Audio only:
In this episode, Trent sits down with Reason TV to explain why Catholics can’t be socialists.
Reason TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Zwg9gA5T8
Transcription:
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. I was recently invited onto Reason tv, their libertarian channel here on YouTube to discuss Catholicism and socialism. But in today’s episode, I want to share a clip from our interview where we discuss one of the hosts, Zach has been noticing more and more of his libertarian friends are Catholic and he’s not Catholic. So we wanted to learn more about the Catholic faith and whether libertarians should become Catholic. Now, he and I, as you can see in the interview, we have very different views on particular moral issues, but he was very open-minded, asked really great questions, and it was a great opportunity to share the Catholic faith with a libertarian audience, many of whom are probably not religious at all. So I hope you enjoy this interview and that you can share it with other people. There is no such thing as Catholic economics per se, so there’s no such thing as Catholic economics.
There’s no such thing as Catholic medicine. It’s not like Catholics discovered, actually we have our own way to do heart transplants and all the other non-Catholics do heart transplants a different way. No, it’s just one kind of medicine, much the same. Economics is a science. It’s the science of studying the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited demand or however you want to define it. The law of supply and demand isn’t owned by any religion. It’s just the law of human nature. But there is Catholic medicine in the sense of, hey, there’s some so-called medical procedures that Catholics recognize are not moral elicit like abortion, for example, because it directly takes the life of an innocent human being, or Catholics recognize some economic arrangements, like some wages can be unjust even if two people freely agree to them because there are extenuating circumstances that result in a person agreeing to all a wage that is incapable of providing him the basic dignities of life or something like that. So I think that’s always important to recognize When it comes to Catholic economics, there’s no science of economics is the science of economics. The Catholicism, like with other sciences, provides moral principles, basic ones, and then people might disagree on the finer points of application.
Zach Weissmueller:
There are no Catholic economics per se. I wonder if there are Catholic politics or if there, I guess the reason partly why I wanted to have this conversation is just the mere fact that I have noticed that a lot of libertarians seem to be Catholic. A lot of libertarians around me, a lot of, we mentioned Liz here,
Liz Wolfe:
Just surrounding usac. This is all, it’s a conspiracy to proselytize, which Catholics don’t really tend to do that much of. But John and I have joined forces.
Zach Weissmueller:
There’s others on staff. There’s some prominent libertarians like Tom Woods who’s a very devout Catholic. Have you noticed some sort of overlap between libertarians and Catholics, and what do you think explains that?
Trent Horn:
Well, I think what can explain it, and we do also have to keep in mind, I think there’s probably a greater number or percentage of non-Catholic libertarians, and so often heads can butt in that regard. But I am noticing more vocal individuals who are proposing economic commentary and solutions to economic problems who are Catholics often tend to look at libertarianism or be very sympathetic to other libertarian thinkers while trying to tweak some of the things that they’re saying. I think deep down it comes to, I think many libertarians, even if they’re not Catholic, even if they’re not Christian, they do have a correct understanding of human nature. I think that socialists often fail because it assumes that human nature is better than it really is. That people will naturally be altruistic. They’ll naturally work hard or extra hard to be extra productive, but to only receive back what society thinks that they should have and that they’re just naturally going to work for the common good of society.
And this goes back, I think, to Rousso who basically took the Christian ideas and inverted them, which is the idea. The Christian idea is were born in original sin. We’re born with a tendency to sin and it’s society, the family primarily, but also society at large. It’s that job to mold us into people who go against our selfish tendencies, our desire to sin, to serve God ourselves and our neighbors, to grow in virtue. So born, not born bad or not so good, not totally bad born bad society makes us good family, primarily the first society. But Rousseau and others would say, no, no, no, no. There was a first innocence, the myth of the noble savage that human beings are born good, and really it’s society that deforms them. It’s society that makes them materialistic and evil. To fix people, you have to fix society.
That’s the two groups. One group says to fix society, you have to fix people. Another group says to fix people, you have to fix society. Now, there can be unjust social structures. If a society enslaves a group of people based on their race and you belong to that race, it’s very difficult to flourish as a human being until you change that law to allow you to flourish. That’s preventing you from doing so because it’s an evil law. But really the problem is ultimately in the human heart. And so I think libertarians for a variety of ways, maybe it’s religious or maybe it’s just pessimism from just looking at the world as it is. My co-author Catherine Lic, and I call that Christian realism. We have Christian ideals, but we see the world as it is that you see, you know what? People aren’t always reliable. People care more about themselves than others. People, they drop the ball, they sin, they’re scandalous. And so libertarians, even if they’re not religious, they have a natural desire to want to diffuse power because of lack of trust in other human beings. And that kind of overlaps a bit with Christianity, understanding our sinful proclivities in that regard. So I think there can be a little bit of, I don’t know if that overlap makes sense of it.
Zach Weissmueller:
That does make a lot of sense. This is central.
Liz Wolfe:
This is very central to, I think, how I look at things and how I’m able to reconcile my Catholicism and my libertarianism. I think to me, it’s always very intuitively made sense that I believe man has fallen. And I don’t think that that is a hopeless thing. I think there’s accepting that as the starting point of man has fallen, and from the sort of more libertarian perspective, that man acts in his own rational self-interest. And then from the libertarian perspective, working to create systems that build that in and have that as the underpinning as opposed to altruism or benevolence as the underpinning. Just assuming that people will behave in their own rational and then in the realm of Catholicism, seeing okay, man has fallen. And so the means of salvation and the means of overcoming that is through the moral influence of the family and society and the church around you, and through turning toward God and toward prayer and toward confession to attempt to over the course of a lifetime better yourself and bring yourself closer to God.
But again, it’s not a, I think Catholicism seems very dark and cynical to people, but the idea that we are made in the image of God, the idea that we have access to confession, that we can repent and atone the fact that we can better ourselves and make ourselves more aligned with God and what he wants for us. To me, this is like a very fundamentally hopeful message. In the same way that with libertarianism, okay, just because we’re behaving in our own self-interest and that sometimes it means bad people are doing bad things, we can build a system that allows people to use that self-interest to guide them to be productive, and then we can engage in all of these voluntary transactions and build good things from that. To me, both things start from a really dark place, but they go to really hopeful places. And I think that that’s something that for whatever reason, a lot of my socialist friends or my non-Catholic friends don’t quite get where I think they have a fundamentally opposite starting place
Zach Weissmueller:
Sense.
Liz Wolfe:
Does
Trent Horn:
That make sense you? Oh, absolutely.
Zach Weissmueller:
Yeah. What’s interesting to me is it’s specifically Catholic.
Liz Wolfe:
Not even
Zach Weissmueller:
You’re right to point out Trent, that of course there are libertarians of all sorts of different faiths, or very commonly no faith because objectiveism is a big strain of libertarian thought, which is explicitly atheistic. But I don’t know, I haven’t done any surveys on this or anything. You just
Trent Horn:
Notice it.
Zach Weissmueller:
My impression, yeah, is that the outspoken religious libertarians seem to be Catholic. Is there something specifically Catholicism versus other variants of Christianity that you think for some reason aligns with this political philosophy?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I’d have to think about it more. I guess I do wonder why we don’t see more evangelicals, because there was an older thesis that Calvinists, for example, were the heralds of capitalism. That was Max Weber’s thesis, right? Why do we see Protestant countries more industrious, for example? And one theory was that, oh, well, in Protestant, in some forms, Protestantism was, especially Calvinism, you don’t know if you’re among the elect, right? God decides who’s the elect. He saves people, and you can’t lose your salvation. So it’s like, oh, well, how do I know I belong to the elect? Oh, we got to show it that your action. Well, how do you show that? Well, typically if you were Catholic, you would show it through acts of piety, say your rosary, you go to daily mass. But the Protestant reformation did away with that. So how do I show that if you’re Calvinists, we don’t have a lot of acts of piety in church.
Oh, well, I’ll be industrious and show that to other people, and I’ll work really hard though. I’ve heard other competing theories that one reason the industrious industrialism took off more in Protestant countries than versus Catholic ones in Europe was just their colder. And in the winter, you’d rather just be in a factory or a kiln. And whereas in southern Europe where it’s a lot more Catholic countries, it’s natural during the summer you have a siesta in the afternoon to deal with the heat. And in the winter months, that’s the time to enjoy yourself if you don’t have to harvest anything. So there’s different theories about that. But when it comes to Catholicism and Christianity, I do think it’s interesting that when people think of capitalism, oh, it’s just about selfishness. No, it doesn’t have to be about that. In fact, if it is about that, you end up not being able to have fruitful transac.
What makes a capitalist system work great is when it benefits both people. If your business only benefits one party yourself, it’s not going to stay in business long unless there is an external agency like the government that props it up and keeps it in business and continually funds and subsidizes it. So I mean, you look at what Jesus said, right? What’s the greatest commandment? Love your neighbor as yourself. So what’s interesting here is Jesus is saying, look, as a baseline, you will naturally love yourself. You will naturally provide for your self-interest. The greatest command is to love your neighbor, to develop virtue and to make an act of will, to do something that doesn’t come natural, but to do that to your neighbor, what you naturally do to yourself when it comes to providing for your self-interest. And Liz, I agree that it’s interesting when you’re talking about self-interest in a system where we serve one another while serving our own interests. That is the genius of free markets. It’s the famous quote from Smith. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Interest.
Liz Wolfe:
I have two theories on point as to why there are a lot of libertarian Catholics out there, though we are obviously just going entirely off of anti data here. We don’t actually have data that
Trent Horn:
It’s vibe. Okay, this is a vibes cast.
Liz Wolfe:
Now it’s a vibes cast, but I think one is libertarians and Catholics, I think both place a really high premium on consistency. We care about making sure there’s no holes, and sometimes that takes us to really crazy places. But the consistency, it’s like this extreme obsession, this fixation on internal consistency of the framework. And I find that to be really satisfying about Catholicism and really satisfying about libertarianism to many people. But that’s how my brain works. And then I think the other thing is Catholics and libertarians, I think both value and think a lot about humility. And I mean, we were even talking about Hayek and the knowledge problem earlier. And there’s a little bit of this sense within libertarianism of some of the folly of the state exercising so much power over us is that they will simply not know everything. They won’t have perfect knowledge.
And it is in fact very hard to understand what’s going on in all of the different sectors of the economy and then to ensure that people with aligned incentives are acting to manage each of those. And so libertarians recognize the fundamental foolishness of that endeavor. And I think humility is actually very central to libertarianism. And I think that’s dissatisfying to some people, right? Because some of the appeal of lefty socialism is a sense that we actually can fix all of the problems that a us, and actually we simply need to appoint the right people to positions of power. And actually pretty much all of these things can be managed and optimized, and yet that’s not really how it plays out in practice. And so I think Libertarians look at those historical examples and say, wait a second, we actually can’t really do this. And I think by the same token, humility is a significant part of Catholicism, and even the act of having faith and growing in your faith requires a certain amount of, I think for many people, a little bit of a jump of I am not going to be able to prove everything in a way that perfectly satisfies Christopher Hitchen’s objections.
But there’s still something deeper that is pulling at me that I know to be true on this very fundamental deep level. And I think with Catholicism, at least for me, the more I’ve tried to strengthen my humility, the deeper I found my faith to be,
Trent Horn:
If that makes sense. I have one last, yeah, I have one last theory popped in my head. I think that the Catholic commitment to natural law, I think also might explain why you see more Catholics who are outspoken among libertarians, even versus Protestants or many Protestants. Their ethics often come from a biblical perspective, but that’s difficult. When scripture was written at a time 2000 years ago when economies are just completely different. You can’t apply it one for one today, but you have a rich intellectual tradition within Catholicism of natural law and of following principles, first principles in metaphysics and reaching them to their natural conclusions in different situations. This would also explain why there are so many Catholics in the Supreme Court or in the judiciary. I mean, you could read articles going back to different Supreme Court nominations and some people saying, are there too many Catholics on the Supreme Court?
Why are there so many Catholics in the federal judiciary? Honestly, it’s the same reason why there’s so many Jews in law, why there’s so many Jewish lawyers, Judaism and Catholicism both have a rich legal tradition, right? Jews follow the rabbinic laws. And these are very analytic, well faceted systems that have been developed for Jews to memorize and have that kind of analytic legal, if that branching tree thinking and Catholics use something similar. So I think, so for many Catholics, when they approach and look at economics, we talk about natural law like in ethics or human anthropology. It applies very well to economics that if you do this as a government intervention, a business intervention, this is liable to happen. And I think the Catholic mind can graft onto that in a special way. So I think that, I don’t know, that might be another thing to look at. Could you
Zach Weissmueller:
Explain what natural law is? I am sure this is a complex topic, but I don’t know if you can boil it down a little bit for us.
Trent Horn:
Sure. So a law is basically a directive or a command that is issued by a competent authority. And so Catholics actually recognize four different kinds of laws. So we recognize the eternal law. The eternal law is just what God says, I made the world. Here’s how I want the world to be. I’m all knowing, all powerful, all good. So I made the universe, I want it to be this way. That’s his eternal law. The natural law is described as the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law. So if you were able, capable of reasoning, you can say, oh, there’s ways I’m supposed to act there, that I’m not just merely an animal driven by instinct. I was created with a purpose to act in a certain way. So for example, the most fundamental part of the natural law would probably be do good and avoid evil.
Okay? You can’t just stop there though, because you get what is good, what is evil. You got to branch out and figure out what all of that is. So natural law, when we recognize that there are moral commands embedded within nature that we can recognize. So Paul talks about this in Roman ones and Romans one and Romans two, that there is a law written on the human heart that you have a rational mind, even if you’re not religious, even if you’re on North Sentinel Island with not contact with the outside world, you can recognize this universal moral law. You’re supposed to participate in it and act in a certain way. And that is why many socialists would go against that say, ah, no. There is no such thing like that. We just decide what is most pragmatic and what will work best for society. There is no law above us that we have to adhere to or to follow.
And that’s why Marx and classical and communists have been so opposed to religion because they want to be the ultimate foundation of the moral life and take God out of that equation of the natural law. So that’s why similar with Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg trials say, look, there is a law even above nations by which nations can be judged. So that’s the natural law, and that we see that in virtue and vice and how we relate to one another. And from the natural law, then we get things like positive law. So we get human laws, we pass laws to govern society. We have laws in the church, civil laws, but even if you read Martin Luther King Jr’s letter from a Birmingham jail, and people are saying, why are you doing this? The law says you can’t eat at this lunch counter. Why can’t you respect the business owner’s? Right? To say that that’s the law. And what Martin Luther King Jr said in the letter to Birmingham Jail was, and he quotes St. Thomas Aquinas in the letter, he says, an unjust law is one that does not correspond to the natural law, the law of God. And so he said that these human laws that are unjust, well, they’re not really laws at all. They don’t command authority or obedience from us.
Zach Weissmueller:
I like that theory for the genesis of the Catholic Libertarian. It explains a lot to me. It makes me understand where Liz is coming from a bit more perhaps. And also you mentioned the Jewish representation and law. It’s interesting. There’s a lot of the libertarian luminaries are also Jewish thinkers, MEUs and Freedman and Rothbard. I wonder if there’s a similar explanation at play here, but yeah, you really
Liz Wolfe:
Managed to take, there are a lot of Jewish lawyers concept and bring that home and make that actually very salient and relevant. Frequently, people go to very dark places from the starting.
Zach Weissmueller:
If
Trent Horn:
You look on the internet, I am half my family’s Jewish. Interesting. My surname is actually Hornstein, and my grandfather changed his name after the war. He got beat up for being a Jew. So if I had kept it, I would’ve had a great law practice, Hornstein and Hornstein or something like that. Why
Liz Wolfe:
Aren’t you a Messianic Jew? I’m confused.
Trent Horn:
Well, because what I believe is that Jesus established, he established one church, one universal church. And so while you can be ethnically Jewish, what I just recognize is that in Jesus who is Jewish, Paul who is Jewish, they established just God’s covenant that was once just for the Jews has been expanded into the new covenant, has been expanded for all people. But I brought that up to say, yeah, when you look on the internet, there are people who say, not so nice things about me when they know that fact. But I like to turn that around to say, why are there Jews in so many of these places? It’s not necessarily something sinister. It’s that, well, that’s just a rich tradition, and just this idea of valuing the intellectual life or valuing the fact of wanting to understand not just even natural law, but just how does the natural world function.
So the word scientist, that word was coined just a few centuries ago in the Middle Ages. People often think of Aquinas and medieval Catholic theologians only talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. That’s not true. They actually practice what we call science today. They call that natural philosophy. And Albert the Great and others would catalog what we call scientific discoveries. They catalog that as natural philosophical discoveries. And so you have people like the Augustinian among Gregor Mendel, who is the father of genetics, and the Mendelian laws of inheritance, Monsignor George LaMere, a Catholic cleric who discovered what was later called the Big Bang theory. And so I think that within Catholicism in this reverence for God created the world with an intricate set of laws, metaphysical, ethical, scientific, a desire, and also many Protestant traditions say that we are so sinful.
The human mind is darkened. Its reasoning we can’t even know God without, by faith alone, basically. Well, no Catholics don’t have as dim a view of human nature. We don’t have as bright a view as the socialists do, but no, we can use our minds to discover the world God created. We can use our minds to know the evidence in the universe that God does exist. And so when all that’s put together, it would also explain why are there so many Jews who win Nobel prizes? The value of the intellectual life and the desire to understand the laws of nature, the natural law. So I think all that kind of comes together.
Zach Weissmueller:
So now that I have a better understanding of the mind of the Catholic Libertarian, maybe I can get a, I’d like to ask you about if a lot of this grows out of natural law, what is your understanding of liberty since that’s central to libertarian politics? I suspect you might view the concept of liberty differently than some libertarians might. How do you view that concept? What’s your conception of liberty?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I would say that liberty is the freedom to choose the good, but it doesn’t follow from that, that the state should create a set of laws so that people can only choose the good. In doing that, the state might create greater evil. So for example, go back to God creating human beings, right? I mean, God could have made us so that we only ended up choosing good things. Either he creates a world where we happen to do that, or he directly controls our wills, so we only choose the good, but God chose not to do that. He chose to allow evil and suffering to exist in the world because he’s all powerful, all knowing and all good. He can bring even greater goods from this, right? If you had a world without suffering, for example, there are goods that would not exist. You couldn’t have compassion, for example, in a world without suffering because compassion is just suffering alongside somebody.
So similarly, when it comes to liberty, I reject the view that liberty is just the ability to do whatever you want without infringing on the rights of others or doing what you want without violating the non-aggression principle or something like that. True liberty would be the ability to choose the good. We don’t want to confuse liberty with license or something like that. But on the other hand, even though that’s what liberty is, a state may have prudent reasons for allowing people the ability to legally choose to do some things that are not good. In fact, you go back in Catholic history, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas argued for allowing prostitution to be legal because they felt like the world would convulse with lust if you didn’t have this outlet for human depravity. Now today, I would say now there’s a prudential intervention. I actually, what’s funny is I disagree with, and there’s going to be some libertarians who agree with non-Catholic libertarians who agree with Aquinas and Augustine, whereas I would disagree with that today that I, sex
Liz Wolfe:
Workers are going to pull out their Aquinas and start lumping Thomas Aquinas all of a sudden. That’s the crazy
Trent Horn:
Podcast. If they could read Aquinas, that’s a price I’m willing to pay if
Liz Wolfe:
Our podcast can get one libertarian prostitute to read Thomas Aquinas. So this is a job well done
Trent Horn:
On my hat. I’m done. Yeah,
Zach Weissmueller:
Go ahead. So I’m clear on that. So I’m clear on what you’re saying. You would not be for legalizing sex work.
Trent Horn:
I wouldn’t be for legalizing. In fact, I did a debate on the whatever podcast a few months ago, myself and Lila Rose debated this with destiny and an OnlyFans prostitute, and we went back and forth, and my argument is that there are going to be, we have more empirical data now that shows that legalizing prostitution results in an overall net harm to society. There was a study done in 2013 of 150 different countries showing that when you legalize prostitution, there are two different effects. One is called the substitution. So the relation of legalizing prostitution to illegal human sex trafficking. And there’s two effects to that. One would be the substitution effect. The idea is there should be less illegal trafficking because now men would rather pick legal prostitution because it’s safer for them. That’s the substitution effect. But the other effect is called the scale effect.
When you make something legal, people are more likely to try and say, oh, it’s legal now. I guess I’ll give it a shot. Because the law would often prevent people from doing it. And because more and more men then want to pursue it, there aren’t enough women willing to do it, and the scale increases too much, and women have to be brought in through trafficking to meet the much higher demand. And what that study in 2013 showed is that the scale effect dominates the substitution and creates an overall net harm. It’s a debate subject for another time, but I would say that Catholics can endorse the idea of liberty being that which is choosing the good. I’m not saying that the state should just, I don’t want to go back to saying the state restricts every single movie that’s over more than rated PG or something like that, the haze code or something like that. But at the same time, the state can also restrict and legally suppress certain things, even consensual activities between people that are deleterious for the common good of society.
Liz Wolfe:
So when I’m sort of going around libertarian world, I begin to notice these sort of two different types of libertarians, but I’ll caricature them for the sake of argument. And there’s sort of the range between them. One type of libertarian is the view that I espouse that appeals to me, which is similar to what you described Trent, which is that it’s important for the state to stand back and allow us to exercise our free will and to make our own choices and to live out our values. But I’m not values neutral as to what those should be. I think that pursuing the good life is very important. I think some people do that better than others, and at least for me, that looks like my primary duty is trying to be an honest and ethical journalist while also raising my son and being a good wife to my husband and working to serve my community.
And that takes some more hedonistic forms. I like throwing dinner parties and there’s wine involved and a little bit of marijuana, but there’s a little bit of, I had this idea of the good life is community oriented and the good life is pretty family centric. And I tried to make sure that I’m not scrolling away on my screens and constantly ordering crap online to fill my house up with stuff, because that’s just not where my purpose and value lies. And to me, I kind of look down on that and I need to tamp down that judgmental part of myself because that’s sinful and wrong, but that’s sort of how I conceive of the good life for me. But then I see a whole other school of thought of libertarians who look at the proliferation of consumer goods and the endless stream of Netflix, Hulu, and movies and video games and all of this content available for consumption and the replica, ai, girlfriend chatbots, and all of these things that basically enable them to kind of shut themselves inside their houses and never leave.
And it’s seen as like, okay, well yay capitalism because it’s given us all of this and people have infinite choice and they ought to avail themselves of that if they so choose. But there’s a certain type of libertarianism that I think sees all of that as totally fine and well. Whereas I tend to be a little bit more concerned with where that leads, where that takes the soul. That’s not the type of life that I would want for myself. That’s not the type of life I would want for my son. And I hope to raise him to be curious about the world around him and to build a sense of in-person IRL, non-tech mediated community and to try to stem the tide of this flourishing of consumer options and products. But I just sort of see it as there’s a holiness and emptiness to that realm that I feel very viscerally. How do you look at these differences within libertarians, and what’s the pitch that you would make to the shut-in video gamer libertarian that I’m describing as to why they ought to do something differently and how that’s still aligned with their libertarianism?
Trent Horn:
You were made for more. You were made for more than this life. There’s this paradox, right? We don’t want to live at the bare subsistence level of life where we’re growing a crop and barely have enough to feed our family. We want to have excess so we’re not always living on the edge of existence, but then there’s always a problem that once we have excess, that when you live on the edge of existence, you want to work hard to survive. You want to put effort out there, but it ultimately becomes an undignified way to live if you’re always worried about starving to death, but at the same, so you want excess and comfort, so you don’t have to always live in that way. But then the paradox is when you have too much excess and comfort, you become almost inhuman. And I think people who defend, even socialism today and the libertarians you’re describing, they would almost have a kind of an overlap saying, look at all this stuff that we have. You can go to Netflix on your phone, you can contact anyone. I am trying to get rid of this thing. I’ve actually ordered a home phone and now an office phone will come next week, so I can just get rid of this.
Liz Wolfe:
You have two phones instead of one,
Trent Horn:
Right? Well, yeah, right. Two phones that I only spend 20 minutes on a day is better than one phone you spend seven hours on. And so that is, I think you’re right that okay, we have this excess. What are we going to do with it? Many of the libertarians you’re discussing, they correctly identify the present state of affairs, right? Lack of knowledge, human self-interest, the fallibility of human beings, the cautiousness we ought to have, and human beings wielding too much power, but they have incorrectly diagnosed the end goal. Okay, we recognize this, we can see what is better. Well, okay, well now what do I do? Where do I go? And that’s where I think for many people, even in a libertarian camp, the general error, whether you’re a radical socialist or radical libertarian, is once I can get society right, things will be great.
Once I either get the right people in power or the wrong people out of power or de power the government or empower the government, then things will be fine at the end of the day. No it won’t. No it won’t. The greatest saints in history lived in some of the worst, under the worst regimes. Some of the worst people in the world grew up in the nicest suburbia. The only thing that can make your life better is you. And you can’t do it on your own because you’re a sinner. You need help from somebody else. And deep down, you were not made to spend your weekend just scrolling on your phone, watching who knows what on there.
Zach Weissmueller:
Let me say as the non-Catholic libertarian on this stream that I actually agree with much of what both of you are saying. I think there’s clearly more to life than empty consumerism and scrolling on your phone and even your debate on the whatever podcast, Trent, I think people can get in the clutches of falling down rabbit holes in terms of consuming sex online and so forth. And this is all stuff that we need to be mindful of and careful about and limiting reliant our addiction to technology. We’ve talked about Jonathan Height’s smartphone idea a lot on this show. I send my kids to a Waldorf school, which is like an intentionally anti-technology type of environment topic.
Liz Wolfe:
This is secretly a Waldorf School podcast. Zach and I are both on this finder know everywhere
Zach Weissmueller:
Around this theme of this podcast. But I guess where the question that always comes up when we’re talking about libertarian politics is where do your moral prescriptions end and the state intervention begin? And you say, in this case with sex work that you’re fine with banning sex work. I think we have a disagreement on that, but there has been a definite rise in a strain of Catholic inspired politics that is calling for a much more robust state, I guess, regulation of the public square. Soah Ari is the exemplar of this. I actually pulled in preparation for this, a slide from one of his articles about this where he says that the only way is through that is to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in form of a public square reordered to the common good and ultimately the higher good. And then he highest
Liz Wolfe:
Good, not the higher. We cannot be content with the higher good. It’s the highest.
Zach Weissmueller:
Thank you for that correction. Sorry, reordered to the common good and ultimately the highest vote. And he’s criticizing what he calls David French in this article, and he says that David French, a classical liberal, believes that institutions of a technocratic market society are neutral zones that should, in theory, accommodate both traditional Christianity and the Libertine ways and pagan ideology of the other side. And this is not a tenable situation going forward. What is your opinion of this, let’s say Postliberal trend in Catholic politics?
Trent Horn:
I have a deep sympathy for it because I think there’s an idea maybe among Catholic libertarians, this ideal would be that we could evangelize people within a state and an economy that is fairly neutral when it comes to the big questions of life related to values, religion and ethics. And we could create an economy that best serves human needs and human flourishing and then by other means evangelize and build up culture. But I have a deep sympathy for Amari’s perspective in this kind of, I dunno if you would use the label, but integral and this kind of approach where the state ought to promote the highest good, not just civil goods, but also religious goods as well and moral goods. Because honestly, the state already kind of does do that. I do believe many things related to LGBT ideology, for example, I think it would be fair to consider it a religious perspective, right?
If an atheist considers my view that the consecrated bread and wine at mass is no longer bread and wine, it’s the body and blood of Christ. Now it’s under the accidents of bread and wine. That’s why it appears to be bread and wine, but the substance has changed. He would say, it looks like bread and wine to me, and you say it’s something else that’s religion. But if a man with full working male genitalia goes into a female locker room and I say, that’s a man. They say, oh, no, no, that’s a woman. That is a woman, and you have to believe that that that’s a woman. It’s on par with me saying, no, no, this is really Jesus and you have to believe it’s Jesus, or I’m going to send the inquisition after you. So I’m really sympathetic to Catholics who would say, look, the state already has an inquisition for their religious dogma of secular progressivism and they’re not playing fair. Why should we play fair? And I’d be honest, I would love to live in a society that does promote the highest good for people. I would like to live there. Where I end up backing off of it from this is I’m just very skeptical about how to get to the end. I’ll ask people, well, how do we get there? How do we get there?
I’m never really sold about the path to get there. I think many Catholic libertarians, maybe they’re the people who are more the pessimists than the optimists who will say, well, at least incrementally I can get some stuff to promote human flourishing. So I’ll go with that. If you guys succeed, great, but this stuff’s working right now and I can make some improvements. That might be the other end. So I guess I have sympathy, but also skepticism.
Zach Weissmueller:
Yeah, I see where you’re coming from. Although I do feel that libertarianism basically resolves a lot of those issues because a lot of these issues over locker rooms and so forth should be mediated by private institutions that can decide for themselves not to state dictate. I understand your point that we’ve got civil rights law that in reality dictates it another way, but I’m just saying if we had a free society, that would be a better way to resolve these issues. In my opinion. There’s a recent,
Liz Wolfe:
But with the amount, the sort of hegemonic cultural forces in certain spheres, I mean, Zach, you used to live in LA for a long time. I live in New York City with the degree to which some of these things have gripped our culture. Do you actually realistically believe that in LA there would be a flourishing of lots of different, for example, the day spas that are sex segregated in Los Angeles, do you actually believe that there’s a significant enough contention of people where there would be three or four day spas that are nude and sex segregated in the traditional manner, and then three or four that are trans accepting that would legitimately allow consumers to have their choice of the type of environment that best fits their values and needs? Is that how it would actually play
Zach Weissmueller:
Out? I do think so, because even in that example with We Spa in Koreatown, there was a big incident where someone was freaking out because a trans identified female went or into the women’s spa, and then it created this huge backlash. So I mean, clearly there is a market for women wanting women’s only spaces. Even in a place like la, there also is probably a huge market in LA for all inclusive. We’re not going to discriminate. So I think both can exist in pretty much every place. It’s not going to be perfect, but people, we didn’t
Liz Wolfe:
See that with Covid policy. Obviously in many of these places, these were mandated by the city or the state, but I just even noticed in the Covid aftermath, after some of those restrictions were lifted in New York, the crazy, the degree to which this sort of way of thinking swept daycares in New York City and the sort of broad consensus that child masking is what we ought to do even long after these specific mandates had expired, at least to me, I think instilled a certain cynicism of like, wow, I want to be able to have this flourishing where parents with different risk tolerances and different comfort levels with this pandemic circulating can make their own choices. But at least when I was shopping for daycares for my son, I felt very much like, wow, I either have to be okay with masking a toddler or I have to get out, but there’s no option that I could see at that time. There’s
Zach Weissmueller:
No doubt that there’s no doubt in the big city, big blue state cities that there is a monoculture. And that’s one reason why we
Trent Horn:
Moved to Texas out of there. That’s why Zach moved before we moved to Dallas in October of 2020. Where
Liz Wolfe:
Were you before that?
Trent Horn:
San Diego.
Liz Wolfe:
Oh, interesting. But
Trent Horn:
There is this recent real Uncle Gavin running everything.
Zach Weissmueller:
Yeah, exactly. There is this very recent real world example of what we’re talking about though with the Louisiana government saying that the 10 Commandments should go in all the public school classrooms. That’s an example of, I would say, taking back the public square in a way that I would think even if you’re Catholic, that might make you uncomfortable just because what are the religious undertones in a place like Louisiana? Is that ultimately, if it’s taken to the extreme, going to be respecting the Catholic interpretation of Christianity, or is it going to be favoring something else? Do we really want to go down that path where we’re saying, let’s retake the public squares and order it to whichever common good the governor of said state?
Trent Horn:
Well, what’s funny about that is in the US public schools, mandatory public schooling was a means to protestantized children. That’s why Catholic churches created the parochial system. So it’s interesting that in 1922, Oregon tried to outlaw parochial schools saying, no, you have to go to the government schools. And that the KKK helped them saying, yeah, we don’t want all this Catholic influence. Got to make everyone a good Protestant American. And then the Supreme Court struck that down in 1925 and Pope Pacy 11th, here’s what’s interesting about that. He included a line from that support case, I think it was Pierce Sisters versus Oregon. Pope Hei 11th quoted the US Supreme Court in his work, divin S Magistrate. He quoted the line from that decision, the child is not the mere creature of the state. So I see what you’re saying that when it comes to, I’m always concerned that the easy solutions are usually aren’t always the best solution.
So just, oh, we’re just going to put the 10 commandments out there. I become skeptical about those being that that’s going to be the way to promote. So I’d rather just encourage every school student to take a critical thinking class, for example, and to read laws, read the law of Ham, Robbi, read the old, read the 10 Commandments, read Augustine’s confessions to learn this stuff versus whatever they might be given. But I guess I’m more for something, I’m more of a pragmatist and a pessimist in my approach. So when you brought up a prostitution, you called it sex work earlier, for me, I might say, you know what, I’m, even if you want it to be legal, fine, I just might be sneaky and say, I just think prostitutes should have to abide by OSHA standards, by osha bodily fluid. You have to wear hard hats.
You have to wear, you have to have you, almost all I’m saying is then you have to just apply all the principles equally, and yes, your way as a good libertarian, your way out of it is just get rid of OSHA entirely. But I guess what many people who are Catholics and Christians, not that they’re opposed, of course Catholicism is a subset of Christianity is just, I think that the Amari approach, the integral approach, swings very far in one direction because it recognizes of saying, we want Christianity to be preferred in the public square, that they’re just recognizing that the public square often does prefer other secular ideologies that are religions, but in name only, but without the name.
Zach Weissmueller:
There’s one last thing I wanted to ask you about Trent, before we get out of here. There’s a clip, and to be honest, I had some trepidation about playing this clip because it’s of Jordan Peterson and he’s become a very polarizing figure. People just have really strong feelings about him, both positive.
Trent Horn:
I clean my room. He doesn’t have to yell at me.
Zach Weissmueller:
I think it’s because his political views, the way he expresses him sometimes, and also the way he conducts himself sometimes. But I would just also,
Liz Wolfe:
His battles with mental illness and addiction I think have, he’s a little
Zach Weissmueller:
Bit Kanye reputation now. Yeah, unfortunately, all this drama around him has created, it’s hard to put people in a neutral mindset, but I would like to just ask our audience to put some of that aside, to consider this clip of him talking with a Catholic publication called EWTN news about his relationship with Catholicism, because it really stuck with me in a profound way since I saw it a few months ago. It was during Easter, and I can’t pass up this opportunity to ask a really intelligent Catholic public intellectual Trent about it. So here’s Jordan Peterson talking about his wife, Tammy’s conversion to Catholicism, and then whether he will also become Catholic on EWTN news around Easter this year.
Jordan Peterson:
If you have a son or a daughter and you want the best for them, your love is the practice of helping that flourish, right? And so while this is why Christ says that unless we become as little children will in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven, and I can see that happening to Tammy, and so it’s great. It’s great. It’s ridiculously good
Colm Flynn:
When you see how ridiculously good it is. What is stopping you from embracing the fate of your wife?
Jordan Peterson:
You mean all those pesky Catholics? I don’t know if anything is stopping me.
Colm Flynn:
What’s holding you back?
Jordan Peterson:
I don’t think anything’s holding me back. Everybody’s got their own destiny. And so
Colm Flynn:
Is it in yours?
Jordan Peterson:
Is it in mine? I would say it’s unlikely, but
Colm Flynn:
Why do you say unlikely?
Jordan Peterson:
I exist on the borders of things. So why is that? I dunno, but that’s how it is.
Zach Weissmueller:
I mean, the reason I find that so interesting is Peterson is someone who’s engaged in such a deep way with the Bible. He has created hours of lectures on it, which to my mind, that’s by far his most interesting intellectual contribution. He’s clearly has a deep love and reverence for Christianity, and yet there’s still this distance, and I think it exemplifies something about the modern mind. It may be the modern mind in the postmodern world where we just can’t know too much. You can’t accept things at face value. It’s hard to suspend your disbelief in material reality, especially when you’re a clinical psychologist with a deep understanding of evolutionary forces. And maybe I’m just projecting some of my own struggles onto this because I do find it to be really relatable in a lot of ways, and I know I threw a lot out there, so take it in any question that’s you want, Trent, fine. But I’m curious what you think about that Jordan Peterson moment.
Trent Horn:
I think the thing that really moved me emotionally when I was watching that was his answer and I could tell it was moving him emotionally was what makes it unlikely? Why wouldn’t you belong to that? Is I exist at the borders. I am not someone that just fits into any particular ideological box and it just made me want to just shout. There’s room for all. Pope Francis often likes to say Totos for all, there’s room for all, there’s mercy for all of the blessings are for all for todos, for all people. What I love about Catholicism is its rich diversity. I remember an anecdote someone told me about, they had friends who were growing up in New England. They were these, I forget they were Episcopalian, but they were some kind of high church Protestant and they made fun of Catholicism and they said, I would never kneel down with the help that within the Catholic church there’s such a diversity of socioeconomic backgrounds and also diversity of political thoughts that I love that within this church you can be a libertarian like myself or Liz.
You can have more of a progressive perspective as long as you’re not endorsing things like abortion or something like that. I know Charles Kosi, for example, is a bit more left-leaning. I would consider more centrist though writes to American magazine. I love what a lot of what he writes. I disagree with some of it, but I really appreciate it that there’s so much diversity within the church of the way that you can apply Catholic principles to contemporary problems in life and seeing so many different people all walks of life. And as Catholics will good natured squabble with each other about these secondary and prudential matters that we can reasonably disagree about. I would really want to say to Jordan Peterson, look, it’s fine. The church welcomes a maverick thinker, someone who wants to be outside the box, but you don’t want to be so committed to having a maverick identity that you have absolutely no guardrails in what you’re thinking.
That if you’re the person who, if you don’t stand for anything, you’ll fall for everything. If you’re saying, oh, I can’t even say that that’s wrong. I can’t even have an absolute view here. That’s not a way to live either. So I just want to say to someone like Jordan Peterson and others like him that what’s great about Catholicism, Pope Saint Shambal II said in the faith and reason and encyclical wrote fide at Rcio, he said, faith and reason are like two wings raising the human spirit to contemplation. And that’s what I love. In the tradition of encouraging, asking these questions and embracing this rich kind of social, political, intellectual diversity within the faith, we see the same thing in the Catholic faith. You have the Franciscan, the Dominicans, all these religious orders of their charisms. They’ll even argue about secondary theological issues, but we have a universal covenant with God, one faith, one baptism, one Eucharist that binds us all together. And that’s why I think very beautiful about it.
Liz Wolfe:
Before we wrap, we wanted to ask you one final question that we ask all of our guests here on this show. Trent, what’s one question that you think more people should be asking?
Trent Horn:
I think one question people should be asking more is this who I am? I think a lot of times in life we will do things and especially when we let other people down, we have this deep feeling, not even that we’ve done wrong, but that you’ll have that excuse. I’m so sorry, this isn’t me. That’s not who I am. This isn’t what I normally, this isn’t me. And other times we look at ourselves say, this is not the person I want to be. This isn’t who I am. Who am I and who am I supposed to be? And I would just encourage a lot of people think about that, especially young people and they’ll go online and who should I be? And they’ll look at people, politicians or demagogues or loudmouth people, social media or people like Andrew Tate or they’ll look in all of the wrong places.
But there is a person who created us, who became man who died for us. He made each of us that we would not exist if he didn’t will that we would exist. Our existence is not an accident. He made the world so that thousands of generations of people had to survive to reproduction and to make the right choices. And if any of that in the chain failed, we wouldn’t be here today. God made it so that it would all come to be so tell that person you would be here. Who are you supposed to be? Think about that a lot more. Life isn’t just living one day to the next. It’s eventually going to come to an end. You need to have that end. Understand that end before you get there.
Liz Wolfe:
Trent Horn, thank you for talking to reason.
Trent Horn:
Thank you for having me. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you want to see the full interview at Reason tv, click the link in the description below. Otherwise, if you want to help us host in-person dialogues here at the Council of Trent, then please support us@trenthornpodcast.com. And don’t forget to this video and subscribe to our channel. Thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.