Transcript

In the 2010s, conservatives rightly mocked what looked like the idolatrous worship of liberal icons like Barack Obama or Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

But some conservatives have fallen into the same trap of offering idolatrous worship or sycophantic flattery to people like Donald Trump, and in doing so, some of them have abandoned their Christian values in the process.

The fact that liberals and conservatives easily fall into self-deceived hero worship shows this isn't a partisan problem, it's a defect in the human condition.

There's a natural human tendency to want to trust the leader of the pack so much that you need to defend him or her from all attacks.

If something is wrong with the leader, then maybe everything you believe is wrong.

We can't have that now.

But this can lead to an almost cultish tendency of endowing humans with impossible, infallible abilities, or as The Simpsons put it

Attention, everyone.

Let's all give thanks to the leader for this glorious day.

The leader is good, the leader is great.

We surrender our will as of this date.

Now, a leader can have a divine protection of infallibility in some instances.

Protestants agree that when the apostles wrote scripture, the teaching they gave was infallible, it was divinely protected from error, and Catholics believe the successors of the apostles have a similar divine protection from error when they universally and solemnly define a theological issue at an ecumenical council, or when the pope speaks ex cathedra.

But the bishops, and even the pope, can make mistakes in other contexts.

Catholics who refuse to criticize the pope get called Popesplainers, but ironically, many of their critics who try to find any reason to criticize the pope will bend over backwards to explain away the errors and evils of politicians or conservative influencers that they adore, especially people like President Donald Trump.

The psalmist warns us, Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help.

When his breath departs, he returns to his earth.

On that very day, his plans perish.

But instead of trusting this sober advice, you get merchandise that says things like, Only God and Trump can save our country, and golden statues of Trump that would make Baal blush.

Paula White, who now leads the White House Faith Office, once said this:

To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God, and there f- and I won't do that.

Some people are even saying that Trump surviving an assassination plot showed that his presidency was divinely appointed, or even had a divine mandate, a claim my colleague Joe Heschmeyer rebuts in the link below.

And here, the female hosts of the podcast Girls Gone Bible praying over Trump, and then they say this prayer for Trump.

Your kingdom come, Lord.

Your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven, in America as it is in heaven, in the life of President Donald Trump as it is in heaven.

Okay, I get that maybe they're asking God that God's will be done everywhere, including in President Trump's life.

Okay.

But it's still really weird to change the Lord's Prayer in this way in order to say that.

Also, Girls Gone Bible?

They're using the exact same logo style as the pornographic series Girls Gone Wild.

That would be like if I created a podcast called Prayboy that directly copied the Playboy Bunny.

And last week, Donald Trump announced an executive order that would require the Domestic Policy Council to find ways to make in vitro fertilization, or IVF, more affordable.

This relates to a promise he made to expand IVF access in February of last year during the campaign cycle.

I suspect that promise was made after the public backlash to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that resulted in IVF facilities closing throughout the state.

For more on that, see my episode link below that I released at that time correcting Trump and other conservatives who had incorrect views on IVF.

And if you want a good book on this issue, I recommend Stephanie Gray Connors' Conceived by Science: Thinking Carefully and Compassionately about Infertility and IVF.

But in the wake of Trump's announcement, there was no shortage of Catholics who were defending him in spite of his promotion of grave evils, because they were huge, I'm sorry, huge Trump fans.

Frank Pavone, who previously served as an advisor to Trump's 2020 campaign, posted this on X after the executive order was announced: On IVF, don't overthink what President Trump is doing or why he does not share our moral position.

He wants to help families have babies, because he believes life is a beautiful blessing.

That's it.

I much prefer that to the Democrat enemies of babies and the family.

Give me a break.

IVF results in hundreds of thousands of embryonic human beings either being deliberately killed or indefinitely frozen.

I wish we could ban it, or at the very least, legally prevent extra embryos from being created.

Unfortunately, if we can't even get a national 15-week abortion ban passed, we are a long way off from being able to ban IVF.

Our best strategy, as I outlined in the previous episode where I criticized Trump when he originally made this promise, is to use legal means to allow people to sue IVF facilities for mismanagement, which would naturally lead to those facilities going out of business.

But even if it isn't politically feasible to ban IVF, it isn't politically necessary to pay for it when only 2% of births rely on this technology.

So it's fair to condemn what Trump is doing here and use this repeated condemnation to hope that he will change his mind on the matter.

Granted, I see Pavone's point a little bit, in that it's easier to get someone like Trump to listen to conservatives on moral issues than to get someone like Kamala Harris, who uses tours of abortion facilities as part of her PR campaign.

But the refusal to condemn any of Trump's actions smacks of something that resembles idolatrous worship that sees no wrongdoing present, or it's a sycophantic political strategy that must downplay all wrongdoing to stay in the person's good graces.

But Christians shouldn't kiss up to those in power.

We should speak truth to those in power.

In fact, the phrase speak truth to power, though often co-opted by godless liberals, has its origin among Christians, specifically the Society of Friends, AKA the Quakers, who used it during the Civil Rights movement.

Of course, liberals do the same annoying thing.

When my ideological enemy does something bad, I rake them over the coals for it, but if my ideological ally does something bad- I take a gentler approach.

For example, another big story recently was that conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair claimed she had given birth to a child whose father is Elon Musk.

Musk reportedly has over a dozen children conceived with multiple women, and while I appreciate the technological advancements Elon Musk has come up with, he should not be anyone's ethical role model.

The real problem were other conservative influencers publicly congratulating St. Clair on the birth of her baby.

Now, on the one hand, the conception and birth of a baby is always a good thing.

It is God who wills when a baby comes into existence, not us.

So even if a child comes to be through an act of fornication, adultery, prostitution, or IVF, the child is still made in God's image, and God chose to bless this mother and the whole world with the birth of this child.

So, we can congratulate the mother and father of this child for the blessing God gave them.

St. Augustine put it this way: A harlot's committing fornication is her own doing; her having a son is God's.

All human beings, after all, are fashioned by the one creator God.

Nor is it surprising that God works well even in the sins of men and women.

On the other hand, publicly congratulating someone can come off to people as an endorsement of the evil method through which the baby came into existence.

Lily Phillips, who had sex with 100 men, and Bonnie Blue, who claims to have done that with 1,000 men, both of whom I covered in a previous episode, each claimed to have become pregnant.

Those claims have now been revealed to be hoaxes, but if they were genuine, would those same conservatives congratulate them?

Or to give another example, many of these same influencers refused to congratulate Dave Rubin for procuring children through IVF to raise with his same-sex partner, a point I also made in a previous episode.

But some of them did congratulate the pair, which further shows the scandal that is created by such public comments.

One of the practical arguments against IVF is that there's no principled way to allow IVF to remain just for loving married couples who long to raise children in spite of infertility and not give it to people who are unmarried or in disordered relationships.

If you believe children do not have a right to come into existence through the marital act and that they can come into existence through IVF, and that children don't have a right to remain in their mothers' bodies through pregnancy, then you have no grounds to object to the following scenario.

Imagine a creepy guy decides one day to just order a baby online.

He pays tens of thousands of dollars to select the right egg donor, the right sperm donor, has it sent to an IVF lab to create embryos, and then chooses the right woman to rent out her uterus for the pregnancy.

And once the baby is born, the baby shows up at his front door via Amazon two-day delivery.

And there have been cases of creepy unmarried men ordering children through surrogates in ways like this, so it's not a fanciful scenario.

People have always tried to justify evil by saying it's only gonna be limited to a few special cases and nowhere else.

In 1930, the Anglican Church broke with 1,900 years of Christian tradition to endorse limited contraception for married couples.

In the US during the 1960s, many drug stores refused to sell contraception to unmarried people.

That changed when the Supreme Court ruled in Eisenstadt versus Bard that contraception cannot be denied to unmarried people.

And the same thing has happened with IVF and the horrors of surrogacy, which is why Christians cannot make it seem like we endorse these evils when our political allies engage in them.

Oh, and it's not just normie conservatives idolizing or sucking up to Donald Trump that's the problem.

The same thing happens when far-right personalities like Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes, whose more zealous followers sometimes treat them as infallible oracles who always have based takes.

I've seen Nick Fuentes' followers bend themselves into pretzels defending his absurd takes, like his claim that the pornographic series Game of Thrones is awesome and Lord of the Rings is awful.

Game of Thrones win.

I don't care if it's Reddit.

I don't care if it's a bunch of feminist, gay Reddit garbage.

It's awesome.

And Lord of the Rings is gay.

Little hobbits.

Little disgusting hobbits with their gross little feet, living in their stupid village.

Oh!

Oh, hey!

Well, you're th- the power of friendship!

The power of friendship and magic!

you, I'm rooting for the orcs.

These far-right influencers get some things correct, but it becomes an idolatrous delusion when you blindly follow all of their hot takes.

For example, I appreciate Candace Owens' work exposing Black Lives Matters, as well as the biased documentary, Making a Murderer, but I've also condemned the outlandish things that she's said, like that NASA is full of demon worshipers or that she can't confidently say the Earth is round.

And listen, I- I'm, I'm not a flat-Earther, I'm not a round-Earther.

Actually what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science.

A new one I need to add to the list is Candace Owens' claim that dinosaurs are a modern conspiracy designed to destroy our Christian faith.

Or in her words, Dinosaurs are fake and gay.

You don't believe dinosaurs are real?

So this is a funny one.

So this is one of the ones where I'm like, gut.

I'm not kidding, this conversation happened, and it was so funny.

Um, I was just walking with Savannah, my manager-

Yeah.

'cause we do, like, these little evening walks, and just looked up to her and I was like, Dinosaurs?

That seems pretty fake and gay.

She's like, uh, she's, Savannah's from Tennessee, she's like, I have never believed in dinosaurs.

Like literally this is, everyone thinks there's, like, some conspiracy behind it.

Like, that was how it started.

And I was like, What on Earth?

Ra- I'm like, it's funny, 'cause you, people will literally say they don't believe in God, but then tell them, like, dinosaurs aren't real and they fall apart.

Like, I'm like, Okay.

She's going, They're just roaming the planet.

These far-right influencers also bend the knee to not upset their allies, like when Candace Owens treated pornographer and

Andrew Tate with kid gloves when interviewing him.

And here is Tate admitting to pimping out women for online -.

I created a system that allowed me to convince girls to do this, allowed me to retain 100% control of their income, allowed me to make sure they were effective, 'cause it's a super competitive industry.

Don't think this is easy money, you're just gonna put a girl on a camera and they're gonna get rich straight away.

No.

It's very competitive and it's very difficult.

I learned every tip and trick it takes to make sure a girl gets paid.

I know how to make sure the girl can't run away, 'cause once you teach a girl how to do this, she has the ability to make unlimited money from home.

Why would she still give it to you?

Why not just run off and keep it all for herself?

Once again, sometimes I get things right.

St. Paul quoted pagan philosophers, so even those who peddle error can have correct takes.

The problem is when people become irrational fans of influencers or politicians who can't see when they go wrong, or they do see it, but they want to stay in the person's good graces and so they do absurd amounts of damage control for that person.

However, when I read online comments about myself, I appreciate that many of them go something like this: I don't agree with Trent Horn on everything, or, I disagree with Trent Horn on a lot.

Or even, Trent Horn has a lot of coal takes, but I still appreciate and have benefited from his work on X, Y, or Z. That's a good thing.

I don't want to be a guru.

I don't want to be a leader of some movement that has followers.

I just want to present evidence for Jesus Christ and the Church he founded and help people find eternal life.

That's all.

If you find what I present to be helpful, then support us at trendhornpodcast.com so we can continue to reach more people.

I know people who support us who are not Catholic and aren't even Christian, but they really appreciate how we equip people to graciously defend a moral worldview.

And it's okay if there are personal positions I take that you disagree with, or arguments I make that you find unconvincing.

I pray you apply the same critical thinking to me and every other online voice or influencer and follow this advice from First Thessalonians 5:21.

Test everything.

Retain what is good.

Thank you all for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.