¶1This is part two of my response to Joe Schmidt in part one, which I've linked below. We take a look at his discussion with Matt Fradd on the doctrine of hell and how he justifies or perhaps rationalizes ascent to the Catholic teaching on the doctrine of hell in light of his recent conversion to theism, to Christianity, to Catholicism. Now in part two, Matt Fradd is going to introduce the question of the church's teaching on homosexuality or same-sex relationships, how they are intrinsically immoral and disordered and get Joe's thoughts on that. And I'm going to provide a response to that as well. I've also linked below my book The Widness of the Sea: How to Be Evangelical and Gay Affirming, which is clearly clearly directly relevant to the things that we're going to talk about and look at here.
¶2So let's get started. >> That's helpful. What about gay stuff >> [laughter] >> and LGBT stuff? What has been your opinion of the Catholic Church's teaching on these things? I presume you've looked into them in greater detail.
¶3Cuz I think I mean I'm sure you're were too smart and wise to realize that the church didn't have the character she's often attributed as having, namely we hate gay people. >> Yeah. >> When you read what the church teaches, it's really beautiful about our love for those with same-sex attraction, the idea that we're all in this together. We all struggle with disordered sexual desires that we have to rein in and >> And just in >> So I just wanted to interject there. So Matt says the church the Catholic Church is often caricatured, and this certainly is true of many Protestant churches as well or Orthodox churches that have taken a similar stance on same-sex relationships.
¶4They said that there's often been a caricature of the church as hating gay people, when in fact there's a beauty to the way that they talk about how we all have sinful disordered desires and we're all in this together. I get that there is to some degree an unfair caricature of what Catholics or Protestants have taught about gays at times. I think we also have to recognize that just if you go into the pew of a Catholic or Protestant church that is non-affirming, you are going to find an enormous amount of homophobia, of fear of or hatred of gay people. Now, I grew up in the 1970s and 80s and in that era and into the 90s and even the 2000s, homosexuality or particularly gay men were closely aligned in the popular cultural imagination and the evangelical Christian imagination with pedophilia, with being sexual predators. So, if a person was male and same-sex attracted, there was this close association between that and that person being a predator of boys.
¶5And of course, this conception is still not hard to find within Christian communities, which is an utter slander. And I I'm disturbed by the degree to which Matt is just sort of dismissive of that and he just wants to look at the church's teaching in the best possible light rather than to acknowledge it the degree to which that kind of homophobia, that kind of fear of and frankly hatred toward gay people is still very common within churches. You just look at the way that a person who identifies as gay, the way that evangelicals I I don't speak so much for Catholics. I don't have as much in interaction with the Catholic community as with the Evangelical Christian community, but I'm I know there are very much similarities here. How they will just kind of recoil when a person identifies as gay in a way that they won't if a person identifies for example as you know, gluttonous or I mean as twice divorced for example.
¶6So, that in and of itself is a problem, but I also just at the outset want to frame this conversation in a particular way. So, again, Matt said that what the church actually teaches is quite beautiful because we all have disordered desires. To me that honestly that sounds like a pandering uh well, problematic at best probably at least pandering or something worse because for years many churches for example taught that it is I'm not saying the Catholic Church taught this, but this was common teaching in many churches. A deep opposition certainly in Protestant churches toward what was called miscegenation or relationships between people of different races particularly white and black. Uh and there was a belief that somehow interracial marriages were morally problematic.
¶7And again, this was a reflection of the wider culture and the racism of the wider culture. Just remember the I think 1968 film Look Guess Who's Coming to Dinner with Sidney Poitier. So, in that film a young woman from a liberal family, I think in San Francisco, Caucasian, she she brings her black boyfriend home for dinner and her parents want to view themselves as very urbane and accepting and embracing of the civil rights movement and so on, but are not so accepting of the fact that their Caucasian daughter brought home a black man. And that is the kind of racism that you can often find in the wider culture, but also within many historic evangelical churches. This opposition to what they called miscegenation or interracial relationships, a belief that somehow those relationships are disordered.
¶8Now, thankfully, for the most part, that kind of racism has has been at least overtly called out, although as I mentioned in the book uh The Whiteness of the Sea that I I referenced earlier, opposition to interracial relationships is still highest statistically in the evangelical population than in the general population, which is a pretty shocking and disturbing fact. And another thing, just empirically to keep in mind, Bob Jones University, one of the bastions of fundamentalist Protestantism, continued to oppose as part of its code of conduct interracial relationships until the year 2000, which is just over 25 years ago. That's not that long ago. Evangelicals have definitely dragged their feet when it comes to interracial relationships. So, with that in mind, imagine going back to the 1960s where you had evangelical churches and pastors and lay people who were opposed to interracial relationships, and imagine them saying, "Look, our view is being caricatured by all these civil rights people.
¶9We actually think uh we don't oppose black people. Um we we think that we all have disordered desires, but the reality is that interracial marriages are disordered, but we all have disordered desires." Would you think it is at all plausible to present or frame that view of interracial relationships as somehow a beautiful teaching because the person who oppose interracial relationships as miscegenation also recognizes it is just a general manifestation of disordered desires which we are all subject to to various degrees. I mean I would still find that an an absolutely appalling view and I suppose you would too. Well, from the critic of the Catholic Church's teaching the non-affirming stance it looks exactly the same. They want to present themselves as being inclusive but in fact what they're saying is oh, well, we still think that your marriages your relationships are intrinsically disordered irrespective of whatever spiritual fruit may appear to come from them.
¶10We still think they are intrinsically inherently disordered. But hey, we're all disordered. Not a very satisfying response. So I think there are these two parts that are problematic with what Matt says. First of all, to summarize, he doesn't acknowledge the to the degree to which homophobia, fear of and hatred and antagonism towards gay people is still very much a part of conservative Christian communities and second even in the best presentation of the Church's teaching, it's not going to look very beautiful for a people who are not already buying into it but rather who view it as prejudice.
¶11All right, so let's uh hear from Joe. >> improperly ordered desires in other cases as well. Um I mean, you know, when you when we say disordered, right? I mean, Catholics are talking about it's not properly oriented toward the good, right? So it's uh you know, all of our actions they have a kind of direction or orientation.
¶12Are we orienting ourselves toward the good or and even our desires have a kind of orientation. Are we desiring an object which is genuinely valuable or genuinely good or is it disvaluable or bad? So that we're not you know, we're not trying to like or at least I'm not trying to medicalize things at this point. When we're this is a moral category. This is a moral category whether you're directing something to the good or whether you're directing it away from the good.
¶13>> Yeah. >> So, yeah, I mean at the outset, whenever I talk about this, >> Uh I want to just say this here. Okay, let's talk about directing toward the good. How does one identify whether a particular relationship is directed toward the good? Well, I think a very reasonable way for a Christian to begin to identify whether a particular relationship is directed toward the good is to look at the kind of fruit produced by that relationship.
¶14So, then that introduces an interesting question. A question which is settled not a priori or in principle, but rather a posteriori or after actually looking at relationships. What you do is you look at relationships a posteriori and say, "What kind of fruit is being manifested by these relationships? What kind of spiritual fruit?" And in fact, there is an enormous wealth of material both anecdotally, practically, but also in social scientific research of the stability of gay relationships, of the way that gay relationships can produce the same kind of things that we would spiritualize as spiritual fruit, virtues, stability of relationship, self-giving, self-love of another, and so on, nurturing of children that are manifested in gay relationships just like they are in heterosexual relationships. The question then is, are you open to and analyzing and considering that kind of evidence which might require you to rethink your unqualified a priori moral censure of gay relationships as intrinsically disordered based upon some argument from natural law and the teaching of the Catholic Church.
¶15>> I just want to emphasize that I would I would die. I would take a bullet for anyone in the LGBT community. I would take a bullet for them. And I'm not lying. I'm not lying.
¶16>> Okay. I You know, it fair enough, but it just There's something about the overly dramatic nature of the way Joe is speaking here that I don't think that he's being disingenuous or dishonest, but I do find it incredibly unsatisfactory, however, that imagine the person was defending not a prohibition on gay marriages, but rather a prohibition on interracial marriages. And that person says, "Look, I would take a bullet for any white or black person who was in an interracial marriage. I would take a bullet for them. But I still think their marriage is intrinsically disordered." Like, you're not going to take a lot of solace from that.
¶17The issue is not whether you'd take a bullet for them. The weather issue is whether you were going to affirm this basic definitional relationship for them through which they have found profound meaning and love and care and support. And if your only response is to say, "No, I think you're actually called to be celibate for the rest of your life barring a miraculous transformation to being opposite-sex attracted." Uh I think you would recognize how the fact that you're going to take a bullet for them would not be a particularly moving a of uh support. >> That's how much I want to love them. That's how much I do love them.
¶18>> All right. >> So that's I want to start with that so that people know that like and this is just like this issue matters a lot to me, right? And I thought a lot about this. So and I struggle with it. I struggled a long time with it.
¶19So how did I get over these hurdles? Well, one thing again return to the I mean it is it is a good point. Like return to the the point about Christ. If you're sitting there with Christ, you see his miracles, you see him miraculously duplicate all the loaves and the fishes and whatnot. You're like you see him heal people.
¶20He's like get up and walk, you know, he's like so that you know that the son of man has the authority to forgive sins. Get up and walk and the person gets up and walks. You see all that. You see him crucified. You're there next to the blessed mother and John at the foot of the cross.
¶21You see him. And then later on you're interacting with him in his glorified body. You see all that. And it you know, it just so happens that he has some moral teachings that grade against your moral intuitions. It's ridiculous.
¶22I I think it's ridiculous. If you're in that epistemic situation, it's ridiculous >> Okay, so he says look, if you're in that epistemic situation, it's ridiculous to question any of Jesus's moral teachings. Okay, well, obvious question here is is any one of us in that epistemic situation that Joe has described? Uh I would think that's questionable. But another issue here is So he says you would never question the moral teaching.
¶23Okay. But you certainly are still going to have grounds for questioning particular interpretations of whatever Jesus' teaching may be. For example Jesus has this infamous interaction with the woman from Cana who reaches out and touches his garment hoping for healing from her hemorrhaging. And he says who touched me? She identifies himself or herself.
¶24He identifies her as you know, outsider Canaanite. He says it is not right to give the bread for children to the dogs. So he uses a slur a slur a slur there. Referring to her as a dog. Now in today's dog obsessed culture where you know, people treat their dogs as fur babies.
¶25Maybe it's not so bad to be called a dog. But you know that um even in our culture today referring to someone as a dog is a disparaging term. Like when Donald Trump refers to so-and-so choked like a dog. Like that's an a popular expression for him to insult people he refers to them as dogs. And in first century Jewish culture yes, to to refer to someone as a dog was refer them as a dirty scavenger.
¶26That is reprehensible and loathsome. So a woman desperate for healing reaches out just desperately hoping to be healed by Jesus and he refers to her as with a slur as reprehensible and loathsome. So here are your choices. To say well, but I've seen him do all these miracles. So I guess we can refer to Canaanites as reprehensible and loathsome.
¶27Or is it to say there must be something more going on in this teaching and I got to figure out what that is. I talk about that example in my book Jesus loves Canaanites. I think it's a very interesting one. I also believe I talk about it in my book conversations with my inner atheist. Suffice it to say you don't simply accept a particular interpretation of Jesus' teaching even if you've witnessed his miracles.
¶28The same thing would go with Matthew 19 or I believe it's Mark 10 where Jesus talks about the nature of marriage which is the closest he ever gets to talking about gay people. And you might take a particular heterosexual exclusivist non-affirming interpretation of Jesus' teaching even if you'd witness his miracles, it still may leave open a re-examination of that teaching and how you understand it based upon uh the acquisition of new data such as if you encountered gay marriages as I said and gay relationships that were demonstrating what a Christian would call spiritual fruit to at least a as great a degree as any heterosexual marriage. That would provide some kind of empirical evidence that maybe you should re-examine that authoritative teaching that you thought you understood but maybe you didn't understand it after all. So, the fact that Joe talks about well, had you been witnessing the miracles of Jesus, even if you had been, it wouldn't settle the assumption that you're necessarily right about how to understand and apply that very teaching. >> It goes to cling to those moral intuitions and not submit yourself to Christ.
¶29He's been manifestly vindicated by God. He's been accredited a deity as a divine legate. So, submit your intellect to him, right? Um don't cling to your own understanding. Submit your intellect to him and that's actually the rational thing to do in those circumstances.
¶30I think it is positively irrational. If you see all of that, to then be like, "Oh yeah, but he had some teachings on morality that I just I sort of disagree with." >> Yeah, I mean it goes against what popular co- >> Again, complete straw man there which I'm I'm sad to see that Joe as an intelligent person as he is is engaging in a straw man there that the only option is to say uh either you accept what the Catholic Church says Jesus' teaching is on this issue or you're just picking and choosing what teaching from Jesus you like. That I already suggested is a false dichotomy in my previous video about hell where you need not accept the Catholic Church's teaching on what Jesus said about posthumous judgment in order to accept the teaching of Jesus. You could disagree with the Catholic Church's interpretation on that point. It's possible.
¶31So, you can do when it comes to what people assume Jesus said or meant or implied or would have thought or taught about gay marriages or gay relationships. >> culture. Yeah, go against what popular culture says. And again, like it's not like at least to me, it's not like he's saying that um you know, like good is evil or you know, like it is permit you are morally obliged to recreationally torture your children for fun or like 1 + 1 = 12. >> Yeah.
¶32>> Like okay, that that that's discrediting. But when it's these other things where like I don't know, the vast majority of humanity for the vast majority of time has thought these things are morally impermissible and uh I don't know, like the arguments here are in a kind of speculative abstract domain and where it's really easy to see how our intuitions could be cognitively penetrated, that is be affected by our prior beliefs and prior desires. So, basically cognitive penetration is when you can either gain an intuition or lose an intuition um including in the moral domain um as a result of your prior beliefs or worldview or desires. Yes. So, and moral intuitions are this overwhelmingly susceptible to cognitive penetration.
¶33I mean, I've just been able to like throughout this >> Okay. So, he's he's saying he's saying here two things I hear. The first is we should have a sort of general caution a fallibilist recognition or epistemic humility about our moral intuitions because they're subject to cognitive penetration and um coming out in errors a result. But, he also seemed to suggest there are certain things and he gave 2 + 2 = 12 or something. He gave like a logical example and a moral example, you know, torturing children for fun where he seemed to imply that those are things that are so deeply rooted and the intuitions about them, rational and moral intuitions about them are so deeply seated that in those cases they would arguably override any counter evidence to them including perhaps the miracles of Jesus or something like that or the teaching of Jesus that those those are so deeply rooted that you wouldn't question them which I think is really interesting.
¶34Because if if he has those convictions about it being wrong to torture children for fun what does he think generally about torturing children? Uh what are those moral intuitions? What what about the moral intuition of torturing teenagers? Maybe not for fun but just generally torturing them perhaps as a form of punishment. What about torturing adults?
¶35What about torturing children, teenagers and adults forever? You see that brings us back to the previous conversation about eternal conscious torment. It's interesting to me that Joe does seem to to have some moral intuitions like about torture that he believes maybe are unimpeachable or more secure and would override or act as a defeater defeater for any counter evidence such as particular interpretations of the teaching of Jesus or claims about miraculous sign events. He does think there is such information and evidence and including torture about the wrongness of torture under certain circumstances. Yet he cannot see how that would apply to eternal conscious torment as well.
¶36I think that's interesting. Uh Now in in terms of his caution about uh gay relationships. Okay, I would just say that that kind of epistemic humility bordering on or sorry moral humility bordering on bordering on potentially moral skepticism with respect to our intuitions about morality. I would just ask what is it what would it be like for a person who had always been same-sex attracted? Uh that had been their only experience.
¶37To them, is that simply a matter of them having a self-delusion, or might that be some ground or evidence to consider or reconsider the church's teaching on these issues? >> process. My moral intuitions have themselves literally changed. Like the way things seem to me change. They're so malleable, right?
¶38And yet they're so malleable. Like previously, I have certain moral intuitions >> When when Joe says our moral intuitions are just so malleable, again, I'd want to hear a little bit more about that. Um how malleable are they? Like if God told you to kill somebody, or you believed you had an experience where you believed God told you to kill somebody, perhaps like in Bill Paxton's movie Frailty, would you be inclined to kill them? Would you kill them?
¶39An adult, maybe a child, an infant? When Dina Schlosser killed her child, her 9-month-old in 2004, because she believed God wanted her to provide an offering, the ultimate gift she could give to God, which was her child, should her moral intuitions have been open to that possibility, rather than considering that God would never command or commend such an action? Um so I I would want to hear a little bit more from Joe. If if he thinks torturing children for fun could never be something that God would command or commend, could never be a morally defensible action, how does he define or decide what range of moral claims have that kind of elevated status, and what kind of claims can he just change his views on in the twinkling of an eye? >> was for or against something, but then just as a result of changes in my background beliefs, like I just no longer feel that like the intuitions, like the way things seem to me, it's like intuitions are highly cognitively penetrated, they're super prone to framing effects, there's significant interpersonal disagreement with respect to moral intuitions, it's really easy to talk yourself into an intuition or talk yourself out of an intuition.
¶40Um So like I don't know, this just doesn't >> Like any intuition? Um you know what's interesting in my book Jesus Loves Canaanites. I grew up in a conservative evangelical church. I spent 30 years trying to convince myself that what I read about God's commands and commendations to the Israelites with respect to other peoples like the Canaanites and the Amalekites and the Midianites could be morally justified. I tried with the best effort to convince myself that God could command genocide, that he could command the mass targeting and slaughter of infants, of small children, of women, of non-combatants, of the elderly, of the mentally and physically infirm because they were a wicked pestilence in the land and they would corrupt the Israelites.
¶41And you know what? All those arguments failed. They all failed. The very last thing I experienced was having easily malleable moral intuitions about such matters. I'm interested to hear of uh how what Joe would think about that.
¶42Again, I'm back to he doesn't seem to view torturing children for fun as being in this category of an easily malleable moral intuition. So for him, what are the limits? >> not seem to be the sort of evidence that stacks up against leg no leg leg, you know, like that sort of thing. Um >> Yeah, so this reference to no leg leg goes back to like witness eyewitness reports and medical documents and so on that seem to support the evidence of miraculous healings. And for Joe, the evidence from that these these accounts of miraculous healings and so on somehow has greater vertical force than his most fundamental moral intuitions about matters.
¶43Um I find that very questionable. Um certainly it it's not, I believe, a a description of my own moral experience or my experience of moral intuitions of the most profound, deeply seated moral intuitions. Well, to conclude, um now I do think, however, uh that there is a lot of wisdom and insight in what he does say here about cautioning about cognitive penetration and our moral intuitions and how they can be flawed. Because uh but here's where I would want to turn it back around on Joe. Cuz many uh Christians are raised with a deep moral revulsion for gay people and for gay sex.
¶44And for the belief that such things as gay relationships are intrinsically disordered. And a lot of that goes goes back to what they think is a deep moral intuition about the inherent wrongness of same-sex relationships. Which I think is often little more than an un- processed ick factor. Uh and I do think that in cases like that we can see that there is a deep moral fallibility about those intuitions. So I I wonder if Joe would be interested in considering whether the intuitions that so many people, including so many Christians, have held an ick factor, an intuition of the alleged inherent wrongness uh and moral debasedness of same-sex relationships, maybe that is the thing that is cognitively in error.
¶45Uh that it is flawed. That it is fallible. And maybe that's the thing you should consider or or reconsider. So with that mind, I'm going to conclude with again a reference to my book, which I've linked below, The Whiteness of the Sea, and also to an invitation to consider the empirical evidence. Again, what I said was the a posteriori evidence that gay relationships can in fact be healthy and productive same-sex relationships, gay marriages can be productive and healthy and exhibit the same kind of things that Christians have called spiritual fruit in heterosexual relationships.
¶46And if you see that and you find that both anecdotally and through social scientific empirical research, does that provide you with a good reason to begin to think that maybe the Catholic Church's traditional teaching on this issue is in fact in error?