Weekly Roundup: Common Sense Christian Supremacy (VP Debate Reaction)
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In this episode of the weekly roundup, Dan and I dig into the recent vice-presidential debate featuring J.D. Vance & Tim Walz. We break down Vance's appeal to 'common sense' and his outright rejection of expert opinions, connecting it to the long-standing Catholic critique of liberalism that’s been around since Vatican II. We also take a closer look at new data showing an unexpected rise in religious affiliation among Gen Z men, particularly when compared to women, and discuss what this trend means in the current socio-political climate. Finally, we reflect on how religious identities continue to play a crucial role in shaping American politics, especially in the context of the MAGA movement. And before we go, don’t forget to check out our upcoming events in Los Angeles and San Diego—hope to see you there!
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But those same experts for 40 years said that if we shipped our manufacturing base off to China, we'd get cheaper goods.
They lied about that. They said if we shipped our industrial base off to other countries, to Mexico and elsewhere, it would make the middle class stronger.
They were wrong about that.
They were wrong about the idea that if we made America less self-reliant, less productive in our own nation, that it would somehow make us better off.
And they were wrong about it.
And for the first time in a generation, Donald Trump had the wisdom and the courage to say to that bipartisan consensus, we're not doing it anymore.
We're bringing American manufacturing back.
We're unleashing American energy.
We're gonna make more of our own stuff.
And this isn't just an economic issue.
That's J.D. Vance from this week's vice presidential debate with Governor Tim Walz.
If you noticed, he talked about common sense a lot.
He railed against experts.
It was perhaps not the most headline-worthy aspect of the debate, but it is something for me that was a window into A long history of Catholic supremacy and Christian supremacy in certain forms.
We break all of that down along with Dan's reactions to the debate and a surprising trend in American religion.
Young men are now on the whole more religious than young women.
What explains that?
What's behind it? And what does it foretell for the future?
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Hello Dan Miller, it's Friday.
You made it. How you doing?
Where do you work? Who are you?
I am, as you said, Dan Miller.
I am Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
It's up in Vermont. I live in Massachusetts.
I hurry home to do this and kind of picked up a state trooper for a while today following me, but I made it.
I fought the law, and I guess the law didn't win.
I did not fight the law.
I just I feel like for a lot of this show on Fridays, we've done it at a time when it's 9 a.m.
for you, and you're waking up, drinking some coffee, reading some books, and you're reflective Dan, analytical Dan, and I feel like now you've raced home.
When we do it now, you've raced home from school, you've outrun the police, and you're very charged up, and your adrenaline's going.
You're dressed like the ultimate warrior for some reason.
I don't know why. When we do it at nine, I've been drinking coffee for an hour.
Now I've been drinking coffee for like four hours.
So like, anybody who doesn't know me or isn't around me may not know how much coffee I drink, but like, yeah, I drink a lot.
So by the time we get to now, I've got the adrenaline rush of, you know, outrunning the state troopers and drinking lots and lots and lots and lots of coffee.
All right, people. I promise you the flyer and the Eventbrite and the tickets are coming very soon.
We're working on it, I promise.
But November 21st, USC, we will be there with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
And that means Rachel Lazar and Andrew Seidel.
It also means Robert P. Jones will be there, Kyate Joshi, Diane Winston, Dan Miller, me.
And we might have a special guest.
I'm not sure yet. We might.
We'll see what happens. Is it going to be Hulk Hogan?
It is not Hulk Hogan. Nope, it's not Hulk Hogan.
And so be there.
I promise you, some of you reached out.
November 20, just write it down right now.
1121 at 7pm, you need to be at USC in Los Angeles.
1122, you need to be in San Diego at the Convention Center at 7pm.
And that'll include us and Matt Taylor, who you all know, Leah Payne, Lloyd Barba, and some others.
So please be on the lookout for those tickets and other things.
Today, Dan, we're going to talk about the VP debate briefly.
That's going to lead into everyone's favorite thing, Brad's story hour.
And the debate will somehow lead us from J.D. Vance backwards in time to Vatican II, the 19th century Catholic sort of theology and movement for a renewed monarchism, and all the way back again to post-liberal Catholic philosophy in the current moment.
It's going to be really exciting, and I promise you that you're going to want to stay tuned.
And I'm not being facetious. You really do want to stay tuned.
If you want to understand J.D. Vance, hang out.
Then we will get to something that's really surprising, Dan, we haven't talked about yet on the show, which is that among younger folks in this country, it really does seem that men are now more religious than women, which is like bucking decades-long trends about religiosity in the United States.
So we'll talk about that as well.
Here we go. The debate, Dan.
I... Don't know what to say, except for J.D. Vance is a much different debater than the Donald Trump presidential candidate.
He is a lot more slick.
Somebody had a great tweet that said he is a good debater, but in a, like, Generation Joshua really sort of evil Christian nationalist way.
I'm going to throw it to you for your first reactions about Vance, Walls, and the VP debate.
Yeah, so I mean, I think Vance, I think part of what you're getting at is the charm offensive of Vance.
I feel like this Vance was the 2028 presidential candidate audition Vance, J.D. Vance trying to say, hey, look, I can make this all seem reasonable and nice and be friendly.
I think he can. And I think that's actually pretty daunting looking forward.
But I think that that's a lot of what that was about from Vance.
He knows, everybody knows all the likability numbers and how unpopular he is and so forth.
I think this was a chance to try to come out and show that he can be something more than that.
On the flipside walls, you know, it was widely publicized when Kamala Harris invited her VP sort of finalists, you know, for that kind of final chance to sit down with her and whatever.
He told her he was not a great debater.
And I think that showed he was just kind of nervous and I'm a knucklehead.
I misspoke. You know, there was a lot of, I mean, the polls afterward showed basically that it was super partisan and everybody who was voting Democratic thought that Walls did fine and everybody who was voting Republican thought Vance did fine, like 50-50.
I don't think it moves the needle in any substantial way.
I don't think it would have.
I think maybe if one of them had really, really, really tanked, It might have, but I think, you know, Walls was kind of nervous, but he did fine.
He did okay. And Vance, I think, was one that's like, wow, if you look like this all the time, you might have been, you know, a force to be reckoned with.
But yeah, I guess the one piece I'll throw out there tied in with this.
So it'd be interesting to see how or if that Vance ever shows up again between now and November.
I think it's worth watching to see what his role as campaign attack dog is.
But it was okay.
It was more substantive than others, but I think it was fine.
It was fine.
And the VP debate isn't an undercard.
These are not folks who can say, on day one, I'll do this, because they're not running to be the executive.
So that's the thing. I also think that what happens with VP debates is you end up with one moment that sticks with you years later.
So I will be very honest, even as we do this work down and this is kind of stuff we are investigating all the time, I don't really remember that much about the Kamala Harris-Mike Pence debate, except for two things.
One, Mike Pence had a fly on his face.
And two, Kamala Harris at one point said, you know, I'm speaking.
Maybe she did more than one. Yeah.
But yeah, like that same thing, yeah, playing that trip.
And so I think that's kind of what's at stake here.
And the one viral moment from this debate was not a Tim Wells gaffe.
It was not a, you know, it was really the moment J.D. Vance said, excuse me, you said you weren't going to fact check.
I mean, like, you said you weren't going to do that.
Like, I'm lying through my teeth.
But guys, that's not the rules, guys.
And I don't know who that plays well with.
If you're already going to vote for Trump, whatever.
But that's just not a good look.
I'm sorry. It's not a good look.
I'll say two more things about Vance that I think struck me with this debate.
One is he articulates the Trumpian vision and worldview better than Trump.
Yes. That may not be a good thing because when you actually explain the policies, you know, Trump, you asked Trump about childcare, you asked Trump about foreign policy and he gives you just word salad?
Vance actually, it tells you.
And once you hear it, and we've been on this kick for a long time with what we've tried to explain to people about Project 25 and other things, is like, once you hear it, you're like, oh, that doesn't sound that good, actually.
I don't think I'm with that.
That sounds bad. So I think there's a weirdly baked-in disadvantage for Vance, who's a much better surrogate of policy than Pence.
Pence, to me, always felt like a backstop.
Pence was always like, If you're a Christian, do I have permission to vote for this barbarian, violent guy who wants to hurt people, like, named Donald Trump?
And Mike Pence was always the guy that, like, the camera panned to, and he was just, like, giving you the nod, like, mm-hmm, yeah, go ahead.
Like, Pence was never somebody who moved goalposts, who furthered the line of attack.
He was just a backstop.
Like, oh, I'm standing here.
Gray-haired, evangelical Mike Pence.
Go ahead, Christian. Vote for him.
That was it. Vance is like, hey, let me articulate a worldview and make some inroads.
And I actually don't think MAGA Nation, that actually does much for you.
Second thought is, I live in the Bay.
I live near Silicon Valley.
And it's a whole thing here.
And for a time, and I talked about this briefly on the show, but for a time, I worked super part-time for a startup.
If you live in Silicon Valley, it's required.
You could be a humanities professor like me, but for six months of your life, you will be part of a startup somehow.
They wouldn't give you a California driver's license again unless you were a startup.
Isn't it part of the form? You can't drive to get them part of the startup.
You can't vote. Yeah.
So I worked for this startup briefly and I'm not going to go into all of it, but the idea of the startup was good and it was like, oh, it was something I went to bed at night thinking like, this could work.
But the people behind it, at least one of them, were really the kinds of folks who are very not involved on the ground with actual people.
They're not the kind of folks who are like out at the ball game, talking to local folks on their block.
And it was very much a parachute approach.
Like, hey, we have a theory.
Let's parachute it down to the ground and it should work.
And it was very much a Silicon Valley kind of approach.
Like, we are these, you know, folks who think we have a really great idea for the world.
We're not the kind of folks built to, like, knock on doors at my block or host the, like, you know, the block party Fourth of July.
We're not the kinds that, like, coach the, like, seven-year-olds in the softball league or we're not the dads who volunteer at the preschool, whatever.
So, like, the idea was good.
It did not work for various reasons, but one of them was just when it hit the ground, there was all these factors that, like, oh, yeah, we actually have to, like, exist with others.
And there's, like, all these particularities about actually, like, getting people to like this or buy it or sign on to it.
J.D. Vance, to me, felt in this debate like a parachute candidate.
Like, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, like, dangled him down onto the earth.
And here he is talking like a sort of, you know, Silicon Valley Trumpian robot who can articulate it all very slickly.
But Dan, I'll be honest, in 2028, if that dude gets up there and does that, does he sound like the kind of guy that that everyday Michigander, that everyday Ohioan, that everyday Arizonan's like, that's my man, just like Trump.
Like, that seems like Who has more charisma, him or DeSantis?
I don't know. It might be DeSantis.
We saw what happened to DeSantis.
That guy got nowhere outside of Florida.
And his attempt to be Trump more than Trump, Trump squared, fell on its face because he couldn't do the Trumpian strongman charisma thing, the nefarious, insidious, evil villain, you know, autocrat thing, because people were not drawn to him.
I think J.D. Vance is like, you can tell me he's the future of the party, and it's like, bro, is DeSantis the future of the party?
Because you guys tried this.
J.D. might be a little smarter, I guess, than DeSantis.
I don't know. Doesn't mean I have any idea that this guy is going to get out here and fill the stadiums with 80,000 people like Trump did in 2016.
So those are my initial thoughts.
I mean, what are your final ones before we get into story time?
Yeah, tied in with that is this notion that Trump taps the emotion, and Vance didn't.
And whenever I hear the Republicans saying, we can beat them on policy, I'm like, I don't think you're reading this right.
You've got MAGA because of the emotion.
You've got MAGA because of the anger, not...
Not because of the actual policy and the content.
And so I think moving forward, if Vance has a future and the world is full of candidates that we thought four years earlier were going to be a candidate, I think it's going to be, can he ever learn to tap into that emotion and be articulate?
Or is that ever going to work?
Or do you need to just rile up the masses and get angry and talk about immigrants eating pets and things like that to be able to make it work?
Let's take a break, come back, Dan, and jump into a little bit of story time involving Vance and some things about why he kept saying common sense.
So if you all listen to the debate, you watch the debate, J.D. Vance said common sense, like maybe a hundred times.
I'm not sure. Right?
Somebody should do a count like specifically of how many times you said common sense or appeal to common sense.
I didn't do it, but I, you know, it was one of those ticks.
And I actually listened to part of the debate on the radio and it came through on the radio even like more clearly because When you're listening, you're not watching.
It felt like the guy was like, well, common sense.
It's like that Jim Gaffigan comedy routine where he's like, oh, we're on vacation.
You guys want to get something to eat? Maybe after that, we'll get something to eat.
I don't know, take a nap, maybe get something to eat, and then go on a walk, get something to eat.
That's what vacation is.
And it just felt like J.D. Vance was like, oh, common sense.
Well, if we just used common sense, we could do some shipping and importing, exporting, according to common sense.
And then we could go get a bite to eat, common sense.
Why? And so, Dan, you're usually the decoder, but I want to go into decoder mode for a minute.
So we'll be right back.
All right, Dan. So let's decode common sense.
And strangely enough, the story starts in the 1960s.
And a bunch of you listen on Mondays.
And on Mondays, I've been interviewing Dr.
Chelsea Eben about her new book, The Radical Mind.
It's all about radical Catholics and the religious right from Paul Weyrich.
All the way to Kevin Roberts and J.D. Vance.
And one of the things I've been talking about is Vatican II. And a lot of folks have written in and been like, yo, what is Vatican II? Like, I hear you all talking about this, but I don't really know what that is.
So it's hard for me to understand your full interview with Dr.
Evan because I don't really actually understand what Vatican II is.
So give me a few minutes here, friends.
I promise we're going to land on J.D. Vance and common sense.
Okay. 1962.
We have Pope John XXIII opens the Second Vatican Council.
And this had been in the works for a number of years, going back really to 1959.
But it was really a kind of watershed moment in the Catholic Church in the 20th century, the late 20th century, etc.
This was the 21st ecumenical council to be convened in the church's bimillennial history.
These ecumenical councils are a big deal in the Catholic Church because they gather the bishops, the cardinals, the leaders, the patriarchs, the theologians, and they work out doctrinal issues related to the church.
I mean, if you imagine the Catholic Church as this global, expansive network all over the world, I mean, we're talking the continent of Africa, the continent of Asia, the continent of Europe, and they're all gathering here in In Rome, it's a big, big deal.
So he announces this in 1959.
It starts to take place in 1962.
A lot happens in that time.
The pope actually dies.
We get a new pope, so on and so forth.
There's four sessions, 169 general congregations.
It's a huge undertaking.
Dan, I had to plan a three-year-old's birthday party a month ago.
That was a lot. Can you imagine inviting like 2,500 Catholic cardinals, patriarchs, bishops, 450 or so theologians?
They allowed for the first time at the Vatican II in the church's history, one of these, Protestants, Orthodox, and other non-Catholic observers?
Yeah. Okay. There was even lay people there.
It was a big deal. Now, Vatican II results, Dan, in what many people understand to be the modernizing of the Catholic Church.
It's a moment when the Catholic Church comes into the 20th century.
And the question is why?
Well, it's because of changes that are made in doctrine, but also really in the sort of ethos and tone of the church, okay?
One of the things that comes Out of Vatican II is Lumen Gentium, or Lumen Gentium.
And this is a document that really identifies the church as a mystery and a communion.
Now, you may be like, well, who cares about that?
But I want to identify something there very quickly.
If the church is a mystery, there are things you don't know, and thus certainty is not something guaranteed to you.
There's a sense of unknowing built into your faith, which is not something we hear a lot.
From people who are on the religious right, Christian nationalist, they are all about certainty and so on.
So this is the thing. Okay.
Then we get De Verbum, God's Word.
And this is really a place where Vatican II leaves a legacy in which there's an understanding that God communicates with human beings.
And that might sound trite or cliche, but the communication with human beings is really relevant for a kind of ecumenical outlook with others.
Because when you talk about scripture or tradition or the teaching authority of the church, you have an idea that every human being is filled with the imagio days, the image of God, and that God can, because of that, communicate to human beings, even if they are not Christians.
There's a famous formulation By, you know, Catholic theologians, Vatican II theologians, who would say that every person is a pre-Christian.
So if you're a Buddhist or you're a Hindu or you're an atheist, you might have wisdom because you're a human being.
And that sounds a little bit like offensive.
Like if someone's like, well, Brad, you're just a pre-Christian.
I'm like, well, thanks a lot. I think I'm just what I am.
You don't like I'm not my life is not leading toward converting to whatever you think.
Nonetheless, there is an understanding that maybe, Dan, and this is for the Catholic Church a big deal, Protestant churches or Jewish synagogues or other religious institutions might have something of God's wisdom in their midst and that the Catholic Church or Catholic people might learn from them.
And I just tied in with that, that the Catholic Church does not have a monopoly on that.
Like, not only can the Catholic Church discover that, but the flip side of that is that the Catholic Church Is willingly saying, as a result of Vatican II, the sort of formulations that come out, that they're not claiming a monopoly on truth or faith or, you know, whatever, which is a huge shift from what the Catholic Church had done.
And from Vatican I, the first Vatican Council in the 19th century, which, you know, had gone in a really different direction.
And no, it's huge.
And so one of the other things that people know about Vatican II is that it led to the mass being done in the vernacular.
So like my wife, she grew up in a small town in Massachusetts where almost everybody was Polish Catholic.
And she remembers that even growing up for her in the 80s, there was part of the mass was in Latin, part of it was in English.
That was a holdover from a previous time when the mass was all in Latin.
So you went to Mass on a Sunday, and 99.9% of people don't understand Latin.
Latin's not even a spoken language.
Nonetheless, your worship service is in Latin.
That changed. So all of a sudden...
From the 70s forward, you can have mass in Spanish, in Italian, in Korean, in English, okay?
It's a big, big deal.
There's a final one, Gaudium Espes, which is a constitution, a pastoral constitution that comes out of Vatican II that acknowledges that things like science and culture have things that could teach the church, that the church needed to be in dialogue with, like, modern science or with things that it might learn from culture, okay? We don't have time for a full Vatican II rundown today.
What I will say about Vatican II, Dan, is that it's understood to be a couple of things.
The modernizing of the Catholic Church, the recognition of the Catholic Church, that it no longer had a monopoly on any part of the world, including Western Europe or the United States or any other place that you might identify as, quote unquote, the West.
That there were so many others in the religious marketplace that pretending that they had the kind of dominant position that was unchanged and unchecked was just no longer going to work post-World War II. It was not an option.
It's also a time when the church admitted that those who are not Christians had wisdom and insight and perhaps an understanding of God's vision for his creation and that science and culture and other aspects of human society might actually be dialogue partners for the church rather than a subset of theological teaching.
That science was not a subset of theology.
That, in fact, that was no longer going to be possible.
Okay? Now, Vatican II was really also, and this is where you all got to stick with me today, okay?
The place where the Catholic Church really started to become in dialogue with what we would call liberalism.
Now, Dan, you are the liberalism expert on this podcast.
I'll give a definition and then you fill in for me what that looks like, okay?
Liberalism is not like, hey, I'm liberal, right?
I vote for a Democrat or I'm progressive or I'm liberal, meaning, you know, I do...
Liberal things or vote for liberal policies in the United States.
Liberal means a political tradition where you view every human being as having inviolable rights That cannot be understood to ever be revoked.
This is very familiar to us.
You're human. You're an individual.
You have the right to liberty.
You have the right to religious liberty, the right to speech, the right to safety, the right to...
We can call these human rights and so on.
So everybody has rights and everybody has the right to choose how they live their life as long as it does not come into conflict with other people, as long as it's not degrading or hurtful or damaging, etc.
This is kind of the baseline of a liberal political order.
All right, Dan, how did I do?
What do you want to add? You did pretty well.
Yep. I mean, the basic liberal idea is everybody has freedom to exercise their autonomous freedom however they want, as long as they don't violate the freedom of others.
And that's where rights are the flip side of liberty.
I'm free to act as long as I don't violate your rights.
That's like the limits of my freedom.
So I can say or do whatever I want as long as I don't infringe on your right to do the same and As you're saying, if that sounds super familiar to everybody, because everybody's like, oh, well, that sounds really American.
It's because all of the founding figures were influenced by that element of liberalism.
So in that regard, I think the other point you're making is we're all liberals broadly construed.
It's not about liberal versus conservative in that narrower political sense, which is really confusing.
Most of us are liberal.
J.D. Vance is not.
And I'm going to So if you're getting bored, you're like, oh my God, Vatican II, those are the J.D. Vance.
Most of us, Dan, would believe in freedom to choose about your life, your pathways, and that's kind of a bedrock American value.
What I'm arguing is J.D. Vance does not.
So James Patterson is a professor at Ave Maria University, a Catholic University, and he writes about the ways that Vatican II was really the first time the Catholic Church brought itself into a kind of Coalescence with political liberalism, as Dan and I just described it.
The Vatican II was significant because it made the church in dialogue with and in many ways coherent with political liberalism.
Here's what he writes. There was a declaration called Dignitatis Humanae that came out of Vatican II, and here's what Patterson says.
Dignitatis Humanae teaches that human beings possess a dignity rooted in the Imagio Dei,
the status each person bears as having been created in the image of God.
That entails certain inviolable rights, including religious liberty.
This means no institution, no state, no church can permissibly coerce a person into the Catholic
faith or into any belief at all.
This teaching is a significant deviation from the earlier Catholics' insistence on establishing
confessional states that publicly enforce Catholic doctrine.
So, hang with me, y'all.
Vatican II, according to Patterson, was the time the Catholic Church said, look, you cannot be coerced in Catholic faith.
faith, you have to be persuaded. And it's a deviation from those long ago sort of
papal states or, you know, medieval Christian states where it was basically
like you are you are Catholic by dint of living in this province or principality
or kingdom. There was also like under under threat of law or, you know, you'll
be punished legally or in other ways, or maybe you won't be able to own property
or whatever if you're not. And this is why there was such rampant anti-Semitism
in those medieval contexts because they were those were folks saying I'm not Catholic.
Okay, so we have public-enforced Catholicism versus...
Inveilable rights of every individual who must be persuaded into the Catholic faith, not coerced or forced.
All right. So this is a huge legacy of Vatican II. Now, one of the things that happens then, Dan, is that we might say is that Vatican II is the time the Catholic Church no longer holds an understanding of itself as prescribing theocracy or Christendom.
The church is not going to go into the world and try to conquer the world for God and create a kind of Catholic Church that has dominated or is going to dominate every person everywhere.
That now we're going to have a An idea that every person has the choice to become Catholic or not, and you must choose.
Dan, I've spent a lot of time in France with a lot of Catholics.
I lived at a Catholic seminary.
I got up and ate breakfast every day with Catholic monks and seminarians and priests.
Almost in the first part of my career, almost all of my work was in France with Catholic people.
And I had a very famous Catholic colleague named Emmanuel Falk, a philosopher.
And I was staying at his house one time, and it was Saturday night.
And he was like, tomorrow we go to mass.
He was like, in French, you know.
And I'm like, okay, sounds good.
I'm not Catholic, but I'll go with you.
He's like, I know you're not Catholic.
It's fine. I'm like, okay, great.
And I was like, I'm not going to participate in the Eucharist, like communion, because I'm not Catholic.
So don't be surprised when I don't go up there with you.
And he's like, Bradley, Bradley, it is not my job to convert you.
It is God's job, you know.
And I was just like, yeah, that's...
Good stuff, man. I appreciate that.
But like, Dan, that was an example of like, he wasn't going to try to force me to be Catholic.
He was going to tell me like, oh, you're an idiot.
Or he was just like, if you convert, that's great.
And that's God's job to convert you.
I want to be a good example of whatever, but I'm not going to like sit here and try to like make you be Catholic.
Well, guess what, Dan? Not everybody loves that outlook.
Not everybody loves the idea that, like, you know, the church shouldn't be into theocracy, that the church shouldn't insert itself into the world in order to build Christendom.
A lot of Catholics were really mad about this big widespread change.
One of them was Paul I was just going to say there was serious pushback, right?
Like backlash against this within Catholicism.
That's the other piece. I think a lot of people on the sort of the outside, they don't know anything about Catholicism.
They know that there's the Pope and the Pope's kind of the head and the Pope calls the shots.
And I think that there's this conception that, oh, well, you know, the Pope is behind Vatican II and says that's what Catholicism is.
So all the good Catholics fall in line, but that the practice is much different than that.
And this was hugely unpopular with lots of, like, not just parish priests, but, you know, lots of high-ranking Catholic people, lots of bishops.
I know this is part of where you're going, but, like, the American Council of Bishops, like, has, you know, long been pretty critical of Vatican II. And anyway, it creates this significant backlash, and I think that's just something for people to recognize, is that the Catholic Church is not the monolith of the things sometimes people on the outside might think that it is.
Well, and it's a great setup because what happens after Vatican II is a lot of the people who are really influential in that pushback are lay people.
I mean, there are, as you say, priests and cardinals and bishops, but we get somebody like Paul Weyrich, who I talked about with Dr.
Eben over the last two Mondays, who is a Catholic, who's really mad about Vatican II, and he starts the Heritage Foundation as a way to insert Catholic morality To build Christendom because his church won't no longer do it.
He's like, well, if you guys want to do it, I'll do it.
That was like, that was one of the reactions to Vatican II. Well, all of you listening are now like, oh, the Heritage Foundation?
You mean like the people who published Project 2025?
You mean that group that's headed by another really conservative reactionary Catholic named Kevin Roberts, who is kind of in the same vein as Paul Weyrich?
And the answer is yes. One of the things that comes to the fore recently, Dan, from Catholics who are really upset about Vatican II and the church's entanglement and coherence with liberalism, political liberalism, is something called integralism.
All right, we got another vocabulary word.
I'm writing it on the board. Okay, everyone, here we go.
Catholic integralism Really had its high point or its most kind of forceful expression in the 19th century, okay?
And you can understand why, Dan.
This is a time when doctrine of evolution starting, biblical criticism, there's a lot of encounters of Europeans with non-Christian peoples, the whole thing.
You can see why the church was like, well, we got to get something.
So what did Catholic integralists argue?
Here's Massimo Fagioli, a leading Catholic theologian and public intellectual who I respect a lot.
He says this, Integralism is the attempt to imagine for the Catholic Church, but also for the world in which the Church lives, a future that rejects the liberal separation between temporal and spiritual power and subordinates the former, the temporal, to the latter, the spiritual.
So he quotes a document called Sacramentum Mundi that says this, There is an article about this that says, look, and it's really drawing on Kevin Vallier's work, All the Kingdoms of the World.
Integralism's core concept was that right government rested on a diarchy or a binary of crown and altar.
The twin centers of authority...
The king and the church, each with distinct but complementary fields of concern.
So I don't want to get too lost in the weeds, Dan.
Integralism is the idea that we should not have liberalism.
Individuals choosing their lives and choosing to be all kinds of things in the world.
You could be, you know, somebody like Dan Miller, who's incredibly cool, listens to all this heavy metal.
People in Discord are like just giving him all the praise.
He's got a huge head. Everywhere I go now, I go to conferences and You know, Denver, and people are like, where's Dan?
I need more playlists.
I'm like, well, good to meet you too, Bob.
All right, thanks a lot. Okay, so you can choose to be Dan Miller.
You can choose to be a furry.
You can choose to be living in a lesbian marriage.
You can choose to be in a throuple.
You can choose to do all kinds of things.
Guess what? Catholic integralists are like, this is terrible.
This is why you don't let people choose what they want to be, because they choose to do all these things that are outside of what we think are God's God's plan.
So we should have two centers of authority.
We should have the church and we should have the king.
And the king should really, the monarch's decision should really be about articulating the values of the church and enforcing them.
If you get out of line, we enforce it on you.
That's Catholic integralism.
The reason I'm bringing all that up today, Dan, is because Catholic integralism is a large source of J.D. Vance's Catholic intellectual cultivation.
That he looks to like the contemporary integralists For understanding governance.
If you go back and listen to this podcast, I've talked about how he thinks the City of God by Augustine is like a great way to understand governance.
He thinks public policy should base on that idea.
And it's this reading, this bad reading of Augustine that says the church should direct the government by way of a kind of certain vision of governing by way of usually a prince or a king.
That's where I think J.D. Vance is coming from.
And you're like, well, I'll prove it.
And I will prove it. One of his closest intellectual friends is Patrick Deneen, the post-liberal Catholic philosopher.
He's a guy who openly calls himself post-liberal.
He's like, I don't believe in liberalism as Dan and I just discussed it, the freedom to choose.
He also wants, as he says in his book, Regime Change on page 231, that he wants to integrate religion and governance.
So he's always talking about the common good.
He's like, we should have the government Impose the common good on everyone because that's what's best for humanity.
Let me quote. The common good is always either served or undermined by a political order.
There is no neutrality on the matter.
He then quotes John Danieleau, the famous French priest.
Politics ought to have the care of the common good, that is to say, the duty of creating an order in which personal fulfillment is possible, where man might be able to completely fulfill his destiny.
Deneen goes on on this page to say that it is the duty of the political order to positively guide the citizens and provide the conditions for the enjoyment of the goods of human life.
The liberal order maintains the absence of constraint, so it's wrong.
So you want me to decode that?
It's this. Deneen doesn't like the idea that people can choose and exercise the inviolable rights, their human rights.
He wants a government that will enforce and impose the Catholic idea of common good on everyone, because he thinks that's what will lead to the good society.
And I'll just tie it in with that a couple of things.
So if somebody hears this, somebody who's never like this, this sounds completely foreign to them.
They're like, how in the world could you possibly argue it's good for people without choice?
It's grand over that it says that fundamentally people are broken.
You know, people are not capable of knowing what the good is.
People are not capable of determining what the good is.
So all of you out there who think that your common good is to, I don't know, be in a queer relationship or to be a woman who doesn't want to get married and have kids or, you know, to transition your gender or to match your experience or whatever, you are misunderstanding the good.
You don't know the good.
You can't feel what is good for yourself.
You are not an authority on the The good for you.
Catholic dogma is the authority and the institutions are in place to interpret and implement that.
So that's how heavy handed this idea is.
I think it's really important people understand that because that's how a Deneen or somebody, you know, if you push them, that's what they're going to have to argue is that, well, of course, you can't just trust people to make their own decisions.
You can't trust them to determine what the good is.
And I think you can also hear this.
There was some coded language used there when he talked about achieving their personal fulfillment by what?
By fulfilling their destiny.
Your personal fulfillment is not what you want.
It's not something you autonomously enter into.
It's not rolling the dice and saying, you know what?
I'm going to live my life this way.
I think it's going to work. And like, maybe it will, or maybe it won't, but that was my choice.
And I'm going to kind of live with that.
I've got the freedom to explore it.
It's your destiny. It's God's will.
And who's going to tell you what God's will is?
Oh, the Denean and the people like him are going to tell you.
The Pope is going to tell you.
The Catholic church will tell you what God's will is.
That's your destiny and your fulfillment.
Is to live that out, whether you like it or not.
And I think that that's a really just key idea here of how stark a departure this is from that conception of human autonomy, self-direction, and so on.
So in that light, let me just land the plane.
What Deneen is going to say is that instead of these liberal philosophies of John Stuart Mill and all this stuff, that we should just base our lives on common sense.
Common sense says that A lot of things.
And, you know, common sense, according to natural law, is going to lead you to that men should only marry women, right?
That kind of stuff. But here's what he says on page 111 of this book, Regime Change.
Common sense draws on a vast reservoir of traditional knowledge, the collective memory of ordinary people.
It's a deep wall of experience and common sense wisdom.
Sounds like J.D. Vance to me, Dan.
Sounds like everything J.D. Vance said at that debate.
Such knowledge resists the narrowness of specialization.
Do you all remember?
Go back and watch the debate.
Actually don't, because just don't.
But still, I'll just jog your memory.
J.D. Vance kept telling Tim Walls, I don't want to trust the experts.
I don't like experts.
Experts don't know what they're talking about.
He sounded like experts were the enemy.
Page 111, regime change.
Common sense is more comprehensive than the narrowness of expert knowledge.
Look at that.
And thus more relevant and illuminating as a form of political knowledge.
What Deneen argues in here is that our government is full of deep state admin bureaucrats who are experts, but they have no common sense.
And therefore, they're advocating policies like letting gay people get married or protecting trans kids that have no common sense.
If we got rid of those, Dan, I don't know, by way of a little pesky document, only 922 pages, called Project 2025, we would have bureaucrats who would not get in the way of the common sense of the executive or the monarch or whatever you'd like to call him, who is the president.
When J.D. Vance is talking about common sense, he's trying to get you to think that all those people at the Department of State, Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, Department of Education are your enemy.
That they actually don't have any common sense.
That they don't have any sense that is for the common good.
They don't have any sense that's for the common good, which comes directly from God.
So what we need is a government that will coerce and impose and force that on all.
And it just happens that the Catholic vision of the good is the model we'll use.
Because as Deneen said on page 231, it's never neutral.
You got to choose one.
We might as choose the one that we have as Catholics.
All right, Dan, I'm done. Apologize for that.
Long story time. The only thing to add to that is, you know, we said the Vatican II, I proposed the idea that it means the Catholic Church doesn't have a monopoly on truth.
This is rejecting that.
Because, of course, the common sense, quote unquote, is not what most people think.
It is not, let's meet together as a society in some way and find ways to, you know, deliberate and find ways we can live in common and, you know, whatever.
No, we're not going to determine this.
It's traditional Catholic moral theory.
Like, that's what the common, that's what quote unquote common sense is.
And if somebody says, as I think any typical modern person is going to, well, okay, but like, Surely there are other people that have a different account of what common sense is or the common good.
Well, here we're back to, yeah, but the Catholic Church has a monopoly on this.
So if we want to know what that is, it's Catholic truth, it's Catholic teaching, not what Vatican II said, but what the Church was before Vatican II and so forth.
That's the aim.
That's the logic of this.
All right, let's take a break, come back.
And I think this does tie in what we're going to talk about next, which is men and women and religion, especially among young people.
Be right back. All right, Dan, take us through what you learned about the trends among men and women and religion in the United States this week.
Yeah, so for decades, and you kind of hinted at this earlier, more women than men have attended church.
It's just like a long-standing American pattern that more women than men attend church.
It's true of evangelical churches as well as other kinds of churches.
So much so that, you know, Brad, you remember, as I do, a time when there was a discussion of a crisis about this, a crisis of masculinity within evangelical churches, that there were more women than men.
Men didn't find them drawing.
I remember reading sociological accounts and stuff where men would talk about church being essentially too feminine or too effeminate or not masculine enough or not engaging men enough or whatever.
People can read somebody like Kristen Dume, who talks about, you know, this kind of aspect of evangelicalism.
Well, what's interesting is that with Gen Z, the tables have apparently turned on this, and there's fairly recent data out that shows that more men than women are now attending and remaining in the church.
Gen Z, now 40% of women identify as religiously unaffiliated, but only 34% of men.
So they've flipped that.
And it's the only age group for which this is true.
It's not true of any other demographic.
So this is a fairly recent phenomenon, and the recency is reflected in the age of the people involved.
So that's really noteworthy.
I think that there are some pieces of this that can help explain it.
I'm going to just sort of throw those out.
Feel free to jump in and or, you know, at the end, tell me why I'm wrong.
But I also came across some stuff, you know, a couple of weeks ago, other data.
I think I was looking at Gallup, but there's some other stuff as well.
Showing that young women are becoming more liberal than young men.
So you have a kind of political and social shift taking place.
Specifically young and senior women as well are increasingly identifying as liberal from like 99 to 2013 about 30% of women ages 18 to 29, so that younger, sort of young adult cohort, about 30% identified as liberal.
By 2020, it was 40%.
So it's a 30% increase in the numbers.
Men's identity has stayed roughly the same.
So more women of that age range are identifying as liberal than men.
And young men, I think, are more conservative than women on a lot of measures.
For example, they have data showing that young men who are not married are more likely to say they want to get married and start families than women of the same age who are not married.
So you have this kind of traditionalism among men.
That's one of the things we've been talking about with this Catholic tradition.
This Catholic emphasis that has been influencing Protestantism as well.
I think that that's one piece.
Tied in with that, we know that men are also way more likely to vote for Trump than women.
So the political identity, the broad social identity, these things map onto, I think, the religious identity.
We also saw, I know we've talked about this in the past, people have seen this, data that's years old now, a pattern that's been there, that more and more people who identify as Christian nationalists, more and more people who are MAGA acolytes, more and more people who are Trump supporters, identify as evangelical because they are Trump supporters.
That the unity between political conservatism and religious conservatism and the prominence of Christian nationalism is so pronounced That there are people who might not have formally identified as Christian who now will call themselves evangelical because they're Trump supporters and so forth.
So that obviously maps on to these other things.
And I think the last one that sort of harnesses all of this is that evangelical churches have been embracing MAGA politics For the better part of a decade now.
It has worked for them. Churches that tried not to do that, they lost members, or pastors got fired, or they shrunk down.
And there have been stories, again, for two election cycles now, of churches that grew because they just embraced it, and they leaned into it.
And so you put all of those things together, and the evidence that a lot of the MAGA stuff is really resonating with, Gen Z men, And I think you get this really, really significant shift of men into the church.
And I think the long-term effects of this are what?
Well, we've been talking about this for years too.
Those who say, well, why doesn't the evangelical church change?
Why doesn't that, you know, 20% who don't support Trump, where are they?
Why aren't they more vocal? Because the church has cast its lot, and I think part of what we're seeing here is the perpetuation of that.
The church is now a haven for disaffected men who support Donald Trump and are politically and socially conservative, and they in turn keep the church going.
This is the next generation of churchgoers.
So really significant shift.
Those are some of my thoughts about sort of what it means and how it plays out, and I think it really, really bears watching long term.
There was a moment when I moved to the UK, Dan, where I remember somebody at Regent's Park where you and I went to Oxford.
There was a kind of conservative Anglican minister in training.
Actually, it was a conservative Baptist minister in training.
And he came down one day to the middle common room and was saying, churches need to do more to recruit men.
And that includes, you should let men be the ushers in church because they're athletic.
And if you're allowed to walk around in church, you're more likely to To attend.
And it was really hard to sip my tea and be like, yeah, mm-hmm.
Yep. Yeah, definitely athletic, walking up and down the aisle, collecting money.
Good one. But there was this desperation, the reason I bring that story up, to get men into the church.
I think now what we're seeing is the church, whether it's an evangelical church, or I'll just go back to J.D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in his mid-30s, there's an understanding that Christianity might offer you a cultural set of resources that will develop a masculinity that will provide you control.
If you're a young man and you're not sure who you are, and I remember being in my 20s and my early 30s and trying to figure out who I was and what I had to offer the world and what might be good about me or what someone might want about me.
It's hard. That's a hard thing.
I'm not going to blame anyone for going through that.
But I think that a lot of times now we're seeing young men say, oh, If I convert to this sort of very traditional Catholicism, I get a whole package of patriarchy and family structure that gives me an elevated place.
And I get to be the one who makes the decisions.
And I'm going to drink whiskey and smoke cigars and talk about Aquinas.
You know what I'm saying?
That kind of masculinity.
But there's also this sort of evangelical version that is just, it's a little less, you know, faux intellectual and a little more just into like, yeah.
You know what a real man does?
This is not my phrase, but this is what they're going to...
You know what a real man does?
He takes care of his household.
He wifes someone up.
He wifes her up. That's what people say, right?
Yeah, I wifed her up.
Meaning, I was so awesome that I locked her down.
I was able to get her to be my wife.
And I think there's just this sense of...
Christianity gives you a package of control.
Unfortunately, in many cases, not all, not by any stretch, if you're a young man in your 20s or 30s, and I think you're seeing men take up that package more and more in ways that many women are like, actually, I don't want to be in that kind of culture.
If that's what you're offering, if me coming to this community in this tradition means taking on that kind of femininity, I'm out.
I'm good. I'm going to trade it all away.
Yeah. So just a couple more thoughts about this to tie in.
One is educational levels.
Younger men also have lower education levels now than young women do.
And this is those of us in higher ed have known for decades that There have been more women who are undergraduates than men, and that catches up into grad school and beyond.
And so we also know that education levels tend to correlate negatively with church attendance.
So you get that piece, like broader demographics, where as women have become more educated, more economically successful, more of them have moved out of the church.
I think another piece of this that you're getting at is, you know, something we've talked about is, we've talked about the camps, the military training camps and stuff, but like, that's the church retreat weekend.
All of that stuff to actively court a certain vision of masculinity.
I think the last one, your issue of control is, you know, we've been talking about all this radical Catholicism, and I can hear somebody being like, well, yeah, but like, you're talking about Protestant evangelicalism.
When I was young, evangelicalism was still on the rise.
When I was in high school, when I was in college, immediately after.
And so you would have all these sociologists that would study American religion.
And the one area of Christianity that was always growing was evangelicalism.
And so there's this triumphalism about that.
And evangelicalism, I think, always believed the same things about society, that it should be a Christian society that should enforce Christian norms.
But the way we were going to do that was by winning people to Christ.
We're going to convert so many people that it'll become a Christian society.
Well, that didn't happen. And evangelicals started shrinking in numbers like everybody else.
And so I think that there has been an appropriation of this Catholic discourse or rapprochement between Catholicism and evangelicals where the evangelicals are like, you know what?
That whole like, you know, imposed social order thing looks pretty good because this converting people isn't working.
We're not able to like win people to the faith as it turns out.
So we need to just breed lots of people into the faith and then we need to just impose laws that make it so everybody has to have the social order we want.
And all of that, yeah, can be super, super attractive.
Like, big shock. If you're a straight white guy, you're drawn to this whole entire cultural discourse that says the world should be run by straight white guys.
And God said so.
Like, yeah, there's a lot of appeal to that.
No, I think that makes total sense.
And it is a striking kind of shift.
Because I don't know about you, Dan, but when I was in ministry in the 90s and 2000s, there was always this trope of the wife who would bring her two kids to church and the pastor's like, oh, where's Dave?
Where's John? Oh, he's busy, or he had to work, or he didn't feel like he had a thing.
He's not feeling good.
And now I think we're seeing a difference with that.
And it maps on to larger trends in the country in terms of politics of young men and young women and so on.
This does not mean that all the young men in their 20s have turned full-on retrograde, patriarchal, you know, integralist or anything.
And I think Melissa Deckman's new book on Gen Z is one that has really nuanced data on this.
So it's not a situation of just wholesale kind of, you know, patriarchy.
But yeah, you can see the ways that a young man who's in his 20s or 30s would be drawn not only to Catholic integralism, but Sadly, Andrew Tate or Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, any of these number of different forms of masculinity that they think will help them.
All right, Dan, let's go to Reasons for Hope.
What do you got? The striking workers reached agreement.
So there was a big strike, which, and obviously, let me begin by saying, yay workers for, you know, striking and getting a better deal and doing the things that you should do as organized labor.
There was a lot of hand-wringing, though, about, like, the economic impacts of this, what that would do to the campaign, and so forth, and lots of very apocalyptic accounts of this, and it was like three days or something, and they've reached an agreement.
So I think that that could have been a big election year kind of thing, and it's not.
It could have been a proverbial October surprise.
So I had hoped that it didn't devolve into that, and I don't even know what kind of political discourse would come from that.
And again, I also think it's a sign of hope because organized labor in this country is not the force that it once was.
And so I'm thrilled to see that the workers got a positive outcome out of it.
I want to say here at the end, we're thinking of everyone in North Carolina and other places affected by the hurricane and just, yeah, devastating.
And we are thinking of you.
And we're also thinking of something we did not talk about today.
We are not experts in, but that's what is happening between Iran and We're good to go.
That was Jack Smith's evidence that has been revealed and made public, and it's a 165-page document that really shows, in very damning ways, the ways that Trump tried to basically conspire to overturn the 2020 election.
We may talk about it next week, but I'm sure most of you listening have seen snippets and read excerpts by now.
My hope is that will bring a fresh invigoration to people of just how illegal And undemocratic and anti-American, his actions were leading up to January 6th.
We shall see. All right, friends, I'm going to say it again.
November 21st, be at USC, University of Southern California, 7 p.m.
We're going to have a book signing and reception about 6.15 p.m., so get over there.
Then on the 22nd, we're going to zip down to San Diego, be at the convention center at 7 p.m.
with Matt Taylor and Leah Payne, Lloyd Barba.
And us, it's going to be a really good time.
So November 21, November 22, both at 7 p.m.
We'll have tickets and flyers up very soon, we promise.
Other than that, we'll say, if you haven't already, become a premium subscriber.
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