Culture Friday: Truth and tribalism

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 21st of February.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is author and speaker Katie McCoy. Katie, it’s always great having all the girls together.

KATIE MCCOY: (Laughter) I’m glad to know that you’ve gotten over that moment, Nick. (Laughter)

EICHER: Vice President JD Vance appeared at CPAC and gave a stout defense of his speech a week ago in Germany. People are still talking about that. He spoke last week around this same time at the Munich Security Conference … and he took aim at Europe, accusing nations like Germany of adopting what he calls a “Soviet”-style grip on free speech. Here’s a short bit of what he said over there.

VANCE: The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America. For years, we've been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.

EICHER: By the weekend, CBS was seemingly making Vance’s point. On 60 Minutes, we saw video of German police raiding homes—more than 50 in a single day—seizing laptops and phones … enforcing the hate-speech law.

Have a listen.

AUDIO: It’s 6 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, and we were with state police as they raided this apartment in northwest Germany. Inside, six armed officers searched a suspect’s home—part of what prosecutors say is a Coordinated effort to curb online hate speech in Germany.

“What’s the typical reaction when the police show up at somebody’s door?”

“In Germany we say, ‘das würde man sagen dürfen.’ (tr., ‘people are allowed to say that’) So we are here with crimes of talking, posting on Internet.

They don’t think it was illegal?

No! They don’t think it was illegal! And they say, no, that’s my free speech. And we say, no, we have free speech as well, but it also has its limits.

EICHER: Earlier in the day, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan is interviewing Secretary of State Marco Rubio. She frames up a question in a crazy way … outright saying Nazis once “weaponized free speech” in the service of their genocidal aims.

I wonder where the line is between free speech and hate speech, Katie, and who gets to draw it. Do you think Germany’s approach exposes a cultural divide with America’s First Amendment ethos?

What does the Christian worldview say about this?

MCCOY: Well, anybody who’s been watching Face the Nation since the inauguration knows Margaret Brennan has just been having a little bit of a tough time.

You know, she’s not the first to slip into this fallacy.

Things that people don’t often know about, in the lead up to what we associate with World War II and the Nazi regime is that they didn’t fall into this. There was a gradual descent. Part of that in 1922, it was the Weimar Republic, actually, that tried to censor the Nazis, the emerging Nazi party, and it had the opposite effect. It was known as the Weimar fallacy.

Another thing that Margaret Brennan—this is kind of an embarrassing cultural revisionist history—is that Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, took over all media: all print, all radio, everything in about the mid-1930s. It had to be approved by the state and any journalist that didn’t comply was sent to a concentration camp.

So, it’s a little mystifying that she either willfully or ignorantly made this statement.

Consider some of the headlines coming out of Europe in just the last probably two or three years, you might remember the hate-speech legislation coming out of Ireland. It criminalized all “hate speech,” but didn’t bother to define what that hate speech was. It was the type of thing that we could see right away where Christians could easily be prosecuted

In Finland, that actually happened. A long-time member of the Finnish parliament, Päivi Räsänen was tried for hate speech because she pointed out Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality. This happened after a church in Finland was publicly supporting a gay pride event. She was charged under what was called agitation of a minority group under the section of war crimes and crimes against humanity, according to the Finnish criminal code.

In Britain just in the last year, a man was convicted of praying near an abortion clinic. It was essentially a thought crime, and that’s one that Vice President Vance had highlighted.

So the reality is that when you move more and more to the left (or to the extreme right, but we see this more typically on the extreme left), it requires censorship in order to work. You have to censor and stamp out everything that does not align with the political narrative.

So not only is Margaret just having a bit of a moment with history. She’s just factually wrong.

BROWN: Katie, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been health secretary for just a week, but his mere presence is provoking lots of debate. When he was sworn in a week ago, he gave a very moving speech … saying

A healthy person has 1,000 dreams. A sick person only has one,” Kennedy continued, describing what he called a “breathtaking epidemic” of chronic illness “that is disabling our people.”

60% of our population has only one dream — that they get better.”

Kennedy argued that this deeper spiritual alienation is what ”drives also the chronic disease epidemic, and the epidemics we’re seeing of depression, of suicide, of alcoholism, of drug addiction.”

I know lots of pro-lifers are concerned by RFK’s pro-abortion advocacy, but could he be on to something?

MCCOY: Very much, very much. In fact, there’s research linking loneliness and isolation to greater risk of heart disease and stroke.

Last fall, there was a study from Harvard University that surveyed 18- to 25-year-olds. Now, when you think 18 to 25, this is college, right out of college, this is the time of relatively low responsibility. It’s the time when the world should be your oyster. You’re dreaming big and you’re going for all your adventures when you’re young and full of idealism.

But here’s what the study found. It found that among 18- to 25-year-olds, nearly three in five of them, 58% reported that they lacked meaning or purpose.

Another significant portion of them said that they felt on edge, lonely, directionless—that they are trying to achieve just to achieve, but they don’t really know what they’re aiming for.

Another 45% of young adults reported a general sense that things are just falling apart. About the same number said that they had a sense of just not mattering to others. This is a significant spiritual and emotional health issue.

It’s also significant, Myrna, when we’re talking about it from here a biblically shaped worldview that this is the first generation, Gen Z, to grow up in a truly post-Christian culture. They don’t have categories like, what happens after death? They don’t have categories to understand purpose and meaning—and with that, too, on far less existential things. But they don’t have categories to understand the meaning of the importance of family, of work.

We have a generation launching into the world that they’re asking some major existential questions with little more than their feelings to guide them, and that is a major health issue.

EICHER: If you don’t live on social media, you may not know Ashley St. Clair. She’s a 26-year-old conservative influencer who recently revealed she gave birth to the 13th child of Elon Musk five months ago—allegedly. St. Clair claims she kept it private for the child’s sake until tabloid pressure forced her hand. When I saw this, I suggested WORLD Opinions tap our “other Katy” around here, Katy Faust, to write on the subject. She did.

We titled her piece “The cost of conservative hypocrisy.” She calls out conservatives who champion traditional family values yet cheer (or are at best keep silence) when allies break them. I saw some conservative personalities offering congratulations—and let’s just all agree, a baby born is clearly preferable to a baby aborted—and I found it discouraging. I know you did, too. What would’ve been the encouraging response, the proper Christian response?

MCCOY: Yeah, whenever something like this happens, it seems like there’s always a false dichotomy. In this case, the false dichotomy was either congratulations or contempt.

I think the way that we are called to respond to issues like this is compassion. So neither congratulating or having contempt, but compassion.

That’s exactly what Katy Faust’s article does. She’s the GOAT on things like this, and so she might be the “other Katy” here, but I want to be Katy Faust when I grow up.

Her article talks about compassion for the child, compassion for single mothers, who are burdened by the effects of raising a child on their own, compassion for this next generation who are looking for something real and consistent.

You know, it isn’t compassionate, it’s actually quite cruel, when we brush these things under the rug—when we don’t apply the same moral rubric because it fits our partisan politics.

You know, Nick, this reminds me of that passage in Romans that we know so well. We think of worldliness often times in terms of morality—and well we should; it’s very important—but we don’t often think about worldliness in the sense of the degree to which we reflect the world. One of the ways we as God’s people are at great risk of reflecting the world is when we allow the political partisan culture that we’re living in to affect our relationship with truth, rather than the other way around.

Romans 12 tells us not to be conformed to this world, but to be renewed in our minds—and a big liability for us is that we would allow our political tribe to shape our convictions, or at least how we express them.

You know, today we’re talking about something related to single mothers, to children outside of marriage. But this applies to every aspect of our public life and culture, and that is something that the world obviously sees. Now, how do we do that? How do we sort of thread this needle and have genuine compassion, compassion that has the courage to say what is uncomfortable in a way that is loving? We need wisdom, and one of the best passages in scripture on wisdom comes from James 3. It says that the wisdom from above God’s wisdom is full of mercy and is without partiality, and that’s what we need.

We need the wisdom from God that has mercy for people that are affected by sinful choices, and also is without partiality. This is where we have the opportunity to be salt and light, to represent another king from another kingdom, and to demonstrate that our citizenship truly is in heaven.

BROWN: Speaking of conservative hypocrisy … and we are running out of time … I want to bring this up. I continue to be alarmed by the positive attention given to the dreadful and probable criminal Andrew Tate. Evidently, the Trump administration is pressuring Romania to ease travel restrictions for Andrew and his brother Tristan Tate. These guys are facing serious charges of human trafficking and sexual misconduct. Romania, though, is holding firm, insisting their courts will decide, not foreign influence. Does the Trump White House really want to elevate these guys?

MCCOY: I hope they don’t.

My goodness, you know, here we are talking about the need to be impartial.

I certainly hope that Andrew Tate is brought to full justice according to the law. This is an opportunity again for us as believers to say that while we are very grateful for many of the policies that President Trump and his administration are enacting; for the White House to advocate that credibly accused predators would not be brought to justice is just wrong. We need to be able to say that no matter who is in the White House, no matter who is in office.

BROWN: All right, author and speaker Katie McCoy. Enjoyed the visit! Thanks, Katie.

MCCOY: Great to be with you all.

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