My Concern About Celebrity Converts

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

Big news, everyone. I just became Catholic, 20 years ago. Maybe that’s not big news, but when an actual celebrity or well-known person becomes Catholic or even Christian, that can be big news to a lot of people, and it’s understandable that the faithful can get excited about that. But in today’s episode, I want to offer a word of caution about celebrity conversions.

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Since we’ll be talking about people with very large platforms today, if you could help me out and click the subscribe button to help my platform catch up to them, that would be greatly appreciated. It helps us to reach more people and helps the podcast to grow. Of course, this podcast can only exist through the support of viewers like you, and you can join our team and access more bonus content at trenthornpodcast.com.

Every now and then, Christianity or Catholicism ends up in the news cycle because a famous person converts. Here’s a few recent examples involving the tattoo artist Kat Von D, actors Shia LaBeouf and Rob Schneider, and Tammy Peterson, the wife of Jordan Peterson.

Kat Von D has embraced a new faith. The LA Ink star shared an Instagram video of her recent baptism on October 3rd. The clip showed the celebrity tattoo artist being dipped into a baptismal pool during a church service in front of her friends and family.

Rob Schneider is with us now. He just turned 60. You’ve become a practicing Catholic.

That little voice of Jesus Christ was always coming back to me, even though I was going away from him.

She certainly found the practice of the rosary. Tammy’s quite a physical person, and it helped her maintain peace while she was facing death.

I always had a belief, but I never had a connection. Latin mass gave me something where I felt connected.

My first reaction to stories like these is the same reaction I have to an anonymous person on social media who says they’ve decided to become Christian or Catholic. It’s to give praise and thanks to God. It’s perfectly natural to feel happiness and excitement over anyone who comes to a knowledge of God in his church, regardless of how well known they are. But with celebrities, we act a little differently. There’s this temptation to want to show off their conversion as evidence that Christianity or Catholicism is true. It’s like, “Hey, they’re cool and they picked us, so we’re cool now.” Part of this comes from a bias we have towards celebrity worship.

Deep down, deep down within us there is this human desire for wealth, for fame, and for opulent happiness, at least to some degree. We naturally admire people who have achieved these things. Because they’ve achieved that, we subconsciously attribute something superior to them as a result to explain how they’ve done that. If this superior person chooses to believe what we believe, well that makes us feel a little superior too.

Remember though, most of this is happening subconsciously. If you consciously thought about it even just for a little bit, you see that celebrities are often only superior in some kind of narrow marketable skill like singing, or maybe they won the genetic lottery for appearance, or they have superior family and professional connections. None of that shows they have any advantage in determining what religious or political system is best. That’s why in the big picture of things, we shouldn’t really care who celebrities vote for or what religions they choose to follow. But, I don’t want to rain on everybody’s parade. It’s fine if a famous person becomes Catholic to use that as an opportunity to share a lesser known aspect of the Catholic faith with non-Catholics.

There’s nothing wrong with using Tammy Peterson’s conversion, for example, as a springboard to talk about the rosary, or Shia LaBeouf’s conversion to talk about the Latin mass. It’s fine to make people aware of the situation so they can pray for these people, these celebrities, for their spiritual journey. What I am concerned about, however, is that we get so focused on the goal of getting another famous person on the team that we make a rush to judgment. We treat the other person as a means to an end, as just another notch on our belts and not as a person who’s going to have unique struggles in their conversion. You can see this in a story that got traction two years ago when it seemed like Britney Spears had converted to Catholicism.

American pop star Britney Spears announced in a now deleted Instagram post on August 5th that she is Catholic and attends mass.

Some Catholics, in an effort to be the first to talk about any issue that breaks the news, ran headlong with this story to celebrate her conversion. But it turns out that’s not what happened. Spears later said that she was actually mad at the Catholic Church for not celebrating her wedding. In a video Spears posted a year later, she said that she’s an atheist.

The singer shared a 22-minute voice memo on YouTube making a series of confessions, including how she lost her faith while fighting to get out of her 13-year conservatorship, which her father Jamie controlled.

The main thing to this day, I kind of stopped believing in God at that time. God would not allow that to happen to me, if a God existed. I don’t believe in God any more because of the way my children and my family have treated me. There is nothing to believe anymore. I’m an atheist, y’all.

Obviously, we should pray for Britney Spears and for anyone who is suffering, that God’s love for them can be better known in the midst of their trials. What we should not think, even subconsciously, is something like this. “Hey, I told my friends you converted to Catholicism and now you’re embarrassing me with this behavior.” By the way, this is a reason that almost all the stories of converts and Catholic heroes that I included in my book, Why We’re Catholic, those stories involve people who had already died. There’s a lot less opportunity for them to leave the faith or have a scandal so that’s why I did that.

But these things do happen. That’s why we need to treat everyone’s spiritual journey as something that’s a work in progress. It’s something the devil will be fighting tooth and nail against. Even amongst celebrity Catholics who have been in the church for decades, we sometimes forget that they’re human beings. Scandal is something that none of us are above, absolutely none of us. We need to be careful about trumpeting celebrity conversions because it’s not uncommon for someone to make a big public announcement for Catholicism and then backtrack years later.

One recent notorious example of this would be Michael Coren, a Canadian author who converted to Catholicism in his 20s, then left for Evangelicalism, and then came back to Catholicism in 2004 at the age of 45. He later wrote a book called, Why Catholics Are Right.

We are pleased to welcome back into this studio, Michael Coren, the author most recently of, Why Catholics Are Right.

Most of the victims now of abortion, babies, female, handicapped, of color, these are the victims now. Surely the silent scream, we should be standing up for the vulnerable. It’s not an issue of left or right. It’s an issue of standing up for people who have no voice.

But 10 years later, Coren left Catholicism again because he changed his mind on homosexuality. Coren is now in an Anglican priest who defends so-called same-sex marriage, legal abortion, and socialism.

Michael Coren has been on some kind of spiritual journey. He is an ordained minister in the Anglican Church of Canada, has pretty significantly changed some of his previous views, and has now written a book called, The Rebel Christ. You do tackle some of the toughest issues in our society going, and abortion is one of them. Here’s what you have to say about that in the book. “Abortion,” you write, “isn’t murder. Murder is murder. Abortion isn’t a Holocaust. The Holocaust was the Holocaust. And a woman’s right to choose is a woman’s right to choose. That’s The Rebel Christ approach.”

The Bible is very vague, and as I say, quite startling at least so at one point, even seems to say abortion is necessary. It’s not a major issue.

A few months ago, Coren and I were in talks to publicly dialogue about all of this, but the event where we would’ve dialogued didn’t transpire. If he would like to dialogue with me about the question, are Catholics right, because I guess he now says no, as opposed to what he said in the book earlier, if Coren would like to dialogue with me about that, the invitation is on the table.

What’s interesting is that the Bible even warns about allowing converts to have leadership positions within the church because of the instability that can be present in their conversions. 1 Timothy 3:6 says, of those who would be bishops that, “He must not be a recent convert, or he may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil.” It’s easy for someone who is a high-profile convert to end up in a path of doing talks, having a podcast, and suddenly speaking with authority about Catholicism when he still has a lot to learn. I’m not saying celebrity converts can never become high-profile public Catholics. I’m just saying that this is a danger for them and us to watch out for.

Another concern I have is with public spiritual journeys. You see this more on YouTube than in larger celebrity circles, but you still see this. Here’s what’ll happen. You’ll have people who may have a public profile on the internet related to Protestantism or atheism, and now they’re chronicling their investigation of Catholicism or Christianity because they’re thinking of converting. Sometimes they might do interview series, they might interview people on both sides of the issue, for example, and the person then after these interviews will comment on where he or she is at in the process of conversion. Now, I have very deep reservations now towards this kind of content. At one point I thought, “Oh, this might be helpful for people,” but the more that I’ve reflected on it, I have some deep reservations. This might be helpful for some people. It helps them to reach the truth, that’s great.

But what I worry about is that the person chronicling his spiritual journey will be unable to completely focus on discerning where God is leading him or her. Instead, that person’s going to end up wondering about what other people, like other commenters in the comment boxes or other social media influencers are saying about their conversion experience. They may even think that in order to earn the right to convert, they have to be able to answer every single objection that’s thrown at them in their comm boxes or in response videos or in things like that. Even after they convert and explain why they’ve converted, they always have to be on the lookout of critics who are going to jump at any chance to say, “Look, he didn’t understand this doctrine.” Or, “Hey, she wasn’t aware of that practice so she did not have a justifiable conversion.”

Now, this can easily become an opportunity for an unfair double standard. If someone converts away from a critic’s religion, he overly scrutinizes the person’s reasons. But if someone converts to the critic’s religion, well, he simply welcomes the convert with open arms. If this new convert is theologically or apologetically uninformed, the critic sees it as an opportunity to deepen that person’s knowledge, not tear down his conversion.

Conversion is a very intimate and personal experience, especially since people evaluate evidence and arguments in different ways. Evidence that may strike one person as compelling may just seem ambiguous to another person. Everyone’s different. If religious conversion is not justified unless you are able to rebut every single objection to what you’re choosing to do, then no one would ever be justified in converting. Much the same way religious faith could never be justified if you were only allowed to hold it if you could rebut every single objection that’s ever been thrown at you by anybody. No one should be forced to meet that high of a rational standard.

Now, that does not mean you should just simply ignore the evidence or put your head into the sand, but it does mean you should not be paralyzed into inaction simply because you cannot refute every single other world view. So what I would say is that if you are a public figure, although this would apply really to anyone, but especially if you’re a public figure discerning becoming Christian or becoming Catholic. You are a Christian already and maybe you’re Catholic, Protestant, you’re not sure, what should you do? I’d recommend spending time in prayer, drawing close to God, and then reaching out in confidence to experts on both sides of the issue to ask questions, though I would recommend doing this in private to have these kinds of correspondences and then evaluate the evidence privately.

Then, if you feel called to do so, make a public announcement once you’ve formally made your decision or formally entered the church. Keep in mind when you do do that, people will throw objections out at you even after you’ve converted. But remember, our beliefs, the justification for our beliefs are not contingent upon us being able to answer every single objection that is thrown at us. However, we should always be open to correcting our beliefs. So once again, it’s a fine line between simply ignoring people and never being rational when you ought to correct your beliefs and being paralyzed into inaction because you feel like you have to respond to every single person who’s criticizing you.

Now, in giving this advice, I want to make sure it applies to everyone. I’m not saying ignore the critics if you choose to become Catholic, and only listen to Catholic apologists if you join a non-Catholic belief system, don’t read what they have to say. That would be self-serving. Instead, my advice is just always keep yourself in the best position to listen to God and to evaluate the evidence. This includes objective evidence like apologetic arguments, or subjective evidence like your own religious experiences. One analogy that I’ve often given is that sometimes you can know something is true without being able to prove that it’s true to other people. For example, you might know you’re innocent of a crime, but just because a court finds you guilty, it doesn’t mean that you should change your mind on it if you know you’re innocent unless the court can present you with absolutely overwhelming evidence that can defeat whatever subjective reason that you may have for thinking that you’re innocent. As I said, it’s a balancing act.

This is important to do because especially for public Catholics or public online profiles, when you’re discerning something as important as conversion, you don’t want to feel like you’re caught in a tug of war between online followers as you try to discern everything. St. Paul put it well in 1 Thessalonians 5:21. “Test everything. Retain what is good.”

Finally, there also needs to be a balance in judging the authenticity of celebrity conversions. On the one hand, we don’t want to be overly harsh and put up unnecessary barriers to bringing someone into the faith, especially when they were previously a very notorious critic or a notorious sinner. In Acts 9, Luke tells us about how the disciples were afraid to welcome St. Paul’s conversion because Paul was a notorious persecutor of the church. St. Luke records the following. He says, “When he had come to Jerusalem, he,” Paul attempted to join the disciples, and they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord who spoke to him and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus.

The name Barnabas means son of encouragement. We should be encouraging to everyone who is seeking conversion. But we should also remember the Russian proverb, [foreign language 00:16:44]. I hope I got that right. [foreign language 00:16:47], I think so, [foreign language 00:16:50], trust, but verify. Once again, it’s a balancing act. If someone seems to be inauthentic, we may have to confront them about that, especially if we know them personally. It can be fair to point out if you were in the position to do this, if someone is seeking conversion for bad reasons or less than ideal reasons, and it’s important to do this so that when they do choose, for example, to convert or become Catholic or Christian, they have a solid foundation for the faith they’ve embraced. In some cases, it’s an opportunity to simply move someone to better reasons. For example, to make a conversion be less out of fear of hell, imperfect contrition to be more about love of God and sorrow for sin, or perfect contrition.

In other cases though, it can help point out if the person has built their faith on a very unstable foundation. For example, recently Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was born a Somali Muslim and later became an atheist and an outspoken critic of Islam, she recently announced her conversion to Christianity. Part of her reason for doing so is because she claims it is only the Judeo-Christian tradition that is strong enough to oppose the modern threats of Chinese communism, Russian aggression, Muslim radicalism and wokeism. She sees Christianity more as having an important social role in the world, saving the world from temporal dangers like wokeism or Jihad, than from spiritual dangers. But that’s a problem if that is your primary reason for converting to Christianity, because even if those forces did win, remember Ayaan Hirsi Ali thinks that atheism is not enough to combat these forces. Only the strong robust worldview of Christianity can do that.

But what if it can’t? What if these forces take over in 30 years and Christians are a subjugated and persecuted minority who don’t really have a lot of social capital to change the world? Well, we should still be a Christian because there are many times in history where Christians were in that exact same position. Look at ancient Rome, or feudal Japan, for example. We should be a Christian because it’s simply true that God loves us and he became man and died for us and rose again. Something that Ali, at least in the article I read from her, explaining her conversion she doesn’t talk about. The closest she comes to saying something approaching this as a reason for converting is when she wrote the following, “I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable, indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question, “What is the meaning and purpose of life?”

Now, that’s a start. It’s a good start. We should pray for Ali that she continues to grow in her knowledge of Christ and knowledge of the church that he established, and that she just deepens our understanding of what it means to be a Christian. All right, I hope this was helpful for you all. Once again, if a celebrity converts, let’s welcome with open arms, pray for the person, but always resist that temptation to see this other person as a means to an end, or it’s just the way that for all the rest of us to feel cool because one of the cool kids is now sitting at our table. Praying for the salvation of their soul and for a deeper understanding on their part of Christ and his church, you can never go wrong with that. Thank you guys so much for watching. Yeah, I just hope that you have a very blessed day.

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