My Apolitical Interview with Dinesh D’Souza

If you’ve paid attention to politics over the last fifteen years, you’ve more likely than not come across the work of Dinesh D’Souza. A prolific author, activist, and filmmaker, D’Souza has been a fixture of conservative media for most of my formative years. When we spoke for an interview on Election Day, politics wasn’t the focus. Instead, the conversation centered on religion.

D’Souza was raised in a cultural Catholic household in India, but discovered his faith more fully in adult life. More recently, his belief took on a new dimension during his travels to the Holy Land, beginning in 2022. There, he was struck by how much of the Bible is corroborated by the archaeological record. I experienced something similar when taking a class on Mesopotamian art history at Penn earlier this year.

He was surprised that church leaders had never shared much of this evidence with their congregations—on this too, I can relate.

Asked what he considered the most convincing discovery, he gave an unexpected answer. Rather than pointing to a particular artifact, such as the Tel Dan Stele, he argued that the power of the case lies in the accumulation of evidence.

The conversation eventually turned to the end times. No, not the triumph of socialism, but the real thing prophesied in the Book of Revelation. On a recent trip to Israel, D’Souza said, he had seen for himself the red heifers from Texas that certain groups, consisting of Evangelical Christians and Jews alike, hope to use in preparation for a rebuilt Third Temple. For many believers, a rebuilt temple would mark the fulfillment of a prophecy that heralds the biblical apocalypse.

The conversation also touched on more personal aspects of D’Souza’s life. Despite his Catholic upbringing, he now describes himself as nondenominational, an apologist for what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity.” We spoke about that journey, his recent disagreements with Calvinists on X, and what he makes of the renewed interest in traditional forms of Christianity.

I also asked about the rising hatred against Indians on the Internet. He provided an analytical response.

After my recent conversation with Rod Blagojevich, and amid the broader cultural resurgence of interest in Elizabeth Holmes, it seemed worth asking D’Souza about his own much publicized experience with federal prosecutors. Unlike Blagojevich, D’Souza acknowledges that he broke the law, though he contends the treatment he received was disproportionate.

Much of what we discussed is laid out in D’Souza’s latest book, The Stones Cry Out: Biblical Archaeology, Prophecy, and the Last Days, published in October.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

You recently wrote a book about biblical archaeology. Let’s begin by discussing your own religious journey.

I was raised a Christian—well, Catholic—in Mumbai, India. My family converted to Christianity hundreds of years ago. It was the influence of the Portuguese, who were colonists in India, and my family took a Christian last name, which is D’Souza. So that’s why I’ve got an Indian first name and a Christian last name. But my upbringing, religiously, was a kind of social Christianity, I would say, not very devout.

I discovered my faith more in adult life. This was in the early 2000s, and then, in the late 2000s, I embarked on a sort of intellectual adventure, debating leading atheists. These were the so-called new atheists, people like Christopher Hitchens. I debated Hitchens maybe a dozen times. So I acquired the reputation of being something of a Christian apologist, although my focus was on things like history and philosophy, science, the architecture of the cell, and the Big Bang.

I was not exposed to biblical archaeology until relatively recently. I went to Israel for the first time at the end of 2022, and I observed with my own eyes artifacts that corroborate some of the historical details of the Bible—in some cases, very minor details that become archaeologically and historically validated. I was like, “Wow, I’ve been in churches for so many years, and I haven’t heard about this stuff.” It needs to be shouted from the rooftops of synagogues and churches, but apparently it is not.

So I decided to spend a few years digging into this field, so to speak, learning not just the artifacts but the methodology, archaeological reasoning. How do you know this is Sodom and Gomorrah? How do you know if an artifact proves an event or personality of the Bible? This book, The Stones Cry Out, is the product of those three years of research. I’ve been to Israel now, I think, four times. I’m going again in February for a political conference. So I’ve continued my interest in Israel, but also specifically in biblical archaeology.

What was the most convincing discovery you came across?

The power of the argument is in the accumulation of detail. There are individual mind-blowing and jaw-dropping discoveries, and I can give you several of those. You’d be like, “Wow, here is the evidence for the prophet Isaiah, and here’s King David’s palace, and I’m walking in the ruins of it, and I think I found the spot where David saw Bathsheba.” But any individual artifact, someone could say, “Well, that’s one thing.”

The Bible covers a long period, from Abraham and the patriarchs—that’s about 2000 BC—all the way through the Christian movement of about AD 40 to 50. Biblical archaeology has been around for more than a century. It has uncovered thousands of artifacts. I’m going to show you in my book more than 100 that decisively confirm events in the Bible, large and small. You can’t show me a single significant archaeological discovery that contradicts or disproves the Bible. So put those two facts together: many, many confirmations, not a single clear-cut refutation.

Now, I agree, there are people who debate whether Joshua showed up in Jericho in the beginning of the fifteenth century BC, or was it the fourteenth century? There are legitimate arguments about dates. There are legitimate arguments about locations. There are certain biblical locations that, to this day, have not been found. But that is not the same thing as saying that the Bible says X, and we have found artifact Y that clearly proves that the biblical narrative is false. No one can do that.

Your subtitle mentions prophecy and the last days. What do you mean by prophecy?

The Hebrew prophets—there were the major prophets and the minor prophets—and the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, have a number of forecasts about the future, clear-cut prophecies. I’m not talking about ambiguous prophecies. If you read the prophecies of Nostradamus, it’s like there was a unicorn over here, and someone goes, “Well, that was a reference to 9/11.” I’m not talking about that kind of thing. I’m talking about really specific statements about the future.

For example, the prophet Daniel seems to say very clearly that the Israelites will be defeated by the Babylonians, who did burn Jerusalem in 586 BC. Daniel says, but the Babylonians aren’t going to last either. Not very long from now, the Babylonians are going to be overrun by the Medes and the Persians. That also happens about fifty to seventy years later. Then he goes on to say that the Persians will be ousted by the Greeks, and the Greeks, he later suggests, will be overthrown by the Romans.

Now, all of this happens manifestly after Daniel’s own life. So the question becomes, how did he know this? How could you possibly forecast events with that kind of historical precision? Biblical skeptics through the centuries have speculated that, since their starting point is that there’s no such thing as prophecy, the Book of Daniel must have been written much later. These events actually came to pass, and then somebody went back and wrote them in as if they had been prophesied in ancient times. But the prophecy couldn’t possibly have been written hundreds of years before it occurred.

The relevance of archaeology is this: If archaeology can prove that the prophet Isaiah lived in the eighth century BC, without a doubt, and Jeremiah in the sixth century BC, without a doubt, and Daniel a little bit later but around the same time, without a doubt, then this skeptical argument blows up.

Similarly, Isaiah 53 is, in the Book of Isaiah, a description of what appears to be Jesus. The actual language even appears to describe a crucifixion. It certainly describes a divine scapegoat, someone who is dying for the sins of mankind. Again, when skeptics saw this, they thought, “Listen, there’s no way that Isaiah,” who lived in the 700s BC, “could possibly write this.” So they thought some Christian writer went in and stuck this passage inside the Book of Isaiah later, as if Isaiah were foretelling Jesus.

But the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, and they are dated to 300 BC to about the time of Jesus. In other words, they’re written before Jesus. One of them is called the Great Isaiah Scroll. This was before Jesus’ time, and you can put it up there on the desk and look at it, and there is Isaiah 53, unaltered. No one came in after Jesus and stuck that passage in there. It was there in Isaiah all the time, and this could be definitively shown beyond a shadow of a doubt by the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are examples I’m giving you off the top of my head of ways in which prophecy is vindicated by the discoveries of archaeology.

The Gospels also record Jesus predicting the destruction of the Temple, which occurred in AD 70, decades after his crucifixion. Some scholars argue that the Gospels must have been written after the event: How else, they ask, could the authors have known what would happen?

There is a debate, as you probably know, within Christianity about whether or not these Temple prophecies have already been fulfilled in Jesus and in the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, or whether there is still a third Temple to be built. I don’t take a position in these debates, because one group of Christians believes that when Jesus said, “The temple is my body,” Jesus essentially was saying, “I am the fulfillment.” There was a Solomonic Temple, there was a Herodian Temple, and now it’s me, and that’s the end of the story. We don’t need to look for a new Temple.

Then there’s another group of Christians who believe that the Bible, in certain places, like Ezekiel, describes the third Temple with great specificity. He’s obviously talking, not metaphorically, about a human body. He is talking about a physical Temple. He gives you the dimensions, he talks about the columns, how far apart they are, and how they’re decorated. So there is a second group that believes that there really does need to be, at some future point, a third Temple in Jerusalem on the location of the original Solomonic Temple. I simply think these things are interesting. I’ve seen the red heifers that some rabbis are taking care of with a view to sacrificing them in a rebuilt Temple.

You’ve seen these red heifers?

Oh, yeah.

Where are they?

They are in a place called Shiloh, which is a biblically significant location in Israel. It’s not in Jerusalem; it’s north of Jerusalem. In fact, I was in Shiloh to have a meeting, and I was waiting in the reception hall. This guy comes up to me and goes, “Hey, is this Dinesh D’Souza?” I go, “Yeah.” He goes, “Well, I’ve read some of your books and seen your films.” Then he goes, “Hey, want to see the red heifer?”

I was like, “You mean the red heifers?” He’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Well, where are they?” He goes, “Right over there.” I was like, “What? Are you telling me that they are a stone’s throw away from where we’re standing right now?” He goes, “Yeah, I’ll show you them right now.”

These are five red cows, raised in Texas, by the way, purchased by rabbis because they fulfill the biblical specifications, and they are being raised in Israel right now in anticipation of being used in a future Temple. It’s one thing if people just go, “I’m hoping that a new Temple will be built.” It’s another thing to take the actual steps to prepare for the kinds of services in the Temple that were done going all the way back to Moses and Aaron.

Is there a genuine effort underway to prepare for a Third Temple?

Yeah, there’s a group called the Temple Foundation, I believe. There are Jews and Christians both involved in all this. I treat the topic of prophecy carefully, because I think there is a reason that the prophetic books of the Bible are somewhat veiled. They don’t give you a chronological or blow-by-blow account. I think the way to think about this is to look for the large biblical landmarks or signs.

One of them, by the way, is the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland. That is predicted repeatedly in the Bible; that did come to pass in 1948. It’s hard to argue that that’s not a fulfillment of a very implausible biblical prophecy. If you or I lived in 1500 AD, or even 1900 AD, and someone told you that this ancient people scattered to the ends of the earth are going to return, we would be like, “Well, how’s that going to happen?” That seems so unlikely. No other group has ever done this, by the way. And yet it did happen in 1948.

Have you noticed the renewed interest among young people in traditional forms of Christianity, such as Catholicism and Orthodoxy, in America and elsewhere in the West?

I’ve heard about it, and I think it’s a good thing. I was raised Catholic, and I got a lot out of it. I studied catechism. I was introduced to the Catholic intellectual tradition. Even though later I found a lot of valuable things in evangelical Christianity, I still think of myself as nondenominational. I think of myself as an apologist for what C. S. Lewis called mere Christianity.

I’m still steeped in the Christian intellectual tradition, which is often ignored. When you go with sola scriptura and with faith alone—and Luther, of course, would make all these very derogatory remarks about reason, “reason is a whore,” and things like that—it discourages one from studying the Christian intellectual tradition, which I think is a terrible weakness and a mistake.

So I think the search that’s going on now among young people is to find a Christianity that is rich in faith but also rich in learning, rich in tradition, and has a line of continuity that goes back to Jesus and the apostles. All those, I think, are very healthy and legitimate impulses.

There’s an interesting archaeological side of the story. When I first began to investigate the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and his burial, I was told there are these two rival sites: the Garden Tomb and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So I began to look at the evidence. The evidence is overwhelming that the site is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

But, of course, that is sort of run by the Catholic Church. It’s populated by nuns and people from the Eastern churches who are there with incense. So the Protestant sensibility is a little revolted, and the Protestants like the calm atmosphere of the Garden Tomb. If you ask them what is the case for the Garden Tomb being the correct site, they just tell you, “Well, it has the right vibes.” But, of course, there’s no archaeological basis for that, and the tombs over there are sixth-century BC ancient tombs.

They can’t possibly be Jesus’ tomb, because the Bible is really clear that Jesus was placed in a new tomb. Joseph of Arimathea had a new tomb that he had built for his family. He hadn’t even used it. So if you want to find a tomb in which Jesus was buried, it better be a first-century tomb. There are those first-century rock-cut tombs underneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. That’s only one piece of evidence, of which I could give you seven or eight.

It’s a good example of how, now, I think the good Protestant scholars who are looking at this are recognizing that the Garden Tomb is not the correct site; it is, indeed, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and that the archaeological evidence is pointing in that direction. It’s not 100 percent certain, but I would say it’s about ninety.

Recently, you’ve had some lively disagreements with Calvinists on X. What prompted you to enter that debate?

The Reformation was an issue between the Catholics, who emphasized that salvation is based on faith and works both, and Luther, who emphasized that it’s based on faith alone. This, it seems to me, is actually a very interesting and legitimate debate. While, of course, I agree with James—the Book of James—that works come out of faith, in some ways the inseparability of works and faith, which is part of the Catholic doctrine, I also agree with Luther that it is the faith that does the saving, and the works that emanate out of that faith.

Now, along comes Calvin, and he radicalizes this debate. He essentially says that salvation is not according to faith or works, either one. It is actually due to God’s prior election at the beginning of the world. God, at the beginning of the world, made a list of all the people that he wanted to be saved, and everybody who was not on that list was designated to be damned by being excluded. God decided, “I’m only going to give faith to the people on my list.”

Think of what a shocking doctrine this is and, in my view, inconsistent with the character of the God of the Bible. So I started developing in my head this idea that there’s a God of Calvinism, and he’s one kind of a god, and then there’s the God of the Bible. We really need to match the two up to see if they’re the same guy. As it turns out, they’re really not.

There are a handful of passages in the Bible. Calvinists will immediately glom onto those, and if you read those passages just by themselves, you would, in fact, become a Calvinist. But they have to be read contextually against the backdrop of an entire Bible in which the issue of human choice is at the center of it, and just choice in general, free will.

Think about it. Didn’t Lucifer rebel out of free will? God didn’t make him do it. Didn’t Adam and Eve eat the apple out of free will? God didn’t make them do it. Didn’t Cain kill Abel out of free will? God didn’t make him do it. On and on it goes. Didn’t David go after Bathsheba out of lust and free will? Didn’t he have Bathsheba’s husband killed by his own choice? God didn’t make him do it.

As I began to go through the episodes of the Bible, I realized how shocking and absurd it is to claim that, essentially, all these grand human dramas and morally significant actions were somehow all just predetermined at the beginning of the world by God. This is, in fact, what Calvinism teaches. I realized that this makes nonsense out of the Bible, in my view, and that’s what encouraged me to jump into that debate.

Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell argued in an interview with us earlier this summer that America’s Calvinist roots explain its preoccupation with sin and collective guilt. Do conservatives need to understand that to heal the country?

Without having read the essay, I would offer just a couple of thoughts, not pro or con, but rather just worth thinking about. One is that when we talk about America, we have to be clear: Are we talking about the America of the Pilgrims, or are we talking about the America of the Founders? Those two Americas are 150 years apart.

I agree that the Pilgrims were motivated. They were on a theological quest. They were trying to create a holy city or a holy nation. They were racked with this sense not only of guilt but also, “Am I called? Am I on the good list, or am I on the bad list?” So this Calvinistic thrust is definitely present in the Pilgrims.

Now, by the time you get to the American Founding, first of all, we’re not just talking about the New Englanders. We now have to include the Southerners, people like Washington and Madison, and these guys are Anglicans. They’re coming out of a different tradition, a different view of Christianity, a different view of society. Then you have to add immigrants like Alexander Hamilton. He was born in the West Indies. So the Founders’ America is, I think, markedly different than the Pilgrims’ America. But that all being said, I agree that America is a more moralistic country to this day compared to almost all of Europe, and the reason for it does have to do with its founding roots.

Given your own experience, do you think federal prosecutors have too much power?

Well, they certainly were out of control under Obama and under Biden. Whether that will continue to be the case remains to be seen. My case was the very first one. It was long before Carter Page, Michael Flynn, Papadopoulos, even all the cases against Trump and all that lawfare.

In my case, I did actually have a technical violation of the campaign finance laws. They basically say you can’t give a candidate more than $10,000, and I convinced two of my friends to give this candidate, a friend of mine, $10,000, and I reimbursed them. So I exceeded the campaign finance law. But normally, if you’re not seeking a quid pro quo, like you’re not trying to get something out of it for yourself, then they give you a warning and maybe a fine, but they don’t try to lock you up.

Injustice isn’t just a matter of, “Did you do it?” It’s a matter of, “Does the penalty fit the crime? Do other people who did the same thing get the same penalty?” If a cop pulls you over for speeding and you get three years in prison, you’ll be like, “Wait a minute, nobody else has gotten that penalty. This is absurdly disproportionate to what I did.” That’s really what happened in my case.

Unlike Blagojevich, I don’t say I was innocent. I said I did, in fact, break the law. I actually deserve to be taught a lesson. But the Obama prosecutors, if they had their way—and I kid you not—if they could have locked me up for ten years for doing that, they would have. They were out to destroy my career and my life. Again, they went after Trump not because they wanted to lock him up. They just wanted to disable his effectiveness.

The same is true with me. I realized when I went into a confinement center that if my career was destroyed when I came out, they would have won. But if my career continued, and I continued to write books and make films, and my reputation was better than ever, then they’ve lost. So I understood clearly what was at stake and what needed to be done on my side to make sure that those guys don’t win.

You’re a documentarian. What do you make of Elizabeth Holmes?

I don’t know if I have anything all that interesting to say on that topic. I wish I did. I’ve seen a few clips on social media, but I’m just sufficiently removed.

The documentaries for me have been ways of engaging large currents of history. I try to look at big questions like, were the fascists and the Nazis left-wing or right-wing? That is a dispute with great significance. Groups like Antifa are based on the premise that the fascists are all right-wing, and therefore these guys are left-wing; they’re anti-fascist. All of this, it seems to me, is based on a certain type of indoctrination that came in the aftermath of World War II.

So I use my documentaries to unfurl and unpack that kind of propaganda, and try to offer a provocative thesis for people to think about and offer a lot of evidence to support it. It’s been fun for me. I was, for many years, just a guy in a think tank, writing books and giving speeches. The documentaries were relatively new for me. I did the first one in 2012, and I’ve done about eight since then.

Are there any new documentaries you’re thinking of making?

Yeah, I’m working on one which deals with Islam in America for some time next year. I do have a documentary called The Stones Cry Out, the same title as the book, that has been released in partnership with PragerU. If you go to PragerU.com and put in The Stones Cry Out, you can watch my documentary, which focuses on the ten great discoveries of biblical archaeology. There’s a lot more in the book, but the documentary is a kind of appetizer that will lead you to the book.

Have you noticed anti-Indian hostility online, and where do you think it’s coming from?

I think that it’s coming from a sense that whenever minority groups are very successful, they are also very visible. This is true of the Jews; it’s true of Asian Indians. These are, in fact, the two most successful ethnic groups in America. It doesn’t go unnoticed that, when you’re talking about high tech, banking and finance, media, and CEOs of companies, you’ll notice that there are more Indian names and Jewish names.

Trump recently had a group of luminaries around the table to discuss AI, and there were maybe thirty people around the table. If you went down the list and checked, you’d find that there were like ten Jews and ten Indians. So that’s twenty out of thirty. I think that is one factor.

The other factor is that the Indians are visibly alien in a way that, say, Jews are not. Jews are by and large white. They fit into the population, and an Indian is going to be more noticeable, particularly an Indian who builds a large temple with a Vishnu statue at the top of it. Something like that, in Dallas, for example, or in Texas, people go, “Whoa, what’s that doing here?” So there’s a sort of sense that this is a cultural imposition somehow on America.

When I came to America, this was actually in the late ’70s, there were fewer Indians. I was initially in Arizona for a year as an exchange student. Then I went to an Ivy League college, Dartmouth, that had very few Indians. I think this hastened my assimilation because I was by and large in white America. I was not living in an Indian subculture inside of America. So I became very Americanized. I kind of lost my Indian accent. I married an American. I have not experienced this kind of prejudice or discrimination or hatred in my entire career.

But I am seeing more indications of it now, and I think it is partly the result of envy directed at Indian success, and part of it is directed at the greater visibility of Indians. Frankly, many of them want to live an Indian lifestyle at an American standard of living. They don’t really want to assimilate, and we don’t have a culture that makes them assimilate either, which used to be American culture in the past. American culture put a lot of pressure on immigrants to become part of the American way of life. American culture doesn’t do that anymore, and that’s not the fault of the immigrants. That’s the fault of the culture.

I was a big fan of cricket and soccer, and I did my best. I mean, I’m still not a major fan of baseball.

It still, to me, makes no sense, even though I know it is an all-American sport. But essentially, I dropped a lot of the things that I grew up with, and I developed new interests—not just, by the way, the Fourth of July, but understanding the underlying ideas behind the Fourth of July. I’ve spent a lot of my career writing about the meaning of America. So I’ve tried to assimilate in that deeper sense of devoting a lot of years of my life to understanding the foundational principles of the country.

What have you retained from your Indian upbringing, and how has it shaped you in America?

There’s no question that there are many core aspects of my personality that were shaped at a young age, that are wired into me, and in no way do I try to repudiate those. I consider myself fully American, but there are certain aspects of me that go back to my childhood, things I learned from my parents. Those are things I brought to America.

Even when I became a conservative, people say, “How did you convert to conservatism?” The way I look at it is, I didn’t convert at all. It’s more like, in college, I was exposed to Friedrich Hayek, Solzhenitsyn, Milton Friedman, and Margaret Thatcher. When I began to absorb these ideas, I realized, “You know what? These are actually things I’ve always believed.” It was more of a recognition than a conversion, and it’s more that I discovered in my late teens and twenties better arguments for the things that I had long believed.

I believed them from the time I came to America, so I brought them here with me. I’m a sort of natural-born conservative, you could say, a conservative going back to my roots in India, but I now argue in a very Americanized way for the applicability of those principles in the American context.

Henri Mattila is the publisher of Merion West.