(LifeSiteNews) — Steve Bannon is calling on faithful Christians to actively defend their families and communities from the pernicious evils afflicting the West, saying he thinks we’ll be “weighed and measured at the end” based on how we responded.

The former Trump adviser and current War Room host was gracious enough to join me for this episode of The John-Henry Westen Show, filmed in Washington, D.C. Bannon is the first of a series of special guests from D.C. this week, so stay tuned for more in the coming days!

The occasion for our interview came after a dinner hosted by Steve Bannon in honor of Bishop Athanasius Schneider. Bannon envisioned it as a sort of “spiritual war council” where there would be “give and take” between Bp. Schneider and attendees about the current spiritual war and how we should engage it.

Bannon, raised in a deeply Catholic environment himself, said “people of faith have got to get involved” politically.

“Politics is not pleasant. It’s oftentimes not fun. It’s very nitty-gritty and grubby,” he said. “And you’re going to have a lot of grease underneath your fingernails. And there’s a lot of things in politics that are going to offend you as a Christian and as a Catholic. But I think you have to make that sacrifice in order for us to, in a democratic society, come to grips with what’s going on.”

Bannon said he believes the United States is in the midst of a “unique time” in its history, where “we’re going to determine whether what was bequeathed to us is what we passed down, or [whether] it can be something radically different.”

Namely, he cites the possibility that artificial intelligence (AI) and transhumanism could upend human experience in a fundamental way through the “singularity,” that is, the self-awareness of AI.

“[I]n Switzerland they ran a test to see if [AI could recombine proteins to make biological weapons]. … In a matter of minutes, it created 47,000 new combinations of potential biological weapons,” Bannon said. “My point, and what these guys know, is that artificial intelligence, and artificial general intelligence, can start to actually program itself.”

“We’re living in times people could say, ‘Hey, these are the end times.’ I don’t know. Nobody knows. But what I know is that man has created, by his own hand, weapons of science and technology that could make nuclear weapons which could destroy the world easily,” he continued. “Between the biological weapons, artificial intelligence, chemical weapons, things have been created, we have the instrumentality to destroy life many times over. And so what is your calling to stop that?”

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