FFAF: How to Spend Money in an Evil World

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

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Free for All Friday here on the Council of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist Trent Horn. On Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics, theology, how to explain and defend the Catholic faith. But on Friday, we talk about whatever I want to talk about.

Recently, I was invited to the Catholic Money Summit to give an interview on money and cooperation with evil. Now, how to look at that through a Catholic lens. So the Catholic Money Summit is put on by WalletWin. It is a couple who looks at issues related to money and finance from a Catholic perspective. They have a great YouTube channel you can check out, WalletWin. So they invited me to the summit, I gave an interview for them, and they asked me questions about, “Well, what do you do if you’re going to go out and you want to buy something, but the company who sells that thing, they donate money to evil corporations? Where do we draw the line between cooperation with evil companies that’s okay versus cooperation that has now become sinful, and you definitely should not shop there?”

So these are important questions as we try to live out good and holy lives in what is an evil world. Scripture calls the devil the God of this world. Of course, God is God of everything, but Satan certainly has a pretty tight grip on the world around us, so we live in an evil world because of that grip, and we have to be cognizant of that and be prudent in how we spend our money, and those entities within the world that we choose to cooperate with.

So I talk about all of that with Jonathan here in this interview. I hope it is helpful for you. If you want more from Jonathan and WalletWin, check out their YouTube channel, WalletWin. They have a lot of other great content. And without further ado, here is my chat with Jonathan on cooperation and being prudent in an evil world.

This interaction, how do we, as Catholics, right? Our faith should influence every aspect of our lives, every way that we go about living. How do we interact with the world, especially in a time when so many companies seem to be just doing everything they can to tell us how in support they are of certain immoral things? So there’s a call of boycotts, or should we just be activist investors? We should vote with our dollars. That should reflect our faith, but how do we do that? So just how do we start thinking about this?

Well, I think the first thing that we have to start with is ourselves. So to focus on our relationship with God, our moral life, doing an examination of conscience. We won’t be able to change the world until we first change our … We can’t conform the world to Christ until we are conformed to Christ. And so if we are just out on a mission, if we’re blind culture warriors, then we’re going to become toxic individuals who have agendas rather than people that radiate Christ to the world.

Now, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight culture wars. I believe there is a culture war out there. Frankly, they started it by making it legal to kill children in the womb, making it legal and encouraged to mutilate children through so-called gender reassignment surgeries, greed, pornography, drugs, materialism. There is what Pope St. John Paul II called a culture of death, and so we should be engaged in a culture war, but we have to be rooted in Christ when we do that.

So starting with that, and once we have those solid foundations, our own spiritual lives set, living our lives in conformity to Christ. Avoiding two extremes. So we don’t want to avoid the extreme of, “Well, my faith is just on Sunday in church and after that, it doesn’t matter.” Kind of compartmentalism. No. Everything that we do should reflect Christ to the world. Jesus says, “We are the salt of the earth, but if salt loses its flavor, what is it good for?” Right? We’re the light of the world. You don’t hide a light under a bushel basket. You don’t just put a light in church. You brighten the whole world. That’s one extreme.

The other extreme, though, is a kind of legalism that says that, “Every single interaction that I do in the world must always achieve a particular good.” Or as some people say, the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. That we scrutinize every single transaction, every single interaction we have with others. The danger with this approach is that we should always strive for holiness. We have to remember that we’re finite beings. We have a finite amount of income, a finite amount of attention, a finite amount of energy, a finite amount of time that we can spend. One of the problems here is that there are certain evil things we know we should not do, and then there are many different good things that we could do. We can’t do all of them, but we have to discern and be prudent.

So here we have to exercise the virtue of prudence in doing good, and prudence is that virtue that helps us to determine what the good is and how to get there. Because there’s people who try to do the good, but they do it in an imprudent way. So we always have to take steps then in looking at especially our financial interactions to say, “Is this overall promoting the common good, promoting the good of others? Am I avoiding directly doing evil, or unnecessarily cooperating with evil?” And those are terms we can obviously unpack.

Sure thing. Yeah. I very much appreciate, love that the focus is, of course, the starting place is ourselves and our own hearts.

Right.

Like you said, yeah, what’s the point of trying … How could we ever hope to conform the world to Christ if we are not ourselves are conformed? And that’s just a very important spot. And to just always go back and to renew that, to make sure that we are reservoirs, that it’s flowing out from our fruits of our prayer, instead of just kind of dishing it out, giving it out, even if we were in a good spot, and kind of wearing ourselves out and forgetting the most important work of spending time with our Lord.

Right.

We’re trying to look at our consumer behavior, I guess.

Yes.

There’s a lot of terms, and if maybe you think it would be better to define some of this later, that’s fine, but at some point we want to make sure that we talk about … Because I think there’s a lot of words, and frankly maybe we don’t quite use them quite regularly, most of us at least, so it’s hard to maybe understand what they all are. Formal, material, immediate, proximate, remote, all that stuff. This cooperation with evil that you mentioned.

Right.

I don’t think I ever want to cooperate with evil. So what does that mean? How do we look at that, and how do we live that out as Catholics?

Well, the problem here is that we live in an evil world. There’s no getting around that. The Bible is very clear. It even says that the devil is called the God of this world. So we live in an evil world. And now Paul tells us that when he said, “I don’t want you associating with unbelievers,” “I did not say for you to be completely disassociating from them, because then you would have to go out of the world.” Now, some people are called to that. They might be hermits, for example. They’re completely detached from the world, and they pray for this world, and that’s good. But for most of us, especially those of us who discern a vocation of building up society, of marriage, children, of serving roles that build up the common good of society, we’re going to be in the world, and we’re going to cooperate with evil.

Now, it’s going to be to different degrees. You might say, “Well, I’m not cooperating with evil.” Well, the cooperation in most cases is remote, but we’re still involved in a chain of decisions that led to evil. For example, if we buy groceries from a grocery store, the grocery store might donate some of the profits that they make to an organization that promotes values that are antithetical to our Catholic faith, for example.

Or let’s say you are the owner of a brewery, and you make wonderful craft beer. Now, drinking craft beer is a good thing. A lot of people enjoy sitting around, having craft beer, and having really good discussions. As Catholics, we certainly believe that drinking alcohol in and of itself is not sinful. If it were, receiving Jesus, the precious blood, would be very problematic for us, because it’s under the form of wine. But the Bible’s very clear that drunkenness is evil. And if you are a brewer, you know that some people will misuse your beer. That some people statistically will take your beer, and they will drink too much of it, and engage in the sin of drunkenness, and you’ve cooperated with that, but you didn’t intend it to happen. You operate something that people can use well, and other people abuse it. If other people abuse it, that’s not a fault on you.

So when we talk about cooperation with evil, we just have to remember, when we engage with other people, when we support other people, and this happens all the time. In the south, for example, if you live in the south, and you go and buy groceries at a store, they probably came to you on train tracks that had been laid by slaves, or roads that had been created by slaves. If you use an iPhone or if you use almost any cellular phone, the rare earth metals that are in it were probably mined in subhuman conditions, or even under conditions of slavery. It’s an evil world. So the question is, where do we draw those lines to determine, when is it appropriate to cooperate, to act in a way where evil is along the chain of causation, if you will, and when is it inappropriate?

So when we look at cooperation with evil, we can break it down this way. First, we have to make a distinction between formal and material cooperation. So let’s say that Planned Parenthood is doing a barbecue fundraiser, and somebody goes there and they buy a burger, not just because they’re hungry, but because they want to help Planned Parenthood kill babies. They wouldn’t call it that if they support it, but they want to help their so-called reproductive healthcare. That would be always wrong. You can never formally cooperate with evil. Formal cooperation means you assist the evil, and you intend for that evil to occur.

So if you’re our craft brewer, and you’re making beer, and you make it for the explicit purpose, you like when people get drunk, because they end up buying more beer from you, and then when they’re drunk, they’re not counting their dollars as well, well, that would be evil. That would be, you are intending the evil, and so it would be wrong for you to do that.

And the next, though, would be material cooperation with evil. So this is the far more common one. That’s where we help in evil, but we’re not necessarily intending … This is for most of us, is what happens. We give people the material. So if the bartender gives someone a drink, or he sells a keg of beer, I should say, and that person uses it to get drunk, there’s material cooperation there. But here, under material cooperation, we have to distinguish between proximate and remote. Are you close to it? Are you necessary for the evil thing to happen, even though you don’t intend it? Or are you far enough removed that there is a good reason to justify you being associated with this?

So to return to the Planned Parenthood example, I would say it would be inappropriate if just because I’m hungry, buying a cheeseburger, and all that money goes directly to Planned Parenthood. That would be pretty close to proximate. It would definitely be scandalous, and it’d be close to proximate. There’s no proportional reason to justify that, when I can go down the street and get a burger almost anywhere else. Or to make it very clear, let’s say the nurse at an abortion facility. She just wants money. She doesn’t like abortions. She doesn’t do abortions. She just hands the equipment to the abortionist. Well, sorry. That’s proximate material cooperation. Another example would be driving someone to get an abortion. You don’t like it, but you know what, you’re going to help them out in this situation to do that. There’s no proportional, justifying reason.

In remote cases, there are, even though you are helping the evil slightly, there’s a proportionate reason to justify it. So to go back through all these examples, yeah, it would be proximate to drive someone to an abortion facility to get an abortion, but let’s say you’re a bus driver, and you’re driving a bus down the city street, and there’s a bus stop in front of the abortion facility. You know you’re helping some people get there to get abortions. You are remotely cooperating, but there’s a proportional reason for you to be involved. People need public transit. They have to get to other places on the bus line. And you could quit your job. You could say, “I don’t want to ever be involved in this.” That’s fine, but you wouldn’t be obligated to, because somebody else is just going to start driving the bus.

Or let’s say I don’t get a burger at Planned Parenthood. I’m just like, “Well, I’m really, really hungry. I’m going to pull into this fast food joint.” And it turns out, if you look through their forms, one of the corporations they donate to is Planned Parenthood. But that’s certainly not the same thing as buying a burger at a Planned Parenthood fundraising barbecue. It’s a remote cooperation, and there’s a proportional reason to buy a burger there. I need to eat, and this restaurant serves the common good. It feeds people. Maybe not the healthiest food, but it feeds people.

Or to give you another … I mean, I can give them all top of the day, but I think that they-

Oh, yeah. Go for it.

Let me keep going. I love it. Another one might be, let’s say, when we patronize organization, you see [inaudible 00:13:48] proximate or remote. So when we patronize an organization, either by buying a product from them, or donating to them, or buying stock, which would be investing in the company, where we aren’t necessarily giving money directly to the company, but the company’s value increases because we invest in it, and so we’re intertwined in the company’s success.

You’d have to judge also, does the company serve the common good, and does the good they do outweigh the bad they do? Because most companies do a mixture of good and bad. So for example, let’s say you’re driving down the street, and you’re like, “I really want to pack of gum,” and there is a adult pornography store, and you just go in there to get a pack of gum. I’ve never been in one, obviously, but I imagine every other store, they have impulse items at the register. You might say, “Well, I’m not buying porn. I’m buying gum.” Yeah, but you’re going to a pornography store. You’re supporting this store. This store should not exist. Basically, 99% of what they do is evil, except for the gum they sell, perhaps.

But let’s suppose you go then to Walgreens, and you buy gum at the register. Well, I would say 99% of the things that Walgreens sell are good, but some things they sell are evil. They sell condoms. They might even have the morning after pill. But pharmacies, grocery stores, the vast majority of what they do, without them, the common good would be severely diminished. It would be very difficult to have the society we live in. The standard of living would be very, very low, and many people would be harmed without the ability to access food and medicine at the prices that these stores give for us.

So I think that’s another thing we have to keep in mind, formal versus material cooperation. Most of it’s material. If it’s material, are we close to it or are we far away? And is there a proportional reason justifying the interaction? And in particular, is the group that we support, is it primarily promoting the common good, even if some of the things that they offer are not good?

Just to walk through some of that and maybe pick apart the pieces, just to make sure, I mean, I think I’ve got a handle on it, but just in case. So it seems like it’s a very clear example, right, the nurse at the abortion facility.

Sure.

Just to make sure I get this, right, if you just separate things out a bit, responding to someone, helping them reach something they cannot reach-

Right.

… that’s a good thing. That’s a helpful thing. So that in and itself isn’t bad. But because I know, well, as soon as I hand whatever it is to him, he’s going to use that to kill a baby-

The act of evil is made possible directly because of what you are doing.

Because I did it.

Exactly. So that makes your cooperation proximate, in that case. Which would be different than, let’s say, a delivery driver, who his job is to deliver medical supplies, and maybe he stops at the Planned Parenthood and drops the supplies off. Now, once again, if he’s uncomfortable with that work, he could quit. But there’s a proportionate reason to justify what he does. The vast amount of his job is to provide medical supplies to heal people, and one of the things he has to tolerate is when that’s used for evil purposes, but most of them are used for good purposes. But if you spend your whole day handing abortion tools to an abortionist, there is no proportionate, justifying reason there.

Yeah. I know it’s not this. I feel like it might be easy, though, especially maybe if we’re looking to justify something, to slip into just like, “Okay, well, I just look at the good. I look at the bad. Yeah. I mean, they’re doing a lot of good things.” How do we not do that? How do we actually see this properly, and know it’s not just throw the bad up there, and throw the good over there, see which one’s heavier?

Right.

How do we do this correctly?

Well, I think what’s important first is to do an internal examination. To really ask ourselves, “Am I biased when I’m analyzing this company that I support? Do I want to support them, even if it would be wrong to do that?” And so we have to be honest with ourselves in that respect, but also we do have to admit that in most cases, it’s going to be a prudential judgment as to whether we ought to support someone. It’s pretty rare where it’s just obvious, “Yeah, you cannot do that.” In other cases, there’s going to be shades of gray about how much evil do they do versus less evil, and that different people will reach different conclusions on that. But I think we have to be honest with ourselves, confront our own biases, and then maybe seek counsel from others.

If we’re really concerned, we should definitely follow our conscience. If our conscience is telling us to do one thing, but another voice is telling us to do something else, go with your conscience on that matter, and maybe seek out a spiritual director, though, to make sure you’re not being overly scrupulous when you are deciding which companies to support.

Because we also want to make sure, we don’t want to conflate people saying, “Oh, well, any evil is all evil.” Well, no. There’s clearly a difference between me buying something at Target, even though they might have some pornographic books that are on sale, versus buying something at a literal pornography store. If we come to the conclusion that any evil makes anything off limits, well, that won’t lead to moral rigor. It will inevitably lead to moral laxity. What will happen is, you’ll end up saying, “Wow, if any bit of evil is just … I can’t cooperate with it. It’s just wrong, full stop,” you’ll notice that basically every company you work with is evil, so you won’t care if you pick the really bad one or the not so bad one, if you think there is no difference.

Interesting. We’ve been talking about it a lot. I think most of the time, these ideas are brought up of how close we are to another’s actions. It’s all about, right, “I want to avoid evil,” which is a very good thing to try to do.

Right.

Do we apply, should we or can we apply these same principles of proximate and material and all that, to doing good? And how much should we think about that when we are out in the marketplace?

Well, do you mean exactly how much we should do when it comes to doing good, like with investing or purchases?

Yeah. Right? So I don’t know if this is the best example, but right, I could buy a pair of shoes from whoever, Nike, let’s say, and then the big marketing push with Tom’s Shoes was that, “Oh yeah, well, you get a pair, and then we’re going to give a pair to somebody who needs shoes.”

Right.

So that’s a good thing, right? And of course, it makes me feel better about them, and myself, and blah, blah, blah.

Right.

But if there is, I know that by supporting this business or whatever it is, there will be additional good done because of it.

Right. Well, I think that-

Do we go through the same things, or because it’s so remote, does it not even matter?

Well, what I would say is that to determine it, the obligation to do good is not as clear cut as the obligation to not do evil. It’s very clear when we have universal norms. Universal moral norms in the church tend to focus on negative behavior, negative commands. Like, “Don’t kill someone. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t steal. Don’t commit these specific acts.” But as I said earlier, who we give our money towards, there’s always going to be a scale. You could always give one more dollar to a charity. You could always buy the next thing. You could always give more, but there’s always going to be a breaking point, because eventually you could donate so much of your money that you are so impoverished your mental health becomes unbalanced, and you’re unable to provide for yourself, and that threatens your ability to continue to be charitable.

So we have to use prudence there, and we have to make that ultimate decision of, “Have I given enough that I’ve done sufficient good?” And that that’s up to us, ultimately. The church doesn’t give … There is no specific, “You have to give this percentage of your income,” or, “that percentage.” That’s between us and God to be able to determine. But you’re right. We have to use prudence. That I could spend money on this, or I could spend money on something else and use the other money towards something that’s good. But since we can always do more good, we don’t want to be overly harsh on ourselves, but we also don’t want to be so callous that we never support the poor.

So one thing we can do is in our monthly budgets, set a target goal for charitable giving. To say, “I would feel that I am doing enough good if I am donating …” Start at 5%, or 7%, or 10% if you can, but start wherever you can. And then to say, “Well, yeah, I could have done more, but you know what? I at least accomplished the charitable goals I set out for, that made me feel comfortable. I have done what I feel like I am capable of doing at this time,” and then try to grow in that area.

But you’re right. We always have to use prudence. The Tom’s example is interesting there, because I actually find … Here’s what’s hard. Helping the poor, also, many times we want to help people, but our good intentions are not good enough, and we have unintended consequences. And so there’s a famous story believed to be apocryphal, but there are similar stories that have happened in history of a village in India overrun by cobras. And so the government said, “We’ll pay people for every dead cobra you bring to us.” And it seems like that’s a great idea. Government should spend money, gets rid of the cobras. That’s great.

But what ended up happening was people found it was cheaper and easier to grow cobras, and raise them, and turn them in to get the money than to catch them, because it’s a lot easier to just harvest them and have them mate somewhere than to try to catch a cobra in the wild. And so they would harvest their own and turn them in to get money. Then when this was figured out, the transaction was stopped, and then all the people who farmed cobras just released them and made the problem worse.

Now, what’s so hard, and there’s lots of examples like this, where you’ll have something with good intentions, but if you don’t follow it all the way through to think, “Oh, what will actually happen if we do this?” The harm that will come, we have to use prudence. So with Tom’s Shoes, I’m not a fan of Tom’s shoes, because the idea is that, “Okay, you buy one pair from us, and we’ll donate a pair to them.” So they take a minor hit, but the shoes aren’t that expensive for them to make. They have a high profit margin. But what ends up happening is you think, “Oh, that’s going to help people in Africa. They need shoes.”

Well, it’s kind of like, if you give a man a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach them man to fish, you feed them for a lifetime. If you give somebody cheap shoes, then they think, “Oh, the only place I can get good shoes is if the nice American drops them over here in a crate, and I can get them.” What ends up happening is, African cobblers and shoe makers, people who are trying to start a business to support themselves and support their community, they can’t possibly compete with free Tom’s Shoes that are dumped on their country, and they end up going out of business. And so people end up being harmed. The local economy is harmed through something that you thought was good, but you didn’t use prudence to reach the ultimate end of all the consequences that are involved.

So sorry for the bit of the long-winded answer. We have to take all those factors into account when we decide what good we’re going to do.

That’s great. No, thank you. It reminded me of this situation, certainly not as serious, I don’t think, but in Seattle, Amazon, they had all these carts just piled with free bananas. Not quite sure why, but just all these bananas. So in particular areas of Seattle, the market for bananas just crashed. Nobody was going to the grocery store. The value of a banana just went through the floor, because you can just get them for free. So it seems like it’s a good thing, but there’s always more consequences that happen after our actions.

That’s right.

I want to just get really, really practical here. As a kid, my parents, they took me to Disney World. I watched all the movies, all that stuff. So I like some of the things they’re doing. Especially lately, they’re getting a little crazy, and there’s certain things they’re putting in the movies, or certain stances they’re taking in public. And of course, they’re not the only … I’m not trying to just single them out because they’re the worst.

Right.

There’s a lot of companies doing all sorts of things, some worse even, but just a really practical one. Can I take my family to Disney World?

Sure. Well, what I would say here is, when you ask that, “Can I?” Once again, that becomes cooperation with evil. And I would say visiting a theme park whose parent corporation supports some evil practices, once again, are you making those evil practices? Are you the immediate direct cause of them? No. Your money gets filtered through to provide for other people. When you look at the scope of what even a theme park does, the vast majority of the things a theme park does are morally good or morally neutral. Provides jobs for people, provides lighthearted entertainment. The problem becomes with the parent corporation, some of the things they do are evil. Supporting LGBTQ ideology would be a prime example of that.

Now, at Disney, what would be interesting there is, I feel like I think you can. The only exception I would give might be if there is a specifically themed LGBT day, which they do do once or twice a year. I would say if you know that’s the case, that’s very scandalous to be there, where the theme of the day is to directly support that kind of behavior.

But in general, you might say, “Well, I’m not you. Trent, they support LGBT. You just shouldn’t go there and spend your money.” If that’s your litmus test, you’re going to apply it everywhere else, though. You’re not going to shop at many grocery and department stores. Most banks support LGBTQ ideology. You start going down the list. Simply refusing to support any company that supports evil practices, you’ll soon begin to discover nearly all of them do, and so you’ll end up using so much energy trying … The problem becomes, you’ll spend so much energy trying to avoid tiny, tiny support of evil companies that … I guess I’ll look at it this way. You refusing to help that company, there will be hardly any noticeable impact of you not supporting all these evil companies. Let’s say you’re like, “All these companies support LGBT causes. I’m not going to be a part of them.”

You withdrawing, the impact is negligible. No one will notice. No one will care. But in your life, the impact could be quite severe. If you can’t bank, you have to drive 30 miles to the one independent pharmacy, 40 miles to the one independent grocery store, you have to do all of these things to have your hands clean, so to speak, and like I said before, you have limited mental health. You have limited mental health and resources that you could have, in conserving your mental health, resources, and money, while supporting these other stores, go and use your money to do tremendous good. To donate to the Alliance for Defending Freedom, to protect Christian stores from discrimination. That you free up your time and money to go and do more good. And that also has to be balanced in to account for it.

So I would say in a general trip to a theme park, or a subscription to a company, and it’s not just Disney. I mean, you might say, “Oh, we’ll just get rid of Disney.” Look, I took my kid on a plane recently, and he watched a kids’ movie, and I watched it with him, and I saw some LGBT ideology hidden within it. The stuff is everywhere with these companies. It’s almost impossible to avoid. So I would say that while it is permissible to boycott, because you feel a moral, want to take a moral stand, it’s not obligatory in most cases, but you can also do other things. You could choose to become a shareholder even of a company like Disney. Because I was listening, for example, a recent shareholder call, where a shareholder said at the meeting at Disney, “What are we doing? We’re supporting these evil things. It’s turning people off. We’re losing money. We need to stop this.” And there’s a proportional good there, in that if you’re a shareholder, you can steer the company into a moral direction.

Bishop Thomas Paprocki, for example, he is a shareholder with Walgreens, and he gave an interview at The Pillar talking about how he has advocated for Walgreens at shareholder meetings to change policies on contraception, and the morning after pill. So that’s all things that you have to weigh in those regards. But I think let’s take, even going back to Disney, one thing you can do with your money is to say, “Well, I’m going to use my money to vote, and maybe if Disney gets it right, and they make a movie that is legitimately family friendly, and has no bad things in it, I’ll support that. But I’m not going to go to things like Lightyear, or other films that have LGBT in it.” And then the company might start to take the hint, “Hey, look at this. The movies with the controversial themes, they tank, and the movies with the good themes, they do well. Maybe we should invest in those more.”

So part of what we do also, that you have to take into account in your support, the possibility of your behavior positively or negatively reinforcing a company to change some of their practices.

That’s very good. Very good. My daughters will be also happy that the Disney trip isn’t canceled. How do we, though … I imagine, unless it’s very blatant and very strong, most of these decisions are up to our own prudential judgment, our own consciences.

That’s right.

And they will be different for different people, and that’s okay, and totally [inaudible 00:32:30]-

Sure. Some people say, “I canceled Disney+. I’m not going to Disneyland.” I’m not going to have a negative judgment towards them, if that’s what their conscience is moving them towards. That’s great. It’s similar to what Paul said. Cooperation with evil, by the way, this is something going all the way back to the beginning of the church’s history. Can you eat meat that had been previously sacrificed to a pagan idol? That is a classic example of cooperation with evil, right? You might say, “Well, no. They prayed over this. It’s demonic. It was used for idol worship. Throw it in the garbage. You shouldn’t eat that.” Well, that’s easy to say now, when it’s easy to drive to McDonald’s to get meat. But back in the first century, meat, being a valuable source of protein to keep you alive to do hard labor, was somewhat difficult to come by, but that could be a real lifesaver for you, to say, “Hey, they’re going to throw this away anyways. I’ll buy it off of you, or I’ll take it, and I can do good with it. I don’t believe in idols.”

And so what Paul says is it’s up to individuals to make a judgment on that. Some people, if you eat the meat sacrificed to the idol, you might slide back into idolatry. Other people, it’s fine. That’s okay. I don’t have to do that. Some people, watching shows on Disney, or watching shows on HBO, for example, they might be tempted to look at things that are pornographic and bad for the health. They’ve got to say no. Other people, “No, I’m fine. I’m not going to look at that.” It’ll be an individual judgment again.

As we’re going through and figuring out the individual judgment, how do we figure out the line in the sand, right? Right now, yeah, some people might not want to go to Disney, might not want to subscribe to Disney+, or HBO Max or whatever it is, and that’s totally fine. Like you said, there’s a lot of legitimate reasons, but that would be a good idea for them, though not required for everybody.

Right.

Saving some … I mean, there would be some crazy, blatant thing where Disney opens up a new theme park that’s like Planned Parenthood Land or something like that, right?

Right.

That would be, “Okay. I don’t think we’re going.” But how do I look at this? Or personally, everybody else, how do we engage this, and sift through this, and discern where we’re at?

Here’s where I think-

I heard this analogy. Yeah. You go.

Oh. Maybe you were almost … What was the analogy? You might be saying what I’m about to say.

Oh. I don’t know. So I’ve heard this analogy about if somebody’s making a batch of brownies, and there’s a little bit of poop in it, you would not want to eat any of those brownies. So why would we do that, whether it’s a movie, or a show, or a company where there’s a little bit of something bad in it. Now, I think that’s way too simplistic, but at a certain point-

I also think-

… there’s going to be too much of that in the brownies, and I’m not going to want to eat it.

I do think that-

How do I figure out where that line is?

Well, I do think that’s simplistic, because you might say, for example, in eating brownies, it’s possible that the person who made the brownies, they went to the bathroom. Even if they washed their hands, A molecule of fecal matter probably got in the brownie mix. I’m sure that the produce that we buy at the store probably has trace amounts of fertilizer or fecal matter. And so the analogy there is, the poison is in the dosage, right?

Now, there are some actions that are intrinsically evil that we must never do. It’s not about the amount of them. So it’s not the amount of abortions or acts of adultery. Each individual one is wrong, and just simply can’t be justified. But there’s other things, where in a film, for example, you might have … I mean, are we not going to see Gone with the Wind, because at the end, Clark Gable says, “Frankly, ma’am, I don’t give a damn”? Which of course, back then was a much more serious profanity than today. But then there’s going to be other shows where it is gratuitous, the profanity, the violence, the sexual imagery.

I think what you’re yearning for is something that doesn’t really exist, which is, “Can someone just give me the absolutely clear boundary marker to know what is appropriate and what isn’t appropriate?” And that thing does not exist. There’s going to be cases where it’s obviously okay, and obviously not okay, and then it starts getting fuzzier. The analogy I was going to give is, this is called the fallacy of the beard. So it’s like, you look at you and I, we’re clean-shaven, and my friend Jimmy Aiken, he’s got a beard. Well, when do I stop being clean-shaven and I start having a beard? Right? Is the fact that I have tiny, tiny stubble here, does that mean I have a beard? No. Even if I shaved this morning and I have five o’clock shadow, is five o’clock shadow a beard? Most people would say no. Well, okay, well, exactly how far is it a beard or not? Well, you can’t really pick.

This is also called the continuum fallacy. And the fallacy occurs when you say, “Since we don’t know when stubble ends and a beard begins, you can’t possibly know if anyone has a beard.” That’s just false. Even if I don’t know the dividing line, I know you and I are clean-shaven, and Jimmy Aiken has a beard. I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt. There’s going to be cases where I’m not sure if it’s a beard yet, and I could get it wrong, but there’s going to be other cases where it’s very clear.

So I think this occurs also when we think, “Well, look, with cooperation with evil, what principle do I use? Where is the exact dividing line?” And there just isn’t. It’s a fuzzy boundary that we have to use our judgment on, and we have to embrace that discomfort in being in the world, that we won’t always be able to clearly pick one side or the other, in those cases.

Now, with intrinsic evils, it’s very clear. You don’t commit adultery. You don’t commit murder. You don’t do these kinds of things. Don’t conduct research on embryos or embryonic stem cell research. You don’t torture people. It’s very clear.

That’s great. I had not heard of this beard fallacy, but that is a fantastic example. You know it when you see it.

You know it when you see it.

And then sometimes, yeah, you’re not quite sure.

And it’s okay if you’re not sure. You’re not going to be held morally culpable when you used your best judgment. And I think here, what you should err on then is the side of mercy. If you’re not sure, and it’s definitely not intrinsically evil, and you don’t know, it’s always hard, what to err on here. I think we should always err on God’s mercy towards us, that at the very least, if we’re not sure, we’re not going to be held culpable. If you’re not sure, it’s better to avoid evil. It’s better to miss out on a good than to commit an evil. But also, you should see, “Is this developing into a pattern where I become scrupulous, and everything, I’m not sure?” There, you might want to defer and trust in God’s mercy more in those cases.

That’s fantastic. Well, thank you very much. I think we have a little bit of time left. We’re going to head over to the lightning.

All right.

All right. Trent, what is one of the purchases you regret the most?

Oh. I’m sure that it’s … Purchase that I regret the most? I’m trying to think of something that I bought it … Man, I’m sorry. This is a boring lightning round. But here’s the thing. Most of the things that I buy are … I mean, I don’t buy a lot of stuff, because I feel like stuff kind of loses its value over time. I buy more experiences, because even if the experience wasn’t that great, my memory of it tends to be rosier as things go on. But I know what’s hard being a dad and with kids, you have this amnesia, like, “What did we do?” But I can recall buying, maybe taking my kids out maybe to a restaurant, or going to do something, and we didn’t have a great time, and saying, “Well, at least we had family time. But I still regret spending the money to do that.” But I cannot think of a particular purchase at the moment. If it comes back to me in lightning round, I’ll give it to you. So let’s keep going, and maybe I’ll [inaudible 00:41:12].

I mean, that’s a good sign. That’s a good sign. What was your first job?

I was a movie theater … I worked at Harkins Movie Theaters for $5.15 an hour. I worked in concessions, slinging popcorn. I hated when people asked for fresh popcorn, because it always burns your hand when you reach in to get it. I was really bad at concessions, though. I didn’t keep my registers straight, so I just ended up being a ticket taker for the rest of my time there.

Do you have to clean up the theaters?

Yes. I did have to clean up the theaters. One time I was there, and they made me clean up a 400-seat theater by myself in 10 minutes, and I was so disenchanted I just shoved everything behind the seats. That was 16-year-old Trent. He was not as good a work ethic as current Trent. But I was also mad. I felt they gave me an impossible task, so-

Absolutely. Yeah. I had a stint at a movie theater too, early on in my life, and yeah. It’s tough cleaning up. One time I found a carton from a rotisserie chicken in the seats.

Yeah. Oh, god. Who? Come on.

Yeah. I don’t know how. Yeah. Come on, guys.

Yeah.

And then one of our projectors was … It was kind of like the second run theater.

Yeah. Yeah.

Everything was a little bit cheaper, and so for a week, my job was to watch the last 20 minutes of Legally Blonde 2-

Oh, gosh.

… and then go hit the projector when it would start messing up.

Yeah. Totally.

It’s a terrible movie. You shouldn’t even watch it once.

I’ll take your word for it.

Trent, are you more of a spender or a saver?

More of a saver. Money ends up sitting. I don’t really like buying things. I’ve got my particular experiences that I like, and I get into a groove of that. I have been spending a little bit more recently, because I’m going through a tiny bit of a midlife crisis, though I’m not buying a Corvette. I’ve bought older video game consoles that I used to play, because I miss playing that, so I’m having a little weepy midlife crisis, but I’m sharing that with my kids, and so that’s fun, too.

What console do you guys play in these days?

Well, okay. So I still have my original Super Nintendo, and it still works, and a lot of games, and I love it, but I’ve decided to keep it kind of pristine, tucked away. I bought a Super Nintendo Classic. It’s an old-

Oh, yeah.

It’s a version that came out a few years ago that has 20 games on it, and you can add more also. It’s not as good. It’s ported over, but I let my kids play on it because they’re eight, six, and two, so if they break that, whatever. I don’t care. I don’t want them breaking my old Super Nintendo. And I take that out, because the graphics are a little better, if I want to do it by myself. But I play with the kids, and it’s still good. The classic. Then just an old Xbox One. I might get a PlayStation Classic. They have those out there. But if it’s a newer, newer game, I can’t do that. I just like my old people games.

Yup. No, I’m with you. Our girls are eight, six, and four, so we’re just starting to introduce video games, and yeah, we’re starting with the old stuff.

Yeah. Exactly.

Let’s see. For the collection at church, do you put in an envelope, just throw cash in the basket from your wallet, or do you give online?

Well, I think our church does not actually have online giving, so we bring the money and throw it in. Some other churches will … We used to donate online, but this church didn’t have that, so we just bring the money in to do that. I think another church had an online giving, but we got hacked later, so I’ve been scared off from that. We noticed debit card fraud after we started giving to that church, so it’s like, “Maybe we’ll just give in the basket next time.”

What’s the hardest thing for you to spend money on?

Oh, goodness. The hardest thing? Well, I guess it’s, I don’t know, things that I have to spend money on that I don’t want. I got a traffic ticket a few months ago. Who wants to spend money on that, right? It’s just a [inaudible 00:45:16]. I guess the hardest things for me to spend money on are having to fix products of my own stupidity. That’s the hardest to spend money on. So if I broke something, or failed to do something, or got a ticket, or injured myself stupidly, when I have to spend money fixing my own stupidity, it literally rubs salt into the wound.

Oof. Yeah. Yeah. Those dollars are not fun to spend. Who or what has had the biggest influence on how you view money?

Probably my parents. My parents did a very good job of scaring me about debt. My whole life, they always scared me. “Don’t get into debt. Don’t get into debt. Don’t get into debt. It’s awful. It’s awful. It’s awful.” And I’m glad that they did that. They themselves have a little bit of debt, but not massive, and they own their home, and they’re doing fine. And because they did that, I didn’t take out a massive … I took out $3,600 in student loans. That was the most I ever took out for student loans, and paid it back quickly. So they encouraged me to save, and just yeah, to not get into debt. And their advice, I think, has provided a lot of help for me down the line.

That’s incredible. Very good job, Mr. and Mrs. Trent, or Mr. and Mrs. Horn. Sorry.

Yeah.

What money lesson do you wish you would’ve learned earlier in life?

Probably the value of compounding interest. I started saving for retirement. My wife actually helped me more to get into saving for retirement. So my parents told me not to get into debt, but they also thought, “Who knows if the world, the civilization will be here in 30 years?” They didn’t really instill a lot of retirement savings advice into me. My wife was better at that for me, and so I think I started saving for retirement after we got married. Probably was like 28. But if I’d started saving when I was 18, compounding interest would be … It would just do so much more for you, just having those extra 10 years. Yeah. But otherwise, I’m still happy with financial … Mostly just not getting into massive amounts of debt. Buying used cars, going to community college. Not putting things on credit. Only buying things when I had the money for them. But if I could have done retirement and long-term savings earlier, that would have been nice.

That’s fantastic. When folks want to get more of what they’ve heard from you here, how’s the best way for them to check out what you’re doing?

Yeah. I would say check out my podcast at the Council of Trent, so that’s available on iTunes, Google Play, and YouTube, and I have a website, trenthorn.com.

Awesome. Well, be sure to check those out, guys. Trent, thank you so much for joining us here on the Catholic Money Summit.

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