Culture Friday: Cultural landmarks

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday the 16th of August, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

It’s Culture Friday, and joining us now is John Stonestreet. He’s president of the Colson Center. He’s host of the Breakpoint podcast. And he’s here now. Good morning, John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: John, a couple of weeks ago we talked about the different groups of people coming together to support the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris. Well, make room for another one: Evangelicals for Harris

WORLD Opinion’s contributor, Denny Burk wrote about this group of Christians who aim to convince evangelicals of Harris’ walk with Jesus. Here’s the thing: on their website, an entire page is devoted to her faith story, a story that never mentions Jesus. Never.

Conversely, Donald Trump doesn’t give evidence that he is a Christian, even though he says he’s closer to God after his near brush with death. But John, is that even the point? Are we looking for the most credible Christian testimony or are we looking for something else? What’s the best way to think about this?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, I think it's notable that many people have said, you know, historically, people of faith, Christian leaders, that, you know, what you want is the best person for the job when you're talking about a political candidate. And if the better person for the job is not a Christian, then that's the leader that you want to have. That's not really relevant to this conversation, I don't think.

However, given that the list of Evangelicals for Harris really just shows that we need to either lose the word evangelical or finally define it once and for all. Because it means anything to everyone. I mean, the headline of the website, evangelicalsforharris.com and I quote here, “Faithful, compassionate evangelicals exercising our God-given citizenship.” I mean, they should be proud of that humility, how faithful and compassionate they are. I mean, that's, you know, if people are going to take seriously the teaching of Jesus, which is what they say over and over and over, there maybe should be something here about not having your, you know, righteousness worn out and announced in public, because that's literally the headline right on the center of the website. Not to mention the list of folks in this group includes those who can't even in any sort of sense to define the word evangelical. Change that to even define the word Christian, could be considered Christian.

If Christian has anything to do with believing who Jesus said he was, that the church has historically understood Jesus to be, for example, the work and actually paying for our sin on the cross, literally rising from the dead, that the Gospel accounts of Jesus are things to be believed, then a lot of these folks actually don't belong. I mean, there's individuals on this list who think Jesus sinned, who think Jesus was homophobic and repented of his homophobia, and this is the sort of bizarre stuff you see they post of themselves, of course, on X and Instagram.

But by and large, it's basically made up of a rehash list of the Biden Evangelicals for Biden, plus extras who really don't even fall into the category of Christian, much less evangelical in any sort of historic doctrinal sense. This movement is certainly not helpful, because at some level, you've got to figure out how the progressive ideology that the Harris campaign and Harris the candidate has so clearly aligned, how that aligns in any sense whatsoever with evangelicalism. And it doesn't.

EICHER: John, it’s been ten years since the death of Michael Brown, Jr. In 2014 he was killed in Ferguson, Missouri by a police officer, after a fight with that officer. The incident sparked protests across the country.

In Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, the anniversary was remembered one week ago. One of the Black Lives Matter local organizers was Cori Bush, now the member of Congress from the district.

CORI BUSH: There has still not been accountability. There has still not been justice for this family. There has still not been change. Not enough for black folks to feel it.

She’s complaining that a local grand jury declined to indict the officer in the killing and the Obama justice department declined to bring federal charges.

Speaking of Cori Bush, she just got thrown out of office, as reported by WORLD’s Leo Briceno this week.

What do you think John, have we learned anything in ten years? How do we move forward from this?

STONESTREET: Yeah. I mean, it is probably time to do a kind of a “you are here” moment on this whole thing, on all sides of it. I mean, for example, here we are at a time when the Black Lives Matter organization is really in shambles, racked by scandal, leaders who clearly abused the system, took lots of money. You've got narratives, narratives that remain firmly embedded, even though, to your point, in the Michael Brown case and in a few others, the details, you know, don't always clearly fit the narrative. And then, of course, overlaying all this is the dominant mood of American culture, which we've called here, I've called here the critical theory mood. And that is that this has become the theory of everything, to completely see who we are as people and others according to race or tribe, some sort of group that fits into either in a category of being in oppressed or being an oppressed.

And you know, at the end of the day when that oppressed-oppressor narrative or framework becomes the theory of everything through which we see everything, rather than something that happens in a fallen world, but not who we are as created in the image of God and also not a permanent situation based on these kind of characteristics by which, you know, we didn't choose and all that that means, it's going to be hard to get anything right. In reaction to what is a mistake in ideology, we've failed to actually think well about what it means to be human in our racial identities. So, we have kind of entire movements, many of them politicized, which basically say any mention of systemic evil is just a form of critical race theory.

Well, that's not the case. Abortion is a form of systemic evil. In fact, I would say abortion, the way it's implemented in America, is a form of systemic racism. And so we know from our Biblical categories that sin can be, is both personal and sourced personally in human behavior, but it can take on systemic realities. And and our inability to think about that and talk about that means we haven't been able to really move forward in the conversation. And you know, part of that is being force fed CRT in every different way. And people are tired of being told that their race or something else is what determines who they are and everything about them. And it hasn't gone well. At the same time, Christians need to have Biblical thinking and Biblical categories on this. And hopefully, you know, we can show a better way forward. Because I do think we're seeing a bit of exhaustion, at least in these theories.

BROWN: Another anniversary to note.

It’s coming up on 35 years since Dr. Jack Kevorkian performed his first public-assisted suicide using a euthanasia device he devised and constructed.

Today a 3-D printed suicide machine has been developed, dubbed the Tesla of Euthanasia. It’s slick and high-tech. New look, same outcome.

At least one country has said, “No, we don’t want it.” Is this a positive sign or is there something under the surface we need to be concerned about?

STONESTREET: I don't know if it's even on the surface anymore, but yes, this is something to be deeply concerned about. The movement towards so called Death with Dignity, or, as the Canadians have called it, medical assistance in dying, which isn't medical, it's not assistance, and it's not in dying. It's elimination and it's to die, not in dying. The whole thing is upside down, but it has more goodwill, more social momentum than ever before.

And I’ve got to be honest. I'm a little cynical on this one. I'm a little frustrated on this one. I appreciate it. I didn't remember that it had been 35 years since Kevorkian. But you remember back then, he was pretty widely considered to be an outlier doctor of death. We named him that, right? And now what he was advocating for has, is now legal in far more states than then, and also just in the last five years in more states.

And for me, it'll go back to what happened in my state. I think the critical moment isn't so much that Jack Kevorkian made headlines when he did. I think a way more critical moment in this whole thing, at least in my state, was when it was put on the ballot and a group of us, a group of ministries, got together and we put together an incredible set of resources, everything from full on, have a whole service on talking about the sanctity of life at the end of life, to here's a wonderful testimony from the husband of the wonderful late Kara Tippett and her story and why she did not choose what Brittany Maynard chose. All these were headline stories about this at the time, and having conversations with two pastors in the state. Grateful for my pastor who was unequivocal in his support on this. But pastors of the two largest churches in my area both told me that it was too political and they weren't going to get involved.

So, when I think about this and why we're at where we're at, Kevorkian, honestly, was a blip in the radar. It has been the thoroughgoing embrace of a culture of death that has happened since then, and also the failure of the church to prevent that in any meaningful way. Mainly because of its capitulation to a compartmentalized, truncated faith where certain things are Christian. We talk about those things on Sunday, and anything not having to do with personal morality or my personal sense of meaning and fulfillment. We won't touch that, even if it involves the threat of real lives.

So, that's what I remember. That's where I stand. And I think that's what we'll look back for. You know, what was it Francis Schaeffer famously said, that abortion is legal with the approval of the church. I think he said something along those lines. And I think that could be repeated, that if doctor-assisted suicide in all of its forms and all of its nomenclatures and false names ever does become the law of the land any more than it already has, it'll be because the church granted permission with its silence.

EICHER: Alright, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thank you John!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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