In this episode Trent examines objections to the Faith made by former Christian artists like Marty Sampson of Hillsong and, more recently, Jonathan Steingard of Hawk Nelson.
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
I was driving the other day and I saw a bumper sticker that made me laugh out loud. It simply said, “I remember Five Iron Frenzy.” And I just thought, “Oh man, I remember Five Iron Frenzy.” It was 20 years ago when I used to listen to all this Christian rock punk, ska, although I think ska was just big across music in general, Christian or not. It seemed like every band had a trumpet at that time. And so that was music that I was really into, and the reason I bring this up today is because a lot of people asked me last week to do an episode on John Steingard of the Christian group, Hawk Nelson, who came out on Instagram recently saying that he had lost his Christian faith or he had given up his Christian faith.
So I wanted to talk about that, and I was doing research into other Christian artists who had given up their faith, and there’s a surprising number of them, well known ones, and we’ll talk about them today on the show, including artists from groups that I enjoyed during my initial conversion experience like Five Iron Frenzy. So before we get into the topic of today’s show though, I want to give a thanks to our subscribers at trenthornpodcast.com. Please consider subscribing there. For as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content and you make it possible for us to do the podcast, to do our rebuttal videos. Search Council of Trent on YouTube. You can check out our latest rebuttal video.
Now, let’s get into, what’s interesting about these Christian groups, especially Five Iron Frenzy. This is something I never even knew about the group during my conversion experience in the early 2000s. I just listened to the songs and I wasn’t a super fan or anything like that. I liked the music, but I didn’t know this. So, in 1998, Scott Kerr, who is, I guess, one of the lead singers of the band chose to leave Five Iron Frenzy after renouncing his Christian faith. According to Kerr, he had begun experiencing doubts in high school, which eventually came to ahead during his time touring with Five Iron. In an attempt to reconcile his faith, Kerr fervently studied Christian apologetics, which he ultimately found not persuasive and at worst intellectually disingenuous, as well as works by David Hume and Bertrand Russell. Well, for me, I would find those works not persuasive at all. Christian apologists have addressed Hume and Russel for decades, if not centuries now. But let’s go on.
Kerr continues to identify as not a Christian and upon rejoining Five Iron in 2011 wrote an explanation for his reunion with the band, which partly read, ” If you asked each of us what Five Iron’s mission is, you might get eight different answers. But from my perspective, this band has no agenda other than to be authentic. It’s about honesty.” Well, yeah, it’s good to be authentic but that always seems kind of like an adverb to me. It’s like, “We’re authentic.” That’s like saying, “We’re very …” You’re very what? You’re authentically what? Yeah, it’s great. You’re authentic. It’s great you’re you, but what’s even more important is what are you? Because you shouldn’t be an authentically bad or authentically selfish or authentically overbearing person. Authenticity is a limited virtue in the sense that people can see who the real you is and the real you is something good and worth imitating.
This also happened to Marty Samson of Hillsong. So Marty Samson is a prolific worship music writer, this is from Relevant Magazine, and he wrote and corrode songs for Hillsong Worship, Hillsong United, Delirious, and Young and Free. However, this weekend, this was in August of 2019, Samson took to Instagram, a recurring theme among these people, they always go to Instagram to let people know they’ve lost their faith to inform his followers that, “I’m genuinely losing my faith.” Here’s the post. “Time for some real talk. I’m genuinely losing my faith and it doesn’t bother me. What bothers me now is nothing. I am so happy now, so at peace with the world, it’s crazy. This is a soap box moment. So here I go. How many preachers fall? Many, no one talks about it. How many miracles happen? Not many, no one talks about it.”
Well, first, not many, if there’s more than one miracle that ever happens, that means atheism is false and you should be a Christian. So it’s like, look, if there’s even one miracle in the world, if Jesus rose from the dead, then that means that he is the way, the truth, and the life, and he has the means to provide us eternal life. He is the God he claimed to be. So if you’re saying, “There’s not enough miracles,” well, look, if there’s at least one that shows you shouldn’t be an atheist. Also, well, how many preachers fall? Many, no one talks about it. People talk about that all the time when there are preachers who fall, whether they’re Catholic priests, Protestant pastors. But that doesn’t disprove Christianity. I mean, 8.3% of the people that Jesus chose to follow him defected and fell away from the faith. Of course, that’s 1/12th, right? Judas. But that doesn’t mean that Jesus is not divine.
I’ve said this before in relation to the sex abuse scandal in Catholicism, you don’t leave Peter because Judas left Jesus. How can God be love yet send four billion people to a place all because they don’t believe? No one talks about it. People talk about hell all the time and theologians and philosophers have written many things about hell, many things that would help clear up these misconceptions that Samson has, the idea that God sends people to hell against their will. If anything, God would plead to these people not to go to hell, but they would be so disgusted by God’s holiness because they’re so in love with sin that they would march right into hell, giving God the bird while they’re doing it. I absolutely believe it. That’s what sin does to us.
And so people talk about it, and it’s not all because they don’t believe. It’s not because someone got a theology test wrong or believed a wrong fact about God. It’s because they have been ensnared by sin and have rejected God’s revelation given to them, whether it was the revelation given in scripture, or at the very least, as Saint Paul says in Romans 2:14 through 16, the revelation given to them in their conscience and given in nature saying that God is real and he has a moral law that they ought to follow. And so they refuse either that natural revelation he’s given them or the revelation of grace in Jesus Christ. Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet, they can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people, but it’s not for me. What, Christians or Christianity? You don’t want to conflate the actions of Christians with the truth of Christianity.
I will be honest, some of the best arguments, rhetorical arguments, not logical arguments or the best emotional arguments against the Christian faith is the lackluster sinful hypocritical behavior of some Christians. I mean, we are all sinful on some level, but there are some people that just make the faith look terrible with their absolutely depraved, hypocritical behavior. I am not in any more. I want genuine truth. Not the I just believe it kind of truth. Well, I want that kind of truth too. You don’t need to have an empty faith or no faith. That’s a false dilemma. You can have a rich, fulfilling faith that provides deep, meaningful answers to life’s biggest questions. Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion. Lots of things, help people change their lives, not just one version of God. Well, yeah, science gives us lots of truth. You see, it’s all half truths that are embedded in here.
Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion. Well, science might disprove some false religions and their claims about the world. I think that some Christians who believe that the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago, science continually disproves that. So you don’t want to hitch your faith to that particular belief system, which is why the Catholic Church, when it comes to the Theory of Evolution, neither prohibits nor requires belief in the Theory of Evolution or the age of the earth. The Church teaches on faith and morals. You just have to believe that God created the world, God made man, and he gave man his immortal soul. Lots of things, help people change their lives, not just one version of God. Well, there’s lots of things that can help people that aren’t explicitly theology.
I mean, there’s things in psychiatry, psychology, even just basic exercise that can help people improve their lives. If something is good, if something is good and improves your life, it does so because it contains a shadow or a reflection of God, who is ultimate goodness itself. So there’s no contradiction in finding truth in the natural world that God created and using that to become the complete human beings God wants us to be. The problem is when we think that the natural world can make us those complete people, when that completeness can really only be found in God, because we have immortal souls. Even if people like Marty Samson or other people who leave the faith find temporary happiness in this life, and for many people who are Christian singers, maybe they’ve have been able to save up enough money or have enough notoriety that they are financially secure, they have a friend network that supports them, they haven’t fallen into drugs and alcohol or other things that are destructive lifestyles, they may find happiness and contentment in a temporary element of this life.
But the fact of the matter is life is forever. We have eternal life ahead of us, and the question is, is it going to be eternal life with God or eternal life apart from him? We can’t just say, “Well, I feel good now. I don’t need this stuff anymore.” That would be a foolish attitude to have. Instead, we should soberly look at the evidence and see, you can even go at Pascal’s Wager here and say, “Look, if this is good, if there’s no evidence to show that it’s false and it’s 50/50 between being a Christian or a non-Christian, you might as well be Christian because there are genuine good things you can find within Christianity that give life a deep, fulfilling meaning that other secular ideologies cannot provide.”
All right, so let’s go to a more recent entry into this genre of Instagram deconversion stories from Christian singers. This is John Steingard from Hawk Nelson, and I’m just going to read a part of his note. He says here that, “Look, when I was up there singing, it wasn’t an act. I really believed this.” But he uses an analogy of pulling threads on a sweater, “When you pull the threads, there’s still a sweater there, but there comes a point you’ve pulled away so many threads, no sweater remains.” So he writes, “So what did this sweater thread pulling process look like then? Okay, let’s get into it. I grew up in a loving Christian home. My dad was a pastor and still is. And as far back as I can remember, life was all about the church. It was our community, it was our family.
“It feels important to point out that church wasn’t something we went to once a week. It was more like something we came home to as often as possible. After bravely venturing out into the world when necessary, it wasn’t a part of our life, it was our life. When you grow up in a community that holds a shared belief and that shared belief is so incredibly central to everything, you simply adopt it. Everyone I was close to believed in God, accepted Jesus into their hearts, prayed for signs and wonders, and participated in church, youth groups, conferences, and ministry. So I did too.” I’ve seen this also in the Catholic world where the faith is something that kids grew up with, and then even they went to a Catholic college like the Franciscan University of Steubenville, but their faith was not reinforced by a genuine internal conviction of making the faith their own, but it was reinforced by habit and by peer pressure and external family pressure.
This is something, I always went to mass to my family, all my friends were Catholic, and you would think as parents, “Well, even if he goes to a Catholic school, things will be fine.” But the problem is there were people living on the hill, Franciscan University of Steubenville, who would start to lose their faith because now they were given freedom. You saw this, especially at secular universities, public universities, non-Catholic schools. But even at Catholic schools, whether it’s private schools or even a very devout school like Franciscan University, when you now have your freedom to live your life under your own rules, as an adult, for a lot of kids, the faith is not as important to them because they don’t have that internal conviction powering it. All they realized what they had were a bunch of external convictions and pressures pushing them through.
And so without that solid intellectual, spiritual, and emotional foundation, their faith starts to crumble, and usually it crumbles when they’re overwhelmed at school or they fall into sinful habits like drugs or a sexual relationship. That’s what happens in a lot of these cases. I remember Timothy Keller in his book, The Reason For God, he talks about how a young man came into his office, he’s a pastor in New York City for university students, and the students said, “Oh, I’ve lost my faith. I don’t believe in God. I have this objection. I have that objection.” And Pastor Keller just said to him, “When did you start sleeping with your girlfriend?” And the guy just said, “How did you know?” And you could just tell. I remember once I was having a conversation with a girl at the University of Kansas, KU, and we’re talking about her deconversion and she gave me all these objections, but they were fairly shallow objections.
Really, her big objection was that her friends snubbed her because when she got to college, she moved in with her boyfriend and her friends wouldn’t talk to her anymore. And they were trying to admonish her, which is a good thing you should do, but they did it in a really snooty and catty and bad kind of way. So let’s just continue on then with John Steingard. “I became interested in music, began playing and singing on worship teams, started leading worship at church and youth events. Even then I remember being uncomfortable with certain things. Praying in public always felt like some kind of weird performance art. Emotional cries such as, ‘Holy Spirit, come fill this place!’ always felt clunky and awkward leaving my lips. A youth conference I attended encouraged every teen to sign a pledge that they would date Jesus for a year. Oh my goodness.”
I remember once we were at a youth event and somebody said, “I want you to listen to this song by Enrique Iglesias and I want you to imagine that Jesus is singing this to you. ‘I can be your hero, baby. I can take away the pain.'” Then they stopped the music. “Just forget about the part where he says, ‘baby.'” But every teenager lost it. It’s like, “Aw man.” So, I mean, in some aspects, especially of youth ministry, there are things that are corny and are cheesy. We must not confuse certain pious practices or certain devotions with the faith itself. I mean, when you look out at the faith, when you look at all the people who practice our faith, even look at the saints, all the saints are different. St. Augustine is not Saint Jerome. Saint Francis de Sales is not Saint Teresa of Avila.
When you look at all of the different saints and the different temperaments they have and the beautiful ways they exemplify the faith, they’re very different. Some of them are bright and cheery and sunny, and some of them are just actually kind of dour and have sort of a dour or lower temperament, but they’re all equally saints because they all lived a life of grace, just with the natural temperaments God gave them. So that’s why it’s hard for me. Some people may feel like the church, they don’t belong at church because they don’t belong. They’d go to a church and there’s a certain kind of pious practice there. Maybe they go to a church that has really charismatic worship and they think, “Oh, I don’t like that.” To be Frank, I’m not as big a fan of charismatic worship either. I feel that awkwardness when I’m there.
But also, there’s other kinds of more traditional practices that I don’t feel as home at there either. So it wasn’t until just a few years ago, when I found, I had always gone to some Eastern churches before like Maronite Churches, but going to the Byzantine right here in San Diego, radically transformed me. I mean, everything else before that was true and it was good and it was beautiful, but it felt like I came home to something that affected a part of my soul that hadn’t been affected before and reached me in a unique way as a unique child of God. So I would just encourage people that if you feel a certain aspect of the church you don’t feel like you fit in, ask yourself, is it Catholicism I’m not fitting in with? Or is it just this group of people or this particular parish or this particular group that I’m worshiping with?
So don’t confuse pious practices with the one whole universal Catholic Church. Catholic is kata Holos, according to the whole. There are many diverse elements within our church that are united by one faith in one God, one baptism, one Lord Jesus Christ, in the one Holy Catholic church we are a part of. “So he said he wanted me to sign a pledge I would date Jesus for a year.” Yeah, I agree, that’s weird. “It felt manipulative, especially for teenagers. It felt manipulative and unsettling to me. I didn’t sign it. I figured I was overthinking all these things. This was the beginning of my doubt. And I began to develop the reflex to simply push it down and soldier on. After all, everyone I knew in love, believe in God, Jesus, and the Bible so I felt it must be true.
“Right there. I mean, that’s 40 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong. 40 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong. Elvis is still among us. No, it has to be true because you feel that it’s true based on evidence, whether it is internal subjective evidence, like the revelation of God that you receive in prayer, or external objective evidence, you can share with others, such as arguments for the existence of God, the historical reliability of the New Testament, the reliability of apostolic succession that we find in Christ’s church. At the age of 20, I joined Hawk Nelson and began touring with the band. It was a blast. Our music wasn’t overtly Christian, but as time went on, we became more outspoken about our faith in our music. To be fair, I was one of the loudest voices pushing for that shift because I believed it would lead to more success in the Christian music world.
“Now we’re at a danger point. When you see Christianity as a meal ticket, you’re more likely to become cynical and more likely to see the faith as a means to an end, rather than as the pearl of great price you would sell anything to dig up, as Jesus said in that parable.” So he goes on. “Even through this shift, there were still many things about Christian culture that made me uncomfortable. In fact, the list was growing. There were things that just didn’t make sense to me. If God is all loving and powerful, why is there evil in the world? Can he not do anything about it? Does he choose not to?” Well, that’s the oldest objection in the book. We should actually do a whole episode on that here on the Council of Trent Podcast. I’ll have to do that soon. That would be a good episode to do.
But it’s interesting, he says, “Is the evil in the world a result of his desire to give us free will?” Okay then. “What about famine and disease and floods and all the suffering that isn’t caused by humans and our free will?” So what I would say is you could get into a long theodicy and say, “Well, look, even natural evil, there’s reasons for that. God made a material world, so in a material world, some material things, they become more perfect. Other things become less perfect. That’s inherent in a material creation.” So as the lion eats the zebra, the lion gets more perfect and the zebra gets less perfect as it’s eaten. You might say, “Well, why can’t God make creatures without any pain?” Well, pain receptors are actually really helpful in life. They allow us to sense danger. There are people who are born without pain receptors and when they place their hand on a hot stove, they don’t notice their hand is on a hot stove until they smell something burning.
So you could say that we have pain in this world because there are natural goods that come from that, also, pain and suffering for human beings is caused by original sin, which results from our free will. But most fundamentally I would say to John, “Look, you see that moral evils, you may not be able to fully explain them, but you see a possible good reason, free will, that a world with free will is better than a world without free will even if we can’t fully articulate why.” It makes sense God could have a good reason. So if God has a good reason for allowing moral evil, is it possible God has a good reason for allowing natural evil? We’ve already suggested a few candidates. But I would say, “Even if you didn’t have those candidates, is it possible that God has a good reason for the natural evil that we see, but we as finite and fallible human beings simply can’t see it?”
He goes on to say, “If God is loving, why does he send people to hell?” I say, “No, he doesn’t send people there.” You could turn this question around and say, “If God is loving, why would God drag people to heaven against our will?” That’s not an unloving thing to do to say, “You’re going to be with me for all eternity even if you don’t want to.” That wouldn’t be love, that would be kidnapping. So hell is a natural consequence of free will that Steingard even says he sees how free will would make sense of moral evil, then it would even make sense of the ultimate moral evil,” which should be rejecting God for all eternity. My whole life people always said, “You have to go back to what the Bible says.” I found, however, the consulting and discussing the Bible didn’t answer my questions. It only amplified them.
Why does God seem so pissed off in most of the Old Testament, and then all of a sudden, he’s a loving father in the New Testament? I hear this objection all the time and it really comes from a selective misremembering of the Bible. First of all, the Old Testament is huge. It covers thousands of years of salvation history. The New Testament only covers decades of salvation history. So put that into perspective. In the thousands of years of the Old Testament, we actually see many places where God is tender and compassionate. The Bible describes God as a nursing mother to Israel, that God will shelter Israel under his wing, that he is caring and compassionate. But also during that time, God’s people did a lot of crummy stuff. And I understand, pardon my French, to borrow with John Steingard said, “I would get why God would be metaphorically pissed off about it.”
Read the Book of judges. You have Israel falling into idolatry, apostasy, sexual occultism. Judges 19 through 21, there’s a woman who ends up being dismembered into 12 pieces, sent to several tries, but first is gang raped by the group of the Tribe of Benjamin dismembered sent to the other tribes, a war breaks out among the tribes, and then to keep the Tribe of Benjamin from going out of existence, girls are kidnapped and then forcibly married off to the Tribe of Benjamin. Over and over and over again, there are these terrible things that happen, but the Old Testament always says that, “The Lord is slow to anger. He is patient and forbearing with you.” When you go to the New Testament, actually, in Romans Chapter Two, Paul says that God is storing up wrath for those who are disobedient. And while hell is only implicitly described in the Old Testament, it’s actually explicitly described in the New Testament.
Why is he saying not to kill, but then instruct Israel to turn around and kill men, women, and children to take the Promised Land? That is a difficult passage in scripture. I talk about it in my book, Hard Sayings. But a lot of times when people have these difficulties, I want to turn the question back around at them and say, “Okay, is it a fact, it is an objective fact, it is wrong to kill innocent men and women? It is wrong to kill innocent children, for example, or it’s wrong to torture a child for fun? Would you say it is a fact that it is wrong to do those things?” If you agree, it’s a fact then if you have an atheistic material, accidental universe, there’s no room for moral facts in it. In his book, the Miracle of Theism, the atheist J.L. Mackie said that moral facts are so bizarre, queer is the word he uses, he says they’re so bizarre that they couldn’t exist unless an all powerful God brought them into existence.
So Mackie says these moral facts are an illusion. He’s a moral skeptic. They don’t really exist. They describe feelings we have about things we don’t like, but they don’t describe objective laws that govern the whole universe. I mean, laws of nature tells us what will happen. If you push someone over a cliff, they’ll accelerate to terminal velocity. But the laws of morality tells us what should happen, and that implies there is an all good transcendent cosmic designer that is worthy of our worship. Why does God let Job suffer horrible things just to win a bet with Satan? That’s not the point of the Book of Job. The theme of the Book of Job is bad things happen to good people. We don’t know why, but God is all powerful, he is in control, and we should humbly submit to him.
And so the Book of Job, it may be fiction, it may just be a fictional story, it may be a real story about a man named Job, but it’s not about some petty attempt to win a bet with Satan. Rather, it’s about showing throughout the whole Book of Job, I think some people only read the first two chapters and the last chapter, they don’t go through the whole book, which refutes the idea that, well, bad things happen only to bad people. So Job, if bad things happen to him, he must really be a sinner. And the book systematically refutes those explanations for evil in the world to show, no, bad things happen to good people, but that does not show that God does not exist.
Why does he tell Abraham to kill his son, more killing again, and then basically say, “Just kidding, that was a test”? It was not a test for God. God knew what would happen. It was a test for Abraham, for Abraham’s sake. The story of Abraham is all about a story of faith. In Genesis 12, Abraham, by faith, went to the Promised Land. By faith, he was going to accept that Isaac was the son of promise, the child of promise that God would give him so that he would be the patriarch of a great number of people. But Abraham lacked faith and so he had a child through his maid servant, Hagar, Ishmael. And so when you get to Genesis 22, God has promised him, Isaac is the child of the promise. God has promised him many descendants through Isaac. And so at that sacrifice, it’s not for God’s sake to make sure that Abraham’s faith is intact. It’s for Abraham to see and for all of us to see as an example of having faith in God.
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews, for example, says that Abraham was so sure he knew that Isaac was the child of the promise through whom he would have many descendants, a whole peoples that even if he killed Isaac, God would be able to bring Isaac back from the dead because God would never break his promise. Why does Jesus have to die for our sins? More killing again. If God can do anything, can’t he forgive without someone dying? I mean, my parents taught me forgive people. Nobody dies in that scenario. He can actually. This is a mistake. Some people say that Jesus had to die for us. He did not. God is all powerful. Sins against him he could forgive with a proverbial snap of his anthropomorphic fingers.
But, rather, what St. Thomas Aquinas said was that God became man and died on a cross to make a sacrifice of love that outweighed the ugliness and penalty due for our sins, that God became man and died on a cross to provide a visceral demonstration of his love for us. I remember a story we actually used to tell in Life Teen Youth Ministry about a guy who would go on business trips and he would always see his kid. And I really identify with this because now I’m not traveling anymore so I get to see my kids all the time. Because of the pandemic, I ain’t going anywhere. But whenever I would leave to go on trips, I’d give my kids a big hug before I leave, before I would go. I’d give them a hug and say, “I love you.”
And so, in this story, the dad gives his kids a hug and he puts out his arms wide, his hands outstretched at his sides saying, “How much does daddy love you? Daddy loves you this much,” and he would put his hands out as far as he could stretch them right to left and then give his kids a big hug. So we would tell our teens that when Jesus was on the cross and his hands were nailed into the cross, into the cross beam, were outstretched and he was fixated on that cross, how much did Jesus Christ love you? How much did Jesus Christ love you? He loved you this much, to become a sacrifice, to become the new Passover lamb that we receive into our very bodies, we receive into our very souls, so that we may have eternal life in Jesus Christ.
So I hope this was helpful for you. I’m not going to go through the whole note here. There’s more that he covers that is actually covered in my book, Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach To Answering Bible Difficulties. But just, remember, your faith should not be grounded on a celebrity. That would be the one lesson I want you to take away from this. Your faith is not built on this Christian singer who really moved you to tears. That person could fall away. It’s not based on this priest or this Bishop. Arius, the famous heretic Arius was a priest. It’s not based an apologist here at Catholic Answers. It’s not based on Trent Horn. I could have a psychotic break in the future and totally lose my faith. But guess what? If I lose my faith, the faith is not lost. Because the faith is not built on me, it is not built on you.
First Timothy 3:15 says, “The faith is built on the pillar and foundation of the truth is the church of the living God, the church.” And the church is built on Jesus Christ whose rose from the dead and that foundation is built on God, who is eternal immutable, all powerful, necessary, the foundation of all reality. You have no surer foundation than that to build your life upon, which would be the almighty God himself. So I hope this was helpful for you all. It was nice to share with you answers to objections, of course, but also fun to go on a nostalgia trip and talk about the music I enjoyed listening to in the past. Thank you guys so much. I really hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com to support us, and have a very blessed day.
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