# Steve Bannon — "Judeo-Christian West" > [!quote] "I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis. … And we're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that's starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years. … One is a form of capitalism that is taken away from the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity and, really, Judeo-Christian belief." > — Steve Bannon, remarks via Skype to the Dignitatis Humanae Institute conference at the Vatican, summer 2014 ## Context [[Steve Bannon]] delivered these remarks by video link to a conference on poverty hosted by the Dignitatis Humanae Institute (also known as the Institute for Human Dignity), a conservative Catholic think tank that held the event inside the Vatican in the summer of 2014. At the time Bannon was executive chairman of [[Breitbart News]], two years before joining the Trump campaign. The full transcript was first published by BuzzFeed News reporter J. Lester Feder on November 15, 2016, days after [[Donald Trump]]'s election and Bannon's appointment as White House chief strategist. The speech was a 50-minute Q&A in which Bannon laid out his civilizational worldview in three moves: first, that "the Judeo-Christian West" faces an existential crisis rooted in the loss of its spiritual and moral foundations; second, that "crony capitalism" and Randian libertarianism have severed free-market economics from Christian ethics; and third, that "jihadist Islamic fascism" represents an external existential threat, casting the political moment as the early phase of a religious war. Bannon praised European populist parties — UKIP, the Front National — as evidence of a "global tea party movement" pushing back against secular elites. ## Why this matters This speech is the intellectual architecture behind Trumpism's religious-crusade register. Where [[Pat Buchanan]] framed the struggle as a domestic culture war (see [[Pat Buchanan - religious war for the soul of America]]), Bannon globalizes the conflict: the enemy is simultaneously internal (crony capitalism, secular elites hollowing out Western institutions) and external (radical Islam), and the defense is explicitly religious — a call for "the church militant" to fight. The framework is classically Manichaean: light against dark, faith against barbarity, with no neutral ground. This two-front civilizational-war thesis became the conceptual spine of [[Breitbart News]]'s editorial line and the rhetorical DNA of the Trump movement's "clash of civilizations" posture. It links backward to [[Paleoconservatism]] and the Buchananite tradition, laterally to the European [[New Right]] and the [[Global New Right Network]], and forward to the governance phase — where [[Kevin Roberts - bloodless if the left allows it]] and the [[Heritage Foundation]]'s Project 2025 translate the crusade metaphor into administrative power. The speech also sits at the intersection of [[Christian Nationalism]], [[Dominionism]], and [[Spiritual Warfare]] — traditions that treat political conflict as a proxy for cosmic spiritual battle, lending ordinary policy disputes the urgency and absolutism of religious eschatology (see [[Christian Eschatology]]). Bannon's later influence on the Dignitatis Humanae Institute — including an abortive plan to convert the Abbey of Trisulti into a training academy for European nationalist politicians — shows the speech was not mere rhetoric but a strategic blueprint for building transnational right-populist infrastructure. ## Verification - **Primary source:** [J. Lester Feder, "This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World," BuzzFeed News, November 15, 2016](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world) — first publication of the full transcript. - **Analysis:** [Georgetown Berkley Center, "Steve Bannon vs. Pope Francis?"](https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/essays/steve-bannon-vs-pope-francis) — contextualizes Bannon's nationalism against Francis's social-justice papacy. - **Date precision:** Sources consistently place the speech in "the summer of 2014" at a Vatican-hosted conference; no exact calendar date has been confirmed in available reporting. The `date_uttered` field uses 2014-07-01 as an approximate placeholder. - **Status:** Verbatim transcript; undisputed. ## Related quotes - [[Steve Bannon - I want to bring everything crashing down]] — the destructionist complement: tear down the administrative state so the civilizational project can rebuild. - [[Steve Bannon - flood the zone with shit]] — the information-warfare method that operationalizes the worldview. - [[Pat Buchanan - religious war for the soul of America]] — the domestic precursor; Bannon globalizes Buchanan's frame. - [[Kevin Roberts - bloodless if the left allows it]] — the governance-phase escalation of crusade rhetoric. ## Part of collections - Featured in [[Politics as Holy War]] — the civilizational-globalization entry in the Manichaean-politics arc.