Culture Friday: A Republican big tent

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 19th of July, 2024. 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 time for Culture Friday, and joining us now is John Stonestreet. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Morning, John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Alright, John, well, we just heard news of the closing of the Republican convention, but I want to rewind a bit, back to Monday night

AUDIO: Hello. My name is Amber Rose …

I want to be careful in describing this RNC speaker, but the convention described her as a model and influencer.

The conservative Princeton professor Robby George says it a bit differently. He says if you go to her social media feed, you’ll find that what’s there “is antithetical to the values and virtues the [Republican] Party claims to stand for—and should stand for.”

Some have criticized the overall optics of the convention as moving away from those values and virtues that it’s a big-tent party now.

And with the VP selection, a real break from a free-market emphasis on economics. But I’ll talk about that on another day.

So I’d ask you, John, about the discomfort here for the Christian ordinarily drawn to the Republican Party. Can a Christian be in the party without being of the party?

STONESTREET: Well, I mean, I think that is the question, and let me just say up front that I appreciated Professor Robby George's post about Amber Rose, other than the point where he said, “Go to her social media.” Do not go to the social media feed. Let me just say that definitively. And it's important to note that these incidents that you're mentioning have additional meaning because they happened in the context of a changed RNC platform. This is not a good sign. It is a sign that what a lot of people believed, which is the major pro-life wins, and even pro-faith statements that were made by the Trump administration and the President himself in the first administration were transactional. They were, “I will do this for you. You support me.” And you know what? We got, Roe overturned. That's not a small thing. But that transactional period apparently is over. And this is a way in which Christians should have understood the limits and scope of political involvement and political action for the good that it can do, without thinking that it can do ultimate good, without kind of thinking that someone who does some things on our behalf necessarily is on our side, when you're talking about something that just seems so intrinsically pragmatic as the political process is right now. And so it's going to have to be a rethinking.

And yet, there still is a real stark contrast morally between these two parties. You know, we had the Biden administration release rules that say Christian families can't really foster unless they sign off into taking their kids to pride parades and using pronouns and so on. We know about the department heads from this administration, men who present themselves and claim to be women and advance things, including the transitioning of children that continues to be promoted by this particular official, despite the rest of the world doing serious backpedaling on it. So there's real and actual harm being done to children from unelected bureaucratic officials running these departments, particularly HHS and the Department of Education.

But and, you know, in all this too a consideration that I appreciated was one that I saw from pro-life activist Mark Newman, you know, who said, you know, a lot of pro-lifers are rightly concerned by this change in policy that they're seeing from the RNC. But do they attend a church that's ever done anything pro-life ever? In other words, if we expect more from a political party than we do our own church on these very important moral issues, a level of clarity from them that we don't expect from our own pastors, we've got something backwards.

We’ve said this from the very time that we got the Dobbs decision, that this pushes the debate back to the states, that there's more work now to be done, we're in for another 50 years, at least, or more, and the goal is that abortion becomes unthinkable, not just illegal. And if we think, then, that we can rely on a political party to deliver that, we can't. And so we need to take this relationship, we need a DTR, you know, as they used to say on my Christian college campus. That was shorthand where you would walk around the quad and “define the relationship.” And that needs to be done. It's long overdue, but it definitely needs to be done.

EICHER: John, of course there was a major, major event between now and the last time we spoke … and it was a “where-were-you-when?” moment. So where were you when you first heard of the assassination attempt on the former president and what’d you think?

STONESTREET: I was on a plane, which meant that I got better information than if I were watching live TV, because the clearest information came through X, and I was able to access that, and the live satellite TV on the plane wasn't working, or wasn't there or something. And so these details continued to emerge. And what a surreal moment. You know, I went back this past week with the help of an article that I came across that was really stunning. Until Saturday, we were in the longest span since the assassination of President Lincoln at Ford's Theater, the longest span between attempts on a president or presidential candidate. When you go back in the decades after Lincoln, it's like every 20 years or less that there's an attempt, and really the last one we had was against President Reagan. And that, that hilarious line that he said to Nancy when he came to, “Sorry, honey, I forgot to duck.” I mean, it was just Reagan doing what Reagan did. But it is surreal. And, you know, one of the things that I'm closely watching is, you know, the the response. Now look, all the calls for unity from the left, from the media left, were quickly abandoned within minutes.

EICHER: John are we talking about the rhetoric now?

We're talking about the rhetoric specifically, yeah, it was just abandoned so quickly. And the clear double standards, I mean, the hypocrisy, it's just be it's just overwhelming sometimes to watch this and you think really is very little that we can trust from the main sources of information in our culture. But an important consideration is whether there's a sense of gratitude that comes out of this from the President and from the President's supporters. This is a big deal historically, when you think about a leader who escaped something like this. And you know, we obviously live in a system where the potential is far more limited than in other situations in terms of access to real power and things like that. But it is going to be something, I think, to to really watch and to really consider and to pray for.

And, you know, I think for Christians, it's renewed, as I wrote about this past week, the need for us to talk about God's presence in the world. We live in a secular age, which means the idea of God has to be relegated to the personal and private. And then you have these things that come up which demand that we talk about God's presence. And what we should do is not so much talk about God's intervention, although I think it's clear that there was a providential hand on these events. But recognize that God's hand never leaves the human experience. This is what the Bible describes. That God is present in this world, that he creates, and he is concerned with the affairs of men. And we recognize His providence in this event, which was an incredible dodge, literally, by one, and a dramatic loss for another family in Pennsylvania. And the recognition has to be the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. That's the response to providence and God's hand and the uniquenesses in which he works that we can't always understand. And I think hopefully that that emerges in the way we talk about it, and also what we see from the President.

BROWN: John, this is slightly related. Now that Elon Musk is on-board the Trump train, he posted on his social media platform X that a new law in California was the “last straw” for him, and he’s moving another of his companies out of the state, specifically Space X.

And it has to do with this: California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law that makes his state the first in the nation to keep school districts from requiring staff to notify parents when their children are battling gender confusion.

Forget keeping parents in the loop. Teachers and other staff have to get the child’s permission to reveal that kind of information.

A spokesman for the governor said this law will protect the child-parent relationship by preventing outsiders from intervening in family matters.

If it’s true what happens in California eventually ends up happening in other parts of the country, what are we in for John?

STONESTREET: You I mean, look, you talk about the ability to actually describe something in exactly the opposite terms of what it actually is. This is precisely enabling outsiders and intervening in family matters. And last week, I met a family who's had outsiders, school officials collude together—counselors, administrators, teachers—to interfere between loving parents and their child. These were engaged parents by all indications, loving parents by all indications. And by the way, this was “flyover country,” not California. So, on one level, it's important to realize that what Newsom is doing here is what Newsom does, which is passed this incredibly progressive law, and describe it in some way that actually is factually not true.

But secondly, this is already happening. In other words, what this law does is basically say you can't, as a school official, without the student's permission, reveal this to their parents. There are school districts we already know of all across America that in practice, are already behaving this way. They're not notifying parents. They're taking students down a road to social transitioning, calling them by different names, using different pronouns. So look, in one sense, this is actually putting in law something that's already being practiced, and not just on the left Coast.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center and Host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Thanks!

STONESTREET: Thank you, both!

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