The New York Post recently caused a stir in the Christian world with its article, “Young men leaving traditional churches for ‘masculine’ Orthodox Christianity in droves.”
To those of us in the Orthodox world, nothing in this article came as a surprise.
Where can a young man lost in the world find the truth, a solid rock upon which to build his life?
Most of us attending Orthodox churches in the United States are used to a swarm of new visitors every Sunday, often families and — as the article specifies — single men. Our own parish has nearly doubled in size in the two years we’ve been attending, and we’re scrambling to expand. You can read about my family’s conversion story in the fall 2024 issue of Frontier magazine.
While the New York Post article did not surprise us Orthodox, it caused a stir in the Protestant world, with pastors and apologists suddenly awakening in a panic that young men are fleeing their denominations for Orthodoxy.
First, let me make this very clear: For many, Orthodoxy was their “last stop” in their spiritual journey before abandoning God entirely. Visit our small parish in Kentucky, and I’ll happily introduce you to many converts who attended all manner of churches before looking into Orthodoxy.
Perhaps, the more interesting question isn’t, “Why Orthodoxy?” but rather, “Why Christianity?” especially in an age where it’s so much easier not to be Christian at all.
I believe the answer is fairly simple: Young men are desperately seeking structure in a time of chaos and upheaval. Many young men these days simply have no idea what the rules of society are — something as simple as asking a woman on a date can be a risky proposition, leading to the dire state of dating and the incel crisis. We saw this come to a head with the cancel culture and #MeToo phenomenas, where once-accepted behaviors were suddenly grounds to be expelled from polite society, with the rules sometimes changing from day to day.
For nearly 2,000 years, the glue that bound Western civilization was Christianity. Yes, there were often bitter — and bloody — theological struggles, but we generally accepted what was and wasn’t permissible in daily interactions. For many young men, that desperate need for clarity and stability draws them to church.
But then the question becomes: Which church? Where can a young man lost in the world find the truth, a solid rock upon which to build his life?
Christ did not leave us with sacred scripture. In fact, when he ascended to Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father, much of it was still to be written. Rather, he left us with the church (Matthew 16:18): A mystical organization established by Christ to guide the faithful. Furthermore, he promised that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
The book of Acts tells the tale of the early church, and the Council of Jerusalem described in Acts 15 gives us the model for making decisions in the church: through a council of bishops.
While we Orthodox agree with our Roman Catholic friends that St. Peter was the first pope of Rome, scripture disproves the notion that the papacy was ever all-powerful. If Peter was an absolute monarch, why bother having a council? Furthermore, while Peter makes the winning argument, it is the apostle James the Just, bishop of Jerusalem, who made the final declaration (Acts 15:13).
For nearly 1,000 years, the pope of Rome was a central figure to the church, but much like the chief justice of the Supreme Court, he was a first among equals who acted as a stabilizing force in the church’s seven ecumenical councils. Unfortunately, what later became known as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches separated in 1054, when Pope Leo IX and Michael I Cerularius, patriarch of Constantinople, simultaneously excommunicated each other for long-brewing grudges too complex to explore here.
Our Roman Catholic friends say that it is the Eastern Orthodox who are in schism. However, at the time, the church was chiefly divided into what is known as the Pentarchy, comprising the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Rome.
After 1054, and to this day, four of the five patriarchates remain in communion, with Rome being the odd man out. So which one is in schism?
Since the Great Schism, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches have been on wildly divergent paths, with all attempts at reconciliation having failed. Our Roman friends have developed many innovations over the past 970 years, as so-called “traditional Catholics” can attest.
After the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Roman Church forcefully abandoned the Tridentine Mass standardized at the Council of Trent — itself derived from the liturgy of Pope St. Gregory the Great (St. Gregory is a pre-schism saint recognized by both the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox).
Instead, it was replaced with the Novus Ordo, the modernized Mass of Pope Paul the VI. The Tridentine Mass was briefly permitted under Pope Benedict XVI before being all but banned by Pope Francis in "Traditionis custodes."
To outsiders, the struggle appears to be a simple difference between using Latin or English in worship, but the aftermath of Vatican II brought many innovations to both worship and ecclesiology. Perhaps the most tragic change to the Mass is the quality of the music. After Vatican II, the beauty of Gregorian Chant has largely been discouraged, instead replaced with often sappy, insipid, and off-key music dating back to the 1970s.
If one man can suddenly change a belief that is thousands of years old, was it ever true in the first place?
The music reflects the more liberal and ecumenical nature of the post-Vatican II Roman Church. Many Roman Catholic priests take great liberties with the Mass. I’ve never seen the much-dreaded “clown Mass,” but I did attend one where the priest broke out a ukulele.
Perhaps most offensive was the fact that the post-Vatican II Roman Church expunged 93 saints from its liturgical calendar, including some of the most beloved saints of all time, such as St. Christopher, St. Nicholas (yes, Santa Claus!), and St. George (the great martyr and dragon slayer). St. Crispin’s Day, the inspiration for Shakespeare’s legendary speech? Gone. Funny enough, after Pope John Paul II was turned away by the Orthodox abbot of the Monastery of St. Catherine, the Pope added St. Catherine of Alexandria back to the calendar.
All that is to say: Those seeking stability and tradition won’t find it in Rome, as the Roman Church is at war with itself.
If you inquire into the Roman Catholic Church, as we did in 2013, the priest will readily tell you that the Catholic Church hasn’t changed in 2,000 years, but that’s laughably false. In fact, it’s changed radically over the past 60 years!
Part of the reason the Roman Church can change so fast is because of the absolute authority of the pope of Rome. Recently, Pope Francis edited the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which dates back to 1992, to declare the death penalty immoral. That, despite thousands of years of the Roman Church supporting — and often enacting — the death penalty.
Our Roman Catholic friends chide the Orthodox Church for our lack of a central authority figure, but I would argue that it’s one of our greatest advantages. Yes, it makes high-level doctrinal decisions difficult, but it also prevents any one person, or even a determined group, from hijacking the church. Many have tried.
Unfortunately, “traditional Catholics” have no choice but to take what the pope dishes out. As Pope Pius the IX declared, “I am tradition! I am the church!” Thus, why I have no choice but to put “traditional Catholic” in quotation marks because if you defy the will of the pope, you are rebelling against your own tradition.
But we must turn now to a more disturbing truth: If one man can suddenly change a belief that is thousands of years old, was it ever true in the first place? Did the men who taught these things ever believe them? If they did, were they wrong to do so? Was the church teaching error? Is the word of Christ eternal, divine wisdom, or does Jesus need to “get with the times"?
Sadly, our Protestant friends are in no better position.
Before we continue, I must apologize to our non-Catholic and non-Orthodox friends in advance for using the term Protestant as a generic term to encompass many diverse believers, such as Baptists, the Churches of Christ, Pentecostals, etc. — some of whom don’t appreciate being called Protestant at all, particularly the Landmark Baptists.
I’ll try to be specific where I can, otherwise I hope you can forgive my generalizations for the sake of brevity.
Protestantism, from the very start, was built on a foundation of sand.
The effective thesis of Protestantism is that the church fell to corruption at some point: either immediately after the ascent of Christ, during the reign of Constantine the Great, or at some later point. Regardless, the claim is the same: The church that Christ established somehow failed and therefore Christ lied when he said that the gates of hell would not prevail against it.
Furthermore, many Protestants insist that holy scripture is all that is needed for religious instruction, with no interpreter required — what they call "sola scriptura." However, the idea of sola scriptura is bankrupt. If sola scriptura were true, and scripture were so easy to understand outside of the church, why do so many Protestant denominations draw wildly different conclusions?
No one reads scripture without an interpreter, whether that’s holy tradition, a commentary, or a Sunday morning preacher. Chances are, you read the Bible in English and not in its original language, and anyone multilingual knows that a translation is itself an interpretation, as many foreign words do not neatly translate into English. For instance, the Greek language acknowledges many different forms of love. You hopefully love your spouse (eros) in a different way than you love your children (storge).
Our KJV-only friends understand this all too well, as many newer English versions feature radically different translation choices, or omit entire verses.
If you are willing to compromise on your church’s beliefs for worldly reasons, you never truly believed them in the first place.
This again illustrates why holy scripture — as precious as it is — cannot be the sole foundation for one’s faith. Holy scripture must be interpreted through the accumulated wisdom of Christ’s church, through the apostles, the councils, and great saints that we call the holy fathers. Many of the issues hotly debated today in the Protestant world were settled long ago in the church.
And this very much matters because as much as the Roman Catholics have changed doctrine over the past few years, many of our Protestant friends have radically overhauled everything including their preferred Bible translations, their music and worship style, and essential social teachings, such as those on abortion, gender roles, and the sanctity of marriage.
Our Protestant friends have the same problem as our Roman Catholic friends: If your beliefs change so easily to suit the world, did you ever believe them?
In fact, Anglican convert Ben Christenson basically said so to the Post: “All of that stuff was basically fungible, which gave me a sense that the theological commitments are kind of fungible, too.”
To be fair, the Anglicans have been much more fungible than other denominations.
Here’s a simple but unpleasant truth: If you are willing to compromise on your church’s beliefs for worldly reasons, you never truly believed them in the first place.
To shrug your shoulders and give up on fundamental Christian belief is a slap in the face to the thousands of Christian confessors and martyrs who suffered persecution under the Romans, the iconoclasts, the Ottomans, and the Soviets. Read a Synaxarion (a collection of the lives of Orthodox Saints), and you’ll read horror story after horror story of Christians who refused to compromise, even when faced with being mauled by animals, dismembered, mutilated, raped, set on fire, and all manner of horrors unimaginable to the American mind.
It is a shame that many of our Protestant friends have largely rejected the stories of the saints. Every time I read them, I’m inspired by their courageous faith, something we desperately need in this age.
I recently asked Grok — Elon Musk’s freewheeling AI — to roast the Orthodox Church, and the result was funny but also true.
Even my priest chuckled at this:
The Orthodox Church – where tradition isn't just a suggestion, it's the whole damn rulebook. Here, change isn't just resisted; it's actively hunted down like it's the last heretic in Byzantium. Imagine a place where the liturgy hasn't had a facelift since the time monks were the original hipsters with their beards and robes.
Come visit an Orthodox Church any given Sunday, and you’ll witness the Divine Liturgy written by St. John Chrysostom in the 4th and 5th centuries. The one exception is during the season of Great Lent, when we celebrate the even-older Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great. And that has largely been the case since the reign of Justinian I.
We do not budge on the truth, even if it’s painful.
There are no surprise rants, spontaneous guitar solos, or random ukuleles. The priest will not show up in a football jersey or attempt to re-enact a "Marvel" movie. We recite the Nicene Creed, as was formulated long ago by the holy fathers, not the Sparkle Creed or some other bizarre variant.
We have a good sense of humor. We often laugh about the beards, our stubbornness, and overall incomprehensibility. But the Divine Liturgy is deadly serious. There is no tolerance for improvisation or irreverence. It is the beating heart of the church and the center of our Christian lives. Every Sunday, we welcome the Lord into our spiritual home and our very bodies. The Divine Liturgy is the very glue holding the world together. It is not a joke or a game.
We do not budge on the truth, even if it’s painful. If you challenge us on our teachings on abortion, female clergy, gay marriage, or any number of controversial stances, there is no argument to be had, even if we sometimes struggle with the church’s teachings ourselves. Those matters were settled long ago in holy scripture, through the collective teachings of the holy fathers, and the church’s seven ecumenical councils, which decided everything from the nature of God to the proper role of iconography. These issues have been thoroughly examined, debated, and settled.
The challenge for us as Orthodox Christians is to learn to accept and understand them.
While we stand firmly for the truth, we do not make a point of beating others over the head with it as many so-called fundamentalists do. We are far too busy repenting for our own sins or at least should be. As Christ asked, “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
Every Sunday at liturgy, just before we partake of the holy Eucharist, the congregation prays: “I believe, O Lord, and I confess that Thou art truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, Who didst come into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.”
I, chief among sinners and a new convert to the Orthodox faith, am no theologian. I don’t expect my worldly reasoning or historical trivia to persuade you. Instead, I would encourage you to come and see.
If you want to know why young men are joining the Orthodox Church, join us for a Divine Liturgy some Sunday morning, and perhaps you will understand.
If you’ve been online, you’ve seen the memes.
Next to the label “Catholic” is a world-famous tourist attraction, a European cathedral. Next to the label “Orthodox” is another world-famous tourist attraction, a Russian cathedral. Next to the label “Protestant” is a strip mall with a corporate-looking sign that says something like “Living Waters Church.”
If you haven’t been online, this is the perception that Generation Z has of the Christian landscape.
There is a conservative resurgence movement among Gen Z in reaction to the radical leftism and social decay that we grew up with. This flavor of conservatism isn’t simply “Republican” but is uniquely focused on tradition.
It is increasingly common among Gen Z males to support religion, monarchy, social hierarchies, and everything the Enlightenment destroyed. As a result, Christianity that looks or feels “traditional” is seen as attractive, and Christianity that feels “modern” — whether in style or beliefs — is seen as repulsive.
In some sense, this is a positive development because no society or religious identity can survive without rootedness in tradition. But the issue for Protestantism is that most young people see it as “modern” and therefore bad.
This is why, as a recent article from the New York Post observed, young men are leaving Protestantism in droves and converting to Eastern Orthodoxy, which they see as a more traditional alternative.
It is hard to blame them for thinking that.
The current reality is this: Only a small percentage of Protestant churches are holistically traditional.
A growing percentage of “Protestant” churches are actually “nondenominational,” meaning they have no connection to any particular Christian tradition. The overwhelming majority of such churches have very modern architecture and use contemporary worship music. They do not feel like traditional churches because they were specifically designed not to feel that way. Back in the 1990s, when tradition was seen as bad, they advertised themselves as “not your grandmother’s church.”
But now the tide has shifted — and it is coming back to bite them.
To make matters worse, the nondenominational style is making its way into mainstream Protestant churches. The New York Post story included examples of Christians leaving Protestantism because their churches switched from traditional to contemporary worship. They felt like Protestantism is always “changing” and that Orthodoxy “never” changes.
There is, in fact, a large group of Protestant churches that have mostly resisted stylistic changes. These are the mainline Protestant churches, which include the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church USA (which I am a member of), among others. Most of these churches still have beautiful stained glass buildings, sing hymns, use choirs and organs, and feel very traditional on the outside.
However, despite not changing their style, these churches have changed their doctrine.
Most, though not all, mainline Protestant churches are very theologically liberal and simply adopt whatever cultural or political views are most common on the left at any given time. Their preachers are notoriously liberal, their sermons are often political rallies, and their churches often display Pride flags.
The current reality is this: Only a small percentage of Protestant churches are holistically traditional.
Most Protestant churches with traditional beliefs have a very modern style, and most Protestant churches with traditional style have very modern beliefs. There are some exceptions. For example, the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod denomination is mostly traditional in belief and worship style.
There are conservative wings of all the mainline Protestant denominations. While most conservative offshoots from these denominations have a contemporary style, there are some churches that do not. However, these are the exceptions, not the rule.
Therefore, there is only one way for Protestantism to survive and harness this religious awakening among the youth: It’s to make Protestantism Protestant again.
People leave Protestantism because they believe they cannot find tradition, liturgy, beauty, or sacraments in Protestantism. This is not true, but on the surface, it may appear true because so many Protestants have abandoned their own religious heritage. Evangelicals, meanwhile, need to abandon the modern trend of nondenominational Christianity and return to the traditional Protestant institutions. Evangelicals need to abandon the watered-down pop-Christianity of televangelists and celebrity preachers and learn the traditional theology of the Reformation.
All of the Protestant Reformers — whether Martin Luther, John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, or Thomas Cranmer — cared deeply about the sacraments (baptism and communion). All of the Protestant Confessions (Westminster, Augsburg, Scots, and Heidelberg) confess the same apostolic faith as the early church as expressed in the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, and they agree the sacraments are means of salvation under ordinary circumstances.
Protestant churches in America up until around 1960 were all beautiful masterpieces of carved stone and stained glass built by the hands of hardworking American Protestant men. Some of the greatest classical Christian music and hymns were written by Bible-believing Protestants such as Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, and Charles Wesley.
However, most modern Christians, whether Protestant or not, are unaware of this heritage.
Many people who leave “Protestantism” are not actually leaving Protestantism. They are leaving modern evangelicalism, which hardly reflects the beliefs and values of the Reformation. It is more similar to the religion of the Radical Reformation, which the mainstream Reformers like Luther and Calvin actually considered to be worse than Roman Catholicism.
It is good to leave evangelical and nondenominational Christianity, but doing so does not require leaving Protestantism.
In fact, leaving evangelicalism is often necessary for joining authentic Protestantism. The Protestant reformers did not see themselves as leaving Catholicism. They saw themselves as Western Catholics — but reformed by the word of God.
Part of the reason that American Christians abandoned traditional Protestantism is because Americans by nature have a rebellious mindset that demands the next “new” thing. Americans are not satisfied with what is tried, true, and has stood the test of time.
Many young Americans abandon their grandparents’ mainline churches because they’re “old” and “stuffy,” choosing instead to start new churches that are bustling with youthful energy. The consequence, however, is the death of tradition and long-lasting communities.
The previous generation of American Christians abandoned traditional denominations, worship, architecture, and theology, which caused younger generations to forget what traditional Protestantism offers. And now, they're choosing to leave it.
Mainline Protestantism is America’s religion.
Another reason why evangelicals are leaving mainline denominations is because they became liberal. But notice how liberals never leave institutions that are conservative. Leftists and marxists have a hijacking mindset. They are patient and spend years insidiously gaining influence in mainstream institutions for the purpose of taking them over — and they are usually successful.
Conservatives, on the other hand, have a retreatist mindset. They often leave institutions whenever they spot even the slightest hint of liberal drift.
Leftists never build great institutions — Christians do. Leftists just hijack them like a virus and turn them into leftist factories. Christians built Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the great Protestant denominations. Leftists turned them into petri dishes of their ideology, and they were enabled by conservatives who always run away.
If conservative Christians are to reclaim their heritage, they need to leave their comfort zone and return to the institutions the left hijacked. If the left can hijack churches, Christians can take them back — unless we believe Christians are somehow weaker than the left.
There are many ways to make Protestantism Protestant again.
Replace “praise bands” with choirs. Replace guitars and drums with hymns and organs. Replace Hillsong with Bach. Replace new church plants with old historic mainline churches. Replace blue lights and smoke machines with blue stained glass and tall steeples. Replace nondenominational churches with institutional denominations. Replace “altar call” with the ordinary means of grace (word and sacrament). Replace celebrity pastors with the confessions of faith and catechisms.
Mainline Protestantism is America’s religion. It’s the religion of the majority of U.S. presidents. It’s the religion that inspired the Founding Fathers, and chances are, it’s the religion of many of your ancestors.
Go back to Grandma’s old mainline church. These churches are bleeding members, so it will be easier than ever to revive them.
Luckily there is a small, yet rapidly growing movement of young people aimed at doing this exact thing. It's called Operation Reconquista. It advocates for conservative Christians to return to the mainline Protestant denominations that liberals have hijacked for the purpose of retaking them.
Every offshoot from mainline Protestantism has abandoned tradition. This is the only way to recover traditional Protestantism.
Of all the divisions troubling Protestantism today, perhaps none is as hotly debated as women’s ordination.
All seven mainline Protestant denominations have adopted the practice, while evangelical and fundamentalist denominations have defiantly refused to entertain the notion on biblical grounds.
Even progressives in the church were apprehensive about this direct assault on the 'patriarchal' status quo, fearing that it would undermine the legitimacy of the church.
Scripture seems to speak quite clearly on women’s capacity for leadership in 1 Timothy 2:12. As St. Paul writes, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man."
But as advocates for women’s ordination argue, female religious leaders in the New Testament like Phoebe, Priscilla, Lydia, and Mary seemed to hold positions of greater respect than St. Paul suggests. Many point out that Phoebe is described as a deacon or deaconess (diakonos) in Romans, which would suggest that there was a model of female authority within the church.
However, the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, which claim apostolic succession and a direct ecclesiastical connection to the apostles, are defiantly against the practice and defend male-only holy orders as the orthodox teaching of the church.
On July 29, 1974, 11 female priests were ordained in the Episcopal Church. The act was largely symbolic, but real change soon followed. Those ordinations became legitimate in 1976 when the House of Bishops conditionally recognized them.
In response, hundreds of parishes broke away from the Episcopal Church as part of the Continuing Anglican movement, paving the way for the founding of the rival Anglican Church in North America in 2009. Ironically enough, that denomination is now split over women’s ordination.
Margo Guernsey’s new documentary “The Philadelphia Eleven” commemorates the 50th anniversary of this watershed moment through interviews with several of the surviving 11.
It’s clear that Guernsey sees women’s ordination as a righteous act of liberationist defiance progress; these women, she writes, “provide a vision for what a just and inclusive community looks like in practice.”
The women in the film depict their quest for greater female participation in the church as inspired by the civil rights movement. It was also an act of “obedience to the Spirit,” which took precedence over adherence to tradition.
The film admits how radical this was. Even progressives in the church were apprehensive about this direct assault on the “patriarchal” status quo, fearing that it would undermine the legitimacy of the church.
In retrospect, it’s clear that their fears were justified.
The ceremony caused extensive turmoil within the Episcopal Church. Several clergy involved had their careers severely damaged. Dozens of bishops and priests condemned the ceremony as an illegal farce, even as the women publicly defended their ordinations as valid. One quoted St. Paul during a television appearance: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
It did little good in the short term, as none of the woman were able to find positions. Ultimately, however, they won. By 1988, the Episcopal Church would even ordinate its first female bishop.
“Half of the human population was acknowledged as being important enough to take on one of the strongest institutions in the world,” said Philadelphia 11 member Nancy Wittig.
That’s certainly one way to look at it. Another way is to acknowledge that the institution Wittig and her cohort defeated is now but a shadow of its former self.
The Episcopal Church has continued down the path the Philadelphia 11 set it on, abandoning traditional Christian teaching on other issues like sexuality and abortion. It revised its canons to the point that bishops aren’t allowed to deny women’s ordinations.
The church now is deeply committed to social justice and tolerance, and it does much admirable work in trying to address many of the world’s wrongs. But it is also on the precipice of demographic collapse and will functionally cease to exist by 2040.
The Philadelphia 11 may have turned the tide against the patriarchy within their church and given women permission to be priests, but the resulting schism may prove too deeply wounding to celebrate their victory beyond the passing of this generation. It leaves a film like “ThePhiladelphia Eleven” balancing awkwardly over the abyss.
Republicans have announced a new bill that declares in vitro fertilization a right, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is leading the charge alongside Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.).
“We came together, and said let’s draft a simple, straightforward, federal bill that creates a federal right that you as a parent have a right to have access to IVF,” Cruz said.
“If you want to have a child and you need medical assistance to do so, that should be your right,” he concluded.
"A right to IVF," Allie Beth Stuckey mimics in clear disagreement.
Associate professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Andrew T. Walker is also extremely disappointed.
“I was really discouraged with this legislation coming out from two senators,” Walker tells Stuckey. “This is obviously coming in the aftermath of the Alabama Supreme Court decision from earlier in the year, but I think tragically, they’re going further out in support of a practice that, tragically, most Americans are just woefully misinformed about when it comes to what IVF is.”
“It’s an affront to human dignity, in the service of so-called support for human dignity,” he adds.
Stuckey is in firm agreement.
“Yes, we like to say that when technology takes us from what is natural to what is possible, Christians have the responsibility to ask, ‘But is this moral?’ And more important, ‘Is this biblical?’” Stuckey says.
“Catholic teaching takes issue with removing or with separating reproduction from sex, which I think is good, and I think is fair. Because when you make that separation, all kinds of ethical issues flow from that,” she adds.
Not only is the process unnatural, but it isn’t consistent with the beliefs of those who claim to be pro-life.
“If life starts at conception, then how we treat embryos matters. IVF very often includes a eugenics process of selecting the best embryos and discarding the others,” Stuckey explains, adding, “If life begins at conception, then how can we say that we have a right to IVF when inherent in IVF is the mistreatment of these little human beings made in God’s image?”
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Why do Catholics pray to Mary and the saints? What do Catholics believe about salvation? And is it anti-Semitic to say Jews killed Jesus? Trent Horn from Catholic Answers recently joined "Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey" to answer these and more questions in an episode about the longstanding disagreement between Protestant and Catholic beliefs.
Catholics have many practices that Protestants find unbiblical: mainly, praying to Mary and the saints and the place of honor Mary has in the Catholic Church. Protestants maintain that praying to saints has no biblical basis, and since Jesus himself intercedes for Christians on earth, we have no need for the intercession of Mary or the saints, citing verses like 1 Timothy 2:5 and Hebrews 2:5 as evidence:
"There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." (1 Timothy 2:5)
"He is able to save completely those who come to God through Him, because He always lives to intercede for them." (Hebrews 7:25)
Protestants also believe that since the saints have died, they have no way of hearing our prayers, and trying to pray to them could be condemned as attempting to speak with the dead, as seen in Leviticus:
"A man or a woman who is a medium or a necromancer shall surely be put to death. They shall be stoned with stones; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20:27)
On the Catholic side, Catholics believe that saints are able to intercede on behalf of Christians on earth, since though physically dead, they are spiritually alive and more alive in Christ than Christians are on earth. Since they are spiritually alive, it is not necromancy — it is asking for the prayers of the members of the body of Christ in heaven. They believe the ability of the saints to hear prayers from Christians on earth is through the omnipotence of God. To support this, Catholics point to mentions of the prayers of the saints in Revelation:
"The twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the saints." (Rev. 5:8)
"The smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God." (Rev. 8:4)
Catholics also do not believe that Christ being the one mediator means Christians cannot ask for the intercessory prayers of Mary, the saints, and other Christians on earth. While Christ is the one mediator between God and man, and no one else can fill that role, Catholics believe that all Christians are called to be mediators between Christ and the world.
On "Relatable," Trent Horn cited the earliest-known liturgical prayer not found in Scripture — the “Sub Tuum Praesidium” (meaning “Beneath Thy Protection”) — as evidence of the early church praying to and honoring Mary. This prayer was found on Greek papyrus around 300 A.D. and asks for the protection and intercession of Mary:
“We turn to you for protection,Holy Mother of God.
Listen to our prayers
and help us in our needs.
Save us from every danger,
glorious and blessed Virgin.”
Many Protestants do not believe that Mary has a place of honor, while Catholics maintain that Mary is the mother of God, the queen of heaven and earth, and deserving of a special type of reverence and love. Allie referenced Mark 3:31-35 as an example of her beliefs that Mary does not have a special place of honor:
“And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, 'Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.' And he answered them, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.'”
Trent then explained his view of these verses, “I think we can misread that, because ... one could take that so far as to say, 'Oh, you know, your mother doesn't really matter. You don't have to worry about your mother, what matters more are other believers.'" He continued, "But the Bible's also very clear you have special obligations to your parents ... what's going on here is Jesus is saying that to have a special relationship with him it is not necessary to be his biological kin.”
The conversation also veered into intercessory prayer, the definition of prayer itself, Sola Scriptura, and salvation theology. This episode is jam-packed with theology and definitely not an episode you want to miss — whether Protestant, Catholic, or any other faith.
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
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