Joe dissects a poorly written, AI-sourced article from X that paints a laughably inaccurate picture of American Catholicism and Catholic Answers specifically.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and it’s not every day that as an apologist for Catholic Answers, I find our work called out in a piece shared by a city and US Senator, but this week I had that unique experience. So Senator Ted Cruz shared a piece by a Twitter user called Insurrection Barbie, and it’s an article, it’s over 8,000 words long, called The Long Game and the Conservative Right. But Cruz gave a very strong endorsement of this article. He said, “Read every word of this. It’s the best and most comprehensive explanation of what we’re fighting.” Now, I’m not 100% sure this was written by a human. It reads like AI slop. It’s filled with basic errors, but I think it’s striking that he shares this piece, which calls out Catholic answers twice by name and gets, as I said, just basic details wrong, completely misunderstands the theological and political things that are afoot.

And I thought to be worth addressing just a handful of the points made. So first, I mean, one of the first clues that maybe this wasn’t written by a human being is that there’s a section attacking this Catholic position called integralism.

Not Ted:

We used an AI voice to read the article to illustrate how ridiculous the article is. The voice was chosen completely at random, of course. The first is integralism, a pre-Vatican II political theology that holds the Catholic church should exercise direct authority over temporal governments. That religious liberty is a Protestant error and that a properly ordered state must subordinate itself to church teaching. This is not the position of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It is not the position of Pope Francis.

Joe:

Now that’s kind of striking because as any human being knows, Pope Francis is not the Pope, but a lot of AI models have not updated that. So that’s the first red flag that maybe we’re not actually dealing with human to human debate here, that rather a robot is just spewing out builge and Ted Cruz is taking this as the best, most insightful commentary on a state of affairs where it doesn’t even … It’s commenting on specifically Catholic political actors and the world of Catholicism, and it doesn’t even know who the Pope of the Catholic Church is. But then it goes on to attack what it calls SSPX adjacent traditionalism, and particularly cites Nick Fuentes as operating in this world.

Not Ted:

The second is SSPX adjacent traditionalism. The world of the Latin mass hardliners, the society of St. Pius X, the ssedevacantists and near set of vacantists who regard this a second Vatican council as a catastrophic betrayal and the post-concealer church is illegitimate or gravely compromised. Nick Fuentes operates in this world.

Joe:

Now look, I’ve been critical of Nick Fuentes before, but this is a bizarre and unfair attack for several reasons. First, there’s nothing pre-Vatican II or dissident or anything about that about the apostles creed imagery. I don’t know what they could possibly find wrong in the apostles creed that they’re viewing as antisemitic or politically problematic. But either way, we still believe in the apostles creed. The Vatican has not disciplined anyone for praying the Apostle’s Creed. At every Sunday, you pray the Nicene or the Apostles creed. This is completely mainstream ordinary Catholicism. Now, it is true that people have used Christ the King in ways that might be an antisemitic dog whistle. So I understand what’s going on there. And I also understand that a lot of people are hostile to ecumenism and interfaith dialogue and the rest. It is very strange to accuse Nick Fuentes of being some sort of traditionalist SSPX, hardliner, SSPX adjacent when he’s absolutely explicit that he finds that whole world weird and is very comfortable just going to a Novus Ortho mass.

CLIP:

I was up there in Michigan with the church militant guys and I was going to go to a Novus Ortho mass on a Sunday instead of their super duper trad mass. And they looked at me like I was a heretic and I said, “Hey, Pal, the Pope’s on my side here.” And you’re sounding like a separatist.

Joe:

So again, just basic factual information is not right. The Pope is not Francis. Fuentes is not a tready.

Not Ted:

The third ingredient is imported European and Middle Eastern sectarianism. And this is perhaps the most important point because it explains something that confuses many American observers. Why does any of this feel so foreign?

Joe:

I think it should say, why does all of this feel so foreign? And the thing I want to highlight here is we should call this out. It’s bad when people on the far right accuse support for Israel of being some kind of international Jewish plot. It’s also bad when people say any criticism of Israel is part of some international Russian plot, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen here. Insurrection Barbie/ChatGPT just says like, “Oh yeah, this is all the work of Alexander Dugan and all of these malicious foreign actors.” And the problem with both sides doing this of just claiming that all of the support is this outside political meddling of this international cabal is twofold. One, it plays up xenophobic fears, and that’s not great, particularly if you’re worried about xenophobia towards Jewish people. And two, it discounts the legitimate reasons people have for things.

It’s a form of what C.S. Lewis calls bulverism, like, “Oh, you just believe that because you’re a man. You believe that because you’re a woman. You believe that because you’re receiving your news from this source or that source maybe, but is the thing I believe right or wrong? You haven’t actually shown me that by telling me I believe it because I’m a man and I watched this program or I listened to this commentator that doesn’t actually address whether the thing is true or not. ” And in fact, throughout this entire rambly 8,300 word article, there’s very little discussion of the truth of any of these things. It’s all just this kind of guilt by association. So we’re told

Not Ted:

That importation is exactly what is happening. Dugan’s geopolitical framework is Russian. The integralist political theology is drawn from pre-enlightenment European Catholic political thought.

Joe:

Hold the phone. Almost anything Catholics believe you’re going to be able to say comes from pre-enlightenment European Catholics or Middle Eastern Catholics or Catholics from before the modern age. So if your requirement for something to be a belief we have is that it has to be written originally by an American, it’s going to be a problem for things like the Bible, also the Summa, the writings of St. Augustine, whatever you want. Yes, of course we’re indebted to pre-enlightenment European Catholic thought and even much earlier than that. That’s part of what it is to be in Western civilization. We are not just the last 30 minutes in American political thinking. We have much deeper roots than that. And if that’s un-American, if that’s dangerous and bad, I think we just have very different understandings. I don’t think you can actually run a civilization where you say you’re not allowed to know anything before 1776 in America because even the founders, think about how much they’re indebted to enlightenment thinkers and how much those enlightenment thinkers in turn are indebted to others before them.

It’s just an absurd critique to say, “Oh, well, you’re drawing from thinkers who came from a long time ago.” Then they say-

Not Ted:

The SSPX traditionalism is French in origin, founded by Archbishop Marcel LeFevre, bishop who openly expressed sympathy for the Vici government.

Joe:

All of this from a Catholic perspective sounds a lot like these longstanding Protestant critique that Catholicism is too foreign and suspect and European and scary to be fully American. And Thomas Nast famously had political cartoons where he showed the Pope standing on top of St. Peter’s spying America as the promised land, which is such a hilariously 19th century Protestant way of understanding America. But that whole model of, oh, Catholics are these dangerous foreigners, it’s a gross thing for anyone to promote and highlight, particularly a sitting US Senator. I would expect, I don’t know, a Senator named Cruz to have at least a greater sensitivity to an appreciation for the fact that, yeah, I bet a lot of your ancestors were treated as second class Americans for not being wasps, and maybe you should be a little smarter about that, but fine. The worst part of this critique, in my view, is actually the part that comes next because a lot of this is just about how we should all be supporting Israel.

And when people question why we’re supporting Israel and try to convince Evangelicals not to just be blindly supportive of Israel, that this proves there’s an anti-Jewish plot and it’s all supported by the Russians and so on. But listen to these words. The

Not Ted:

Middle Eastern dimension adds another layer. Part of what Carlson Fuentes and their network have successfully done is import the sectarian framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it exists in the Arab world and on the European left, a framing in which Israel is a settler colonial project, Zionism is racism, and Christian support for Israel is a form of complicity and oppression and introduced it into evangelical spaces where it has no native roots.

Joe:

Now, all I would say is you don’t have to be a foreigner to believe any of those things. Whether those things are right or wrong, treating those ideas as these crazy foreign things from either the Arab world or the European left is kind of absurd. This is the part I found most egregious.

Not Ted:

Palestinian Christian angle. Sympathetic pastors presented on platforms like Carlson’s as authentic voices of the church and the Holy Land is specifically designed to create cognitive dissonance for evangelicals who have never had to think of support for Israel as a form of Christian on Christian hostility.

Joe:

I think this gives away the whole game right there that yes, when you actually listen to Christians in the Middle East, a lot of them say, “Israel has treated us very badly.” And this is opening the eyes of many American Christians, including American evangelical Christians to say like, “Oh, I’m just sitting here imagining we’re supporting democracy in the Middle East and we’re supporting biblical Israel, but now I realize that these foreign policy decisions might be getting Christians in the Middle East killed, and now I’m having second thoughts. I’m more conflicted about this. ” And so the idea that this is bad, that people are now more aware of the impact this is all having on Christians and the Holy land is really remarkable. Politico had a piece from just earlier March this year, this called How the Rapture Explains the Rupture Over Israel on the right.

And one of the details pointed out there is that the Barna Group found that young evangelical support for Israel had plummeted from 75% in 2018 to just 34% in 2021. So I went and looked up the numbers, and it really is quite shocking that the blue lines there are young evangelicals, evangelicals 18 to 34. In 2015, 40% of them leaned towards Israel, only 3% of them leaned towards Palestinian and 55%, neither side, but I’m going to leave the neither sides out. So it’s 40 to three. By 2018, it was 21 to 18. So you went from having, what is that? A 13 to one disparity to something that’s almost one-to-one in just the span of a few years. And all of that is before October 7th. All that is before the war in Gaza. All of that is before you have things like Amnesty International suggesting that Israel’s committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

All of this is to say trying to come up with some cabal of influencers online or foreign powers or anything else that are tricking evangelicals into not blindly supporting Israel, I think misses the mark that there is a very demonstrable drop in support for Israel because people are seeing things on the news that they’re not comfortable with. And so yes, they are being forced to grapple with the fact that some of the things happening in Palestine aren’t great. Some of the things happening in Iran are not great. And you can believe the Jewish people deserve to be free from persecution and Israelis shouldn’t be persecuted and killed and also be uneasy about actions Israel’s taking both in Palestine and in Middle Eastern politics more broadly without being a hypocrite or antisemite or feeling like you have to choose just everything Israel does is okay or everything Israel does is the worst thing in the world.

And I think more, and we see it in the numbers, more young evangelicals are certainly going that way. Now, this is what’s obviously upsetting the Ted Cruzes of the world, the insurrection Barbies of the world, but you can’t blame Catholic answers or any of these Catholic thought leaders for causing this drop in evangelical support for Israel. The call is coming from inside the house.

Going back to the article though, it says, this is the line that I was struck by again, that the Palestinian Christian angle, meaning when you get to actually hear from Palestinian Christians, for example, when the patriarchs and the holy land put out a statement warning that Christian Zionism was leading to a lot of them being killed, those kind of things, the article says, are specifically designed to create cognitive dissonance for evangelicals. But the whole thing is this is not cognitive dissonance. This is the opposite. When you have to confront the reality of your actions, that’s not what cognitive dissonance is. When you believe one thing and then the reality is something totally different and you have these two separate things that you don’t really harmonize in your mind, that’s the dissonance cognitively. For evangelicals who’ve never had to think of support for Israel as a form of Christian on Christian hostility, well, if it is Christian on Christian hostility, even if you’re not intending it to be, if the effect of it is we’re giving a lot of weapons to Israel and it’s leading to more conflict and innocent Christians are getting killed in the process, then yeah, that’s a good thing to grapple with.

And this isn’t particularly unique. I mean, you can look at the history of conflict across the 20th century. Oftentimes American support for involvement abroad goes down when you actually have video of what our support is leading to. This is much of the story of Vietnam. Whether you think that’s good or bad, at least understand what’s happening. If people are seeing the ugly reality of war and they’re saying, “I don’t want to support that. ” That’s not insane. You don’t need any kind of cabal, any kind of international conspiracy to account for that. Now, sure, would the other side in a war want to use the ugly images of war to demoralize American support? Absolutely. But that doesn’t change the fact that war is ugly and that people when they see it don’t want it. There’s nothing particularly shocking about that. But according to this article-

Not Ted:

None of this is accidental. All of it is deliberate and all of it is being imported into a country that uniquely among Western nations built its founding constitutional architecture specifically to prevent exactly this kind of sectarian conflict from taking root.

Joe:

Now, I find this whole thing bizarre to the point of almost insanity, meaning this, the idea that it’s perfectly American to just say, “I support Israel, I’ve got a US, Israel flag, lapelpen, and I support the Jews as they are engaged in this battle against their mostly Muslim Arab neighbors.” That’s not sectarian conflict. But if you say, “I’m actually uneasy about that, ” or more radically, “I support the Muslim Arab neighbors,” that becomes sectarian conflict. Why is the sectarian conflict not that we are supporting war in the Middle East or that we are promoting the interest of one religious and ethnic group over the interest of their neighbors? Why is that not the sectarian conflict? If the position that insurrection Barbie or Ted Cruz took was, “We should have nothing to do with the Middle East, we should leave Israel alone,” then it would understand saying, “Yeah, the American thing here is no entangling foreign alliances and we want to avoid this kind of sectarian conflict.” But when you’re the one supporting getting the US involved in the Middle East in these ways where we’re backing up Israel and wars we didn’t really choose for ourselves to then complain that the people showing footage of what that is doing are bringing sectarian conflict home to the US.

I mean, it would be like saying, “Oh, well, critics of the US’s policy and the Cold War and Latin America are bringing too much Latin American politics into things.” It’s like, well, maybe the CIA is doing that. Maybe our meddling is the thing that’s getting us entangled, not the people pointing the meddling out. And again, I say this while being perfectly comfortable saying you can support Israel, but to pretend like calling out the costs of that support is somehow off limits. That’s the part that calling out is just absurd. Okay, let’s turn to part two of this article, what they call the theological attack, targeting the foundation. The author, Bumano Robotic, says-

Not Ted:

You cannot dismantle evangelical political power without first de- legitimizing evangelical theology.

Joe:

Now, this points to a theme running through the article that I think evangelicals should be very annoyed by, where the whole thing that Cruz is promoting is the best analysis treats evangelical religious beliefs as useful, not true, that it’s important evangelicals have this view of solo scriptura. It’s important they have this view of dispensational pre-millennial theology because that’s helpful for US interests in the holy land. And that should be gross. It should be repugnant because it’s treating Jesus as a convenient crutch to get to the political goals that you want to get to, that evangelical political power is the thing worth protecting, and the evangelical theology is the means that we get to that end.That is pretty on the surface in the article.

Not Ted:

The movement’s entire political architecture rests on a theological claim that God made an eternal, unconditional covenant with the Jewish people that the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and that Christians who bless Israel are obeying a direct divine command. Remove that conviction and you remove the moral engine that has driven evangelical political engagement for half a century.

Joe:

Now, I think there’s actually a lot of truth there. I think it is certainly true that if you want to understand evangelical views on foreign policy, some of that is just Cold War, some of that is just pro- democracy, but a huge portion of it are these set of largely untrue theological beliefs that evangelicals have believed. And so one of the reasons in that political article, political article that I cited to earlier that it talked about this plummeting and support for Israel is because evangelicals are less likely to believe these things anymore. Protestant fundamentalists had their own overlapping eschatology, dispensational pre-millennialism, which as the article explains, was a complicated eschatological or in times framework that was once deeply familiar to tens of millions of American Protestants and was essentially a detailed scenario for how the world would end. So the idea was God worked through these different dispensations or historical eras that we are currently in what was called the church era, and that this would suddenly close with a rapture in which the true believers were taken up into heaven.

Then you’d have a seven-year tribulation, the antichrist war, all of this. And at the end, Christ would return and establish a thousand-year reign of peace before the final judgment. Now, that set of beliefs is no longer believed in as much by Protestants. And that’s really important because as this article notes, as the Insurrection Barbie Post notes, this was a major driver because the idea was, oh, look, Israel and the Holy Land, this is the Israel of the Bible, and if we support them, this is going to be this trigger for the end time. Now, I’ve done a couple videos on this. One of the reasons evangelicals don’t believe in this as much anymore is these prophecies have repeatedly not come true. There were a series of predictions prominent dispensationalists made about the timeline for when Jesus would return in the 1980s because the idea is, oh, look, we’re going to support the creation of Israel in 1948, and then 40 years later in 1988, Jesus will return.

And none of that happens. And so when time and time and time and time again, the dispensationalist timeline turns out not to be true, people start to question, well, maybe you’re reading the Bible wrong. Maybe your reading of the Bible is not correct or maybe your understanding of Israel is not correct because none of the things you think are going to happen are happening. So the article goes on to say, “This prophecy once supplied the why of Evangelical Zionism.” The obvious question is why it supplies less of it now. And the answer I would give is fewer evangelicals believe in this kind of dispensationalism. It’s still popular. There’s still a lot of people who believe in it, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as popular as the 1990s. You have the Left Behind series. You’ve got prominent people like Kirk Cameron, and Cameron has rejected all of that now.

So we can see particular prominent figures who have repudiated their earlier support for this kind of theology. But additionally, you just have less doctrinally serious Protestants today, and the political article acknowledges this. Part of this is doctrinal drift. Dispensationalism emphasizes a literal interpretation of the Bible hasn’t disappeared, but evangelical scholars and pastors have noted it’s declining dominance in Christian intellectual life, but also younger evangelicals are less likely to inherit dense institutionally reinforced systems of belief and more likely to inherit a package of cultural and increasingly partisan cues. So Christianity today reports on evangelical fracture described in a movement splintering into subfamilies with some younger cohorts less committed to older doctrines or rituals, including weekly church attendance. And so the article goes on to basically suggest for a lot of young evangelicals, evangelicalism is more kind of a MAGA worldview and less a specific set of theological commitments.

Now, obviously that’s not true in a broad brush kind of way, but in as much as there is this divergence, that means there’s going to be less interest in or commitment to a particular escatological end times view that would then support a particular kind of foreign policy that ironically, the very thing that the article I’m critiquing is guilty of, of treating evangelicalism simply as a political tool to support a set of policies ends up becoming self-refuting because if people don’t really believe it, if it’s not really the worldview they’re operating in, then you can’t draw on that worldview as support for your foreign policy. All right, so let’s pivot from dispensationalism, which I’m going to actually re... Read more on Catholic.com