Steve Deace interviews Protestant minister turned Catholic apologist over authority, tradition, Mary, and church unity



On a recent special episode of “The Steve Deace Show,” Steve, a devout evangelical, interviewed former Protestant pastor turned Catholic apologist Keith Nester about his decision to convert to Catholicism.

In this fascinating and educational interview, Steve and Keith dive headfirst into the turbulent waters of the core issues that separate Catholics and Protestants with openness and sincerity.

The son of a United Methodist pastor, Keith gave his heart to Jesus at church camp when he was just 11 years old. Catholicism wasn’t even something on his radar until his young adulthood, when he got the opportunity to serve as a youth pastor at a small church in Iowa. The youth program started with just 12 children, but two years later, it had grown to 250. Many of these children’s parents then began coming to the church, and the congregation exploded.

Most of these new congregants, however, were Catholics. “They were coming over to our church going, ‘This is the greatest thing ever. I've never seen anything like it before. We're learning about Jesus here,”’ says Keith.

This engrained the idea that Catholics “don't know anything about the Bible” into his mind as he began his ministry as a Protestant pastor.

But this mindset started to unravel soon after he met a graphic designer who was an on-fire-for-Jesus Catholic. The two quickly began trying to convert each other. Keith, who at the time was in seminary school, consulted his Bible professor to give him the information he needed to “defeat this Catholic.”

“She just said to me, ‘Well, we believe that because we're Protestants,”’ says Keith, who was forced to go on his own “wild goose chase” looking for the “silver bullet” that would prove his Catholic friend wrong.

But after years and years of searching, he never found it. It wasn’t long before he felt the Lord calling him to convert to Catholicism, but he was resistant — not because he didn’t fully believe in Catholic doctrine but because he had built a life as a Protestant youth pastor. His wife, who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, and his children were devoted to the Protestant church.

For years, Keith dodged the calling he felt God had put on his heart. “Life got pretty dark. Things went kind of crazy for me,” he admits.

In 2015 the Methodist Church, which Keith had been part of since his childhood, began unraveling. Heated debates over same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBTQ+ people started to fray the edges of the denomination. Keith, committed to scripture, found himself in heated arguments with other Methodists, who contended that scripture could be interpreted in different ways.

“I started to think, okay, well, if I can't argue from scripture alone, from tradition, then I have to argue from authority, right?” he recalls.

“That got turned back on me pretty hardcore. I even had someone say to me, ‘Well, if you believe in all this church authority stuff, why aren't you a Catholic?"’

This sent Keith back to the dusty Catholic apologetics books his old friend had given him years prior. “Through a series of just deep dives into things and … semi-mystical experiences, where I just had things that happened to me experientially around things related to the Catholic faith, I became convinced that the Catholic Church was what it claimed to be: the one true church … the church that Jesus Christ started,” he tells Steve.

But there was still the issue of his family and established career as a Protestant minister. One night Keith cried out to Jesus: “If you want me to become Catholic, I will do it. But you've got to make a way.”

“And I'm not kidding around, Steve, from the crucifix, He spoke to me and He said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. You don't need me to make a way, you just need me.’ And I realized in that moment that there He was in the Eucharist and that there He was with me, and He was calling me to lay it all on the line for Him,” he recounts. “I had never felt something more strongly when it comes to my faith in all my life.”

He went home that night and told his wife, and the next day he told the senior pastor at his church. “It was tough … but I knew in my heart that this is what it meant for me to follow the Lord,” Keith admits.

In the second half of the interview, Keith and Steve dive into the individual issues that distinguish Catholicism from Protestantism: the authority of the Catholic Church versus sola scriptura, the role of Scripture and tradition, the veneration of Mary and saints, and the nature of church unity and historical continuity.

To hear their compelling and heartfelt discussion on the core differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, tune in to the full interview above.

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Jimmy Kimmel's show SHOULD be pulled by the FCC for THIS reason



After Jimmy Kimmel was fired for his comments regarding Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination, the talk show host was promptly reinstated by Disney — despite the show's lack of viewership before his firing.

“Everyone at ABC and Disney knows who’s watching. They know the numbers better than we do. And all the advertisers know, too, that the phones aren’t ringing — 'buy advertising on Jimmy Kimmel.' They know this,” BlazeTV host Steve Deace explains on the “Steve Deace Show.”

“So why is making $20, $30, $40 million a year, whatever it is? Why? Because it’s not about the money. It’s about sending a message. He’s there to be a vessel of propaganda. That’s why. There’s no marketplace of ideas for that. There’s no one to bang on for that. It really would not matter if we all stopped watching,” he continues.

The real audience, Deace explains, is the alternative media on the right, who have been playing Kimmel’s clips in order to expose the left.


“Same thing with ‘The View.’ ‘The View’ will generate way more engagements and reactions from us than they can on their own. And that’s pretty much true of all of their media outlets and all of their content,” he says.

“That’s what Jimmy Kimmel is. … His god is making sure that his message gets out there, ratings and numbers be damned, because it’s a shibboleth of the damned. That’s the point,” he continues.

Which is why Disney continues to produce “all these flops.”

“They’re not dumb. Like we keep saying, they are well aware of what they are doing. They’re nihilists. They’re deconstructionists. They’re iconoclasts. They’re here to smash the stained-glass windows. They’re doing this on purpose,” he says. “They want to inject what we call ‘rotgut’ into the culture because it’s doctrine to them.”

But Deace has solutions, like using the FCC to pull shows like Kimmel’s.

“We will either do that, or new voices will emerge, and they’re already emerging,” he says, “who will demand we start playing by the left’s more nihilistic rules now.”

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A movement or a moment: The power behind the 'normie' response to Charlie Kirk



The murder of Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska by a man wielding nothing but a knife is a story that “Steve Deace Show” executive producer Aaron McIntire believes “broke containment” — leading to the mass show of respect that followed for Charlie Kirk.

“The left couldn’t wait to get off of that story,” he says. “Well, we got off of that story with the bullet through the neck of the most prominent conservative influencer and voice in this country. And that story could not be contained either.”

Human beings, McIntire explains, are not “wired to see what we saw multiple times last week.”

“Now I just think because of everything that we saw last week that penetrated the normie water table to the extent that it did … those people are either going to side with us or they’re going to say nothing at all and not push against us,” he says.


“And I’ll just say this. I would bet my house; I would bet Matt’s house without his permission, Steve’s house without his permission, Todd’s house without his permission. I would bet all of our houses that this is a movement,” he adds.

While some might believe the response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination is purely “an emotional moment,” McIntire truly believes it is not.

And BlazeTV host Steve Deace agrees, chiming in, “Well said.”

But Deace believes the right does need to keep the momentum going, as well as watch out for what could derail it, in order to keep the movement strong.

“The number-one thing the right needs to do, is, after Charlie is laid to rest, not destroy itself over Israel and the Jews and anti-Semitism. And I think there are some people that are going to try to take advantage of not having someone of Charlie’s intelligence and the magnitude of his platform that could play a buffer between these two sides and maybe try to exacerbate this debate to an existential level,” Deace explains.

“And so I think that we need to make sure we don’t immediately come out of this with all this unity and momentum and then immediately step on a rake and destroy one another with this,” he says. “It’ll be a generational mistake.”

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MSM reporter fawns over alleged killer’s texts to transgender partner



ABC News correspondent Matt Gutman is under fire — and rightfully so — for having one of the more innately disturbing public responses to the news of Charlie Kirk’s murder.

The reporter called the text messages the alleged assassin sent to his transgender partner about killing Charlie Kirk “very touching.”

“It was very touching in a way that many of us didn’t expect,” Gutman said. “A very intimate portrait into this relationship between the suspect’s roommate and the suspect himself, with him repeatedly calling his roommate, who is transitioning, calling him ‘my love.’ And, ‘I want to protect you, my love.’”

“So, it was this duality of someone who the attorney said not only jeopardized the life of Charlie Kirk and the crowd, but was doing it in front of children, which is one of the aggravating circumstances of this case. And on the other hand, he was, you know, speaking so lovingly about his partner,” he added.


Gutman had been suspended before for falsely reporting on the Kobe Bryant death.

“He instinctively framed it like this,” executive producer of the “Steve Deace Show” says, shocked.

“That’s the thing. I mean, he’s riffing, guys,” BlazeTV host Steve Deace says.

“And understand, he is not your lefty neighbor who is getting information from his sources downstream lying to him. He is at the press conference. He is receiving the evidence, or at least the alleged evidence,” Deace explains. “So, it’s been handed to him.”

“This is innate. This is visceral. Out of the heart, the mouth speaks. And this is what he took away from this,” he says.

“Now, let’s be fair. It’s a tale as old as time. Boy meets boy. And they just exchange a litany of long-form text messages where they literally say things. ‘I will kill Charlie Kirk now’ — period. ‘I will go grab rifle now’ — period. ‘This is where I will be and when’ — period. ‘Will you help me?’ — period. ‘No, I will pull trigger myself,’” Deace mocks robotically. “Because people just routinely communicate like that.”

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Steve Deace: 3 things America MUST do after Charlie Kirk’s assassination



Just a couple of months ago, Steve Deace spoke at an event at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, where Charlie Kirk regularly worshipped and collaborated on initiatives. Right before he walked on stage, Charlie leaned down and whispered a word of encouragement in his ear.

“Go hard,” he said.

Today, as we continue to wrestle with the loss of Charlie, we all need to take that advice to heart. It’s time to go hard.

But what does that look like? How do we “go hard” in a way that hits at the root of this violence and culminates in positive change?

At a recent event for Conservative Partnership Institute, Steve answered that question with three bold initiatives that we all bear the responsibility of ensuring come to fruition.

1. Punish evil

Steve beseeches all of us, but especially elected officials, to treat evil as such. Enough with leniency and delay. Either we punish evil, or we welcome it through the front door.

“The scriptures say the only reason God permits government on this Earth is to be an avenging angel, a sword of righteousness against evil,” Steve says.

“The people in this room who hold elected office and the ones who [do] not, you must punish evil. ... You must!” he urges.

Failure to do so will have one outcome, he warns: “more evil.”

To the dissenters who argue that to meet evil with fitting consequences will backfire because Democrats will only return the favor, Steve has a sobering message: “They’ve already done it all! They’re all going to do it all over again. 2005 called, and it wants its talking points back. That’s not where we are right now. My friend’s body is cold to testify to that truth.”

But it’s not just Charlie’s tragic death that demands justice. There are many atrocities in this country that have yet to be addressed, Steve says. Whether it’s the deliberate invasion of illegal immigrants perpetrated by the Biden regime or the fact that the American people were lied to about Joe Biden’s mental acuity while a cabal of shadowy Democrats ran the country in his stead, justice has yet to be served on a number of iniquities.

“Who’s gone to prison for this? Who’s been referred to prosecution? Who’s been arrested?” Steve asks.

“We have to punish evil. If we don’t punish evil, there will be more evil. I promise you,” he reiterates.

2. Stop the contagion of political sadism

“We have a social contagion, and I’m not talking about trannyism. ... This is actually worse. I will call it political sadism,” Steve says.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s near assassination and Charlie Kirk’s murder, the radical leftists have shown their true colors. Their brazen celebration of the attacks on people they consider their political enemies reveals just how sick and twisted they’ve become. They are reveling in “the physical suffering and debasement of people,” Steve laments.

It’s not even taboo anymore. “Now teachers, nurses, public officials, financial advisers just post this stuff under their names, and they’re proud to do it,” he says.

“It’s like a macabre carnival of ghouls fetishizing, turning the death of, I think, our best general into a kink that they cannot wait to satiate and rub in your faces and share with others.”

So what do we do? We employ one of the left’s favorite weapons: “cancel culture.”

“We have to publicly shame this out of existence. That’s the only antidote,” Steve says.

“I kind of like cancel culture when my side’s doing the canceling,” he admits.

“We have to [employ cancel culture] in return because they’re already doing all those things to us right now. This stuff has to be shunned. There should be a graveyard of lost jobs, lost careers. The social stigma to this should be overwhelming.”

3. Redden the red states

“Our red states have to be every bit as red as the blue states are blue,” Steve says.

He explains that blue states never eased up on their progressivism after Donald Trump became the president. If anything, they doubled down because “they have complete and total control of the governing infrastructure ... [and] the policy-making” in their states.

So why aren’t red states doing the same?

“It needs to be inconceivable that they could propose these [liberal] policies in the places where we have total control,” Steve says, urging states like Wyoming and Idaho to become the right’s California and Massachusetts.

The attitude we need to have toward progressive voters moving into red states is this, he says: “You’re not going to move here because Google gave you a job and come here and vote communism and cultural Marxism into my state. ... There’s more to life than a balance sheet, and part of that calculus needs to be the moral one.”

We need to adopt the bold stance Ronald Reagan took when he declared an arms race against the Soviet Union: “Do not launch on us, [or] we will launch on you.”

“We have to immediately establish that mutually assured destruction deterrent. We have to. If we don’t, I’m telling you right now, we’re going to bury more Charlies,” Steve says. “Well, we won’t bury any more Charlie Kirks because there’s nobody like him. The void he has left is immeasurable. But we’re going to bury more of us because they’re unbowed.”

The debate is no longer Republican versus Democrat or even conservative versus liberal. The debate is now: “Do I still get to be an American or not?”

How we respond to the death of Charlie Kirk will determine the answer to that question, Steve says.

“Don’t sentence your children and grandchildren to have to settle these disputes in unpeaceable means because we weren’t aggressive enough to defend them with the peaceable means we still have,” he pleads.

This is the fight Charlie was fighting until his last breath. That’s “why I am confident the next words he heard after that bullet ripped through his neck were, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’” he says.

We should all live our lives so that we, too, can hear these words when our time comes.

So “go hard,” Steve says.

Our future depends on it.

To hear his full speech, watch the video above.

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Steve Deace: The void left by our ‘most important general’ is as big as a movement



One of the last times BlazeTV host Steve Deace saw Charlie Kirk, Deace recalls having a long conversation with him to discuss the state of the country and the conservative movement.

Deace’s wife, who was there, said later, “I just have a feeling that whatever we do moving forward, he’s going to be a big part of it.”

When the pair last spoke on Tuesday, Deace received a text from Charlie: “Thank you, you are a dear friend.”

And he is among the thousands of Americans who can count themselves forever changed — for the better — by the Turning Point USA founder.


“I’m devastated. I’m angry,” Deace says through tears. “But now is not the time for anger. There will be a time. There will be a time, and it is coming soon. But we have to mourn first so that that anger does not eat us alive.”

“Charlie was the best of us,” he continues. “He was the brightest of the lights. He was literally one of the last people left on our side still trying to change minds, still trying to persuade, who hadn’t given up. And that frankly was just too much light for the darkness in our world right now.”

“If the enemy wanted to target our most important general, he did. The void that is left here is incalculable. There is no single person that could possibly step into the shoes of everything Charlie was a part of and helped to lead or made happen. It’s going to take more than a village. It’s going to take a movement to fill his shoes,” he adds.

While Deace is at a loss as to why Charlie was taken, he believes there must be a reason.

“I am going to trust that a God who did not even spare his own son for me or Charlie or for you, whose son the grave could not hold and whose last enemy, death, he conquered,” Deace says, “I am going to trust that someday in the future I’m going to look back on this, and I’m going to say, ‘Devil, that was the dumbest thing you could have possibly done.’”

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Steve Deace: How the ‘tranny madness’ must be eradicated



While Christians on the right may be viewed as “radical” in the eyes of the left, they’re not even as close to how radical the left has become.

And BlazeTV host Steve Deace believes that needs to change if Americans want their children marked safe from the kind of evil that the left’s most radical are capable of unleashing — like the recent shooting of school children at church in Minneapolis.

“Even as radicalized as we’ve all become in the last few years, we are still not to the level of radicalization that we are up against. Now, I would not be a supporter of equaling their radicalization because I think that would call us to do things that God’s word says that we cannot,” Deace says.

“That being said, I think being more aware of their radicalization will make us more prone to do the preparation that God’s word says we must. And we haven’t,” he continues.


And that radicalization of the other side was on full display in Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s comments regarding the horrific shooting on CNN.

“Obviously, I’ve heard about the rhetoric and the narrative that is being pushed out. But here’s the thing. Anybody that is going to use this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any community has lost touch with a common humanity,” Frey told reporter Erin Burnett.

“We’ve got to be operating not out of hate for any group, but out of a love for our children,” he added.

“Straight up demonic levels of gaslighting,” Deace says.

“How can the mayor of Minneapolis say that level of gas lighting with conviction? There was real conviction there. That’s not BS at all. That’s not virtue signaling. That’s real, because this is his religion, and he’s committed to it, and he’s more committed to it than most of you are,” Deace continues.

“That level of conviction there is biblical, man,” he adds.

And while many liberals have been touting the line that “prayer is not enough,” Deace is actually in agreement.

“Words are not enough, and we need some commonsense gun control. Anybody who has ever sought any level of counseling, I don’t care if they’re 8 or 108, any level of counseling on quote, ‘gender affirming care,’ can never own a weapon,” Deace says.

“What needs to happen is tranny madness needs to be completely eradicated from every social institution and polite conversation in the United States of America and not just for children. Any age regardless. It cannot happen,” he continues.

“The sheer lunacy of this, no human civilization can be civilized and sustain it,” he adds.

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Chip and Joanna Gaines embrace LGBTQ ‘spirit of the age’ and ‘punch back’ at Christian fans



Chip and Joanna Gaines’ new show, “Back to the Frontier,” has stirred up backlash from their Christian supporters, as it features a homosexual couple who used a surrogate to become fathers to their two boys.

The Gaineses did not take the backlash well, with Chip doubling down on their position by writing in a post on X: “Talk, ask qustns, listen ... maybe even learn. Too much to ask of modern American Christian culture. Judge 1st, understand later/never.”

“It’s a sad sunday when ‘non believers’ have never been confronted with hate or vitriol until they are introduced to a modern American Christian,” he added.

BlazeTV host Steve Deace of the “Steve Deace Show” is disappointed in the Christian couple.


“You are watching Chip and Joanna Gaines now continue to descend into the abyss,” Deace says. “Now, what I think will be fascinating about them is they have chosen — well, Chip in particular tried to be a keyboard commando tough guy the last time they got exposed and went about not just deconstructing his faith, but reconstructing and attempting to say, no, they actually represent the true light of Christianity.”

“And that generated a way bigger level of backlash than what I’ve seen with others who have gone down this road,” he adds.

Deace explains that this is a common pattern that unfolds when it comes to Christian television stars like Chip and Joanna.

“What you see is using us to gain an audience. And then once you gain a certain foothold of that audience and credibility with said audience, to the point now that you cross over as something that’s known mainstream,” Deace explains.

“Once that crossover happens, then the offer is brought to you from the spirit of the age. Bow to the shibboleth of the damned, the rainbow jihad. And they pretty much all do,” he adds.

Now, what Chip has done by calling out his own base may have caused irreversible damage.

“They chose not to just abandon their base or assume that their base would not know and just stay with them no matter what. They chose to punch back at their base. So we’ll see if it works out for them or not,” Deace says. “It’s a bold choice, Cotton.”

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Pro-life leader: Democrats only ‘win’ the abortion debate by hiding what abortion is



When it comes to abortion, the Democrats never describe what they’re intent on defending. Instead, they pick and choose words that represent a woman’s freedom rather than the murdering of a baby.

“They pretend to be talking about abortion, and they talk about women’s rights, the Constitution, women’s health freedom. Well, we agree with all those things. We just don’t agree with the killing of babies,” pro-life leader Frank Pavone tells BlazeTV host Steve Deace on the “Steve Deace Show.”

“They don’t want to admit that the baby’s even there,” he adds.

This is why when it comes to changing the way Americans see abortion, Pavone points to a South Dakota law that required that abortionists say to women getting the procedure, “This procedure is about to destroy a whole, separate, unique, living human being.”


“The law actually provided those words as what that abortionist had to say to the woman,” Pavone says. “Now, Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry objected, and they said, ‘Oh, that’s just ideology and belief. You can’t require somebody to say that.’ And when the court looked at it, the conclusion they came to was: This is not ideology or belief. This is simply scientific fact.”

“The court said, ‘No, no, no, no. The difference with this is, this is the only procedure that involves the intentional destruction of a human life,’” he continues.

“And so that is where I think we have to begin. How do we get to the end of abortion? Maybe we ought to start by defining abortion,” he adds, noting that this is why there is so much miscommunication between the left and the right when abortion becomes the topic of debate.

“In a sense, we’ve had a pretend debate in America over abortion. We think of the word, we’re thinking about the destruction of a whole, separate, unique, living human life. We’re thinking about an act of violence. The other side uses the same word, but they’re thinking about freedom and rights and women’s health,” he explains.

“It’s like, what in the world are we talking about? What is an abortion? And the only way that the other side ... ‘wins’ any of their battles is precisely by not facing that question,” he adds.

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