A year of bizarre cultural moments

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

From the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in February to the presidential election in November, 2016 was atypical in the number and significance of its cultural milestones. John Stonestreet said this week that many of those milestones resulted from one major cultural event.

“We continue to live in the wake of sexual revolution,” he said. That cultural shift introduced two major ideas: that sex, marriage, and babies are separable and that men and woman are interchangeable.

“We have cultural implications of those two ideas that are playing themselves out all over,” Stonestreet said, pointing in particular to the recent National Geographic cover featuring a 9-year-old transgender individual.

The sexual revolution manifested itself in the American systems of law and government this year in a bizarre way, Stonestreet said. He referenced the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor, nuns who sued to protect their right not to buy contraceptives for their employees. The Department of Education’s “getting into the weeds on who goes into what bathroom” was another example, Stonestreet said.

“The rules of the sexual revolution are ideological fantasies that do not correspond with reality,” he said. “We’re basically saying that what we feel determines what is. Instead of having to conform my feelings to reality, reality has to conform to my feelings. Now we’re trying to put this sort of thinking—this fundamentally flawed, anti-real thinking—into law and public policy. That’s, I think, why it got so bizarre in so many different ways in 2016.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on the Dec. 23 edition of The World and Everything in It.