Culture Friday: A sad juxtaposition

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s the 17th day of February 2023.

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!

Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

BROWN: John, I know you are pretty active in Christian worldview work on campuses, so I’m sure you’ve heard about what’s happening on the Asbury campus in Kentucky. A regularly scheduled chapel service did not end. Ten days later students are still there praying, worshiping. Other students have joined.

As a matter of fact, we have a WORLD reporter there on the ground who is putting together a report for us. Our Zoe Schimke is there. She shared with us one of her early interviews and I’ll just play a few seconds. She’s talking with student Ashton Montgomery, who’ll describe an email from Asbury President Kevin Brown that went out to students:

MONTGOMERY: I opened up my email and President Brown had sent an email saying that, like, worship was still going on and anybody who felt called to join could do so. And I was there for 12 hours that day. And so I'm looking forward to— I'm not looking forward to this being over. I'm looking forward to seeing the fruit of it once it's over.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Are you ready to call it a revival?

STONESTREET: I think the question is, are the people that are there and experiencing it ready to call it a revival of their own hearts? And it seems to be there's an awful lot of people there that are ready to use that language for what God is doing in their own hearts. And you know, that's the thing is we want a corporate revival that sweeps the nation. But that is the result of the revival of individuals. This is one of the things that's so interesting about American history is that revivals have been so instrumental in our history and to our history. And from massive revivals to what we call awakenings, which are really the sum total of a bunch of revivals kind of added together. And there's this sense that they come and go, that it's a work of the Spirit, that they're not without accesses. It's kind of what Jesus said that the wheat and the tares would grow together and we see at the end what happens. But we've prayed for this. Many people have prayed for this. In fact, the last time I was on the campus of Asbury to speak in that chapel there, there were a number of people who remembered that this had happened in 1970. And there was a number of people that said that they knew people that had been praying ever since that it would happen again. So here we are 50 years later and it's happened again. It's an answer to their prayers. It's such a part of that institutional memory of that place. Anybody that's been on Asbury's campus, my guess, has heard that story from 1970. And now anybody over the next several decades will hear the story of 2023. So I'm just praying. I'm praying against the enemy, who's particularly good at twisting things that are good and praying that this would continue. There are early reports of that Lee University and Cedarville University kind of catching the wind. And I mean, there's so so much interesting here for me, Myrna, in terms of the history of revivals, the unique history of revivals in the United States and the unique history of revivals among college students. For example, one of the centers of the Second Great Awakening was a revival that came out of Yale under the leadership of Timothy Dwight who was a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. It's just an amazing connection. And part of that history and Yale students went over and evangelized Harvard students as a result, and what did we see? We look at Yale today and it's certainly no bastion of Christian conviction. And so we need both the stability of institution building around what is true and good in the Gospel. And we also pray and beg God to move in our hearts and to change them. And I think that's happening in a lot of hearts right now at Asbury.

EICHER: I have zero transition to this next story, and I feel a little sorry bringing it up, but it seems so important: we now have a highly credible whistleblower from a transgender clinic right here in my town, St. Louis. Jamie Reed is her name. She describes herself, and this is not my word, it is her word. She describes herself as queer and to the left of Bernie Sanders politically. Jamie Reed is blowing the whistle on the practices of the transgender clinic where she worked up until November of last year.

Writing on Bari Weiss’s site “The Free Press,” Reed said, and I’m quoting here: “Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.”

Going on some more:

“Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.”

This is a massive scandal. Reed appeared on a podcast conversation with Bari Weiss and she described how the transgender clinic operated. Here’s about 90 seconds of really candid commentary. Have a listen:

REED: You're putting these parents in a non-winning situation. You're putting their seriously distressed child in front of them, the child who believes that if they could have just had this medication, these hormones last week, that their entire world would now be rainbows and glitter. And you're putting that kid in front of the parent and the parent is then put on the spot. And the parent is who's going to have to go home with the kid at the end of the day. So none of the way that the system worked, was actually looking out for how do we, how do we build this family up and keep them intact and whole? How do we empower the parents to be parents? And to be able to say no. And the thing that really irritated me often is when the parents would say no—to me, parent says, "No," you back off, you're done. We're not talking about this anymore. And that was not what happened. The parents said, no, these doctors would push and push and push and push, and every single visit, it would be push some more. And they would talk in the team meetings about how Oh, we just like they were just convinced, like if we could just convince them if we could just make it happen. And there were also plenty of parents who straight up said to us when they were giving consent, they would say things like you're going to do this anyway. I don't really have a choice. I feel like I've been bullied. They would straight up tell us this. I feel like I've been bullied into saying yes. And somehow the doctors thought that that was a true, good consent.

As I say, I hate to juxtapose this against such a hopeful story in Wilmore, Kentucky, but, again, this seems like it warrants an investigation by people with subpoena power.

STONESTREET: Well, I felt the juxtaposition to your question here, Nick, I felt the juxtaposition this week of all kinds of things as I was continuing to look at this revival, awakening, whatever juxtaposed to this whistleblower story. And I think it's also important to note that something profound has happened in this whistleblower story. And I would say it is a work of God, not because this person identifies to be in Christ or anything like that, but when evil is allowed to remain hidden, evil flourishes. And one of the marks of what God is doing is exposing evil. We've been told for a long time this isn't happening, this isn't happening, this isn't happening. And it was almost as if this whistleblower, a former caseworker at this gender clinic at a children's hospital there in St. Louis, went down the line and said, Yep, this is happening. This part is happening. That part is happening. For example, usurping parental rights. For example, the contagion, particularly among teenage girls. This caseworker mentions that up until 2015, the vast majority of the cases that they saw were boys. And then after 2015 something happened, and it was a bunch of girls. Something else exposed by the whistleblower there at that clinic is that so-called reversible treatments actually have long term effects and damage, and talking specifically about just additional levels of testosterone for young girls. Another thing that we saw come out of this whistleblower report is that other mental health issues that were present, and where we know a lot more about them than we know anything about gender dysphoria, that these things were being ignored, and these kids were being essentially fast tracked into what Abigail Shrier has rightly called irreversible damage. And I'm talking about mental issues like autism. I mean things that have a much longer medical history and are significant. The sheer number of girls struggling with gender dysphoria who are on the spectrum of autism. I mean, another thing that was revealed by the whistleblower is that this has exploded recently, that at the beginning of her career, she was seeing maybe 10 cases a month. Now there are well over 50 cases a month, and 70% of those are young women who have been told that they were born into the wrong body and have feelings of hating themselves. So again, this is stuff that has been sneaking out here, there, and everywhere. And yet we've been told it's not happening. It's not happening. It's not happening. Well, look, there's a lot to be said here. I'd love to come to one week either on Breakpoint or Culture Friday and not have to talk about the issue because I'm really tired of talking about it. But these are really important developments right now. And the whistleblower story in particular, I think is very, very important.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.