Welcome to the Council of Tren Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Hey everyone, in today's episode of the Council of Tren Podcast, oh by the way I'm your

host, Catholic Answers Apologist Tren Horn, I want to reflect on an older episode from

Ben Shapiro's podcast where he interviewed the Protestant Apologist John MacArthur.

So MacArthur made a lot of claims in that interview, but one part of it that really stuck

out to me were his unhistorical swipes against the Catholic Church.

So that's what I want to talk about today. Before I do that though, just want to let you know

I'm getting over a cold, so that's why I might sound a little off in this episode.

And if you could hit the subscribe button, I would really appreciate it. It helps other channels

to get to know us, if our subscriber count grows, maybe one day get on Ben Shapiro's Sunday special

myself, who knows? Anything you could do to help out would be appreciated. So at one point in the

interview, Shapiro asked MacArthur, do you think the enlightenment was a good thing or a bad thing?

In response, MacArthur gave a kind of rambling answer that focused instead on the Protestant

Reformation and the Catholic Church. And in the process, MacArthur shared typical anti-Catholic

historical myths. He began by saying we need to look at the big picture and remember the following.

When Christianity comes and the church is founded, the church flourishes in the first century.

By the time you get to the third century and you get Constantine,

you have organizational Christianity, institutional Christianity. They decided that everybody's

going to be a Christian, so they baptize all the babies and everybody is a Christian and you have

essentially state-sponsored Christianity. This is a pretty typical argument. Many Protestants

like to claim that the fourth century pagan converts to the church caused a great apostasy.

They all joined the church for political expediency and they brought in their pagan beliefs that

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