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<\/span><\/p>\nA few days ago<\/span> Latter-day Saint apologist Jacob Hansen of A Thoughtful Faith had a debate with noted Catholic apologist of Pints with Aquinas fame Trent Horn<\/span><\/a> that has been garnering some attention.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At the outset, I love these sorts of things. A respectful but straightforward debate about contrasting religious views can help both sides articulate their beliefs and responses better. When a faith does not face explicit doubts and pressures their scalpels become dull. Another example of this in our tradition is Stephen Robinson\u2019s excellent back and forth <\/span>How Wide the Divide?<\/span><\/i> With Craig Bloomberg. Eminently respectful but not holding anything back.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s a long, venerable tradition of structured interfaith debates; even in the Middle Ages Christian kings would sponsor religious debates between Jews and Christians in the great <\/span>\u201cdisputations<\/span><\/a>\u201d (which, given the power imbalance weren\u2019t exactly \u201canything goes” debates on the part of the Jewish rabbis), and prominent, structured debates <\/span>between Proto-Protestants and Catholics<\/span><\/a> played a vital role in the early religious fermentation of the Reformation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n However, anybody with proselytizing experience knows that the following literally never happens: two people get into a debate about this or that theological point, one person marshals their argument and convinces the other by sheer reasoning, the other person concedes, loses their faith, and converts to the other faith.<\/span><\/p>\n When somebody has a strong faith to begin with, some people see the conversion as a two-step process: 1) destroy their initial faith, and 2) rebuild it in the image of the proselytizer. That is the premise, I assume for why, for example, some Christian groups attack Latter-day Saint truth claims. However, this approach never sat well with me, and on my own mission I adhered to a strictly positive rule; always proselytize based on the Latter-day Saint message, but don\u2019t ever go on the attack against their beliefs, whether with Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses or what have you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Even if you accomplish #1, the chance that #2 is going to happen is still pretty small, but in the meantime you have destroyed something that has potentially brought a lot of meaning and purpose to somebody\u2019s life. Instead, the more likely option is that you will leave in your wake a trail of completely disaffiliated people, missing out on all the benefits that religious adherence brings. Focusing on the positive keeps open the door for conversion while not potentially destroying something so valuable in their life while not providing anything to replace it with.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The current religious ecosystem is not like some small town where half the town is Catholic and the other half of Protestant, where one side’s loss is necessarily the other\u2019s gain. Instead, there\u2019s one big black hole of secularism and disaffiliation that\u2019s eating up by both sides, so like the Chinese Communists and Nationalists putting aside their differences and joining forces during World War II to combat the Japanese, from a purely strategic perspective it is not worth the energy and resources to do cross-faith sniping when we\u2019re both being eaten alive by the same conquering force. We are not \u201closing\u201d our children to Evangelical Christianity and the Evangelicals are not \u201closing\u201d their children to the Church; rather, both of our children are becoming unchurched altogether.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There is a quote from Elder Cook I vaguely recall from when he was talking to Cardinal Dolan that I can\u2019t find the reference to for the life of me, but whether he said it or not it conveys my own sentiment. \u201cOf course, we would love it if you became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but barring that..you need to get your Mass attendance up.\u201d And this is the crux (again, whether he said it or not). It is in our interest to have a thriving religious ecosystem, and it is not zero-sum. Once the entire world is attending a religious faith then we can talk more about zero-sum, competitive dynamics, but with the on-the-ground sociological reality of today makes it clear that that approach is wrongheaded. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few days ago Latter-day Saint apologist Jacob Hansen of A Thoughtful Faith had a debate with noted Catholic apologist of Pints with Aquinas fame Trent Horn that has been garnering some attention.\u00a0 At the outset, I love these sorts of things. A respectful but straightforward debate about contrasting religious views can help both sides articulate their beliefs and responses better. When a faith does not face explicit doubts and pressures their scalpels become dull. Another example of this in our tradition is Stephen Robinson\u2019s excellent back and forth How Wide the Divide? With Craig Bloomberg. Eminently respectful but not holding anything back.\u00a0 There\u2019s a long, venerable tradition of structured interfaith debates; even in the Middle Ages Christian kings would sponsor religious debates between Jews and Christians in the great \u201cdisputations\u201d (which, given the power imbalance weren\u2019t exactly \u201canything goes” debates on the part of the Jewish rabbis), and prominent, structured debates between Proto-Protestants and Catholics played a vital role in the early religious fermentation of the Reformation.\u00a0 However, anybody with proselytizing experience knows that the following literally never happens: two people get into a debate about this or that theological point, one person marshals their argument and convinces […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comparative-religion"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/c43caa0b-cc01-481f-aad4-cbaae9ce7330.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47776"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50272,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47776\/revisions\/50272"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}