In 2018, late night television host and devout Christian Stephen Colbert called President Donald Trump a “heretic against reality” in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. During a recent interview on CNN, Anderson Cooper asked Colbert about those comments. Colbert delved into a theological explanation of the nature of heresy to justify where he was coming from.
“As a raised Catholic, the greatest sin is actually heresy, because not only are you astray from the right path, you’re inviting and encouraging other people to come with you on that path,” he says. “Specifically, heresy is like proselytizing for the devil. … [The punishment] is red-hot iron coffins in Dante’s Inferno. … So it’s pretty bad.”
Colbert then asserted again that Trump is committing heresy against reality, by trying to force a distorted view of reality upon others and drag them down with him.
“Our president wants to live in a fantasy world where only the way he perceives the world is the way it is, and only the things that serve his vision, and he is also trying to convince us that that is the only world which exists. It’s extremely solipsistic. But he’s also trying to invite us into this madness that he has. That’s heresy against reality. That’s proselytizing for the most selfish and basest instincts that the American people—like all people—have. But he is not appealing to the better angels of our nature.”
In September 2015, Colbert invited Trump on his show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and apologized for past disparaging comments he’d made against him. Now, when asked by Cooper, Colbert says he would not invite Trump back on his show at this time, because he would find it personally difficult to show him proper respect (which is commanded in Romans 13:7).
“It would be hard for me to be properly respectful of the office, because I think that he is so disrespectful of the office, that it’s very hard to perceive him as I would want to perceive a President in terms of their status and the dignity and the representation of the United States,” Colbert says. “So I just think for safety’s sake, it wouldn’t be a good idea.”
The full interviewed is embedded here.
