In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent shares his recent interview with Amber Rose, the Religious Hippie, and their discussion on the ups and downs of being an online Catholic influencer.
Transcript:
It is Free For All Friday here on The Counsel of Trent. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Recently, I was invited onto Amber Rose’s podcast. Amber is also known as The Religious Hippie. She’s been on Pints with Aquinas before. She does a lot of interesting updates and YouTube videos, and so she asked me to come on to talk about being a Catholic on social media, about Catholic influencers, things that are good, things that are not so good.
So we had a really good conversation and I’m really excited to share that with you all today. For those of you who are new, Monday and Wednesdays, we talk apologetics and theology here on the podcast, but Friday, we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And I think you really enjoy this interview that I had with Amber Rose on The Religious Hippie Podcast.
Very happy to have you here today, Trent. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me. I think my greatest accomplishment is I’m married to the host of Too Far with Laura Horn.
Yes.
And so that would be, and I do make occasional cameo appearances and technical setup for that YouTube channel. I’ve noticed you’ve made a few comments here and there. I’m glad you’ve received it well also.
Oh yes. Whenever I’m on Laura’s thing for whatever, whether it was the modesty discourse, I’m like, this is the content I live for. I wish more people did stuff like this because I just think we take ourselves too seriously these days. I mean, Laura being able to bring the type of humor she does and be unapologetically herself, it’s so fun.
Oh, absolutely. And I think there’s always a ton of material for Laura to draw from when she’s on social media .and she’s not on social media a lot, and I think that makes it work. She doesn’t have a Twitter profile, or she has some things so that she can see things on Twitter, but she’s not on Twitter. She’s not on Facebook. She barely just started on Instagram, but she likes just observing everybody else getting a bit out of hand and poking fun at all that.
Honestly, that’s what we need because without that, I feel like the whole Catholic online world is kind of like doom and gloom, which is a little bit what our topic is today about celebrities, Catholic celebrities, convert celebrities, and just being on social media as a whole can really impact your faith life in a really negative way.
I know for myself having to go through and seeing all the negativity on Twitter especially, you know who I’m talking about, all the people, and it’s crazy how people allow a small comment to just ruin their day or they take so many things out of context and they have to have their own spin on stuff. And I do feel like to an extent, there’s that danger for us as content creators, as Catholic content creators, that we push the doom and gloom because we know it’s what gets gets us views.
Oh yeah. I mean, that’s a danger if you’re really trying to create, like you said, just content and followers and you’re focusing not so much on edifying and building people up, but you’re thinking, oh, what are people talking about and what could I say that gets a lot of attention? And honestly, a lot of people will calculate, well, if I say something really extreme, even if it gives me a lot of negative attention, it also will get me a lot of positive attention, so it’s all worthwhile.
I think you notice that the people who are the most moderate and reasonable and try to have the most balanced takes, they’re just not as popular as the people that have the most forceful takes because people like that kind of a rush, either a rush of agreement or a rush of disagreement. And I do think, yeah, it creates this bad environment. If you look at my social media, for example, I don’t do a lot of posting there anymore either. I do a little bit of it. I mostly use it to reach out to people, things like that, but it’s just gotten a lot worse.
I mean, I know I mainly followed you on YouTube and Twitter, and I watch your videos and everything. Twitter though, I mean, there was so much stuff going on where it’s like, should we speak out about this because technically this person is saying stuff that might lead other people astray? And so you also have to find that balance.
You could get lost forever trying to correct everybody on the internet. Because then when you correct that person, you’ve got to correct other people. I think there’s a place for that for people to do that. Honestly, that might be the place. I don’t know, it’s so hard. It’s just so easy to lose your soul on the internet. You become angry, uncharitable, dishonest, mean. You just get so fixated on things and also you just can’t let things go either.
I mean, I still get in little debates with people here and there, but overall, I find it to not be very fruitful. I’d rather find something that’s going on on Twitter and I’ll just talk about it as an episode of my podcast for a larger perspective on whatever the issue is, or I might restrict myself if someone’s wrong just to post under, “That’s actually incorrect. Here is the correct answer,” and then just let it go after that and then I’m done.
I think that’s so important too is setting those boundaries and those limits for ourself and not getting sucked into the vortex of online internet fights, because that’s something that happens daily on Twitter. Honestly, it happens probably a hundred times a day on Twitter. I don’t know. But you’ve done debates. Debating is something that you’re very good at.
But the thing is, on Twitter, because of the limited amount of characters, there are a lot of things that get lost in the context and the punctuation and just the feel of a tweet, where people just tweet and it’s like, “Mary is sinless,” and that’s it, or something.
And it’s like, okay, that’s great, but clearly, and that’s true, but there also needs to be more context behind that for some people who don’t understand because then you’re going to create controversy. And my spiritual director specifically told me, he’s like, never post to create controversy. Even if it’s subconscious, think before you tweet or think before you post. Go ahead.
I was going to say, I think that one of the difficulties we have on social media is we’ll post something, but we won’t think, how is that going to sound to other people? Or we will think, “Oh, this will offend Protestants or it will offend atheists, but I don’t care because I’m right. And so I’m just going to put that out there,” instead of presenting in a way that’s measured, that anyone can appreciate if they give it a fair reading. So I think you’re right that there are certain things that you could say just to “own another person,” to say something in a very provocative way.
And sometimes there are times to do that, to test whether Twitter’s actually censoring people, things like that. But I find it difficult when people will post when without thinking about how it’s received from other people, either that it’s very provocative or that it’s just flat out wrong. It’s just incorrect. I’ll give you a classic example. When Catholics say, “Why would I be Protestant when Protestants have 30,000 denominations? You have so much disunity.” That number is actually not true.
It comes from a source that categorizes things very poorly. That same source said that there are like 200 denominations in Catholicism. I didn’t know if you knew this figure. It’s out there all the time, the 33,000 denominations of Protestantism. It’s not true. I mean, rather I say something like, “Hey, how many churches did Jesus want us to have? Probably not more than one. Protestantism seems to have a lot more than that.” So you’ll notice that that is a very measured claim.
It’s a modest… Well, you can appreciate this. You’re always talking about modesty. I have my own ministry. I do apologetic modesty. You’ve got some of these apologists that they let everything hang out there and it’s scandalous, some of these misleading claims or arguments that are poorly sourced or citations that are not true. And I’m saying we should really be modest in the claims we’re making.
That’s going to get you a lot further in a dialogue with someone than a very provocative argument, especially one that you can’t support. Look at me. I guess maybe I should start my own little modesty Twitter. That’s what I should do.
Just have modesty with Trent Horn.
I will, theological and apologetic modesty. Different people have different approaches, but that is the approach that I’ve tried to take. I mean, I’ll give you… It’s funny, I had a problem… Not a problem. I remember back on Reformation Day. I just always think it’s funny. I’m like, you mean Halloween? Reformation Day, October 31st for our Protestant friends. Come on, man. It’s Halloween. You’re not fooling anybody. But I remember I saw a Catholic YouTuber, who shall remain nameless, who was doing a video on here’s what’s wrong with Martin Luther, here’s what’s so bad about Martin Luther.
And he was quoting from a webpage written by a Jesuit I think in the ’30s, and the research on that particular webpage is really… I know that page. It’s really, really bad. The article’s bad. Other Protestants and Lutherans have rebutted it and it’s just not good. And he just used it because he thought, hey, there’s footnotes here. This guy seems pretty well sourced. No, you’ve already started off on the wrong foot.
Yeah, your presentation is going to impress Catholics who don’t know any better, but it’s going to turn off a Protestant who does know, hey, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And then I just debated, should I correct this person on this? I’ve corrected this individual before on other things, and I felt like I just don’t want to get in another Twitter fight, just not another one. So maybe when Reformation Day comes around again next year, I’ll make an episode, the things Catholics get wrong about Martin Luther.
That would be a good idea.
Yeah, but it’s hard. What’s hard about it is that we all have this nasty habit of confirmation bias. So we hear something and when we agree with it, we’re like, “Yeah, that’s awesome,” and we don’t question it. And when we hear something we disagree with, we ignore it or we question it as much as possible, instead of just fairly looking at the evidence. And so it’s just something we all have to get over.
Yeah, no, I think that there’s a real danger there too, because if we’re, like you said, confirmation biased, then we’re leading people astray. And that’s something that as Catholics we’re not supposed to be doing, which is why it’s so important that we know our faith and we don’t just know our faith, but we know the other faiths too. A lot of people have argued about me on this, and I’m like, I don’t think it’s wrong to learn about Hinduism, not practicing it or anything, or Hinduism…
Are there people who say it’s wrong to even learn about it?
Yes. Yes. People have told me, they’re just like, “Why are you learning about this or that?”
Why not? But this is good that you’re out there and I think it’s hard, especially on Catholic social media. The hardest part on Catholic social media is I feel like you have some traditionalists who think everybody’s going to hell and some liberals who think everybody’s going to heaven. So it just doesn’t really matter what we talk about, or you’ll just nitpick about these things, major and the minors. So even that example, wouldn’t it be most impressive, you meet a Hindu and to be able to speak to them and say, “Yeah, I’m familiar with the Bhagavad Gita. I’m familiar with the elements of Hinduism?”
And I’ve done this with other faiths when I’ve… I do think that there’s a problem, especially within the online Catholic liberals and the Catholic traditionalists. The liberals think everyone’s going to heaven, so you don’t have to witness to the non-Catholics. I really feel like some of these, not all, but some traditionalists think like, oh, they’re all going to hell anyways. Deus Vult, here’s the gospel, take it or leave it. You didn’t leave it. You left it. Well, you’re going to hell. What do you expect? Instead of the sense of, oh no, you can actually…
Now I understand some of their criticism. Some of them get really mad at me, like I say, we should dialogue, and they roll their eyes like, “Ugh, dialogue. Novus Ordo, ugh, that’s modernist.” I agree if it’s the kind of dialogue that sometimes the Vatican hosts where people sit around and they only talk about what they agree about. That’s not helpful. That’s bad. But when I have dialogues, like I’ve had dialogues with Alex O’Connor, with Brandon Robertson, I’ve had dialogues with Gavin Ortlund, I’ve had dialogues with people who are not Catholic where I challenge them on where we…
Here’s agree, this is great, and I challenge them on where we disagree. But the only way I can have a good dialogue with someone… If I’m just totally ignorant of what they believe, they’re not going to… It’s the same thing you and I, if we talk to a Protestant who said, “Oh, well, as a Catholic, you worship Mary. So do you think that that’s okay?” You don’t know the first thing. Or someone says this, “Oh, as a Catholic, you think you need an indulgence to go to heaven.”
See, that shows me right there that person has no hope of wooing you to Protestantism because you’ll say, “You don’t even know Catholicism. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And the same thing happens if you try to engage a non-Catholic. If you don’t understand what they believe, they’re not going to take you… So yeah, that does make me really roll my eyes that someone get mad at you.
Now, I understand if someone is in a spiritually bad place, maybe they shouldn’t be reading up on other religions if they’re tempted to leave Catholicism. I understand that. But if it’s just, I am trying to learn about the world to spread the gospel, I find that quite silly to condemn that.
Well, it is. When it comes down to it, I think back to the Jesuits back in the day where they would literally go to Native American tribes and learn the language, learn the culture, immerse themselves in the culture, and then weeded out all the paganism and convert them and start working their way into baptizing these people. That’s how it’s supposed to be done, not that you conform to their culture and you conform to their sins and their paganism. You keep the Catholicism, but you teach them another way by learning and gaining that trust.
There’s also I think a difficulty sometimes with Catholics is that they will consider certain cultural elements to be essential to Catholicism. So for example, we have debates about the liturgy and the traditional Latin mass. And some people might think that for liturgy, using the organ or singing in polyphony, multiple notes, that is what the liturgy ought to be. But 1,500 years ago when the organ was introduced in church history, it was very controversial. The organ who was an instrument previously that had been known for being used in things like Roman orgies.
Well, yeah, think about what we’re borrowing from. We’re taking things from Roman culture, right? I don’t exclusively attend anymore, but I’ve often attended the Eastern liturgy, the Byzantine Catholic Church, and I find that that liturgy is even more ancient because it’s only sung using acapella. There are no instruments. The first liturgical music, it did not have instruments. Adding things like the organ, it was essentially an instrument at the time. The same if you use more intricate musical compositions like polyphony instead of monophony.
But now it’s 2,000 years later, we think, oh, organ is the most traditional thing, when there was a time when, oh, that’s, that’s very, very controversial. And so we become a bit ignorant of history. And so by that same token, incorporating elements within the faith, we should be more open to that. Now, of course, there is another extreme where it becomes banal, it becomes you’re trying to ape the culture, and you’ve got these churches that were designed in the seventies that are just awful.
That’s the other extremely where you’re conformed. I mean, if it’s so funny, I always think like, oh, if I was the pope or bishop, or if I had real authority, Veal asked me, what kind of mode popery would you do? I wish that there was a law like every Catholic Church that was built now, its architectural plans had to be… The architectural style had to be before 1910.
Yes. Yes, please.
That’s what attracts people. If you build a church in the ’70s with ’70s style, it’s always going to look ’70s, but if you build it with the style of the 1700s. If you just walk down the street and you saw just a Catholic parish, but it looked like a little mini gothic cathedral, non-Catholics would just go there and take pictures.
Yes, evangelizing.
Exactly. They’re like, “Whoa, this is really interesting,” or whatever. “It looks exactly like a Spanish mission from the 18th century in California,” or whatever it might be. So yeah, I wish that we had more things. For example, in San Diego, because Catholic Answers is there and I travel out there often, there is a Mormon temple there that looks like a Disneyland castle. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to San Diego.
No, I haven’t. But I mean, if I do, I’ll look for it.
Well, can just look up San Diego Mormon Temple. If you look it up online, it’s just like, wow, it looks like a Disney castle. You’re awestruck by it. So to parse what I was saying before, you don’t want to turn false settlements. What was considered traditional now was at one point often controversial and new. So you should be open to that, which is controversial and new, but at the same time, not every new thing is a good thing. So there’s a balance.
Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve talked about this multiple times about how I don’t like ugly churches. And every single time I get dragged through the mud for it saying, “You can’t say that about God’s house.” I’m like, God deserves a better house. I mean, come on. This is the King of Kings, the Lords of Lords. And if we truly believe that, why are we putting him in a ’70s office building? Like The Office could be filmed in most of these churches, and I wouldn’t know the difference.
Actually, there was one church, it just popped up on Instagram I think it was yesterday. I don’t know if it was in San Diego, but probably. There was a beautiful, beautiful church, beautiful cathedral, and it was sold in 2003 to San Diego and they gutted the whole thing and turned it into a wedding venue so that the church could build another cathedral further down the street. And I’m like, why not keep both? I mean, I understand money’s tight and everything like that, but I mean, I go to St. John Cantius. I’m sure you’re familiar with that, right?
I think so.
It’s ranked one of the most beautiful churches in the nation.
Sounds familiar. I’ll just bring it up. Let’s see.
Yeah, that works. And it’s beautiful. And so St. John Cantius…
Oh, is it in Chicago?
Yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s gorgeous, and I’ll post pictures.
Those vaulted ceilings, wooden pews. It’s hard for me the wooden pews though, that’s very Protestant. I don’t like that liberal stuff.
You want to stand 24/7?
No. Now, by the way, it’s so funny, people… Well, you get this too, probably. People they think they know you or I like, “Oh, they do this. They do that.” Uh, no. I might’ve said one thing a few years ago, and you’re just running with this. Sometimes life changes. People think, for example, that I exclusively attend the Byzantine Catholic Church, the Eastern Byzantine liturgy, and I did for a while. But now our family life plans have changed, and now we almost exclusively attend a Novus Ordo.
It’s a beautiful Novus Ordo liturgy that I enjoy, and I do go to Byzantine every now and then because I also really do enjoy that. So people think like, oh, he tells people, “I’m Catholic.” He won’t even attend the Novus Ordo. That’s not true actually. I’ve never said that, but you can go ahead and run with it.
And that’s exactly what happens for me as well, where I tell them like, “Oh, I go to the traditional Latin mass and that’s my preferred mass,” and they’re like, “Oh, so you hate the Novus Ordo?” I’m like, no.
Right.
Where did I say that?
Right, just because I have a preference. I still prefer the Byzantine liturgy, but our life plans, it just makes more sense for the Novus Ordo and your bias. I even like the Novus Ordo parishes that people would cringe at, but I sometimes enjoy the homey familiarity of that which is cringe and I find a particular kind of beauty in it. I know there are downsides to it, but it’s kind of like when I watch old sitcoms from the ’90s that are cringey still.
They have a warmth and familiarity that I enjoy. And just seeing the community that they love it and their little choir that’s doing their best and shaking the orange with the rice in it. And it’s like, you’re going for it. So I was saying the pews though, some people don’t know this, pews were really invented as part of the Protestant Reformation to accommodate sitting for two hours listening to a sermon.
Most Christian churches throughout church history, the posture was standing. It was not sitting actually. But there’s nothing bad about it if you have that posture and you adopt it and you have pews. You can worship God in a lot of different ways. So just chill out, everybody.
It’s crazy too, because with things like that, I’ve had a lot of people email me, and at least 10 people email me in, saying, “Oh, my mom prays the rosary during the Latin mass, or this person praise the rosary during the mass. Is that technically like, can they do that? That’s not really participating.” And I’m like, whoa. The Low Mass came when we had to do underground masses. And so the Low Mass was celebrated in barns, in houses and basements. And so praying the rosary might’ve been the only way they could have participated.
Not saying they were alive all the way almost 100 years ago, wow, but it’s like it was a way to still celebrate mass without being found out. And sometimes that’s how people can participate because that’s the only way they’ve learned. And yeah, it’d be nice if they could get a missile or something, but they’re still participating in their own way. It’s not illicit. Leave them alone. Focus on your own relationship and your own focus on God. Because if you’re getting distracted by other people in mass, you really need to focus in on your own relationship, because I used to have that issue.
People would walk in shorts and t-shirts and tank tops and short shorts and all this stuff, and I’d be like, oh my gosh, do they know where they are? Do they know who they’re in front of? And then I’d think about it, I’d be like, you know what? Maybe they’re depressed. Maybe they don’t know better. Maybe something. Maybe this, but I’m glad they’re here. So I’d pray to God. I’d be like, “God, I don’t know what this person needs, but you do,” and then I’d leave it at that, focus on God.
But so many times I’ve had people just become distracted and almost hateful towards other people in mass for having different preferences or certain things or not doing the things that they do. And unfortunately, this usually does fall under the traditional people, though I have been told by a few Novus Ordo people to not lower my veil and things like that.
I think people have to learn to be able to take more things in stride so that you have the energy levels to deal with something that is egregious, that is sinful, or someone is attempting to disrupt mass, or save your energy for the fights that are there. If you have an opportunity to talk with this person about something that’s pressing, you’ve put yourself in a good position to do that. But whether it’s online or in church, I do think people can take things a little more stride and to try to give people more of the benefit of the doubt and try to be charitable in your interpretations of others.
Yeah, I definitely feel like though, to an extent, when I see people do that, it’s almost like it’s a learned behavior from their favorite Catholic celebrities, personalities who always are nitpicking other people, are always bashing the Pope or bashing the cardinals and things. And because of all this negativity, it feeds into their life, and so they start thinking negatively about other people instead of charitably.
And you can see the fruit of that. There’s certain people who I know watch certain people and they all have the same outlook where it’s very negative and judgmental almost, and then I have other people who watch this other group of content creators and they’re very nice and charitable. It’s crazy how that works.
Yeah, I do think it’s hard. Once again, it’s all about finding a balance, that there is the extreme of what we’re talking about, nitpicking and making things obligatory where we should have freedom. And this is the complaint that Jesus had about the Pharisees, that they’ll strain a gnat, but swallow a camel.
They’ll do everything, they’ll go through all this work to not eat a tiny unclean animal like a gnat, but then they’ll eat a giant unclean animal, the camel. I mean, not literally, but they’ll work hard. And I’m going to be honest with you, I have known people… Yeah, I mean, I am familiar… Well, I mean, honestly, we’ve seen scandals that are… Yeah, I can say this now. It’s always hard to think what is the traction, what is [inaudible 00:26:16]
I know it’s hard.
But to be frank, to talk about what was going on with church militant, that’s become a public issue involving morality issues with Michael Voris, but there’s others, I have seen this, of an individual… It’s not unheard of for an individual to become obsessed with critiquing even the appearances of evil or being overly harsh and critiquing the minor sins of others when that person in their own life they are committing major sins. And it does bogle my mind that there are people who will be so obsessed with the minor sins of others that they cannot…
I mean, that is why, once again, Jesus gets it right. Why do you pick the splinter out of your brother’s eye when you have the log in your own eye? Now, his solution was not just to stop judging people and not care. It was to take the log out of your own eye and then you can address the splinter. Jesus never said that we couldn’t… We can’t judge the souls of other people, we can’t see that, but we can judge other actions and proportionately say, “This is scandalous. This is a gray area.”
I do think there’s also a concern that sometimes… And I understand how this is abused. I think the traditionalist extremes often are the result from more liberal extremes in the church. So a liberal extreme is use your conscience, let your conscience tell you what’s best to do, but then people will abuse that to engage in things that are objectively evil. So the extreme corrective approach is, no, don’t follow your conscience. Father so-and-so said this is wrong. Father so-and-so said this particular situation is evil.
You can’t do that. Well, maybe the church doesn’t have a teaching on that. It is up to us. So that’s where I think the difficulties can arise.
I definitely see that a lot with certain… Especially in the traditional mindset, because I’m in the traditional world quite a lot. I see it a lot with exorcists, not one specific one, but a lot of them altogether, where people latch onto every single word they say.
And not to say that they’re wrong or that they shouldn’t be listened to, but we still have to listen to church authority on a lot of stuff and say, “Okay, yeah, this is what this priest says or this authority figure, the celebrity says, but what does the church say? What does Jesus say?”
Yeah, and that’s what I’m always trying to bring people back to. I mean, I stumble at this, everybody stumbles, but I try hard to distinguish between my opinions about matters and what the church teaches about things. And to be honest with you… It’s funny, I feel like I’m just cutting loose in my opinions here, whereas on my podcast, it’s very, here’s the argument, the counter argument.
Because on my podcast, I’m trying really hard. I just want to build people up. I want to help people become Catholic, refute false worldviews. I don’t really care about spreading my opinions or commenting about things. I feel like the Catholic commentariat, it’s kind of a wing of online Catholicism that I think can breed a lot of more problems. It creates more heat than light.
Oh, yeah.
So when I’m trying to engage, I try to really separate, look, well, what does the church teach? And there are many in… So the dangers here, it is interesting we can find the middle line. On the liberal side, it will be, oh, yeah, you can do this. It’s ignoring, no, you can’t. The church has a teaching that this is wrong. You can’t do that. Whereas on the more traditionalist side, the extreme can be, you can’t do that even though the church doesn’t have a teaching on it. I or father so-and-so, exorcist so-and-so, this church father or this saint said that it’s wrong.
For example, people often do this with St. Alphonsus Liguori and sexual ethics, marital sexual ethics. They’ll say, “Oh, well, St. Alphonsus Liguori said married couples can’t do this. Therefore, it’s wrong.” Well, that’s his opinion. It doesn’t mean we are bound to follow it. And they’ll say, “Yeah, but the church said that St. Alphonsus’ opinions are morally safe to follow.” Right.
What that means is if he thought this act between married couples was wrong, you’re not sinning by following him and not engaging in that act, but you’re also not sinning by disagreeing with him because this is a subject the church has not given a teaching on.
A lot of people, they’ll take the magisterium, which is the successors of the apostles, what the bishops formally teach, and they’ll say, “Well, no, the church’s teaching is really in what I think the bishops say, or what I think the Church Fathers have said, or what this Catholic YouTuber says.” And that’s where I think it’s really dangerous that they create their own magisterium in that regard.
I agree. I think also a lot of people, they confuse dogma with opinion. I think a lot of people… You know the whole like the Pope’s infallible. People constantly misinterpret what that means. And so they think that like, oh, well, this is a dogma taught by the church. And it’s like, no, just an opinion.
Well, papal infallibility is a dogma, but hardly almost never is what the Pope says a dogma. That’s only when the Pope is defining it ex cathedra. So papal infallibility is a dogma, but what the Pope says, you’re correct, there is a range of authority between… And honestly, there is a range that we have to give different levels of adherence to.
Like when the Pope teaches in an encyclical, when he’s making an act to formally teach, that requires the religious submission of mind and will when it’s on a matter of faith and morals, sometimes the Pope might say something, “Hey, here’s a concern I have about climate change and what other countries should do.”
Well, that’s a prudential judgment, so we should give the Pope’s opinion respect, but we don’t have to give it the same level of assent that we would give like a teaching on faith and morals and an encyclical. So I think that people have to understand, you’re right, it’s about these nuances of teachings and their impacts on us. When you oversimplify it, you usually end up getting it wrong.
Yeah, and that’s so difficult, especially when a lot of people have a lot of followers and a lot of people who literally rely on them for anything and everything, and they become that person’s sole source of news or opinions. And we have to understand that people aren’t… We’re fallible. We make mistakes. We get things wrong all the time.
And like you were saying earlier, just because I believe something a year ago does not mean that rings true today still. We grow. We learn. And as we do that, it’s okay to look back and say like, “Oh, I don’t do that anymore,” but you’ll be scrutinized for that on social media if you’re a content creator. They’re like, “Oh, well, then you lied to me.” It’s crazy.
There’s issues where I’ve developed in my understanding of arguments and what arguments I would deploy or not deploy, I’ve learned things the hard way of evidences that don’t work or are faulty. And I have had opinions that have changed on issues where I might’ve been favor of one prudential approach, but now I’m not in favor of that. You need to give people elasticity to be able to develop in their views and their understandings, and just charity with one another as we try to confront what’s going on.
I do think with the whole thing that people cling to content creators now, part of that is though I feel like the bishops did this to themselves sometimes by ineptitude, by failing to teach clearly on particular issues or to uphold that teaching in action, that maybe a bishop does teach that homosexuality is wrong, but the bishop hires people to be principals in Catholic schools that are obviously in a same-sex relationship. We all know it, but we’re not going to say anything. Well, how is that teaching if you’re hiring people and you’re giving the wink wink about what they’re doing?
Or you’re telling people to be pro-life, but you do a fund for the diocese, and the fund ends up donating to a company that also provides for abortions indirectly. So I think that some people, they throw up their hands and think, “Fine, I don’t even trust the bishops. I trust this guy on YouTube. He’s a good Catholic. He sounds great.” But the danger there, once again, yeah, the bishops aren’t perfect, but nobody’s perfect, but they are the ones that Christ gave us to be the teaching office of the church.
And if you say, “I don’t need them. I have scripture, and I have tradition, and I have all these documents,” you are two steps away from becoming Protestant. You really are, because a lot of people… And I’m actually working on a book on this right now called Protestantism… The working title is Protestantism at the Bar of History.
Is that the one that’s coming out next year?
No, that one is Against Liberal Catholicism.
Ah! Excited for that one.
Oh, yeah, yeah. That’ll be a hoot.
Trent will be back on the show for that one.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that’ll be fun. Some Catholics think, oh, Protestants just thought, I don’t want to have to listen to the church anymore, so I just want the Bible. I’m going to read the Bible. Here’s what I think the Bible means, and I’m going to go and do my own thing. And that is a caricature of the Protestant Reformation. That the reformers, when you read Luther and Calvin, especially Calvin, they cited the Church Fathers a lot.
And they said, “We are restoring the Apostolic Church that you all have corrupted into the Middle Ages. We don’t trust the bishops and their corruption involving indulgences and the financial scandals of indulgences or the scandals of priests who are married or have concubines or openly sodomites in the priesthood.” St. Peter Damian had to deal with this back during the age of the Counter-Reformation. The exact same problem, sodomy in the priesthood.
So the Protestant is saying, “Look, this is corrupt. The church has become corrupt. I don’t trust the bishops. I trust the Bible and the fathers, and I can read the fathers. And I know that they support me, not what Rome has become in the 16th century.” So it’s not that Protestant Reformers are just “Oh, me and the Bible and that’s all.”
Because some Catholics think, I can be Catholic if I just have the Bible and I have the tradition and I can ignore the bishops. Saying I have the Bible and the tradition and ignore the bishops, that’s what Protestants did in the 16th century. That’s absolutely what they did.
That’s crazy.
And so you’re not that far away from doing that. Same thing happens when people say, “Oh, Francis isn’t the Pope.” Why do you think that? Because he’s a heretic. Why do you think he’s a heretic? Look at these scandalous things he did. The problem is there’s no stopping point there. That if that’s how you’re going to judge, say the Pope’s a heretic because he did something that scandalizes me, well, that’s also going to apply to John Paul II, Benedict.
Every other pope has done something scandalous in their pontificate, except for John Paul I. I mean, it’s a scandal that he died like eight days later or whatever. But you go through, you’re going to… It won’t just stop at Francis. Quickly you can become a 1958 [inaudible 00:38:14] Of if you say, “Oh, they weren’t really a pope.
They weren’t a pope because they committed this heresy,” what about the accusations of heresy that Protestants make against other popes in church history? If you’ve lowered the bar and you say, “Oh, Francis did this thing that’s so ambiguous, he’s not the pope,” you’re going to start X-ing out popes all throughout church history. You’re going to undermine everything. So I’m sorry for the long-wind, baggy answer, but that’s my concern.
And I definitely think we’re seeing history repeat itself, right? I mean, that’s something that we see time and time again. The church goes through a difficult time. People leave the church. And when it comes to that, I mean, I think of JP II who is so beloved by so many polls like myself, but he did the Pachamama scandal, and there were a lot of…
Are you talking about the statue? I think I remember that. I was thinking with the Assisi meeting was the big scandalous…
Oh, I love that too. No, it was like this pagan idol, and then he kissed the Quran. There are some things that happened, but people think he was the best pope ever because he had this great connection to the kids.
Yeah, I remember that. The problem with Pachamama also is that that phrase means Mother Earth. I mean, that’s what Pachamama means, Mother Earth.
Makes sense.
But you can use these titles in a literal way, like there’s some people who literally worship Mother Earth and believe the earth is a goddess, but you can also use descriptions like this in a personifying sort of way. For example, if I say that, “Father Time has really gotten to him,” I don’t think there’s a literal person named Father Time who makes someone age. Father Time is just a way of describing time and aging and things get older. Mother Earth can just be a colorful phrase to refer to the shared environment that we have.
When the Bible talks about Lady Wisdom, it doesn’t mean there’s an actual lady named wisdom. It’s a personification of the Spirit of God. So you’re right. So going back, when these things come up, if you’re going… This is what I would ask I guess of Catholics. What bothers me is you’ll have Catholics who will bend over backwards to explain a Bible difficulty or explain a difficulty with a pope from early church history like Honorius or Vigilius, and oh, they weren’t really heretics, or this doesn’t really disprove papal infallibility.
That’s not popesplaining if you say, “Pope Honorius does not contradict papal infallibility for these, these, and these reasons.” They’ll bend over backwards to do that. The church didn’t contradict itself at this council or that council. They’ll go into overdrive mode to say, “No, no, no, no. Let me walk you through church history. The Bible and slavery, yeah, that is that passage about you can own slaves in perpetuity. Leviticus 25. That does sound harsh, but let me give you the social background and the context.
Or in the Bible where it says kill men, women, and children, leave none that breathes, there’s a context here, and there’s this and there’s that.” You’ll have Catholics who will bend over backwards. But then when it comes to Pope Francis, suddenly it’s like, “Ah, we won’t give the time of day.” Now, obviously there’s differences there. The Bible is divinely inspired and without error. A pope can just make a lot of errors just in his own teaching.
But my concern is that instead of just looking at all of the evidence objectively to come at the reality of a situation, we apply different evidential standards based on a preexisting attitude towards what we’re critiquing, and that’s never a good idea.
Yes. And I think social media has magnified that. Because if you think about… I mean, we’ve only had social media for about not even 30 years really. We’re coming up on maybe 25 years or maybe a little more, I don’t know. But they didn’t have social media back in the day like they did now, so all of the information they’re getting from from these old popes are from writings and old church documents and things like that.
We had a little bit of social media when I was your age.
Really?
I’m an old geezer now. Well, let’s see, you’re in your early 20s.
Tumblr?
No. What we had, we had a thing called LiveJournal.
Huh?
You ever heard of LiveJournal? No, it was before your time. This was an amazing, dramatic thing. LiveJournal was, it was just basically a diary that people could read publicly. It was similar… I mean, I guess it’s like Twitter, but you get longer entries and people would write in them. And it was just an amazing source of drama. I remember that probably at the early 2000s.
There’s always been a kind of media to keep people socially engaged with one another. But you’re right. During the pontification of St. John Paul II, the closest you would have might be a Usenet group, but you had to really know the internet to find something like that, or someone shared you a newspaper clipping at mass. But now it’s just this immediate feedback that overwhelms us.
And I think it can really overtake somebody’s life. Because I think as human beings, we’re drawn into the drama. If we get endless amounts of it, especially surrounding our faith. And that’s why I always tell people, I’m like… How do I explain this? You are responsible for your own salvation. And so it’s like if you’re focusing on things that are taking you away from God, not saying…
Obviously, you still pray for the popes or the pope and the cardinals and the bishops and everything, but cut out the drama. Don’t pay attention to it. Because most of the time those headlines… People I notice today, especially in my generation, they love reading headlines, read none of the context.
Totally.
And people don’t get that those headlines are meant to hook you, but most of the time they’re a lie. They’re clickbait.
It’s also called burying the lede, L-E-D-E. The salient part of an article that changes the entire context for journalistic integrity, it’s included, but five paragraphs down so that a lot of people don’t even get there to see, oh, this actually wasn’t that big a deal, or there’s a totally different context than what’s being involved.
So you’re right. I think that we get so overwhelmed, we just want to click, I want that headline. We want to consume information very quickly, so you just do even beyond… Once again, back in my day. Back in my day, it was hard to cheat at things. We didn’t have Wikipedia to give us a plot summary. We had to buy CliffsNotes.
Those are free now.
This is the fun game. Maybe you and I just do a podcast called Have you ever heard of?
We Should.
And I’m just going to sound like some old-timey person. Did you ever play Jax?
And then I’ll quiz you on Gen Z grammar or something. Be like, what does frizz mean?
I do not know what… Okay, let’s try that. Oh, rizz. I know what frizz is. Okay, wait, let’s try this. I think I can do this. Rizz is similar in my day to what we… I think it’s similar in my day we called that game.
Yeah, basically. Confidence, game, dating, kind of thing.
Yeah, rizzing up someone. So in my day, we called that that game. I could kind of keep up with some of it. Some of it I am just still totally out of loop on. But when we would try to obtain information, it was a lot slower. We had dial up internet. To learn about something, you had CliffNotes.
CliffNotes, they were yellow and black. Literally, it was a book. It was yellow and black stripes. That was the summary of a book. And if you could get that, it just made your book report so much easier. Then that became SparkNotes. But nowadays, it’s just like you can have ChatGPT write your book report in two seconds.
Yup, with minimal editing.
The times they are a changing.
It’s true, and not always for the better. We see that the educational system is failing kids, and most kids that are like nine to 12 can’t read behavioral issues all because… I mean, after COVID happened, the whole social media thing just overtook and parents started putting iPads in front of their kids. It’s just crazy.
But now it’s like we’re raising Millennials and Gen Z kind of are raising this generation of iPad kids, and my generation, Gen Z, is seeing this and they’re like, “We’re not giving our kids iPads. No way.” And so I think there will be for more of a push in Gen Z to have a better relationship with social media.
I’m excited. I am excited about that. So every generation, it skips who raises who. So Gen Z is being raised by Gen X right now. I think that’s how it works. Because if you think about it, the parents of millennials are baby boomers. The generations, there’s always a halfway point. So if you’re a millennial, your parent is probably a baby boomer. If you’re Gen Z, your parents are probably Gen Xers, which means they’re probably in their 40s or early 50s, as opposed to being in their 60s or 70s.
And so they’re still comparatively young. They were the Gen X. When I think of Gen X, I think of Slackers and Beavis and Butt-Head. They were an underappreciated generation for sure. So the most recent generation is called Gen Alpha, and that’s anyone who was born after 2010. Those are the children of the millennials. And so you’re right that Gen Z… So I don’t even know what the name…
The one after Alpha, we haven’t reached that yet, because Gen Z is just starting to have kids and families. We don’t have a name yet for that. Maybe Gen Bravo, which would be really unoriginal, but fine. But I am glad to see with Gen Z, it’s like, yeah, maybe we should have flip phones. Maybe we should have dumb phones. I mean, maybe it’ll be funny that in 20 years people won’t use social media as much and we’ll look back on how people use social media now.
Kind of like how we looked back, how in the 1950s and ’60s Fred Flintstone would smoke cigarettes and do cigarette ads. We’re like, what were people thinking back then? I hope people would do the same with social media in 30 years.
I hope so, because the studies are coming out about the radiation from phones and phone head where the kids’ necks are forward more because they’re always looking at their phones and depression, anxiety. I mean, it’s crazy how high the numbers have gone up since social media has been introduced. I mean, it’s 100% increases. And so it’s very interesting to see how that’s affected our brains too, because it’s social media, but in reality, it’s isolation media.
And it’s hard to see the person behind the phone, which is why I think it’s so hard to be charitable online and to be good Catholics and Christians online is because somebody attacks your faith, they attack you personally. You want to just lay into them. I really think part of it’s diabolical, especially some things that people say here.
But I guess just wrapping up here, we definitely have to have you back on sometime, but wrapping up here, what would you say to the content creators, those people who have a large following of Catholics, what would you say or what kind of warnings would you give them to keep them from falling into these scandalous issues?
I would say make sure to have disinterested parties that can hold you accountable. What’s very difficult is you have individuals, they start a channel… I love working at Catholic Answers, so I’m not a solo operation. I have a boss and there’s a board of directors and there’s a staff of 40 people and I talk with them, but I have accountability. And I love that because it keeps me from going off the rails. I don’t think I’m anywhere near going off the rails yet, but it’s nice to know there are people who can do that.
But if you’re just on your own and you don’t have other people that can tell you, “Hey, maybe this isn’t a great idea.” But I have other content creators who are on their own, so to speak, who call me and ask for advice, “Is this a good idea?” And I’m always happy to help them with that. So I really do feel like my advice for creators would be make sure you have a good… Well, number one, I guess your support network. So the core of your support network is going to be your relationship with God, frequenting the sacraments, not being in a state of mortal sin, having a continual prayer life.
I have seen apostolates where the leaders abandon public prayer and those apostolates just fell apart. That’s the core, your relationship with God. Beyond that, do you have trusted people in your life to hold you accountable and make sure that you’re edifying people? Are you creating content that… Write down a mission statement. What is the mission of your platform? What is the mission of the content you create? What is its mission? And then ask, if I go and create something, is it to further that mission, or is it just going to get me a lot of attention?
And if it’s just going to get me a lot of attention, be really, really, really wary of something like that, and have others to make sure that you’re not just slipping into, I’m giving content that gets me a lot of engagement, but I am walking the balance of creating really good content that is engaged a lot, that fulfills my mission, which should be to build up the Christ Church and to build up the kingdom of God.
That’s so impactful. I think everyone can learn from that. I myself can learn from that as well. I think it’s so difficult out there today. But I really appreciate you coming on here, Trent, and talking to us about this. I think it’s such an important topic, and I hope people learned a lot from it.
Thank you for having me on.
Absolutely. And really quick, where can my listeners find you one more time?
They can find me at The Counsel of Trent Podcast. That’s available on iTunes, Google Play, and YouTube. Just search Counsel of Trent, C-O-U-N-S-E-L. So they can go and become a subscriber there. They can also support us at trenthornpodcast.com.