'Voice of Reason' scandal shows you can't make saints out of influencers

Daniel Turner• July 23, 2025

The aftermath of a scandal often reveals as much about a culture as does the scandal itself. So it was last week, when allegations surfaced against Catholic YouTuber Alex Jurado, known as "Voice of Reason", including claims of inappropriate messages to women and the grooming of a minor.

Reactions online were immediate. Some were furious. Others seemed oddly triumphant. A few declared that it demonstrated why laypeople should stay out of apologetics altogether – apparently forgetting that the Church has spent the past two decades reckoning with abuse committed by clergy.

Only those directly involved know what really happened. The rest of us are left with one appropriate response: to pray for those involved. Beyond that, speculation does little good.

Though this moment invites a broader reflection on what it reveals about our wider modern technocratic culture, including the strange ecosystem of online Catholic influencers.

It is hard to emphasise enough how strange and unprecedented this era of online influencers is. The rise of the Internet and more crucially the arrival of social media has democratised fame – and infamy – virtually to the point of insignificance.

The rise of social media has lowered the bar for visibility. Fame, once tethered to accomplishment, is now often a matter of algorithm.

This significant decrease in requirements for "virality" is having a seismic impact on us, as individuals, as a Church and as a society writ large. We use consumer-based logic in the marketplace of ideas, and then are surprised when things begin to backfire.

It is an unfortunate tendency that we have as a collective to attribute merit to public figures simply based on the size of their megaphone, rather than basing such attributions on the content being produced.

As a result, we live in a time when memes are referenced unironically by academics to explain social divisions; when potential legislation is discussed off the back of Netflix shows.

Jurado, for instance, has hundreds of thousands of followers across platforms. A generation ago, the idea that a man in his twenties producing mediocre apologetics-themed videos could wield that kind of reach would have been inconceivable. Today, it’s the norm.

This is not a swipe at Catholic content creators. Many, including Jurado, have provided accessible catechesis to those with few other resources. I have spent hours listening to the likes of Matt Fradd and Trent Horn and being better for it. Their work matters. But it’s precisely because attention is limited – and influence so easily gained – that we must think critically about where we direct it.

Too often we confuse popularity with credibility and we treat influence as a proxy for wisdom. We consume content by the metric ton and then act surprised when those in the spotlight fall short of sainthood.

None of this is unique to the Church, but the stakes are higher. Theology is not entertainment. Scandal in a parish or an apostolate can wreck faith. The attention economy does not reward quiet holiness – but the Church does.

We already have a treasury of “influencers” whose credentials are eternal – the saints. Their teachings are vetted; their lives are examined. If you must choose between a YouTube clip and a page of St Teresa or Newman – choose the latter.

And if not the saints, then silence. Put down the headphones. Take a walk. Say a Rosary. Relearn how to listen to your own thoughts. Holiness rarely announces itself through a livestream.

The Internet has given Catholic laity a powerful opportunity: to evangelise in places where the institutional Church cannot easily go. But with that comes a responsibility. To be wary of false teachers. To be wary of our own inclinations to be drawn towards big personalities rather than good and holy ones.

And a responsibility to, instead, choose substance over style. To remember that the time we give to these platforms is not refundable.

The true voices of reason – the saints, Scripture, the Magisterium – remain steady. They don’t trend. They don’t monetise. But they endure. And they are worth listening to.