Noah Bieser, better known online as Jesus and Whatnot, has become one of the more recognizable young Catholic voices in digital apologetics. Coming from a Presbyterian and Calvinist background before entering the Catholic Church, he has spent years arguing for the papacy, the Real Presence, the Deuterocanon, Marian doctrine, and the necessity of baptism, often in long-form debates with Protestants, atheists, and Eastern Orthodox interlocutors. That work has real value. Many people first encounter a confident, Scripture-literate case for Catholicism through his videos. He takes doctrine seriously, he is willing to debate, and he is not embarrassed by the supernatural claims of the faith. Those are gifts the Church can use.
Precisely because his broader project is serious, his recent video Dancing is sinful… Most of the time deserves a careful Catholic reply rather than either uncritical applause or a dismissive eyeroll. The video is not a cartoonish “dancing is of the devil” rant. Bieser quotes St. John Vianney, the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, early Fathers, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Scripture. He grants that some dancing can be good. He distinguishes married from unmarried couples. He is especially concerned about school slow dances and the sexualization of young people on TikTok. Those concerns are not imaginary. A Catholic response should keep what is true and reject what overreaches.
The overreach is this: the video often treats mixed-sex social dancing—especially any close or “round” dancing—as if it were, in ordinary circumstances, a near occasion of sin that must be avoided “at all costs.” That tone can sound more Puritan or Jansenist than Catholic. Catholicism is not a religion of maximum suspicion toward the body. It is a religion of the Incarnation. The body is good. Joy is good. Recreation is good. Chastity governs these goods; it does not abolish them.
What the video gets right
First, dancing is not morally neutral in every form. Some dances are constructed to arouse. Some clothing is constructed to display the body as a sexual object. Some settings—dark clubs, heavy drinking, music whose lyrics are pornographic—make chastity unusually difficult. Social media dance trends have, in many cases, trained teenagers to treat their bodies as content for strangers. A Catholic who shrugs at that is not being “balanced.” He is being naive.
Second, saints and pastors have always warned about particular dances of their own time. St. John Vianney’s pastoral experience in nineteenth-century rural France was not abstract. Village dances were often late, mixed, poorly supervised, and spiritually costly. The Fathers who condemned theatrical or cultic dance were looking at pagan spectacle, not a parish hall Virginia Reel. Local councils that warned against “fashionable dances… as at present carried on” were reacting to concrete abuses of dress, hours, and manners. Those warnings still teach us something: pastors may and should condemn this dance, in this culture, when it is immodest.
Third, St. Thomas himself, whom Bieser cites, does not treat recreation as an excuse for lust. Eutrapelia—the virtue of play—is a mean. Too little recreation makes a person harsh. Too much, or the wrong kind, makes a person dissipated. Aquinas is not a 21st-century dance-floor libertine.
So the video is not wrong to say that Catholics should think harder than the surrounding culture about what they do with their bodies.
Where the argument becomes rigorist
The problem is the slide from “some dances are dangerous” to “most dancing, especially mixed dancing with contact, is to be treated as sinful or nearly so.” That is not how Catholic moral theology works.
Catholic moral theology distinguishes:
1. Acts that are intrinsically evil.
2. Acts that are good or indifferent in themselves but can become sinful by intention, circumstance, or scandal.
3. Occasions of sin that are proximate (likely to lead to sin here and now) versus remote.
Dancing belongs in the second category. Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary states the ordinary teaching plainly: “In itself dancing is perfectly licit. It may, however, become a source of evil either because of the way in which it is done or because it is an occasion of sin for some particular individual.” That is the Catholic sentence. It is not “dancing is sinful most of the time.”
Catholic Answers makes the same point in its Q&A on ballroom dancing. The Church has never issued a universal ban on ballroom dancing. The Second Plenary Council of Baltimore warned against fashionable dances as then practiced—with décolleté dress, late hours, masked balls, and a loss of delicacy—not against the waltz as a metaphysical species of sin. Protestant sects have sometimes banned dancing categorically. The Catholic Church has not.
When a creator treats Baltimore 1866, or a sixth-century disciplinary canon, or St. John Vianney’s parish policy, as if they were timeless dogmatic definitions, he is doing what traditionalists sometimes accuse liberals of doing: isolating texts from their genre. A regional council’s pastoral decree is not Lumen Gentium. A saint’s severe sermon is not the Catechism. Discipline changes. Moral principles do not. The principle is chastity and prudence. The discipline of “no public mixed dancing under pain of excommunication” is not a living law of the Latin Church.
Scripture does not support a general ban
Bieser is honest enough to list the positive texts: David before the Ark (2 Samuel 6:14), Psalm 149:3, Jeremiah 31:13, and the warning in Ecclesiastes against the seductive dancing girl. The interpretive key he offers is that biblical dances were “for the Lord,” modest, and bodily separated, whereas modern dances aim at the opposite.
That contrast is too neat.
Jeremiah 31 does not describe a liturgical ballet of same-sex groups standing three feet apart. It describes young women, young men, and old men rejoicing together in the restoration of Israel. Luke 15 puts music and dancing inside the father’s house as the image of heavenly joy at a sinner’s return. Exodus 15 is Miriam and the women with timbrels after deliverance. These texts do not give a choreography manual. They do show that rhythmic bodily joy, including among the young, can be an appropriate human and even religious response.
Ecclesiastes 9 (or the related wisdom warnings about the seductress) condemns allurements that destroy, not every festive movement. Using that verse against a modest contra dance is like using Proverbs against wine to forbid the wedding at Cana.
A Catholic reading of Scripture holds both sides: the body can praise God, and the body can become an idol. The Church does not resolve that tension by declaring most dancing suspect.
Aquinas is more permissive than the video allows
Bieser cites Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 168 on eutrapelia, then immediately hedges it until almost nothing social survives except the most antiseptic “cultural” dance. Aquinas’s actual concern is whether play is ordered to rest and cheerfulness without obscenity or cruelty. He knows that jokes and games can be sinful. He does not conclude that Christians should therefore treat ordinary festive dancing as a spiritual hazard to be avoided unless sin is “not reasonably possible.”
That last phrase is the rigorist tell. Catholic moralists do not require the absence of all reasonable possibility of sin before an activity is allowed. If they did, mixed conversation, mixed workplaces, dating, beaches, theaters, and smartphones would all fall under the same ban. The standard is whether an activity is a proximate occasion of sin for this person in these circumstances, and whether there is a proportionate reason and means of making the occasion remote.
A three-minute waltz in a well-lit hall, with defined steps, modest dress, and other couples present, is not the same moral object as grinding in a nightclub or filming a sexually suggestive TikTok. Collapsing them into “round dances / embracing / attraction to the body” flattens moral analysis.
Peter Kwasniewski’s “Go Forth in Dance” (Crisis Magazine, 2024) makes this point from inside a traditionalist milieu. Formal social dancing—country dance, contra, a restrained waltz—can teach courtesy, timing, restraint, and ease between the sexes. It is structured touch, not private groping. Young men who never learn how to stand near a woman without panic or lust do not become more chaste; they often become more awkward and more interiorly obsessed. Catholic culture historically included village dances, wedding feasts, and courtly forms. An imagination that can only see lust there is, as that essay argues, out of touch with Christian humanism.
The married/unmarried distinction is too crude
The video says the prohibition “pertains mainly to the unmarried,” while married couples “can certainly enjoy each other’s presence in the form of dance.” There is a truth here: spouses have rights to one another that the unmarried do not. But public dancing has its own rules of decency for everyone. A married couple performing bedroom intimacy on a dance floor would still be indecent. Conversely, an unmarried man and woman dancing a figured reel with brief, conventional handholds are not thereby imitating the marital act.
Dominic Prümmer’s classic Handbook of Moral Theology treats familiarity between persons contemplating marriage with the sobriety one would expect from a pre-conciliar manual: intended venereal pleasure is gravely sinful; signs of affection that are not intended as such and are not a proximate occasion can be licit; if something is only an occasional danger, the confessor does not immediately treat it as an absolute ban. That is the Catholic casuistry of real life. It is not “avoid all bodily contact between unmarried persons.”
If the standard becomes “no proximity that could possibly stir attraction,” courtship itself becomes unintelligible. Holding a hand, a formal dance, a goodbye embrace at the door—all of these can be chaste or unchaste. The Church teaches people to govern desire, not to pretend they have no bodies until the wedding night.
Saints are not a substitute for the magisterium of today
This is the methodological issue behind many internet-traditionalist videos, including this one. A catena of severe quotations looks like “the tradition.” Sometimes it is only a catena of severe quotations.
St. John Vianney is a canonized pastor of souls, not the universal ordinary of every diocese in 2026. The Cure of Ars also imposed penances and parish rules that no bishop would impose today. Origen and Tertullian said many true things and some things the Church later refused. Constantinople III’s disciplinary line on public dances does not function as a current penal canon. Benedict XV’s complaint about exotic salon dances in Sacra propediem is a papal warning about a fashion, not a definition of dancing as such.
Catholics honor the saints by receiving their end—the protection of purity—without freezing their means. The same Church that produced Vianney produced Catholic wedding receptions, Polish polkas, Mexican folklórico, Irish céilí, and centuries of court dance. A theology that can only process the first half of that history is truncated.
Social media dancing is the stronger part of the case
Here Bieser is at his best, and the criticism should be lighter. Platforms reward provocation. Young girls learn that a certain hip movement plus a trending audio equals attention. Influencers who began with relatively innocent short dances often escalate into more sexual content because the algorithm pays for it. Parents who hand a child an unfiltered phone and then act shocked are failing in their duty.
Even here, though, the remedy is formation and limits, not a metaphysics in which “moving one’s body on camera” is the newest and most evil species of dance. A high-school liturgical choir’s modest praise dance in a gym, a ballet class, or a family video of children jumping around the kitchen are not Charli D’Amelio’s business model. Moral theology lives on distinctions.
Why the Puritan note is un-Catholic
Puritanism, in the popular sense, treats created goods as guilty until proven innocent. Jansenism treated frequent communion and ordinary human cheer as spiritually dangerous. Catholicism does the opposite with created goods: they are innocent until a specific disorder is shown. The Catechism presents chastity as the successful integration of sexuality within the person, not as the subtraction of all delight (CCC 2337). It presents recreation and rest as part of a human life. It presents the body as a temple, which means it is holy, not merely a trap.
A young apologist who has seen the sexual chaos of the last fifteen years can be forgiven for overcorrecting. The culture is not modest. Schools sometimes are reckless. Pornography has deformed desire. In that climate, “just don’t dance” feels like a clean rule. Clean rules are pastorally tempting. They are also how scrupulosity is born.
Catholics already know the pattern. Some communities treat alcohol as practically forbidden because drunkenness exists. Some treat mixed swimming as forbidden because lust exists. Some treat novels, theater, or sports as worldly. Each time, a real vice is met with a false universal. The Catholic answer is virtue: temperance, modesty, custody of the eyes, honest friendship, early marriage when appropriate, and the sacraments. It is not a new commandment against the waltz.
A more Catholic way to talk about this
If Noah Bieser wanted to keep the force of his warning without the rigorist frame, the thesis would sound more like this:
- Dancing is a created good that can express joy, skill, courtship, and even thanksgiving.
- Many contemporary forms are immodest or are proximate occasions of sin, especially for the young and for those already struggling with lust.
- Parents and pastors should forbid particular events, playlists, and platforms when they are corrupting.
- Modest, structured social dancing is not forbidden by the Church and can even serve formation in courtesy.
- Clothing, music, alcohol, hours, and supervision often matter more than the name of the step.
- Married and unmarried people alike must practice public decency.
- No one is obliged to attend a dance; some people should stay away because they know their weakness. That is personal prudence, not a law for the whole Church.
That position is stricter than the average American high school and looser than the video. It is also closer to Aquinas, to the Catholic Encyclopedia, to Catholic Answers, and to the lived practice of Catholic cultures.
In praise of the work—and a request
Jesus and Whatnot exists because Noah Bieser decided, while still in high school, that Christ and the Church were worth defending in public. He has argued the Filioque, the papacy, the canon of Scripture, and the deity of Christ in front of audiences that would rather mock than listen. That is harder than posting a video about dancing. The Church needs more converts who can speak the language of the internet without dissolving doctrine into vibes.
The request is simply that the same precision he brings to Trinitarian and ecclesial debates be brought to moral theology of the sixth commandment. Quoting saints is not the same as weighing them. A local council is not a dogma. “Near occasion of sin” is a technical phrase, not a mood. And Catholicism is not safest when it most resembles a sect that is afraid of ordinary human joy.
The Word became flesh. He attended a wedding and provided the wine. He let a woman anoint his feet. He rose with a glorified body. A Church formed by those mysteries will be severe with lust and generous with legitimate gladness. That is not laxism. It is the Catholic mean.
Dancing is not the heart of the Gospel. Neither is avoiding dancing. The heart of the Gospel is Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, who claims the whole person—including the body that can kneel, work, embrace a spouse, carry a child, and, at the right time and in the right way, move for joy.
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References
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 168 (on modesty in outward movements and eutrapelia).
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2337–2359 (chastity); 1809 (temperance).
- “Dancing,” Catholic Encyclopedia, via Catholic Answers.
- Tom Nash, “No Ban on Ballroom Dancing,” Catholic Answers Q&A.
- Catholic Answers Staff, “How can your Church condone dancing?”
- John A. Hardon, S.J., “Dancing, Morality of,” Modern Catholic Dictionary.
- Second Plenary Council of Baltimore (1866), pastoral warnings on fashionable dances “as at present carried on.”
- Peter Kwasniewski, “Go Forth in Dance,” Crisis Magazine, September 9, 2024.
- Dominic M. Prümmer, O.P., Handbook of Moral Theology, on familiarity between persons of different sex.
- Scripture: Exodus 15:20; 2 Samuel 6:14; Psalm 149:3; Ecclesiastes 3:4; Jeremiah 31:4, 13; Luke 15:25.
- Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship, Dance in the Liturgy (1975), on why Western liturgical dance is generally excluded—an important distinction from social dancing outside Mass.
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