Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for Living, Understanding, and Defending Your Catholic Faith. I'm Cy Kelly, your host. And one of the things we kind of have to understand, explain, and defend these days is the Christian person and the church as a whole in its involvement, in its where it's connected and where it's disconnected from politics and lots of accusations. We hear newly minted words, at least they're newly minted as far as I can tell, like Christophasist being applied to those who even in some cases just think that Christian values should be brought into the public square and shared there or encouraged in voting and that kind of thing. So, in order to, well, we wanted to talk about that and in order to have a good conversation about that, we thought we'd get a lawyer and a theologian and a very fine apologist. Joe Hejmar, hi Joe Hejmar. Hi. Thanks for coming.

Are you Christophasist? I'm not. I'm not sure anyone is. I mean, it's possible there are some people who are. The problem is the term doesn't seem to mean anything exactly.

It seems it impressionistic really, but there does seem to be, I mean, I would say, and I want to be careful about how I say this, but certainly there is a kind of fear of fascism, but there's also an active exploitation of the fear of fascism. So, we have both things going on. And so just throw Christo with that. Now, we're fear of Christianity with it. Yeah.

I mean, it really is. It's an impressionistic sort of insult, you know? It's like feminazi. You're not going to find any self-proclaimed feminazis in Christophasist. Oh, yeah. It's munching. It's a term used to joride. Another person said of beliefs. And the problem is because it's just an insult, it's hard to know what does that insult actually mean? Like, what are the tenets of fascism that you're claiming are in common with Christianity or that this person is merging some Christian belief system over here and some fascist belief system over there? What does that mean exactly? Right. That would just mean they want to use the power of the state to advance or impose a certain vision of reality. Well, then you can call everybody a fascist because every law is in some ways the advance of a particular vision of reality. Right. If I think, you know, no one is responsible for their neighbor. You should be able to drive as fast as you want. I'm going to have one set of beliefs about what the speed limit should be. If I think everyone should be concerned about their neighbor, that there's a moral duty to take public safety seriously, including for strangers you've never met, I'm going to have a different idea about the speed limit. And whatever speed limit law gets set is going to advance one or the other of those visions of reality. So regardless of whether your vision of reality is informed or influenced by your religion or whether it's coming from somewhere else, everyone has a vision of reality, one that their neighbor does not agree with in all its forms. And they try to impose that vision of reality in some way on society. And that's actually okay. Yeah. As long as you're respecting your neighbor's freedom of conscience, freedom of conscience does not mean that nobody gets to win in terms of setting what the law is. It's never been the rule that like, hey, you make a law for you and I'll make a law for me because even that kind of an article understanding of the nature of reality, I would then be imposing that anarchy on you, which is the tremendous irony. So you just can't get away from the fact that all law by its nature is the imposition of values.