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March 31, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:42
Matt Walsh | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 44
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I would rather have a church that becomes condensed and much smaller, but what you have left with the remnants are people who are really on fire with the faith, really believe in it.
And so I say that's fine.
Trim the fat.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
We'll be joined momentarily by the man more dour than I, Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire.
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All right, Matt Walsh, thanks so much for joining the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
Thanks for having me.
I mean, not that you had much of a choice in this.
Yeah, I know.
I feel like you're scraping the bottom of the barrel a little bit having me on here, but I mean, I appreciate it.
Okay, well, for those of us who don't know anything about your background except that you sit in cars and have a beard and are dour, what's your background?
How did you get to the point where you get paid to sit in cars and write columns and be dour and have a beard?
You know, it's a really uninteresting story, but I think it began with I was kind of a terrible student.
People ask me all the time, did you go to college and what did you go to college for?
Did you go to college for singing in cars and screaming into a phone?
And the answer is no.
I didn't go to college.
I was a pretty bad student.
Barely graduated high school.
I don't know why I'm mentioning all this, but it's true.
In fact, I didn't even know that I was going to graduate high school until the way that I found out is I went to the graduation rehearsal, which for some reason you have to rehearse walking across the stage.
And I knew that if I went to the rehearsal and my name was on a seat, so I had an assigned seat, then I'm going to graduate and I'm going to get to, and so it was.
And so that was that story.
And I kind of bounced around for a while, but I knew that I wanted to somehow sort of be engaged in the conversation on a public level.
I didn't really know how to go about doing that, so I figured maybe one way is to get into radio, which is what I did for about seven years.
I got into just music radio.
I was a music DJ and making about $17,000 a year doing that.
Basically poverty wages and at some point I realized that this is not you know it's it's hard to climb your way up in terrestrial radio these days so you had to get online and I started a website called the Matt Walsh blog which was very creatively titled and after about six months it just kind of took off and I had you know I was getting a couple million readers a
So, you're known for not only being very caustic, but obviously being very religious.
So, what is your religious background?
We'll get into religion a little bit more deeply a little bit later in the show, but what's your religious background?
What's your belief system?
Yeah, I'm Catholic, so I grew up very Catholic, very conservative Catholic.
I've got, you know, five brothers and sisters, and one of my sisters is a nun now, so that's the kind of Catholic family that we have.
But I grew up in a very kind of liberal area, going to public school, so You had to, you know, your parents had to instill in you the ability to defend, not just the ability to defend your beliefs, but also the willingness and sort of finding joy in that argument.
So I think that's kind of where I got it from.
And how did all of this impact on your politics?
So you're a conservative, obviously.
You were not a super pro-Trump conservative during 2016.
So how does your worldview shape your political views?
Well, you know, for me the first objective for everyone is to get to heaven, right?
That's the first objective is our spiritual fulfillment.
So, that to me is number one before you get to politics or anything like that.
And this is You know, one of the problems I see in the conservative movement now is it seems like it's not really grounded in anything like maybe it used to be.
Grounded in those deeper kind of spiritual moral truths.
So I think it's got to be kind of ground up from there.
What are your fundamental beliefs?
And that is, why are we here?
What's the point of life?
What's the point of any of this?
I think those are the questions you have to be able to answer, and then once you can answer those questions, then you sort of build your political framework on top of that.
So, from a religious point of view, when you say that the goal is to get to heaven, are you a belief-based person?
I mean, is it that you believe in Christ and therefore you go to heaven, or is it a works-based thing?
Because obviously this is sort of a differentiator between Judaism and Christianity in some iterations.
Yeah, I think, well, and I don't mean to dismiss like 500 years of fighting between Protestants and Catholics, but I kind of think that at least between Protestants and Catholics, the works versus faith dichotomy, it's kind of a misunderstanding.
Because I think we actually generally agree in that I certainly don't believe that the whole point of life is just to intellectually assent to the proposition that Jesus Christ So people say that all you have to do is believe in Jesus or all you have to do is believe in God.
I definitely don't believe that.
But, if we want to talk about faith, okay, well you have to put your faith in God.
That is more than an intellectual exercise.
That is something that you do with your whole life and your whole mind and soul and body, that you're investing yourself in this belief.
And that includes works, but it's not as though You know, you give a certain amount to charity and you help old ladies across the street and you go to heaven.
It's not as simple as that.
So it's kind of a combination of the two.
The way that I see it, it's sort of like, you know, if God is a bridge into heaven, into the afterlife, you can't just walk up to the bridge and say, yes, I believe that the bridge is there.
I ascent to the existence of the bridge and then just go and sit on the other side of the bridge and not cross it.
You actually have to Trust the bridge and with your own effort walk across it, over the abyss.
And so I think it's sort of, that's what faith is.
So when it comes to your view of the afterlife, what cultivated that?
Where do you get your view of heaven?
What do you think heaven looks like?
And what makes you believe that there is something after we die?
Well, you know, I get it from my faith primarily, but of course, you know, when you read the Bible, There isn't a lot in terms of description of what the afterlife is actually going to look like and everything that it entails.
So, you know, I think if you look at, if you look at, you have to look at Christian philosophy through the ages and how they've sort of developed this idea.
One For me, in terms of my thinking about the afterlife, for me the most influential thing that I've read besides the Bible would be C.S.
Lewis' Great Divorce.
I don't know if you've read that.
I don't know how biblical it really is, but what I like about what's in that book is what he does is he's able to really illustrate how it is That a person might choose hell instead of heaven.
Because the only thing that makes sense for me, in terms of hell, is, well, it's not so much that God sends you there.
Even if you really want to go to heaven, God says, no, you know, you did this, you did that, that was wrong, and now you have to go roast in the eternal fires for 50 trillion years, and then you haven't even started at that point.
So that sort of version has never really made sense to me.
What does make sense, And what you'll hear Christians say a lot is, well, no, God doesn't send you to hell, you choose it.
Okay.
Well, all right, then it seems more just, but what does it mean to choose hell?
How could anyone ever choose hell when they know that eternal joy is on offer?
And anyway, in the book Great Divorce, I think he does a good job of showing what that might sort of look like, or why a person might actually choose hell.
Uh, rather than heaven.
And it all comes from, uh, are you interested?
Are you able to find joy outside of yourself?
Or, um, have you only ever been able to figure out how to pursue your own interests?
And if that's what it is, if you're only interested in yourself, then God will say, okay, well you want yourself.
That's all you want.
That's all you love.
Then have yourself in isolation for eternity.
That's what you want.
Yeah, there's a Talmudic tale that sort of says something similar.
The Talmudic tale is that there's a bunch of rabbis.
It's the afterlife.
There's a bunch of rabbis trying to figure out what's heaven and what's hell.
And basically, hell is a bunch of people who are sitting around a table, and there's these amazing foods that are on the table.
And all that is in front of people are spoons that are too long for them to actually take the spoon and put it in the food and get it to their mouth.
It's too long.
They just can't reach it.
The spoon is too lengthy.
And heaven is the people have realized that the spoon is too long for their own mouth, so they're feeding each other.
Right.
It's being able to look beyond yourself.
And so the question that I always ask myself, and I was talking to some people in my family about this recently, is, Is it possible for someone who loves anyone to go to hell?
Even if you have someone who didn't really believe in God, wasn't religious, but let's say they really did love their wife and they really did love their child.
Not just that emotional affection, but actually love them.
Is it even possible, metaphysically, for that person to go to hell, considering that they have love in them?
And if hell is a place where no love can be, then how could that person be there?
And I guess it seems to me that if you figure out how to love anyone outside of yourself during your life, then I think that's something God can take and work with.
And those are little embers of something that he can ignite into a fire, in a good sense.
So that's sort of the objective of life, is to love.
Love and do what you will, as Augustine, I think, said.
Very often.
I hear, you know, Christians say things like, God is love.
And the Jew in me goes, well, he's a little more than that.
What's your take on the sort of boiling down of Christianity to the sort of trope that God is love?
What does that mean?
And what is that supposed to mean?
Or is there something beyond that?
I think that that statement is only problematic in our society because we have such an absurd view of what love is.
A shallow view, I should say.
We think of love as just an emotional attachment.
And so very often when we say we love someone, it's really about us.
What we love about them is how they make us feel when we're with them.
But that's not actually what love is.
I think it was Aquinas who said, love is willing the good of the other.
That's what it means to love someone.
It's a very kind of simple way of looking at it.
If you really want what is best for them, in every sense, spiritually as well, and you're going to work as much as you can to help them bring that about in their own life, then you love them.
And so, if we think of love in that sense, number one as a choice, as a force of will, Um, then I think God is love kind of works.
Although I, although I think maybe it's just better to say God is all loving.
Uh, maybe when you say God is love, it just becomes sort of confusing.
Love is God, right?
Exactly.
Love is God.
It becomes a sort of pantheistic thing of we're all, we are all God ourselves if we love and you know, just weird stuff.
So I think God, God is loving is the best way of putting it, I think.
Yeah, certainly in the Jewish view, when it comes to the notion of love being giving, that's actually embedded in the Hebrew of ahavah.
Ahavah is the Hebrew word for love, and hav, the root of hey and bet, means gift.
So it's actually embedded in the word ahavah.
So when it comes to, you know, you write a lot about politics.
How do you separate out talking about religion from talking about politics?
When should you speak in sort of a religious moral sense, and when should you speak in kind of a secular sense, when you're trying to make an argument?
Yeah, that's a good question.
It's a balance I am still struggling to strike myself.
I can't say that I always do the best job of it.
But I do know that when it comes to these great moral issues in our society, like abortion, marriage, gender, that we have to be able to engage on those issues without throwing the Bible at people, especially if we're talking to people who don't Believe in the Bible.
Because when you try to go the biblical route, you're talking to someone who doesn't believe in it, well then you've just put an extra step in your way, which is first you have to get them to believe the Bible, which is a whole different conversation, and a pretty difficult one.
So, I think that that's not the route.
Instead, you have to talk about these natural laws, these fundamental moral truths that you have to try to connect with them on.
And also logic and reason.
It's something like, I always cringe when I hear, when the topic is something like transgenderism, and I hear a Christian say, you know, quote Genesis or something and say, well, God, male and female, he created them.
I say, yes, that's true, but we don't even, you don't need to bring Genesis into this.
This is a very basic logical distinction between you got men here, women here, men have penises.
So, you know, you should be able to explain that without quoting Genesis.
And you also give, I think, your listener an easy out, because then they're going to say, oh, you're just tossing a Bible at me, I'm not going to listen to that.
Or they'll say that, well, you know, you only disagree with abortion because you're Christian, or you're only saying that because you're Christian.
When really, no, even if I was not a Christian, I still would say it's not okay to kill babies, you know.
So, I think that on that level we have to be able to connect without religion.
Although, at the same time, within the religions, certainly within Christianity, there are a lot of Christians who are very confused on these issues and who think that it's okay to be a Christian and endorse the killing of babies.
And in that case, okay, now you're going to start throwing scripture at them, and now you're really coming with the, you know, the holy, now it's a holy war, because this is someone that already supposedly agrees with the basic religious premise.
What do you think has happened to religious leadership generally?
So I know that a lot of religious people, you do it, I do it, we sort of lament the fall of religious leadership, the feel that churches and synagogues are emptying out in many ways, that too many religious leaders have decided to give sort of rote General statements about the Bible rather than some of the hard-nosed truths of the Bible.
What do you think the religious community is doing wrong?
What can we do better?
I could say, certainly with Christians, what are they doing wrong?
I mean, that's a two-hour conversation alone right there.
I think that maybe the best way to condense it is to say that Churches, church leadership, they're trying too much to look like secular society and they're thinking that that's the way to bring people in and you see that even when you go to a lot of Christian supposed church services and you walk in and You might not even know that you're in a church.
In fact, I remember a few years ago, I went with my wife when we were living in Kentucky, and there was this weird structure that had been built near our house.
We had no idea what it was.
We thought it was a mall.
It was our best guess.
And so we went one Sunday after we went to a real church, we said, let's go check out this mall.
We walk in, and we're looking around.
We're a little bit confused, and then we realize in about 10 minutes that it's actually a church.
So, it shouldn't be that way.
This is a church that is trying to blend in with the world, as Christians would put it.
But then once you do that, it's like, what's the point?
What are you offering?
If you're aping secular society, and you're offering secular platitudes, and secular lessons, and you're giving motivational speeches, and giving financial advice, and all of these things that you get in sermons these days, Well, if somebody wants that, then why would they even go to a church?
Just go to a Tony Robbins seminar.
Go watch Oprah.
Go to an actual mall.
I mean, go do anything.
Go walk on a beach.
I mean, there are so many other things you could do if you just want sort of non-religious, secular enjoyment and encouragement.
So, you have to give people something different because that's what people are Hungering for it.
We're all living in this secular society.
None of us are happy with it.
I'm especially unhappy with everything.
But, you know, everyone's a little bit unhappy at least.
And so we're looking for something different, something substantive.
And so religion should be there to offer that thing.
And I would say that, from my experience, I go to a Latin Mass Church, which is the super, you know, crazy traditional women wear, have head coverings and all of that kind of stuff.
And it's a very young church.
I mean, there are a lot of young people in there, young families, and it's just energetic and everything.
Whereas if you go to a Catholic church where they're doing the, you know, they're doing the secular choir and they're doing all that, and you walk in and it's just, there are five or six old bored baby boomers sitting in the pews yawning.
And it's just, It's not working.
Let's do a little bit of free association here.
So I'm going to give you a phrase and you give me your immediate response to this.
So let's start with President Donald Trump.
Can that just be my answer? - You know, I think that... Am I supposed to just give you one word, or can I do a whole thing?
No, no, please go off.
We have an hour to fill, so I'm gonna need you to do that.
Okay, good.
Yeah, you know what?
I think that...
I obviously didn't support Donald Trump during the primaries.
And people ask me, I'm sure they ask you all the time, well, do you regret that?
Or have you seen how wrong you were?
And my answer is no, I was not wrong.
I was right, as usual.
My point about Donald Trump Well, I never thought that he was going to start World War III or any of this crazy stuff.
My concern about Trump was the effect he would have on the conservative movement and that he would cause a lot of conservatives to spend a lot of time defending every little thing that he does, even things that are indefensible or little petty things that just don't need to be defended.
And I was concerned that that would happen.
And that's what the conservative movement would become.
And that is what it has become.
So, no, I don't think I was wrong.
Now, yeah, he's done some good things.
We got the Supreme Court justices.
Although, honestly, the Supreme Court justices he gave us, any of the Republicans would have given us those two guys.
So, okay, that's fine, though.
And plus, I give McConnell more credit than I do Trump for those things.
And he's done a couple of other good things.
I just think, I don't know, I hear conservatives all, even some former never Trumpers, which I never loved that label, but who say, oh, I was totally wrong and I've been totally proven wrong.
He's been great.
And I don't believe them.
I don't think they really think that.
I think they're just saying that because it's the popular thing to say.
I think we all know that there are certain aspects of Trump that have been pretty disastrous And we all know that, so I don't know why we're pretending otherwise.
But, as I said, he's also done some good things.
And what I'll say, this is what I've been saying about Trump for a long time, is that the great thing about Trump is that he is willing to say things that a lot of Republicans, or any other Republican, is not willing to say.
The problem is that a lot of those things he's willing to say are stupid.
But, if you can get him, like, if you write him a speech, like a State of the Union speech, and you put a lot of great stuff in there about Israel, you put a lot of great stuff in there about abortion, he'll say that stuff.
And those are things, what he's said in State of the Union addresses about the topic of abortion, no Republican speaks like, certainly no Republican president has spoken that way.
So he's willing to do that, and that is where he's really useful.
But that only really comes out when he's sticking to the script and when he's got people helping him and sort of guiding him.
I think when he's just off on his own doing his own thing, then he goes off on all these tangents that are, you know, I'm not crying about them, I just find them useless and petty and they're more important things to be talking about.
You know, you and I voted the same way, I think in the last election, which was not at all at the top of the ticket, right?
Did you vote at the top of the ticket?
Yes, I did.
My take was that there were three things I was afraid of if Trump were to win.
One was that he would not govern conservatively because he'd been all over the place in his statements.
He's governed more conservatively than I thought.
Second was the same thing that you're worried about was this kind of soul suck of the Republican Party where the party starts defending every little thing that he does or starts seeing him as a thought leader and defending bad ideas that he puts out there.
I think it's about half true because I think that very few people in the actual Republican Party see him as a thought leader.
I think a lot of people see him more as a vessel for their policy preferences or for smacking the left.
And then the third thing I was worried about was him poisoning the well with young people, which obviously is not only true, but multiples of true.
Just by poll numbers, he's not popular among young people at all.
With all of that said, he's been the president that's changed the evidence on the ground.
So I've said I'm more likely to vote for him in 2020 than I was in 2016, meaning the damage is already done.
It's not like I can put the genie back in the bottle on all of those things.
And now it's the president of the United States who's sitting in that office versus Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
So where are you leaning in 2020?
Are you more likely to vote for him in 2020 than you were in 2016?
Yeah, no, I'll vote for him in 2020 for the reasons that you gave.
Barring some, I can't think of a scenario where I wouldn't.
So I would say, yeah, I would vote for him.
He's already there.
He's in office, as you said.
There isn't, for me, the whole never Trump thing was that was a something for the primaries when there were 19 other options and I was saying any of these people will be better.
So let's go with one of them.
But once you got into the general, it was a little bit less of a, there's less of a point to it.
And once he's in office, it's- There's no point, right.
Exactly.
Never Trump is, never Trump for the, what does that even, I don't know what that means.
I still don't know what that means.
Right.
At this point.
So he's already there.
So I'll certainly vote for him.
He is, of course, he's better than, than what Kamala Harris would be, or God forbid, or any, Cory Booker or any of these people.
But, you know, it's not just a pride thing.
I do think that, as I said, that, The people who are criticizing Trump, the Never Trump people, it's not like they've been totally proven wrong on everything.
They haven't.
Some of what they've said has come to fruition.
And as you point out also, there's the demographic thing.
And so we still don't even know exactly the long-term damages that we're suffering right now.
Okay, let's continue with the Free Association.
Game of Thrones.
Satanic.
No, you know, I made one attempt to watch it, and in the very first episode that I watched, there was a brother and sister having sexual relations.
A kid was tossed out of a window.
An old lady was set on fire, I think.
That was part of it.
Uh, and so I was just scandalized.
I wasn't really scandalized.
It was just, I thought, you know, I don't know if I need this in my head.
And so I've been, I, I personally been making more of an effort in recent years to say to myself, All right, do I really need that?
Do I need those images?
Do I need that stuff inside me?
Is this really gonna be an edifying use of my time?
And I know anytime I bring that up, everyone laughs and says, oh, you're being a Puritan.
But that is an issue, right?
There is a moral component to what we watch and to the entertainment that we choose to consume.
Some people act like it's a totally amoral arena.
And so to offer any criticisms of that, sort of stuff is crazy.
And so I don't see that.
Although I've only seen the one incest episode of Game of Thrones.
It's possible that it got a lot better and it hasn't.
It actually turned into actually, you know, a religious revival in episode two.
So you missed the entire religious revival.
Well, I gotta go back.
I gotta go back and watch it.
Yeah, no, of course, you're right.
I mean, there's an enormous amount of terrible behavior in the series, and it is pornographic, particularly the first couple of seasons.
It sort of gets better as it goes on with the pornographic aspect of it.
It's not something that I would have my kids watch.
My view of it is that there is an element of morality to it.
It does have—there is a feel that The bad guys, in the end, are going to pay a moral price.
But I guess the question is what you intend on getting out of your entertainment.
So I've been an advocate for the series because good drama is good drama just on an aesthetic level.
It is well plotted.
There are characters that you care about and root for.
It's clever.
It's visually appealing.
I'm not sure that it is morally edifying, but do you think that it's possible for there to be stuff made that is both Not up to the standards that you would want to watch it next to your priest or I'd want to watch it next to my rabbi, but still portrays moral imagery in the end, for example.
It's better than some of the other stuff that's out there.
Yeah, definitely.
I'm not one of those Christians that says you can only watch Christian movies.
I think most Christian movies are abysmal, and I'm sure that Jesus doesn't like them either.
So I think that my favorite show of all time is Breaking Bad, and that is not exactly a Christian Show, but I think it's a show that has a deep moral sense.
And so it's sort of a morality play about what happens when someone, you take this decent guy, but he makes one bad choice and then it steamrolls from there.
And so I think there's a lot to be gained from shows like that.
So I think you could have shows and movies that deal with really difficult things.
And have some objectionable material, but in the end, you do gain something from watching them.
My favorite movie is The Godfather.
Again, I mean, there's a lot of violence and everything in that, but it's the same sort of story about sort of meditation on evil in a way.
So, yeah, maybe the Game of Thrones is that.
I don't know.
It sort of moves in that direction.
I will say at the very beginning it's a lot more nihilistic, and then it seems to have moved more in the traditionally moral direction.
It's hard to make a TV show that is completely nihilistic, is the truth, because people just don't resonate to narratives that are completely nihilistic.
If it turns out that all the good guys get killed and all the bad guys win, is that really a show that anybody wants to watch or is interested?
interested in watching, probably not.
The human heart sort of longs for stories where people do get their just desserts in the end, even if along the way some good people end up getting destroyed.
So, okay, time for the next round of Free Association.
Michael Moles. - I was gonna say good Catholic.
He's not as good as me, but he's, you know.
Mediocre Catholic.
And mediocre person.
I mean, I think we can agree on that.
I mean, Knowles is a discredit to the company.
But it's not my free association.
I really shouldn't be sounding off.
No, go ahead.
Yeah, he's just awful.
I mean, the fact is that Knowles has somehow been able to make a career out of being a complete empty vessel.
And it's incredible to me.
And all the stuff where he's not an empty vessel, whenever he talks about it, I mean, my goodness, have you heard him go on for like an hour about Aquinas?
It's really just, it's pretty terrifying.
We've done it during the backstage.
It's not great, I'll tell you.
The entertainment value is not high.
Well, but it's Catholic though, so I have to... I've got that connection at least, so I have to... He's part of the Catholic team.
Okay, final free association.
Yoga.
I already used satanic, so satanic would be my answer for everything you said.
You know, I still believe, I wrote an article, as I'm sure you know, about yoga.
It appeared on a website that I edited, in fact, yes.
Right.
And I still believe that I was totally right about that.
Listen, yoga is, if you talk to someone who's Hindu and you ask them about yoga, they're going to tell you that it's a spiritual Hindu exercise.
And they don't understand why all these Americans are doing it.
It's cultural appropriation.
So really, part of my problem with it is cultural appropriation.
I'm very concerned about that.
And then also, I think that of all the ways to exercise, if you're Christian or Jewish, so many different ways to exercise.
You could do, you know, you could do so many different things.
You go to a gym and there are a million different exercise machines.
Why do you need to do A Hindu spiritual ritual.
Of all the things in the world, why that?
That's my only question.
And I posed that question and no one could answer it except to say, you're insane.
Which I might be, but that doesn't make me wrong about that.
So, just to be clear, you're okay with the physical motions, you're just not cool with all of the Hindu associations that Listen, I think those physical—if you even accidentally do one of those physical motions, you could be entered by Satan immediately.
So, that's my belief on it.
Okay.
No, it is the whole—because no one knows I'm joking.
That is the—it's the whole yoga thing that I think is the problem.
But, you know, if you're just doing some stretch, I think you'll probably be— Fine.
Okay, so let's talk about the biggest problems facing the country.
We've talked about the decline in religion, obviously.
What do you think is the number one issue, the pressing issue in the United States right now?
Well, I'm going to give the answer I always give, which for me, it's the life issue.
For me, that's why I write about abortion 50 times a week, because I think that how are we supposed to move on to other issues when we haven't settled the basic question of whether or not life is valuable, and if it even means anything, or if it's worth preserving.
So to me, it's a two-fold issue.
It's number one, you've got the actual death toll, which is It trumps any other cause of death, manyfold.
But then also there's the philosophical issue of, does life even matter?
If it does, then let's focus on it.
If it doesn't, then what does any of this stuff matter?
Let's just go home and drink ourselves to death, right?
And practically speaking, I would also put the fact that we're continuing to fund Planned Parenthood 500 million a year that we're giving this organization that kills 330,000 babies a year, and the fact that we're doing that even after Republicans controlled the White House and Congress for two years, and that, by the way, is one of the reasons why I can't give Trump or any of these guys anything close to an A+, because it's not just that they didn't defund it, it's that they didn't even try.
They weren't worried about it.
And I don't know how that is.
I don't know how people could not be focused on this.
We are giving Half a billion dollars to a company that directly kills, you know, several stadiums worth of people every single year.
So to me, that's number one.
Well, in your book on Holy Trinity, you talk about that as one of the big three issues that you're worried about.
And then you talk about marriage and gender as the other two, if I'm not mistaken.
So what do you think is the future of marriage?
You know, a lot of us in the religious community and just generally we're worried about the impact of same-sex marriage on American society.
I was more worried about the government using same-sex marriage as a club to beat religious institutions into the ground through anti-discrimination law, which is something we've obviously seen in California.
We've seen it in Colorado.
What was your big worry about same-sex marriage?
And do you think it's been realized or have you sort of come to the conclusion that the government should stay out of all of this?
Where are you on that issue now?
I certainly think that there's probably no going back.
Gay marriage is here and there's not going to be any effort to get rid of it.
So I certainly accepted that reality, even if I don't like it.
But I do, you know, in a perfect world, I do still maintain that it's not that gay marriage should have been illegal.
It wasn't the issue.
No one was saying, let's make a law declaring that you're not allowed to get married when you're homosexual.
The issue was What does the government recognize marriage as being?
Does the government recognize marriage as a thing?
If it does, then what is that thing?
And I do think it's important for the government to recognize marriage and to offer certain incentives for it, because marriage is the foundation for civilization, because it's the foundation for the family.
So that's why I still believe that.
And as far as, you know, the slippery slope of where we head next, yeah, I do think we see that slippery slope happening.
There's the slope you're talking about of now they're using it to, you know, first they're going to the private businesses and saying, You know, yeah, you can have your freedom of religion, but sort of, you know, sometimes you can't, and so they're doing that, and we're going to see that effort continue, and then eventually they will get to the churches and the synagogues.
They're going to get to the houses of worship, and they're going to say, because if the problem is if they're saying gay marriage is a human right, which is what the Supreme Court said, it's a human right.
Okay, if it's a human right, Nobody's allowed to deny a human right.
A church can't deny a human right.
It's not like a church can say, oh, in our religion we have slavery, so we're going to keep slaves in the basement.
Obviously you can't do that.
No one is allowed to deny human rights.
So based on that premise, they've already set the stage to be able to go to churches and say, If someone wants to get married in your church, you have to let them, because you're denying them a human right.
I mean, this was my great fear, obviously, about the Obergefell decision, and also about the legalization of same-sex marriage, or enshrinement of it in law, as a general rule.
My feeling was that we'd be better off as religious people having a strict separation between the state and the marital issue entirely, simply because, from my perspective, you know, I'm an Orthodox Jew, obviously, I have two marital documents.
One is the one that I got from the state that I do not give two damns about, and then there's the one that I have from my From the rabbinate of Israel, we were married in Israel, witnessed by two Sabbath-observing Jews.
That was the one that said, I get to shtup my wife and live with her and have babies, right?
That was the one I actually cared about.
I didn't care about the secular one at all.
And by allowing the state to redefine marriage, what we were really doing is, that was just the capper on that decline of marriage that had been occurring in the United States and in the West for 50, 60 years.
It wasn't like same-sex people, I think on the right, treated same-sex marriages as though, this is what's going to finally break marriage.
And I looked at it and I thought, No, this is just the capstone on a system that's already broken.
Once the social fabric was broken, the law was the last thing that was standing, and it was the last thing to sort of fall away.
I don't know where you come down on that.
Yeah, and the liberals, they had a really good point to make, and that was that Well, you know, all you people, all you Christians that are saying gay marriage is such a terrible thing.
Well, you allow divorces in your church.
I mean, you'll let a guy marry a woman on your altar and then divorce that woman and then marry another woman and another woman.
So it's just essentially polygamy by succession.
So you're already allowing that.
What do you care?
You obviously don't care about the sanctity of marriage.
And they were absolutely right about that because a lot of these people who cared about the sanctity of marriage when it comes to this Really didn't care about it, especially when it came to their own life, you know, when they had to make sacrifices and be faithful in order to protect the sanctity of marriage.
Well, then they don't really care as much about it.
So that was a very good point, and I agree that a lot of churches gave up on marriage essentially in the mid-20th century when they started allowing divorce and remarriage, which is, look, in the Bible, in the Gospels, There really aren't a lot of hot-button issues that Jesus speaks about really directly and says, listen, here's the deal with that thing.
He doesn't do that very much.
Marriage is one of those things, though, where he says very directly, if you get divorced and remarry, that's adultery.
And that is recorded in multiple Gospels, him saying that.
So if you can just ignore that and say, you know, no, there's none of that.
He said it.
That's one of the few issues where we can look at what he said.
It's right there.
So if we're going to punt that down the road, then how do you, you know, you've already given up the defenses.
I mean, it seems to me that what happened from a religious and from a secular perspective is that the institution of marriage, which was always about the bearing and rearing of children, fundamentally changed into it's two people who love each other.
Well, once it's two people who love each other, you're at Same-sex marriage, because it could be any two people who love each other.
It has nothing to do with kids anymore.
It has nothing to do with building a functional institution with a religious goal.
It has nothing to do with enshrining a standard for the community.
If all it is is two people who love each other living together, then it could be any two people who live together.
And there, there's not even a limiting principle with regard to siblings or with regard to anybody else.
Or any seven people.
Right, exactly.
I mean, I'm frankly, I've always been confused by the leftist argument that two-person marriage is okay so long as it's same-sex marriage, but sibling marriage, so long as they're not having kids, is bad, or that polygamy is bad.
I think that standard is going to fall in the next few years.
Yeah, and I don't even, and when people say, well, it's a slippery slope, next thing we're going to have polygamy.
Well, I actually think that, you know, if we're on a slope, gay marriage is like down here on the slope.
Polygamy was up here.
We just kind of hopped over it.
There was like a ramp on the slope and we went over it.
It's not even a slippery slope argument.
A slippery slope argument suggests that one thing happens and that leads to another thing.
It's just a principle argument.
Once you define a principle, there are certain things that fall within that principle.
If it's two people who love each other, then you've defined the principle.
There's a lot of stuff that falls within that.
And if it's just a group of people or any number of people who love each other, well, then you've defined that principle.
Yeah, I think that there's a great J.K.
Chesterton quote where he talks about, you know, if you're walking down the road and you see a gate, a fence, you're going to want to know why that fence is there before you decide that, hey, I'm just going to tear this fence down.
And so the problem is that we started tearing down these lines of distinction, these fences, without having any understanding about why they were actually there.
And so the left, when it came to gay marriage, they said, oh, you're trying to stop people from loving each other.
You're being a bigot.
It's like, no, you don't have to agree with us, but that is not our point.
That is not the point that we're making here.
And so you just tore this thing down without even understanding why it existed in the first place.
And that's pretty concerning, considering this thing that we're talking about is one of the fundamental human institutions.
So once you've torn down those barriers, then, right, there's really no argument to be made against any, certainly any form of human coupling.
I just don't see what basis we would Object to that.
Well, speaking of tearing down fences without any sort of regard for what comes next, obviously we're in the middle of a wild rethink in the West about the nature of gender, the attempt to separate off gender from sex, the attempt to suggest that you can be any gender you want to be and that you don't have to be a biological woman to be a woman or you don't have to be a biological man to be a man.
Where do you think, what do you think the end goal of this is and do you think that this is a battle that the left is going to win?
Because obviously they won the same-sex marriage battle.
Do you think that they're going to win the redefinition of sex Next battle as well.
Certainly if they win it then, and I know these kind of statements are made all the time and it's overdone, but in this case I think we could say if they win that battle then it really is over.
Western civilization is over at that point.
If they're able to do that, then what else is there?
Because what they've done there is they have, this is why I think they care so much about the issue, is that this is all about relativism.
Everything is about relativism for them.
It's all about it's my truth, this is my truth, this is what I believe, this is good for me.
And so this is sort of the ultimate That's sort of the ultimate relativistic peak, where if you're even able to do that with your own biological identity, where I can say, no, I'm not this.
I'm going to be something else.
And if we've decided that that's okay, well, then it's game on.
We live in a relativistic society.
And that's why I think we need to pay very close attention to the change that's happened, even in the last year or so, where Originally, they said that, well, you've got sex and gender, and gender is a social construct, sex is biological, and you can be whatever gender you want.
That was the original argument, right?
If you've noticed recently, now they're saying that, no, biological sex is also, you can be whatever you want.
It's the same thing.
They've now, they originally created this false distinction, and now they've merged them back, and they moved gender over into being this sort of social construct, and now they've recoupled them, but they've done it over here in the social construct.
Thank you.
And I think on transgenderism, like on every other issue, the conservative movement was very slow in picking up on it.
In fact, when I wrote the book about transgenderism, I started writing that book, I don't know, it was four years ago, and I was talking to my publisher about it, and they said, you know, but transgenderism, isn't that kind of a fad?
Are people really going to be talking about it a year from now?
And I think that was the attitude a lot of people had.
They thought that, meh, it's not a big deal.
But, you know, it's not going anywhere, that's for sure.
Yeah, well, I mean, the attempt to take what is a very fringe issue, statistically speaking, and then make it central to the American public discourse and the Western public discourse, it doesn't really have much to do with sympathy for the people who are suffering from gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria.
It seems to me it has much more to do with redefining not only sex itself, but redefining the nature of reason.
So if you even attempt to use reason and facts, then you are deemed a bigot.
And that's part of a broader agenda, which is to link politics with identity.
If I disagree with you politically, it's an attack on your identity.
And therefore, you can be silenced because you're actually acting in vicious fashion by citing facts in the first place.
That to me is the real danger in all of this.
There are a couple of dangers that I see.
One is the attempt that I see coming to take children out of the homes of people who refuse to abide by the new dictates of the social left, that if you have a seven-year-old who is expressing some sort of confusion about their sex, that if you don't kowtow to what the authorities would have you do, they will remove the kid from your home.
They'll take the kid away and say that you're being cruel.
You've already seen this happening in Britain.
I, I, I think that is obviously one move, but the broader move is to redefine the nature of even how we argue, how we discuss these things with each other.
Because if you say, you know, a man is a man and a woman is a woman, you'll get banned from Twitter now.
I mean, they've literally banned feminists for doing exactly this.
Yeah, and that's why I think the whole pronoun thing, it's actually, it's not semantics, it's a really important...
It is a hill worth dying on because they're trying to redefine the language and they're saying, what's it to you if someone says that they want you to refer to them as she when it's really a he?
Well, because it's not true.
That's why I'm not going to do it.
There's nothing against that person.
I've got all the sympathy in the world for them, but I'm not going to lie for you.
And that is just a lie and I won't participate in it.
And when we allow the left to not only you know they've been doing it for a long time where they come up with these euphemisms and they require us to use them and then a lot of the time we do use them for some reason but in this case they're saying that no you're you have to lie when you speak about this.
And I think we need to draw the line there and say, absolutely not.
So what's your personal view on this?
So my view is that publicly, when I'm speaking about this issue, I refuse to use arbitrary pronouns.
I use biological pronouns.
If I were out to dinner with somebody who are transgender, I'm not going to go out of my way to alienate the person by calling them something they don't want to be called, because who cares?
I mean, I'm out to dinner with the person.
The goal of the dinner is not to insult the person.
But in public view, when the issue at issue is this, then I'm only going to use the factually correct pronouns.
Where do you stand on this?
I think it's similar to what I say about the abortion argument, which is, when we're talking about abortion in the public arena, I think we need to use phrases like baby killing, because that's what it is.
And people need to understand that.
But if I were talking one-on-one to a woman who just had an abortion, or who was considering one, I would not say, I wouldn't call her a baby killer, and I wouldn't use phrases like that.
Because I think on a one-on-one level, it requires a little bit more understanding and sympathy.
And the last thing that person needs is fear, because that's what they're getting from the clinics anyway.
So it's a similar thing with this issue, where on a public level, We draw a hard line.
If I'm talking to someone one-on-one, I still am not going to use the incorrect pronouns, but I'll probably do my best to just not use them.
Usually when you're talking to someone one-on-one, you don't have to use their pronouns anyway, so that would be the effort that I'll make.
But push comes to shove, even one-on-one, I'm not going to lie to somebody, or at least I would hope that I wouldn't.
Okay, so let's talk about Pope Francis for a second.
So, I will admit, I was a much bigger fan of Pope John Paul II.
I was a much bigger fan of Pope Benedict.
I am not a fan of this particular pope, but I'm an outsider.
Obviously, I'm not part of the Church.
What's your take on Pope Francis?
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think that's a view that most conservative Catholics have, is we would love to have either one of those two back.
But when Francis first came onto the scene, I thought that he was It wasn't my first choice, but it's not my decision anyway.
And there were certain things about him, the whole thing.
He's so humble, and I've come to believe that some of that is really just shtick, honestly.
But at the time, I thought, okay.
But over time, as you see this sort of side of Francis, where there appears to really be... It's not just that he disagrees with conservative Catholics on a lot of issues, which he does, which is concerning enough.
Because conservative Catholic is just Catholic.
It's just foundationally Catholic.
But there's also this vindictive streak to him.
I think that he really doesn't like conservative Catholics.
And he says these things that... He's made comments about Catholics that have a lot of kids and comparing them to rabbits and stuff like that, which is pretty common.
You hear that out in society.
But from the Pope?
Saying stuff like that?
So that's what I pick up from him, is that he really doesn't like He actually has a personal distaste for conservative Catholics.
And what we need in a Pope is, even aside from the doctrinal issues, which are so important, we also need a Pope, especially these days in the Church, who is willing to go into the Vatican and clean it out.
And I'm not just talking about child molesters.
Obviously, we need to get rid of those.
But the bigger issue in the Church that few people want to talk about is the homosexuality in the priesthood.
And that's what a lot of this stuff is.
Even these sex scandals.
You know, McCarrick, I mean, he was accused of being with some young children, which is horrible.
Most of the accusations, though, had to do with him and seminarians, who are grown adult men.
So, what we need in a Pope is someone who's going to go in and address that issue.
And Francis just is not willing to do that.
Famously, he said, who am I to judge?
Which again, hear that in society, I'm used to hearing that in society, hearing that from a Pope is very concerning.
So as a Catholic, how do you deal with the sort of cognitive dissonance of having a Pope who you feel isn't really doing what he should be doing?
Well, I remind myself that in the Gospels, even Peter as the first Pope, he denied Christ three times.
I mean, Christ chose twelve apostles, one betrayed him, one denied him, the rest abandoned him at the cross except for one.
So, you know, it's a pretty low batting average already, even from the very beginning.
And so, you know, the church is, I believe, a divinely established institution, but it is an institution comprised of human beings who are all very flawed.
And so that doesn't really shake my faith in any, because I never expected perfection from them.
Do you think that the Church, how could the Church be doing a better job of dealing with the sex scandals generally?
You sort of referred to it tangentially there, but let's say that you were a suddenly elected Pope.
It was Pope Matt I. So what exactly, I don't know what name you would take, but I assume wouldn't, maybe it would be, I mean Matthew works, but I mean, what would you do if you were in charge of the Church?
Uh, first thing I would do is bring back the Inquisition.
Well, then I am out of here, my friend.
Yeah, well, I think that there have been some measures that they've taken, so it's not like they've done nothing over the last decade or so.
But I think that we have to realize where the problem predominantly is.
And that is not just with pedophilia, which is an issue, but statistically a smaller issue.
The greater issue is just sort of sexual indiscretion of all different kinds in the priesthood.
It's sort of like a sexual anarchy, it seems like, in the priesthood.
Even though a lot of it is legal, what they're doing, you know, according to the laws of man.
So there needs to be, I think, a refocus on chastity and sexual morality.
And if you've got priests who don't appear to be buying into that and don't really love the church and don't love their faith, it's pretty obvious.
You can kind of point those guys out.
I've been to churches with those kinds of priests.
You can tell from a mile away.
Then you've got to start weeding those priests out.
I think the church is Reluctant to do that for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that there's also a crisis of vocations right now where there aren't a lot of young men trying to be priests.
So they figure, well, if we start getting rid of all these guys, there's not going to be anyone around to run the churches.
And so it is a problem.
But you know what?
I would rather have that.
I would rather have Churches shutting down.
I would rather have a church that becomes condensed and much smaller, but what you have left with the remnants are people who are really on fire with the faith, really believe in it, sort of the church militant.
And so I say that's fine.
Trim the fat.
And if you've got to shut down churches, and that means that the parishioners that went to that church now have to drive 45 minutes, if they're not willing to do that, then Okay, then it's not that important to them, clearly.
So, maybe that's what we need, you know?
So, let's talk about American conservatism for a second.
So, obviously, we talked a little earlier about President Trump and the sort of redefinition of the Republican Party.
Where do you see American conservatism right now?
Is it a movement?
Does it exist?
What are the core tenets?
And where do you see it going in the future?
It's hard for me to call it a movement because I have no idea where it's moving to.
And I don't think that anyone knows what conservatism is.
I can't.
Can you define it?
I don't know.
If I were to say, you get 100 conservatives in a room, what do most of these people fundamentally believe in?
I'm not sure that you'll find any real agreement.
Maybe on a few issues.
Okay, so they'll all believe in gun rights, which is great.
They'll probably all be against illegal immigration, fine.
I think that's kind of it.
Those are the issues that we all agree on, which are important, but they're not foundational.
You can't build a movement on that.
That's sort of a niche.
That's sort of a separate movement that branches off of the main one.
And you need that.
You need the kind of specialists who really are focused on the border.
Or gun rights.
The problem in conservatism is we don't have the foundational agreement about what we actually believe.
So I would say that conservatism essentially doesn't exist.
So do you see any political leaders, obviously you're not a huge Trump fan, do you see any political leaders who sort of are people who you would like to see in positions of power?
I hate all of them.
My first reaction to any politician is just to hate them by default.
So they're already in the doghouse with me, and now you have to prove to me that you deserve to come out of the doghouse.
And I think that's the attitude we should all have to politicians.
It's not healthy.
I go on about this all the time.
You should never be a fan of a politician.
Be a fan of a pop star or an athlete, not a politician.
These are people that we should be skeptical of.
And we should have always be looking sort of have given the side eye to looking at what they're doing.
So.
A politician that I really like, you know, guys like Ted Cruz, I mean, I liked him in 2016.
Mike Lee and you know, these these kind of classic.
I mean, I'm not sure that there is a politician who comes to mind.
like them.
I don't know, though, that these are the guys who can reignite the movement.
So is there a guy like that?
Maybe I just don't know who it is.
I mean, I'm not sure that there is a politician who comes to mind.
There are politicians who I like, but I think the rule of politicians is that they either die a hero or they live long enough to become the villain is typically the theme for politicians.
There are people I like right now, but they haven't held tremendous power or been in a competitive race where they have to start pandering in the middle of the race to people who I think they ought not be pandering to.
Yeah, the problem with politicians is that they're They became a politician because they want that job.
And so anyone who wants that job, you automatically have to be skeptical of because why would you want to do this?
I think it was J.R.R.
Tolkien who said something like, you know, bossing other men is the most unnatural job in the world.
Very few people are fit for it, least of all the people who actually apply for the job.
And so that's kind of the way that I that I look at it as well.
I think that you could sometimes have a politician who gets into it because they really have a passion for public service and they want to lead and they love America.
Every once in a while you have that benevolent sort of figure.
We have none of those right now.
So the second best option is someone who's obviously self-interested, obviously focused on their own advancement.
But they also happen to have some good and useful qualities and they're good on the issues and they have some integrity.
So that's sort of that's what we're looking for is that second best option.
And I don't know.
I don't know who that is right now.
So let's talk for a second about college.
So you've seen in the past few weeks these scandals unfolding with parents paying exorbitant fees to get their kids into colleges like USC, which like I'm a UCLA guy, but also $500,000 to get into USC.
That is not a bargain by any stretch of the imagination.
That's a $200 cheeseburger.
No offense to USA, but come on, guys.
You didn't go to college.
Obviously, you live a happy, well-rounded life.
I mean, you make a good income.
What's your recommendation to people who are in high school?
Should they be shooting for college?
Is college useful?
Where do you think it's useful and where is it not?
I think it's sort of simple, and that is, if you're getting out of high school and you know exactly what you want to do with your life, and you know that you need college for that thing, if you want to be a doctor, an engineer, architect, something like that, then yeah, absolutely go to college.
It'll be worth it.
If you know that you want to do something, be a mechanic, something like that, where you're not going to need that, then obviously don't go, or go to a trade school.
That's obvious enough.
Most kids, I think, fall in the middle category, which is they have no idea at the age of 18 what they want to do, which is partly natural at that young age.
Also, it's because the public schools do a terrible job of actually helping kids explore their passions and skills and interests.
So you've got a whole bunch of kids that are coming out of high school and saying, I have no clue what I want to do.
If you're in that category, then here's what I recommend.
Don't go right away.
There's no good reason to go sign on the dotted line, sign yourself up for decades of debt, and then go to this institution, get the degree, pay $100,000 for a piece of paper, hoping you'll figure out what to do with it.
Don't do that.
Go live your life for a few years.
Go get a job.
You know, get an apartment, save some money, you know, just experiment with figuring out what it is that you're good at and what you want to do.
And then if you discover down the line that you're really passionate about something where the college degree is necessary, then go.
I just don't understand.
Why did we get into this thing where you have to go when you're 18?
If someone goes when they're 22, what does that matter?
It's not a race.
Who are you racing?
You've got a long life ahead of you.
Or you don't.
You're going to die young.
It doesn't matter anyway.
So then don't go for sure.
Okay, so in one second I want to ask you our final question, and that is, you got kids, so what do you do as you're trying to prepare your kids for a world that inevitably seems to be falling apart?
Do you have any reading recommendations?
What are your big parenting tips?
So I'm going to ask Matt that question, but if you want to hear Matt Walsh's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, it is that simple, and you can hear the end of our conversation.
Well, Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire, thanks so much for stopping by, I really appreciate it.
I mean, you had to, I mean, you really didn't have a choice about it, but now that you're here, thanks for coming.
Good to see you, Steve.
Appreciate it.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer, Mathis Glover.
Edited by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
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The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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