Hello friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw.

I have in front of me a very long list of questions that my Patreon supporters have sent in and I'm going to answer about just about half of them on this public podcast and the other half I will answer in a Patreon Only podcast, which is what I do once a month.

So if you're a Patreon listener and your question is not answered on this podcast, go ahead and check your Patreon account and hopefully the Patreon Only podcast will be up in your inbox somewhere.

Okay, let's dive in. These are a wide range of questions that came in and I feel like I say this every time I do a Q&A podcast, but I'm going to say it one more time that these are incredibly hard questions.

And I will be honest with the code sort of level of confidence I have at answering these questions. The first one is a really personal one, which is which I love these I love relational kind of questions that that you guys often ask. So I'm going to say I'm going to save the name on this one.

Not say the name out loud just for the sake of an anonymity, but you say my 22 year old son is going to become Catholic and I am disappointed.

What should be my mindset and how should I deal with this? He was raised in an evangelical home.

This is a great question. Let me begin by saying I don't or I guess I just say I no longer think that Catholics aren't like saved, you know, early on in my Christian journey, I grew up in an environment where I would have said that, like, you know, Catholics because of their doctrine, they cannot be Christians.

I no longer believe that. And I would say I've got several people I know that are either Catholic or Orthodox Greek or Eastern Orthodox who are from what I could tell sold out believers in Jesus.

Obviously, I'm not Catholic. So there's reasons why I don't. There's reasons why I'm not Catholic. There's disagreements I have with Catholic teaching.

But I don't think those disagreements are significant enough to say like I don't think they're genuine followers of Jesus at all. I've had Catholics on the show talk about Jesus and yeah, maybe you didn't know their Catholic.

I don't even know I'm trying to think of a recent one actually that just came out. Yeah, I think she did say she was Catholic, but I mean, you almost wouldn't even tell, you know, unless we're talking about like our view of Pope or priesthood or something like that, you wouldn't really even tell that they're not just a standard kind of evangelical believer.

So that's where I'm coming from. So I mean, you say you're disappointed. I don't want to say don't be disappointed. Like your reaction is your reaction.

I can't control how you're reacting. Here's what I would say is if you do feel disappointed in this decision. Don't publicize your disappointment.

I mean, anytime a parent like expresses disappointment in their kids, it's typically not a good way to like bring them back or change their viewpoint. So whatever disappointment you might be feeling.

I would say definitely keep that to yourself. Don't express that to your kid. For what it's worth. I mean a lot of younger people are leading traditional forms of evangelicalism to more liturgical forms of Christianity.

And so this situation you're in is not abnormal at all. Like this is almost more normal than not. And if you really step back and look, I mean, there's aren't there things in traditional evangelicalism that we would say, oh gosh, like, yeah, I don't really love this or don't, you know, or love that.

So I mean, it's not like this person is necessarily your son is necessarily leading like a form of church. It's super awesome and totally ironed out to a way lesser form of church. Like they're, you know, we can, and I'm not, I don't want to get into, you know, debating which, which expression is more true to the Bible, whatever. I just think that both Catholicism and evangelicalism would have, you know, some resonance with biblical New Testament Christianity.

And also some departures from what the Bible envisions the church should be and look like one of the best things you can do.

Here's my, I guess, the most important piece of advice I would give is I would say I would work really hard at showing genuine curiosity about your son's journey and about Catholicism.

Get to a place where you can genuinely want to learn more about why they're becoming Catholic, learn about the Catholic faith. In my experience, a lot of the sort of criticisms I had about the Catholic church were found to be kind of inaccurate because I was basing those criticisms on people who are critics of Catholicism rather than actually asking Catholics to articulate their beliefs to me.

When I do that, I often, in the, I know it's a lot, but in the few conversations I've had Catholic friends and I said, Oh, well, tell me what you believe about this with that. And when they explain it from the position of being Catholic oftentimes, my assumptions about Catholicism were unfounded. They were founded on misunderstandings, misinterpretations or maybe cherry picking certain things from the Catholic church that a critic didn't like, you know, I don't know.

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