Can Politics Be Evangelized?

What does evangelization have to do with politics?

More than we might think.

In this episode of Catholic in America, Jason Adkins welcomes Dr. Matthew Petrusek, Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute and author of Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture.

Petrusek argues that politics can provide Catholics with an important opportunity for evangelization. Political debates inevitably raise deeper questions about morality, human dignity, justice, truth, and ultimately our understanding of reality itself. Rather than abandoning these conversations, Catholics should learn how to engage them with reason, courage, charity, and a well-formed understanding of Catholic social teaching. 

Jason and Matthew discuss why politics is much bigger than elections, how Catholics can distinguish arguing from fighting, why local political engagement matters, and how institutions themselves can become places of evangelization.

They also explore the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, the dangers of ideology, the importance of natural law, and what Petrusek describes as a Catholic approach of "hopeful realism" toward political life.

Ultimately, evangelizing political culture is not about creating heaven on earth or imposing Catholicism through government. It is about helping create a society where it is easier for people to pursue what is good, true, and ultimately Christ Himself. 

Links: 

Matthew Petrusek Bio and Evangelization and Ideology
https://bookstore.wordonfire.org/pages/matthew-petrusek?srsltid=AfmBOopnBaDU5JlHrmxNRyXV6V8RNjdA6vOUGubhkz-TD8hfkY68bGP2

Word on Fire Institute
https://institute.wordonfire.org/

Pope St. John Paul II on Catholic Social Teaching and Evangelization
https://focusequip.org/catholic-social-teaching-and-the-new-evangelization/

Jason Adkins, host of Catholic in America, engages our own time, culture, and political milieu with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to explore how to live more fully Catholic. With so much to explore, we have guests from a variety of perspectives and faith backgrounds, and conversations do not necessarily constitute endorsements. 

Catholic in America is an OSVNews.com podcast partnership. Support Catholic in America by becoming a patron of the show here. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Welcome to Catholic in America, a podcast in partnership with OSV News. I'm Jason Adkins. Many wonder whether politics can ever mix with religion at all, let alone be a place of evangelization. But the Great Commission to baptize all nations means that there is no place that should not be evangelized, including in discussions of the issues of the day around the water cooler and even all the way into the halls of government. Sometimes we evangelize directly through a proclamation of the word, or we become living witnesses by our actions. In other times, we're called to evangelize the culture and institutions, which requires both wisdom and spiritual discernment about how to best engage people in discussions of ethics and values, art and science, and yes, even politics. As disciples of Jesus, we are called to evangelize. And the church calls us here in the United States to be faithful citizens. In other words, we're called to infuse public life with gospel values. But how do we do that? Pope John Paul said that Catholic social teaching was a powerful tool of evangelization. And I think he was right. Fortunately, there is a manual of sorts in this revolution, really, and of catechetical resources and materials that are out there for us to learn from and digest that we can be better evangelists ourselves. And it's a great new resource from my friend Dr. Matthew Petrusic. He is senior director of the Word on Fire Institute and wrote a book in 2023 that I highly recommend called Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture. In it, he equips Catholics to be effective agents of dialogue and truth in the public discourse by offering tools for helpful discussion, the relevant principles of Catholic social teaching, and a deconstruction of some of the ideological presuppositions embraced by so many today, wittingly or unwittingly. I'm delighted that he's willing to join me on this episode to share some of the highlights of the book and the evangelical, excuse me, opportunities for Catholics within the political sphere. Besides his leadership at the Word on Fire Institute, he is a professor of ethics at the Institute itself. He lectures broadly in both English and Spanish on moral philosophy, politics, social issues, and the Catholic intellectual tradition, and holds a PhD in religious ethics from the University of Chicago. I'm also glad to say he currently serves as the chair of the Minnesota Catholic Conference Advisory Council. Dr. Matthew Petrusek, welcome to Catholic in America. It's a pleasure to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_02 2:36

Thanks, Jason. It's always a great joy to talk with you.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

What is the Word on Fire Institute?

SPEAKER_02 2:42

So Word on Fire Institute is one of the uh three major divisions of uh Word on Fire Catholic ministry. So the first that everybody knows is uh Bishop Barron and all of the uh fantastic work that he produces is Sunday Sermons, Bishop Barron presents uh the Word on Fire show. And so we have a whole production team that's just devoted to um to his work. Uh many of your listeners listener listeners are also probably familiar with uh Word on Fire Publishing, which itself has various imprints, including a children's imprint, an academic imprint. Uh and so that uh, you know, those are sort of the origins of Word on Fire. The Word on Fire Institute is the formative division of Word on Fire. And so we're we're here to provide sort of a deep, ongoing, uh uh evangelically oriented formation for Word on Fire Institute members, which right now order uh are in the um the 28,000 uh member range. So we're blessed to have uh many people on board with us. Uh but we have uh an a digital platform uh that's sort of a mixture of a social media platform, a conversation platform, and a course delivery platform, um which we're interacting with thousands of uh members every day. We have uh evangelization and culture online articles. A few of those go out, fresh ones per day. Uh our journal, which goes out quarterly. Uh, and we also have uh uh newly a master's degree program in partnership with our friends at the Catholic University of America in evangelization and culture. Uh so we're we're in the education uh business, but specifically with the task of forming evangelists.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

There is has been a catechetical revolution in this, at least in the United States, over the past couple decades. Um I grew up Catholic not even knowing there was a catechism, and now there are a plethora of catechetical and formation ministries. Where does Word on Fire fit within the constellation of great organizations out there like Augustine Institute or Ascension Press or these sorts of things?

SPEAKER_02 4:43

Yeah, so we're we're really blessed to, as you put it. We're in a golden age of catechetical materials, of apologetics. You know, what one of the sort of the sad features of our age, which it's improving and it's improving in real time, is that we are in the golden age of apologetics. There's never been more access to better, higher quality materials in history to understand the truths of the faith. And yet we continue to see um sort of this mass exodus from the pews. Now, again, there's some bright spots that show that that may be just starting to turn around, uh, but there's still some connection that needs to be made. So what we do at Word on Fire is we primarily focus on the ad extra, uh, so those who are uh outside of the church. Now that includes those who uh are loosely connected with the church, you know, what we oftentimes refer to as cultural Catholics, um, but we're especially looking at the secular world. We might even begin to call it the pagan world more than the secular world, uh, and really reaching out to those who um are adrift in all of the cultural wasteland and um seeking to make contact with them through the seeds of the word uh and also to influence culture. And something uh both you and I are looking forward to working on, uh evangelizing institutions uh in the culture as well. So we're really focused on on the outsiders.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

You are an extremely talented uh person. You've got degrees from Yale and the University of Chicago, you were in traditional academia for a long time. Why did you decide to make a switch to a perhaps non-traditional institution for someone with your education credentials?

SPEAKER_02 6:19

Because I'm an extremely humble person as well, Jason. That's why. Because I'm so motivated by doing service. Uh, you know, I was so just a little backstory. I was uh I was a professor uh for 10 years at Loyola Marymount University. I'm gonna name and shame on your program, name and shame. Uh I went to uh I got a great education at Yale, University of Chicago, sexual institutions, but really just fantastic education. This is really before you know wokeism um took over the institutions. To its credit, University of Chicago has done a pretty good job of holding its old. But then I got into a first job right out of um my PhD program, Loyola Marymount University. I was delighted that I would get to teach in a Catholic university, at a Jesuit Catholic university. And I ended up teaching in a Catholic university with a K. It was something other, other than the Catholic university that I thought I was getting into. And unfortunately, it's a place that has really lost its way. There's some great people there. Obviously, there's some great students there. I've heard of really from a grassroots perspective, the students are kind of beginning to rise up, God bless them, and to um to reclaim the the real promise uh of that institution. But uh it was 10 years kind of in the wilderness there, even though I went through the tenure track, tenure process, I got tenure, uh fortunately. But I was always sort of in an underground movement in the theological studies program, which is what they call. They couldn't decide whether it was religious studies or theology, so they just cut the baby right in half and called it theological studies.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

Well, religious studies versus theology is like examining the cadaver versus, you know, uh looking look looking at the live thing, you know.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

Yes. And so we got a zombie, basically, is what we got. We got an undead, an undead academic discipline.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Like a ghoul in a midnight horror film.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

You just can't feel the thing. It really was. Yeah, again, good people, all the disclaimers, you know, but overall um really lost its way. Uh just just to put a fine point on this, uh, the the year I left, I was able to join uh Word on Fire thanks to Bishop Barron. Um, I I got onto the elevator at the end of the day in St. Bellerman Hall, where my office was located, and I see an advertisement uh for a fundraiser for planned parenthood to take place uh in a few evenings from then in St. Robert Bellerman Hall. Uh and, you know, I thought I'd seen it all at this institution. I had not. Uh, unfortunately, even after notifying the Jesuit community, the president, everybody we could, EWTN even did a story on it. They said, in the name of diversity and inclusion, uh, we're going to allow this fundraiser for the murdering of our precious children to take place.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

Even Moloch is tolerated in an atmosphere of tolerance.

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Even Moloch is tolerated, but not Yahweh. Yahweh is not in the circle of inclusion. Uh, so uh I I had started working with Word on Fire during my time in LA at this in at the LMU. And fortunately, happily, uh providentially, I was able to jump ship. At which point I was living the dream because I was working for Word on Fire and living at home in Southern California, tending to my orange trees when I wasn't busy evangelizing evangelizing the culture. And then all the staff at Word on Fire gets a uh a link to a uh a YouTube, a YouTube link. We're told to connect at a specific day and time for an important message. And that message is Bishop Robert Barron announcing he's Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona, Rochester, which I had never heard of up until that announcement. And now I'm here.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Outstanding. What's the what is the what are the opportunities uh for being in a non-traditional academic institution like the Word on Fire Institute that maybe you wouldn't get in a traditional academic setting?

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Yeah, well, I yeah, I can I can um readily compare the two. Uh I'd say the first is you really get a wide latitude to do work that that has at least the chance of being impactful. Uh within higher education, the current academic structure, even sort of bracketing the terrible ideological takeover uh that's taken place. Uh it's just it's become sclerotic. Uh, you know, you get focused on one particular area within one particular area within one particular area, and that's where you do your work with the hopes of getting squeezing out an article, you know, every every few months or maybe once a year. Uh and no one ever reads it. I I went to conferences in my previous life as a recovering academic, uh, where I would present to two people. I would travel across the country and one or two people would be in the audience. But it was all this sort of open secret that the reason we all did this was because we needed to put it on our resumes that we had, or CVs uh that we had done this. So the first benefit of working for a non-traditional uh uh but still academic place is we can actually do work that seems to matter. So we're really grateful for that. And we hope to certainly preserve that spirit as we continue to grow.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Word on Fire publishes a lot of books and a lot of really good ones. Uh I want to talk to you about one that you published with Word on Fire in 2023, Evangelization and Ideology, how to understand and respond to the political culture. A lot of big churchy words there, and we're gonna unpack them all. But I want to first ask why you decided to endeavor to write this very meaty but very accessible book.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

It grew out of my experiences teaching in the classroom. So when I was at LMU, uh I was shocked to learn early on, and so this is this is over 10 years ago now, so it's only gotten worse since then, that the the features of the culture that I would assume to be in place, even for relatively secular students, uh, would still be relatively universal. So I could say the Bible and they would know what that is. I could say the New Testament and they would know what that is in the Old Testament, right? I could say Jesus Christ was you know resurrected from the dead, and they would know that that's a particular historical and religious claim made by Christians. I could take none of that for granted, what I found pretty early. And even among some uh self-identifying Catholic students, sort of the basic religious and I would even say philosophical literacy uh was very, very low. And again, unfortunately, it's for the most part, it's only it's only gotten worse. So what I discovered early on is I kind of had to go to a totally back to basics approach, even to teaching generic philosophical and religious concepts. So one thing students were interested in and would talk about was politics, uh, including at a at a fairly high level. This isn't because the students were stupid or dumb or you know, low IQ or something like that. They just had the culture had had already collapsed, and so it hadn't sort of provided them with the means to be able to uh to grasp these these uh these concepts. And so I used, began using talking about politics as a bridge to talk about values and principles, and then to use values and principles is being talking about the origins of values and principles and the conditions for the possibilities of different kinds of principles in order for them to be coherent and and meaningful. And so then we could begin getting to philosophy, and from then we can get in religion. So it was it was sort of just out of necessity on the fly that I discovered here's here's some here's a place I can get begin to get traction. And this book over time grew out of that.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

I think people intuitively think politics and religion, even the cover of your book, has a communion host or the Eucharist, and then it has Caesar's coin. Uh, what does God have to do with Caesar? Politics have to do with religion, uh, evangelizing the political culture, this probably makes some head spin. Uh, how do you connect the dots for people that politics and religion do have something to say to one another?

SPEAKER_02 13:56

Well, there's a there's a very practical way, and I I take a line from you, Jason, if you're, you know, if you're not at the table, then you're on the menu. Uh so for those who are who are sort of agitated justifiably or anxious about what's going on in the world, uh, if they don't not only focus in the political realm, but then focus in and through the political realm down to the deeper issues that are at stake, uh, then they're not gonna have any kind of traction. They're not gonna get anywhere in terms of of advancing very practical political goals that they may have. Uh the other sort of just basic recognition is that, okay, well, let's say you don't want to, you're not ready to say that there's a connection between religion and politics, but let's start examining some of the claims that you make uh and see you know what's necessary in order for those claims to be to be meaningful and to have, you know, to have some kind of coherent foundation beneath them. And one of them is the claim that all people are equal, morally equal. Uh now this is changing, and that's kind of terrifying, but um up until relatively recently, most people would generically say, oh yeah, well, of course all people are morally equal. It's inconceivable that anybody would ever hold a different view from that. And then you say, okay, well, if that's true, and I I agree that's true, what must be true about human beings? What must be true about our capacity to know as human beings? What is the form of knowledge that we're appealing to when we say that all human beings are equal? Because it's certainly, we're certainly not doing observation. Uh, what must be true about the nature of existence to talk about there being a moral existence that could possibly make this statement true? So you can start doing a lot of work there and then circle back to the specific realm of politics once you've kind of established that basic buy-in.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Now, it's it's often said that all all political questions are ultimately theological questions. And you're kind of alluding to that in the sense that even when you make certain political claims, as politics is applied morality, um, you're going back to deeper first principles, deeper questions of how we understand things, how we receive knowledge, how we understand the nature of the universe, and so on and so on. Is it necessarily the case? Unpack that statement. Is it the case that ultimately all political questions come down to clashes of worldviews?

SPEAKER_02 16:10

I think that's absolutely the case. And another way that that truism sort of uh expresses itself is uh uh ideas matter or ideas have consequences. Uh so one of the ways that I try to describe uh what an ideology is, because there's a historical definition of what ideology is, but I use it in a broader sense, is a totality without transcendence, a totality without transcendence. So every ideology in its own way is seeking to give you a comprehensive view of reality. Now, many ideologies will deny that they're doing that, and one of them is operative in like the classical liberalism, which basically says, you do you and I do me. So it's sort of on principle says we're not going to discuss what a figure like Rawls would call comprehensive doctrines, uh, because that's all personal. That depends on you. I have mine and you have yours. But we can see we can create a political system that's procedural and so allows all of us to sort of go after our own vision of the good without bumping into each other, and certainly uh without getting violent with each other. That sounds great. But what's political liberalism, classical liberalism, is telling you is that your comprehensive view of the good, whatever it is, is a rational, not just like irrational. It's not that it violates more uh rationality, it's that it has no rationality whatsoever. It's purely preferential. So that's a comprehensive view. To say that any view that's comprehensive is a rational is a comprehensive view. And so we're again, we're just we're we're we're you by trying to get around it, you just reaffirm the basic truth that yes, as you put it, all views are ultimately theological in nature. It depends which God you worship.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

One of the challenges it seems that people make the disconnect or have a hard time reconciling religion and politics or these sorts of questions, is that this category of religion is not particularly helpful. And you alluded to that, that almost it's almost like we live in the world of William James, where religion is just a merely a phenomena of how people experience the irrational or the supernatural. Instead of thinking about Christianity as getting to the heart of the truth of things, and there's various perspectives on the nature of things and the nature of reality. And apart from being simply uh what, you know, our subjective beliefs about the supernatural, in fact, Christianity is a deeper account of reality. And is it the case that what you're alluding to in the book is that we need to be arguing on that plane as opposed to just bracketing religion as this thing that we do in private over here, but really a comprehensive account of reality that has the transcendence that makes conversations about politics even possible.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

Yeah, and you've just beautifully described the Catholic view. I mean, that that's that's our basic understanding of reality, moral reality, and then a subset of that, but just a subset, not the totality of it, politics. And so, yeah, what what we're what we're seeking to do is to advance claims that we think are not private personal claims because they're grounded in the very structure of reality and they're grounded in human reason itself. Now, again, you the secular mind goes nuts when it hears something like that. And even some strands of Protestantism, to be fair, go nuts. Some, not all. Some strands of product go nuts when they hear something like that. But again, then that's that's a comprehensive claim. To say that we, it is impossible for us to identify any universal moral objective truth is a wild claim to make. But that's what most of the culture is is operating on, and then yet seeks to be highly moralizing and sort of politically dominant, even as it rejects any kind of universal moral claim. So, yeah, we're trying to just establish baseline truths about what must be the case in order to have any kind of just political order at all, and then to build up from there.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

Yeah, I think this point about thinking about religion or thinking about these issues, politics and deeper questions of theology on the plane in the realm of truth, as opposed to bracketing religion as a sociological category is one important place to start. But maybe we also need to think about politics and the nature of politics. One of the challenges that we confront in speaking to parishes about the why of political engagement is that they think of politics merely in terms of elections and electioneering. Of course, electioneering is a matter of democratic politics, but it politics is a lot bigger than that. So, what do we mean by politics and the political culture as you describe it?

SPEAKER_02 20:35

Yeah, well, politics, uh, in in sort of its broadest sense is the the rules of engagement that we have in place to live with each other, especially those uh with whom we're not connected to by by bonds of of blood and friendship. And so in that sense, it's like, well, I'm not into politics. It's like, yes, you are. I mean, you live in a community of people outside of your household. So the question immediately becomes, well, how do we get along? And what kind of common good, even in a sort of a very abstract sense, are we aiming at in terms of our communal life? Uh so you know, as you know, this goes all the way back to the Aristotelian understanding of what a of what a polis is, of what a community is. And so, yeah, it certainly is the case that that politics has a sense of being partisan and and sort of it temporarily impinges on our life when it's like election time. But I think, especially now, especially in Minnesota, we see like, oh, when we're not paying attention to the comprehensive view of politics, everything starts to fall apart. And so this should be a wake up call for everybody, but especially Catholics, that it's not just it's not just for some people to deal with.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Politics is literally the work of ordering the city. And sometimes we get distracted because we feel like we have no. Agency with what goes on in Washington or Brussels or some far-flung place. But if we perhaps reframe our focus to the work of the city, maybe politics and its work looks a lot more intelligible.

SPEAKER_02 22:12

I think that's right. And I think that's one of the I'm hoping that that's one of the major movements now that we can do uh to get on the on as a Catholic priority. Because yes, it does seem like where do we even begin? If I'm not Elon Musk, how in the world could I could I have any influence on what's going on at the at the highest level? Now part of that is the lack of agency we feel is because of social media. And we see so many problems that are both highly upsetting, but also very distant from our agency. So it gives us a sense that everything is outside of our control. Um, but there's a lot that is within our control. And Jason, you've been this is your day job, probably your night job as well, of showing how strategic action here and there and and and with these communities put together actually does uh effectuate change. So it a lot of this has to do with with just education and also people taking responsibility. If you're gonna, if you're gonna be, you know, complaining about the world, well, then do something about it. And there actually are ways, especially at the more local levels, to uh to to to to do something for the good.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

We jokingly say that you might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

Uh you don't have a choice but to participate. And the church calls us to be faithful citizens. Again, the that you see the word city built into that. And then and it calls us to participation in public life precisely because it is the work of ordering the city, and we all have gifts to share in the community and perspectives to bring, and to see with the eyes of Christ is an important call of faithful citizens. What is faithful citizenship and the call to participation look like to you?

SPEAKER_02 23:53

I think first and foremost, it's a it's a duty. And I think we've already sort of been describing in that way, but just to give it a specific kind of uh uh moral oomph to it is we have a duty as Catholics to be engaged in the political sphere. Now, that duty can take different forms depending on our charisms, depending on where, you know, what like what stage we are in life. We have little kids, are we retired? All of that, all of that, of course, matters. But in terms of the basic dispositional recognition that this is my responsibility. My responsibility is not only to those in my household, of course it is, but it's also to those in my community. And it's not as if that responsibility is just sort of this ambiguous, uh uh completely undefiable, undefinable sort of uh set of duties that I can't otherwise specify. No, you can do this and you can do this, you can do this, and we should be uh doing that. So faithful citizenship is not, it sounds abstract, but it just means faithful in the sense of fidelity to those to the around you, and of course, fidelity to the law of God, to the uh to the natural law, uh, all of that as well. But first and foremost, thinking all of ourselves as responsible for each other in a very concrete way.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Thinking in that term and that frame of reference, the terms solidarity and subsidiarity, two pillars of the Catholic social teaching tradition, which we'll we'll talk more about CST, but in that light of that local engagement, subsidiarity and solidarity, I think are really important based on what you just said.

SPEAKER_02 25:19

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And and sort of the basic error that we see so often in in it's in a partisan expression is well, I'm a solidarity guy, well, I'm a subsidiarity guy. And it's like, oh, we're we're both. And and and the two concepts actually don't really make sense, absent of each other. So solidarity sort of unites us to uh to all human beings. Uh and I know that sounds like a wild claim, but it's like, well, if it's true that there's one God, and it's true that that one God created one species of humanity, then we all have the same father, and we are all in fact metaphysically related to each other. The Catholic view of the um, you know, the communion of saints, you know, supernaturalizes that, makes it even cooler. Like we're all we're all metaphysically supernaturally connected to each other, and that has moral implications. That's beautiful, but then you're like, okay, well, where do I even begin to fulfill these moral implications? Well, then you turn to uh the the concept of subsidiarity and you start where your actions have the most uh probability of being able to advance other people's good, which of course starts in your own household. So yeah, those two things they they go hand in gloves. I mean, uh they we we need to talk, we be talking about both of them at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

We're so often fixated on what goes on in Washington, but one of the things that is facing many people around the country is the lack of affordable housing, or what another way of putting it is housing affordability. And some of that has to do with things like zoning laws that are outside of people's frame of reference that they're not paying attention to. Um, but those things matter. And because people are asleep at the wheel at the local level and engaging in exclusionary zoning practices that in some cases are driving up home prices, then uh in an act of uh subsidiarity, the state has to step in with mandates that require more flexible zoning. But that's just one issue where I think it's impacting people's lives and people overlook at, be overlook it because it's not necessarily in the headlines every day, but a very practical way in which getting involved at the local level really can have an impact on people's lives.

SPEAKER_02 27:25

Absolutely. And those zoning laws, for example, are uh defined by and instituted by a very small number of people, right, in local, uh, in local areas. And so you could be one of those people. Uh another example I shared with this recently, Jason, but I it's it's just been motivating me so much is I met a councilwoman from um, I won't name the the city, but a city that you wouldn't expect, you know, with being you know in line with necessarily with with Catholic uh natural law values. And uh she was explaining how their library had a problem, as so many public libraries do, of having wildly inappropriate literature for children, uh uh, especially, you know, of you know, embracing and celebrating gender identity and everything that that entails. Uh and the sexualization of children, all of that terrible stuff. Uh and the question is, well, well, what can I do about this? Well, one of the things that she did is she worked with others on the city council in order to change the acquisition policy for new books and for and current books in the libraries, that those would be that would be held on to over time, that sort of by definition would exclude those uh that that really highly inappropriate literature for children, uh, but not name it as such. So the new criteria was not we are going to exclude trans and LGBTQ plus books, because why? That would cause an explosion. It would be you know an MSN, you know, MSN now or whatever it is. Right. So that so that would become a fight. Well, do you want to fight or do you want to win? So by just altering in a in a fair, justified way, though, that criteria, the library is now clean of all that stuff in the children's section. And so again, there's like that took a very small number of people who were committed to a very specific thing that had a massive benefit for the community from a natural law perspective. And so that's the kind of thing that we all can be doing.

SPEAKER_01 29:18

See an act or see a problem and take an act upon it. That's why the popes have called politics, that work of ordering the city, one of the highest forms of charity because it serves the common good. Did it cost those people time and effort uh to get on the city council or the library board to make that change? You bet it did. Um, watching Netflix would have been a lot easier, but making a real impact at the local level in a way that has a profound impact on people's lives. That's a perfect example of the type of thing that we're talking about. I w I want to get to the more in the book and the man, this is really a manual for evangelizing the political culture, but say a little bit about the importance based on that last point of not just trying to convince people at the level of the intellect of the truth of things, but also being present within institutions and evangelizing institutions themselves by our mere presence.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Yeah. So at sort of a very general level, we can think of evangelize evangelizing as solving a problem. Uh, so you have the very personal problem that all human beings share, which is sort of like the existential problem of why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? Oh my gosh, I'm going to die. Uh how how do I structure my life in the light of that very dark truth? So that sort of existential evangel are the first sort of step of evangelization is addressing that that fact that it weighs over all of us. But that sort of is the foundation for more specific forms of evangelization. And that's first, you know, personal evangelization, building relationships with people. Uh, and so much of evangelization takes place just built on friendships and and establishing communities of trust where even people are highly skeptical about the claims of a of a particular tradition of the Catholic tradition, uh, you know, they like these people and they like hanging around them, and then that leads. Well, there's also evangelization of the culture, which is what Word on Fire is, you know, really is focused on. And that's the making connections with the seeds of the word that are already out in secular culture and building on them in order to establish bridges to say, look, you're interested in this and I'm interested in it too. Wouldn't it, isn't it even more interesting that if we just go down one level and we see, you know, what this greater truth is? So that's really important as well, evangelizing the culture. But evangelizing institutions is just as important because ultimately, institutions are really the only place where all of us are together collectively. We have our culture, we're kind of out in that, but that's pretty amorphous. We have our relationships with a high particular, but they're very specific and not, you know, not on a large scale, our institutions where we interact with each other. So if we're not an evangelization, evangelizing presence in our institutions, we're not gonna really evangelize the culture ultimately, not in any long-standing way. And two, we're gonna make that individual particular evangelization at the relational level that much harder because the reigning sort of secularism, the reigning anti-Christian sentiment will take root and make life more miserable for all of us, especially Christians. So we really got to be present in those, in those institutions. And that's that's you know one of the things that we're especially focusing on.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Rella at a deeper level, you highlighted this in the beginning of our conversation, that young, even young people think about, talk about, engage political questions, even if generically or if half-informed or formed in social media or whatever, but being wise in our evangelical efforts and being strategic, recognizing the fact that this is one of the places where people are living and conversing. So being intentional about evangelizing and engaging in that mission field. So we talk about the existential peripheries needing to be evangelized. And it seems that you've really written a manual to do just that. And I think what stood out for me right away was let's stop fighting. And that's why a lot of people avoid politics and political discourse, and let's start arguing. What's the difference between fighting and arguing?

SPEAKER_02 33:14

Yeah. Um, the let me I think one thing that we really need to recognize now is that arguing is getting harder and harder and harder to do as fighting takes uh sort of uh the the the preeminent place in our culture. The difference is arguing, at least in theory, has within it the way that the argument is set up, the possibility at arriving at some kind of consensus. Because we're speaking a relatively similar moral language. We've accepted sort of rules of engagement with each other, and in a kind of Socratic way, we're willing to ask and answer questions sincerely and lead to where reason naturally wants to take us. Um now, that is that's ideally how politics is done is we make competing claims and then we weigh competing claims against the best available evidence, and we specify what counts as evidence, and we specify what counts as you know, uh coherent and incoherent and all those things. So that's that's what we need to be skilled at doing. And that's within the Western intellectual tradition, traces itself all the way back at minimally to Socrates, who's sort of the father of that discursive way of breaking down a problem, including political and moral problems. I also want to highlight, though, that what the question of what do we do when it's impossible to argue. And what I mean by that is, again, argument requires a kind of good-willed buy-in to the process itself and a recognition that we might be led to change our minds. But if you've rejected that on principle, especially at the outset, and we live in a world where people can look at the exact same phenomena and come to completely different conclusions because their minds have been ideologically hijacked, then it's not clear that that you know engaging in argument is going to lead us to, you know, at best having to drink our own hemlock. So that's another reason why capturing institutions or reforming institutions uh is so important because argument is a necessary, necessary but insufficient uh way to uh to live in the culture as the political culture as Catholics. We have to be willing to fight within the bounds of morality uh for uh for the good.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

I think those of us in Minnesota here are concerned about what might seem like an academic distinction to others because the alternative to arguing, which is fighting, uh, we've seen the reality of that here in violence. You know, we've had politicians assassinated, shot, street violence, things of that nature. So the imperative to arguing and being effective at arguing as opposed to fighting really uh has become clear in the last couple of years.

SPEAKER_02 36:06

Absolutely. Yeah, and it is. I mean, it's just as a sort of a statement of fact, if you're not arguing, you're fighting. And if you're fighting, it's going to be the who the most powerful in in all the different ways that power can be exercised, are going to win.

SPEAKER_01 36:20

Politics without reason is just a power game at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_02 36:23

It really is, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

So you you would identify some key print you know, some key tools that Catholics have in the toolbox, uh, the the ability to make arguments, and I think you give us a helpful primer on uh reasoning with ideologies, but also the importance of Catholic social teaching. Say a little bit about um how to make how one even begins to make arguments effectively, uh, where to start, in other words, um I'm not equ when the person says, Well, I'm not good at arguing, I don't know things, I'm not formed, I don't know logic, or I didn't take a logic course, I wasn't a philosophy major. Where does the normal person even start uh in this journey if they want to evangelize the political culture?

SPEAKER_02 37:06

Yeah, start start by uh I uh first of all, I would I would do an early diagnosis of the kind of person that that you're engaging with. Uh and what I mean by that is are you engaged in a sincere debate uh or are you engaged in a kind of hostile uh engagement? Um, because trying to use the tools of argumentation in a really hostile environment may be just putting it bluntly, just maybe a waste of your time. Um again, thinking of the Minnesota kind of context, you know, when you have people who are you know shrieking uh in the streets and and really engaged in violence, you know, that's not the time to go out there and and you know to begin to seek to reason calmly. Assuming you do have somebody who's willing to listen, uh, then seek to find a common point of agreement, even at a really highly abstract level. Like we should have a just society. Uh you'll find that, again, most people uh will say, well, agree with that. Yes, of course we'll have a just society. Now, what you'll immediately discover is that the definition of justice um uh differs drastically, but at least you have sort of a formal agreement on the principle we should have a just society. That's enough. Then you start asking, this is this is this is really important, ask sincere questions, not troll questions, not manipulative questions, not instrumental questions that you're sort of trying to lead somebody down a path to make them look like an idiot. Because everybody detects that, right? Or most people detect that, and that's a form of manipulation. Sincere questions. How do you define justice? Based on that definition, where do you find the the grounds of your justice? What sort of what what worldview does this form of justice emerge from? And again, if you're if you can kind of keep the conversation at the level of logic, at the level of testing claims, you can find that people will, in good faith, say, I guess in order for me to believe, for example, that justice is real and it's something that's worthwhile, sort of even setting aside what specifically defines it, uh, I have to have some form of objective view of morality. I have to say that values are real, which means I guess I shouldn't say that it all depends on experiences and everything's ultimately reducible to power. That would make my other claims inconsistent. So again, to the extent it's possible, uh, just engaging in that kind of sincere question and answer can lead us in very productive uh directions.

SPEAKER_01 39:38

I think you helpfully point out that you don't need to be Socrates to do this. No. And you can start with basic moral claims. Torture is wrong. Yeah. All human beings have dignity. I I've used the torture one a bunch of times. You can get just great consensus. Well, why? And then that's a conversation starter. You also identify five basic tasks of good government. I think that's really helpful as well. Say a little bit more about uh, you know, if you're talking about politics, what should government do? And there's five, there's five principles we can start from and a metric for measuring what politics ought to look like.

SPEAKER_02 40:13

Well, I would say I don't have the five in front of me right now. Uh, but I uh I'd say the the first and foremost is uh is is basic basic security. Uh and that is can be minimally defined as the absence of fear for your life to the extent that that's possible to systematize and institutionalize. I mean, think how different our lives would be, even in the United States, especially in certain pockets of it, if the government were doing its most basic duty uh to um uh to ensure safety, to ensure that people are not aggressing against other people to the degree that that's possible to prevent. And then when it doesn't prevent, to ensure that the legal system is functioning the way that it should. The principle, even I would say, even beneath that, is just to provide the grounds for respecting human dignity. Now, that has that has two fundamental components to it, out of which all the other principles, all the other responsibilities of a of a of a government flow. So one is conceived negatively. So the fact that human beings have dignity, the fact that we're made in the image and likeness of God, means that no, there are some things that must never be done. It doesn't mean they can't be done. It means if they are done, it's a violation of human dignity. It's a violation of the eternal and the uh natural law. So torture is an example of one of those. Um, murder is an example of one of those. Um the seeking to um uh to eradicate someone's freedom of conscience, even that's impossible to do, but seeking to do it uh is uh one of those. So the first sort of category of responsibilities the government has is ensuring that these prohibitions are enforced, the things that we must never do, including the government, but not only the government. However, respecting human dignity also calls for positive action. Uh so going straight to scripture on this, Jesus specifically identifies those who do not feed him in disguise and do not clothe him in disguise and do not welcome him in disguise, I'm gonna be, you know, in eternal punishment, to put it very bluntly, right? So that means we're also called as Catholics to do things. But here's the crucial distinction: there's only one way not to do something, right? If something's prohibited, the only way to respect that commandment, to respect that principle of human dignity is not to do it. So there's no debate about how we don't do something, we don't do it. So we work to have a society where no hu no innocent human life is ever extinguished, period. That's the goal. However, there's great debate on how to do something. So it's one thing to say we have a moral obligation, for example, to care for the poor, which we do, and it's just as important as our moral obligation to protect innocent human life. It's another thing to say how do we go about doing that? And how we go about doing that is a prudential discussion about what's going to be most effective, what's realistic, what may appear to be helping, but in fact undermine uh what we what we otherwise or the goal that we otherwise have in mind. So I think politics operates in that sphere from a Catholic perspective, and all of the obligations of government come from there. What must never be done and what must be done, but then how it gets done gets worked out in the political process.

SPEAKER_01 43:32

The moral principle is clear, and that moral principle could establish common ground for a good discussion, even among Catholics, about prudential ways of implementing those positive injunctions, as we might call them, as opposed to the moral prohibitions. The reality, though, at the end of the day is that you can't avoid the con the responsibility to form your conscience, inform yourself about the issues or at least the arguments so that you. Can transform the society around you. Fortunately, there are, as we've talked about, there's a catechetical revolution where so many great resources, including your book, Evangelization and Ideology, are at people's fingertips. And I think that's really, really helpful and why this book is so important. Say a little bit, though, about uh Catholic social teaching and how Catholic social teaching gives us those principles by which we can uh engage the political culture and evangelize the political culture by trying to find some common ground and laying out some basic moral premises that can be the foundation of deeper discussion.

SPEAKER_02 44:35

I think I think one of the most important Catholic uh principles, this would be the foundational principle, uh, is this in having a coherent middle ground on this question. Uh, is it possible to make moral progress in time and space? Uh, because that's it's kind of it's kind of tricky to answer that question right. And you can easily go to two extremes. So one extreme is to say it's absolutely possible, and it's the goal of government to make as much moral progress as possible. And here you get a kind of utopianism uh that always and will always lead to a kind of totalitarian society because ultimately the only way to try and set up everything in such a way so that the vision of the good actually comes into fruition is to start destroying those enemies who are of the good. Uh, and we know you know how that all ends up. So on the one hand, Catholicism rejects utopianism and says, no, our my kingdom is not of this world. And so that sets our work here within a sort of uh a horizon of recognition that whatever we do as Catholics, we are never going to bring the city of God, the kingdom of God uh to earth. And so we should never try to do it. So one clean line of rejection of utopianism. But there's another re there's another danger, and that's to say moral progress is impossible. There's no way that in space and time, human beings will ever really get any better. And in fact, anytime it seems we're getting better, all we've done is taken one step forward and two steps back. So, yes, look at all this great technological progress, but you know what? We also created uh let's say the nuclear bomb or social media, the like button, right? So we've created things that, yes, look like progress, but ultimately destroy us. And so the best kind of uh solution we have to all this uh is really a kind of deep pessimism. Uh you kind of make your way through life protecting what's yours and just wait for, you know, the you can even have Christians who who take this point of view. Wait, you know, wait till the end times when God will make everything right. Well, obviously, Catholicism rejects that as well. And so it's it sees sort of moral progress as real and uh and is a moral obligation that all of us have to pursue, while also recognizing a kind of asymptotic relationship that with that the kingdom of heaven. So our goal is to get closer, but recognizing that this space here is always going to be a space and we must preserve it as a space. Now you'll get different theologians. I compare in the book, for example, Thomas Aquinas, who's much more sanguine about the possibility of really putting a just political order in place, uh, with someone like uh St. Augustine, who's more on the sort of the pessimistic side in his conception of the two cities. That's a debate to be had. But the rejection of pessimism on the one hand, total pessimism, and utopianism on the other, that creates a very fertile ground for real politics. That's just one example of the uniqueness of the Catholic social thought tradition uh that um allows us to do good politics.

SPEAKER_01 47:40

This that part of the book was so important, and I loved how you unpack it that history is not necessarily the ever ever ongoing march of progress. Uh, at the same time, though, we actually can improve things, and politics is part of that work of improving people's lives. And we can sometimes we take two steps back when we take one step forward. Um, and we see that all around us in our society today, but we do make improvements in how people live and how we treat one another. And this is, I think, the important point about why Catholicism and the church is an important voice in the political arena. It embraces what might be called a hopeful realism about politics. And that's what you really describe as a is we're realistic about the possibilities and limitations of politics. Politics that building that basic skeletal framework of a just society is not going to be uh salvific in and of itself. It requires the church to enflesh those relationships of justice with the work of charity. But we can make progress, we can do good things. And when we recognize the limitations, then we don't get discouraged because we don't have expectations that are utopian and unrealistic. Absolutely. And at the same time, we don't need to be pessimistic. We don't need to invest politics with more than it can possibly achieve on its own. And then we can do the patient work of recognizing the incremental way in which political change comes about without thinking we're gonna change the world overnight. Um, or every time we walk into a politician's office, he or she's gonna fall down like the walls of Jericho because we've been so compelling. We can take an incremental, hopeful, realist approach and then not get discouraged. People ask me how I've been doing this work for so long. Because I don't think the work we do is gonna save the world.

SPEAKER_02 49:25

Yeah, absolutely. It's so sane, it's so commonsensical. But as we know, the sane and commonsensical easily gets occluded by all the different um currents of the world. But I also think it's important to recognize within that beautifully um expressed paradigm you just laid out, that uh it can't, the way we set up society can have salvific implications. So it doesn't save anybody and it doesn't damn anybody, uh, but it can make salvation, to put it sort of uh sort of crudely easier or harder for individual souls. So here's an example. Think of the drug policies uh in many of our major cities, where they make it easy for young, vulnerable people to go out and get addicted to the most destructive drugs, right? That will the the first time you take it, you're gonna be an addict your whole life, even if, God willing, you can eventually stop using. Well, those are those are decisions that human beings are making, right? They're making it easy for drug pushers to exist in our communities and to not, you know, not by not enforcing the law and even providing free needles and all that stuff. Well, that policy is destroying individual lives and destroying the lives of their families as well. Think about how hard it is to say yes to Christ. Not impossible, but hard when you're a fentanyl addict, right? So again, these sort of these these policies we have in mind, we think, well, it's just about, you know, kind of improving on the margins and trying to make life a little more comfortable while we're here. It can have salvific uh implications.

SPEAKER_01 50:57

Yeah, so that's an important clarification. It leads me right to the last paragraph of your book, not to bury the lead, but I think it's an important one. You this is a uh almost exact quote. I'm sure I maybe got a word or two wrong. The final purpose of evangelizing the culture is opening the widest and straightest path possible for the pilgrimage to the Lord. I think that's exactly it, right? So you talked about a stumbling block that we create when we make marijuana, for example, legal and accessible, pornography, gambling, you name it. So these things aren't simply, oh, well, it's just recreational activity and some may choose to do it or a question of technical competence. We are actively as a society putting stumbling blocks in people's way, harming them, not just at the temporal level, but harming their eternal destiny and their ability to make that pilgrimage to the Lord as well.

SPEAKER_02 51:48

Absolutely. And and we're we're seeing the effects of it in real time. Another one of those examples that it appears to be uncontroversial, no fault divorce. It didn't that didn't used to be the case. In order to get a divorce, you used to have to identify some some kind of breaking contract, right? There'd have to be some kind of violation of the terms of the contract of the marriage. No, I can get married and divorce. Well, who pays for that? The kids pay for that. Wounded their entire lives with an emptiness that's so difficult to fill that leads to all these other social problems as well. That's a policy decision that we have made. And it's made life more miserable existentially, spiritually, for untold numbers of people. So uh, yes, we we're not going to bring heaven on earth, but we can certainly reduce, as you put it, the stumbling blocks.

SPEAKER_01 52:37

That's exactly right. And a helpful qualification and clarification. Family law and marriage law used to be about connecting men and women to the children born from their union. It enshrined in law that the presupposition of marriage was the fruitful lifelong union of one man and one woman. And we've systematically undone that to satisfy adult desires to the detriment of children's needs. Absolutely. That has an imp that has an etern, a temporal, but also an eternal implication. And what we do at the Capitol, at least in our capital and in capitals around the country, we undo the or try to undo or put a band-aid on the damage that backing away from those policies has caused. Uh everything is mitigating, it seems that everything is mitigating uh problems that are fundamentally problems that uh related to family fragmentation, the breakdown of the family, and the implications and all kinds of things that happen because of that. So politics really does matter in and of itself, and it just doesn't have temporal consequences. It can have um uh eternal consequences, but I think the the definition that you've provided, and similar to what Peter Morin and Dorothy Day would say, we need to create a society where it's easier for men and women to be good. I think that encapsulated perfectly.

SPEAKER_02 53:53

Yeah. Yeah. It's hard enough to be good even when things are going well. Uh it's it almost becomes, and again, recognizing free will can never be completely erased, but it can become functionally impossible to be good when you uh, for example, a drug addict.

SPEAKER_01 54:10

Well, this is what we mean we call structures of sin. Yeah, it is, yeah, right. We're putting stumbling blocks in pe in people's uh in people's way from their pilgrimage to the Lord. Talk, let's talk a little bit about ideology. You talked about it as a total uh a totalizing worldview without transcendence. Robert Bella, the great sociologist, said that Americans uh were embraced the religion of Sheilaism, uh, and Sheila was his character who just sort of embraced, you know, various ideas like a smorgasbord, as opposed to embracing one totalizing ideology. To what degree uh have Americans become more ideological in the way you define it, or do we still have this kind of Sheilaistic smorgasbord um approach to ideas and concepts and politics? And is it easier to engage and evangelize one or the other?

SPEAKER_02 55:04

Yeah, we have the the worst of both worlds. I think I think we become more ideological in the sense of more prone to possession of ideas that are not rooted in the transcendent and those ideas sort of defining every aspect of our life. And we've remained thoroughly inconsistent, as Bell uh points out. Um we just had Ryan Burge in studio. I know you're familiar with his work, the um sociologist of religion. And one of the most frequent things he finds in his data is people who will hold completely opposing views uh uh uh without any kind of per uh perturbation to their to their intellect or to their spirit. Like, yeah, of course I'm pro-life, and and obviously that means abortion until the uh should be legalized until until birth. And you know, that's that's actually not a hyperbolic example. There are people who hold that view. So it's it's the loss of it's the loss of of a good, sound metaphysical understanding that is not only internally coherent, so all the ideas fit with each other, but is ultimately grounded outside of itself in truth. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that one when we lose that, we get the worst of ideological possession and just sort of buffet style um personalized uh life plans. Um, but that's what happens when we lose God. Everything, everything goes wrong. We get the worst of every possible error.

SPEAKER_01 56:31

The skeptic might argue if people haven't can't even hold the principle of non-contradiction, then we're we're beyond even arguments and and reason, and something else has to happen. Uh, and maybe it's a return to the theological and less the political. Unpack that for me.

SPEAKER_02 56:51

That's right. So so one of the things that I it's been I've been thinking about a lot recently is there's this fundamental debate between Kant, the Enlightened philosopher Kant, and Aristotle. They're not debating with each other, but they represent two different uh schools. So the Aristotelian view is that truth itself exists objectively, but it's not enough in and of itself to compel you to act. You have to be habituated. And to be habituated, you have to see other people acting in accordance with the truth. You have to build character by imitating people who already have good character. That's Aristotle. Kant believes that the truth itself is powerful enough to make you act in accordance with it, so that no sane person would ever recognize something as true or inconsistent or illogical and uh and either and act against the truth or to see something's illogical and say, well, yeah, I'm actually going to do exactly what I identify as illogical. Well, I think Aristotle's just won. Aristotle's right. It is the case that human beings, it's not enough for us to be able to identify the truth. We have to build communities where the truth, the truth gets habituated into us, and that's the Catholic conception of virtue theory. Uh, that's the Catholic understanding of the importance of both nature and uh and nurture. And so it's the creation of these kinds of communities. And to give you an example of where these communities are right now, I think our Newman Guide schools are doing a fantastic job, all in all, of showing how that works. Here's an intellectual institution where we're going to teach you things and how to identify truth and all the different other positions that are out there and give you the tools to identify what is true and why. And we're going to model that in the way that we structure our social life, uh, in the way that we structure the relationship between teachers and students and all of that. Uh so there are examples of that, but I think I think just as a basic point, the truth alone is not enough to move certainly where we are in the culture now.

SPEAKER_01 58:47

So is it is it the case then that one might say that if the truth is not enough, well, what about the way we conduct ourselves and politics, given how acrimonious and polarizing politics has become? Maybe it's not just a case of what we say, but also how we say. Perhaps that civility too can be an evangelizing force in this society.

SPEAKER_02 59:07

Yeah, I agree. Uh civility with courage, though, because civility can oftentimes be a kind of uh mass to hide uh the inability to actually get in the fray and get something done, to keep your hands clean. So civility is not about keeping your hands clean. It's about keeping your conscience clean as you get your, let's say, your hands dirty, uh, metaphorically speaking. Uh and so, yes, I think it's absolutely true. Our politicians should model civility, um, but that civility also shouldn't be a cover for otherwise not confronting the really, really nasty problems uh that we have before us. And there's also a kind of innocent as dove, wise as serpents uh element that we also have to keep alive is you know, recognizing that rhetorical strategies do matter. So you can't ever lie, but how you tell the truth matters. Uh and there's creative ways to communicate where you can sort of create movements that otherwise wouldn't be created if you just sort of blandly went out and said, you know, I'm here to speak the truth. Uh and so we have to be creative uh in the way that we approach our problems uh as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:16

I think it's an important point when we talk about evangelization that to think about what's the why behind all this is ultimately to help people meet Jesus Christ. I mean, that's the there there are no political solutions uh to what are ultimately moral and spiritual problems. There are only religious solutions to those problems. That's right. And we have to help people meet Jesus Christ. But when we talk about evangelizing the political culture, we're not going in and you're not recommending we go in and hit people over that with a Bible or the catechism. You're really talking about what might be called uh pre-evangelization. That's my me putting words in your mouth. Or to use an analogy, we've you know, if you talk about, you know, tending the soil so that the seed falls on fertile ground, yeah. Um we're not the we're not the sower or the harvester, but what we can do is eliminate the rocks and the boulders uh so that the seed can fall on fertile soil. We can tend the soil, if you will. And that's kind of what I feel like this work is in evangelizing and political culture. It's it's not direct evangelization, it's sort of indirect or pre-evangelization where we tend soil so that when the seeds of grace do fall, or when people are able to connect those dots that they see out in the culture, that we've kind of tended the soil for that to happen. What's your reaction to that analysis?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:31

Yeah, I think it's it's a beautiful framing. And I would just add to it that, you know, what when we're when we're in evangelizing the culture from a Catholic perspective, what we're seeking to do is to imbue the culture with the natural law. The natural law is the moral law. The moral law is objective reason embedded in reality itself, also known as the logos. And Jesus Christ at the beginning of the Gospel of John identifies himself as the Logos. So we are making Christ present. Uh, the same Christ who is revealed to us in Scripture is present in the natural law. Uh, and so we don't have to think of ourselves as sort of um uh sort of taking a shortcut or otherwise, you know, going half measures by, you know, working at the political level when what we really should be doing is being on a street corner, uh, you know, with um St. Paul's street evangelization. Fantastic organization, right? That that's what real evangelization is and evangelization that cultures doesn't really count. It's both. It's both. So, insofar as we can create a community in which the natural law is sort of the at least primary operative principle that's organizing everything, well, we've done a lot to evangelize for Christ.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:43

We have what I like to say that when we communicate and advocate for policies and principles that support human dignity and promote the common good, the natural law, one might say when we promote those Catholic social teaching principles, we're ultimately pointing back to the author of those principles, who's Jesus Christ. And hopefully, people in that encounter with those policies and truths, uh, encounter the great author, uh, the Logos, uh, who makes all things intelligible. And when we follow his instruction plan, we can be happier than if we don't.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:16

Amen. That's right. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:18

You've written a fantastic manual, I think, to engage and evangelize the political culture. What else would you like to leave our listeners with before we uh depart ways?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:27

Uh sometimes uh I I ask myself, you know, like what why why am I supposed to be evangelizing? Well, what's like it's your job. Okay. So it is my shop. Uh, but yeah, the the deeper level uh is because sometimes I don't, I would say oftentimes I don't feel like evangelizing. Oftentimes I can came up with a great rationalization for why I shouldn't be in the fray, why it's somebody else's job, why why I have a very specific purpose in life that doesn't really involve directly seeking to advance the gospel. Uh so all these rationalizations, lies, I tell myself. Uh ultimately it comes down to uh we are called to do, we are commanded to evangelize. The last words in the gospel of Matthew, right? Go out. That is not just to the bishops, it's not just to the priests, it's not just to the religious, it's to every single one of us. And so what I tell myself is if I'm not in the fray, then I am disobeying my Lord. And that that helps simplify it for me. I don't know if that helps other people, but the question of moral motivation, especially when you don't feel like it, especially when things are hard, especially when you think you're probably gonna get hurt if you you stick your head out, which you will, uh, is well, he's the Lord. Who else could I possibly give my life to? And he's called me to this, to this form of life.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:46

As disciples, we're all called to evangelize. We're all called to be faithful citizens and called to participation in society. And therefore, we're all called to engage and evangelize the political culture.

unknown 1:04:58

Dr.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:58

Matthew Petrusek, what a fantastic conversation. Thanks for this great work. The book is Evangelization and Ideology, how to respond to the political culture. Where else can people find more of your work and find out more about the Word on Fire Institute?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:11

So uh wordonfire.org is sort of the the our clearinghouse site where you can find everything. Um, the institute in particular is institute.wordonfire.org. Uh the book's on the in the bookstore. It's also on on Amazon. Um, but certainly if you haven't checked out Word on Fire, sort of all the different offerings, um, that they're all tools. That's what they're intended to be. It's tools, y'all become a better evangelist, then do please check out wordonfire.org.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:33

Wonderful. Thank you very much. And God bless your work, evangelizing the culture.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:37

Thanks, you Jace. Thanks. God bless.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:41

That was a fun conversation. I was drawn originally to Dr. Petrusic's book because I have taught a course at the St. Paul Seminary entitled Politics and the New Evangelization. So I too have been thinking about these questions. Whereas a course in Catholic social teaching covers the substance of what the church and its members may propose in the public arena as the basis of good public policy, the course I taught covers the why of the church's engagement in public life, as well as who is called and how we do it effectively. In other words, it's the evangelical dimension of politics, which is also the subject of Dr. Petrusek's fine book, along with tactics for engaging in real dialogue that changes hearts and minds, but also evangelizes. But as Dr. Petrusek noted, doing the right thing in politics and public life is not just a question of the intellect, but also one of the will. For our proposals and principles to not merely be a skeletal mass of fleshless dogmas, they need to be lived joyfully by Catholics inside the church and in the institutions we inhabit, starting with the family. Evangelization requires words and deeds so people can see a better way and seek to mimic its beauty, goodness, and truth. I strongly recommend Dr. Petrusek's great book as a good starting point for those who want to move beyond keyboard wars or pessimism and start incrementally planting seeds of truth in those around them, and then watering those seeds with joy, hope, and prayer. Thanks as always for investing your precious time and listening to Catholic in America. I hope it makes you a better disciple on your journey and in your work in this corner of the vineyard. Thanks for listening. God bless you and your family. I'm Jason Atkins.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:13

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