Of Camels and Unitarians
/I remember riding through Tehran next to Kevin Barrett listening to him tell me the story of his conversion to Islam. This was probably in 2013 at the first of many conferences I would attend over the next ten years organized by the late Nader Talebzadeh, a man who brought east and west together in a way that has been sorely missed since his untimely demise. The bus was full of Iranians who were evidently listening to our conversation. I know this because when Kevin said that he had been raised as a Unitarian, I replied “All you did was add camels to your Unitarianism,” at which point the Iranians on the bus all burst out laughing.
I have nothing against camels, but as “America’s leading Catholic intellectual,” as Kevin put it, I have a congenital allergic reaction to Unitarianism and more importantly to the Puritanism which spawned the Unitarian reaction by promulgating the distorted notion of Original Sin that goes by the term innate or total depravity. Ever since Ralph Waldo Emerson gave his Harvard Divinity school address, American culture has been plagued by two equally false understandings of Original Sin. Kevin continues that great American tradition by perpetuating that misunderstanding in one of his recent articles.[i]
Kevin dives into the deep end of the theological pool by citing as his authority on matters Catholic a young man by the name of Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth is an Englishman, who converted from England’s version of Greta Thunbergism to Eastern orthodoxy, without picking up a rudimentary understanding of Christian theology along the way. Kingsnorth’s conversion, however, did allow him to dress up England’s ancestral hatred of Catholicism in theological terminology, and that led him to excoriate the Catholic Church for consigning “countless Irish babies . . . to unmarked graves and presumptive hellfire or purgatory because they were unbaptized.” I’m not sure whether presumptive hellfire is hotter than normal hellfire, but the idea that the Catholic Church sends “countless Irish babies” to hell “or purgatory” is a preposterous claim unknown in Catholic theology. To begin with, only the baptized can go to purgatory, where their souls are purged of the effects of the sins they have committed in this life. The souls in purgatory are known as the Church suffering because they have been saved and will eventually enter heaven.
Dr. E. Michael Jones and Nader Talebzadeh in Iran, FARS photo
The Catholic Church affirms that Baptism is necessary for salvation, but it also affirms that those who through no fault of their own could not know of Christ or his gospel or the requirement of Baptism will be saved by how they follow the moral law which has been engraved on their conscience. The doctrine is known as invincible ignorance, and, unfortunately, it does not apply to people like Kingsnorth, who is presumably a member in good standing of the Orthodox church even though he does not understand its theology, which is not identical to Catholic theology on Baptism and Original Sin.
In a recent interview with Ben Shapiro, Bishop Robert Barron misused the idea of invincible ignorance by applying it to Jews alive today. After Shapiro asked him “Am I going to hell?” Bishop Barron hemmed and then he hawed and then he invoked a misunderstanding of the documents of Vatican II, when he should have asked simply, “Ben, are you baptized?” Shapiro presumably would have said “no,” and at that point Bishop Barron should have said, “Ben, if you refuse to be baptized, you cannot be saved.” In doing that Bishop Barron would have established at least one Catholic principle—the necessity of Baptism for salvation—in a clear-cut case, namely, the fact that the Jewish refusal to accept Baptism denies them salvation…
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