On this week's episode of Big Matt's Day Off, Big Matt and Drew are joined by special guest Ben Shapiro to discuss a variety of topics, including: 1. What's the best gift you can give your wife for her anniversary? 2. What are you going to do on your big day? 3. What do you want to do for your wife on your anniversary that she doesn't want to go out? 4. What should you do for her? 5. Is it a good idea to take her out to dinner in the middle of the woods? 6. Should you take her to the beach? 7. Should she go to the Caribbean? 8. Is Catholicism rising in the United States? 9. Is Jesus a Christian?
00:23:26.380It was There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Children of Men, Apocalypto, The Dark Knight, and a bunch of other great films came out at the same time.
00:23:35.920I mean, it was like some of the, arguably, maybe the five of the eight greatest television shows of all time were airing, overlapping with each other.
00:23:46.280The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Shield.
00:23:51.760The Office was in its prime, I think, in its prime, probably the greatest comedy of all time.
00:23:56.420And then a bunch of others we could name.
00:23:57.800So all of this was happening at the same time with pop culture.
00:24:01.520And what you find is this decline that started right around that time, in particular with comedies.
00:42:00.700I mean, as I've said before, whoever converts me gets a million.
00:42:03.320Well, infinity heaven points actually is what I, is my understanding of the theology.
00:42:07.060But, uh, when, when it comes to, you know, are people going back to church?
00:42:10.220I think the overwhelming broad answer is no, but the people who are going back to more traditional churches, uh, you, I'll speak for my own religious community on this one.
00:42:19.900Uh, obviously, you know, in America, the Jewish population is declining because the number of people who go to synagogue is declining.
00:42:25.480However, the number of people who are going to synagogue who are going to Orthodox synagogues is radically increasing because the Orthodox are maintaining their own and their kids are staying Orthodox and they're having lots of kids.
00:42:35.640And people who want to be invested in the religion want a form of religion that actually teaches the, the religion.
00:42:41.320And I, I suspect the same thing is happening in the Catholic community.
00:42:45.160There are a lot of people who are lapsing away from Catholicism as, as sort of mainline Catholic churches in, in some areas liberalize or there are disagreements with some, you know, the last couple of popes, particularly Pope Francis in terms of some of his politics.
00:42:59.840But the people who are re-engaging are re-engaging in very, very strong and vibrant ways.
00:43:04.240And so I think what we're seeing is not that the numbers are going up right now, but that the seeds are planted for the numbers to go up very rapidly in the future because the people who are sticking around are, are bringing their friends and they're, and they're keeping their families Catholic.
00:43:16.840But, you know, I don't want to, I don't know why you went to me.
00:43:18.860Why, why am I speaking to the Catholics?
00:43:20.320I mean, you really should go to, you know, like Matt Fradd or Matt Walsh or Michael Knowles, all of whom are Catholic.
00:43:25.800And like, why are you just leave me out of this?
00:43:42.020I think back in 2008 during the height craze of the new atheism, we were assured that as people gave up their primitive knuckleheaded belief in God,
00:43:53.000that a golden age of reason would be ushered in.
00:43:57.320And then you've got some Sheila named Carol marrying a train station in San Diego.
00:44:01.680And more recently, men can have periods.
00:44:04.020And I think we've sort of just woken up in the wreckage that these lies have brought about.
00:44:09.380And we don't want to live in a completely meaningless universe.
00:44:12.460And so if there is an argument that's moderately convincing, it's better to go with that than to live a life in despair,
00:44:21.780which is what I think atheism gets you.
00:44:24.280So maybe it was that the new atheists overplayed their hand.
00:44:27.080They were very cool, but there wasn't much in the way of argumentation on their side.
00:44:33.220And so it was like a smoke bomb going off in culture and people couldn't see straight.
00:44:37.180We didn't know if we were abusing our children for teaching them the Christian faith, as Dawkins said, and these sorts of things.
00:44:44.820But I think over time, we've realized that arguments for atheism aren't good, that there are compelling arguments for theism.
00:44:53.500And also, I think we're just cultureless monads adrift.
00:44:58.640And we are desirous for a culture, preferably a culture that was once our own,
00:45:04.580which is a sort of piety, a sort of natural piety, a desire to live the way that my ancestors lived.
00:45:22.180I want to contradict your premise here, which is the notion that more people are leaving the Catholic Church than they're coming in,
00:45:27.820which I guess is literally true because we have infant baptism as Christians have practiced for 2,000 years.
00:45:33.380So that's a debate for another time, I suppose.
00:45:35.220But because of that, you know, there are people who they'll baptize their kids so that they can have a nice lunch with, you know, Aunt Sheila.
00:45:42.300But they don't have any intention of practicing the faith.
00:45:45.240And so, yeah, a lot of those people will fall away, echoing a little bit what Ben said.
00:45:49.520But if you look at adult conversions, especially young adult conversions, those really are spiking.
00:45:54.360And more traditional forms of Christianity, especially Catholicism, you are seeing a real surge there in America and in France.
00:46:02.440And this got me wondering how Mr. Walsh would react to this because it's a frequent tension in Matt's thinking.
00:46:09.480Is there, you know, the natural instinct toward pessimism, which is, you know, things are collapsing and we're all going to be raving baboons?
00:46:18.060Or is there this sense of victory that after many centuries of oppression, the Catholics are finally coming out of Augsburg and Westphalia, and now we're actually going to retake all of the West?
00:46:41.000But in the medium term, before we get there, what's going to happen?
00:46:44.140I think I have a mixture of pessimism and optimism because I do think that kind of to the point that's already been raised, the church is getting smaller, but it's also getting more conservative.
00:46:57.760It's getting more faithful at the same time.
00:46:59.280And that's kind of what the statistics show us.
00:47:02.040But then also what you realize is that you can't really trust the stats because I think what's actually happening is that now that we live in this godless, heathen world, there's no real cultural incentive to just show up to church, even though you don't believe and you don't care.
00:47:20.100So there's no, there's, you don't really have the cultural Christians anymore because there's no incentive for that.
00:47:27.520You could, you could not claim any faith and you'll be fine.
00:47:30.140And I, so I think that that is falling off.
00:47:33.560Now, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, if you look at church attendance or whatever else, people that were claiming to be Catholic, claiming to be Christian, it was higher.
00:47:41.860But a lot of those people, you know, they didn't really believe, they didn't actually care.
00:48:33.580And you find that they're going to the Latin mass and all that kind of stuff.
00:48:36.660And then you also have Gen Z, they've gone to the other extreme and they're getting into LGBT and trans and all that.
00:48:41.840But it's, it's all, it is all this intense hunger for, for meaning.
00:48:46.320And some of them are finding the right place.
00:48:48.140Some of them are finding the wrong place.
00:48:49.900I mean, I hear, I want to compliment our new acquisition, Matt Fradd here, because I think that one of the things that is happening and it's been happening in religious communities for a while is that what you said there, Matt, which is that so many young people for a while and sort of the new atheist movement, they figured that it was just dumb to be religious.
00:49:05.440That if you were a smart person, you could not be a religious person because science said, and because if you were the kind of person who went to church or you went to synagogue, that meant that you believed in some like weird old man in the sky who was manipulating the marionette strings.
00:49:18.800And I think that one of the things that Matt Fradd in particular has done, because you dedicated your life to making logical arguments on behalf of faith and on behalf of the Bible, because of that, even if people don't necessarily believe because of those arguments, they understand that intelligent people do believe those arguments.
00:49:34.040And I think that this is actually a really, really important thing, because there was sort of a cultural dichotomy that was placed for most of my childhood between sort of the dumb rubes who went to church and believed in God.
00:49:44.900And then the very intelligent university goers who who really believed, you know, the smart things and the smart people would never hang out with the church people and the church people were a bunch of backwater kind of like how Barack Obama described them, right?
00:49:56.560The bitter clingers and all of this. And I think that two things happened.
00:49:59.680One, the expert class completely fell on their face with with so many of their beliefs.
00:50:03.440And it ended in men can be women. And at the same time, there was a new class of people like you who are out there intellectually saying, hold up a second.
00:50:13.040Like, here's a high IQ defense of of what of what God is and how people believe in God.
00:50:20.300And in fact, I don't have to make that up. I can cite some of the smartest people who ever lived, including Aquinas, to actually explain all of this.
00:50:26.760And so even if people don't necessarily understand the ontological argument, they understand that very intelligent people make the ontological argument.
00:50:33.040And therefore, it is not stupid to believe in the ontological argument.
00:50:36.320This is such a great point, Ben, because it just gives a kind of permission.
00:50:39.680It's happened to me. It's not like I certainly not when I first encountered them that I understood these arguments for God.
00:50:45.340It just was enough to say, oh, wait, smart people can articulate things in a smart way.
00:50:49.860Maybe I should give that a go. And to your point, Matt, yes, you know, 30 years ago, maybe the number was higher or the percentage was higher of supposedly practicing Catholics.
00:50:57.580But to me that the test is, well, how many go to confession?
00:51:01.020You know, and like 30 years ago, like everyone stopped going to confession.
00:51:03.900And we believe as a matter of faith that you can't receive our Lord in a state of mortal sin.
00:51:08.400And if you're in a state of grave mortal sin, you know, you're really in danger of hellfire.
00:51:12.640And so if you're not taking that part seriously, you know, you do have to wonder how serious you're taking the faith.
00:51:17.980I think it was Padre Pio said that the confessional is like a bath for the soul.
00:51:22.380And Mr. Fratt, I can't help but notice that when you get out of the bath, you, unlike the other people on this panel right now, you shave what would be your beard.
00:51:32.120Well, first of all, I think it should be, I want to just state for the record that I said to Daily Wire, don't you think it's a bit tacky for me to shill your merch on day one?
00:51:43.840And they just showed me a whip and told me to shut up.
00:52:43.920We named them after Jeremy Irons, I think.
00:52:46.080And we started to put out razors that actually support the idea that men should be men and should be, you know, have a razor that can not just cut the beard.
00:52:58.000It should just take their skin right the hell off, you know.
00:53:02.080I think that's why we're so tough that we can use, you know, Jeremy's Razors.
00:53:09.220And right now, you can get two full years of premium shaves for just 21 cents a day, which for me is like, I mean, you've got to prorate that.
00:53:56.000That's exactly what I meant when I said that there's no good segue.
00:53:59.960So, if I'd already gotten into it, we could have just moved on.
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00:56:00.060Okay, Matt, I've had enough, Matt, Brad, I've had enough talk about just generic theism and everything.
00:56:05.160I want to know, it's been a little bit of a rough 500 years for Holy Mother Church, and there have been ups and downs, really great art, actually, in the counter-reformation.
00:56:18.020And I know there's some people who always just want to be down, and anything the Pope does is bad, and anything that seems good about the culture, the Christian culture, or, you know, for the church, I don't know, somehow is bad.
00:56:29.020And I don't know, maybe I'm a little too rosy about it, but are you feeling good?
00:56:35.760Yeah, I think the reason I'm a Catholic is that I think Catholicism is true.
00:56:40.840I think that God exists, that Christ is the second person of the Blessed Trinity, the long-awaited Messiah.
00:56:46.260I think he established a church, and I think he gave that church authority, and that that church is the Catholic church.
00:56:51.000You know, we live in a day and age where we're constantly bombarded with the latest scandals, and that can be very demoralizing, and it makes sense.
00:56:57.880You know, and you think, well, how could this possibly be the true church of Christ when we see scandals, when we see abuses, when we see cowardice?
00:57:06.560But I was thinking this morning that that would also invalidate the true religion in the Old Covenant.
00:57:11.440You know, I mean, Rahab the prostitute, Moses the murderer, Solomon has his heart turned towards Baal by his foreign wives, David the adulterer.
00:57:23.360So, I think if you're looking for the true church, and by the true church, you mean the church of perfect people, then you won't find it.
00:57:31.580And if you did and then joined it, it wouldn't be because you're abysmal.
00:57:36.720So, I think when people are evaluating whether or not the Catholic church is the true church, they should think of it that way.
00:59:10.920Once you start getting into your own personal religion, I think things, you know, then you get into the old arguments.
00:59:16.000And I believe those should be solved by violence.
00:59:18.660I think the Thirty Years' War, we should just bring that back and just have utter, like, warfare and death across the different belief systems until the last man is standing.
00:59:50.380I was going to say there's like a pragmatic reason to believe in God and Christianity as well.
00:59:56.060Now, Pascal gets into this in his ponces, the basic idea being, if I can't decide whether the arguments for atheism or Christian theism, if I can't decide that one's better than the other, then I still could have a pragmatic reason to preferring one over the other.
01:00:11.700The Second Vatican Council said that when God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible.
01:00:17.320And I think if you look around in what we call our culture, I don't think we have a culture, but when we look around today, I think we just see a lot of people who don't know where they're from, what they're for, or where they're going.
01:00:28.500But I think the opposite is true too, right?
01:00:31.000So if I can come to believe in God and his revelation, then I know that I've come from somewhere, that I'm for something, and that there's a way in which I should live.
01:00:40.020And that when I act in accordance with that, whether or not I know how to out-debate atheists on the internet, if I put that into effect in my life and my life becomes better, if people around me start, like if my wife starts liking me more, you know, because I'm patient and kind, then maybe do that.
01:00:56.060I remember I met several people, like, I just can't believe.
01:01:34.800And it turns out that when you do the thing and it enriches your life in a particular way, then you end up actually with a deeper belief system about the nature of the system into which you are buying than if you had never done the thing.
01:01:45.340Like, I know there have been some jokes about, you know, if I were to convert, would I end up as a Catholic or a Protestant?
01:01:51.540And I've offended both parties by suggesting that while I have tremendous sympathy for the rules-based order that the Catholics provide, if I were going to ditch an even more rules-based order, I'd go all the way and it'd be party time and I'm going full Protestant.
01:02:05.500So I've pissed off everybody with that particular answer.
01:02:08.980But the sort of acts-based, you know, form of finding religion, I think it actually is the way I think that most people actually end up believing in religion.
01:02:18.760I think that the intellectual frameworks that all of us spend time creating around God and around the Bible, you know, I think that those, it provides that permission structure.
01:02:28.180But I think that the way that most people actually engage in religious life is they just engage in religious life.
01:02:33.780And it's why even the very notion of I believe in God is such an intellectualized form of how most people actually behave with regard to God that I don't think it has tremendous value in the way that I think that our overly intellectualized society, you know, sort of promotes.
01:02:49.200Our society is like, well, do you believe in God or do you not believe in God?
01:02:51.960If you believe in God, why do you believe in God?
01:02:53.760What are all the reasons you believe in God?
01:02:55.320And that's sort of like saying, you know, do you believe in gravity?
01:02:59.000If you do believe in gravity, please explain the physics of how gravity works.
01:03:01.940Well, no, I live in a world that has gravity in it.
01:03:04.900And so for me, I live in a God-created world and I act in a way that I would only act if God were a part of my world.
01:03:11.580And I think that even people who are atheists or agnostic very often are living in that same world without recognizing that they're living in that God-created order.
01:03:19.420And so I think that, you know, that—
01:03:48.160But, Drew, I think that that's—it's a great point, but I also think that's why it's very important.
01:03:52.140And this actually is, I think, a general statement about religion that I'll be interested to hear you guys take on.
01:03:58.000I think one of the problems with sort of the internet subculture around religion is that people go very quickly from new convert to preacher.
01:04:04.220And, you know, that I think is actually a gigantic mistake.
01:04:07.960I don't think that you get to convert to Catholicism tomorrow and become pope the day after.
01:04:11.000And I don't think that—like, you actually have to spend some time and become comfortable with the ideas to the point where you actually live the ideas, believe the ideas, and understand them to be true in your heart in order for you to promote them rationally.
01:04:24.260And I think that you can start off by not fully believing the thing that you're working through.
01:04:28.360But I do think that you actually have to spend a lot of time with the thing before you actually believe the thing to the, you know, to the point where you can say to other people, this is true and not be dishonest about it.
01:04:38.580Yeah, and as you say, the smartest people in history have all believed, and there's—you don't want to throw away their thoughts, which is what guys like Dawkins do.
01:05:29.540I do think—well, I was thinking about, Matt, the point you made about—not to oversimplify, but it's a little bit of like fake it till you make it.
01:05:38.460Like, you know, maybe you don't fully believe this, but if it's not true, you've got nothing to lose by sort of acting as though it is.
01:05:47.340And then maybe as you act as though it is, you'll come to believe it if I understand kind of your point.
01:05:53.340And I think that in many cases in life, I actually think fake it till you make it is maybe one of the wisest cliches that's ever been uttered because that is true for a lot of things.
01:06:05.560I mean, I've said this many times about depression.
01:06:08.400You know, people say, well, I'm so unhappy.
01:06:34.940But I think there's a lot of truth to that.
01:06:39.100But the counterpoint when it comes to religion in particular is that, like I said, what feels like two and a half hours ago, that it's like people were doing that in the culture.
01:06:49.660When there was a social incentive, they were going to church.
01:07:08.800And, you know, look, a lot of what we're talking about is actually natural reason, right?
01:07:13.420You know, a lot of it is, okay, we can know things about human nature.
01:07:16.900Even to your point, Matt, on fake it till you make it.
01:07:19.020There's just things about human nature and human behavior that will conduce to some kind of flourishing and maybe make you happy.
01:07:24.080And in all this talk of, like, if you live in accord with the truth, that's going to get you somewhere.
01:07:29.700And look, there's truth in natural religion, even Matt's Baba Swami stuff from the Far East.
01:07:34.060And, but I think this also gets to the point we were talking about earlier when we were alluding to relitigating the Thirty Years' War is, you know, look, there's a lot we can know from abstract reason and, you know, from nature.
01:07:46.500But then there's particularity to it, too, you know, and certainly Christians believe in a very particular religion.
01:07:51.900Jews do also, you know, a particular people or a particular God speaks to a particular people on a particular mountain.
01:07:56.820And so I think that's what's really interesting about this moment is we've gone from this bland generic Gnosticism that says not even our bodies really matter to us at all.
01:08:05.400That's where you get transgenderism down to, well, hold on.
01:10:03.440And, you know, on that truly dark note, I'm going to give you a note of light.
01:10:07.200And that is that lifetime memberships are available.
01:10:09.240So if you want an entire lifetime of watching this show, I know that Matt feels like he's already experienced an entire lifetime of participating in this show.
01:10:16.920But if you want an entire lifetime membership, you know, you get to, like, come here whenever you want for literally the rest of your natural life,
01:10:22.940which, you know, depending on your age, should be well beyond Drew's natural lifespan.
01:10:26.160So you get to see who we replaced Drew with, which will be exciting, I think, for all of us, actually.
01:10:29.540And then you'll be able to check it out with the lifetime membership here at Daily Wire.
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