The Priest: Lighthouse Or Culture Warrior?

Memo Writers for God: Robert Barron, Evangelicalism, and the Danger of Certainty

An essay on Robert Barron, evangelical exclusion, capitalism,
and why Christianity loses its soul when it forgets first love.

A Priest Once Held in Esteem

There was a time I held Robert Barron in the highest esteem.

He is a priest, yes. But one whose agenda now appears increasingly misaligned with the agenda of Christ.

My essay titled The Priest Is a Lighthouse was written with theologians like him in mind. Men who fancy themselves members of what I half-jokingly, half-fearfully call God’s Advisory Council. I call them memo-writers for God, a phrase I gladly borrowed from Cardinal Arinze.

They speak about God fluently. Elegantly. Endlessly.

Yet more and more, they presume to speak for Him, as though proximity to intellect, influence, or institutional authority grants permission to edit the Gospel.

The Lighthouse and the Counterfeit

True spiritual discernment does not announce itself with memos or manifestos. It stands like a lighthouse, steady, quiet, and unshowy, amid the dark and restless sea of borrowed certainty and counterfeit inspiration.

That reflection was written to expose the counterfeit, to contrast it with authentic holiness, and to call us back, not forward, to truth, integrity, and genuine Christian witness.

Above all, it calls us back to the words Christ Himself spoke in the Book of Revelation.

Remember Your First Love

Remember your first love.

That was not a suggestion. It was a warning.

Christ addressed those words to a church that was busy, orthodox, disciplined, and productive, and yet drifting. Sound doctrine remained. Correct language remained. But love had cooled.

They had not abandoned the faith. They had professionalized it.

They had laboured for God, but now they argued Scripture, reminding God, it would seem, of what Scripture says. Becoming, in the process, memo-writers for God. No longer walking humbly with Him.

Remember your first love, the Lord said. Repent. Return.

Not to cleverness.
Not to influence.
Not to proximity to power.

But to the simplicity of love. The first love. The love that listened more than it spoke. The love that trembled before mystery. The love that did not presume to advise God.

Religion Without Awe

This is the danger of religion without awe. It retains the vocabulary of faith while quietly losing its heart.

And so the call remains urgent, timeless, and merciful. Remember your first love.

A Conclusion Reached Over Time

I do not form my opinions based on a single event. I have observed Robert Barron for over ten years. I have read him. I have listened to him. I have watched the patterns.

Only in the last two years, especially after I watched an interview in which he stated flatly, “I hate wokeism,” did the picture finally come into focus for me. That was the moment of clarity.

My conclusion is not casual. It is the result of long observation.

I believe he is a white Christian nationalist, and as such, a danger to the Body of Christ. That is the first point.

Systems, Power, and the Gospel

The second point is this. I do not traffic in labels. There is nothing inherently wrong with socialism, just as there is nothing inherently good about capitalism. Systems are tools. They are judged by their fruits.

Jesus was not a capitalist.

Capitalism, especially in its modern form, centres profit, accumulation, and market efficiency. Jesus consistently warned against wealth as a rival master. You cannot serve God and Mammon.

Capitalism treats wealth as morally neutral. Jesus treated it as spiritually dangerous.

A Troubling Inversion

Have you noticed how priests like Barron seem far more concerned with:

• Defending capitalism,
• Protecting an economic system that routinely produces staggering inequality and entrenched structural injustice,
• Defending historical injustices, 

Than in speaking up plaining for 

• The poor,
• The struggling,
• The sick (advocating affordable healthcare)
• Immigrants,
• The homeless?

Have you also noticed that such priests tend to ignore moral decay in the corridors of power and only speak about it 0 loudly too amongst... you gottit - the poor the struggling, the sick (without healthcare, the immigrants, the homeless, the unloved

Such inversion of concern should trouble every serious Christian conscience.

The Gospel does not require:

• Elaborate footnotes to side with the vulnerable.
• It does not need economic justifications to recognize suffering.
• It does not hedge when naming injustice.

And yet, what we increasingly hear are defenses of systems, not cries for people. I am being quite restrained here. Very restrained.

In truth, I believe Robert Barron is not merely mistaken.
Not merely compromised....But morally dangerous.

And I do not say that lightly.

Those words are not the product of impulse or animus. They arise from:

• Sustained observation,
• From patterns rather than episodes,
• From what is emphasised, what is excused, and what is conspicuously absent.

Ideas have consequences.
Theology has consequences.
Silence, too, has consequences.

When a priest with immense reach consistently expends moral energy defending systems of power while offering only muted concern for those crushed beneath those systems, the danger is not theoretical. It is pastoral. It is ethical. It is real.

To mislead consciences while appearing faithful is a grave thing.

And that is why restraint, here, is not softness—but responsibility.

Evangelicalism and the Theology of Exclusion

At this point, it is necessary to widen the lens. I understand the viewpoint of many who subscribe to Evangelicalism.

The religion of Exclusion.

Of Exceptionalism without effort.

Of Cheap grace.

The religion with a worldview where virtue and so called good "works" are measured by how loudly one condemns sinners.....

....Sinners who, even in their own eyes, know that they are condemned by every holy book. Yet they are driven by forces, by passions they themselves cannot explain.

Paul's Hijacked Will

Even Paul was gripped by such anguish. He called himself a wretched man, lamenting:

Who will save me from this body of death?
The things I hate, I do.
And the things I love, I do not

I paraphrase.

If Paul lamented this way, then perhaps many of those we so easily condemn, on whose backs we have built entire theologies, feel exactly the same.

Yet Paul supported the killing of Christians, found grace. He encountered the Holy Spirit and took on a new nature.

I doubt any LGBTQ person in America supports the killing of Christians. So why do we act as though others could not also take on a new nature? And here is where it becomes even more uncomfortable.

It was after that transformation that Paul made his famous lament! Lamenting that his Will appeared hijacked by forces he could not control.

Hey!!!

If that could happen to St. Paul, the man who wrote Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, then how much more those we are so eager to exclude from fellowship, under the mistaken belief that we gain divine approval by condemning hopeless sinners?

Judgment, Mercy, and the Samaritan

I am as perplexed by gender reassignment as any Pharisee out there. I am also perplexed by homosexuality and same sex attraction.

But to condemn them, I cannot.

Nor will I subscribe to any organization that does.

Not because I doubt the Bible, but because, as Pope Francis said, who am I to judge?

I once wrote a piece on the Parable of the Good Samaritan and deliberately gave the Samaritan false eyelashes and lipstick, making him visibly transgender coded.

Why?

Because I wanted to understand why the Levite and the priest walked past him.

The Samaritan saw himself for what he was, yet still spent his time and treasure on the wounded man.

Why?

Because he knew God.

While the others hurried past, perhaps to meet God in the Temple, the Samaritan recognized God in a human being.

Jesus loved the Samaritans. That forced me to learn more about them.

They were hated by the Jews, though they were Jews themselves. They were the ones not carried into Babylonian captivity and who, out of necessity, intermarried with Gentiles.

But I digress.

Final Word

Bottom line: Be wary of Barron and his ilk. Be very wary. He sits on Trump’s so called religious advisory council. That alone should tell you enough.

Do not be deceived.

Don Don Kenobi
OldManInTheMolue
Molue Monologue 2026

For context and earlier reflection:
https://donkenobi.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-priest-is-lighthouse.html