Matt Walsh Quotes

You can lie to yourself all you want, but you cannot drag me into it. And so it goes for pronouns. If I intentionally call a man “she,” I have lied. I have conveyed something that isn’t true. Despite my polite intentions, all I’ve done is contribute to the confusion, dishonesty, and intellectual chaos rampant in our culture.

As far as I can tell, kids are called bossy when they behave in a dictatorial and domineering fashion. They’re called bossy when they try to order people around and refuse to listen to authority figures. Here’s a suggestion: instead of telling us not to refer to them as bossy, why don’t we teach them not to be bossy? We concentrate so much on eradicating negative words while forgetting to address the behavior that the words describe.

The world is full of weak, pitiful sinners like myself, people just looking for a way around our duties and obligations. A way to follow Christ without taking up our cross. A way to be a Christian without making sacrifices. A way to enter Heaven while holding onto a piece of earth.

If you won 600 million dollars in the lottery, would you go out the next day and break into cars to steal the change from the cup holders? That’s what sleeping around is like when you’ve already found a woman who will pledge her life and her entire being to you for the remainder of her existence. You tell me that you are in an “open marriage.” I will probably be lambasted for “judging” you for it, but, sorry Professor, an “open marriage” makes about as much sense as a plane without wings or a boat that doesn’t float. Marriages, by definition, are supposed to be closed. Actually, I’m getting rather tired of people like you trying to hijack the institution, strip it of its beauty and purpose, and convert it into some shallow little thing that suits your vices.

We celebrate ‘freedom’- which has become nothing more than the freedom to destroy ourselves. Our founders envisioned a people free to be moral and religious, enabled to achieve their full spiritual potential liberated from the oppression of a tyrannous government. We have taken this spiritual freedom and turned it into spiritual slavery… Only the slave to Christ is free. The slave to Satan is wrung out like a sponge until he is nothing but a husk, and then the husk is incinerated.” -pp. 24-5

Meanwhile, feminists regularly insist that the absence of a uterus and a vagina excludes men from having an opinion about things like abortion. So a man can’t have ideas about women’s issues because he lacks the correct anatomy, but he can actually be a woman despite lacking the correct anatomy? How does that make any kind of sense?

Anyone who celebrates or endorses abortion but then pretends to recoil at any other form of murder is lying.

This is the great problem with American society: It is the widest gate the world has ever known. We are free to spread our arms and live exactly as we wish. But true freedom is not found in living exactly as we wish, but in living as God wishes.

Bossy means “given to ordering people around, highhanded, domineering, overly authoritative, dictatorial, abrasive.” ...Could it be that girls are called bossy when they’re… well, bossy? Could it be that boys are also called bossy for the same reason?

I will fold acceptance and tolerance together here because they are generally treated as if interchangeable. In modern parlance they’re both just extensions of “welcoming.” To welcome is to tolerate, to tolerate is to accept. This is wrong, of course. It is possible to be welcoming toward someone without necessarily tolerating his behavior, and it is possible to tolerate someone without accepting everything he does. Our culture demands acceptance—more than that, celebration—of all lifestyles and life choices, but it often makes those demands under the guise of less intrusive sounding words like “tolerance” and “welcoming.

God does not want my bare minimum. God does not want me to go just one step further than other people. He does not say, “Be good enough.” He does not say, “Be better than most.” He says, “Be perfect.” Of course, it’s hard to shoot for perfection. It is all the harder when you are surrounded by people who are not even trying. The world tells us that there is no such thing as good or bad. All is permissible. Sin is no big deal. Some sins are even laudatory. There is no perfection. But Christ calls us out of that relativistic fog—all the way out. Not to mere acceptability or decency, but to holiness, to sainthood. He will settle for nothing less, so neither can we.

Ask the average American Christian to tell you how his life would be different if he didn’t believe in Christ, and he will struggle to provide a single example. And this fact will not trouble him. He is supremely confident in his own spiritual complacency. He laughs at the very notion that God might send him to Hell. He has no problem believing that some people are damned—a lot of people, even—but not him. He lives in a fog of cowardly and comfortable delusion, and it grows thicker by the day.

The first liberal was named Lucifer. He

In other words, nothing is stopping us. We’re stopping ourselves. We are comfortable—and consumed by our comforts.

It’s not fair for anyone to be given what is not his, yet our Father opens up eternal joy to us, despite the fact that it isn’t rightfully ours and we’ve done nothing to earn it or deserve it. This knowledge should make us eternally grateful for any blessing, however small, and totally accepting of any suffering, however large, knowing that it’s only the smallest portion of the suffering we’re due.

This is quite the scary world we're constructing. One where the disabled can be discarded and NBA stars can be gods. Come to think of it, that pretty well describes our culture right now. Thank you, liberalism.

We learn about the categories of temptation that Satan will use against us. Satan tempted Christ to turn stones into bread, appealing to appetite. Then Satan tempted Christ to worship him, the Devil, in exchange for all of the wealth and power in the world, appealing to the desire for wealth and power. Then, appealing to pride, Satan tempted Christ to fling Himself off a precipice so that the angels would come and rescue Him, thus demonstrating His magnificence and glory to the masses. It seems that Satan seeks to make us gluttons, materialists, or egoists. He will settle for just one, but often he has no problem convincing us to be all three.” -p. 85

For the majority of human history, it was taken for granted that a person’s status as “man” or “woman” was purely biological and determined by his or her sex at birth. Nobody had any notion of a “gender spectrum” or “gender fluidity.” There have always been effeminate men and masculine women, but there was never any thought given to the possibility that the effeminate man might really be a woman, and the masculine woman might really be a man. But as the irrational, anti-scientific, and superstitious belief in “transgenderism” was introduced into the cultural bloodstream by academia and Hollywood, individual Americans, feeling the increasing peer pressure, quickly forsook their knowledge of basic human biology and adopted progressive gender theory wholesale.

Christ responded to each temptation by quoting scripture. This, again, was for our benefit. Our Lord didn’t need to get into a theological debate with Satan. He didn’t need to provide the Devil with any exegetical justifications for His actions. But He, the Word, leans on the Word, because that is what we must do when the Devil comes knocking on our door. Jesus is warning us not to rely on our own understanding, our own will, or our own strength when the forces of darkness are scheming against us. All we can do or should do is cleave to God, His Word, and His Righteousness. The Devil cannot carry us away when we are hugging tightly to the Lord. He cannot claim us when we are huddled under the cross.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote, ‘If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be permissible, even cannibalism.’ All of the Russian author’s great works revolve, in one way or another, around this idea: that a life without God is not worth living- and barely livable. He is right. And it is better for the unbeliever to confront the spiritual desolation of unbelief, and to really feel its emptiness and coldness, than for him to push those thoughts away while still remaining in his squalid state. We are told that despair- or depression, as we call it today- is a mental illness. But how can we call someone ill for being in despair when he has so many good reasons for that despair?....We do nothing for a despairing man by numbing his sadness while leaving him to his empty, miserable existence.” -pp. 72-3

If we are to be living Christians, then we can never stay in one place. We are always traveling towards God—or else away from Him. To finally and completely reach God is to enter into Him, to live within Him in Heaven. But we will never arrive at that point in the course of our mortal existence. We can only get closer and closer to the end goal, or further and further from it. This is why Christ tells us repeatedly in scripture to “follow” Him. He does not tell us to stand beside Him, or sit, or lie on the ground near Him.

Wrapped up in all of this talk of acceptance and tolerance is the matter of judgment. The worst thing in the world, we are told, is to judge. We must never judge, never be judgmental. We are constantly reminded that Jesus said, “Do not judge” (Matthew 7:1). And those three words have become the most popular words ever uttered by Our Lord. We like to pretend that everything else He said is summarized by this one phrase. We treat “Do not judge” as the distillation of His life and ministry. There are over seven hundred thousand words in the Bible (yes, I counted), and we have come to believe that they all can be condensed down into those three. We’re wrong. Yes, He does tell us not to judge. But to understand what “Do not judge” actually means, and how it ought to apply to our lives, we have to look at those words in the context of Christ’s teachings. We don’t even have to look very hard, because He makes the point clear in the very same chapter of the Bible. Here is the full verse from the seventh chapter of Matthew: Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. The point here is that we must judge rightly and fairly, as Jesus says specifically in John 7:24: “Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.” The whole Bible is chock-full of judgments we are told to make about ourselves, about others, about actions and things and situations. Of course Jesus is not warning against judgment per se. He is warning, instead, against hypocritical and self-serving judgments. He says we must attend to the plank in our own eyes rather than focusing on the dust in our brother’s eye. But He does not recommend that we just leave our brother there to deal with the dust on his own. He tells us to take the plank out of our own eyes first and then help with the dust. This is both a practical and moral prescription. Moral because ignoring your plank would be self-righteous and dishonest. Practical because you cannot see well enough to handle the dust problem if you’ve got a big plank sticking in your eye. Judgment is good. We are commanded to judge. But our judgments themselves must be good, and made out of love and concern for our brother.

How many of us are willing to give up anything—let alone everything? Most of us will lash out bitterly if we are asked to make any sacrifice at all, any adjustment to our lives, any change to our lifestyles. We will shriek in horror if anyone suggests, say, that we give up watching certain television shows or listening to certain music. We will explode in fury if anyone questions whether a Christian ought to watch pornography, or dress provocatively, or use profanity. We will laugh and mock and practically spit at any critic who dares to look at something we do, something we enjoy, something that gives us pleasure, and question whether it is proper. Most of us, if we are being perfectly honest, cannot think of one thing—one measly thing—that we greatly enjoy and have the means to do yet have stopped doing because we know it is inconsistent with our faith. I do not believe that I exaggerate when I say that the average American Christian has never given up one single thing for Christ.

But we are too numb. Our faith is too stagnant, too stale, too watered-down, too wide. The great paradox of our religion is that the gate to eternal life is narrow, but God is larger than the cosmos itself. To get through the narrow gate, we must cling to that vast, eternal Being. If we cling instead to smaller things—our jobs, our relationships, our ambitions, our friends, our hobbies, our phones, our pets, or anything else—then we will not fit through the narrow passage. We will find ourselves on the broad path to destruction. We are so firmly set on this ruinous path, many of us, that we don’t even think of Him most of the time. We make little or no attempt to conform our lives to His commandments or to walk the narrow path that Christ forged for us. We are too busy for that. It’s inconvenient. It’s dull. Christ says, “Pick up your cross and follow Me,” but we take it as a suggestion—just one possible way to live the Christian life. We leave our crosses on the side of the road and head back inside where it’s warm and there’s a new Netflix show to binge. We tell ourselves that we’ll be fine in the end because we are decent people and we are leading normal lives, and God cannot penalize what is normal. And Satan laughs.

Sure, we’ve come up with theological excuses for not going to church, not changing our lifestyles, not really doing anything at all. We’ve found a verse or two that justify our laziness in our minds. This is the one area of religion where we exert some effort: in finding excuses to not be religious. But our brothers and sisters in the East know nothing of these excuses. They can’t conceive of why we’d even want to find them. They look at us and say with exasperation: You can be as Christian as you want and nobody will hurt you. Nobody will kill you. You can shout about Christ from the rooftops. So why aren’t you on the rooftops? Why aren’t you shouting? Well, we might lose Facebook friends. Someone might accuse us of being weird. And, besides, if we start being really Christian then we might feel guilty about all of the gossiping we do at work, all the lies we tell, all the sexual sins we commit, all the porn we watch on our computers while our wives and children are asleep. We might feel ashamed of the fact that we drink too much and spend too much of our money on frivolous things, and that we give nothing to charity, and that we make no sacrifices at all, and that we live just like everyone else lives. That’s what’s stopping us.

It is easy to be virtuous in our world because we have adopted easy virtues. We applaud ourselves for our goodness, but it costs nothing to be “good” in modern times. A man can be good just by sitting in his living room. The couch potato is the new paragon of virtue, exceeded in goodness only by the man in a coma. Virtue has been pulled down from its lofty perch and made accessible to the inert. By this standard, the most virtuous thing on the planet is a turnip or a blade of grass. It just sits there and says nothing and does nothing and does not get in the way. The church, once the stalwart defender of real virtues, now promotes cheap and shallow ones. Christians are not often exhorted to courage, chastity, fidelity, temperance, and modesty anymore. Those virtues require action and sacrifice and intention and thought and sometimes pain. They ask you to do something for their sake, become something, be something. These are the formidable, inconvenient virtues. You must rise to them because they will not come down to you. Luckily for us, we are no longer asked to strive for those high virtues. Instead we are encouraged to be welcoming, accepting, and tolerant. The turnip virtues. Compassionate, too. Always compassionate. And I agree, of course, that a Christian ought to be welcoming, accepting, and tolerant. Certainly he must be compassionate. But these virtues have superseded and ultimately consumed all the others.

Jews and Asians are only 7 percent of the total population, and between them they dominate in fields like medicine and engineering, not to mention entrepreneurship and academics. They rarely end up in prison or gangs (this is especially true of Jews). And while they are historically poor and persecuted, they have not allowed themselves to stay in that position. Take their story and compare it to black Americans and how can we explain the canyon that separates them? I’m sure the Jesse Jacksons of the world would sooner become Holocaust deniers than admit to the real answer: Family. Education. Ambition. Family. Education. Ambition. Whenever the plight of the minority in America is discussed, you’ll notice that Jews and Asians are left out of the conversation. In fact, many school systems are now trying to figure out how to get LESS of them in advanced placement courses and prestigious colleges. They’ve become too successful, apparently. But it’s not just their success that the race mongers hate, it’s HOW they accomplished it. Their men don’t father dozens of out-of-wedlock babies with dozens of women. Their households insist on discipline and academic success. They work hard, they are driven. Asians may now be at the point where they actually enjoy preferential bias. If I’m an employer and an Asian walks in to apply for a job, I’m going to assume he’s an achiever. That’s not a stereotype, that’s called a reputation. And they’ve freaking earned it. Family. Education. Ambition. These three things really are a recipe for success. If you don’t believe me, ask the next Asian or Jew you meet. And then make sure to take care of your co-pay on the way out.

The multiplication of desires. This is what our culture has given us. It gives us things and the desire for those things. And the more attached we are to things—whether those things are physical objects, or sins, or pets, or people—the less we hunger for the real bread of eternal life (see John 6:55). We are like a man dying of malnutrition despite having a pantry full of food. He stuffed himself with soda and chips and chocolate, but it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t sustain him. And he never felt the hunger pains because he had filled his stomach with junk. Every petty and meaningless desire of ours is filled. We have so much that we even invent new desires and fulfill them, too. Every day you hear about some new fetish, some new perverse interest that has taken hold of some segment of society. And with these new fetishes always come new “rights.” We plunge into ourselves and bring to the surface every dark and depraved and strange desire we can find, and then we fight for the right to satisfy it. We not only indulge ourselves, we even feel heroic in our indulgence. We have made selfishness into a cause; a banner under which we march and sing songs of victory. All of it is empty, none of it has any substance, but we drown our souls in it, in this sea of nothingness, and God is pushed ever further to the periphery. As Jeremiah said, we have gone after empty idols and become empty ourselves; we have exchanged our glory for useless things (Jeremiah 2:5, 2:11). Our lives have become consumed by so much noise, so much commotion, so much food, so much media, so many advertisements, so many lights and sounds, and all it does is keep us focused on a million things besides the one thing that matters. We run from God into the haze of modern culture, and we lose Him somewhere in the chaos, in the noise.

I have never in my life encountered a religion as oppressive, cold, and stiff as Progressivism. I've never known a faith more eager to burn heretics at the stake. Even a fundamentalist Iranian Muslim would flinch if he came face to face with a western liberal's rigid dogmatism. I imagine that even a Saudi Arabian Islamic cleric would take one look at how American left wingers react when anyone deviates ever so slightly from their established orthodoxy, and say to himself, 'man, these people REALLY need to chill.

Therefore, if we celebrate abortion we celebrate the self-destruction of African-Americans and the dehumanization of all people.

Television is a passive experience, which makes it the perfect medium for shaping minds. The unresisting mind is most easily shaped. Especially an unresisting mind that does not realize it is being shaped. We begin to act like the people we see on TV, dress like them, speak like them, think like them; we adopt their viewpoints and priorities. We do all of this without noticing it. Five or six or seven hours a day watching TV, thirty-five or forty hours a week, two thousand hours a year, year after year—after a while, we cannot distinguish our real lives from the fantasy world we enter through the screen.

What we call “liberalism” in public discourse today is really just the worship of self.

Of course, even when tolerance and acceptance are promoted and celebrated more broadly and nonspecifically, it is still, in the end, selfish.

If liberalism were an ideological force determined to convert the masses through argument and activism, it would now consider itself victorious, and begin the less exciting task of maintaining and sustaining the “advances.” But liberalism, or progressivism, is exactly what it claims to be. It must keep moving. It must tear down walls it already tore down and vanquish enemies who’ve long since surrendered. Because it is not anchored in truth, it is not anchored at all. It cannot stay still and defend this New World it created, because it’s not the creation of something new that it’s interested in, but the destruction of something old. Progressivism is an ideology of anti’s. It

Definitions require lines of distinction. If I’m going to define the word up, for instance, then I must come up with a definition that rudely excludes down. If I want to define cow, I must have a definition that discriminates against horses and aardvarks. The “old” version of marriage drew a clear, obvious, logical, purposeful, meaningful, and objective line. What about the new? Is marriage merely a romantic agreement between two individuals who love each other? If so, that opens up a whole slew of alternate manifestations of marriage, which either leaves the definition so “open” as to fade it into oblivion, or else it requires the pioneers of this edited thing to begin making a thousand stipulations until, before long, they’re doing exactly what they accused us of doing, only they’re now doing it for increasingly arbitrary and superficial reasons.

Women are adult human females. They have XX chromosomes. They can bear children and give birth. They’re not necessarily nicer than men, but they sure are better looking. Even if you didn’t know the science or use the exact right words, you could point a woman out pretty easily. By nature, they look and act differently from men.

But we can strive toward perfection, toward holiness, toward home. That is what it means to have faith. Faith is in the striving, in the climbing, in the grasping for something we cannot yet see.

hatred in and of itself is not evil. Hatred can in fact be a good thing, even a beautiful thing. We should bear in mind that indifference, not hatred, is love’s opposite. Hatred is a part of love and a sign of its vitality. Hatred is love in its ferocious and militant form. Whether it is a good hatred or a bad hatred depends on what, precisely, it is aimed at. Hatred aimed at the cancer patient is bad. Hatred aimed at the patient’s cancer is good. Not just acceptable, or admissible, but good. If you love a person, you must hate his cancer. There is no way to love someone while being indifferent, or tolerant, toward the disease that ravages him. Hatred always seeks to annihilate. So we should not want to rid the world of hatred unless we have rid it of all the things worth annihilating. Unfortunately, we have not accomplished that task and never will. There are many ugly, terrible, deadly, revolting things in our world, and we must have a raw, raging hatred for all of them—especially sin. The Bible repeatedly speaks of this holy and righteous hatred, and commands us—not merely allows us, but commands us—to have this sort of hatred in our hearts: Psalm 97: “Let those who love the Lord hate evil.” Proverbs 8:13: “To fear the Lord is to hate evil.” Romans 12:9: “Hate what is evil, cling to what is good.” Proverbs mentions seven things that God Himself hates, and in four places in the Bible (Genesis 4:10, Genesis 17:20, Exodus 2:23, James 5:4) we are told of sins so abominable that they “cry out” to Him for vengeance. A passage in Revelation is particularly interesting: “I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people.… Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” God can find few redeeming qualities in the church in Ephesus—except for its hatred and intolerance. Those are the two things He cites positively, the two that they need not repent of. What redeeming qualities will He find in the church in America?

A modern Christian believes that believing he is a Christian is enough to make him a Christian. He thinks that his vague acknowledgment of God’s reality and of Christ’s saving work comes close enough to discipleship. He believes that belief is faith.

Atheists will point to all of this evil and use it as evidence against God’s existence. They will insist that no truly good or loving God would allow such things to happen. A good God, they say, would reach out His hand and stop evil in its tracks. They do not understand that God made us free and gave us the power to choose. Love, by its nature, requires the consent of the will. God can compel our obedience. But even He cannot force us to love Him. If there is going to be the possibility of love, if we are going to have the power and the choice to love, then there must also be the possibility of hate, and the power and the choice to hate. God can and does intervene in any moment that He chooses to prevent this or that bad thing from happening, but in order to prevent all bad things from happening—in order to rule evil out in principle—He would have to either wipe humanity from the face of the earth or convert us all into automatons. There would be no pain, no evil, no suffering. But there would be no love, either, and no joy.

have already mentioned homosexuality and gay marriage. I should probably dwell on it for a few moments because this is probably the issue, more than any other, where even faithful Christians wish to find some sort of harmony between the Christian view and the worldly view. Unfortunately, no such harmony is possible. To adopt any part of the world’s view on the question of homosexual marriage or homosexual acts, you simply have to deny, implicitly or explicitly, the truth and authority of Christianity. A person cannot go to the moon without leaving earth, no matter how much he may wish to stand on earth and the moon at the same time. In the same way, a person cannot adopt the morality of modern society without leaving the Christian faith behind. The two stand in direct contradiction to one another. You must choose one or the other, or some third option in opposition to both.

Words have meanings. If you were to search for the word “he” in the dictionary, you would find that it is, by definition, a pronoun used to refer to a male human being or animal. If you’re a male human or animal, that’s your pronoun. Or, I should say, that’s the pronoun that applies to you. You don’t own it. You can’t change it or reject it or outlaw it any more than you can change, reject, or outlaw gravity. It is what it is, you are what you are, and words mean what they mean. Your feelings do not come into play here at all. They have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the meanings of things.

As I said, there are many examples of Hollywood openly and gleefully mocking Christianity. But it’s not the open and gleeful mocking that’s really a problem. It’s easy enough to avoid watching a show where Satan is a crime fighter. What’s far more dangerous is the show or film that embeds nihilistic and hedonistic themes in a story line that never directly touches on anything religious or spiritual. And this describes the vast majority of the content churned out by Hollywood on a weekly basis. We Christians sit and absorb it into our minds and souls, rarely stopping to question the messages we are receiving. We tell ourselves that all the time spent watching TV or binging Netflix is just an “escape,” an opportunity to “turn our brains off” and “relax” for a while. The problem is that we are always escaping. Our brains spend most of the day in the “off” position. And in this submissive, malleable state, we are utterly susceptible to whatever ideas or messages Hollywood wants to feed us. Television is a passive experience, which makes it the perfect medium for shaping minds. The unresisting mind is most easily shaped. Especially an unresisting mind that does not realize it is being shaped. We begin to act like the people we see on TV, dress like them, speak like them, think like them; we adopt their viewpoints and priorities. We do all of this without noticing it. Five or six or seven hours a day watching TV, thirty-five or forty hours a week, two thousand hours a year, year after year—after a while, we cannot distinguish our real lives from the fantasy world we enter through the screen.

He speaks to us internally, in our hearts, and often His voice is no louder than a whisper, easily muffled or ignored if we aren’t paying attention. What this means is that we need to have a vibrant and active intrapersonal existence. We need to be “in touch with ourselves,” as a therapist might put it. We need to have moments of silence and quiet and contemplation. Almost all of those moments, for us, are cannibalized by social media or Netflix or cable.

But many of us Christians have decided that our entertainment choices ought to be exempt from moral scrutiny. We’ve come to the convenient conclusion that television is a neutral medium. We need not even engage with someone who suggests that a certain TV show or movie is not helpful in our Christian walk. “It’s just entertainment,” we respond with a shrug. Which is a bit like saying “It’s just food” when someone warns that a Cinnabon won’t help us lose weight. It’s one thing for us to debate which shows or movies bring us closer to God. That’s a healthy discussion. It’s quite another for Christians to claim that we shouldn’t even take such concerns into consideration. I’m willing to listen to an argument that a show I’ve written off as morally objectionable is actually edifying. But I have little patience for an argument that a show isn’t morally objectionable because it’s morally neutral.

Nothing you do is morally neutral. Your clothing, your diet, the way you speak, even the kinds of thoughts you allow yourself to think—none of these are neutral. They are for good or ill, one way or another. There certainly is no moral neutrality in the sorts of images and ideas you choose to spend several hours a day passively ingesting. You are either being hurt or helped by them. Most of the time, you’re hurt. We often pretend not to believe or understand this simple concept. When St. Paul said, “Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God,” we imagine that he meant to include a disclaimer, but somehow forgot: Whatever you do—except for the thing that you spend the majority of your free time doing, and that influences human behavior to such an extent that companies spend billions of dollars advertising through it—do it for the glory of God. Quite a boneheaded oversight on the great apostle’s part. Or else a boneheaded interpretation on ours. Here’s a question: If TV is such a neutral thing, if it’s “not a big deal,” then why do we defend our TV-watching habits so passionately? Why do we consider it “unrealistic” to curtail those habits? Because TV is not neutral. Entertainment is a force. It moves us. That’s why we value it so highly. That’s why we spend hours a day with it. That’s why actors in this country make millions of dollars. We value what they do more than we value pretty much anything else. There is much to be said about that fact, but you cannot pretend it shows TV is morally insignificant.

Our culture has many ways of forcing this particular delusion upon us, especially through the manipulation of language. We are told that people may come up with their own “preferred pronouns” and it is then our obligation to use them when referring to those persons. This is nonsense, of course. You don’t get your own “preferred pronouns” for the same reason that you don’t get your own “preferred prepositions.” These aren’t subjective terms. These are classes of words that exist to convey factual information, not feelings.

compassion is a strong and vibrant and heroic thing. Compassion comes from the Latin for “co-suffering.” To be compassionate towards others is to take on their suffering, to share in their pain in the hopes of guiding them towards a good end. Christ showed us the most perfect form of

Follow me,” says Our Lord. Keep moving. Keep going. The job is not yet done. Christ commands us to “be perfect” just as our Heavenly Father is perfect, knowing full well that we are not perfect, and in this life will never be. But we can strive toward perfection, toward holiness, toward home. That is what it means to have faith. Faith is in the striving, in the climbing, in the grasping for something we cannot yet see.

will fold acceptance and tolerance together here because they are generally treated as if interchangeable. In modern parlance they’re both just extensions of “welcoming.” To welcome is to tolerate, to tolerate is to accept. This is wrong, of course. It is possible to be welcoming toward someone without necessarily tolerating his behavior, and it is possible to tolerate someone without accepting everything he does. Our culture demands acceptance—more than that, celebration—of all lifestyles and life choices, but it often makes those demands under the guise of less intrusive sounding words like “tolerance” and “welcoming.

Of all the Christian doctrines, I find the doctrine of God’s perfect mercy the most difficult to believe, in the sense that it takes the most effort for me to believe it. But my difficulty in fully accepting this essential teaching of our faith stems from my own weakness, not a weakness in the teaching. Indeed, while the teaching is incredible and unlike anything you find in any other religion, it does make sense. It is only out of an eternal abundance of love that an all-powerful cosmic being would create human life in the first place. If He created life for any other purpose and with any other motivation, He would have realized His mistake and wiped us from the planet long ago. The fact that we’re here after millennia of greed, violence, and corruption tells us that God simply loves us, and that’s all there is to the story. But a perfect being could not love such imperfect beings without an infinite supply of mercy. One could argue that He would not be a perfect being if He lacked mercy. So the fact that He is perfectly merciful is consistent and easy to understand on an intellectual level.

Christ is there for anyone who really wants Him. Heaven is open to anyone who actually wants to go. But we only want to go to Heaven if we want a life that is completely consumed by Christ and nothing else. If we want a life that is only partly Christ, we don’t want Heaven. We may as well admit it now while there’s still time. If Christ is not close to our primary joy in life, how can we go to a place where He is the only joy? If we are content to make Christ only a part of our lives here, how can we go to a place where there is no life apart from Him? I ask these questions of myself before I ask them of anyone else. I certainly know that my life doesn’t revolve entirely around Christ at present, but the more important question I must face is this: Do I want it to? Many of us think we desire Heaven because we imagine it as a place of self-centered pleasure. We believe that the happiness of Heaven is much like the happiness we find on earth. So if we enjoy eating good food, watching movies, playing sports, whatever, we fantasize that Heaven will be like some sort of resort where we can eat all the cheesecake we want and have access to an infinite Netflix library and maybe toss the pigskin around with Johnny Unitas on a football field in the clouds. But if this is the only kind of happiness we desire—a selfish, indulgent kind of happiness—then we clearly do not desire the happiness of Heaven.

Imagine you are on a very long train with thousands of train cars in front of you. Now imagine that this train is careening off of a bridge, with one car at a time going over the edge. Perhaps you have a few minutes, a few hours—maybe, if the train is absurdly long, a few days. But your fate is set. You are going over. The train is not going anywhere but down. That is your destination. That is what life is like without God. Demanding positivity from the godless is like turning to the passenger in the seat next to you on that doomed train and saying, “Let’s just enjoy the ride.” Enjoyment would be impossible for a rational person in that situation. The only thing that would heal the despair would be news that the train is not falling over a bridge and into its own destruction—but instead transitioning to a new track entirely.

We live in a valley and death casts its shadow over us all. We can be swallowed by it any time. We are only here today because God, through supernatural effort, has kept us here. He holds death back with His hand. One day, when we have reached our conclusion, for better or worse, he will let go and let it take us. From there we will enter eternal life or eternal damnation based not on what we have done or achieved, but on where we were already going. If we were following the Evil One down into the depths, that is where we will land. But if we were following Christ up the mountain, we will ascend after death to its peak. And here’s the really beautiful and remarkable thing: it doesn’t matter how far we’ve climbed. All that matters is that we have begun. Christ does not say “get to this point here,” or “you must make it over that first peak.” He says only, Come. Start your journey now. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter who you were before. Repent of those ways, leave them down there in the dark, in the shadows, and come with Me. There is joy and glory at the top. But you must come now. There is no time to waste. A man may live his life in the shadows and be saved in the end because he took just one step up. A man may take many steps up the mountain but be destroyed in the end because he gave up too soon and started to descend back into the valley. A man may climb up, and lose his grip, and trip at certain points, and hurt his shoulder, break his leg, knock out a tooth, and still find the top at the end because he kept going in spite of it all. The main thing is just to climb.

Jesus Christ is the bridge into eternal life. We cannot make it over the abyss just by staring at Him. We must give ourselves to Him. We must take one step onto the bridge, and then another, and then another. Our knees may shake and our legs may wobble, and we may fall and trip along the way, but we will never plunge into the depths so long as we cling tightly to the One who submitted to being trampled upon by man so that we could walk through Him into Paradise.

But we complacent Christians have lost sight of the eternal hope. We talk about the need to be hopeful, we like the idea of hope, but our hope lies in things temporal. We hope for comfort and pleasure along the road. We have hopes for the day, hopes for the year, maybe even “long-term” hopes for things five or ten years down the road. But all of our hopes have expiration dates. We are constantly achieving our meager and temporary hopes, finding that they do not satisfy, and then scrambling to conjure a new hope, a new purpose, a new source of satisfaction.