It is Free For All Friday here on The Counsel of Trent. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Recently, I was invited onto Amber Rose’s podcast. Amber is also known as The Religious Hippie. She’s been on Pints with Aquinas before. She does a lot of interesting updates and YouTube videos, and so she asked me to come on to talk about being a Catholic on social media, about Catholic influencers, things that are good, things that are not so good.

So we had a really good conversation and I’m really excited to share that with you all today. For those of you who are new, Monday and Wednesdays, we talk apologetics and theology here on the podcast, but Friday, we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And I think you really enjoy this interview that I had with Amber Rose on The Religious Hippie Podcast.

Very happy to have you here today, Trent. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me. I think my greatest accomplishment is I’m married to the host of Too Far with Laura Horn.

Yes.

And so that would be, and I do make occasional cameo appearances and technical setup for that YouTube channel. I’ve noticed you’ve made a few comments here and there. I’m glad you’ve received it well also.

Oh yes. Whenever I’m on Laura’s thing for whatever, whether it was the modesty discourse, I’m like, this is the content I live for. I wish more people did stuff like this because I just think we take ourselves too seriously these days. I mean, Laura being able to bring the type of humor she does and be unapologetically herself, it’s so fun.

Oh, absolutely. And I think there’s always a ton of material for Laura to draw from when she’s on social media .and she’s not on social media a lot, and I think that makes it work. She doesn’t have a Twitter profile, or she has some things so that she can see things on Twitter, but she’s not on Twitter. She’s not on Facebook. She barely just started on Instagram, but she likes just observing everybody else getting a bit out of hand and poking fun at all that.

Honestly, that’s what we need because without that, I feel like the whole Catholic online world is kind of like doom and gloom, which is a little bit what our topic is today about celebrities, Catholic celebrities, convert celebrities, and just being on social media as a whole can really impact your faith life in a really negative way.

I know for myself having to go through and seeing all the negativity on Twitter especially, you know who I’m talking about, all the people, and it’s crazy how people allow a small comment to just ruin their day or they take so many things out of context and they have to have their own spin on stuff. And I do feel like to an extent, there’s that danger for us as content creators, as Catholic content creators, that we push the doom and gloom because we know it’s what gets gets us views.

Oh yeah. I mean, that’s a danger if you’re really trying to create, like you said, just content and followers and you’re focusing not so much on edifying and building people up, but you’re thinking, oh, what are people talking about and what could I say that gets a lot of attention? And honestly, a lot of people will calculate, well, if I say something really extreme, even if it gives me a lot of negative attention, it also will get me a lot of positive attention, so it’s all worthwhile.

I think you notice that the people who are the most moderate and reasonable and try to have the most balanced takes, they’re just not as popular as the people that have the most forceful takes because people like that kind of a rush, either a rush of agreement or a rush of disagreement. And I do think, yeah, it creates this bad environment. If you look at my social media, for example, I don’t do a lot of posting there anymore either. I do a little bit of it. I mostly use it to reach out to people, things like that, but it’s just gotten a lot worse.

I mean, I know I mainly followed you on YouTube and Twitter, and I watch your videos and everything. Twitter though, I mean, there was so much stuff going on where it’s like, should we speak out about this because technically this person is saying stuff that might lead other people astray? And so you also have to find that balance.

You could get lost forever trying to correct everybody on the internet. Because then when you correct that person, you’ve got to correct other people. I think there’s a place for that for people to do that. Honestly, that might be the place. I don’t know, it’s so hard. It’s just so easy to lose your soul on the internet. You become angry, uncharitable, dishonest, mean. You just get so fixated on things and also you just can’t let things go either.

I mean, I still get in little debates with people here and there, but overall, I find it to not be very fruitful. I’d rather find something that’s going on on Twitter and I’ll just talk about it as an episode of my podcast for a larger perspective on whatever the issue is, or I might restrict myself if someone’s wrong just to post under, “That’s actually incorrect. Here is the correct answer,” and then just let it go after that and then I’m done.

I think that’s so important too is setting those boundaries and those limits for ourself and not getting sucked into the vortex of online internet fights, because that’s something that happens daily on Twitter. Honestly, it happens probably a hundred times a day on Twitter. I don’t know. But you’ve done debates. Debating is something that you’re very good at.

But the thing is, on Twitter, because of the limited amount of characters, there are a lot of things that get lost in the context and the punctuation and just the feel of a tweet, where people just tweet and it’s like, “Mary is sinless,” and that’s it, or something.

And it’s like, okay, that’s great, but clearly, and that’s true, but there also needs to be more context behind that for some people who don’t understand because then you’re going to create controversy. And my spiritual director specifically told me, he’s like, never post to create controversy. Even if it’s subconscious, think before you tweet or think before you post. Go ahead.

I was going to say, I think that one of the difficulties we have on social media is we’ll post something, but we won’t think, how is that going to sound to other people? Or we will think, “Oh, this will offend Protestants or it will offend atheists, but I don’t care because I’m right. And so I’m just going to put that out there,” instead of presenting in a way that’s measured, that anyone can appreciate if they give it a fair reading. So I think you’re right that there are certain things that you could say just to “own another person,” to say something in a very provocative way.

And sometimes there are times to do that, to test whether Twitter’s actually censoring people, things like that. But I find it difficult when people will post when without thinking about how it’s received from other people, either that it’s very provocative or that it’s just flat out wrong. It’s just incorrect. I’ll give you a classic example. When Catholics say, “Why would I be Protestant when Protestants have 30,000 denominations? You have so much disunity.” That number is actually not true.

It comes from a source that categorizes things very poorly. That same source said that there are like 200 denominations in Catholicism. I didn’t know if you knew this figure. It’s out there all the time, the 33,000 denominations of Protestantism. It’s not true. I mean, rather I say something like, “Hey, how many churches did Jesus want us to have? Probably not more than one. Protestantism seems to have a lot more than that.” So you’ll notice that that is a very measured claim.

It’s a modest… Well, you can appreciate this. You’re always talking about modesty. I have my own ministry. I do apologetic modesty. You’ve got some of these apologists that they let everything hang out there and it’s scandalous, some of these misleading claims or arguments that are poorly sourced or citations that are not true. And I’m saying we should really be modest in the claims we’re making.

That’s going to get you a lot further in a dialogue with someone than a very provocative argument, especially one that you can’t support. Look at me. I guess maybe I should start my own little modesty Twitter. That’s what I should do.

Just have modesty with Trent Horn.

I will, theological and apologetic modesty. Different people have different approaches, but that is the approach that I’ve tried to take. I mean, I’ll give you… It’s funny, I had a problem… Not a problem. I remember back on Reformation Day. I just always think it’s funny. I’m like, you mean Halloween? Reformation Day, October 31st for our Protestant friends. Come on, man. It’s Halloween. You’re not fooling anybody. But I remember I saw a Catholic YouTuber, who shall remain nameless, who was doing a video on here’s what’s wrong with Martin Luther, here’s what’s so bad about Martin Luther.

And he was quoting from a webpage written by a Jesuit I think in the ’30s, and the research on that particular webpage is really… I know that page. It’s really, really bad. The article’s bad. Other Protestants and Lutherans have rebutted it and it’s just not good. And he just used it because he thought, hey, there’s footnotes here. This guy seems pretty well sourced. No, you’ve already started off on the wrong foot.

Yeah, your presentation is going to impress Catholics who don’t know any better, but it’s going to turn off a Protestant who does know, hey, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And then I just debated, should I correct this person on this? I’ve corrected this individual before on other things, and I felt like I just don’t want to get in another Twitter fight, just not another one. So maybe when Reformation Day comes around again next year, I’ll make an episode, the things Catholics get wrong about Martin Luther.

That would be a good idea.

Yeah, but it’s hard. What’s hard about it is that we all have this nasty habit of confirmation bias. So we hear something and when we agree with it, we’re like, “Yeah, that’s awesome,” and we don’t question it. And when we hear something we disagree with, we ignore it or we question it as much as possible, instead of just fairly looking at the evidence. And so it’s just something we all have to get over.

Yeah, no, I think that there’s a real danger there too, because if we’re, like you said, confirmation biased, then we’re leading people astray. And that’s something that as Catholics we’re not supposed to be doing, which is why it’s so important that we know our faith and we don’t just know our faith, but we know the other faiths too. A lot of people have argued about me on this, and I’m like, I don’t think it’s wrong to learn about Hinduism, not practicing it or anything, or Hinduism…

Are there people who say it’s wrong to even learn about it?

Yes. Yes. People have told me, they’re just like, “Why are you learning about this or that?”

Why not? But this is good that you’re out there and I think it’s hard, especially on Catholic social media. The hardest part on Catholic social media is I feel like you have some traditionalists who think everybody’s going to hell and some liberals who think everybody’s going to heaven. So it just doesn’t really matter what we talk about, or you’ll just nitpick about these things, major and the minors. So even that example, wouldn’t it be most impressive, you meet a Hindu and to be able to speak to them and say, “Yeah, I’m familiar with the Bhagavad Gita. I’m familiar with the elements of Hinduism?”

And I’ve done this with other faiths when I’ve… I do think that there’s a problem, especially within the online Catholic liberals and the Catholic traditionalists. The liberals think everyone’s going to heaven, so you don’t have to witness to the non-Catholics. I really feel like some of these, not all, but some traditionalists think like, oh, they’re all going to hell anyways. Deus Vult, here’s the gospel, take it or leave it. You didn’t leave it. You left it. Well, you’re going to hell. What do you expect? Instead of the sense of, oh no, you can actually…

Now I understand some of their criticism. Some of them get really mad at me, like I say, we should dialogue, and they roll their eyes like, “Ugh, dialogue. Novus Ordo, ugh, that’s modernist.” I agree if it’s the kind of dialogue that sometimes the Vatican hosts where people sit around and they only talk about what they agree about. That’s not helpful. That’s bad. But when I have dialogues, like I’ve had dialogues with Alex O’Connor, with Brandon Robertson, I’ve had dialogues with Gavin Ortlund, I’ve had dialogues with people who are not Catholic where I challenge them on where we…

Here’s agree, this is great, and I challenge them on where we disagree. But the only way I can have a good dialogue with someone… If I’m just totally ignorant of what they believe, they’re not going to… It’s the same thing you and I, if we talk to a Protestant who said, “Oh, well, as a Catholic, you worship Mary. So do you think that that’s okay?” You don’t know the first thing. Or someone says this, “Oh, as a Catholic, you think you need an indulgence to go to heaven.”

See, that shows me right there that person has no hope of wooing you to Protestantism because you’ll say, “You don’t even know Catholicism. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And the same thing happens if you try to engage a non-Catholic. If you don’t understand what they believe, they’re not going to take you… So yeah, that does make me really roll my eyes that someone get mad at you.

Now, I understand if someone is in a spiritually bad place, maybe they shouldn’t be reading up on other religions if they’re tempted to leave Catholicism. I understand that. But if it’s just, I am trying to learn about the world to spread the gospel, I find that quite silly to condemn that.

Well, it is. When it comes down to it, I think back to the Jesuits back in the day where they would literally go to Native American tribes and learn the language, learn the culture, immerse themselves in the culture, and then weeded out all the paganism and convert them and start working their way into baptizing these people. That’s how it’s supposed to be done, not that you conform to their culture and you conform to their sins and their paganism. You keep the Catholicism, but you teach them another way by learning and gaining that trust.

There’s also I think a difficulty sometimes with Catholics is that they will consider certain cultural elements to be essential to Catholicism. So for example, we have debates about the liturgy and the traditional Latin mass. And some people might think that for liturgy, using the organ or singing in polyphony, multiple notes, that is what the liturgy ought to be. But 1,500 years ago when the organ was introduced in church history, it was very controversial. The organ who was an instrument previously that had been known for being used in things like Roman orgies.

Well, yeah, think about what we’re borrowing from. We’re taking things from Roman culture, right? I don’t exclusively attend anymore, but I’ve often attended the Eastern liturgy, the Byzantine Catholic Church, and I find that that liturgy is even more ancient because it’s only sung using acapella. There are no instruments. The first liturgical music, it did not have instruments. Adding things like the organ, it was essentially an instrument at the time. The same if you use more intricate musical compositions like polyphony instead of monophony.

But now it’s 2,000 years later, we think, oh, organ is the most traditional thing, when there was a time when, oh, that’s, that’s very, very controversial. And so we become a bit ignorant of history. And so by that same token, incorporating elements within the faith, we should be more open to that. Now, of course, there is another extreme where it becomes banal, it becomes you’re trying to ape the culture, and you’ve got these churches that were designed in the seventies that are just awful.

That’s the other extremely where you’re conformed. I mean, if it’s so funny, I always think like, oh, if I was the pope or bishop, or if I had real authority, Veal asked me, what kind of mode popery would you do? I wish that there was a law like every Catholic Church that was built now, its architectural plans had to be… The architectural style had to be before 1910.

Yes. Yes, please.

That’s what attracts people. If you build a church in the ’70s with ’70s style, it’s always going to look ’70s, but if you build it with the style of the 1700s. If you just walk down the street and you saw just a Catholic parish, but it looked like a little mini gothic cathedral, non-Catholics would just go there and take pictures.

Yes, evangelizing.

Exactly. They’re like, “Whoa, this is really interesting,” or whatever. “It looks exactly like a Spanish mission from the 18th century in California,” or whatever it might be. So yeah, I wish that we had more things. For example, in San Diego, because Catholic Answers is there and I travel out there often, there is a Mormon temple there that looks like a Disneyland castle. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to San Diego.

No, I haven’t. But I mean, if I do, I’ll look for it.

Well, can just look up San Diego Mormon Temple. If you look it up online, it’s just like, wow, it looks like a Disney castle. You’re awestruck by it. So to parse what I was saying before, you don’t want to turn false settlements. What was considered traditional now was at one point often controversial and new. So you should be open to that, which is controversial and new, but at the same time, not every new thing is a good thing. So there’s a balance.

Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve talked about this multiple times about how I don’t like ugly churches. And every single time I get dragged through the mud for it saying, “You can’t say that about God’s house.” I’m like, God deserves a better house. I mean, come on. This is the King of Kings, the Lords of Lords. And if we truly believe that, why are we putting him in a ’70s office building? Like The Office could be filmed in most of these churches, and I wouldn’t know the difference.

Actually, there was one church, it just popped up on Instagram I think it was yesterday. I don’t know if it was in San Diego, but probably. There was a beautiful, beautiful church, beautiful cathedral, and it was sold in 2003 to San Diego and they gutted the whole thing and turned it into a wedding venue so that the church could build another cathedral further down the street. And I’m like, why not keep both? I mean, I understand money’s tight and everything like that, but I mean, I go to St. John Cantius. I’m sure you’re familiar with that, right?

I think so.

It’s ranked one of the most beautiful churches in the nation.

Sounds familiar. I’ll just bring it up. Let’s see.

Yeah, that works. And it’s beautiful. And so St. John Cantius…

Oh, is it in Chicago?

Yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s gorgeous, and I’ll post pictures.

Those vaulted ceilings, wooden pews. It’s hard for me the wooden pews though, that’s very Protestant. I don’t like that liberal stuff.

You want to stand 24/7?

No. Now, by the way, it’s so funny, people… Well, you get this too, probably. People they think they know you or I like, “Oh, they do this. They do that.” Uh, no. I might’ve said one thing a few years ago, and you’re just running with this. Sometimes life changes. People think, for example, that I exclusively attend the Byzantine Catholic Church, the Eastern Byzantine liturgy, and I did for a while. But now our family life plans have changed, and now we almost exclusively attend a Novus Ordo.

It’s a beautiful Novus Ordo liturgy that I enjoy, and I do go to Byzantine every now and then because I also really do enjoy that. So people think like, oh, he tells people, “I’m Catholic.” He won’t even attend the Novus Ordo. That’s not true actually. I’ve never said that, but you can go ahead and run with it.

And that’s exactly what happens for me as well, where I tell them like, “Oh, I go to the traditional Latin mass and that’s my preferred mass,” and they’re like, “Oh, so you hate the Novus Ordo?” I’m like, no.

Right.

Where did I say that?

Right, just because I have a preference. I still prefer the Byzantine liturgy, but our life plans, it just makes more sense for the Novus Ordo and your bias. I even like the Novus Ordo parishes that people would cringe at, but I sometimes enjoy the homey familiarity of that which is cringe and I find a particular kind of beauty in it. I know there are downsides to it, but it’s kind of like when I watch old sitcoms from the ’90s that are cringey still.

They have a warmth and familiarity that I enjoy. And just seeing the community that they love it and their little choir that’s doing their best and shaking the orange with the rice in it. And it’s like, you’re going for it. So I was saying the pews though, some people don’t know this, pews were really invented as part of the Protestant Reformation to accommodate sitting for two hours listening to a sermon.

Most Christian churches throughout church history, the posture was standing. It was not sitting actually. But there’s nothing bad about it if you have that posture and you adopt it and you have pews. You can worship God in a lot of different ways. So just chill out, everybody.

It’s crazy too, because with things like that, I’ve had a lot of people email me, and at least 10 people email me in, saying, “Oh, my mom prays the rosary during the Latin mass, or this person praise the rosary during the mass. Is that technically like, can they do that? That’s not really participating.” And I’m like, whoa. The Low Mass came when we had to do underground masses. And so the Low Mass was celebrated in barns, in houses and basements. And so praying the rosary ... Read more on Catholic.com