In this episode, Trent talks about the necessity of “imaginative apologetics” and the art of persuasion, with a little help from his 2012 past self!
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
I was going through my hard drives the other night, and I came across something I thought you would find really interesting. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn, and today what I want to share with you is a talk that I gave at Benedictine College back in 2012, Correcting Arguments and Capturing Imaginations.
And it’s fun when you go back through the old computer files, the old hard drives. Now, I was just looking for pictures. With our baby on the way, I was just going through and seeing, okay, what can I find in here? I really like cleaning and organizing things, and so I was going through the folders, and then I saw the old MP3 of this talk that I gave, so I started listening through it.
And a lot of times, when I confront my previous work, I really don’t like it, especially when it’s been five years or 10 years or a long time. I always think to myself, “Oh, I would have done that better. I would have done that differently.” But I thought to myself, “Hey, this wasn’t too bad of a talk. I wish it had been recorded on a better device.” I just have real those little MP3 recorders I put on the desk in front of me. So the audio quality is just terrible, but if you want to listen to it, I’m going to include it as a bonus link under the show description at trenthornpodcast.com, where remember for as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content like that. So you can hear the original circa 2012 edition of the talk, and you can also get access to bonus content, submitting questions for our open mailbag episodes, messaging me for ideas for episodes, all that more for as little as $5 a month. And you now have the opportunity to become an annual subscriber.
So you can purchase a tiered membership at trenthornpodcast.com at a 15% discount if you choose to give annually. So be sure to go and check that out at trenthornpodcast.com for as low as $5 a month, to get that access. Gold level and higher, you get premium access to have your questions answered on the podcast, and you get a Council of Trent mug, which is always super fun to have.
So what I want to share with you today in this episode, I’m going to recreate the talk. Now I’ve got better equipment, I can share it with you all. I can give it in more of a relaxed, casual delivery than I did when I previously gave the talk. Maybe I was nervous, I hadn’t been out speaking that much really.
Though, when you’re out giving a talk and you’re actually in front of an audience, you’re always a bit more animated than when you’re just in front of the microphone here, recording the podcast. So, that’s what I want to share with you all today.
And I’m going to leave in a lot of the references to 2012, so you can get an idea of the dating of the talk. I will update here and there, some of the statistics, because it’s interesting to see where they’ve changed. So in fact, as I start right here with the first paragraph, you’ll see how some things have changed since I gave this talk eight years ago.
According to the Pew Forum of Religion and Public Life. Since the 1980s, the percentage of young people identifying as non-religious has nearly doubled. So that now one in every four young people claims to have no religion. Now that was back in 2012. Now in 2020, it’s not one in four or 25% of young people who claim to have no religion, it’s 40%. Nearly half of young people say they have no religion.
Here’s another interesting statistic on that front. When you look at the Hispanic population in the Catholic church in America, 10 years ago, it was 57%. So the majority of the Hispanic population were Catholic. Now, it’s down to 47%. What happened? A lot of you might be thinking, “Oh, well the Hispanic population went to evangelical or Protestant churches. Only a very small number.
Because you see 10 years ago, the Hispanic population in the United States, 23% were Protestant. Now it’s just 24%. It only went up by 1%. Instead, the percentage in the Hispanic community that is religiously unaffiliated, not religious at all has gone up in 10 years from 15% to 23%. So the situation now is even worse than what I presented back in 2012 were especially among young people, 40% of them are not religious.
One factor in this rise of disbelief is the increased use of the internet and social media Amit Mehta, the moderator of the friendly atheist website says it may have been possible to protect Christians from opposing viewpoints before the internet, but it’s hard as hell to do that now.
Of course, it’s not just atheism, which is using the internet to distort the gospel, consider the viral video, Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus. The main thesis of this video, which has amassed over 20 million views, that was back in 2012 when I gave this talk. Is that Jesus preached the gospel of individual salvation by faith, and that the church is at best irrelevant or at worst a hindrance to promoting the gospel.
So I remember when this video came out, actually it was at my birthday party, I saw that it was on the internet. I went out to eat with friends, but then I cut my birthday celebration short and I went home and I filmed a response to this in my bedroom. It was like one of the first apologetics videos I ever made to put on YouTube. It’s actually still on YouTube.
So you know, why don’t we do a blast from a past moment here, I’m going to play a clip of this original video. I’m sure you remember this. Why I Hate Religion, But I Love Jesus. I’ll play a clip of the original. And then I’m going to do a throwback to some of my response to it.
Speaker 3:
I mean, if religion is so great, why has it started so many Wars? Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor? Tell single moms God doesn’t love them if they’ve ever had a divorce, but in the Old Testament, God actually calls religious people whores. Religion might preach grace, but another thing they practice tend to ridicule God’s people, they did it to John the Baptist. They can’t fix their problems, and so they just mask it, not realizing religion’s like spraying perfume on a casket.
Trent Horn:
All right. Now here is the response from a very baby faced 2012 Trent Horn.
Now I don’t have a fancy soundtrack or production values to show. I do have common sense and an old Mac Book Pro. You love Jesus, but hate religion? That’s odd. Because religion is just man’s response to God. Sometimes it’s fake and the righteous call it quits. But you and I agree that Christians shouldn’t be hypocrites.
Your video is made for good, now it’s just fodder because you threw out the baby with the baptismal water. I agree God doesn’t withhold love because of divorce, but is breaking marriage a sin? Jesus says, “Of course.”
Well, that’s not too bad. That’s not too bad. Okay, so let’s continue on then with my talk. So how should Catholics respond to these attacks on the faith? First, we must present well-formed logical arguments in defense of the truth found in the teachings of the church.
Of course, people may object that we live in a postmodern culture that doesn’t care about truth. Aren’t we, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI dominated by a dictatorship of relativism? Yes and no? Yes, the inane truisms of relativism are parroted in our culture, but no one really believes them in their entirety.
People may say everyone has a right to choose for example, but then those same people condemn a company that chooses to fire its employees because of their sexual behavior. People may say you shouldn’t judge people, but then they link to the viral video, Kony 2012 and demand that someone stop the evil Joseph Kony, who forces children to fight Wars for him. Remember Kony 2012? That’s a real flashback.
While many Catholics believe that our culture’s morality has been reduced to relativism, trends on social media tell a different tale. A brief look at Facebook status updates shows that our culture views things like hate crimes, the rape and torture of women in Africa, companies that pollute and contribute to global warming, and the denial of so-called same sex marriage rights as not just being wrong from a certain point of view, but just being wrong. Period.
Several months ago, I responded to a viral Facebook petition that slandered a well known Catholic speaker as being homophobic, just because he claimed that homosexuality was disordered, which is also what the church teaches that the orientation to engage in same-sex behavior as paragraph 2357 of the Catechism claims is intrinsically disordered. That’s a subject for another podcast.
I then proceeded to use arguments in my posts and comments to show that the standard used by our culture to approve of homosexual behavior is itself a flawed standard. After my posting, I received this message from a girl who used to attend my local youth group.
She writes, “My brother’s friends kept forwarding that petition to him, and he was struggling with how to respond to them. I copied the conversation from your wall and forwarded it to him. And he said, your arguments really helped him. My brother is such a good guy and I was happy to be able to steer him the right direction. So thanks for being such a good evangelist.”
So even the walls of our Facebook profiles, a place where arguments usually don’t get a fair hearing, can be a springboard to lead others to truth. Now, since that time, what’s funny is that I can’t comment on other people’s Facebook threads or pages because I only have a public Facebook page, not a private one.
So on that public one, people will say, “Trent, can you come over on this Facebook page and help me?” Now of course normally, no, I can’t. I don’t have time to police the internet about doctrinal disputes or things like that. But even if I could, I can’t because of the limitations I have now moving from a private page to a public page. Let’s continue.
Along with good arguments, we must be prepared to answer objections raised against the arguments we make in defense of the faith. Proverbs 18:17 says, the first to present his case seems right until another comes forward and challenges him. As ambassadors for Christ, we should take the strongest arguments against the faith, make them even stronger, and then proceed to refute them.
What’s funny is now if I went back, I would have included the example of that’s exactly what St. Thomas Aquinas does in the Summa Theologica that he starts with arguments against the faith. He strengthens them, even he puts forward the objections and then he makes his reply to each one. Finally, when we counter error or distortions in the gospel we find on the internet or anywhere else, we must maintain integrity.
In his book, Humble Apologetics, John Stackhouse recalls the performance of one Christian apologist who smugly dealt with a questioner at a public university talk. Two female students leaving his presentation were heard to say something to the effect, I don’t care if he’s right. I still think he’s a jerk.
It’s very tempting to respond to critics with anger of our own, but the 19th century philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche put it best, “Those who fight monsters must take steps to ensure they don’t become monsters.” In many cases, a person may be rude or disrespectful because the issues being discussed remind them of a hurtful experience in their life, such as a Christian who is intolerant or abrasive or even abusive towards them.
Therefore, it’s prudent for Christians to sympathize with a critic’s distaste of inconsistent mean or irrational people. But on the intellectual side, we should also bring the issue back to the central subject being discussed. Most effective way of doing this is to say, let’s say you’re right about me that I am a, insert, insult. How it me being a bad person show that the thing that I believe in is not true?
Remember an argument’s truth doesn’t depend on the character of the person making the argument. However, Catholic use of online media must present the truth in a way that captures the imagination. As well as the rational mind, when Paul preached to the Jews in Jerusalem, he appealed to fulfilled prophecy to argue that Jesus was the Christ, but when he debated the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill, he did not use the same approach. Instead, he quoted the stoic philosophers and argued that God had revealed himself in nature. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, to the Jews, I became like a Jew to win over Jews. To those under the law, I became like one under the law. To the weak, I became weak to win over the weak. I become all things to all to save at least some.
Like Paul, we should be prepared to honestly share the truth using methods that our audience can appreciate. I believe that this approach must include some combination of the following three elements, empathy with the listener, narrative understanding and motivational persuasion.
First, our online media projects would show that we listen and understand the situation and worldview of our listeners. Psychologist Carl Rogers summarizes listening this way. Real communication occurs when we listen with understanding, what does that mean? By the way, this shows up again in my 2014 book, Persuasive Pro-life. So when you see things in books, it’s funny to see where they were originally adapted from. What does this mean? It means to see the expression of an idea or attitude from the other person’s point of view, to sense how it feels to him to achieve his frame of reference in regard to what he’s talking about.
In his book, unChristian, David Kinnaman summarizes data from the Barna Group, which shows that unchurched people aged 16 to 29 most commonly use these words to describe Christians; hypocritical, anti-gay, political, judgemental anti-science and out of touch. Instead of beginning our approach with aloud, “No, we’re not.” Rogerian empathy begins with the humbling admission, “I can see where you’re coming from.”
It then proceeds to ask other questions like, why do you think Christians are anti-gay or hypocritical? What makes you think Christianity is anti-science? What would a pro-science Christianity look like? And asking questions to find common ground.
Second, our efforts to promote the gospel through social media must not neglect a narrative approach in our arguments and presentation of the gospel. Jesus himself told over 30 parables in the canonical gospels. When he was challenged by his critics, he would often tell a story that subtly painted them in a bad light.
Jesus himself told over 30 parables. And when he was challenged by his critics, he would often tell a story that suddenly painted his critics in a bad light, such as the Parable of the Wicked Tenants in the Vineyard. People without philosophical training aren’t used to analyzing complex arguments, but they are more than used to watching fictional characters face complex situations, and then discussing what is the best course of action for those characters to take.
The 19th century Christian philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard lamented that even though truth comes from the church, it is often passed over in favor of cultural fads. He writes, “Whereas, alas, the Christian proclamation very often is scarcely listened to, everybody listens to the poet, admires him, learns from him, is enchanted by him; whereas, alas, men quickly forget what the pastor has said, how accurately and how long they remember what the poet has said, especially what he has said with the help of the actor!”
But doesn’t our culture just reject Christian stories as being too religious and therefore unappetizing for consumer consumption? Well, one reason that Christian stories are rejected in our culture is not necessarily because they are Christian, it’s because they’re bad or they fail at the art of storytelling.
Rather than tell a great story with the intent of communicating a gospel truth, poor Christian stories tell a gospel truth and merely have the intent of telling a great story. This results in stories of flat, unforgettable characters and plots that are loosely constructed in order to facilitate the preaching of a message.
Here’s an exercise that demonstrates the difference between great storytelling and mediocre storytelling. Can you remember the names of the main characters in the following films, Star Wars, the Lion King, Braveheart, Titanic, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Trek, Toy Story.
All right. Now, can you remember the names of the characters from these Christian movies? Courageous, Fireproof, God’s Not Dead. And Kirk Cameron doesn’t count by the way, or Kevin Sorbo, who are the characters in Bella? I loved these films, but I can’t remember the names of the characters. I don’t really get attached to them.
Now to be fair, there are many mediocre and awful non-Christian films that are totally forgettable, and there are great examples of Christian and Catholic storytelling, but sadly, the great examples are often from a bygone era. Like C.S. Lewis’s the Chronicles of Narnia, or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
With the advent of ebook and even blog publishing, magazines outdated. This has really gotten to speak of blogs as the new thing. Catholic writers have a new venue to craft great stories that move not only minds, but hearts towards God’s plan of salvation.
Another point that I’ll update the talk with is at five years after I gave this talk, Holly Ordway, a professor at Houston Baptist University, who is Catholic, actually, published a book called Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith. So I definitely think you should check it out. I’ll include a link at the show description at trenthornpodcast.com.
The talk she gave at the 2018 Defending the Faith Conference at Steubenville, and it’s called Imaginative Apologetics, What it is and Why We Need It. So let me play a clip of that talk by Holly Ordway, which really supplements what I was saying in my talk at Benedictine almost six years earlier.
Holly Ordway:
Imaginative apologetics seeks to harness the God-given faculty of imagination to work in cooperation with a reason to open a way for the work of the Holy Spirit to guide the will toward a commitment to Christ. Now, what do I mean by imagination? At its most basic level, imagination is what allows us to conceive in our minds the image of something that is not present, what J.R.R. Tolkien Calls the mental power of image making.
But this apparently simple imagining is more potent than it seems, or than we tend to give it credit for in the modern age. Seeing imagination as a fundamental cognitive faculty may seem strange to us, but only because in our modern post enlightenment age, we’ve gotten used to have this modern reductionistic way of viewing the world and we’ve by and large abandoned, an older and richer view of human cognition.
Trent Horn:
So what I found helpful though, about this approach about with imagination, is that imagination a lot of times we denigrate that as just something that’s children, make belief, imaginary friends, but rather imagination is how, like what Holly is saying takes the data of the world, and I feel like amplifies from it, you see the bigger picture or the grander story, if you will, that links everything together where your entire worldview comes into focus and crystallizes when you see how all the little data points fit together, like what’s the grand story you’re going to believe in? Or what philosophers might call a worldview.
So I think that that is important that we can’t just refute arguments, we have to get people to be imaginative to see where it fits in kind of a grand picture or drama or story that they are a part of. Finally, we must master the art of persuasion. While the Bible makes it clear that is the Holy spirit that converts the hearts of men as ambassadors for Christ, we must be in the words of Jesus as wise as serpents, but as gentle as doves.
For example, in the 1930s, Alan Monroe trained salesmen how to more effectively sell their products in an increasingly diverse marketplace, but eventually Monroe while he was a professor at Purdue, published what has become known as Monroe’s Motivated Sequence. The sequence is a simple description of the nearly universal structure that is found in persuasive appeals.
And I’ll say that in using this in evangelism, we are not selling a product, we’re just understanding the most basic elements when it comes to persuading people. If you watch infomercials on late night television, be sure to look out for the following structure found in Monroe’s Sequence of Motivation, also called Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.
Step one, get their attention. Oh no, your meeting is in 15 minutes and your shirt’s wrinkled. Step two, state the problem. It’s so hard to keep wrinkles out of shirts or to get them out when you find them. Step three, propose a solution. New Wrinkle Away is a spray-on substance that gets rid of wrinkles and keeps them off clothes. Step four, ask the person to visualize the solution. Imagine pulling a shirt out of a drawer and never worrying about it being wrinkled again. Step five, issue a call to action. Call now and get to Wrinkle Aways for the price of one.
So let’s recap the sequence. This is the sequence in every persuasive appeal. Step one, get their attention. Step two, state the problem. Step three, propose a solution. Step four, visualize a solution. Step five, call to action. And we can have the same thing when we are presenting the gospel to people.
Step one, get their attention. I was driving down the road actually, and I saw a billboard and it said, “When you die, you’ll meet God.” Now that won’t necessarily be persuasive to everyone, but it got my attention and it could get other people’s attention as well. Then we might state the problem in classic evangelism. The problem is we can’t reach God on our own merits. We’re sinners, we do nothing to merit eternal life with God.
Step three, propose a solution. God became man and died on the cross so that if we repent of our sins, believe in him and receive the grace of God, receive Jesus into our hearts by receiving him through baptism and through the Eucharist, we can have eternal life. Visualize it. Imagine a life where we are no longer slaves to sin, but we become adopted children of God and find joy in him for all eternity.
Call to action. Get baptized, nothing holding you back. If you haven’t been to confession in a long time, you don’t know if there’s going to be another day or another week ahead of you go and find reconciliation now.
So get their attention, state the problem, propose a solution, visualize a solution, issue a call to action. All right, let’s continue. One excellent example of a persuasive approach is the Catholics come home media campaign. In one television spot, we see groups of people who have died, viewing the film footage of their life being projected on a screen in a giant empty airplane hangar.
The wide shot of the stark empty hanger gets our attention and fulfill step one of the sequence. Next, the actor watches a film reel showing the good moments of their life, that are dwarfed by the shameful bad moments like drug abuse or family neglect. The actor’s grief resonates with the viewer and the viewer sees a problem or step two of the sequence that they probably have in their own lives.
The viewer sees we’re all broken sinful people, but then there is hope. The viewer is told about God’s grace and how it can change our broken selves. The viewer connects to the promise foretold by the Prophet Ezekiel, I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you so that you will walk in my statutes, observe my ordinances, and keep them.
So it’s a step three, the solution, but to make the solution even more appealing, the actor sees what their life could have been like with Christ in it. Scenes of tears and anguish are replaced with joy and genuine purpose in life. The viewers now visualize the solution in their own life or they’ve witnessed step four of the sequence.
Finally, they’re given a call to action in the form of a website where they can find a Catholic church near them affiliated with the campaign. And now I’ll do what I couldn’t do when I gave the talk originally at Benedictine, I’ll play a portion of this video. You can find it at the Catholics Come Home YouTube page. I’ll also include a link to it at trenthornpodcast.com.
And just a little bit of trivia about this video if you go online to watch it, the girl who is in it, who sheds a tear and realizes she needs to be nicer to her grandmother, we actually did community theater productions back in Phoenix. So I said, “Oh my gosh, Angela, I can’t believe you’re in this video. I totally forgot about that.” But we did a musical theater production together. We were involved in Catholic youth groups. She’s just a few years younger than I am. So this is funny to see.
And I’ve remembered that these videos were actually filmed with a lot of people in the diocese of Phoenix. I think that’s where the company was based, at least at that time.
Speaker 5:
Over the years, we begin to realize how quickly life goes by. For some of us, our journey will end without notice. And when our transition into eternity begins, there won’t be a chance for any do overs. No time to rewind our life, no chance to choose a different ending.
Speaker 5:
Thankfully, you still can ask God to help edit your life story and create the ideal ending. Jesus can heal your memories and forgive your past if you accept his mercy. You really can be freed from the addiction of sin and find lasting peace. If you’ve been waiting for a sign, this is your chance to begin an adventure with God that will last forever. Learn more at catholicscomehome.org.
Trent Horn:
Well, I hope that was helpful for you all to be able to share about countering error, but also capturing imaginations to capture the deepest part of a person so that they can love the Lord our God with all their heart, with all their mind, with all their soul, and with all their strength.
And our goal is to be able to live out the gospel in that way, we should share arguments with people and reasons, and that’s important. People need to have good reasons for what they believe, whether they’re objective reasons that other people can debate and dialogue about, or subjective reasons. Sometimes God just reveals himself to a person. Other people can’t see that revelation, but the person who’s experienced God and prayer, or has a religious experience. They have no reason to discount that evidence that might be more subjective.
But we might have our experiences, we have a testimony we can share with others, and we should do that. We should share that subjective evidence with people who consider to share our story, but also we should ask other people about the story they find themselves in. I really do believe that when people look at life and try to understand their place in the world, especially with the advent of fiction, I mean, 500 years ago, most people did not have access to that many fictional accounts.
Trent Horn:
I’m sure you probably heard tales and stories told by Lantern Light, you would go to mass and you would hear stories from scripture, but we are inundated with stories today, works of fiction books, but more in particular television shows, films. And we think of ourselves as the protagonist in a story. And I think that imaginative apologetics helps us to engage with people and to help them see where all the pieces of the world fit together.
Both the evidences for God and the majesty of the universe, on 19:1, the sky proclaims the greatness of our Lord, the heavens are his handiwork. And also within the heart of the human person himself. I think actually there’s a Protestant philosopher, he’s at Azusa, or another university nearby here in Southern California, Josh Rasmussen, wonderful guy. I hope to have him on the podcast soon.
And he talks about that kind of a defensive God and in the face of evil, a theodicy or defensive God looking at life is sort of a great story and that if God exists, we actually shouldn’t be surprised if there are trials, tribulations, ups and downs, drama. If there are antagonists, cliffhangers, if God is the author of the universe, we might expect him to author our lives in that similar way. And we’re called to trust in him as we do that.
So counter-arguments, share the faith, share good reasons, but we got to engage imaginations as well. And I hope that you will do that, and I hope this talk was helpful. Giving you tips for that, and it was just fun to have a little stroll down memory lane as well, back to good old 2012. I hope you all are doing well. Thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
If you liked today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member-only content. For more information, visit trenthornpodcast.com.