 You are listening to the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Now today's episode is a fun one. I got to interview Bishop Robert Barron. He's a Catholic Bishop. He's been on the show a couple of times before and he always does such a great job. We always get our minds blown by some of the stuff that he talks about. But in today's episode, I got real specific with him. I wanted to know why we seem so divided over the past 10 years. Things have gotten more partisan, extreme. I mean, for all intents and purposes, of course, up until the pandemic, it seemed like the numbers look great. People were making more money. The average person had more wealth, race relations, although people perceived them to be worse. Statistically, they looked a lot better. We seem to be in better position, yet everybody seems to be upset. And perhaps the answer cannot be found in wealth or in government action, but rather somewhere else. So I talked to Robert Barron, Bishop Barron, about this. And I thought, maybe he has the answer. Maybe it's something to do with our spiritual side. Maybe it's character flaws in humanity right now. Maybe this is something that was predicted. And also, how can we fix this? He's an incredibly, incredibly intelligent man, amazing communicator. He uses media, new media in ways that I don't think anybody else from the Catholic Church has ever done before. He's got a phenomenal podcast called The Word on Fire Show, and his YouTube channel is How I Found Him. In fact, Bishop Robert Barron, you can find him on YouTube. And he answers pretty much any question that people ask him, everything. He's always reaching out to new people to talk to them about whatever they wanna talk about. I think you're gonna love this guy, whether you are religious, Christian, or not. In fact, some of the people that liked his previous episodes the most were atheists. So I know you're gonna enjoy this episode. Now, before it starts, I wanna let everybody know that we're at the final hours for our January special. We had what's called the Starter Bundle, which combined multiple workout programs designed for people who are getting started with their fitness journey, or people who took a long break and wanna get back into fitness. So this program includes Maps Starter. This is a two to three month workout program. It's perfect to get started with. Then we have Maps Enabolic. That's the program you move into after Starter. That's great for building muscle and strength and shaping and sculpting the body and speeding up the metabolism. It's great for fat burning because of the fat, the metabolism boosting effects. We also have Maps Prime in there, which teaches you how to prime your body before your workouts to prevent injury, to get better connection, better form and technique and mobility. And then we also put the intuitive nutrition guide in there to help you with your diet. Now, if you got all of these at retail, you'd spend over $340, but right now you can get all of them for 80 bucks. So 80 bucks in the Starter Bundle gives you all those programs, lifetime access, plus a 30 day money back guarantee. If you're finding this episode, when we drop it, you have a few hours left to take advantage of this promotion. Go check it out. Go to mapsgenuary.com. That's the word maps, M-A-P-S, January.com. Bishop Barron, thank you so much for taking the time for me to be able to talk to you about certain things that are happening right now. For me personally, it's a bit confusing to see just kind of the way things are going. And the reason why it's confusing to me is because by all objective measures, at least material measures, things have been phenomenal, or at least we've been doing phenomenal objectively. Again, materially speaking, before the pandemic, we had wealth was doing great, real wages were growing, unemployment was very low. This was just a trend that had been happening for decades, crime was at all time lows as well. Yet polls were showing that Americans were more divided than ever. Depression seemed to be on the rise, anxiety on the rise, lots of mental health metrics seemed to be getting worse, especially among the youth. And I know a lot of people talk about the answers being found maybe in more wealth, more material stuff. And it just doesn't seem to match up with what's happening. Of course, we had this pandemic and things seem to be worse than ever. So that's why I wanted to talk to you. You're somebody I turned to for answers when I can't find answers in other places. So I'd like to ask you, what is going on? Why are things, why do people seem to be feeling so bad? Why do we feel so divided when objectively speaking again, we seem to be doing great in lots of areas? Yeah, good. So thanks for having me on, first of all. You raise a lot of interesting issues there. Here's a first reaction. I'll speak now out of the spiritual tradition. Even if all things are going well and the things that we can measure like employment, like income, that sort of thing, there's more to life than that. And so it doesn't surprise me really at all if depression could be on the rise even as these material benefits are on the rise because people need more than that. And what's also on the rise, you and I have talked about this a lot, is secularism. What's on the rise is a bracketing of religion and I can guarantee you that will lead people down a road to depression. No matter how prosperous we are materially if we're not prospering spiritually we're gonna walk down the road toward depression. So that doesn't really surprise me. We gotta be attentive to a greater matrix than just the economic and the political. Second observation is, you know, let's face it this past year, the race issue again presented itself as a real danger in our society. What I mean there is from the beginning there's been this problem of racial injustice. I mean, without going so far as to say it's the original sin of America. I mean, from the beginning with slavery and then coming up even after slavery has ended in decades and decades of oppression the civil rights movement which was a huge step forward but then that too followed by a sort of stubbornly enduring you know, racial oppression. So I don't deny that for a minute and the George Floyd incident and others brought that to the fore. I mean, it brought it again to people's consciousness and there was legitimate anger about that. Now it's never right to express your anger in violence but I understand where some of the frustration societally is coming from. Now, maybe we could talk more about this as we go but I mean, I'm not at all excited about sort of woke ideology that has come to dominate this discussion but that there's a problem I don't deny for a minute and that there are these tensions that are really, they're moral problems. So again, to go back to your opening observation even if we're flourishing at the material level which we are in many ways. Still, if there are moral and spiritual deficits in the society, that's gonna lead to all sorts of psychological and spiritual problems. You said secularism has grown and has exploded. What do those numbers look like? What are we talking about? We're talking about, in our country right now about 26% would claim no religion and to give you a sense of a proportion there when I was a kid, so like in the early 70s it was about 3% of our country would have claimed no religion. Among younger people, say 30 and younger, it rises to 40%. So it bodes very ill for the future that 40% of our young people would now claim no religion at all. And see, I think that's a recipe for deep suffering because when you bracket that part of life, that dimension of life, something very deep in us is not gonna be satisfied. So those are a couple of the statistics around secularism. Okay, so you also mentioned morality. Can we find objective morality without religion? Well, yeah, I mean, so a non-religious person could still intuit that there are objective moral values. I mean, so I think an atheist of good will should be able to see that rape or murder, that oppression of people because of their race and et cetera, et cetera are all intrinsically wrong things to do. They're all objectively wrong. Now, I would argue what a non-believer can't do is finally justify that because the question naturally arises, where do these objective moral values come from? They're a bit like the objective intelligibilities that the sciences depend upon, right? Every science goes out to meet some form of objective intelligibility in the world. So naturally a question arises, where does that come from? Why should the world be marked in every nook and cranny by intelligibility? So in a similar way, why are there these moral values and disvalues? Where do they come from? And I would argue the only way finally to ground that intuition is by talking about God, namely a moral law giver. But to your question, sure, a non-believer can recognize objective moral values. You know, from my perspective, I think sometimes just as I've gotten older, I've read more about history and I realized how much I took for granted, you know, widespread belief in what we may call objective morality. It didn't seem so natural when you go back just 100 years. In fact, you know, believing that people should be treated equally is relatively new concept. If you look at how we've lived for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, using that as an example, it seems like the natural state of man is not, you know, kind of the morals that we may now believe to be objective. Am I shooting in the dark here? I'd make a distinction between objective moral values and our subjective capacity to appropriate them and recognize them. I think there can be real evolution and real development in our capacity to see them. Let's say the fundamental equality of all people, which is grounded as Jefferson himself saw in God, right? All men are created equal because we're not equal. You know, in almost any other area, we're not equal in intelligence or courage or beauty or skill or we're not equal physically. We're not equal at all. But I'd say what Jefferson correctly intuited is, we're all created equal. We're all equally children of God. So that's an objective truth. That has always been true. But it took, let's say in our case, the Western mind a while to fully appropriate that. And then I would say fully to pull out the implications of it for the way we organize ourselves politically. So I would say Jefferson and company weren't so much inventing a new set of ideals. They were more clearly appreciating and then appropriating objective moral values. I see, how is this different than the philosophies of say Karl Marx where, you know, we're talking now about people being created equal, whereas Marxist philosophy is more about us being equal and trying to achieve being equal in all, I guess, ways. How is that, how are those two different? Well, Marx is coming out of an entirely different philosophical framework. Marxist philosophy of the human person is that we really make ourselves who we are. So there is no objective human nature for Marx. One of his famous lines is a human nature is the sum total of social relations. So it's the way a society organizes itself economically determines sort of who we are. So there's the human being in a slave economy, human being in a feudalistic economy, human being in early capitalist economy. And then Marx envisioned human being in perfect communism and they would all be different instantiations of human nature because there's nothing objective about it. That does have implications for the way Marx understands the moral life, which is why a lot of Marxists following him will say things like, hey, whatever you need to do to bring about the revolution, to bring about communism, okay, because there really is no objective moral value. There's a human nature being created as we go. So Marx is coming out of an entirely different philosophical framework and I would say finally a dangerous one. You mentioned this kind of woke movement and some of the characteristics of it from my perspective seem to view things or people as either being oppressed or oppressors. So you're in one category or the other category. Does this kind of current woke movement, which is quite different from my perspective again, from classical liberalism or what liberals might have been in the 1960s, does this have its roots in Marxism? Yeah, and other thinkers too, but Marx is one of them. I've identified Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre and Michel Foucault as some of the major players in the formation of the woke mentality. And I think you're absolutely right the way you put it there is the tendency to see human beings through this one lens, the lens of power. So who has it, who doesn't have it? The lens of the oppressor and the oppressed put it in Hegel's terms and Marx was deeply Hegelian, the master slave dynamic. Who's the master, who's the slave? Now, is there something to that? I would say sure, that's one way we might look at human society, but there tends to be a reduction in the woke movement to that, you know? And also the questioning of an objective human nature that draws us together. What I much prefer, as you say correctly in classical liberalism is that the appeal to our common humanity and appeal to common moral values and a common human nature that brings us together. And on that basis, we can move toward greater and greater justice. Now, that's the language of Martin Luther King and I'm a great advocate of kings. What we're dealing with today is something very different. It's a different philosophical framework and I think a much worse one. Yeah, you bring up Martin Luther King, I'm glad you did because as I'm looking at everything that's kind of happening, there seems to be some similarities to the turmoil of the 1960s and 70s. We had civil rights leaders assassinated. We had a president who was assassinated and his brother, a war that was very unpopular. People forced into a draft protest that were absolutely insane, double digit inflation in the 1970s, oil embargo. I mean, it was the peak of domestic terrorism, I believe an example being like the weather underground who actually bombed a federal building if I'm not mistaken. So similar in the turmoil, but it seems very different. What are the differences between now, what's happening now and in the 1960s and 70s? Yeah, as you rehearsed all that, Salis thinking, I lived through all that, I was a kid. When King was killed in 1968, I was eight years old, but I remember vividly his assassination in Robert Kennedy's and also 68. I remember all the things you've been describing throughout the 1970s. Yeah, in terms of the turmoil and kind of social upheaval, but I'd say here's the major difference. The civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s was led almost exclusively by deeply religious people. King being the most famous, I mean, he's a Christian minister, but the top leadership in that movement was largely religious people. And they brought together, I think, very cleverly and very effectively the ideals of the Bible. So think here of King invoking Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and Hosea. He invokes the great prophetic tradition of Israel, right? That speaks out on behalf of the poor and behalf of the oppressed. They link that together with the great American tradition, which is grounded in what you call correctly classical liberalism. So when King stands on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, and he invokes the Hebrew prophets, and he also invokes Jefferson and the Declaration and Abraham Lincoln to bring the American vision. I like that. I thought that was tremendous, how he brought those two traditions together. I don't see either one of those in the woke movement today, and that's what bugs me about it. Now, before I say any more about that, I'll say something very positive about it. The deep concern for people who are oppressed, the deep concern to right wrongs, to address injustice, I'm all for it. That's right out of the Bible. The Bible gave to Western culture, especially to the whole world, but it gave to Western culture this deep sense of identification with the poor and the oppressed, and reaching its culmination in this crucified criminal dying on an instrument of torture outside of Jerusalem. So the fact that the crucified Jesus is at the heart of our Western civilization, that's where our concern for the victim comes from. So to that, I say, hooray, I say terrific. The problem is the woke people, notice first of all, the lack of religious leadership. The movement today is not led by religious people because there's often a hostility between the woke philosophy and religion. That to me is a tragedy. I'd be so much happier if we could find that space again that Martin Luther King found where classical liberalism meets the Bible in a societal transformation. So that's why I prefer that 50s, 60s style to what we have now. Yeah, it seems like the movement today is not just not working with religious leaders, but rather might even be opposed. Right. I know during this period of time, we've seen churches get vandalized. I know here in California, there were some statues that were torn down, in Nipro, Sarah, in fact. Why is this happening? Why is the church and why are religious institutions being attacked at the moment? I'll give you one reason. I mentioned those four figures, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault. They have many things in common, but one thing they really have in common is, they all hated religion. They were all anti-religious. Religion tends to be seen in the woke perspective as part of the power establishment, as part of the oppressor class. And religion is a whole over from a more superstitious time, religion in league with powerful and oppressive forces. King did not see it that way. I mean, King comes up out of the wonderful kind of church tradition of the American South, but the woke folks are influenced by deeply anti-religious people. And so it manifests itself in some of this hostility toward religion. I was involved in some of that stuff this past summer because in my pastoral region, so I'm in Santa Barbara County and Ventura County in California, there were groups going after the Junipero-Sara statues in Ventura, which was on civil, it was on state-owned property, but they also were going after a statue on our own property at the Santinez Mission. So in both places, I stood with the people that were trying to defend these statues because I thought that protest was such an irrational, deeply unfair characterization of Junipero-Sara, who was in fact a great friend of and advocate for the First Peoples here. So anyway, it's part though, as you say correctly, of this anti-religious quality. And that's what I hate. I wish we could find the space that King found in the 60s. I'd be happy from the religious standpoint to have a conversation with people today who are concerned about social justice quite rightly, but are doing it in a way that I think is less than productive. Yeah, you mentioned some of the philosophers that may be behind the current, I guess, woke movement and some of their, what they may have in common, kind of moving laterally, if when I look historically at tyrants, you know, people who've ruled with an iron fist, dictatorships, more often than not, they tend to be opposed to religion or at least religious freedom. Why? Because we're the dissenting voice. If you're claiming totalizing control over the society, and that's what, you know, whether it's Hitler, it's Stalin, it's Mao, it's Pol Pot, it's Castro, all those folks were trying to exercise a totalizing control over the society, and religion stands a thwart that, because we think that is a usurpation of power that's completely illegitimate. In speaking for God too, we speak for a moral norm that stands outside the will to power. So if someone assumes power, they want a totalizing control over society, and there's no check on them, right? Well, what stands a thwart that is religion, because religion says, no, no, we, you can't control the whole of society, and you are, as we say, under God, right? Your authority is not something you invent and have no limit, you're under God, and see religion speaks those truths, which is why you're quite right, the tyrants of the 20th century to a person opposed religion and saw religion as the problem. And that goes back to the French Revolution. I mean, what really gives rise to modernity is that great event at the end of the 18th century, and what was characteristic of it, but a deep hostility to the church. And you'll see that rising up whenever this kind of Jacobin mentality arises. And I think the woke people, it's a Jacobin movement today that has always been anti-religious. Yeah, you know, what's interesting is when you, you know, look at old photos of communist buildings or Nazi, you know, offices, or even, you know, today, North Korea or China, you see pictures of the world leaders in people's homes, you see them, you know, statues of them, almost as if they need to be worshiped. And if, and you can't worship anyone above them, I think that's kind of pointing to what you're saying. Yeah. When people say, when they do those polls and they say, you know, are you religious? And they say, you know, no, do you worship anything? And they say, no, are they not aware that they're still worshiping something? Or are we, is our very nature in that we worship something? Yes. And you actually articulated there a very deep truth. I would say from a biblical perspective, we were made for praise. We were made to worship. That read the opening verses of the book of Genesis, and that's what you find is this great liturgical procession of the creatures coming forth from God. And I say that as a Catholic, we recognize in that high poetry of Genesis, as the creatures come forth, it's like a procession. Well, who comes at the end of it, but the human being? Well, who comes at the end of a liturgical procession, but the one who will lead it, right? So there we see there's biblical anthropology is the human being is meant to lead all of creation in a great chorus of praise to God. Now what sin, it's bad praise. It's always the same thing. It's bad praise. I begin worshiping someone or something other than the true God. And what follows from that is a disintegration of the self and of the society. Now that, if you want, in a nutshell, that's the book of Genesis. That's the beginning of Genesis in a nutshell. And so you're quite right. When we stop worshiping God, we don't stop worshiping, we just worship something else. So worship just means worship, right? What do you give highest value to? Everyone's got something. You can say it's my own ego, it's my family, it's power, it's wealth, it's the government, it's the culture, whatever. But everyone's worshiping something. The Bible keeps saying, forget these forms of false worship, get order to correct worship, you know? So that's a very deep intuition you've got there which is quite right. Everyone's religious in that sense. Everyone worships something. The key is worshiping the right thing. Yeah, years ago, one of the ways I found you was a video that you actually had put on YouTube talking about this subject and you talked about power, pleasure, think it was money. Yeah, wealth, pleasure, power, honor. Honor, right. And I was an atheist years ago and if you asked me if I had worshiped anything, I would have said no, I don't worship anything. But then when I understood them, my actions actually reveal what I worshiped. The way I understood it, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but obviously as humans, every choice we make is based off of values. So like for example, I chose to wear this shirt today because I thought it was better to wear this shirt than another shirt and I chose, I choose to do this job because it's better than another choice. And when I eat for lunch and along those lines, everything I choose is something that I value more than the other choices. And ultimately at the top of that is my top value which is what I worship. So in other words, my actions revealed what I worshiped. What's the problem with that versus worshiping God? Why worship God versus allowing myself to just allow my actions to determine something else is valuable or most valuable to me? Because God is the highest value. And so when you forget that and you turn something which is less than God into God, it causes turmoil within you. When Augustine says my heart is restless until it rests in thee, oh Lord, you made me for yourself and therefore my heart is restless. It means even as you achieve these various goods and everything you describe, you're right. These are values. My talking to you right now is something I chose to do because it's a value. Now ask the question why about five times and you'll come to the religious level. What I mean is, okay, so you chose to be with Sal this morning. Well, why? Well, because I think he has a good show and he has a large audience and we talk about some important things. Okay, well, why is that important to you? Well, because my job is to evangelize and to try to get the church's point of view out to as many as I can. Okay, how come that's important to you? Well, because Jesus commanded us to evangelize to the ends of the earth. Well, how come that's important to you? Well, I think Jesus is the Son of God and what he says goes. You know what I mean? And take anything you decide from getting out of bed in the morning and take the most trivial choice you make. Ask the why question five or six times. You'll get to ultimate value. Now, if you say, well, guess my ultimate value is I want to be happy, pleasure. That's the ultimate value for me or it's because I want people to admire me. Honor is my ultimate value. Well, it's really important exercise to uncover that. But I would say, well, if you're stuck at the level of pleasure or honor or power or something, you're not in the right spiritual space. Your heart is gonna be restless because it's not meant for something as trivial as that. It's what differentiates us from the other animals. A dog has his dinner and has enough water and has a place to sit down. The dog is blissfully happy. Dogs are much happier than we are. It's obvious, isn't it? You look at a typical dog, they're much happier than we are because they attain what they're meant to attain much more readily. The trouble is, we're built for so much more than, oh yeah, I found enough food and drink and I gotta place this rest and I got enough people around me to entertain me. I'm not all that's fine, but I'm not destined for that. I'm destined for so much more than that. And so my heart is restless until it finds what it's looking for. In my space of fitness, you find people who just through their actions worship their bodies, right? They worship fitness. And that ends up turning into a bad relationship with food or food or eating disorders, overtraining, terrible insecurities because there's no end to it. I imagine it's that way with other things. When you see a celebrity who's got money and power and pleasure and they commit suicide or they're depressed and you wonder how they seem to have everything, it's almost as if they're trying to quench their thirst with sea water. Right, and see, you will, as you quite correctly say, you will inevitably become addicted when you get stuck at one of those low levels because for just that reason. So let's say you attain the physique you've always wanted. It's like, this is like perfect. I just won whatever the top prize I was going for. Well then the next day, I'm gonna say, okay, but now I gotta make it better and I've gotta try harder and I've gotta keep going after it. Or you're looking for pleasure and you find pleasure, but the pleasure always wears off and so now I need to get more of it. And because the heart is actually ordered to God, not to these lower things, I'll get stuck in an addictive pattern because I'll say, well, it's not enough. I'm not happy. I don't have what I want. I just need more and more and more of this lower good. And the answer is no, you don't need more of that. Rather, take that lower good, whether it's your own physique, it's pleasure, it's power. And now give that to God. So you say, I'm doing this, ad bayorum de glorium, as Ignatius said, right? To the greater glory of God. Now, now your bodybuilding, your pleasure, your power, your political position, whatever it is, will take on real meaning. Now it'll be something that is very life-giving, not something addictive, but that's where I think at the heart of the spiritual life in many ways with these themes. And you see it, if you're a pastoral person all the time, it's the basic pattern of us sinners that we get addictive in our strategies. Yeah, it's funny as you're talking, I have three children. I just had a baby about three months ago and my second youngest is 11. So 11 years later, I had another baby. And if I were valuing kind of those worldly things that you talk about, pleasure, money, honor, I probably would never have had any kids because kids are expensive. They're very stressful, that's for sure. I'm not having as much personal pleasure, fun stuff. A lot of the stuff is dedicated to children. Is the connection of secularism to people wanting less children, for example? Is that a connection? Yeah, absolutely. Watch when cultures are very ordered to God, they tend to be more fruitful. Why is it in the Bible that the covenants that God makes with us are almost always sealed with the command, go forth, be fruitful and multiply? Because life follows from that. See, it's the fruitfulness of the whole of your ordinary life becomes greater the more you give it to God, that's the paradox. If I surrender that to a higher good, they all become better, they become more themselves. That's, I think maybe you and I talked about this, but the image of the burning bush from the book of Exodus, that's what's being conveyed there spiritually is the bush is on fire but not consumed. So the closer God gets to us, the more beautiful we become and the more radiant and we give warmth and light to others, right? But we're not consumed. It's not like God burns us up. No, he makes us more beautiful the closer we get to him. So your bodybuilding or fitness or whatever it is you do will become better, higher, a vehicle of grace the more you give it to God. So from your perspective, a lot of what's happening was predictable, predictable because of the decline of religion or spirituality or value or worship in God. I wouldn't underplay that for a minute. I think it is true that the more secularized a society becomes, the more dysfunctional. I agree with that. But I also wouldn't want to lose the fact that a very real concern about racial justice emerged this past summer. I don't deny that for a minute and that people were legitimately expressing a deep concern about it. Now the violence that came from it and all that obviously is not a good thing but I wouldn't want to overlook that as though it's all just a question of secularism. It was people with a real passion for justice. And as I said, that's Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Jesus and the whole teaching tradition of the church advocates concern for the poor and the oppressed. So I'm not against that at all. I think that was a healthy expression. Okay, you know, one of my past times is I love learning about economics and politics. And when I look back through history, I noticed that the most powerful ways to manipulate people is through real kind of feel good or justified feeling. So you mentioned, you know, the root of wanting people to not be oppressed of people noticing injustice and wanting it to be changed and different. You know, we're talking now the spiritual realm. Is that a feeling that is often manipulated by not by God, but by Satan, by evil forces? And are we, what does that look like when evil forces are at battle with good within us? Yeah, and that's good. It's a good question. It's a searching question, because I think you're right. You know, the Romans had that saying corruptio optimi pessima, you know, the corruption of the best is the worst. And so what's really beautiful and good, passion for justice, a concern for the oppressed, reaching out to those on the margins who have been overlooked, it's beautiful. That's a great thing. But when it goes bad, it can go very bad. And it can turn into violence, it can turn into this deep rupture between classes and races, et cetera, it turns into violence. And it turns into scapegoating. And here I rely on the work of that great philosopher, Rene Girard, who said that when tensions arise in any society, it could be your family to a nation state. By a very deep instinct, we reach out for scapegoats. So we reach out for someone to blame, and then we can all come together in a kind of ersatz piece that we all come together, yeah, that person's to blame or that group is to blame. And we find a kind of equilibrium in that, you know, a sort of satisfaction, but it's deeply dysfunctional because it leads only to greater division and violence. So the scapegoating instinct is so deep in us. And I think that was on full display throughout this past year, you know, the casting about for scapegoats, the searching for the victim and so on. So that's a dysfunctional feature of this. We also saw a lot of kind of this mob mentality. I know from a psychological standpoint, if you look at studies, humans behave very differently when they're caught up in the frenzy of the mob. We tend to do things that we would never do if we were alone, act in ways that are not characteristic of how we would act on our own. Do you think social media has kind of spread mob mentality or made it a bit cancerous? Because now you're meeting with other groups and you're sharing these things and we're getting scared together. And normally we'd had to get together, but now we can use the internet. Yeah, my answer is emphatically yes to that. And I say it, Sal, as someone who uses social media, so my ministry depends a lot on social media. So I don't wanna demonize it. I mean, I think a lot of good can be accomplished through it, but boy, that's the shadow side. You're right. It facilitates precisely the formation of mobs. And mob is the right word for what Gerard is describing. So together we find a common victim, the scapegoat, and we form ourselves precisely as a mob. So not rational, not loving, but rather this irrational and violent conglomeration of people. But we all sense the thrill of it, don't we? And that can be, you're in a school cafeteria and a bunch of your buddies are bad-mouthing somebody, right? And you hear that and you say, oh, I wanna get into that conversation. Let me be part of that. And then you feel this kind of commonality, but it's not a healthy commonality, it's a mob mentality. Well, take the high school cafeteria and now just extrapolate from that to a nation state, to a society. And you're right, facilitated by social media that allows these mobs to form very quickly. And look at, don't we even refer to it as a Twitter mob? And I think one of the ugliest developments in the last, what, 10 years would be that, that a mob can form like that, watch how people are scapegoated like just overnight. And let's face it, lives can be destroyed. There's the whole cancel culture side of this thing. But cancel culture is part of the scapegoating mechanism, right? It's that guy, it's that article, it's that lady wrote that she said, and now the mob forms, we get excited within that mob, but then irrationally and with deep hatred, we destroy people. So that dynamic is God-awful and it's been facilitated, you're right, I think by social media. It's very powerful. I even can sometimes catch myself getting caught up in a frenzy just through, again, through social media or from around everybody, people that think in similar ways to the way I may think, and then I find myself thinking in more extreme ways. What's the antidote to that kind of mob, that psychological effect because you use social media, I use social media, I think it's a part of life and there's great things. With it, I wouldn't be able to do what I do without it. You've been able to evangelize in ways, people haven't been able to do in the past. How do we check that? What's the antidote to the negative side of mob mentality? Well, first to be aware of it and to aware of its dynamics. And I love the fact that you admitted and I admitted too, that we all get caught up in it. We're all sinners here. And we're all in danger of falling into the Gerardian trap of getting excited by this mob, this group that's formed and I can be part of that. And I, yeah, they're the one to blame. So it's very enticing. First thing to be aware of it. Secondly, don't cooperate with it. You know a story that Gerard, especially love from the New Testament, was the woman caught in adultery in the Gospel of John. Remember that story? When the Pharisees bring this woman to Jesus. We've caught her in the very act of adultery. So they found their scapegoat. And around them, this angry mob is forming, right? They're taking stones in their hand because with the Mosaic law, we can stone this lady to death. What does Jesus do? And they come to him, hey, tell us, what do you think about this? They want him to sanction it. And instead he just bends down and he writes on the ground. And famously we don't know what he wrote. It's the only time he's ever described as writing something in the New Testament. But we don't know what it is. But I think what's important there is he doesn't cooperate with it. He just doodles on the ground. I'm not gonna cooperate with it. And then he has the devastating one liner, right? Let the one among you without sin be the first to cast a stone at her. So that's a beautiful way to disempower the Gerardian mob. Don't recognize it for what it is. Don't cooperate with it. And then turn its energy against itself. Let the one among you who's without sin be the first to cast a stone at her. So I think especially for Christians, it's very important for us to be aware of this dynamic. How sad, I'll speak bluntly here, that way too often in the Catholic media space, you got people stirring up the Gerardian mobs. You got people stirring up just this kind of scapegoating violence. And that's especially tragic when Christians do it because we're the ones who should most be able to see through it. Listening to what you're saying, I agree 100%, but I also acknowledge that that can be scary. To be the one person to stand up to the mob or not go along with the mob, you get afraid. Is my business gonna be destroyed? Am I gonna be hurt? What do you do in that situation? What do you do in that situation where you're afraid to not go along? Yeah, I get it, I get it. And people are very aggressive and they're trying to destroy careers and destroy lives. And so people start getting naturally defensive. So I get that, I wouldn't wanna be pontificating here to people that are really in danger of losing their livelihood. But I think to do all we can to unmask and not cooperate with these tendencies. And yeah, to have the courage to tell the truth publicly when you know it's probably going to excite a Gerardian mob. No, I get it. And again, I don't wanna sound facile to those whose lives and work are really threatened by this, but the best we can do is unmask it and try to disempower it. Yeah, I think sometimes what gives me courage is realizing there's probably other people that may wanna do the same. They just feel like they're alone. So maybe make them feel like there's other people. Yeah, and again, I wanna be careful because I know I'm dealing with people's real lives here. But it's been said that a lot of the woke cancel culture stuff is propagated by essentially bullies. And the bullies are cowards. And we know that from the grade school playground. And so standing up to them can be the best thing. It often disempowers them. And so Jesus in that story is basically standing up to a mob. He's challenging them. He's getting in their face. And now, he paid the supreme price. One way to read the cross is precisely Jesus himself becoming the scapegoated victim. So I get that, I get the seriousness of it. But to do all we can to stand up to the bullies. I wanna change directions a little bit and talk about just the pandemic and the response that we've had to pandemic and maybe what may happen in the future. Let's start with the lockdowns or forced shutdowns of businesses that most governments enacted. There's been a lot, I mean, on both sides, there are people saying it's necessary to save lives. And there's people on the other side that say, my life and my business is destroyed and this is a voluntary exchange. Are lockdowns moral? Is there a moral backing to them? Well, I'd say yes in general. If you wanna speak abstractly about it, sure. And certainly in the beginning of this whole crisis back in March and April and May, I think most of us saw, yeah, given the nature of this pandemic, there's something we should do to protect people's lives. And even now, I'm here in Southern California where there's been a terrible spiking of this thing. So yeah, I understand that. And in the sort of the opening months, the church was very cooperative with the government and saying, yeah, we should keep our people safe. Now, is there a legitimate room for a certain pushback or people saying, well, no, no, wait a minute, we've done this, but do we have to do this for the next six months? And I think there can be a healthy conversation within the body politic, the people pushing back against the government. A good example is the church. Over these months have been in kind of steady conversation with the government out here in California, pressing our case to allow greater openness in the churches. Sometimes, I think saying, okay, we understand, we acquiesce, other times pushing back, getting some of what we want, other times no. Okay, I think that's all right within a democratic polity that we have that kind of give and take. So in answer to your question, I'd say, yeah, lockdowns can be construed as something moral, but they're not absolute. And I think people can raise legitimate objections. There's also fears that there may be policies to force vaccinations to, you know, just to be able to function in society. Is there a moral backing to forcing people to vaccinate? Well, I suppose we have to look at what's on the ground. My instinct is against that. I think when the government starts imposing things on people, it tends to be a bad idea, and tends to awaken resistance. You know, I think where we are now that most people are very open to receiving the vaccination when it becomes available, I think for the moment we're probably okay with that. My instinct is against governmental impositions, but I suppose like in an extreme emergency that government could legitimately do something like that. But we're getting a little bit too out of my field so I wouldn't wanna be pontificating much further about that. Sure, no problem. Okay, so are you able to, what do you think is gonna happen? I mean, we're kind of talking about maybe the root cause of this division among people being just lack of spiritual health. Where is this going? Where do you think this is going? What's it gonna take to reverse it? Well, I do think ultimately it's a revival of religion, a revival of the spiritual is what it'll take to reverse violence in our society. We can't solve this problem within a purely secular framework. If we, let's say the pandemic is over, we return simply to, you know, achieving as much material success as we can. I mean, that's fine, but it's not gonna solve the societal issues. I mean, where does racial hatred finally come from? A lack of a spiritual vision that we don't recognize objective moral values. We don't recognize our common humanity, which is grounded in our common status as creatures of God. You know, I think recovering all of that is key to a moral revolution. And if we just go back to business as usual, we just go back to seeking the goods of the world, we're not gonna solve these fundamental problems. And let me say this too, Sal, I think it's very important, you know, I speak as a Catholic Bishop. We're never gonna solve our problems this side of the end of time. You know, I mean, we're a compromised dysfunctional family. We're made up of sinners. There's no program. There's no political reform. There's no great leader that's ever gonna solve our problems. And that's not to be pessimistic, it's to be deeply realistic. We turn to the grace of God finally. We beseech the grace of God. And there's no moral program or political reform that's ever gonna solve our problems. You know, it's been said like maybe a week after the eschaton, meaning the end of time, we might actually solve our problems. You know, so there's a healthy Christian realism, I would say, about that. And a certain modesty in regard to whatever we propose. So, oh, I got it. I got, here's the solution. Here's what we need to do. I'm always wary of that. Here's the program. Well, there's no program that's ever gonna solve it because the problem is a problem of sin, finally. When things get really challenging, societally speaking, do we tend to see people become more religious or do we see people move away from religion? And then the second part to that is, how has this affected the Catholic Church? Yeah, in answer to the first part of your question, I say yes, tends to be the answer. And the reason for it is, religion tends to flourish when people are brought to certain limits. See, as long as I'm living my life, I'm basically happy. I'm having my needs met and so on. Okay, I'm all right. But when I come up against limits, so I become sick, I fail. Someone in my family dies. My business collapses. At those moments when I'm more vulnerable and I feel the limits of my own finitude, I tend to look to what stands beyond the finite. I tend to look toward God. So it's not like, oh, there's religion as a crutch. No, I think it's a natural instinct that when we come up against the limits of our ordinary experience, we tend to look toward God. What's gonna happen in the current situation? It's too early to tell, we don't know. My biggest fear to tell you the truth right now is that people aren't gonna come back to church because we have now for almost a year, and legitimately, we've suspended the obligation to come to Mass on Sunday, which is a very serious moral obligation. But we've suspended that, because we've said, look, to keep yourselves safe. So people have gotten into the habit now, most people, of not going to Mass on Sunday. That concerns me a lot, and whether we can recover, I think we gotta really work overtime to make sure that people don't stay away. Yeah, I'll have to say, Bishop, I think people will come back because I know for myself, part of the value that I get going to church is being with other people. And I haven't been able to replicate that with Zoom. Even this interview with you now through Zoom, it's just not the same. You don't get that same connection. So I- No, I hope you're right, I sincerely hope you're right, that people feel just that way. Because, you know, as Catholics, I'll tell you one thing, this was about a few weeks ago, it was the governor of Virginia, I think, and he was talking about the shutdowns, and he said, hey, look, you don't need to come to church. You can worship God anywhere in your heart. Well, I did a little video on it, because I said, no, no, stay what you want about that, but that's a very Protestant way to understand that worship is just an interior, personal, individual thing. Catholics feel very strongly about what you just said, that we come together, you know, we come together as the mystical body of Christ, and the fact that we worship together corporately matters immensely. And it's not like, okay, you're fine, and you go your way, and you go to the woods and worship, and you go to the beach, and no, no, Catholics don't believe that. We believe it's very important to come together in a sacred place, you know, where Christ is really present in the Eucharist, and that we worship together. So I hope you're right, I sincerely do, that people sense that, and they wanna come back. So last question, you know, let's say somebody's watching right now, they're not religious, maybe they're agnostic, or maybe even atheist, and they're, but what you're saying is resonating, they're noticing that they feel, they just don't feel whole, or like the way I felt, like I was always needing something, something was always missing. What's the first step? They're not ready to worship God, they're not ready to take that step. What would be the first step for them to take, to see if this actually improves their quality of life, or brings them any value? Perform the simplest act of love. Love means willing the good of the other, right? So it doesn't mean a feeling, you can't just generate feelings about things, but you can do an act of the will. I will the good of another, I do something on behalf of somebody else. It could be helping a kid with their homework, it could be making cookies for someone, it could be a friendly smile, right? To someone who looks lonely. Perform the simplest act of love, and you actually have opened a very important door thereby, because at the heart of Christian faith is the claim that God is love, right? He doesn't just have love, he is love. That's what God's nature is. So when we love authentically, even in the simplest way, you are in fact in the presence of God. You are in fact filled up with the Holy Spirit, at least to a degree, right? So I would, this was a famous thing in the 19th century, Jared Manley Hopkins, the great Catholic poet, right? Was asked by an agnostic friend, I mean, what should I do? I want to believe in God, but I just can't muster it, you know? And Hopkins said to him, give alms. And that's what I'm saying. In other words, perform a simple act of love. Give some of what you have to the poor. Find a homeless person, and just go up to that person, give them something, or smile, greet them, say something warm and friendly to them. That's a first step, but a very important step, because Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or the Little Flower, the highest saints will say, the culmination of the spiritual life is that, is to perform the simplest act of love. If I go to Mass every day and I read spiritual books and I'm studying Thomas Aquinas, but I have not love, as St. Paul said, I'm nothing, right? I'm nothing. So do that. Right now, today, perform an act of love, and you've opened the most important door into the spiritual life. That's a great way to end this interview, Bishop. Thank you very much for coming on. I appreciate it. Hey, Sal, always my pleasure. Great talking to you. Thank you.