Audio only:
In this episode Trent defends his recent conversations with two atheists.
Gen Z Revival Myth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdsPPxaGVUs
Gay Pride Parade Article: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/sharing-the-faith-at-a-gay-pride-parade
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Transcript:
Trent Horn (00:00):
After my conversations with Danny Philtock and Kate Bradley, some online commenters complained about me in their words, platforming gaytheists. So in today’s episode, I want to address their criticism and more importantly, help you have conversations with similar people who reject the church’s teachings because that’s one of the purposes of the Council of Trent. Now, just to clarify, while Kay Bradley does identify as gay, Danny identified as bisexual after being asked about it in a debate, but he’s been in a monogamous married relationship with a woman for nearly six years. Now, some Catholics were even scandalized by this title and thumbnail from my talk with Cade. It said, “I debated a gay ex trad on sexual ethics and the thumbnail showed me in Cade with the words adult incest, fornication, and sodomy.” I honestly don’t see how this is scandalous. Granted, it may be scandalous to a young child whose innocence we should protect, but not for adults who should, as St. Paul tells us to, destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God and that we should take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.
(01:06):
So yeah, I don’t like talking about violent or perverted evils, but we can’t pretend like these evils never happen because we live in a world that is so saturated in these evils that as St. Paul says in two Corinthians four: four, the God of this world, Satan, has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, while the percent of Christians in America has remained constant or shrunk since 2013, the percent of Americans who identify as non-religious has grown from 21 to 28%. In 2013, 32% of people under the age of 30 identified as non-religious, but among that age group today, it’s close to 40%. In fact, every age group is less religious than it was 13 years ago. Gen Z is the least religious generation in history, which may be surprising if you spend a lot of time on social media and only see Gen Z accounts, debate dogmas, or read articles talking about a so – called Gen Z religious revival.
(02:08):
But social media algorithms fill our feeds with like – minded people causing us to ingest a distorted view of reality. I’ll link to an excellent video from the channel Religion for Breakfast, which goes through the data and shows that claims about a Gen Z religious revival are overblown. Now that being said, it isn’t all bad news. While the number of people in America who identify as Christian had been declining for the past two decades, in recent years, this seems to have leveled off at around 63% and Gen Z and Gen Alpha who do identify as Christian seem to be more passionate about their faith and invested in it than previous generations who took their religious identity for granted. But along with religious belief, we should look at moral beliefs to assess our culture’s moral decay. On the plus side, for the first time, we’re seeing a decline in support for moral evils like contraception, having children out of wedlock and teenage fornication.
(03:03):
We’re headed in a good trajectory, but most people still reject Christian morality. For example, from 1996 to 2022, support for so – called same-sex marriage increased from 27% to 71%, but in the past few years, it has dipped to 69%. In the same time period, believing homosexual acts are moral rose from 40% to 71%, but that too has dipped to 64%. Likewise, 60% of people think abortion should be all or mostly legal and only 11% think it should be completely illegal. So we aren’t in the Roman empire when it comes to morality, but we’re also a long way from Christendom. But in order to get to a society where Christ is Lord of all, we can’t just focus on winning elections, we have to win hearts. And the way you win people’s hearts is through the cumulative effect of millions of individual conversations and interactions. I’ve often said my mission for this channel is to reach the most number of people who are the furthest away from Jesus Christ.
(04:05):
So while it may be shocking for you to hear me dialogue with Cade Bradley about the morality of sodomy, what should really shock you is that most people agree with Cade on this issue, not me. I think some people were also offended that I called Cade a gay ex – trad, which is a term he uses to define himself. And it may have been shocking for them to hear from someone like Cade who was raised in a very traditional Catholic environment, even choosing on his own as a teenager to attend the traditional Latin mass who is now passionately defending things like same-sex relations. But I know several people who are raised in very traditional Latin mass environments that are no longer Catholic or even Christian. Of course, that’s also true of many people raised in conservative Catholic homes who didn’t attend the traditional Latin mass. My point is just that if we retreat into a social media algorithmic bubble of like – minded Catholics and Christians and think this is what happens to people out there and not here, we do so at our and our children’s peril.
(05:08):
So when I talk to someone on this channel, it isn’t because I want to platform them or celebrate their worldview. It’s probably a sign I see something very wrong with their worldview. It may be a theological problem like a failure to fully recognize the authority of Christ’s one holy Catholic and Apostolic church and the salvation that comes through the church’s sacraments, or it may be a philosophical or moral problem related to rejecting God’s existence or an important moral truth. When choosing to dialogue with non-Catholics, I want to talk to people who are one, open to having a good conversation and two, are willing to talk about a widespread moral or theological error. Some people defend widespread errors, but they aren’t the best dialogue partners, so I’m going to pass on talking to them. Others might be nice to chat with, but they defend a fringe or secondary issue that I’m not interested in debating like young earth creationism.
(06:01):
And some of them are just jerks who traffic infringe nonsense, the worst of both worlds. But if someone can reflect how average people would civilly respond to the church on issues like homosexuality, why wouldn’t I talk to them? For those who said that I shouldn’t platform gaytheists, well, my question to you is this, how should we evangelize non-religious people who believe what Danny and Cade believe? And if there is a productive way to share the faith with these people, why shouldn’t you or I model how to do that? That’s my goal on this show. So what I want to do now is share with you some basic skills that you can use when you have conversations like this with friends and family, even if they have a strongly opposing view like those of Danny or Cade. And don’t worry if you think, “Well, I don’t know what to say.” You don’t need all the right answers.
(06:51):
You just need the right questions and no matter what, you can always fall back on these two questions. What do you think and why do you think that? Too often we just assume that we know what other people think and we don’t bother to ask them what they believe or we let people’s beliefs go unchallenged and only defend what we believe instead of asking them to provide evidence for what they believe. That’s why a good question to ask is along the lines of, why do you think that or this, how do you know that’s true? The Christian apologist Greg Kokel says, “When you ask questions, it takes you out of the hot seat and it puts you into the driver’s seat of the conversation.” Now, I’m not encouraging you to use questions in a bullying kind of way. Instead, think of yourself as a reporter in these conversations with your friends and family trying to just get all the facts of the story.
(07:40):
You’re not in debate mode. You just want to gather as much data as you can in order to tell the story. When you’re in investigator mode, it takes a lot of the pressure off in a conversation because you’re there to learn and people love to teach about themselves and it shows you respect the other person because you really want to know what he or she believes. Another good tactic for conversations like this is what I call the hypothetical Catholic or the hypothetical Christian if you’re one of my Protestant or Orthodox friends. Here’s how it goes. Let’s say you’re at work or school and someone shares an opinion or even an argument against the faith. You could say something like this in response. I have some friends who are Catholic or Christian who really study this stuff a lot and they would say X. What would you say to that?
(08:28):
Now notice the subtle shift in the conversation. It’s not you saying, “Hey, I think you’re wrong about X. Debate me, bro.” Instead of starting a fight toe to toe, you’re now standing shoulder to shoulder with the other person looking at a position together and asking, “What do you think about this? ” In using this framework, the conversation goes from being confrontational to being collaborative and you can have more fruitful conversation. One time when I was walking in San Diego, I came across a gay pride parade and a group of Christians who were protesting it. So I just walked around and asked some of the attendees, “What do you think of these Christian protestors?” And we were off to the races having good conversations that were not confrontational. You can read about our exchange in the article link below. When you get good at asking questions, you can move from merely gathering information to asking questions that expose an inconsistency or an unevidenced assumption in the other person’s worldview.
(09:24):
But once again, you shouldn’t do so in a bullying way. You should ask in a way that goes like this. “You said this, but this doesn’t make sense to me, or I’m having a hard time with this. Can you help me see what I’m missing? “That way you want them to diagnose the problem and maybe they will see it’s a problem they can’t answer immediately. I’ll give you an example. If someone says they’re pro – choice but obviously they don’t like abortion, you can identify an inconsistency there and then ask them politely,” Well, I’m just curious, why don’t you like abortion? “Because the only reason to not like abortion is the same reason to say it should be illegal, i.e. It kills human beings. However, asking questions is useless without the other side of the coin, listening to the answers. If you ask questions and then interrupt the person and give them his answer, you’re just going to annoy that person.
(10:13):
Or it’s not helpful if we ask a question and then spend the entire time the other person is talking thinking in our heads about what we want to say next. I call this listening to refute when we should be listening to reflect. Listening to refute makes conversations heated and awkward. They turn into ping pong matches where the arguments are traded back and forth really quickly. In contrast, our conversations on important issues should feel more like a game of volleyball. When a volleyball is served or returned, it kind of floats through the air for a little bit before it’s hit. The arguments we share with other people should kind of float in a similar way and listening to reflect helps us to do that. And to achieve this kind of dialogue, I recommend pausing to think of it after a person is finished speaking, then paraphrase to the person what you heard.
(11:00):
This reduces tension by slowing down the conversation and it provides an opportunity for clarification and misunderstandings. A good way to start a paraphrase would be to say this. Let me make sure I understand where you’re coming from. You said X. Did I understand you correctly? The psychologist Carl Rogers summarizes listening this way. Real communication occurs when we listen with understanding. What does this mean? It means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person’s point of view to sense how it feels to him to achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about. By the way, a huge caveat before I continue. While I try to model these skills in my own conversations, I’m not perfect at it, far from it. In fact, I get really embarrassed when I think about the times that I have interrupted a person or just failed to take my own advice in having a productive dialogue.
(11:54):
It makes me think of the memes associated with one Corinthians 11: one where St. Paul says, “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ.” Where Paul comes off as a decent imitation of Christ and you or I don’t even rise to the level of Timu Jesus. But that’s okay because if we never chose to talk to people about our faith or evangelize until we were absolutely perfect at it or we never made a mistake, then we’d never evangelize anyone. It’s okay to make mistakes when we share our faith. It just isn’t okay to stubbornly refuse to learn from our mistakes. Also, as has been said by many others, God doesn’t call the equipped. He equips the called and many times that equipping only comes through a process of trial and error. Nobody ever became a great musician without hitting some bad notes or a great comedian without getting booed offstage and nobody ever became a great disciple of Christ without stumbling.
(12:47):
Ask St. Peter about that. Plus, if you go out and talk to people about the faith, it won’t feel like the conversations I have in my studio or on other people’s podcasts. As good natured as they are, they’re still artificial. I and the guests know lots of people are watching us and rooting for their side. So it’s never going to feel like a truly casual conversation, but it can come close to it and it can provide a model for dialogue that you can have in a way more relaxed setting with your friends and family. One thing though I hope you’ll see is that in having these conversations, the goal isn’t to just crush the other person or own him. Pope St. John Paul II said this. Dialogue does not originate from tactical concerns or self-interest, but is an activity with its own guiding principles, requirements and dignity.
(13:34):
It is demanded by deep respect for everything that has been brought about in human beings by the spirit who blows where he wills. In other words, when we have conversations, we don’t always know where the conversation will go and we have to ultimately trust in the Holy Spirit to plant seeds of faith. But that doesn’t mean dialogue should just turn into mutual flattery sessions. Pope Benedict the 16th said this. I’ve noticed a growing interest among governments to sponsor programs intended to promote interreligious and intercultural dialogue. These are praise worthy initiatives. At the same time, religious freedom, interreligious dialogue and faith-based education aim at something more than a consensus regarding ways to implement practical strategies for advancing peace. The broader purpose of dialogue is to discover the truth. So to recap, when we have conversations about the faith, we need to ask questions, especially the questions, “What do you think?
(14:24):
Why do you think that? Or how do you know that’s true? Then we need to listen to reflect instead of listening to refute. And after that, we can ask challenge questions in order to show that the other person’s worldview is incorrect, but we should always listen when we do that and be gentle in our approach. But what if the other person steals our playbook? What if they ask us questions and we don’t know the answer? Nobody likes to say, I don’t know. ” So you could just say this. That’s a really good question and I know people who’ve done much more research on that issue than I have. So can I get your email and get back to you on it? Well, now the pressure’s off. Remember, it’s not a fight. It’s not a debate. It’s a collaborative search for the truth and realistically that’s how conversion works.
(15:07):
It takes time for people to accept a radically different worldview. So the most important thing we can do to help someone on that journey is to be kind and patient with them and always keep the door open when they have questions. It’s way better to be an evangelist who has maximal love with minimal knowledge than the other way around. It’s easy to fix an encounter with a loving Christian who didn’t have apologetic answers by just giving the person they talked to the apologetic answers, but it’s a lot more difficult to undo the scars and unloving debate broapologist can inflict on his victims. That’s why St. Paul said, “If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I’m nothing. And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome, but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher forbearing, correcting his opponents with gentleness.
(15:59):
God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth and they may escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will. For a good book on how to develop these skills and conversations, I recommend Tactics, a game plan for discussing your Christian convictions by Greg Kokel and made this way, how to prepare kids to face today’s tough moral issues by myself and Layla Miller. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.