I find it somewhat telling that Robert Barron is involved in public education about apologetics. That's not what I know him for.

I know him is one of the most hateful Catholic leaders in the United States. I know him as somebody who has twisted the lovingkindness message of Jesus into an instrument of persecution and oppression.

He's one of the most implacable anti-LGBTQ leaders in the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, and that's really saying something. A strong majority of US Catholic bishops are consumed with hatred for transgender and gay people — hatred they have leveraged to almost unbelievable effect.

For example, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops lobbied Congress in the autumn of 2020 to remove suicide-prevention services to transgender and gay people from the proposed national suicide hotline. The bishops' lobbying failed, with Congress passing the law in a highly unusual bipartisan move. Catholic lay people working as journalists for a Catholic newspaper discovered the lobbying and broke the news in a rather horrified tone, challenging Barron and his buddies to stop being so evil. Actually, their words characterized the bishops' behavior as, "a stomach churning new low."

https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/catholic-bishops-opposed-suicide-prevention-hotline-why

So, apologetics? The absolute uninformed silliness of the Kalam Cosmological argument?

Yeah, that's all absurd and ignorant — specious arguments for willfully ignorant people — but few people pondering the moral reality of Christianity today really care about apologetics, in my opinion anyway.

They're more interested in what religious institutions are doing, whether they're living out Jesus's message of lovingkindness. (To be clear, I'm an atheist and I'm not endorsing Christian teachings. But I do like some of the teachings of Jesus that have come down to us.)

Americans are responding en masse to what religious institutions are doing. In particular, Catholic pews are emptying out at an astonishing rate.

Mostly, I think, that's because people of good will and decency reject the hatred and persecution urged and modeled by depraved monsters like Robert Barron.

Because nobody needs sophistry to understand that opposing suicide prevention for queer people is monstrous.