A certain Jesuit I once knew liked to write the following syllogism on the board on the first day of his introduction to Catholic theology course:
“I want to have sex with my girlfriend. The Church says I can’t. Therefore, there is no God.”
Besides grabbing the attention of his college students, forced as they were to take theology with an old celibate priest, the syllogism got to the heart of university students’ resistance to faith. God does not exist, they decided, because if he did, he would not allow them to do what they wanted.
When I ask my own introduction to theology students — many of whom attended 13 years of Catholic school before coming to college — whether there is such a thing as religious or moral truth, they say no; truth, they insist, is knowable in the areas of math and science, but religion and morality are matters of subjective opinion.
To be clear, the majority of students do not claim, as Immanuel Kant did, that moral and religious truths exist but are merely inaccessible to human reason. They claim that religious and moral truths do not exist outside of one’s subjective invention of them. Indeed, students regularly go so far as to say that the afterlife will be whatever one wants it to be: Christians can expect Jesus, Muslims can expect Allah, Buddhists can expect nirvana and materialists can expect to rot in the ground and experience nothing. “What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me,” they pronounce. The fact that they themselves are advancing a universal truth claim by saying that there is no truth escapes them.
The demands of truth
This notion that truth exists as a product of the will but not in reality is called voluntarism from the Latin, “voluntas,” meaning will. A voluntarist attitude says that things are true because I want them to be so, not because they are. Thus, one might think of a child caught in a lie who insists, “I did so eat my vegetables!” when in fact he fed them to the dog, because he wants access to dessert. Or, on a more serious level, a man might proclaim that the fetus growing within his girlfriend’s womb is just a clump of cells even though it is a developing human being. The man does not want the fetus to be a human being because then it would place a demand upon him, the demand of fatherhood.
So, how do we move forward in sharing the Faith when so many young people are steeped in this ideology?
Hardwired for truth
The good news is that voluntarism is not sustainable. The human mind is hardwired for truth, and students today still, deep down, desire to know it. Nevertheless, they are scared. The narrative they have been told is that truth claims are invented by those in power to keep certain groups oppressed and that the goal of life is to achieve the greatest degree of comfort possible.
The existence of truth would compromise one’s freedom and ease.
I propose that one of the tasks of those educating college students — and of all those who teach the Catholic faith — is to re-present the relationship between freedom and truth. Thus, for instance, while the truth that sexual union is intended to be a physical expression of the spiritual reality of two people becoming one flesh might initially strike college students as inconvenient, it ultimately frees those students to have a healthier marriage down the line and potentially better mental and physical health in the present. Truth and freedom coincide.
As Christ proclaimed, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32). May we who pass down the Catholic faith to Gen Z be deeply confident in the relationship between freedom and truth and show forth the splendor of truth to our students.
