was was just a poster of God's grace. He was a poster child for God's grace. And I never fully understood that until now, as an adult, as a minister. I'm thinking to myself, "I absolutely get it. It's a picture of grace."
Tucker Carlson: It's got to be one of life's greatest blessings to really come to understand your own father. That's something that most men never get.
Rev Billy Cerveny: It's true. That's something all men carry — the relationship with their dads. Who was this man who was the center of my world, this reference point? We all grow up looking at our dads as superheroes, guys that wear a kind of red cape. And then there's this moment that you catch up with them and you see their humanity. You look at your dad and you see, "Oh, you're this paradox of greatness and brokenness." The coin dropped for me when my dad began to be able to share — "These were the struggles of my life. This is where it was hard. This is where God met me." He just owned his humanity in open ways, directly to me.
Tucker Carlson: That's pretty wonderful. It's a rare experience.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Very rare. As a father, when you have children — especially when you have a son — looking at your son is like staring in a mirror. There are moments where they look at you and you realize, "Oh, they're looking at me asking me what it means to be a man." And you have these moments of existential horror where you're like, "I'm not sure I know myself." Most of us do our best imitation of what we think manhood looks like. And then we come to this place where our job as parents is not to create this picture where our children have to duplicate your version of manhood. The best thing we can show them is, "Hey, this is my version of manhood. This is where I've screwed it up. This is where I've erased it. This is a picture of God's grace." My job as a dad is not to show my son what it means to be a perfect man. It is to show him what it means to be an imperfect man in relationship with a God of grace — to walk in ways that are hopefully noble and honorable and that reflect the goodness of God, but also to reflect the humility of someone who knows what it means to need a savior. Let me show you where God has stepped in and moved in my life. This is where I've blown it and this is where I've done okay. But at the end of the day, we all fall on the mercy of God. And I think that is a gift we can give our children, in the same way my dad gave to me towards the end of his life.
The father-son relationship and the need for blessing
Tucker Carlson: I think it's the heaviest, most complex relationship in any man's life — with his own father.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I don't think anything comes close. We always talk about how difficult it is for men and women to understand each other because they think so differently and express themselves so differently — the great joy and frustration of marriage. But I don't think it compares to the father-and-son relationship. That is hard and poignant. As men, we have these core longings that God hardwired into our hearts. One of them is to be part of something that's a story bigger than me. Another is to be in relationship with other men, to feel known or seen and loved. But one of them, foundationally, is this idea that we were created to receive the blessing of a father.
You read the story of Jacob and Esau — where Jacob steals the blessing from his brother — and the whole picture of his life is him going on this journey trying to satisfy a heart that has been denied the blessing of his father, who showed preference to his older brother. Jacob had stolen the blessing meant for his brother and it ended up poisoning his life. He goes and amasses wealth, gets wives, comes back. And there's that famous scene in Genesis where he's sitting in the woods and the angel of the Lord comes out and he begins to wrestle the angel of the Lord. They go at it, and Jacob pins him, and the angel reaches out and dislocates his hip with just the touch of the thigh. In that moment he realizes he's not wrestling a person. But rather than giving up, he says, "I'm not going to let you go until you bless me." To paraphrase: "I would rather be torn limb from limb than to go from this moment without the blessing of a father." And that's where he changes his name to Israel. It's a picture of our hearts — we need that in a way that is foundational.
The problem and the rub is that I'm an imperfect man. I can't provide that blessing in the full way. But part of the way we do bless our children is that we encounter them as adults and, as they get older, we begin to show them the realities of our humanity and we point them towards Jesus. And that becomes a profound gift to our kids as they encounter the blessing of God the Father.
Tucker Carlson: I know that approval is just part of a blessing, but it's the part that people understand immediately. The approval of your dad — "Good job, son."
Rev Billy Cerveny: Oh yeah. That's like everything.
Tucker Carlson: "Well done, good and faithful servant."
Rev Billy Cerveny: Amen.
What is spiritual warfare and how does it manifest?
Tucker Carlson: Speaking of wrestling — there's a phrase you hear a lot now that you never used to hear until about six or seven years ago, and that's "spiritual war." The famous Ephesians quote: "We fight not against flesh and blood, but against principalities." What is that, and what are its manifestations?
Rev Billy Cerveny: That's a small question. We live on this side of a curtain. We live in this temporal world — you and me, the rooms we're in. We all think of ourselves as spiritual beings. But we were fashioned by God as spiritual beings to be in relationship with him. And there really is this curtain behind which there is an entire unseen realm — God and the host of angels and all that. Much like here, it's a world that is in rebellion as well. The irony is that the world we experience now was never meant to be separated from that. When God created all things, he created heaven and earth to overlap. He wanted to walk with Adam during the cool of the day. He wanted his imagebearers to be in relationship with God in a very tangible way. But because of sin and the brokenness of the world, there's this separation that occurred. And there really is a spiritual battle, as you quoted.
Tucker Carlson: Wait — you said behind the veil, behind the curtain, the things we can't see, the unseen realm is God and angels. But it's not a civil war. There's turmoil there. It's war, right?
Rev Billy Cerveny: That's what scripture describes. So who is the war between? God — the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the creator — he spoke all things into being. He also created a heavenly host. And you read that story in Genesis with the serpent in the garden. Genesis was where heaven and earth overlapped and man walked with God. But you see the beginning of a divine rebellion there. You see this mysterious serpent figure — which we later learn is this Satan figure — and he rebels against God because he's prideful. He wants to be equal with God. And if he's going to attack God, if he wants to unravel God, what's the first thing he's going to do? He's going to attack his plan. He's going to attack his imagebearers.
And that plan that you see hatched in Genesis 3 is still the plan that's happening now. Our war is not against flesh and blood, but against these principalities and powers. He's a deceiver. Satan and his henchmen — his demons and the demonic forces — it's very real.
Marriage under spiritual attack
Tucker Carlson: We're the same age — we're in the same college class. I didn't grow up in a world where any of that was considered real at all. I thought God was real, but I didn't think there were actually evil forces floating around, unseen, impelling people toward self-destruction. I just didn't believe that. Now it's like the most obvious thing ever.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I think it's obvious to everyone. There's the old quote: the greatest trick the devil played is to convince humanity that he doesn't exist. And I think that's part of it — especially in America, we live in such a binary, materialist culture where we don't think in terms of that generally speaking.
Tucker Carlson: What are the manifestations of it?
Rev Billy Cerveny: You can see it on a large scale. You see it in the destruction of marriages. You see it in pornography. You see it in addictions. I find that I see those kinds of attacks happen most egregiously in the areas that God values most. So if you want to know what God loves the most, watch what Satan attacks the most aggressively. And what does God love the most? You look at the creation story and all those things God set in motion in the beginning — marriage, ideas of masculinity and gender, the role of humanity in the world, us being God's imagebearers to create a kingdom that reflected his glory.
Let me just go through the list. Marriage — that's part of his creation mandate. "Be fruitful and multiply." When you read the story of God creating man, he creates Adam out of the earth, he empowers him, he brings all the animals in front of him. After each creation day, you hear God say, "It is good. It is good. It is good." And the only thing in the creation story that God says wasn't good was man's aloneness. He says, "It is not good that man be alone." So he brings all these animals and there was not a helper that was suitable for him. Then he puts Adam to sleep, pulls the rib, and makes Eve. And you hear the first song ever written in creation — anytime you read the Old Testament and the text is indented, it's either poetry or a song. And the first words out of Adam's mouth were, "Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh." He was smitten.
Marriage was not a human invention. I say that at every ceremony as part of our liturgy. It wasn't a human invention — it was God's idea. It's something honored across cultures, Christian or not. It's the seed from which so much goodness flows — children, a missional relationship into the world where you love others. God loves the idea so much that the marriage image is used throughout scripture. Even when the new heavens and the earth come together and the end is consummated, he describes it as a wedding banquet. He talks about marriage as a picture of Christ's relationship with the church — the way husbands are to love their wives the way Jesus loved the church, and wives to respect their husbands. To say that's something God values would be one of the vast understatements of the decade. And that is why I think Satan attacks it so viciously.
Tucker Carlson: So you see it constantly because you're a priest — you give sermons, do the Eucharist, but you also pastor your congregants and talk to them a lot. In general terms, how is marriage under assault?
Rev Billy Cerveny: Marriage is hard to begin with because you have two fallen people coming together and making all kinds of demands on each other. But marriage is under assault in the idea that just the notion of marriage itself is under assault. People aren't even getting married. The divorce rates are off the chain. And then just the idea of what marriage is — I don't think people see it in light of the larger story we were just discussing.
But on a more personal level, when you talk to people who desperately want their marriages to work, to be happy, to continue, but they're struggling — the most nefarious way Satan attacks us is when he seeks to deceive us. And the most nefarious way he does that is when he whispers in our ear in our own voice. He whispers to us and it stokes the embers of selfishness and pride. As Tim Keller so famously said, if you want to know what your biggest problem in your marriage is, it's selfishness. It's always going to be that. It's this journey of two self-oriented people learning what it means to die to self.
Spiritual attack in marriage looks like selfishness and pride. That can bubble up in a lot of ways — through adultery, through people having secret lives or pornography addictions, or just people losing sight of each other. It's so easy. You have kids, you've lived a life — how difficult it is in marriage to stay connected. People can stop talking.
Tucker Carlson: I don't know how people do it. Once kids leave, you're like, "I don't know how we managed to stay married." No matter how much you love the person, you don't have time to talk.
Rev Billy Cerveny: It's a challenge, man. It is a discipline. One of the more common things when people come in for marriage counseling — inevitably one of the things they'll say is, "We just have a hard marriage." And I'll sit and listen and say, "Dude, you just got a marriage." It's two fallen people learning what it means to love you and pursue you and lay down my life for you and love you more than I love myself. As it says in Ephesians 5, husbands, love your wives like Christ loved the church. How did Christ love the church? It wasn't by clinging to his authority and hammering his points home. It was really laying his life down. And it's a great picture of what love and marriage is. One thing it's not is fair. If you want fairness, go get a business partner. But if you want to love someone in marriage, the question is: when I feel wronged or hurt or unseen — what the world would tell me is I have every right to not love you anymore until I get what's mine — but the Christian call to marriage, especially for husbands, is no. You play hurt and you continue to love and you move forward and you still wash feet and you still love your wife. That's the call. It's a call to lay your life down.
It's ironic talking about marriage in any authoritative way because it's a topic — like prayer — that you riff on but never really feel like you have a handle on. I've never had any problem with humility having three daughters. But you never feel like you can wrap your arms around it fully because it is a mystery and it constantly requires humility. And I think the profound gift of marriage is that it is the crucible with which God transforms your lives, if you let it. And ironically, it is those moments of brokenness and restoration where the most profound transformations tend to happen.
Tucker Carlson: Of course, it's the crappy things you're grateful for. I've seen marriages shattered by adultery that, because of the willingness and humility of the two people to invite God into the middle of it, have emerged with marriages they'd only dreamed they could have.
Rev Billy Cerveny: No question. And they would both sincerely say, "I'm happier in my marriage than I've ever been." God works all things together for the good of those who love him. And if you let him — I don't want to sugarcoat it, it's brutal, and I would never suggest that as a journey anyone wants to go on. But for those that I've seen marriages heal in ways you couldn't imagine from such egregious pain — and I've also seen marriages disintegrate for far less because people aren't willing to walk in with humility and look at themselves. They're just too busy pointing at the other person.
Pornography and its damage to marriage and sexuality
Tucker Carlson: You mentioned pornography as a threat to marriage. It's one of those things I think we're maybe 10 years too old to really understand the magnitude of. How often does pornography arise in marriage counseling as a huge problem?
Rev Billy Cerveny: It's hard to overstate how pervasive it is now. If I meet with a man — take marriage counseling out of it, just men in general — I assume that's in the mix until proven otherwise. And that's not an indictment, but it's so pervasive. I'm safer to assume that's part of the narrative than that it's not. We walk around with these little Apple porn boxes in our hands. Could you imagine being a teenage boy growing up where the greatest temptation in your life is literally three button clicks away at any moment? What that's doing to the hearts and minds of young men. What it's doing to their concept of marriage and sexuality. We're Gen X — you and I came along and if you wanted to do something, you had to work for it. It is literally force-fed to these young men.
Tucker Carlson: But you're only telling one half of the story. The other half is Tim Cook's a billionaire. So there has been a big upside to this.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Yeah. If you're Tim Cook. It's crazy we haven't had a revolution. I pray it's coming, but I don't think that will ever happen apart from revival.
Tucker Carlson: I think that's right.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Going back to what is spiritual warfare and how does it play out on practical levels — I think that's a profound evil. The earlier you can damage someone sexually, just think about what that does.
Tucker Carlson: You get stuck in patterns. Men do anyway. In human sexuality, it's malleable.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Right. Our sexuality as we live it out — our gender is assigned and it's obviously a God-breathed, holy call. When we talk about things like pornography and the abuses of pornography, it's really easy to get your wheels caught in this sort of dark melancholy aspect of it. But you've got to flip it over and first see the glory of what God designed when he created human sexuality — when he called people and created man and women to be sexual beings together. It's a glorious, beautiful thing. People often criticize Christians as saying, "You have such a low view of sexuality." I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. We have such a higher view of sexuality than the world. It's a fire that just needs to be kept in the fireplace.
Tucker Carlson: It's not a consumer product.
Rev Billy Cerveny: No, it's not a consumer product. It's not an adult playground. It has profound spiritual impacts for us if we cut against the grain of how God designed us. So when we talk about how spiritual warfare plays out in our world at a practical, boots-on-the-ground level — that's a perfect example. The assault on what God values — marriage and human sexuality — because if you can twist that, it will turn us fully inward. We become full-blown consumers. We become slaves to appetites. And going back to the beautiful thing you see — when the Lord heals in that place, you see just the power of redemption. Watching men and women be restored and feel like they're washed clean, that they're not objects of shame — it's a beautiful thing that God has blessed me to be a part of.
Tucker Carlson: Internet pornography was sold to us — and I kind of remember this — as the end of rape and sexual assault because there's a healthy outlet for sexuality in the form of pornography. People said that. I remember when they said that.
Rev Billy Cerveny: That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Tucker Carlson: The internet would make us free and inform us, when actually people don't even read anymore and we're surveilled constantly. We're going to put this fire out by pouring gasoline on it.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I totally agree. Fast forward 35 years — what damage does it do? In simple terms: one, it twists your view of sexuality and it twists your view of your spouse. People say, "Oh, it's the objectification of women," and they say that all the time, but it truly does do that. Women's sexuality is very different than a man's. It doesn't mean it's less important for them. God fashioned it differently. And that's another cliché people say — "Oh, sex just means more for a man than it does for a woman." Actually, that's not true. It's not more important for a man than it is for a woman. Men just go about it differently. And for a man to understand the value of it from a woman's perspective requires us to slow down and have that conversation and listen in a way that we aren't naturally wired to do.
Tucker Carlson: My father always said that. Slow down.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Your dad was a wise man. So the first thing pornography does is it twists that — it presents women as caricatures of male sexuality, and I think that does a tremendous amount of damage. Two, it pushes men into isolation. Pornography addictions or hidden sexuality — these are things men don't do out in the open. They do it in secret, in private, and they don't tell anybody about it. And the number one tool that Satan uses is isolation. He will push men into the shadows because that's where shame can grow unfettered. That's where people feel more broken and become more broken and become more perverse, which makes them feel more shame, and it's this vicious feedback loop. It always starts with, "Oh, I can handle this," and before they know it, it becomes a consuming thing in their lives.
And what is marriage designed to be? You read Genesis chapter 2. Right after "bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh," it says they were naked and unashamed. They stood before each other. That's about sex, but it's also about a spiritual heart posture — all that I am, seen and unseen, I am here before you. And pornography goes to war with that and pushes men into the shadows. Women, too, by the way. This is certainly more dominated by men, but it's very real for women as well.
Tucker Carlson: It screws up your sex life, doesn't it?
Rev Billy Cerveny: It does. And our human sexuality, our sex drives — they're malleable. If you marinate in those kinds of perversions, it will take you places you don't want to go.
Tucker Carlson: My father, when I was little, said — this is so over the top, but I remember it. It was my favorite line ever. I never say it because it's so over the top. We were driving in the car, and something about pornography came up. He goes, "Yeah, it's a really bad idea. It makes you perverse." And he said, "Your sexuality is like a grain of wood. If you take your fingernail and run it along a wooden kitchen table, it gets deeper with every pass." And he said, "If you get into that — " my father was very pro-sex, but he goes, "It's a dark road, and it gets weirder and weirder and weirder, and the next thing you know, you can't get it up unless you're wearing a chicken costume." That's what he said. I have no idea what that means, but it stayed with me for 45 years.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I knew your dad. I believe that 100%. Your dad was awesome.
Tucker Carlson: That's the kind of what you're talking about. It takes you places. It's the law of diminishing returns. You need this amount of heroin to begin with, and before you know it, you've quadrupled the dose. It's all about the dopamine hit. Our sexuality is no different — when it's taken out of context, when it's used in a way that God did not intend it.
Rev Billy Cerveny: God's design for it is not to be prudish and to keep you from having a good time. It's the idea of how can this flourish and become something that is life-producing, that breeds intimacy between a man and a woman, that breeds connection, that breeds a sense of wonder and awe and beauty. That was his design for it. And when you step out of that boat, it does the opposite of all that.
If there's one thing I could tell young people, it's protect that with all that you are, because the world is lying to you. It's lying to you about the frivolous — "Oh, it's no big deal." No, it is a big deal. It has profound spiritual implications. It can take you places where one day you wake up and say, "I don't want to be here and I don't know how to get back."
There is good news, though. I've seen this over and over again — you're not damaged goods. God uses the broken things of this world. The places I've been, the places you've been, the things we've done in our lives — God is all about the prodigals. There's no one that is beyond redemption and healing. God loves to restore that because God loves that. It ain't fun, it's not a place you want to go, but if that's where you are and that's what you've done, it's okay. There's a God of grace. That's the reason Jesus came — because we misuse our sexualities, because we're bathed in our own shame, because we make bad decisions, because we're so committed to our own self-destruction. That's why he calls himself a savior and not a self-help guru. I need someone to reach down and pull me up and save me from me.
On a theological level, he saves me from sin and washes me clean and my standing before God — all of those things which are deep and profound and eternal and worthy of reflection for thousands of years. But when you boil it down, he really came to save me from me. From my own devices and where I would go. Think of the number of things that God has saved you from that you're not even aware of.
Tucker Carlson: There's a long list of things I am aware of.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Right. But think about how dramatic the list is that he saved you from that you didn't even get to see. Even the way he's restrained your own appetites in those places that you didn't even know. So yeah, going back to your question — pornography is evil and it's done so much damage. And as you said, I think there's going to be a revolution against it, but I don't think that's ever going to happen until we have an actual revival. We've lost the plot. And when you lose the plot in sexuality, you lose the plot of the gospel story, the creation story. Your story just kind of becomes about your narrative of "my sex life," and it becomes a very dangerous thing. But when you read it in light of what we're talking about — the Genesis story and God's creative intention — all of a sudden you become invited into this larger epic tale that becomes about something so much more. Your soul is of so much more immense value than you ever imagined. To be a part of something so much more incredible than anything you could ever cobble together on your own — why wouldn't you want that?
Gender, Genesis, and God's design
Tucker Carlson: You're the person who put the gender stuff in context for me when this first happened — people questioning whether gender is real, whether sex distinctions are real. This has been going on for 70 years. Of course, it's the core premise of second-wave feminism that there's really no difference between the sexes. But then it became much more radical maybe 10 years ago. Doesn't it strike you that even in every context — secular or in church — when people argue there are no gender distinctions, you can make theological arguments, biblical arguments, whatever, but simply saying that before 70 years ago literally no one agreed with this position — in all human history — doesn't that make you want to pump the brakes a little bit?
Rev Billy Cerveny: When you read the Genesis narrative, God creates the heaven and the earth, and you have this picture of chaos, and God's spirit hovers over the water. The Hebrew — the hovering is almost like a mother bird's wings hovering over the chaos. And he begins to speak things into order. Day one, he creates light. As it grows, he separates the land from the waters, throws the stars in the sky, shoots fish in the sea, the animals come. And each time you see each creative day, what you're watching is it grows in glory. It grows in complexity. And each time God says, "It is good." And then you get to day six where God creates humanity, and it's this crowning explosion of creation — the largest expression of his glory. The crown jewel of creation was the last thing created, and that was woman. That is the final, most glorious creation.
Tucker Carlson: That's certainly how I feel.
Rev Billy Cerveny: And that's the way the story needs to be read. Side note — women always, and I have sympathy for it, there's much the church needs to apologize for in the ways they've hurt women in the past. But I can tell you as a Bible nerd that is the fault of man and not of God, because the biblical story elevates women in a way that the world never would.
So in this crown jewel of creation with humanity, God could have expressed it in any way, and he created man and he created woman. They are — he created masculinity and he created femininity. This is not a human construct. It is not a social construct. Of course there are things that cultures and cultural moments can shape in the way those are expressed, but generally speaking, masculinity as we understand it is not just "oh, you're a dude" — it's a holy calling. It's a holy calling. And as God says, you are his imagebearer in this world. And women are his imagebearers. They come together to create this fuller image of what God is, to be expressed and rolled out into the world. It would behoove us to understand: what is this thing called masculinity that I've been called to? What is femininity that I have been called to?
And to your point — you cannot make a biblical argument against what I just said. You just can't read scripture in any intellectually honest way and not see that that's just the way it is. And also experientially, it's just true.
Tucker Carlson: I know it's true experientially. Because God also doles out punishments for eating the fruit. He says to Adam, "You're going to live by the sweat of your brow. It's going to be hard for you to make a living. You've got to work." Thorns and thistles, futility. And he says to Eve two things: one, childbirth is going to be hard for you, and two, your desire is going to be for your husband, and he's going to rule over you. And those are the things that men and women resent. Men need to work, they derive satisfaction and self-respect from work, but they also hate to work because it's hard. Women, of course, most women love children, but they fear childbirth, and that is suffering.
Rev Billy Cerveny: When we lose the plot, but when we step back into the story — when we encounter God in a real way through the gate of Jesus — we go through and begin to see the redemptive story. When we see the creation story and the creation purpose like we just described, you realize, "Wait, this is a holy calling." What was God calling Adam to? Work didn't happen after the fall. God's purpose was work for Adam. He said, "I want you to exercise dominion." What he was saying is not just "I'm putting you in charge." What he was saying is, "I'm giving you a job. I want you to take what is in Eden and take it all around the rest of the world. I want you to turn the world into this. I want you to drag the realities of this out and create — go be ruthlessly human in relationship with God. Go create cities and art and cuisine. Build out the kingdom of God."
And when you see that — when Jesus came talking about the kingdom of God, it wasn't plan B. He's grabbing plan A and saying, "We're reinstituting it." It's all about that. And so when you see in Revelation 21 — "Behold, I see the new heavens and the new earth are coming down, and behold, I'm making all things new" — that holy city coming down was the city that Adam was supposed to have built. And where Adam failed, Jesus is the second Adam. He succeeded and he came and he made this happen.
How does this go into the question about man working and the sense of futility? Not only is masculinity a holy calling, but the work we put our hands to — when we now have a gospel lens, when Jesus says "the kingdom of God is at hand" — we get to be participants in the original mandate. How do we bring and build the kingdom of God here and now? And all of a sudden it animates. I don't care if you're a plumber or a lawyer or a baker or a candlestick maker — all of a sudden we are participants in something that God is doing. And that sense of futility goes to war with our sense of futility. Does that make sense?
Tucker Carlson: It does make sense. Can I add one liner note? Eden was what, physically? Rivers and trees, correct?
Rev Billy Cerveny: Rivers and trees. And I believe it says in Ezekiel it describes it as on a mountain — a place where God, the divine and the human, overlapped and dwelled together.
Tucker Carlson: So maybe there's a reason that when people are in office buildings, they feel differently from the way they feel when they're next to rivers hanging out. And maybe anyone who destroys rivers and trees is on the wrong side.
Rev Billy Cerveny: The Lorax might have had a point. I really believe that. I believe trees are really important. They're all over the Bible. Cedar has a special place. But you look at it — going back to the creation story, each creation day after God made the trees, what did he say? He says, "It is good." It was good in and of itself because he found pleasure in it. Not just for its utility. So when Adam was to exercise dominion, it wasn't "what are you going to kill and cut down?" It was "how are you going to nurture? How are you going to take this and bring it everywhere?" That's why when people get in that kind of relationship with nature, they feel a deep satisfaction and a peace that is clearly from God.
Tucker Carlson: So when you deny people that — when you deny them beauty, when you destroy God's created beauty — that is not good.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I just preached on this the other night. The idea of redemption and recreation — in Genesis 3:17, talking about thorns and thistles, one of the lines is, "Cursed is the ground because of you." God is saying: because of your sin, Adam — you whom I've put in charge of the created order as my vice regent — because of your sin, it has paid forward and corrupted the creation. So the earthquakes and the fallenness of this world is a product of the fallenness of man. When you read in Romans 8, it talks about the creation groaning. Scripture tends to personify the birds and the mountains and all of it, and it says the creation groans. And in Psalm 19, all of creation sings of God's glory, but the creation groans. The redemption of creation is going to be tied to the redemption of man. As we have been recreated and are living out that recreation, and one day will stand in the full realities of our recreation, so will the world. When Jesus came to redeem all things, he wasn't just talking about people. All things — the cedars, the trees, the rivers.
Tucker Carlson: On the way to that day, you can get flashes of it. I watch the sun come up. All around us.
Rev Billy Cerveny: And we can participate in that. Behold, the kingdom of God is at hand. What is Jesus doing every time you see him do a miracle in the New Testament? Is he just doing a trick? Is he trying to flex his God muscle? Is this a proof? I mean, there's some of that — he's pulling back the curtain and revealing his divinity. People aren't just asking "who are you?" anymore. They're asking "what are you?"
But when Jesus heals the hemorrhaging woman, or raises Jairus's daughter from the dead, or calls Lazarus out of the tomb — what he's doing is reaching forward and grabbing the realities of the new heavens and the new earth that we will one day live in the full experience of, and planting them in the moment. Giving people a foretaste of what the kingdom of God is. The ultimate consummation is not about how do we get man out of earth into heaven. It's about how do we get heaven and earth back together. And those miracles are Jesus doing that very thing.
And to your point — where you say you stand out there and see pops of this — we now get to participate in that. We get to bring the realities of the new heavens and the new earth. How does that look? When we bring comfort to someone who is lost in grief. When I sit with a couple who is shattered by adultery. When someone is on their deathbed and they are scared and feel alone and you sit and pray with them and bring those realities to bear. When you feed the hungry, when you love the very difficult to love. When you plant a garden — what are you doing? That's an ancient call. That's what Adam did. That's what Noah did. He was a farmer, he grew grapes. We are participating in the original mandate.
Tucker Carlson: Anyone who would mock the idea of garden planting as a profound act just hasn't lived long enough.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I watered my wife's garden the other night — she had to go and she said, "Will you water my garden?" Took me like 40 minutes. But by the end, I was like, "Man, that was amazing." All I did was exercise my dominion with a hose.
Responding to gender confusion with compassion
Tucker Carlson: So the question of whether God created male and female — this is not some minor question. And liberating people from the constraints of gender is probably not actually liberation. Is that what you're saying?
Rev Billy Cerveny: I think it's a confusion. And it's sad. In fairness, let me take it from a non-political lens. There are people who have profound confusion in that place, and brokenness in that place, and feel very lost. And the way Christians talk about it in a sort of argumentative way — "Oh, you're wrong, we're right" — I'm like, dude, we can fight a theological air war and have these debates, but at the end of the day, we're talking about people. And there are legitimate people who are hurting and asking real questions in this place.
Tucker Carlson: A lot of them. Not a small number. What would you say to someone who was in your care — just another human being, your neighbor as defined by the New Testament — who was questioning his or her gender? Presumably you don't want that person to suffer, and you don't want them to take the next steps, but you love that person. So you're probably not screaming at them. What do you say?
Rev Billy Cerveny: The first thing I would do is walk with profound humility, because I know I'm stepping into a story that involves a tremendous amount of shame and a sense of isolation. This is something this person has undoubtedly been contending with far longer, at a far younger age, in solitude — which is heartbreaking to think of. A child asking theological questions they shouldn't have to contend with alone: "Am I going to hell? Am I this? Am I that?" I could weep thinking about that. So my heart posture is one of deep and profound compassion, because they didn't ask for that.
And for those who sit on the opposite side of a theological fence and come at this with hammer and tongs — you might win an argument, but you are shattering people and winning no hearts in that place. It is God's kindness that leads to repentance. We would be wise to remember his kindness to us before we ever step into a conversation like that.
Tucker Carlson: And by his kindness to us, you mean they're no better than me?
Rev Billy Cerveny: Exactly. I'm no better than them. What lottery did I win? We were talking last night — we single this issue out, and it's like, okay, but I will wink at greed or blood lust or whatever it is. And we can wink at all these things. But all those things keep me out — I deserve hell for all those things. But for the grace of God, period.
Tucker Carlson: So how do you walk into it? What do you say?
Rev Billy Cerveny: You don't say anything first. You listen. And you earn the right to be heard. You earn the right to be heard by nonjudgmentally listening and inviting forward. "Who are you, man? Because that doesn't define you." And you become a safe place and a trustworthy place — not with an agenda so you can eventually pull a judo move to show them how they're wrong, because that is not your job. It's God's job to move someone's heart.
When Jesus ate with sinners, do you think he sat around telling them where they were wrong? Like, no, that would be a very short hang. They liked him. And why did they like him? Because he probably listened really well. He sat with them and earned the right to be heard. As a philosophy of ministry, as you step into places like this with the broken and the bruised — the bruised reeds and the smoldering wicks, as scripture says — you listen. And hopefully they come out of the shadows and begin to talk about the struggle, and you honor it and you love them and you let the Lord steer it.
I know what I wouldn't say and I know what I wouldn't do — I wouldn't lead off with a moral lecture, because they know. They've contended with those arguments. They could probably shape those arguments better than I ever could because they've dealt with them far longer and in far more personal ways. So yeah, you love them well.
A bunch of years ago someone asked me, "What is it like to do the Lord's work?" And I thought to myself, "I'm not doing the Lord's work. The Lord is doing the Lord's work." My job as a priest, as a pastor, as a Christian, as a man, is to cultivate a heart that knows what it means to listen to the Holy Spirit and to see where the Holy Spirit is moving and just agree with it. How do we learn that? We learn it through reading the word. We learn it through prayer. We learn it through worship. We learn it through our relationships with other men or women, in our marriages. We tune our hearts — as the hymn says, "Lord, tune my heart to your grace" — so I can see it when you're doing it and just agree with it. And the doors you open cannot be shut. The doors you close can't be opened. Just help me not beat my head against those doors that won't open.
Tucker Carlson: People have an overwhelming desire to be right.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I do. It's hard, man.
Tucker Carlson: That was a beautiful description of how to actually love somebody. Because I know where you're coming from — you want to see people genuinely liberated and not led into their destruction by any of these things. But we're all fighting against our desire to be right. That's really what it comes down to.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Yeah. 100%. Can I say one thing I can't resist? Jesus says, "Woe to anyone who leads the children astray." And you do feel that — when you're looking at people who are beset by any of these agonies, you look at them with compassion, but then you think, "Someone lied to them and got them here in the first place." And I feel less compassion for that person.
There are a lot of voices, and I would just say that as people ask those questions about their own life, you can easily find someone to affirm the path you're going down. You want someone to prop up your lifestyle and give you theological and biblical justification? You don't have to scratch very deep to find someone to do that. But that's why I think it's so important that we go to scripture and test everything against it. Measure everything against what we're hearing in the world. What you're hearing from me, what you hear from church leadership — I'm not scripture. Who gets to answer what's right and what's wrong? Does God get to answer that question? Okay. How does God answer that question? He answers it through his word. That is how God has taken a knee and written this redemptive, historically rich, dynamic gift to us called the Bible. If we are people who want to understand what it means to ask these questions and move in these directions with any truth and integrity, we have to measure what we're hearing against this. "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind through the scriptures," it says in Romans. And we can test — is this God speaking to me, or is this some new-fangled cultural moment that's just trying to claim air dominance right now?
Addiction, shame, and the need for community
Tucker Carlson: Addiction has been a feature of human life — it's described in the Bible, so it's been around since people have been around. But it does seem like a bigger factor in the lives of Americans than 40 years ago. There are just a lot more ways to get addicted, and there's less cultural resistance to addiction than there's ever been. Entire generations are getting destroyed by it.
Rev Billy Cerveny: There are more obvious things to be addicted to that aren't just substances.
Tucker Carlson: Exactly. So how big a presence is addiction in your experience of counseling?
Rev Billy Cerveny: It's just part of it. When people come into my office and knock on my door, very rarely is it, "Hey, I have a question about why in the book of Numbers did Moses hold up a golden serpent." It's more like people who can't keep their cheese on their cracker, man. They're saying, "Hey, I'm addicted to this," or "My marriage is coming apart." So addiction — you've got substance abuse, alcoholics, people on opioids now, which is insane. The list is endless. Gambling, pornography. Gambling is huge. That scares me because of just the online stuff.
Tucker Carlson: Do you see that?
Rev Billy Cerveny: I have seen it. It's not something I face frequently, but I know a lot about it. I know a lot of people who have gone that journey, and gambling is one of the most nefarious and hard-to-beat addictions. But to those who contend with addiction — the one thing I can say unequivocally is there is so much hope. It's not a path you ever want to walk down, but my favorite people that I deal with are my friends in AA or NA or who have gone through recovery — people who have had all their self-righteous pretenses stripped down, who have been brought down to the studs, who have blown up their lives. They don't have anything to prove. And they've been on this redemptive journey. I always talk to these people and say, "Would you please come and join my church? Would you please come and be a part? We need this." The church needs to be a hospital, not a showcase.
Tucker Carlson: I've never been to a church as Christian as some AA meetings I've been to.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I agree with you. Church needs to be a place where we can get blood on the walls — where we can tell the truth. Church is not designed to be an AA meeting, and AA meetings are not designed to be church, but there are aspects — the humility, the honesty — where people can come in and walk through the doors of a church and say, "This is populated by people where I could sit in a room full of men or women or couples, and I could have a human yard sale of what I've done and who I've been in my life, and I would be met with love and grace and people looking at me and saying, 'I want to hear more of that.'" When I show you the most wretched parts of me, it doesn't push you away, but it draws you closer, because you're able to look me in the eye and say, "Yeah, I get it, man. Me too."
And that's it. Because with addiction especially — be it pornography, gambling, alcohol, whatever it is — it breeds so much shame. And that's what sin does. It breeds shame. You read the story in the garden — when Adam eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he runs. He hides in the bushes. And then God comes and asks a question: "Adam, where are you? Why are you hiding?" Little pro tip — anytime God asks a question in scripture, he already knows the answer. But what he needed Adam to see was the answer for himself. And Adam comes out and God asks, "Why were you hiding?" The logical answer is, "I just broke the one rule." That's not what he says, though. He says, "I was naked and I was ashamed." To paraphrase: "I wasn't hiding because I have done something wrong. I'm hiding because I am something wrong. And I could not bear for you to see me. And if you saw me, you would reject me and I would be alone."
And that is the most foundational cry of the human heart. It was the cry of Jesus on the cross when he became sin — when he truly became like us and absorbed the sin of humanity and quotes the Psalms: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The cry of dereliction. He could have said anything in that moment, but it was this cry of our deepest longing: "Don't leave me like this, this shameful thing that I am."
Going back to AA — the biggest poison that leads to addiction is this shame engine that drives us. I don't want to feel it, so I drink. I feel more shame, so I drink more. It becomes this cycle. But when you get into these rooms and you're able to have a yard sale and say, "This is what I am. I'm Billy. I'm an alcoholic," and you can lay that out in front of a group of people and they don't run away — they don't give you the rejection that you think you deserve, that pushed Adam into the bushes — it just sweeps the knee of your shame. And all of a sudden, the thing that Satan meant for evil, God means for good. The place of your greatest destruction, your greatest fears, your greatest self-sabotage becomes the place where life grows. Tell me there's not a living God. Tell me there's not a God who is using the tools of the enemy against him. That makes us more than conquerors.
Tucker Carlson: Me too. I want more of them.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I feel exactly the same way.
The core human fear: aloneness, and the gift of male friendship
Tucker Carlson: The most profound thing you said was that the core human fear is "don't leave us alone." And that the first thing God saw that was wrong with creation was Adam's solitude — "It is not good for man to be alone." It does feel like people are more alone.
Rev Billy Cerveny: We're isolated, especially as men. Why as men? Because we are scared to be found out. Men live in the same way — that description of Adam, hiding, feeling like "I'm not something right." It sets Adam on this course where he has to become, it's on him to become, this ruthless quest for validation. That's the spiritual genetic heritage we've all received. I think all men are born with this idea that "I'm incomplete and it's on me to be enough." And I'm terrified that people will see that I don't have it all together. We all have two things in common: none of us have it all together, and we all want everyone around us to think we do.
And the fear is the same fear Adam had — that you would see something you found undesirable and you would abandon me and I would be left alone. So as men we have become so artfully skilled at working side by side, playing golf together, doing all these things, but knowing nothing about each other's lives.
Tucker Carlson: I think the structures have completely changed in the world around us and it is more and more difficult for men to find the chance to be with other men.
Rev Billy Cerveny: It's an ancient problem. One of the great unspoken miracles in scripture is that Jesus, as a man in his mid-30s, had 12 best friends. How many men in their 30s have that? One of the last times that most men remember having real relationships was back in college. And then they step into the workforce, they get married — which is wonderful — they have children — which is wonderful — but they lose sight of the importance of male relationship. They lose sight of the value of why you need men around you. Jesus demonstrably illustrated that with his 12 disciples. On the most basic level, it was just: we need that.
You read Mark chapter 2 — Jesus is in Capernaum, teaching in a house, it's packed, people hanging in the windows, no one can get in or out. There's a man who's been paralyzed and his friends want Jesus to heal him but can't get to him. So his friends pick up the mat, carry their friend to the roof of where Jesus is teaching, and they begin digging. They tear the roof off. And they lower this man down. If I went down the street and randomly asked men how many of them would have mat carriers — people who would tear the roof off to get them to Jesus — how many do you think would?
Tucker Carlson: I do. I do, too. Thank you for being one of those mat carriers. Yeah. We saw this coming 40 years ago. I just knew that men I knew and respected and loved would get to middle age and old age and have no real male friends. So we decided — the five of us in college — we're not going to let that happen. And we set up a pretty complex structure to maintain that friendship. And we did. For over 40 years now. And that's been one of the most profound things in my life. I'm one of very few 57-year-old men I know who has four genuine best friends — not kind of academically my best friends, but people I see regularly, who are the godfathers of my children, who we travel somewhere in the world every single year, who I talk to all the time, who I've relied on consistently for 40 years for advice, or if I needed it, money, or whatever I need. And not to brag, but of those five men, all five are still happily married. All five have children who respect them. All five are basically happy. And I think it's in part the result of those friendships.
Rev Billy Cerveny: That's been one of the single most profound gifts of my life. You've been one of the most profound gifts of my life. You know what's funny about our group of five guys? You couldn't find five more different people. And the beauty of it was the commitment and the covenant where we pushed in. We were 20 years old. We didn't know what we were saying. And we pushed in and said, "We will not break this covenant, this vow with one another until we die." And we have not and we will not.
Think about all the seasons of life we've been through — all the births and deaths and transitions, all the tears that have been cried, all the things we've won and lost, and how the world has tried to conspire to pull our relationships apart just by proximity. But we've really held to that. And for me, personally, knowing in those dark places that I could always just reach out — knowing that you're there and the other guys are there — it's been such a gospel expression.
We talked about how Jesus saves us from sin, breaks the back of sin and death. But foundationally, he's saving me from myself. And one of the reasons I love our friendship is the number of times you guys have stepped in and kind of saved me from my own decisions. Just being able to speak like, "Hey, I wouldn't do that." Just loving each other through hard times. I remember my dad died last January. Walking into that church — it was packed — and turning around and seeing you guys all sitting on the row. It just shattered my heart in the most beautiful way. It was a huge gift to me, man.
Tucker Carlson: No, it's been absolutely incredible. I've never talked about this in public before, but the only reason I'm saying it is not to brag — I've just been the beneficiary of it. But I think it's worth saying out loud that in some sense it's different from marriage, obviously totally different, but it's the same in the sense that it's the product of a covenant, of a promise to other people that you're just going to abide by. And when you have a six-month-old and your buddies are like, "This year we're meeting in Barbados" — or Hartford, Connecticut — and your wife is like, "What? Come on now. You've got three kids and I'm breastfeeding." It cost you something to be there.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Big time. And I think all five of our wives support it because they see its fruits. But to say to your wife, "I'm sorry, this is a commitment that I made" — and she's like — and you never want to make your wife mad, especially when she just bore your child. And you do it. So it does take some sacrifice, not small sacrifice. But the dividends are so exponentially more.
Going back to what we're saying about the importance of male relationship — the problem is, in the same way we talked about pornography or addiction, one of the things is it pushes you into isolation. Isolation is a bad thing. And for us as men, as masculine beings, you lose perspective on your own masculinity and your own sense of self and your own role as a husband and father. It's essential that you have good, healthy men that can serve as mirrors and reflect and just kind of play catch with you on these ideas. Otherwise you get in your own one-man echo chamber and you start feeling crazy. Then you start feeling the shame — "I'm not doing this right" — and then you start living out a caricature of what you think you should be versus what you really are. And the next thing you know, you want to talk about how marriage problems start? There's a great place. Having those healthy relationships for men has done a tremendous amount in helping me have a healthy marriage, because it's helped me regulate my sense of self.
Tucker Carlson: I got famous in my 20s. I didn't expect to be famous. If it hadn't been for you guys, I think I would have been totally off the deep end.
Rev Billy Cerveny: And our wives.
Tucker Carlson: For sure. But you know, I know a lot of married men — your buddies are a little different from your wife because your wife is thankfully — but you go see your buddies and you're like, "I host a cable television show." They're like, "Cable?" They don't care at all.
Rev Billy Cerveny: So important. And I think this was kind of baked into the cake with us because we met when we were 17 or whatever, and we were very unimpressive at that time. Not that we're very impressive now. But what happens is — and I think one of the values of this friendship, and I think it's the value of any male friendship — is that we love each other and we respect each other, but we're not overly impressed with each other. When we get together, we will rag on each other, we will bust each other's chops in a way that only people with that kind of relationship can do. We lovingly humiliate one another continuously. And I think there's a huge value to that. For male relationship, what I'm talking about doesn't have to be some giant therapy session. It just has to be men that see you, that have the ability and willingness to speak truth into you and say, "No, dude, you're not all that."
About 10 years ago, one of my children said, "You've got to get off nicotine." And I was like — obviously it's wrong to get off nicotine. So I get bullied into this. I get off nicotine and immediately go crazy and get fat. I kind of knew I was crazy, but I didn't quite realize how fat I was because no one in my world said one word to me about it. I was like, "Man, I think my pants shrunk." We go skiing and I'll never forget it — we get off the tram in Jackson, Wyoming. One of them turns to me and goes, "Dude, you're fat." And I was like, "I don't think I'm fat." He goes, "Look at you. You're fat. It's disgusting." I'm like, "I'm not fat." He goes, "You've got your own weather system, man." I'm on TV every day. I didn't think someone would tell me if I was fat. He goes, "Dude, you're fat. Someone is telling you."
Tucker Carlson: And so gently, too.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I think everybody else noticed. Obviously everyone else noticed. But not one person said one word.
Tucker Carlson: But you know why he did that? He had earned the right.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Yes. Because you knew he loved you.
Tucker Carlson: He's the godfather to my son. Yes. No, I know you're talking about him.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Yeah. You kind of fat too.
Tucker Carlson: I agree. Anyway, what an incredible blessing. I hope this conversation doesn't make other people feel — I don't know. It's just true.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I say this as an invitation. Whether you're young — especially young people — lock in, man. Find your mat carriers. Because you're going to need them. One day you're going to be on the mat and you're not going to be able to get up, and they're going to need to carry you to where you need to be.
Tucker Carlson: That is real. And it is true. And for people that are older — if you don't go to a church or you don't have a place where people can do that, if you don't have a community, then either look deeper in your church or find another one, because it is so essential and it's so available. It just takes the risk of being able to step in and a willingness to tell the truth. And also a willingness to be the kind of person that can hear someone else tell you the truth about their life and love them anyway — whether it's said graciously or they're telling you you're fat in a very unceremonious way. But it's done with love.
Rev Billy Cerveny: I say that as an invitation, man. I think it's good.
Tucker Carlson: It's one of the most important things I've ever done after my marriage. The most important thing.
Hallucinogens, spiritual realms, and the danger of bypassing the gate
Tucker Carlson: Last question. I think about this a lot. Your answer about what you'd say to someone questioning their gender was wonderful because you approached the person with love. So I want to ask a related question about something that's a kind of trend now among people who are really hurting — some of whom I think are wonderful people, veterans — and it's the use of very heavy-duty hallucinogens. Famously ibogaine, but there are a bunch of them. To heal them. The reason I've never really talked about it is I want to approach it with that same spirit, because these are some of the best people I know and also some of the most hurting people. They've done what they were asked to do. In some cases it meant killing other people, and they've been deeply damaged by it. We spend a lot of time talking about how bad it is to be killed. I think we spend almost no time talking about how bad it is for someone to kill. But it is bad. And I know a lot of people who've done it and it has hurt every one of them. So out of that pain, many of them go to hallucinogens — very heavy-duty hallucinogens. I should be totally honest: I've used hallucinogens and I was totally convinced that's not for me, that's bad. I was afraid of it. I did it a lot and I was really afraid of it and I'm very opposed to it. But I want to be open-minded and loving because I know that they are suffering so much. So what's your view of that?
Rev Billy Cerveny: Taking that in pieces — medically speaking, I know I've got people that I know who had medication-resistant depression and did experimental but medically directed use of certain things that really helped them with their depressions and things like that. But I don't know enough to speak about that. I would say to someone suffering from PTSD to that level — first of all, in the same way, what would I say? I wouldn't say much in the beginning because the trauma of that is something they never asked for.
If I could distill it down — here's the great tragedy of it: it's not your fault. You may have done things, but to have those experiences and be thrust into a context where it's unwinnable — you're in war or whatever the context may be — it's not your fault that you bear the psychiatric wounds. Those are real. Those are neuropathways that are legitimately carved. PTSD is a real medical reality. It's not your fault — comma — but sadly, and this is the tearing of it, it's now your responsibility. So now, what are you going to do? How do you choose to step in these directions?
As far as hallucinogens — ibogaine, DMT — where all of a sudden you are meeting figures in the spiritual realm — this is where I have strong opinions.
Tucker Carlson: But that's what I'm specifically talking about.
Rev Billy Cerveny: This is where I have strong opinions. Much like I talked about earlier — we live on this side of a curtain. There are thin places, as we talk about when I minister to someone by their bedside. It's a thin place. You can almost feel them crossing over. What the Celtics would call a thin place — where the heaven and earth, the divine and the supernatural, the unseen realm and the seen realm, are beginning to touch.
Tucker Carlson: And that's real.
Rev Billy Cerveny: Yeah. And what Jesus says in John 10 — there is that inside, but I'm the gate. If you want to go into the unseen realm where it produces life and God, there's a way to do this. And it's through me. I'm the gate. And if you try to climb over the walls and try to get in any other way — guess what? You're a robber and a thief. You're trying to gain the things of God without God. You're trying to gain access to the divine and the unseen. You want the cookies in the cookie jar, but you're not going through the gate.
And what I would say is — you read stories about DMT, and I've never done it, but I know people that have dabbled in it quite a bit. And when you hear encounters — "I crossed over and I had this encounter with all these beings, and there was this purple woman that I talked to, and I developed this relationship, like I was there for years but I was there for 10 minutes" — and then somebody else goes and has the same trip and comes back and says, "Hey, I met a purple woman who knew your name and was asking about you" — that's documented reality.
Tucker Carlson: I know people who have had that experience. Many people have that experience.
Rev Billy Cerveny: So what I'm telling you is this isn't just some psychiatric mind-bending exercise. You're actually crawling over the fence into a real place. A real place that is demonic. And those are — you are encountering, I think, a demonic experience. And it's a dangerous one.
Tucker Carlson: It's not your imagination is what you're saying.
Rev Billy Cerveny: It's not your imagination. So when you read in Deuteronomy and other places where God says, "Don't practice necromancy, don't do magic, don't get involved in tarot cards or all that kind of stuff" — what he's not saying is there's no power there. What he's saying is, actually, the reason it's a warning is there's a lot going on over there. But it's really dangerous and it's not of God. It's not of Jesus. And it will — what's so dangerous about it is that the people who encounter this generally speaking — and there are different experiences — but when people step into those places and have these encounters, they have this profound sense of enlightenment. They feel special. They feel seen. They feel good. And it's just like a taste. It's like the crack dealer giving a taste on the playground, and then the kid just gets deeper and deeper. And what they think is giving them life is really hollowing them out from the inside.
What's happening in those experiences is the deeper you go, you will one day wake up and discover that you have been dabbling in a demonic realm that promised you life and insight and progression and enlightenment, but has really been hollowing you out from the inside. Taking you away from the source of light, taking you away from the source of forgiveness and redemption that is only in Jesus. And distorting the image in which you were created. I think it's a dangerous place.
I have a lot of compassion for people like veterans who are in PTSD. And again, if there's a medical shallow end of that pool that has some benefit — that's not you running through the unseen realm. I don't know. But people who do that recreationally, who go on some spiritual safari to go into that place — I would caution you against that. That's one place you don't need to go to know you don't want to be there.
Tucker Carlson: Amen. The Reverend Billy Cerveny. A phrase I never get tired of using. It's one that still feels ironic to me. God bless you.
Rev Billy Cerveny: God bless you, man. I love you. Good to see you.