In this free-for-all-Friday Trent shares his recent interview on the state of apologetic discourse with Adherent Apologetics.

Trent Horn (00:00):

Mondays and Wednesdays, we talk aboutologics and theology on the podcast, but Fridays, sometimes we talk about apologetics and theology because it’s free for all Friday. I can talk about whatever I want to talk about. And today I wanted to share with you an interview I did on adherent apologetics. This is a non-Catholic YouTube channel, but they invited me to come on and discuss the current state of apologetic discourse. I really enjoyed it. They were a great host and I think you’ll benefit a lot from this interview and definitely go and check out their channel. So here you guys are and I just hope you have a very blessed weekend.

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (00:34):

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Adherent Apologetics. I’m so, so excited to join us today to have Trent Horn. We’re going to be talking about apologetics and online discourse and the state of the current temperature. Trent, welcome. Just thank you so much for joining me. How you doing today?

Trent Horn (00:48):

I’m doing well. I’m blessed. I’m really glad to be here chatting with you.

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (00:52):

Yeah, I’m super excited. So today for everyone, we’re going to talk about discourse and just what’s going on with the world and whatnot. Trent, thank you for joining. Just to start, do you want to talk a little bit about who you are, what you do, things like that?

Trent Horn (01:06):

Sure. My name is Trent Horn. I am a Catholic apologist. I’ve been working at Catholic Answers since about December of 2012. I was a convert. When I went to junior high in the beginning of high school, I was a deist, so I was not an atheist, but I was not a Christian either. I believe there was a God out there, but I thought religion was a crutch for people. Then I met Christian friends, came around on that, came to believe in Jesus when I was 16 years old. Did more investigation into denominations and church history, was received into the Catholic Church, baptized and confirmed. 2002, I was 17. Started doing pro- life work after that for a while. When I graduated college, I traveled the country, going to college campuses, debating people on the issue of abortion. Then I started working for a pro- life group after that.

(01:57):

Then as I said, in 2012, I started working for Catholic Answers and I’ve written books since then. And my desire is just to really to share Christ to reach the most number of people who are the furthest away from Christ. So that’s why my very first book I wrote was Answering Atheism. After that, I wrote Persuasive Pro-life. So these are issues that I care a lot about. Though my bestselling book is my book, Why We’re Catholic, which I wrote back in 2017. Yeah. And I just want to share the truth about Christ as church, what God desires for us regarding divisive moral issues. And I want to engage people in a charitable way. Second Timothy chapter two talks about correcting opponents with gentleness, correcting with kindness. And I want to engage people in debates and dialogues and with a very particular way of engaging people that represents being an ambassador for Christ as two Corinthians chapter five references, not being a jerk for Christ as some people try to do nowadays.

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (02:58):

Well, Trent, I’m grateful and you’re a great person to talk to about this topic. I read your book Case for Catholicism probably a year or two ago now. And I walked away, not a Catholic, but super impressed. Just with the way that you wrote and how you argue. And I just love the book and I loved everything about it and how you wrote and how you argued. So just grateful for that and your work. Let’s talk about lowering the temperature. So have you noticed things within maybe the past month, six months, year in apologetics and just conversations about what’s the current temperature that you see right now?

Trent Horn (03:37):

Well, I mean, it depends. A lot of what I see is just stuff on social media. I mean, it’s hard to see what people do in the offline world away from you, like how someone might just engage in an apologetic discussion person to person in some other college in this country. But I can see how people interact on social media. And I feel like in the past, I want to say kind of like about two years, maybe really since 2024, when Trump was reelected and we got kind of the new Christian right being emboldened by that. I think I noticed the … I mean, there’s always been a deterioration of the discourse in various ways, but I’ve noticed … Well, there was that. I guess it was the new right coming out of Trump 2024. I also noticed a lot of deterioration after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, where you’re seeing people saying, “Don’t bother having dialogue.” Dialogue is what got Charlie killed.

(04:34):

We just have to destroy, take power and demand that other people do what we say because we have the power now and we just have to mock and belittle those who disagree with us. And it’s the idea of just we’re going to win through force, either physical force or just force of mocking and ganging up on people online and meming them out of existence and just trying to win the discourse in that way. And I am firmly against that, that it’s not the Christian way of evangelizing and sharing the gospel with others. So I guess those are kind of the catalysts that I’ve noticed. I don’t know if you’ve noticed anything similar or maybe if you’ve had divergences there.

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (05:15):

Yeah. It’s been really interesting because I was in the apologetics world and like the theology and all this stuff from like 2019 to about mid 2024. And then I just kind of stepped away and took a break for really like over a year. And I came back right around October, November-ish, I believe. And I think that was right around the time … Do you know when Charlie Kirk was assassinated? It was around that time.

Trent Horn (05:43):

Yeah. I mean, it was, gosh, it was just a few months ago, but now it’s starting to feel like years time, especially as you get older like I am, time moves at a very unusual speed for us. Yeah, it was September 10th. Yeah, so it was one day before nine eleven commemoration. So yeah, September 10th of 2025, but it feels like it’s been years, it’s been a few months.

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (06:08):

Yeah. And I mean, what I’ve seen is it almost feels like it was kind of this way before, but I feel like, and I don’t use social media a whole lot, but I see it’s almost like just different echo chambers where there’s not really a lot of conversation, but it’s more like, here’s the way things are from our point of view. And there’s a bunch of comments that are like, “Oh, you’re crazy,” or, “Oh, you’re totally right and everyone else is crazy.” This goes Christian atheists, politics. Yeah, I just see that everywhere. That’s what I’ve seen.

Trent Horn (06:38):

Yeah. I think also algorithms have gotten much worse. If you’re talking about socially social media discourse, the algorithms have gotten much worse at sorting us into communities where we’re just echo chambers. We hear what other people … We hear people who agree with us, and then maybe there are particular kinds of people who disagree with us that we’re stuck in a vacuum talking to. For example, I find it … Now, I do think there’s some sense of revival among Gen Z, especially towards more ancient forms of the Christian faith, like Catholicism or Orthodoxy. But when you actually look at the data, Gen Z is like the least Christian generation ever. They are very non-religious, not going to church where the Gen Z who do become religious are very devout, but overall, there’s just a lot of non-religious people, a lot of people buying into arguments similar to Reddit atheism or new atheism from the 2000s and 2010s.

(07:33):

But I’ll look on social media and it’s just Catholics and Protestants and Orthodox now arguing with each other when it’s like, “Hey, there are a ton of people who don’t know Jesus. We’re not reaching out to them. We’re not engaging these other non-religious influencers that were just kind of sorted into this interdenominational debate, which I still think is important. I want people to have the fullness of what God revealed in the Catholic church, but I also want people to know Jesus don’t know Jesus. And if we’re just ignoring that, I’m wondering what are we doing

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (08:02):

Here?” There’s something to that. I remember I recently moved to Northern Virginia and I remember it was one of the first Sundays I went to church in Northern Virginia. So I live five, 10 miles south of DC, not a woodsy area in site besides for a park. And then one of the pastors said very clearly, he’s like, “There’s people in Northern Virginia and the United States of America, this country that have never stepped in a church a day in their life.” They lived their whole life in the United States of America. And we’d like to think of ourselves as a Christian country and there’s people that have just never gone to church in their whole life. And to me, that sounds a lot like, “Oh, that’s what I heard about Europe. Oh, we’re going to become Western Europe.” And I just find that sad. Yeah.

Trent Horn (08:44):

You think because you see all of your friends online talking about Christian topics, things like that in your social media algorithm, the real world is not like social media. And it is so difficult to see how we can have fruit on social media. A lot of times, I mean, I’ve interacted with people there and helped them come to know Christ or repent of really grave sins, people I would’ve never met in the real world. So I’m grateful for the internet to allow me to reach out to them and help them. But at the same time though, there are just so many people out in the real world that we’re neglecting if we get stuck in these algorithms that distort what we think the world is like.

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (09:23):

Yeah. No, I get that. I have friends that I think of that I’m like, people I’ve met here that have literally just either never stepped foot in a church or it’s a very vague experience as a little kid and it’s just a very large … There is that disconnect. So what do we do about this, Trent? If Trent Horn’s in charge of the world, how does Trent Horn fix this problem? I want

Trent Horn (09:46):

To give people off the internet so bad, which is of course hypocritical because-

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (09:50):

As we’ve talked about the internet.

Trent Horn (09:53):

Well, it’s like the meme. I think it’s called the rage against the machine meme or something. It’s like a peasant carrying sticks and he’s like, “We should make society better.” And a guy pops out of a well is like, “And yet you are part of society.” I’m very intelligent as if it’s hypocritical to belong to a thing that you want to make better.

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (10:12):

I saw an article on, but we just want to cut you off on- Yeah, go

Trent Horn (10:14):

Ahead. Sure.

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (10:15):

Man, where did I see this? Maybe AP News somewhere where this person, this influencer on TikTok who’s like, “I want you to get off TikTok and spend maybe an hour or 30 minutes a day on TikTok or whatever, but the 30 minutes or an hour you do spend, I want you to spend watching my videos and then I want you to get off the app.” And I’m like, just out of that.

Trent Horn (10:32):

Oh, totally.That’s absurd. For me, if somebody stopped watching Council of Trent because they stopped being on the internet, I’d be so happy. I’d be absolutely happy. And it’s not even that like what I do for Council of Trent, it started as a podcast in 2018 and I still release episodes on Apple iTunes, on Spotify. And I think I would be happy if someone was like, “Hey, the internet’s sucked away in my life. I’ll just listen to you as a podcast.” I find that’s way … If you put in the chart of addictable things, the most addictive is like TikTok, shorts, Snapchat, then YouTube, social media like X or Instagram, but down at the lower end is going to be like just a podcast playlist. It’s way easier to unplug from that or not get sucked into that versus just being online. So I would be happy if someone just stopped watching me on YouTube, listen to audio podcasts.

(11:28):

I would even send people a CD if I had the infrastructure just to like freely keep them off there. No, I think it really does suck us away. I use blocking software to not get sucked in, but it still happens. I’m trying to manage that. And the more and more that we’re online, the more that we learn to relate to each other and in human ways. And this is also something that happens just in general that people want to avoid conflicts or they’ll text each other for like three hours when if they just talked for 10 minutes in person, it would be fine because we’re so worried about conflict, it’s safer to text than to … My wife and I have always had this disagreement because I am a elder millennial and she’s a baby millennial, so we’re almost across the generational divide. And I remember when we first started dating, I would call her and it would go to voicemail and then she would text me back and say, “What’s up?” And she’s a baby millennial.

(12:20):

You go to even younger than that, it’s like if someone calls you, it’s like, “Did mom die? Why are you calling me? Why don’t you just text me? ” So I do think that we have to be able to engage one another honestly. I feel like social media really engineers us towards behaving in inhuman ways, but I think when we’re going to be critiquing other worldviews and engaging in apologetics and discourse about important topics, we should treat each other fairly. So for example, in the past few months, I started doing something I hope others will imitate. I haven’t seen people really do this a lot yet, but I’ve enjoyed it. When I do a response to someone, let’s say … So Gavin Ortland makes a lot of videos and sometimes he’ll critique Catholicism or something like that. And so I saw one he did on infant baptism and I said, “Hey, Gavin, I’m going to write this script engaging your arguments on infant baptism.

(13:10):

Can you review it to at least make sure I understood your original argument? I didn’t misunderstand you. ” And we went back and forth and that was really helpful for my script. I’ve got other scripts coming out the same thing with other influencers coming out soon and it just makes it better and it lowers the temperature and it’s not like … And knowing that he’s going to review the script also, one, the fact that I script it makes it more measured and controlled instead of just turning on a stream where you’re likely to say something inflammatory or use words you probably shouldn’t have used. But also knowing he’s going to read it, it’s like, “Oh, I can be nicer because I’m talking directly to him before I put it out there.” And then also we don’t have the misunderstandings and it’s just way more pleasant to engage each other.

(13:52):

Just this idea like, well, let’s try to get together the truth together, not just playing this kind of gotcha game with each other. That’s what I want to see the discourse kind of getting to.

Zac (Adherent Apologetics) (14:01):

I love that. One thought I had is something I wanted to bring up just like talking about with you, Trent, before we even had this conversation or before it began was I’m working on my master’s degree and I had to interview a leader who’s a believer and my master’s degree has nothing to do with apologetics. It’s my career, but it was about conflict and like how do you deal with conflict in the workplace? Yeah. And what she said is she blew my mind. She said, when you have a conflict or a disagreement with someone, you should call them into your office … Well, she’s office workplace, call them in, talk to them in person, you sit with them, you look at them, you listen, you listen, you listen, you listen, you listen, you let them say everything you say. And then before you say what you got to say, you got to make … She says you shouldn’t be able to make sure that you can say everything that they said in their own words and be able to understand their position fully.

(14:49):

Then you check with them. We’re still not at the part where you say what you believe. And then once you check with them, you ask them, “Okay, what do we do to make this right?” And that’s more like conflict and business, but there’s that point that I think translates into apologetics where I think it’s very wise what you’re doing because you can’t respond to Gavin or treat him or w... Read more on Catholic.com