Conservatives Who Need to be Converted

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

It’s no secret that conservatives are more likely to believe in God and support traditional moral views like being pro-life. This graph from 538 shows that in the last 30 years, conservatives have remained fairly religious, while liberals who don’t identify with any religion have risen from 10% to 40% of liberals. But conservative is not synonymous with Christian, and sharing faith in the true God is infinitely more important than sharing certain political views. That’s why in today’s episode, I’m going to talk about two types of people who either identify as conservatives, or at least claim to oppose modern liberalism or modern leftism who still need to be converted to a full acceptance of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the teachings of his church. First, they’re the immoral individualists. These are people who tend to be economic conservatives, but also support liberal social policies. There are people like Dave Rubin who say they left the left because liberals went crazy on social issues, but then perpetuate their own kind of crazy by doing things like ordering children via surrogates to be part of their so-called gay families.

It’s also hypocritical for conservatives to ridicule political opponents like Pete Buttigieg for depriving children of a mother and father, but congratulate political allies like Dave Rubin for doing the exact same thing. Conservativism leads to anarchism if you don’t have a consistent, virtuous worldview that you’re actually trying to conserve. When it comes to sexual immorality, so-called same-sex marriage, drag queen story hour, and transgender ideology did not come out of nowhere. They came partly from conservatives decades ago in the mid-20th century who said, “Contraception isn’t a moral issue as long as I don’t have to pay for it,” or conservatives who trumpeted family values while being on their second, third, or fourth marriages. They weren’t trying to conserve a Christian worldview for society. They were immoral individualists who only stood up for moral causes when it was popular to do so, like being against so-called same-sex marriage in the 90s. Even Democrats like Hillary, Clinton and Barack Obama were against so-called same-sex Marriage going into the 21st century.

Gays and lesbians should be able to get married. My feelings about this are constantly evolving. I struggle with this.

But when you normalize non-procreative sexual acts between men and women through things like contraception or downplaying the importance of marriage through no-fault divorce, this normalizes all non-procreative sexual acts, including acts between people of the same sex. When it comes to transgender ideology, part of this comes from widely accepted social caricatures of women, including those conservatives hold. If women are reduced to a collection of exaggerated secondary sex characteristics, then womanhood becomes a costume designed to arouse others and not a unique life-giving foundation of society. And if womanhood is a costume, then anybody can wear it, even a biological man.

That’s the problem.

You want to reduce women, you want to reduce men down to maybe just their genetics, our genitals,-

No.

… our chromosomes, right? That’s what you’re saying. That’s what [inaudible 00:03:26].

What you want to do is appropriate women. You want to appropriate womanhood and turn it into basically a costume that could be worn.

Consider this 2024 calendar marketed to conservative dads from ultra-right beer. It’s supposed to make fun of Dylan Mulvaney, the man who claims to be a woman that single-handedly destroyed Bud Light’s market value. In fact, while I was on the Three Hearts pilgrimage in Oklahoma last October, I took this picture of nearly a dozen cases of Bud Light someone had thrown out on the side of the road. But while the Real Women of America calendar from ultra-right beer does feature real biological women, this is not a celebration of real women. None of these, so-called real women is pregnant or with their husbands or raising children, or even just doing their jobs. These are caricatures of women designed to arouse men. They’re not depictions of real womanhood. You see these same caricatures in some online tradwives that dress immodestly in order to get attention.

Once again, this is not traditional womanhood. It’s a modern fantasy or fetish, if we’re being honest, that appeals to a disordered view of sexuality. On the other end of the spectrum are women like Pearl who claim to defend traditional gender roles and even claim to be Catholic, but then defend other aspects of immoral individualism among conservatives, like downplaying the evil of men committing adultery.

We should just let these men cheat in peace.

No.

I’m serious. He’s rich and famous. What do you expect? Again, I just think life’s about choices and trade-offs, and men, I just think are biologically predispositioned to sleep with. A lot of women. Men who are over six foot tall are statistically 38% more likely to cheat, which is presumably just down to the opportunity. So it’s like if we’re going after the guys with all of these qualities, do you think we should maybe expect it on some level?

For more on that, check out my entire episode on Pearl linked in the description below. It’s not enough to just oppose obvious evils like transgender ideology or hardcore pornography. If you don’t have a solid foundation for your worldview, it’s going to quickly deteriorate when it faces cultural pressures. I saw one meme that put it best. A culture that considers this a celebration of womanhood will eventually consider this a celebration of womanhood. You can’t consistently defend immoral individualism for people with opposite sex attractions through things like immodesty, contraception, and divorce, and also oppose liberals who want to practice their own individual immorality. In fact, in my dialogue with Brandon Robertson, who is a pro-LGBT pastor, he admitted that Catholics are the most consistent when it comes to sexual ethics.

Look, there’s a lot of Protestants who see no problem with non-procreative sex between men and women, oral sex, anal sex, divorce and remarriage. And I think you actually make a very compelling point there. But for me, it would go in the other direction, not that, well, we should endorse same-sex behavior, but that the opposite-sex couples need to clean up their own backyards first.

Right.

So you see where I could see that, that it’s like, oh, you could go in one or two directions.

And that’s where I’ll say this, probably the only time I’ll say this, I think the Catholic Church is better than Protestants on this in the sense that the Catholicism is really clear on all of these issues. I disagree, of course, with… I think divorce and remarriage, I think we should have a more open approach to. But for the sake of moral consistency, I think the Catholic church is an upper hand.

By the way, if you want to help us have more dialogues like what I have with Brandon and reach more people with our message, please like this video, subscribe to the channel, and support us at trenthornPodcast.com. So first, we had the immoral individualists, but the second type of conservative that needs conversion has too much of a fixation on group identity beyond the individual. In fact, they treat entire groups of human beings as being less than human. Those would be the racist conservatives. Now, I don’t throw the term racism around lightly. Liberal activists love to call anything and everything racist until the word is lost all of its meaning. They also frequently and unashamedly engage in their own racism. See my previous episode about how Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How To Be An Anti-Racist is actually racist. Kendi says that the only answer to past discrimination against people of color is current and future discrimination against white people. So many accusations of racism are either blown out of proportion or they’re completely made up, but that doesn’t mean racism itself is a myth. Real forms of racism still exist in society.

There are racist people of color who treat white people as having less value than other races, or even as being an especially dangerous threat to society.

Why exactly are white people superior?

They’re real good at violence.

Violence.

Genocide.

What exactly are white people superior in?

Insecurity.

Pretending.

Fear.

Being fearful of nothing.

Being ignorant.

Blame.

Letting their egos control their every move. Superior at being (beep)

And by the same token, there are racist white people who identify as conservatives, or even as Christians, who treat people of color as having less value or as being unique threats to society. For example, here’s some memes I found online shared by people, once again, who would identify as conservative, or at least opposed to modern liberalism. Many of them say they’re Christian conservatives. Here’s one complaining about how too many white women get abortions, whereas black women have too many children. And when someone in the comments pointed out that black babies should not be aborted, the response was to “Stop cucking for a group that allegedly wants white people dead,” and also with a Pepe meme of a black baby being aborted. Here’s a self-described Christian nationalist on X, formerly Twitter, talking about how blacks aren’t Americans and saying you can show children interracial marriage is bad because when you mix different Play-Doh colors together, they look like dog feces, ergo mixed-race children are disgusting.

In 2023, reporter Christopher Mathias revealed that Richard Hanania, a popular right-wing commenter had previously written racist articles under the pen name Richard Host. According to the Atlantic, Hanania blogged for white supremacist websites about the evils of race-mixing, advocated for the sterilization of people with a low IQ, and for the deportation of all post-1965 non-white migrants from Latin America. He also said white nationalism is “the only hope that part of what made the American nation great will survive somewhere.” Now, Hanania later said, these earlier views of his were repulsive and he does not hold them anymore, but there are still countless other conservatives and Christians who hold to these repulsive views. And Hanania still has a fixation on issues related to things like whether some races have higher IQs than others. Now, claims about the intelligence of various races have been used to defend racism against minorities and people of color. Most critics of these racist views usually argue that there’s no good evidence for showing that there are biologically based differences in IQ among different races. But even if it were true there were these biological differences, that still would not justify racism.

The second Vatican council said the following, “Since all men possess a rational soul and are created in God’s likeness, since they have the same nature and origin, have been redeemed by Christ, and enjoy the same divine calling and destiny, the basic equality of all must receive increasingly greater recognition. True, all men are not alike from the point of view of varying physical power and the diversity of intellectual and moral resources. Nevertheless, with respect to the fundamental rights of the person, every type of discrimination, whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language, or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent.”

In 1938, Pope Pius XI took the unprecedented step of releasing an encyclical in German called Mit brennender Sorge that was smuggled into Nazi Germany. It said the following, “Whoever exalts race or the people or the state, whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God. He is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life, which that faith upholds.” The Catholic philosopher, Ed Faser notes in his book, All One in Christ, that the Church’s teachings on human equality are rooted in the fact that while the bodies and abilities of human beings are unequal, our souls are equal in the fact that they are all made in the image and likeness of God. Faser writes, “Our basic rights and obligations as potential citizens of heaven are grounded in grace. This grace has been offered to all human beings of whatever race. Hence, whatever biological and cultural differences may exist between the races, nature and grace alike ensure that their basic rights and duties are the same.”

The title of Faser’s book comes from what St. Paul said in Galatians 3:28. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Also, I highly recommend interviews with Catholic author and former neo-Nazi Joseph Pierce who talks about how he went to jail for inciting racial hatred in the UK and how he encountered God during that time and rejected his racism.

Things such as racism, it’s not a rational thing, right? It is something which is just like hatred. If you have hatred for somebody, irrespective if it’s for different race, it’s another person, then that’s not a rational relationship. In my book, I took about three different occasions where my enemies loved me when I was in the neo-Nazi. Now, my attitude was it’s an eye for an eye. I expect my enemies to hate me. I expect you to try to hit me, and I’m going to hate you back. That’s the relationship we have. So on the three occasions where instead of hating me, somebody perceived by me as being an enemy treated my enmity towards them, my antagonism towards them with a loving response, it’s absolutely disarming.

One thing that’s beautiful about the Catholic faith is it’s diversity. When I was an actual youth, I attended World Youth Day in 2005 and 2008, and it was amazing to see the diversity of so many people from different cultures and ethnicities who worship together within the one universal, AKA Catholic church that Christ gave us. However, this doesn’t mean the church has always perfectly opposed racism. For example, Martin de Porres was born in Peru in 1579 as the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a freed slave. Because of his mixed-race, heritage Martin suffered many instances of racism in his life. The law prohibited him from full membership in a religious order, so he volunteered for the Dominicans at the age of 15 to simply perform menial tasks. Some of the novices at the order even called him a mulatto dog, which means mixed breed.

But Martin persevered in kindness and service, and he eventually did profess his vows at the age of twenty-four, he was known to have supernatural abilities to heal people. And once, he was praying so intently in front of the blessed Sacrament, he didn’t notice a fire had started near him. He’s now Saint Martin de Porres, and he serves as a helpful correction between two extremes. One is to reject the church entirely because of the bad actions of few people, as some liberals might do, and instead attach yourself to so-called anti-racist irreligious ideologies. For Martin though, the only way all humans can be brothers is through the one father who made us and the one son who redeemed us. But the other extreme is to exalt white or European Catholicism over other cultural expressions of Catholicism. But honestly, if you want to see the future of an Orthodox and vibrant Catholic church, don’t look to the church in Europe, look to the church in Africa.

So just to pull all of this together, I’m grateful when self-described conservatives agree with me on important issues, but that’s not a free pass. Anyone who is far from Christ theologically or morally should be called a conversion, even if there are friends who agree with us in the political sphere. And so-called conservatives need to be careful because you have to have something to conserve that’s good, true, and beautiful, and not just a few pet policy positions. Without the fullness of the faith. Christ gave us, immoral individualism and the exaltation of race and cultural identity can serve to corrupt society instead of bringing it to its ultimate glorification in God.

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