This is The Babylon Bee Interview Show. On The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to Bishop Robert Barron. Kyle and Ethan talk with Bishop Barron about wokism, Catholic politicians, and why he loves the Coen Brothers. Bishop Barron with his media company, Word On Fire, engages the culture with videos on movies, music, and evangelization. Bishop Barron's YouTube channel has been growing since starting in 2007 and has become a voice for Catholics in the culture. Bishop Barron has appeared in interviews with Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and many more. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans Topics Discussed Starting Word On Fire Bad advice for connecting with young people Engaging the culture creatively Self inventive culture Starting with beauty Chesterton wants more holes in your skull Religious themes in movies Affirmative orthodoxy God is revealing himself through the culture Private belief vs Public belief The modern peace treaty Propose vs imposing Mario Cuomo Catholic politicians How to lead the way in the argument against abortion Engage the people at a high level Pope Francis Libertarianism and Catholicism Classical Liberalism Marxism Subscriber Portion Chesterton Bishop Barron as a universalist Evangelization Reasonable hope Catholic teaching on grace Dare We Hope Wokeness as the greatest enemy G.K. Chesterton view on culture Buffered self Wokism takes itself too seriously Cross breaking the circle of the rationalism Pre-modernism Top five Popes 10 Questions
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Bishop Robert Barron, everybody's scaring because they don't know what to do when we're daring to interview this guy.
They're in.
Kyle has a rhyme because he wants to keep going with our Bishop Robert Barron rap.
It drives a McLaren.
I don't know.
I don't know what you're going to do.
People be staring at our YouTube Aaron.
So Bishop Robert Barron is a bishop.
And he has a website called wordonfire.org, which has become a hub for Catholic and Christian engagement with the culture.
Yeah.
He's shared dialogues with Dr. Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, William Lane Craig, and all kinds of people.
Wow.
He's got a lot of YouTube videos, but this is the best one.
This one?
Yeah, right here.
Are you complimenting our own podcast YouTube thing on the very good?
We talked about Chesterton.
We talked about people saved or not.
We talked about Marxism.
He talked about how much you can't stand all this woke stuff.
Wokeness.
We talked about whether you can be pro-abortion and a Catholic.
Spoiler alert.
Spoiler alert.
No.
Not cool with that.
Actually, I don't think he said no.
I think he said.
But you have to.
You can see what he said because I forgot already.
Yeah.
Very nuanced.
But anyways, he's the most concise, quick answer guy.
Like, it's crazy.
Like, he's one of those guys where you could come up to him and be like, papayas.
And then he would just go like, the history of the papaya began in the 17th century and it really is related to cultural Marxism.
And then he would just give a really smart answer to a really dumb question.
And that's great for us because we ask a lot of dumb questions.
And then it's concise.
That's the thing I can come back to.
I was always amazed how quickly he was done.
He said so much.
Yeah, and it's not that his answers were short necessarily.
It's that he packed so much into an answer.
Yeah.
It's almost like he's smart.
Yeah, it's like he's smart and stuff.
Anyway, we've been really excited to have Bishop Aaron on.
We've been anticipating this for a while.
And here it is.
Bishop Robert Barron.
Join us.
Bishop Baron, thanks for coming on.
It's great to have you.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me, guys.
Yeah, this is awesome.
It feels like a sitcom.
Does it?
Two Protestants and a Catholic.
I don't know.
Well, in the office, we have three, four.
Well, it depends how many, but yeah, I guess our office.
We have a token Catholic here.
The guy cackling in the background is our cackling Catholic Patty.
Just one Catholic in the group?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So where do we begin?
All my Catholic friends, you're like a rock star.
Was that right?
So I guess that's my question.
I mean, you're huge on YouTube.
You're killing it.
And you're this like bishop guy in like a white collar thing and everything.
And it's just impressive to me that like you're reaching all these people.
Well, I'll tell you a story about the collar.
When I first started back in like 2007, right after YouTube came into being, we got on.
And we had this guy who was a consultant.
And I started with the collar and a bookshelf behind me.
And he said, Father, my recommendation, lose the collar, get rid of the bookshelf, just wear casual clothes.
And I'm not making this up.
He said, it might be good if you came in on a skateboard or something.
So happily, I rejected that.
And we stayed pretty much all these years with the collar and the bookshelf.
But see, I think that does prove something, you know, because I grew up in the time when pandering to young people was all the rage, you know?
And I think that's crazy.
I think young people respond when you're passionate about something and you're smart about it.
I think they respond to it.
So I'm glad I rejected the consultants.
Can you skateboard?
No.
I need some training.
Yeah, I needed some special assistance.
Yeah, well, now like dressing up like a priest and having books behind you is the new rebellion.
I mean, nowadays.
Now that makes you count.
That's right.
That probably looks hip or something.
Well, I mean, it does feel like a crazy time culturally.
And I know a lot of us are kind of wondering what to make of things.
And you talk a lot about culture.
You talk a lot about how Christians can engage culture, what kind of things we can do.
So, I mean, I guess that's a broad question.
But as a starting point, like, how do you see, where do you see Christians in this current cultural, I don't know if you want to call it a culture war or you just want to call it a discussion around the culture, but what are some starting points for how we can engage culture?
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think Christians at their best, I mean, across the 2,000 years, have always engaged the culture creatively.
It doesn't mean you cave into it.
We've always had critics of the culture because you have to resist, you know, what's antipathetic to the gospel.
But our best people from Origin and John Chrysostom through Thomas Aquinas and everybody else have engaged the culture creatively.
And they look to the philosophy of the time, et cetera.
So I think it's the same situation today.
There are a lot of things we have to resist.
I think Christians should stand athwart a lot of elements of the culture, but then we should also engage it positively when we can.
So that's been sort of my modus operandi.
I think really maybe the most important thing right now, we live in a culture of self-invention.
So the default position I'd say of most young people today is I invent myself.
I make up my values.
I make up my truth.
I define who I am.
And that is antipathetic to the gospel, which is announcing something objective.
There's something objectively true and morally right, et cetera.
And the church has to keep proclaiming that because that's what actually liberates us.
And this philosophy of self-invention is debilitating.
And I find people falling into depression all the time over that.
If I got to make up this project as I go along, I mean, God help us.
So I think we got to keep saying, your life is not about you.
It's not your little project.
It's God's project.
And you're part of this story that is so much more interesting than whatever you're going to come up with.
So I think Christians, and this is across the denominational lines, we should make common cause in announcing that to the culture of self-invention.
So that's where I really stand athwart the culture, even as I'm very happy to engage it positively too.
How do you even start to convey that message to this culture that self-invention is bad?
Because that is held to so firmly to even be able to point out.
No, I agree.
And I trace it back to people like Nietzsche in the 19th century, come up to Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century, Michel Foucault in more recent years.
that was sort of high level philosophical musing at one time.
Now it's already when you start saying that, but it, But they're in the minds of young people.
They don't know the source.
They can't name the sources.
But that philosophy for sure, you know, when Sartre says existence precedes essence, that's his definition of existentialism.
That means my freedom comes first, and then I decide who I am.
Well, that's the default position of every high school kid in America, it seems to me.
They're all existentialists in that way.
Or, you know, Nietzsche, there are no objective values.
It's just you assert your will to power.
That's also, I think, the standard position of most young people today.
I think what you do is you show how compelling and beautiful the Christian alternative is.
And that this whole self-invention thing leaves you in this sort of vacuum or this echo chamber.
You know, I'm inventing my values.
I'm affirming myself.
It locks you in this really dull space.
And Christianity is like an adventure.
It's, you know, it's like, which one of you likes Chesterton?
G.K. Chesterton.
Well, both of us, but mostly.
He's got a Chester.
He's got a two on his lower back.
That's exactly what Chesterton saw over 100 years ago is he saw the beginnings of this.
And he said, you got to knock holes in your skull to let in some light because he saw that this rationalism of his own time was an echo chamber.
Well, that's what our self-invention culture is today, I think.
So I'm with Chesterton.
Knock some holes in your skull and let in some light.
You were asking earlier what my religion is.
It might be just G.K. Chestertonian.
We'd have that in common.
I discovered him a long time ago.
I love Chesterton.
Well, I mean, one of the problems, though, is I think Christians tend to be very reactionary in the space.
Like we don't, we look at bad ideas or bad, you know, liberal art and we go, oh, that's terrible.
And then that's our whole, or we just get outraged about it.
You look at Christians of the past, like Tolkien or, you know, even Chesterton that were right, they were writing beautiful fiction that made a positive case for goodness and truth and beauty.
And you don't see that.
I don't know why that is.
I don't know if you have an answer, but I mean, I don't know, you don't see that as much anymore today.
Or maybe you do know some good examples of Catholics, Christians who have done that kind of thing.
No, I think you're right.
And yeah, Tolkien and company and Chesterton and Lewis in their own way, they were trying to do that.
One of my strategies, and I started with this a long time ago on YouTube, was to look at films, especially that are out there, because films have such an impact on people, and say, look, there are a lot of religious themes that are implicitly in these movies.
And I would try to bring that out.
So my approach tended to be more positive is say, okay, what in the culture is redolent of Christianity?
Now, you know, there is a no that we have to say to certain elements in the culture, but I've tended to say what they call affirmative orthodoxy, like kind of say what's positive and what's the yes that we can find even in the culture.
So yeah, I believe in that.
What kind of lines do you draw?
I'm always interested in, you know, because I grew up in the, you know, Christians just drew lines that like, oh, it's R-rated, you don't watch it.
Or, you know, one thing I love about Catholics is you guys have like a really, you're very methodical and plan thought out on all of your, I don't know if rules is the right way to put it, but, you know.
So what kind of guidelines do you have for a content that you take in when you are looking at all this cultural stuff?
Well, it just depends on the person's age and experience.
I mean, I'm not going to tell a kid to go see a Cohen Brothers movie, but I hope that an adult, mature, intelligent Catholic should go to a Cohen Brothers movie and find all sorts of marvelous things.
I mean, one of my favorite movies is Gran Torino of Clint Eastwood.
I mean, the most probably politically incorrect figure you could imagine.
But there is no better presentation of the Christ figure, seems to me, in the last 25 years of cinema.
Now, I wouldn't say to Parents with young kids.
Oh, yeah, bring the kids to Gran Torino.
But I want, sure, mature, adult, intelligent Christians to go to a movie like that.
I used to tell my students, I was a professor for a long time at the seminary.
I said, we evangelizers can't afford to be puritanical when it comes to the culture.
It's not going to serve us, you know?
We have to be able to go into it and find the elements of truth and so on.
And I used to tell them, I'd say, you know, Jesus undoubtedly heard the Aramaic version of the F word.
I mean, that he would have heard whatever the most obscene.
And my point was, you can't be so fussy that, oh my gosh, they use the F word in a movie.
So, you know, as a Christian, I can't watch it.
Well, then, you know, you're not going to take in much of Chaucer.
You won't take in a lot of Shakespeare.
You won't take in Flannery O'Connor in the 20th century.
You won't take in the Cohen brothers.
And that's a tragedy, you know?
So don't bring young kids to it, of course, but I think we've got to engage it intelligently.
Yeah, you wouldn't be able to watch Eight Mile, and that'd be a real tragedy.
I actually did see Eight Mile.
No, but here's the thing, too.
You would not read the Bible.
So I've had people over the years, obviously, and I'll review a movie like Scorsese's The Departed or Cohen Brothers or something.
And Bishop, how could you be going to this movie that features, you know, fill in the blank, all these bad things?
And my standard response is: have you read the Bible recently?
The Bible that has in it, you know, rape and incest and masturbation and genocide.
And I mean, come on, it's life.
And God is revealing himself precisely in all the, you know, muck and mess of the human condition.
So we can't afford to be that puritanical if we're biblical people.
Come on.
Yeah.
Well, part of what inspired that question: I heard you talking about Game of Thrones in one of your interviews.
And that's what made me go, like, because, you know, you guys have celibacy and like, you know, and then you're watching Game of Thrones.
Like, how's that?
Are you watching Game of Thrones?
That's my question.
Well, sure.
And I hope I'm mature enough in my celibate commitment that watching a movie on TV is not going to compromise my life.
I'm not calling on anything.
I'm just like interested in what you're.
No, it's.
Yeah.
Right.
But heck, you know, the violence of Game of Thrones.
Read that.
You read the book of Joshua recently or the book of Judges?
The book of Judges.
I'm doing a Bible commentary right now.
The book of Judges is a lot like a Scorsese film.
Look at the end of the book of Judges.
Involves the murdering of a prostitute and then her dismemberment and sending the pieces of the body around the country.
That's how the book of Judges ends.
Well, I mean, say what you want about that.
It's not, you know, like a nice, cute story for kids, but it's God speaking through, you know, that's as gross as anything in Game of Thrones.
And so we can't be that puritanical.
I like the idea that he watches Game of Thrones and he's like, well, strip off the collar.
Give up the commitment.
That's not what I meant.
So, I mean, I don't know how related this is.
It feels related.
But there's this kind of cultural idea that Christians should be, we can believe whatever we want in private, but we can't let that affect how we work.
We can't let that affect our politics.
You know, for politicians like Amy Coney Barrett, it was like, well, what if she lets her beliefs affect how she rules from the bench?
But it's kind of this one-sided thing where that's only said of Christians.
That's not said of people who subscribe to existentialist or secular philosophies.
How do you respond to something like that?
Well, I'm against it.
I mean, that's the, call it modern peace treaty.
I think Stanley Hauerwass, the great Methodist theologian, put it that way, that at the beginning of modernity, a kind of peace treaty was made.
Like, we'll tolerate you religious types as long as you remain private.
So you can whisper your religion among yourselves, but don't come out in public.
The public space should be, you know, kind of religiously neutral.
Well, I mean, the best and brightest people in our own tradition have always resisted that because Christianity can't exist that way.
It's not simply a private reality.
It has to do with God.
It has to do with the declaration of the lordship of Jesus.
And that means lordship over every aspect of life.
So we can't accept the modern peace treaty that simply privatizes religion as a kind of hobby.
Now, the line to draw there, John Paul II said this, you know, that religion at its best never imposes, it only proposes.
So certainly you don't want an imposing religion in the public space.
Like, I'm going to make you become Catholic, or I'm going to make a law saying you must go to Mass on Sunday.
But our capacity to propose our religion in the public space, to live it, to live out the moral implications of it, yeah.
I mean, we have to claim that, it seems to me.
So that's the space I think that we have to move into.
But the modern peace treaty, that gets reasserted a lot, is we'll tolerate you, you know, somewhat crazy people, as long as you keep yourselves private.
But we can't abide that.
So what about pro-choice Catholics?
You got politicians that are Catholics.
You got the current president.
What do you make of that stuff?
I'm against it.
No, but it's not a consistent position to hold.
I mean, you can't be a consistent Catholic and say, I'm also pro-choice on the abortion issue.
You know, and also the only thing I've noticed on that, because I've lived long enough to go from Mario Cuomo to his son, Andrew Cuomo.
And I remember Mario Cuomo in the 80s, you know, and I'm, look, I am really opposed to this as a Catholic, but, you know, publicly, I kind of grudgingly accept it because of, you know, whatever.
So the, you know, I'm personally opposed, but publicly kind of, well, you go from that, a kind of reluctant, you know, acceptance to his son, who when they pass the most, you know, egregiously brutal abortion law in the country, we're lighting up the Empire State Building.
We're having a public celebration over it.
I remember Bill Clinton and company, you know, abortion should be legal, safe, and rare.
Well, heck, I take that today as a step in the right direction.
Now it's like, hey, let's have a party when we pass the most brutal, even this happened just a few days ago, when they considered again this amendment that would say, hey, how about if a child somehow survives an abortion procedure and is lying on the table, shouldn't we do something to save that baby's life?
And the answer was no.
Well, I mean, to my mind, that's just barbarism, you know?
So, and I say that not as a Catholic, I say, I think, I hope as a decent person, I'm saying that, appealing to people's moral sensibility.
But that's my thinking on that.
I don't think it's a consistent position for a Catholic to hold.
No.
Well, what are good ways for Christians to make that argument in the culture?
I know there's people who feel like we should make the scientific argument.
I know there's a lot of Catholics tend to lead the way on this in terms of the pro-life organizations and fighting that battle.
I mean, are we making the right arguments?
Are we having the right discussions?
What are some ways we can do that?
Yeah, you know, it's a good question because we've been making the argument in a way for a long time.
Let's say ever since Roe v. Wade, we've been making the argument.
And I think we have very good arguments based on biology, based on embryology, et cetera, that human life recognizably begins at conception, I think is a very defensible position.
So we've been making that argument.
I think, you know, you're up against an ideological position where people are not responding so much to reason.
They're caught in ideology.
And I'll go back to what I said a few minutes ago.
Heck, at this point, I take it if you said, hey, why don't we say the baby on the table that survived an abortion procedure should be saved?
I'll get behind that bill.
I'll get behind, why don't we eliminate partial birth abortion?
I'll get behind it, step in the right direction.
How about we limit, which, again, I'm old enough to remember when Democratic politicians were saying, look, why don't we just say, you know, first trimester, but then after that.
Sure, I'll accept any of these limitations.
That's a step in the right direction.
So you keep making the argument.
You keep pressing it legally, as I've been suggesting.
And I think you witness, I think it's maybe the most powerful thing is, again, I'll mention Hauerwass here.
Hauerwass appeared before Congress many years ago as a Methodist theologian, and they asked him, what's your argument against abortion?
And he said, Christians don't kill their children.
Now, what he was doing there on purpose was not appealing to science or to even like natural law.
He was saying, look, I'm a Christian.
I'm a Christian in the public space.
I'm here to tell you Christians don't kill their children.
That's my argument.
Now, as a Catholic, I certainly accept natural law and the use of philosophy and all that.
But I also think that's a cool Christian witness is to say what the early Christians, go back to the early centuries, when Romans would expose the children on the hillside if there was a child that was deformed in some way or unacceptable.
And Christians said, we're not going to do that.
And people said, hey, how these Christians love one another.
And that had a huge impact on evangelization.
So that's important too, I think, just our witness.
Yeah.
It's difficult for me because I do what you're talking about here is that people are not convinced by these arguments in a lot of ways because they have bought into an underlying philosophy and they don't even know what it is or they don't even know where it comes from.
And like he was, you know, Ethan was saying, it's not a very convincing argument.
You've already lost them when you start talking about Nietzsche, you know, because they're like, what are you even talking about?
You know, but they do have these philosophies from Marx and Nietzsche and the other guys you mentioned that are informing this worldview.
And we need, it's like we need to wake Christians up to understand the culture before we can even engage it.
But how do you get people to read dead guys from the 19th and 20th centuries?
I don't know.
No, you don't have to.
I've got a question in there, but it's difficult.
No, I get that.
But what I'd say is that some people, yeah, use a skateboard, I'd say, with Nietzsche.
You know, that's going to work.
No, I think some people should actually read Nietzsche and company and Michel Foucault.
So people like me, you know, I was a theology professor for a long time, philosophy professor.
So people like me, good.
We should read those texts and understand them, but then translate them and interpret them for a wider public.
So, I mean, I will talk about these themes often without mentioning any of these people.
That's not the point.
But the idea, as I said, is in the minds of almost every 17-year-old.
So they can understand Nietzsche in his sort of distilled form.
So it's important that some of us in the Christian world really engage those people at the high level.
But then we got to do a kind of a translation move.
And that's okay.
We've been doing that for 2,000 years.
Yeah.
Are you seeing the effects of like Marxism and existentialism in the church?
I mean, especially among the young people?
Is this something that you're constantly having to engage with?
Well, I think that was actually more common maybe years ago when I was coming of age.
So right after Vatican II, for us, that's a big watershed, the Second Vatican Council.
And in those years after Vatican II, like the late 60s into the 70s, there was kind of a very left-wing Catholicism that was holding sway.
And yeah, some of those influences got into the church.
I think during the John Paul II and Benedict years, a lot of that was kind of dealt with.
I think it was argued away.
Some of it coming back, maybe, but I don't see it as much in the church as in the wider society.
My fear is disaffiliation, is young people are leaving the church in massive numbers.
So that's been a major concern of mine is why are they leaving and how do we get them back?
Do you feel that the this is a hard one because I'm not a Catholic, obviously.
And then I so I asked my friend who's a Catholic what he would ask you and then he asked me yeah he gave me questions I don't fully understand the context of.
But like he asked, does the USCCB have appropriate priorities?
And he said the same question for Pope Francis.
I know he's implying to me that he feels like there's a leftward leaning thing going on there.
Do you feel like they address these issues properly or do they veer off to other issues?
I guess I don't know.
You can make the question better, I guess.
Well, stay with Pope Francis for a minute.
You know, every pope is different in personality and style and emphasis, and he's different than Benedict and John Paul II.
But would Francis, for example, he stands absolutely opposed to abortion.
I can give you these texts of his that are really fierce on that.
He's against the gender ideology.
In fact, we met right before COVID.
The bishops of California went to Rome for what's called the ad limina visit.
That means to the threshold.
So you go and you visit with the pope.
And we had three hours with him.
And he said, ask me whatever you want.
So we just talked to him for three hours.
He was like really strong against the whole kind of gender ideology movement.
So on those issues, I think he's perfectly clear.
Is he kind of more naturally given to economic issues, concerns about the poor, about immigration, about climate change and all that?
Yeah, he is.
Now, Pope Benedict, who was known as more conservative, Benedict was known as the green pope because he installed solar panels in the Vatican, et cetera.
He was talking a lot about the environment.
So did John Paul II.
So famously, Catholic social teaching, we call it, our sort of political teaching, covers the gamut.
I mean, it's not left or right.
It simply does not fit into our left-right categories.
So I don't know.
I think Francis maybe is naturally a little more given to what you might call left issues, but he covers the range left to right of Catholic social teaching.
We have a friend named Seamus who is a Catholic.
He's a cartoonist.
He said he's as libertarian as his Catholicism will allow him to be.
I'm just curious, what does that mean?
Do you think libertarianism aligns enough with Catholicism or where does it run into problems?
Well, it's a matter of definitions there too, I suppose, but I wouldn't be all that sympathetic with a libertarian view, which to me is very much of a modernism that puts too much of a stress on kind of that self-invention, that it's my freedom and it's my determination.
The church holds out, I think, a biblical view of liberty.
And this brings us close to the great reformers, too, because for the Bible, freedom is not self-determination.
So Paul will say, it's for freedom that Christ has set me free.
But Paul doesn't mean, you know, I can do whatever I want.
Because he also says, I'm the slave of Christ Jesus.
Well, see, modern people, they don't know what to make of that.
How can you be anyone's slave and be free?
Well, it made perfect sense for Paul because under the lordship of Christ, he was now freed from all of his attachments and all of his sin and so on.
But it was his submission to Christ that liberated him.
So I would follow that line.
I mean, our liberty, indeed, is found in surrender to Christ.
And so it's not a matter of I've decided and this is, it's up to me.
Now, another shade on this, another side of the libertarian thing would be suspicion of a government that wants to be too manipulative and too involved in every aspect of life.
And Catholic social teaching likes that too, because it talks about subsidiarity, that things should be left at a more local level.
Government shouldn't be like fussily involved in every aspect of life.
So to that degree, I'd say, yeah, I'd be kind of with some of the libertarian views.
So anyway, that's, you know, it all depends on how we're defining our terms, I suppose.
Sure.
But do you see like the Enlightenment idea of like classical liberalism being fundamentally at odds with Catholicism, or does that come from a healthy and a balanced understanding of God and human will?
The best of it does.
And it's a very important point because, you know, one thing I hate today is the whole woke thing.
Wokeism is a vile movement in my judgment.
And compared to wokeism, I'll take classical liberalism any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
It's infinitely better than wokeism, which is based in Nietzsche and Foucault and all those people and is an antagonistic social theory and it wants equality of outcome and all these things that are really inimical.
Classical liberalism, if you define it as things like equality of opportunity, respect for the rights of the individual, the equality of all people under God.
So I'd always add that caveat and I'd insist upon Jefferson's language that we have these rights from God.
We are equal as children of God because look, we're not equal, any of us, in skill or beauty or talent or athleticism or anything.
We're all radically unequal.
So how the heck are we equal?
And the real classical liberals, I think, understood were equally children of God.
So if all that's in place, yeah, I love it.
I love classical liberalism.
What happens is it can morph easily enough into a kind of libertarianism or into a sort of a self-assertive when you start taking the divine element out of it, you know?
But so on my little spectrum, wokeism I hate.
I think that's really bad news.
Classical liberalism, 100% better.
Catholicism and a richly Catholic understanding of social life, better still.
But we can talk about that for a couple of hours.
So you did your master's thesis, I think, I think I got that right, on Karl Marx.
Yeah.
And, you know, the word Marxism gets thrown around quite a bit these days.
You know, that's like kind of the right-wing thing to just shout Marxism at everything.
Yeah.
Where do you see it being correctly, you know, Karl Marx's influence, but also do you feel like there's any places where that's overused?
Where does it get an overstep?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, if you say anything left of center is Marxist, well, that's not right, of course.
I mean, Marxism, you could say state control of the means of production.
You could talk about Marx's pure communism.
You could talk about Marx's very reductive view of the human being.
Well, I don't think Joe Biden has any of that.
I mean, that Joe Biden or like the classic Democrats are Marxists.
That's not true.
Now, there are people today that self-identify as socialists, and so they get closer to Marx.
Now, not all the way, even like a Bernie Sanders or AOC, they're not Marxists in the pure sense, though they're trending a bit in that direction.
So, yeah, we probably overuse the term.
It's a pretty technical description.
You have to understand Marx's basic moves.
And they're, you know, like the denial of God is essential to real Marxism, it seems to me.
Marx thought it was the first critique.
Before you get to economics and politics, you've got to get rid of God because religion is the opium of the masses.
And as long as religion's around, they're going to be drugged into complacency.
They're not going to want to change anything.
There won't be a revolution.
So get rid of God first.
I mean, I think that's elemental to Marxism in the full sense.
But then it's, you know, the state control, the means of production, it's the elimination of private property, all that stuff.
There aren't many people in our situation that would adopt that entire program, it seems to me.
So we're probably overusing it that way.
There's like the cultural Marxism talk.
Do you think that there's you see validity to that talk?
You know, where it's yeah, now they're right.
Like in some of the movements on the scene today, there are Marxist elements, to be sure.
And some of that is in that what I referred to earlier as antagonistic social theory.
So Marx wants to stir up antagonism.
That's the whole purpose of the Marxist intellectual is to stir up, in his case, the proletariat, so that it engages in active rebellion.
Marx is a Hegelian, so he sees, you know, thesis, antithesis, and when the two clash, we get the synthesis.
So he wants that.
He wants there to be conflict.
And Catholic social teaching is a non-antagonistic social theory.
You know, it's based on the kind of a complementary understanding of the classes and so on.
So I think those elements are there.
And even the use of violence, the condoning of violence, that's certainly true of Karl Marx.
So there are those elements in it.
And also the questioning of religion.
In some of the social movements today, you definitely see hostility toward religion, that we're part of the problem, that we're part of the establishment that has to be done away with.
That's got a Marxist flavor, to be sure.
Sure.
All right.
Well, we're going to move into our subscriber portion.
And Bishop Aaron's going to tell us how to defeat Marx once and for all.
We're going to grill him.
We're going to grill him on being a universalist, apparently.
Oh, on the internet.
Hard.
Grill him so hard.
And then we'll talk about G.K. Chesterton.
Okay.
Let's do it.
Grill him on GK Chesterton.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
He says you have some detractors claiming that you're virtually universalist, that everyone has a reasonable hope of being saved, and that you would say like Catholicism and Christianity are like preferred path.
Yeah, I'll talk about both of those.
What do you think Chesterton would make of Donald Trump?
But I think that's what you're saying is right: that wokeism now is a common enemy of a lot of us who just hold to classical values.
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