The Dangers of Secularism | Bishop Robert Barron
58:39 Share

Part of the problem is that we religious people, I think we've wrung our hands too much. We've, you know, the scandals and everything else, and we've kind of retreated to the sidelines or we enter the conversations very defensively. We shouldn't. We represent, as you say, these ancient traditions that have fed, in fact, and shaped Western culture. We should not be in a position of hand-wringing apologetics, but of bold proclamations.

Bishop Robert Barron is a renowned Catholic theologian and author, often cited as the bishop of the internet for his innovative approach to evangelization in the modern world. Through his Word on Fire ministry, Bishop Barron produces and publishes books, documentaries, sermons, and podcasts that spread the gospel to over 200 million viewers online. The bishop's distinctive articulation of faith, culture, and philosophy is also featured here at The Daily Wire in Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's latest series, Foundations of the West. While

While exploring sites across Rome like St. Peter's Cathedral and the catacombs, Jordan and Bishop Barron discuss the church's pivotal role in shaping Western civilization as we know it. In today's episode, Bishop Barron and I dissect contemporary myths about traditional religion and delve into the underlying presumptions of a secular society. The bishop also highlights the ideological tension between virtue and freedom and how the pursuit of unqualified liberty is not as useful as we may think.

Bishop Robert Barron's monumental contributions to our modern conversations around faith and culture inspire both believers and seekers alike. Stay tuned and join us for another excellent discussion on this episode of The Sunday Special.

Bishop, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Ben. Always good to be with you. So let's talk about Foundations of the West. That's a series that we both had a chance to participate in with Jordan Peterson. I took him around Jerusalem for an episode. You took him around Rome. So what did you actually do with him in Rome for those who haven't seen the episode yet? A number of things. We started, I think, in the Colosseum. We went to St. Peter's. We ended up in Ostia. We were in Santa Maria and Trastevere. So a number of places, both in classical Rome and in

Catholic Rome, if you want. And we tried to draw some links between those two worlds, how the first Christians used the sort of infrastructure, the cultural infrastructure of Rome to propagate the Christian message.

the continuity between, let's say, Rome's more imperial imagination and the church's desire to spread the word of Jesus around the world. So some of those themes that connected classical and Catholic Rome we looked at. And that really is a fascinating phenomenon because the way that many of us who have, I would say,

like me, more of a passing familiarity with Christian history just as part of a general world history is the sort of old-fashioned idea that Christianity and Rome are working in direct opposition to one another all the time. And how much of that is true? Well, I think I said to Jordan during the show that there's a great yes to Rome and a great no to Rome that you can see clearly in the first Christians. What I just alluded to is the yes to Rome. They

You know, these two Jews, Peter and Paul, make their way to Rome because they knew they've got to be in the action. They have to be in the center of things. If they want this message to go out to the world, Rome was the place to be. And they indeed used that infrastructure, even like literally Paul using the Roman roads to make his way around the eastern part of the empire and eventually to Rome itself. So there is that. There's the great embrace of Rome, I would say.

And even the fact that in the Roman Catholic Church, there are Roman elements that remain to this day. I'm the bishop of a diocese. That's a Roman idea. I wear purple as a bishop, which is an imitation of the senatorial purple, etc. So there's all of that, I would say,

positive. At the same time, there's a great critique of Rome. Nowhere is it better expressed than in St. Augustine. So now, maybe the last of the really great classical figures in the West. But Augustine writes The City of God, which is a very, very sharp critique of Rome. Rome is politically compromised as a fallen culture, engaged in false worship. And let's face it, the Church was brutally at times persecuted by Rome, and

So, you know, there's no question about that. But the church also says no because it speaks of Christ as the true Lord, not Caesar. So to me, that's part of the drama, the poetry of it, is we say both yes and no to Rome. And it's wonderful that, you know, I'll be leaving just—

shortly to go to Rome for a synod. So the church still gathers in Rome for its major acts of government and so on. So we're still saying yes to Rome, and I think we're also still saying no to it. That is one of the fascinating things about the history of the Roman Catholic Church is, again, the sort of modern conception of the Roman Catholic Church is almost sort of bizarrely sidelined. The church in sort of

Western history. There's been attempts really since the Enlightenment to take the church and pretend that the church was sort of an extraneous force pushing back against the progress that would have occurred in the absence of

of the church. And that's completely false. I mean, that is completely separated from the reality of history in which the church is the source of literally every great founding university in the West and is also the source of most of the great early scientific discovery. And so that attempt to separate it off from the church is really bizarre. Yes, it is bizarre. But you know what it is? It's the repetition constantly of the founding myth. So the founding myth of modernity is

Both political liberation and epistemological liberation, if you want, happened after a long twilight struggle against the forces of obscurantism. They want to keep us in superstition on the one hand and keep us in political oppression on the other. And the convenient myth is all that's associated with the Catholic Church. And so on a regular basis, you see it to this day, on a regular basis is trotted out this old myth.

myth of origins. And so we have to beat up the Catholic Church over and over again to say it's out of a terrible struggle with this still-existent institution that modernity emerged, when in point of fact, as you correctly say, from hospitals and schools and universities and science itself,

The church is not the opponent. The church is the matrix of all of these realities. This is not to whitewash church history and to deny that there are bad things. There obviously were. But it's a complete caricature to say that modernity and its positive elements emerges after a terrible struggle against the church.

We've been battling this for several centuries now. And the simplistic version of history, instead of seeing, for example, Luther's 99 Theses as an attempt to course correct what he saw as, for example, a corrupt church, and he was actually sort of a fundamentalist in that way. Instead of seeing all of these debates as existing within a larger Christendom, there's been an attempt to basically posit sort of a good side of history and a bad side of history. And the

the modern mind has put the church at the center of the bad side of history. He said most clearly in the way that the French revolution sees itself, the French revolution sees itself as, as,

setting up a god of reason as opposed to this horrible Catholic god, which is, of course, why the French revolutionaries talked about strangling the last king with the guts of the last priest. The idea being, of course, that monarchy and the Catholic Church were in cahoots together and that the only way to overthrow tyranny would be to overthrow the church itself. That is a complete misread of history and is pretty obviously a misread of history given the fact that the French Revolution ended up becoming one of the great tyrannies of history. Well, right. I mean, I'm...

I don't want to move into the space of the French Revolution and say, well, that's where we ought to be going. I mean, talk about a corrupt political matrix. And again, none of this is to deny that there was, let's say, real corruption in the church, and Luther and some of the reformers were responding to that.

that there were elements of modernity that were correcting problems within the old, you know, the ancien regime. And I don't deny any of that for a second, but it's, again, a gross caricature to say that the church just represents the forces of darkness. You know, just the fact that for many people, if they study philosophy in our universities, they might look at the ancient philosophers, and they probably leap right over to Descartes and

and the founding of modern philosophy, where, you know, from Augustine to Anselm to Aquinas to Bonaventure to Duns Scotus, I mean, all these major figures, or Moses Maimonides, for example, that these are philosophically irrelevant figures. Well,

Of course, they're of massive importance. And I go back to an intellectual hero of mine, Étienne Gilson, the great Catholic philosopher, who began his career as a kind of more secularist student of Descartes. And what he found as he read Descartes was, you know, there are so many things in Descartes that are not in the classical authors.

Where did we get that from? And that led Gilson to go back to especially Aquinas and the Middle Ages and say, well, we shouldn't leap over this whole thousand-year period. So that's another way that the thing gets distorted.

And to more of this in just a moment, first, y'all know that I find almost everything the left is proposing to fix our economy, like their ideas to make owning a home a reality for people. I find their ideas laughable. What is not laughable is that Churchill Mortgage can actually help you do that today. You don't need a politician to help you realize your dreams of building wealth through home ownership. You just need a team of brilliant people who actually care about you and your dreams. That's why we've partnered with Churchill Mortgage. My wife and I have bought and sold multiple homes over the course of our marriage. Every time we've increased our equity. If you're renting, you're

You're lining your landlord's pockets. Churchill Mortgage gives you, the buyer, the power through their Home Buyer Edge program. It allows you to compete with cash offers as a certified home buyer. Churchill also sweetens the pot with a $10,000 seller guarantee that they pay for. Go to churchillmortgage.com slash shapiro today to get connected with a real human being who actually cares about you. That's churchillmortgage.com.

dot com slash Shapiro. Also, current homeowners rates have in fact dropped. So if you're ready to keep more money in your pocket each month instead of handing it over to the bank, go to Churchill Mortgage dot com slash Shapiro today. That's Churchill Mortgage dot com slash Shapiro today. This is a paid advertisement. Homebuyer Edge and seller guarantee are available for qualifying borrowers and select loan types only. Not available in all states or locations. NMLS ID 591 MLS Consumer Access dot org. Equal housing lender 1749 Mallory Lane, Brentland, Tennessee 37027.

And I think it's really important to call out that distorted view of history because it does have very modern ramifications. And the most obvious ramification is that if you set up sort of rationalism versus, say, the Catholic Church or religion more broadly, which is what it's become, it's not just an attack on the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is at the center of that attack, but the attack

by a sort of secular modernism against all forms of religion. That would include Judaism, that would include Protestantism, it includes everybody who is a God believer who believes that there is in fact an ordered nature to the universe created by God. The oppositional history is written for a particular purpose and that particular purpose is to basically suggest that everybody who is not on our side is an irrational tyrant who's attempting to bring us back to a time of total theocratic rule.

And that's the old myth of foundation again. So you just brought it out, but it's trotted out regularly. But as you suggest correctly, in a Christian context, think here of Pope Benedict's famous Regensburg Address, where he talks about the primacy of logos within our tradition. If we say Jesus is the logos made flesh, the word made flesh, that means he's linked automatically to all expressions of logos, whether that's in

culture, science, philosophy. That's making a positive statement about the relation between religion and secular reason, if you want. Then go back even further. Go back into the wisdom literature in the Old Testament. You have all kinds of references to the order of the cosmos and the heavens speaking of the glory of God, and we know God through the harmonies and intelligible patterns of the universe. That's not just a Greek idea. That's a deeply biblical idea.

But you're quite right in suggesting that the modern myth is, no, no, on one side is good light and reason, on the bad side is obscurantism and superstition. But that's a complete distortion of the religious tradition. And I think that it's a necessary myth for secular modernism, because secular modernism on its own can make very few affirmative claims. I mean, this is an argument that I've had with sort of the new atheistic crew, people like Sam Harris. I said that secular modernism very often uses the tools of religion. They use the language of free will, for example,

or the language of order in the universe, the language of scientific discovery, which is all about the idea that there are, in fact, these rules that govern the universe that are discoverable by a human mind. All of these are religious premises. There's nothing in sort of the evolutionary biological record that suggests that your meatball of a mind is capable of grasping anything like a quote-unquote higher truth, which should not exist in the context of evolution. There's merely what's adaptive and what's not adaptive. But

The secular modernists, their entire movement is predicated on the idea that they don't actually have to make an affirmative claim for why the world works the way that it does. They just have to reject the religious claim. And the rejection is in and of itself an important quality. So important because, again, if they were to lose, then we would revert right back to the quote unquote dark ages.

Right. And they're overlooking that it's so surpassingly weird that the universe should be intelligible. That's the famous quote from Einstein, right? The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible, that it's marked by intelligible pattern. And that's why many have argued, and I quite agree with this, that the modern sciences emerged where and when they did because of religious suppositions. If you believe in creation—

You know two very important things. One is the world isn't God. The world is not divine. The world is not to be worshipped. It can be experimented upon. It can be observed. It can be analyzed objectively. But the second thing you know is it's endowed in every nook and cranny by intelligibility because it was made by an intelligent mind.

Those two premises are required, it seems to me, for the emergence of the physical sciences. And that's why it's no accident that so many of the founders of the sciences were indeed religious people. Einstein now takes on a more kind of Spinozan flavor. But still, even in Einstein, you find a sense of kind of divine grounding and purpose.

So, yes, it is being borrowed from religion, even as they're trying now to debunk religion. But they're standing on a foundation provided by religion. Yeah, and I think that there's something else that's going on, too, which is if you make the claim that everything secular, all sciences, all of the reason itself is posited against religion, this is like a hard gap. On one side, you have religion.

reason and decency and enlightenment, and on the other side you have darkness and obscurantism and faith, that if you posit those against one another, then that also suggests that there is no limit to human reason, which is how you get into some pretty dark areas of human activity. Once you decide that everything can be reasoned out, everything in terms of human relations,

And human beings are innately malleable because if you can reason everything out, that means you can change yourself. And if you can change yourself, then that means everyone can be changed. And human beings, there is no human nature. There's just sort of a blank slate to be operated upon. Once you get there, you get into some pretty dark spaces. I think what religion tends to do, and this is particularly true in Roman Catholicism, it's also true in Judaism, of course, it says...

Yes, there are these things that reason is capable of doing. And then there are also circumscribed limits to what reason can do. And that is so important. It is really important to see as a source of data things like revelation. Not just that revelation...

once happened believing the historical truth of the thing, but as Thomas Sowell has suggested, these are rules that have stood the test of time. When you're talking about the Roman Catholic Church, you're talking about something that stood the test of time for over 2,000 years at this point. When you're talking about the Jewish religion, you're talking about something that has lasted past 3,000 years, and people are still attempting to live out those rules.

This is a time-tested way of actually looking at data as opposed to what reason suggests, which is, hey, look, there's a new study. It came out from Stanford last Thursday. Let's just try it out on all of humanity. And we're going back to the very beginning of the book of Genesis, aren't we? You know, when you're grasping at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a way to read that is I'm taking to myself a prerogative that belongs to God alone. If God is the ground of epistemic value and moral value—

I can't make up the rules. I can't grasp at that and say, I'm going to make this for myself. Rather, I want to bring my mind and my will into harmony with these objective intelligibilities that are grounded in the creative mind of God.

Now, that's a formula for a happy life, a healthy life. The trouble is, and it's right in Genesis, you see it, you can trace it up through Western history. It's rampant today that I have this kind of Promethean capacity to determine good and evil. I can determine right and wrong. I decide what's true, what's false.

Now we've opened up the abysses, as they say. Now we've opened up chaos. And the psychological and spiritual space a lot of people are living in, sadly, is precisely that space. And the book of Genesis knew all about it. That's the root of our fundamental problem.

Now, when I surrender my mind and my will to the objective values that are placed in the world by God, now I find real flourishing. Now I find real joy. That's a message that we religious people hear.

have to say today, I think, with great insistence. The thing I'm describing as Prometheanism is the default position of almost every kid in America now. It's the basic philosophy they'd accept. And part of the problem is that we religious people, I think, we've wrung our hands too much. We've, you know, the scandals and everything else, and we've kind of retreated to the sidelines, or we enter the conversations very defensively. We shouldn't.

We represent, as you say, these ancient traditions that have fed, in fact, and shaped Western culture. We should not be in a position of hand-wringing apologetics, but of bold proclamation. There's more on this in a moment. First, folks, it is, of course, election season. You may have noticed—

Time to choose who we think is the best candidate for a higher office. But let's be honest, choosing the right candidate for any office is a huge undertaking. Whether we're talking the Oval Office or local school board or just your business, you need the best. Whether you're staffing a classroom, construction site, even a toll booth, no matter what kind of office you have, one thing is for certain, if you want the best way and fastest way to find qualified candidates,

And

and effective. With ZipRecruiter, you can even invite top candidates to apply for your job, encouraging them to apply sooner. Want faster hiring for your office? Choose ZipRecruiter. See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the very first day. Go to this exclusive web address to try it for free. ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire. ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire, which is why we've been using it ourselves at DailyWire for years. Head over to ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire to try it out for free.

Yeah, and I think that's such an important point because one of the things that's happened in Western life is that the burden of proof seems to have shifted. So it used to be that if you wanted to change all of the rules, you actually had to prove, as Chesterton suggested, why the rule was wrong. You had to demonstrate that there was a better rule in the offing. And now it seems that the burden of proof is on people who have historic rules on their side to prove why the rule is good. And so the idea is you have to

prove to me why traditional marriage is good. Now, that would have been a question that people laughed at for thousands of years and still in most parts of the world laugh at. I mean, it's an obviously silly question in the sense that, well, of course a man and a woman produce children and that is the foundation of the world going on for humanity and that

man, woman, child is the basic foundational unit of civilization. I mean, this was seen for literally all of human history and in most places in the world as the foundational truth. And then the West simply said, well, I mean, now prove it. Now prove it. And if you can't prove it,

in a way that is sufficient to how I feel, and that is able to overcome my authentic desire for a thing, then that means that the rule has to go away. The burden of proof shifted, I think, specifically because of this long-lasting attack on the foundations of things like the church or like the Torah or like these historic institutions. So it was an indirect attack. Instead of attacking the rules directly with those institutions sort of un-enhancing

I'd say undamaged. They instead decided to go right at the foundations of the institutions. And then they knew that the rules would topple if you go after the institutions. Yeah. And I'll go back to Billy Graham, who said one time, the the objection to God on the part of atheists is not really an intellectual objection because he knew. And I think most human beings know that atheism is a fundamentally irrational position.

Where's the objection coming from? It's a moral objection. Because if God exists, then there is a ground for objective morality and intelligibility. If God exists, there's a demand made on my conscience. If God exists, my freedom is not unlimited. It doesn't run amok.

And we don't like that. We haven't liked it from Adam and Eve on. Human beings don't like that. And so we rebel against it. And that's the form it takes today. And it can express itself as a disdain for the church and all this. But deep down, it's a moral resistance to the demand of objective morality and truth.

And that's the fight we're in today, I would say.

but they were always in tension. I mean, there was always this sort of dialectical conversation that was happening between virtue and the idea that there is such a thing as the good that should be pursued, whether that should be pursued by government or whether that should be pursued by the individual or whether we're talking freedom. And the idea is that that individual should be protected from those who are pursuing virtue if virtue is left sort of undefined. And there's always been that sort of tension right there. And

again, I think the war on virtue has led to libertinism, not to actual liberty. Right. To pretend away the difficulty between the two, I think, is short-sighted, but the tension needs to remain, for sure. Let's stay with that. It's an exceptionally important point, I think, because I'm not an advocate of a sort of libertarianism or, you know, just the individualism and do what you want and

No, no. Our country is based upon the idea of an ordered liberty. And you read the founders on this. They're not libertarians. It's an ordered liberty. In the great Catholic tradition, freedom is not the capacity to do whatever I want. Freedom is the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good

First possible and then effortless. So you're a musician, you know, you'll be playing an instrument. You internalize the rules and the practices of that instrument so that in time you can play freely. You can play effortlessly, right? Learning a sport or learning anything, learning a language, it's the same dynamic.

There are these objective rules. You don't talk any way you want. You subject yourself to all these rules of syntax and grammar and vocabulary so that you so internalize the speech that you now can say whatever you want to say. You can speak freely. That's freedom in people like Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and also in the Bible. The trouble is we've taken in a kind of libertarian sense of freedom.

Freedom of indifference has been called by the philosophers like, well, yes or no, it's up to you. Don't worry about it. That's not freedom. That's a distortion of freedom. And in the measure that that view of freedom has come into our political thinking, I'm against it. And you call that conservatism. It's not authentic conservatism in my view, but I'm against that. I

I'm for the kind of Russell Kirk sort of conservatism, you know, that understands the religious underpinnings of our society, understands the moral framework for freedom, understands that the market, for example, is not just wildly free, but the market, as Catholic social teaching has it, is disciplined morally and legally and so on, to try to move it in the direction of virtue. That's what I'm for. And I think that in the measure that it's still a battle within conservatism,

That's the side that I'd be on. You know, it really is sort of fascinating how a good indicator of how far society has come in its conception of freedom is the willingness to abandon the last half of the of the Pasek in Hebrew, the verse in the book of Exodus where it says, let my people go. There's an end to that verse. The verse does not end with let my people go. Right. The verse ends.

that they might worship me in the desert. - Correct, there's an actual end to that verse, and that verse is, we are not going to serve man, we're gonna go serve God. And the sort of idea that the freedom is just a freedom from as opposed to a freedom to is a huge mistake in sort of Western philosophy. - Right, and see, modernity in some ways teeters on that divide.

There's a side of modernity, and the roots of it, if you want to get technical, the roots are back in people like Duns Scotus, I would say, in the philosophical tradition, that tended toward a voluntarism.

You know, the view that God's voluntas, God's will is what's primary. So God has this kind of sovereign, indifferent freedom. Descartes picks it up in modern philosophy. Two plus two equals four because God desired it. But God could have desired that it be equal to five. Well, see, once you've made that move, you're into chaos. That's not Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas would never have understood God's nature that way. God is, if you want, faithful to his own being.

The ground of his will is in his own being, his own truth. So it's not an arbitrary. Now, I press it to it on the Christian side, forms of Calvinism that would see predestination, double predestination as just the arbitrary will of God. That's a dangerous view of the divine freedom. And the interesting thing, Ben, is it's mimicked in precisely the kind of political freedom we're talking about.

If you want that kind of freedom, you're mimicking the arbitrary, capricious God of the freedom of indifference. But a proper conservatism, I would say, is ordered to acquaint its understanding of God, that God's freedom is grounded in the integrity of his own being. But it's a theological point, but it has huge political implications.

We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, you know what's really keeping Americans up at night? It's not just the radical left's attempts to destroy our values. It's also uncomfortable betting. That's why I've decked out my entire bed with Bull & Branch. Now, I'm not usually one for changing with the seasons. My principles stay consistent year-round. But when it comes to betting, it's another story. Starting with the Bull & Branch Signature Collection, their 100% organic cotton sheets are like the constitution for your bed. Foundational, timeless, getting better with age.

They start off buttery soft and somehow get even softer with every wash. Plus, you can easily add their blankets, duvets, and quilts without making your bed feel heavy or hot. Trust me, a fall refresh with Bowling Branch will have your mind changed for good. Best of all, Bowling Branch gives you a 30-night worry-free guarantee with free shipping and returns on all U.S. orders of $100 or more. Let me tell you, when you're fighting the culture war day in and day out,

Good sleep is, in fact, crucial. Start getting your best sleep this fall with Bull & Branch. Enjoy 20% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bullandbranch.com slash ben. That's bullandbranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com slash ben for 20% off and free shipping. Exclusions apply. See site for details. You know, when we talk about freedom, this raises the deeper question of, so what is the value of freedom? So there's a philosopher, a Catholic philosopher named John Finnis, who's a

He's written extensively on this. And one of the things that he talks about is the idea that freedom actually ought to be treated not as inherent as a quality, not as something inherently valuable, but as instrumental in the same way that money is an instrument, that money is good because it can be used for a good thing, but it's not inherently good. So freedom is instrumental. It is to pursue the good. As you were suggesting, freedom is something that you cultivate in order to pursue the good.

And if you didn't have freedom, you wouldn't be able to pursue that good. So if you're not freely worshiping God, are you actually worshiping God in a way that God wants? Or are you just being forced to worship God at points of gun, for example? And that's why we care about freedom of religion. When it comes to freedom of speech, you want to be able to have these open debates so as to come to the proper virtuous response to these things, not so that you can shout the N-word, for example. The freedom of speech is instrumental. It does not grant inherent value. It's a case made by, again, another philosopher named Joseph Raz, actually an Israeli philosopher,

who is not of the right, who has suggested that it is a grave mistake to treat liberty itself as inherently valuable. And you can see, by example, that's not true. If I were to... If somebody were to put a gun to my head and say, shoot the person next to you, and I did it, that would be less morally blameworthy than if somebody...

did not put a gun to my head and I just shot the person next to me. My liberty to shoot the person next to me did not actually make the quality of the shooting better. It made the quality of the shooting significantly worse, which suggests, of course, that liberty is not in and of itself an additive excellent quality. Liberty is useful and necessary in order to achieve certain things. But

But liberty used the wrong way actually makes things more evil. If you misuse your free will, you're doing something more evil than you would have done if you had not been allowed that liberty in the first place, which is, again, why this balance comes into play. Right. It's an ordering of an intelligent being toward the good. So in Aquinas, for example, the will is a modality of the intellect. What he means is when the mind knows the good as good, it ipso facto wills it.

So I can know, let's say, the camera in front of me in a scientific way. If I'm knowing it as something good, well, then automatically, ipso facto, I will it. I desire it. I'm ordered to it. That's what the will is. And so you can't define it apart from the good. It emerges, in a way, out of the intelligent perception of the good.

I would say of value to use more contemporary language, but it's if you construe it as something in itself or valuable as such, you've misconstrued it. It's, it exists only in relation to the good. And at clients will say, even a very wicked person is choosing what at least appears to be good. The,

The at least apparent good is being sought even by the most wicked person. So you can't escape the relationship to the objective good. So, you know, the big question that comes up on the other side of this is, okay, so you're talking a lot about virtue and the good and ordering liberty in order to achieve the good. So how do we avoid theocracy, right? Well, you're a religious person. I'm a religious person. God has set a set of rules. Why not have a religious king who simply imposes the will of God from above and

and demands of everybody that they simply follow these particular rules. Why have something like a freedom of religion or a freedom of speech if we know the best way to speak and we know the best way to worship? Because it goes back to the point you made a few minutes ago about God doesn't want us to be automaton, doesn't want us to be compelled. He wants us freely to respond. And so if you construe a theocracy as a kind of use of the secular arm to compel religious activity or belief, that violates religion.

God's deepest desire for us. That's why John Paul II said, I think quite correctly, the first freedom is freedom of religion. That all the other freedoms we talk about of the press and of assembly and speech and so on would follow from that most fundamental orientation of the conscience toward the good.

So the good coerces it, that's true, but we shouldn't have a secular arm coercing religious belief. That's why we'd stand a thwart of theocracy. So I've been working on sort of some theories about exactly what the limits of liberty should be, obviously, because you need limits to liberty, otherwise you end up with libertinism. As the Bible says, everyone does what's right in his own eyes, and the minute that happens, the entire society collapses. I mean, that's an actual description in the book of Deuteronomy, which is clearly what we are seeing right now. The

attempt to allow for spheres of liberty within still an ordered life is very difficult and requires a sort of moral view that is slightly broader than I would say is a rule-based sort of deontological system, a sort of rules-based system, because rules by their nature can only...

achieve what's been specified by the rules. You can have broad rules, but if the rules are too broad, then they become too vague. And if they're too specific, then they become too... Fussy. Yeah, exactly. As somebody who follows an awful lot of rules every day, they become quite burdensome. Or they can become quite burdensome if not enacted in the right way. And so one of the theories that I've come up with and I think is in line with much of what we've been talking about is what I've kind of gradually termed role theory, which is the idea that

Contrary to modern society, which suggests that roles are bad, roles are an imposition on you, that basically your authentic self is being inhibited by the roles that society places on you, gender roles and familial roles and religious roles. The reality is that roles are good.

Roles are very good. And that human beings were created in order to fulfill these particular roles. And the book of Genesis is all about establishing what those roles are. Adam as husband, Adam as father, Adam as tiller of the ground, Adam as the one who cultivates the garden, the

Image of God. Image of God, right? These are all roles that you are supposed to fulfill. And liberty exists within those spheres in the sense that there are, in fact, a great series of choices that you can make within each individual sphere. In order to become a good father, there are many paths to being a good father, for sure. And many of them are matters of moral indifference would be the wrong term. But they're matters of moral choice without there being significant moral after effect. You can be a good father the minute that the liberty starts to threaten the roles.

That's when society blows up. So when liberty starts to say, okay, you don't have to be a father. In fact, it's not important for you to be a father. In fact, abandoning your kids is just another form of liberty. Or you don't have to be a good husband. In fact, any form of sexual relationship that you choose to enter is equally valuable. And so you blow up the role of what it means to be a husband or what it means to be a wife. That is when liberty turns into libertinism and has overstepped its boundaries.

No, quite right. And that's, again, when you grasp the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you're trying to get to that point where I'm deciding what the basic structure of my life is. Now, within that, as you quite correctly suggest, go back to our earlier analogies, sports, there's no basketball team that's ever brought the ball up the court in exactly the same way.

Think of those five, high school kids, college kids, pros. No team has ever brought the ball up the court in the same way. There's always a spontaneity and a freedom and a novelty and a creativity. I grew up watching Michael Jordan in Chicago and Scottie Pippen and the way they would do a fast break, there was nothing quite like it. It had never been done that way before.

Nevertheless, all those guys were operating with a very clear structure of the game of basketball. They were playing basketball. If they picked up the ball and ran up in the stands, then they're not playing the game anymore. And that's Chesterton's point about the kids who play a game with reckless abandon, even on the edge of a cliff, as long as there's a big, thick, high wall around the cliff. If you know the rules, they're in place. Now play with reckless abandon. But that's devolved into an either-or.

To be really free, I've got to get rid of the rules. And it's up to me to decide. And I'm beyond good and evil. And I'm the uber mensch. And I'll decide. But see, all of that is a recipe for disaster and for psychological collapse, which is why I've argued for years in my pastoral life

The kids today, and we know this statistically with the anxiety and depression and suicidal ideation and the gender confusion and all of that, is born of this sort of now practical Nietzscheanism that's taken over.

will to power. It's just up to my freedom. But see, as we both know, the Bible knew all about this. Genesis is eminently clear on this point. It was true 3,000 years ago. It's true now. And again, we biblical people, I think, have to shout that from the rooftops.

We'll get to more on this in just one second. First, betting with BetOnline is a ton of fun. Beyond traditional sports, BetOnline gives you the option to bet on political events like the outcome of the presidential election. I favor President Trump right now. Or if you're a sports fan, BetOnline makes sports betting more accessible and convenient than ever before. BetOnline is the best place to be. Producer Jake placed a bet on who will win the election a few weeks ago. He bet on Trump to win at even odds.

That looks like a pretty good bet at the moment. With just a few clicks, you can place bets on your favorite teams or events from the comfort of your own home. BetOnline prides themselves on their higher-than-average betting limits of up to $25,000. You can increase your wagering amounts by contacting their player services desk by phone or email. So, while you're watching your favorite team or the news on upcoming elections,

Why not spice things up with a friendly wager over at BetOnline. Go to BetOnline.ag to place your bets today. Use promo code Ben for a 50% sign-up bonus of up to $250. That's BetOnline.ag. Use promo code Ben. BetOnline. The options are endless from election bets to sports bets. You can go check them out right now. They've got some awesome options for you. BetOnline.ag to place your bets today and use promo code Ben for a 50% sign-up bonus of up to $250.

I mean, it's perfectly obvious when it comes to raising kids. So I have four kids. The fewer rules you set for them, the worse it is, by far. Kids want responsibility. They want clear lines of demarcation. They want to know if they do X, then Y is going to happen. They want to know that if they do something good, they're going to be rewarded, and if they do something bad, that they are going to be punished. They want all these things. Kids are seeking out this sort of stuff, and our entire society has now told parents that they basically ought to treat their kids like Rousseau's Emile, that you basically let them off free in the woods. You do whatever they want and discover themselves. And of course,

There's a sort of famous story about Rousseau being confronted by a woman who'd read Emile and said, you know, I read it, I loved it, and I've been raising my child this way. And Rousseau looking at her and saying, are you insane? Why would you possibly do that? It's supposed to be a metaphor. It's not supposed to be reality, but we've taken it as reality. And talk about one of the people that shaped modernity. You know, we mentioned Descartes, you can mention Marx, mention Nietzsche, but Rousseau's another one that's had a giant impact on the way we think about things.

But, and this is not some sort of, you know, defensive conservatism, but to say the Bible is,

It's just so much better on these matters. It's so much better than what the modern philosophers have given us. And the philosophers that we reverence who were very much conditioned by a biblical imagination, recovering those figures, I think, is eminently important. You know, I don't know if I, when we were in Rome, if I told you the story, but when I was a little kid, I read Chaim Potok's novel, The Chosen. It was sort of my introduction to that wonderful world of, you know, Judaism and all of its practices. And it was that Hasidic form, et cetera, et cetera.

But you remember the basic thrust of that story was this brilliant kid raised by the rabbi, and he knows the Jewish tradition really well, and he's brilliant. But yet he wants to read Freud. He wants to become a psychologist. And the whole thrust thing is to help him get out of this narrow ghetto and to get into the wider. Well, I read it as a kid. I loved it. Well, I reread it, I don't know, a couple years ago maybe. Yeah.

The whole time I'm saying, no, don't go to Freud. No, no, no. Stay with your father and stay with the rabbis. Much, much better. You know, but I don't know what Potok had in mind exactly, but how much I changed over the years having grown up a bit is to say, no, no, Freud is not where you want to go. The rabbis have it much better than Freud. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about that book is that in the end of The Chosen and then in the sequel, The Promise, by the way,

by Potok, then what ends up happening is that Danny, who's the name of the character you're talking about, Danny ends up basically retaining his orthodoxy. He ends up becoming effectively a modern orthodox psychologist. And the problem with the book, of course,

is that there is the possibility that when you seduce somebody away from, you know, what are time-tested truths and toward Freud, they don't stop at becoming sort of a modern orthodox psychologist, that they end up basically having their brain rotted. And I think that one of the points that's fascinating about that particular book, and we don't have to get into a literary analysis of The Chosen, which is a fascinating book, but one of the points is that the rabbi, for those who've never read the book, it's a really good book, the rabbi basically says,

doesn't talk to his son. He doesn't talk to Danny at all. And the reason he doesn't talk to Danny for nearly the entire book is because he sees that his son is not sympathetic to people. He sees that his son is incredibly analytic and he doesn't actually have sympathy for people. And so what he decides is that he is going to use this treatment essentially on his son in order to get his son to be more sympathetic to other people. And again, there's this sort of, the one thing that does come through, aside from the sort of secularism versus religion point, is that good fathering is good fathering.

And I think that that's one of the points of that particular book. That does bring us to something else that you've been talking a lot about for a very long time, of course, and continue to talk a lot about, and that is the relationship between Jews and Christians. We've talked about this, obviously, at length many times, both off-air and on-air. One of the things that's been happening that really is, I think, a shame in today's age is there are some people who seem to be attempting to divide Jews from Christians in an era when you do have –

much broader divides that are much more dangerous than the divisions between Jews and Christians. The divisions are obviously very real. Belief in Jesus versus not believing in Jesus is a massive issue in Christianity and also in Judaism. But the sort of orientation of a Judeo-Christian West or a Christian West with Judaic roots versus the secular modernist world

and its allies and sort of woke them. That is the real battle. And I'm sort of bewildered by this attempt to divide Jews from Christians in this moment. No, actually right about that. And the common enemy I've been saying for a long time is a materialist secularism, but now with a particular accent of wokeism, which is, I think, a really nasty consequence of that materialism and so on. So yeah, that's absolutely true. And

And the other thing I would say is this, that I love those scholars in the last maybe 30 years or so within the Christian world who've been really stressing

the Jewishness of Jesus and the importance of Judaism and understanding the faith. I'll tell you the truth. When I was coming of age in the university and seminary, Catholic liberalism was very much renyant. And we define liberalism in different ways, but one way is trying to read Christianity kind of relentlessly through the modern lens.

So beginning with, you know, Schleiermacher and coming up through Tillich and Rahner and many other figures, that's the style of a liberal Christianity. Now, one of the marks of that, and you can see it from Schleiermacher through Bultmann and up until the present day, is a tendency to de-Judaize Christianity. So to present Jesus as sage or as mystic or moral teacher or, you know,

Read something like Bultmann. Bultmann wants to just rip him up from the roots of his Judaism. Look at much of the historical critical approach to the Bible often effectively does that.

I love those scholars—and there are a lot of them now in both the Protestant and Catholic side—who are insisting on the Jewishness of Jesus, that without that we're not going to understand who he was, nor what the first Christians were even saying about him. Take him out of his Jewish context, and he becomes this avatar of liberal Christianity, who is as boring as it can be. That's the problem, is liberal Christianity is just not a compelling vision. It's the Jewish Jesus.

The Messiah of Israel, the culmination, we would say, of the great story of Israel, that's the one Paul was talking about. That's the one Peter was talking about. That's the one Thomas Aquinas was talking about.

So that's something I feel very strongly about as a Catholic theologian and bishop is rediscovering Jesus' Jewishness. It is kind of a point of astonishment. Sometimes when I talk to Christians, they'll make reference to something in the New Testament, and I'll say, well, right, that's also in the Old Testament.

And people will say, well, yeah, but I've never read the Old Testament. It's like, well, I don't understand why you would read the sequel without reading the actual first thing that came out. You're not going to understand half the references in the New Testament unless you actually read the Old Testament. Exactly. It's like reading Act 5 of Macbeth, but you've just overlooked Acts 1 through 4. You'll have no idea what's going on. But see, it is...

been true and unhappy that we Christians have often presented it just that way. And this goes back to one of the oldest heresies in Christianity called Marcionism. Marcion, second-century Roman figure, who proposed the Jewish God's a fallen God, and so any references to that should go away. Anything in the New Testament that's too Jewish, get rid of that. So he kept little bits and pieces of the New Testament.

But see, Marcionism, Irenaeus fought it. God bless him, one of the great doctors of the Church, one of my heroes, St. Irenaeus, fought it tooth and nail. But it comes back, and it's back today. Whenever you hear someone casually say something like, "Well, I'm for the God of the New Testament, the compassionate, gentle God of Jesus, not this old, mean, oppressive God of the Old Testament."

First of all, that's silly and false, but second, it's Marcionism. It's, I want to read my Christianity apart from Judaism. Whenever you have the kind of Oprahization of Jesus, where he's a guru, he's a spiritual teacher, that's also ripping him up from his Jewish roots. But you're right, you will not get Act 5 of Macbeth if you've not read Acts 1 through 4. And we would say, as I mentioned, Jesus is the climax—

of the great story of Israel. Now here we disagree, obviously, but I,

I won't get him apart from the story that came before him. Right, and I think that that is so important because, again, the differences are great and really matters, but the commonalities are also intense and really, really matter. I mean, pretending that the trunk of the tree in the Catholic Church is not related to the root of the tree, which is in Judaism, would be to completely deracinate. I mean, it would deroot the entire substructure, I would imagine, if you're a Catholic. Right, and, you know, think of...

Yesterday, I said mass in two different places. And I'm on an altar. I'm dressed in temple vestments. I was wearing a mitre. I'm a bishop. I had incense. I incensed the altar. We had candles on the altar. I offered a sacrifice.

So what am I doing? I can't begin to articulate that apart from the temple sacrifice of the Old Testament, without the book of Leviticus, without sections of Exodus. I can't begin to articulate what I'm doing. Now, mind you, a lot of Catholics don't get that. If a Catholic says, oh, the main thing I want is to hear you preach, well, I mean, that's fine, the preaching part of it, which is

I think where the synagogue service comes into the Catholic Mass. But the temple side of it, the sacrificial side of it, it's entirely Jewish. We would see all of that coming to its fulfillment in the great sacrifice of Christ on the cross. But I'll just do one more connection there because the temple, the temple is so important.

Ezekiel chapter 10, when the Shekinah of the Lord up and leaves the temple and goes east over the Mount of Olives, how important in the gospels that Jesus, when he comes to Jerusalem, is coming over the Mount of Olives from the west and reentering his temple.

And then he says, "I'm going to tear this place down in three days, rebuild it," referring to the temple of his body. And then what do we see at his death when his side is pierced and out comes blood and water? And we say the blood of the Eucharist, the water of baptism—true. But also it's the Ezekiel prophecy that when the glory of the Lord returns and the temple is restored, water will flow forth from its side for the renewal of the world.

Well, in that little detail of the blood and water coming literally from the side of Jesus, the audience was meant to see, ah, Ezekiel has been fulfilled. The Shekinah returned, and now the water's going forth. We would read that then as the grace of the sacraments and so on and so forth that renews the world. But see, apart from a Jewish background, none of that makes a lick of sense. You won't make sense of this story.

this insistence within the Gospels, and that's, I can multiply that across all four of the Gospels. By the way, this is a great place to mention that not only, obviously, the Foundations of the Last Syriza is great,

you went with Jordan to Rome. When you go to Jerusalem, you can actually see these sites. I mean, it is totally worth, whether you're Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, you should absolutely go and visit Jerusalem. Jerusalem is an unbelievable place, and you can actually see the place that are being talked about. The Mount of Olives is directly above the temple. The Temple Mount, you can see exactly where it was, where the Dome of the Rock is now. It's pretty amazing to see all of it in person.

So, Bishop, one of the things that you've talked about a lot is the relationship of Jews and Christians. You've contrasted a couple of different visions of that, one Jacob Neusner's vision and one Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sachs' vision. What do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I find both those figures fascinating. I might have mentioned this during the...

our Peterson conversation, but I loved Rabbi Sachs's remark, an NT Wright, I think I read it in him, that, you know, let's face it, the Christian churches brought the God of Israel to the world. And so those texts like in Isaiah, when we, you know, what's envisioned is the coming of all the tribes of the world to the God of Israel. Well, the fact that the God of Israel has gone all over the world is, is,

from the Christian churches. And what I find interesting is that it's not just Rabbi Sacks, but that goes right back to Moses Maimonides in the Middle Ages said the same thing. And Maimonides, who had no great affection for Christians, but said, let's face it, the Christian churches have brought the Torah to the world.

And so I think it's just a fascinating bit of divine providence there that what was anticipated in the Old Testament, and I would say as a Catholic, has indeed come true through the ministration of the church, which is exactly how Paul read it. If you look at Romans 9 through 11, which is the great text on Judaism in relation to Christianity. And here's Paul, right? Rabbi Shaul, he's a Jew, and he proudly says, I'm a son of the tribe of Benjamin. And, you know, he's an Israelite's Israelite.

And he's talking in those terms about the relationship between Israel and Christianity. But that's how he saw his own mission, that he was the means by which now the Torah and the God of Israel and the commandments and the salvation offered in God would go out to the world.

So I think that's really fascinating in Rabbi Sacks, in Moses Maimonides. Neusner I also find really interesting. And he was a great friend of Benedict XVI, of Josef Ratzinger, who read him very carefully. I think they met on a number of occasions. And

I love his honesty and his directness that if he were a first century Jew listening to Jesus preach, he said, I would have found so much of it compelling and so much of it redolent of the prophets and like Hillel and all of these wonderful things. He said, though, I would have balked.

The minute he said, you've heard it said, but I say, so at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, and what he's referring to, of course, is in the Torah. Well, he's claiming an authority beyond the authority of the Torah. Or even like a little reference in the Capernaum Synagogue when he's expelling the demon, and they say,

He preaches with authority, not like the scribes. And it's a subtle reference, seems to me, to the divinity of Jesus. He's not speaking based on the authority of his teacher, who spoke on the basis of his teacher's authority, going all the way back to Moses, who received it from God. Jesus...

You've heard it said, but I say. And Neusner, I think, honestly, says, look, that's where I would have walked away because a Jew can't say that coherently. And I would say as a Christian, yeah, that's the point of demarcation. Jesus does indeed, and not just in the Gospel of John. My generation would have still learned that, that, oh, it's only in John, this high Christology, that synoptics don't—nonsense. The divinity of Jesus is affirmed

in more Jewish language, but affirmed all throughout the synoptics. And that's the point of demarcation. Was he a crazy man? Was he deluded? Was he deeply mistaken? Or was he who he said he was? And I think that's the point of demarcation fundamentally between Christians and Jews. So to go back to sort of where we stand in current society, one of the big problems for all of us in traditional religious circles is

is the declining levels of church membership, if you're Catholic, the declining levels of synagogue membership. What you are seeing is a revival in sort of traditionalist versions of this. So you can say overall the number of people going to church or synagogue is going down. Within that, the number of people who are going to traditional church and synagogue is radically increasing. That's certainly happening in the Jewish community. What you've seen over the course of modern Jewish history is more and more people falling completely out of Judaism,

They still identify as Jews and Poles, but they're not actually practicing any form of Judaism in any serious or authentic way. That might mean that they go to synagogue once a year, they fast for half the day on Yom Kippur, that kind of thing. But you are seeing a radical increase in the number of people who are going back to traditionalist synagogues, which are starting to thrive again. You're seeing that both in the United States and in Israel. You're seeing the same thing happen in Catholic churches. You're seeing overall decline in Catholic churches.

church going in places like the United States, but you are seeing an increase in the number of people who are going sort of back to more traditionalist churches and traditionalist teachings of the Catholic Church. What do you make of that? And can that continue to grow beyond sort of the boundaries that it's currently established? You're going to lure me into Catholic liturgical wars here, but let me, I'll make a general comment first from my mentor, Cardinal George of Chicago, when he referred to liberal Catholicism as an exhausted project.

And it was just the right way to describe it, I think. Cardinal George, as a younger man, was, and he would have admitted this, a liberal Catholic. But he intuited over time that it was an exhausted project, that whatever value it had, going back to people like Schleiermacher and coming up into the 20th century, as a critique, it's run out of steam.

It doesn't have persuasive power. It's a flattened-out version of Catholicism. I think what people are responding to is, okay, that liberal Catholicism is just not compelling, but a biblical Catholicism, a confident Catholicism, a colorful, unapologetic Catholicism, that is more appealing. The

The one that tells me, hey, do whatever you want, and I'm caricaturing here. I don't want to get my liberal friends mad at me, but one that is trying to make it easy. Let's make it as accessible as possible. That one's run out of steam. I think that people are disaffiliating from that, but they are finding more compelling what we've been talking about. The liberal conservative thing distorts it. So I'd use more of the language of this sort of flattened out, culturally accommodating version

versus a biblically dense and confident Catholicism or Judaism. I think that's what's appealing to people. And I get that. I see it all the time in my pastoral work. So I think we continue riding that wave. I mean, I would stay with the trajectory that you and I have been talking about. Biblical,

confident, colorful, morally rich and dense. I think that's the version of it that we want to keep propagating. So, you know, the sort of countervailing effect of that is that you've seen this, and this occurs in the Jewish community as well as in the Catholic and the Protestant community as well, is that in a sort of rebellion against sort of the watercolor version of the religion, you do see people, you know, embracing a version that is, you know,

is so sort of reactionary to that, then it moves beyond the boundaries in the other direction. So in terms of Catholicism, you do see a wing of Catholicism now that is attempting to, for example, wholesale reject Vatican II, for example. What do you make of that? No, and that's the problem. So as I've been a longtime critic of Catholic progressivism, I'm also a critic of what we call kind of the more radical traditionalism within Catholicism. And that's one of the marks, you're quite right,

I would say a disdain for the Pope, and you see that in some Catholic circles. I mean, almost a disrespect toward the Pope. But even more importantly is the rejection of an ecumenical council.

You can't do that and be a Catholic. It's as simple as that. I mean, that to us is the highest doctrinal authority there is, is a council. If you say, well, I don't like Vatican II, well, then how about Vatican I? How about Trent? How about Nicaea? How about Chalcedon? Can I pick and choose which councils I like? I've told some of the radical traditionalist Catholics, you become really a Protestant at that point. You've given up on the authority of the Church.

So that's the problem. Yeah, you can move this thing in that direction. See, one of my great heroes, of course, is John Paul II. Everything we've been talking about, he understood and believed and propagated. And he was a great student of philosophy. He loved St. Thomas Aquinas and the sciences and cultural engagement. He didn't want a sort of ghettoized Catholicism or crouching defensively behind walls. He didn't want that. He wanted a boldly confident Catholicism that goes out to meet the world

Based on Logos, that's what Ratzinger again saw, is if we're the religion of Logos, that means we can meet any scientist, we can meet any philosopher, we can meet any representative of the culture. So it's not a defensive, fearful thing.

you know, ghettoized Catholicism. That to me would be the rad trad side of it at its worst. So I don't want that. I don't want Catholic progressivism. I want what we've been talking about. That's the trajectory that I want to stay on. Well, Bishop, it's always amazing to see you. Thanks so much for the time. Thanks for the conversation. Folks, if you haven't seen Bishop Barron in Foundations of the West, you should go check it out right now at Daily Wire Plus. It's an awesome series with a lot of conversations just like this one. Bishop, really, thank you so much. Great being with you. Thanks, Ben. Thank you.

Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.

The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2024.