The Mormon View of God w/ Francis Beckwith | Fr. Bonaventure Chapman & Fr. Patrick Briscoe
April 28, 2025
This transcription was generated using AI technology. Please note that there may be errors or inconsistencies.
Fr. Bonaventure
This is Father Bonaventure Chapman.
Fr. Patrick
And this is Father Patrick Briscoe.
Fr. Bonaventure
And welcome to Godsplaining. And thanks to all those who support us. If you enjoy the show, please consider making a monthly donation on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to your podcasts. This is a Guestsplaining episode. We are very delighted to welcome Professor Francis Beckwith. Professor Beckwith, welcome.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Fr. Bonaventure
Okay. Well, I know you’re going to do a little introduction as well, or you’ll be able to fill this in. But for those who don’t know you, you are prolific, I have to say lots of books, a lot of articles. But Dr. Beckwith is professor of philosophy and church state studies at Baylor University, where he serves as the associate director of the Graduate Program in Philosophy and resident scholar in Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion.
You have many books published, including you’re a convert, of course, to Catholicism, and you also have a book, one of these there’s a ton of these things that you can mention, whichever, but the one that one might be interested to our listeners as well, of the one we’re going to talk about is one in 2019 called Never Doubt Thomas: The Catholic Aquinas as Evangelical and Protestant.
That’s always great to hear. And the book we’re talking about in more and more recent books, the one we’re talking about here for Ignatius Press is a Catholic Engagement with Latter Day Saints. And this is an edited collection which you did with Richard Sherlock. So welcome. And we’re excited to talk about this this book project with about LatterDay Saints or Mormonism and anything else that comes up here.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Great. Well, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to the discussion.
Fr. Bonaventure
Great. Professor Beckwith, first off, I suppose what you were just sitting one day and you thought, you know what? Let’s do Mormonism. What a what can what how did how did this talk about what? Why Mormonism? Why discuss this? Why at this particular topic with these particular people and what you hope for with this book?
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Yeah. So there’s a kind of personal and professional history that goes into the book. So I grew up in southern Nevada, I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I actually left the Catholic Church as a kid, as a teenager. And then as you mentioned, I, returned back in 2007 , but while I was growing up in Nevada and then eventually when I went on to study philosophy, I actually became fascinated with Latter Day Saints.
Why Nevada? Well, Nevada is one of the states that is part of what is sometimes called the I-15 I corridor that goes from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. And so there were a lot of people who I grew up with who were Latter day Saints. And I was always fascinated by their their theology, their beliefs. I was never tempted to become a latter day saint, but I just thought it was so interesting how different they they the different views they held about God in Christ and Scripture, even though they used much of the same language as as sort of more conventional Nicene Christians.
Except now when I was at Fordham, I actually wanted to do my doctoral dissertation on the Mormon concept of God, and I was rightly, rightly discouraged from doing it. Not because it wasn’t an interesting topic. My professors thought it was really interesting, but they thought it would not be the best way for me to enter the job market.
So after I was done with the dissertation, which was actually on David Hume’s argument against miracles, I co authored a small book with a gentleman named Steve Parish, a evangelical philosopher at Concordia University, and it’s called The Mormon Concept of God, that was published about thirty years ago. And and so I, I sort of never lost that interest. And then in the late nineties, I was approached by two graduate students at Biola University.
Biola is an evangelical school and two students at their seminary, both of whom eventually went on to get doctorates and become professors themselves. In New Testament, they had come across that early 1990s book and they said, you and Steve Parish, about the only two evangelicals that we know of that even though you’re critical of Mormonism, you don’t engage in rhetorical flourishes, you treat them seriously.
And we kind of want to, we want to continue what you guys are doing and draw more scholars into the conversation. So we published in 2002 a book called The New Mormon Challenge, which was mostly a collection of essays. Actually, all the contributors are evangelicals. We deal with issues about the Book of Mormon, whether Mormons or Christians.
Not many, although virtually all the book would be all of the chapters would be received favorably by Catholics. We were actually intentionally trying to cast a kind of wide net among what we call Nicene Christians. And in fact, we invited two Catholic theologians to contribute to the book, and they declined because they were too busy.
Fr. Bonaventure
So, yes, sounds fair.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
So several years later, I eventually returned to the Catholic Church and I get an email from Professor Richard Sherlock at Utah State University, who I’ve known since the late nineties, and Richard, who is was Latter Day Saint, said I converted to Catholicism and let’s put together a book like you guys did with the Mormon Challenge. And so that’s, that’s the story. Great.
Fr. Patrick
You’ve mentioned a couple of times, Professor, this categorization and some of our listeners, I’m sure right there with you but but others might be might be a little unsure exactly of what it means because you made a big distinction where you were talking about Catholics as Nicene Christians and suggestion suggesting that Mormons were not Nicene Christians. Could you say just a little bit about what that means and how that’s, that’s a pretty fundamental claim. I mean, it’s a neat little sentence, right? It’s very tight, but that’s a big idea there that I’m sure many Catholics are not aware of.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Yeah. So at the Council of Nicaea, there were several separate issues that were resolved in the church having to do with the nature of Christ and his relationship to the Father. And they’re the council uses, I think, the important and rich language of Greek philosophy to help explain what it means. As we say every Sunday, the Son is substantial with the Father and as nicely and Christians, we accept that.
We accept the oneness of God. But at the same time, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father and eventually the the Holy Spirit’s role is also dealt with, obviously not as as detailed for obvious reasons, because of the dispute between areas and Athanasius. But so so were Mormons to part from that is they just simply deny that the members of the Trinity are of one substance.
They also hold that God is not outside of time, that He is a physical being, and that the unity of God is not a unity of substance, but just a unity of purpose. So it’s a radically different view of God. Now there is a scholar who’s now since passed away, Steve Webb, who was for years a professor at Wabash College in Indiana.
He was a convert to Catholicism, and one of his last works was on what he called Mormon Christianity. And he’s the one who actually really I think he’s right by saying that. Well, I don’t know if he’s right about this, but this is his view. He thinks that Mormonism is what Christianity would have turned out if it had not employed the resources of Greek philosophy to account for God’s tri-unity.
I’m not I’m not too sure about that. I’m sure Steve and I had our disagreements. He was a good friend. I think he was a little bit too sympathetic to Mormonism as a Catholic, but he was a very, very bright guy. And I actually wrote an endorsement for the book. But so that’s where I kind of got the idea from Steve that to refer to to distinguish Mormons from Nicene Christians.
Fr. Patrick
And then if I could just jump in there with a follow up, you know, because these debates circle around from time to time in various ways, right? Like there, there have been big, big discussions in various Catholic and evangelical circles about whether or not Catholics and Muslims worship the same God, for example. So these are this is a related a kind of allied question.
And so I want to put that question to you, Professor, is it fair to say that Catholics and Mormons worship the same God, or do you think that these fundamental disagreements mean that we’ve got different categories at work here?
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Yeah. So the short answer, the short and quick answer is no, I don’t believe they worship the same God. Whereas I do think that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. And I think it’s because they both have the same understanding of what constitutes a divine nature philosophically, whereas the Mormons completely reject that. So in terms of sort of doctrinally not the same God.
But having said that, do I believe that each and every individual Mormon doesn’t worship the same God? I don’t know that, right. You know, it’s like with anything concerning theology or doctrine, I don’t want to say that in order to in order to properly worship God, you have to be able to fully articulate the Nicene Creed and know exactly what each element means in its deep history.
I just think that’s this is why. Yeah. Yeah. So you think about like you know Aquinas does talk about that right that that one can have implicit faith. I think that’s the way he puts it, you guys are the Dominicans.
Fr. Bonaventure
So you know the conceptual target, conceptual, I mean obviously you love what you know in a sense that you need to have some targeting for worship particularly. But this the fine greenness of that need not be. Yeah, you don’t have to have the knowledge of a theologian to worship God. And in fact he has this beautiful line in the apostles Reflections, Apostles Creed where he talks about how the faith of a washerwoman utilizes is as powerful and more powerful as Timothy looks because of the Ascent of Belief, even though her cognitive capacities and resources are not up to the theologians because it has this sort of also, you know, fiduciary trusting capacity to it. So I think we do want to hold. You don’t have. Yeah, I don’t have it’s like I mean, well, the Eucharist too, which I want to talk about because you have a chapter on the Eucharist in here. And I couldn’t imagine what the Mormons would have to do with the Eucharist and excited about that.
But like, I mean, when they did the study, you know, the Eucharistic doctrine transplantation is, is a, is a powerful metaphysical thesis that explained the real presence of Christ. But do you need to understand scholastic metaphysics of substance, actions, relationship and can competence on the defensive quantity? You know, no you need to believe that’s Jesus and not bread anymore.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Yeah well, that’s The church accepts the sacraments of those Eastern Rite churches that never really have had an elaborate, you know, transubstantiation, you know, at least the Aristotelian version.
Fr. Bonaventure
Yeah. And it would be strange, but I mean it’s it’s not the telling Aristotle comes out you can’t even have transubstantiation, qua that. Okay but let’s not do that let’s do the question of so Mormonism as far as I can tell is they’re really great people. I remember reading it early on a book called The Natural Family: a Manifesto, which was cowritten by Alan Carlson and Paul Team Marrow.
And I was in college and I just thought this was just fantastic. It was this, you know, beautiful discussion of big families and traditional models and this kind of stuff. Third Way-ism, as you could say, you might say. And so that always struck me as being right that Mormons and Catholics alike have some of the same moral structures and practices.
We’re big family people. We care about. This kind of stuff, relied on these things. And it’s the beliefs that like our are very different and it’s a shame that like you’d think, let’s shoot some beliefs, not matter to practice, but I want to know about beliefs. Like what surprised you is the as you’ve read a lot about Mormonism and talked with Mormons and such, what misconceptions are surprises?
You know, what was your biggest surprise like? Oh, I thought they believed this, which sounded crazy. But, you know, actually, I don’t disagree with them maybe or I don’t. Yeah, like but there’s it’s not as crazy as it sounds. And this is, you know, this kind of it’s one of the maybe a misconception or two that Catholics might have or you might have had about them?
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Well, you know, I can I think I’ve over the years after I think becoming Catholic or returning to the Catholic Church has made me more sensitive to a tradition, having a variety of sources. This is something I didn’t really have as an evangelical. I was very much a sola scripturist, and so I would read Mormons or Mormon literature with an eye to sort of catching them to believe the wrong thing rather than being open to the possibility that their own theology has changed over time as as a result of not so, not nefarious reasons.
They just simply begin to maybe more better understand their own theology. And that and I think I learned a lot of that from reading Latter day Saints theologians, and there aren’t many of them. Most Latter Day Saints are very well educated in general, but in terms of of the humanities or the classics or philosophy, theology, not so much, but they do have some very well educated, very bright theologians, some of whom are friends of mine.
And one of the things that I’ve noticed in their own journeys is that they’ll go off to, let’s say, a Princeton or a Harvard or Florida or Texas for a Ph.D. in philosophy or religious studies or theology, and then realized that Mormonism is sort of outside of the sort of regular Christian traditions. And they will actually like some of the regular, more ordinary Christian writers and thinkers, both Protestant and Catholics, and try to appropriate that and then go back and read their own writers and find something in them that they may have not seen before.
And so one of the things that I think that this at least my contribution to the the chapters that I wrote for the book, as well as the introduction that I coauthored with Richard, is that I, I, I wanted to always read the Mormons with the principle of charity in it. And that’s something I think, and it’s made me better understand how the Latter day Saints will sometimes interpret their own precedents and prophets in ways that, let’s say, their predecessors did.
And so to give you an example, the late Joseph Smith Jr, the founder of Mormonism, says he said he tells this the story of how God became God. He said God was lived on his own planet, was a mortal like us, and then eventually evolved to godhood. And that sounds like, you know, if you just read that, it sounds as though that there’s a time where God was not God.
And yet if you read the Book of Mormon, which was the first of the books that are added to the canon, there’s nothing in the Book of Mormon that doesn’t sound like classical theism. That God has always been God. And so what you find is some Mormon scholars saying, look, there’s a way to read Joseph Smith where it doesn’t sound like he’s saying that, you know, a human being became God.
Well, you know, we believe God was in some ways like us and we share his nature or he but we don’t have to accept necessarily the view that he was at some time, never God or not God. So I’m not sure. So what I’ve done and this is where my writing has changed on Mormonism, is that in my chapter where I where I make my make the chapter, I primarily authored is the one where I respond to the great Mormon writer B.H. Roberts, who had debated a Jesuit priest in the early th century and had the last word.
And so my chapter called, The Long Awaited Reply to B.H. Roberts. And so one of the things I try to do in the chapter is whenever there is a disputed Mormon doctrine among scholars, I say that, you know, and it’s not and I don’t want to saddle with them with a view that they could get out of reasonably.
Fr. Bonaventure
Yeah, yeah, that’s fair.
Fr. Patrick
Well, I wanted to ask a little bit of a follow up there, because Father Bonaventure kind of prompted with the moral tradition. Do you think do you think that that is the best place to begin building this common ground? You know, you talk about how important the the principle of charity is. And I completely agree. We want to we want to, in a in a in a serious conversation, we want we want to take learned individuals as learned individuals.
Right. And is is them is the moral life really, though, the best place for beginning to build that bridge? I think instinctively that’s where many Catholics would would begin. Or are there other places where you see stronger resonance between our two traditions?
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Yeah, I think that in fact, the first book I edited back in two thousand to the New Mormon Challenge, my chapter is actually makes that very argument that that that I begin with those moral questions that Mormons and traditional Christians hold in common and talk about how we can be co belligerents and work together. And then I move from that to the question, can the Mormon view of God sustain the the moral views that they hold?
In other words, if God is God the source of morality, and is it then that you have a kind of use of road dilemma? Yep. Within Mormonism where you have morality without a without a without a source, that is a mind. So I actually use that as my way to sort of dialogue with the Mormons.
That’s one way I think another, especially with Catholics. And here I would also it would be moral, but it would be more focused on Catholic social thought. So when I wrote that chapter in , in the first book, I was an evangelical and I was mostly interested in issues concerning culture and what the Bible teaches on certain moral questions.
Now, when I return to the church, I gave a talk to the LDS Public Affairs Office in 2011 on Catholic social thought. And that’s why I bring it Up. And they just were absolutely into it. I mean, as I presented it and I talked about how Catholic social thought as we know it today really arises with Leo and Rerum Novarum and how the church is really responding to this modern view of the self.
And so you really can’t say it’s left or right. And, and I explain the anthropology behind it. And the most fascinating thing that occurred, at least the first thing that blew my mind is the every the first four or five questions were all about the climate. You know, when does a pope decide to write an encyclical kind of question?
They were sort of these kind of bureaucratic ecclesial questions and they weren’t about like, oh, can the church defend these views as correct? Because it was pretty clear from my audience they all agreed that virtually everything the church had taught. Yeah. And so and that made me think about Latter day Saints, even though we tend to at least I tend to think of them as a kind of Islam.
I think of them as sort of the Islam of Protestantism. If there could be such a thing. Yeah, but they also, because of their hierarchical structure, they are sometimes really more interested in these kind of internal church questions and just another place where we can meet the Mormons as well.
Fr. Bonaventure
Bureaucracy. Yeah, great. That’s the best meeting place in the world. Professor Beth, because I want to ask about you reflect on that. Some people have said that Mormonism is the most American of religions like it is a fundamentally American religion, you know, like Catholicism or the French religion or something. I don’t know. Protestantism is like a German or a Huguenot religion, but that a Mormonism is like something quintessentially American about it.
Do you what do you make of that? And I mean, how yeah, is that is there something to that?
Dr. Francis Beckwith
I think I think there is. I don’t know who said it, but I remember reading years ago somebody saying that Mormonism does what nobody thought was possible, merging a 19th century progressive confidence in human nature with biblical literalism, which is.
Fr. Bonaventure
Which is. That’s America. Yeah, that’s totally America. Hoover Dam and. And the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Yeah, that’s right. Or like the secular version of it is, I think Alan Blum called it nihilism with a happy face, Right.
Fr. Bonaventure
Yeah.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
You know, it’s good it’s Whereas did the religious version. Yeah I mean it’s really interesting that within Mormonism you have a very positive, very positive, confident view in human nature. It’s a I when I mentioned earlier when I spoke it in Salt Lake City to the LDS Public Affairs office, I also gave it a couple of talks at BYU and there was a young man, a doctoral student from Indiana University, I think Father Patrick said, What was it?
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Which one of you is from Indiana?
Fr. Patrick
Father Oh, yeah. Patrick from Indiana. Go Hoosiers.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
So so this this young man was a doctoral student in, I think, political science, and he was doing his doctor work in church and state issues. And he literally flew out to Provo to be my ride because he was interested in my work on church and state. And he’d gone to he had gone to BYU as an undergraduate, and he he gave me a kind of tour of Provo and went to a couple of Mormon wards.
And then I something I never noticed before. I asked him, I said, Why is it that every painting of Jesus that I see he doesn’t have any scars? Oh, interesting. You know, and he doesn’t have any in his hand. Yeah. And he said, Wow, I never thought about that before. And so there’s, there’s it’s interesting for a religion that is so physicalist in terms of its view of God and the world.
It’s very materialistic. It doesn’t believe in the immaterial realities. Yeah that that it would be so at least esthetically devoid of the physical marks of suffering and and I just and I don’t know the answer to it.
Fr. Bonaventure
It’s just it’s intentional, though. Do they miss out the marks? Right. Oh, interesting. That’s fascinating.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
And so it was great. And then he took me to the to the the cathedral in Salt Lake City, which is Catholic, which was beautiful. And it was when I walked up to the front to pray, I noticed on the top right, I asked there, there, there in there’s this big green patch and there’s words inscribed. It says, I think it’s from Galatians where Paul says, “Even if I or an angel from heaven were to preach another Gospel”
And I thought, Wow, that’s that clear. And I looked at the history actually was the one that I think the first Catholic bishop of Utah when they were designing the chapel, had that put there.
Fr. Bonaventure
I love that. That’s bold. Yeah.
Fr. Patrick
Kids would say today based.
Fr. Bonaventure
Yeah, but Professor Beckwith, Father Patrick has a particular question at the end I wanted to end on there, but I want to ask you, just following on on this ritual business, just because I mentioned it, you have a chapter in there on the Eucharist and realism and such. I mean, what in the world do the Mormons care about Eucharistic realism?
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Yeah. So we we also have a chapter on the liturgy by Rachel Lou, who’s a convert. So her chapter is kind of complementary with ours. She talks about and something that, that I didn’t really appreciate is that every LatterDay Saints Sunday service has a distribution of communion. They call it the sacrament.
Fr. Bonaventure
Okay.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
But their view of the Eucharist is very much low church Protestant. So they would be, you know, Zwinglian, I guess.
Fr. Bonaventure
Symbol, symbolic.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
This very symbolic view. So what we do in that chapter is kind of situate the Mormon view with Protestantism in terms of, you know, where it fits, and then it just explain the the Catholic view, both historically and philosophically. And in that chapter, that chapter is coauthored with my brilliant colleague, Alexandra Pruss, who is is not a scholar of Mormonism, but he is one of the great Catholic metaphysician, is alive today.
And so I kind of brought him up to speed with Mormonism, and he was able to contribute the section of the chapter where he talks about quantum physics. And I’m not sure I even understand that portion of the chapter that I coauthored.
Fr. Bonaventure
I can’t believe in real presence if you don’t understand quantum physics.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
So he gives all these sort of analogies. And so Alex is it’s wonderful that that he he’s.
Fr. Bonaventure
Great, agreed to do that really great. So he’s a man who can come up with in a philosophical conference. He’s he can always come up with a counterexample. I mean, all he’s is do you make a position is like, well, but yeah, but what if what if we think about the number of left handed termites in my room? It’s just that he, he can come up with this, you know, defeat or counterexample to any sort of proposition. It’s a classic analytic philosophy move.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Alex will sometimes knock on my door and he’ll say, Frank, I have a question. You did this a couple of times. And then I went to his blog and he would say, I just went to Beckwith’s office and we had this and it was amazing, but very bright guy, always thinking.
Fr. Patrick
Yeah, Majestic. Well, my, my, my last question, I because I what I do when I get a question about liturgy in there so I’m very glad you followed up on that one Father Bonaventure. But my last question, professor, that I want to ask about because I genuinely I don’t know what what the understanding is what what do the last days look like according to Mormonism and what what is the events.
Fr. Patrick
I do know a little bit about about the eventual promise for for eternity. But I think the last days the end times yeah the ultimate ultimate our ultimate end that that’s a great place to kind of round up our discussions.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
FII Yeah. So the Latter Day Saints have a kind of four tier afterlife. They’re the highest form of salvation, if you want to call it. That is for a mormon male to become a God of his own world and to procreate children with his wife.
Fr. Bonaventure
Okay.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
And then there is a realm of heaven for those that that have not did not were not married in the temple, who did not go through that. But they you know, they just don’t get to benefit from sort of eternal marriage. And then there are those probably people like like us who, you know, are you know, we’re not Mormons, but we’re not necessarily anti-Mormon.
So, you know, there’s a place for us. And then very few people make it to hell in the in LDS.
Fr. Bonaventure
Super optimistic. All right. Yeah.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
So it feels like yeah. So yeah, yeah.
Fr. Bonaventure
Super American. Yeah, so do I. But so do we. We don’t get planets. We’re living in other people’s planets. Oh, yeah. Okay. But the second ring doesn’t get planets either though, right? The second level is the planet. That’s okay. That makes you feel all better. All right, that’s fine. Well, Professor Beckwith, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s Mormonism is fascinating because it is this American kind of religion.
And, I mean, what if you were to leave Catholics with something? What what are we to know about it? What? What’s something we should think about with Mormonism? Like what? So, you know, kind of the so what point like, what do we have to do with them?
Dr. Francis Beckwith
I think there’s there’s things we can learn from the Latter day Saints. I think that even though they’re I think their theology is mistaken, I do think that there is an element of grace that they’ve received for whatever minimal faith they have. And they have in many ways explore avoided it far beyond their theology, should have let them, you know, if I could say such a thing, and I have great admiration for them, they I think of all religious groups in the U.S. they clearly suffered the most persecution, even more so than Catholics.
I mean, for different reasons. The practice of polygamy drew the attention of the federal government, which came very close to confiscating all their property and assets. So what they’ve built in the Great Salt Lake Basin is extraordinary. I don’t know if you’ve ever have opportunity to go to Brigham Young University and visit a you should, it’s I had a wonderful time there.
The thing that I that I that I noticed and I’m not this is years ago so I don’t know if it’s still the case that most or a large segment of the students were married with children.
Fr. Bonaventure
Yeah.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Which was really, really extraordinary. I saw undergraduates walking with baby carriages on campus, and I think that’s something Catholics may want to think about that you know, that we shouldn’t emulate the world’s understanding of putting off marriage for career, which is, you know, I think my own view, it’s not such a great idea. But it’s interesting how their emphasis on family, they’re they’re the charity that they have exhibited within their community.
I think there’s a lot of things we can learn from them.
Fr. Bonaventure
Yeah. And I think that’s the sort of moral earnestness and the seriousness they take with terms of the natural goods of the family that we Catholics sometimes don’t take us seriously. So I yeah, that’s great. Well, Professor Beckwith, thank you for discussing the book we’re talking about here is an edited collection called Catholic Engagement with Latter Day Saints.
You get it from Ignatius Press and to look up all the we didn’t talk about a bunch of the chapters of course, but all the things there and just a fine delve into America’s strangest religion perhaps one most unique one in prospect with where else. Obviously people can just Google your name and they’re going to find I promise you, tons of things, but it really is our website or any other.
Or do you are you an X or do you have your own kind of website or thing that you like to keep up to date with? Things people could find out more about you because you again prolific more than just Mormons.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Yeah. So I have a website Francis Beck with dot com. I do have an I am on X although it’s a long story but before Ellen Musk took it over I lost my account, so. Oh my.
Fr. Bonaventure
Gosh. Fantastic. Well done.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Remember that it was uploaded from afar. It was. It was something so minor, I, I Yeah, I made a joke that was picked up by Fox News, and the joke was about a a political person. And within hours, my account vanished.
Fr. Bonaventure
Oh, my.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
God. And I only had like seven thousand followers. But Fox and Friends had this on the screen. I had no idea this happened until after class. One of my high school buddies called me, says, My God, you just made Fox News. Yeah, your joke. And and and so to make a long story short, it was gone. And so I had to start over.
Fr. Bonaventure
Oh, my gosh. Fantastic. You might be the first person we’ve had on here that was banned. I’m not sure there might be others. It is God’s plane, after all. But Professor Beckwith, thank you so much for for joining us for the conversation.
Dr. Francis Beckwith
Thanks for having me.
Fr. Bonaventure
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