Veritate Podcast

Veritate - Christianity "Jehovah's Witnesses" and the Questions

Before I became Catholic, I could not tell the difference. Two Jehovah's Witnesses would leave my door and I had heard something about Jesus, something about the Bible, something about a better world coming. It sounded like everything I had already heard from the Baptists down the street. That was not an accident. They are fluent in a language most Americans already half-speak, and they have replaced what every word means underneath. They are organized, they are committed, and they are knocking on your door in a country where half the population has already decided they do not need organized religion. The question is not whether they are sincere. They are. The question is whether what they believe is true. Jehovah's Witnesses are not Protestant. They share no historical connection to the Reformation. Their Christology was condemned as heresy at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, twelve hundred years before Luther existed. They use a Bible produced by anonymous translators to support conclusions already reached. They answer to a Governing Body that claims to be God's sole channel of truth on earth, predicted the end of the world in 1925 and again in 1975, and told the members who sold their homes and skipped having children that they had believed too completely. This episode follows the evidence on who they are, where they came from, and what they actually believe when they knock on your door.

Veritate - Christianity "No Name" and the Questions

There are 44,000 of them in the United States. They have no shared name, no common creed, no authority above the local pastor. They call themselves just Christians. When I was an atheist, I could not figure out what they were. I visited a gymnasium, a barn, a community college classroom, and a church in Yuma, Arizona that locked the doors once you were inside. My confusion was not the problem. My confusion was the answer. This week on Veritate, we reach the end of the Reformation arc. Five hundred years of private interpretation did not fail to arrive somewhere. It succeeded. It arrived exactly where the logic was always pointing. We apply the four questions to a movement that refuses to answer them, trace the history it will not teach, and ask what it means that the largest Protestant body in America has no confession it will put on paper.

Veritate - Christianity "Episcopalian" and the Questions

The Episcopal Church kept everything. The bishops. The creeds. The apostolic succession. The sacraments. The Book of Common Prayer. It is the most Catholic-looking Protestant denomination in America, and it is also one of the most theologically progressive. That is not a contradiction. It is the result. This episode is the American continuation of the Anglican story, tracing what happens when Queen Elizabeth I's via media, her refusal to press questions to conclusions, gets transplanted into a republic with no king to enforce the ambiguity. The church of George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and eleven American presidents becomes, by the late twentieth century, a church that cannot say no to anything the culture demands. The fracture is real. The numbers are real. The property lawsuits are real. In 1960, the Episcopal Church had 3.4 million members. By 2023, it had 1.6 million. And the question the Episcopal story forces is the same one underneath every episode in this series: who decides? When there is no pope, no king, no binding confession, and the General Convention votes, whatever the majority approves becomes the teaching of the church. Jesus did not speak in the plural when he said I will build my Church. He said mine. He said one. The Episcopal story is what happens when a body that started with that claim hands the building permit to a democratic vote. The results are in.

Veritate - Christianity "Pentecostal" and the Questions

I was seven years old at a family reunion when I heard something that terrified me. Some of my family members were Pentecostal. Someone began to pray and what came out of their mouth was not a language. I did not have the framework to say that at seven. I just knew something was wrong with the sound. I speak English, Spanish, conversational Arabic, and I am working through Latin. I know what language sounds like. What I heard that day did not sound like language. It took me thirty years to understand why that mattered. The Pentecostal movement claims 700 million followers and traces its modern origins to a horse stable in Los Angeles in 1906. It is the fastest growing Christian movement in the world and the logical endpoint of the Reformation. Every tradition we have covered in this series moved authority one step further from the Church and one step closer to the individual. The Pentecostals completed that journey. The authority lives in your experience. In your body. In the sound coming out of your mouth. This episode asks the question a terrified seven year old already knew to ask. How do you verify that?

Veritate - Christianity "Presbyterian" and the Questions

John Knox would not move. He stood before a weeping queen and held his ground, certain he had followed the argument to its rightful end. He had taken Calvin's theology from Geneva to Edinburgh and built the most disciplined, most intellectually rigorous expression of Reformed Christianity the Reformation ever produced. The Westminster Confession. The regulative principle. Elder governance. A faith stripped of everything that could not be proven directly from Scripture. It was serious. It was coherent. And it was not enough. The Presbyterian tradition answers every question the Reformation raised except the one that matters most: who decides? Westminster says the assembly decides. Then the assembly splits. Then the new assembly decides. Then that one splits. Five hundred years of serious, faithful, confessional Presbyterians following the same principle Knox carried out of Geneva, arriving at fifteen denominations and counting. I came to faith through evidence, not inheritance. I followed the argument. And the argument did not lead me to a confession. It led me to the Church that was here before Knox built his. There is only one way this story ends. We are getting there.