Culture Friday: Apocalypse overstated

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 14th of March.

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 John Stonestreet … president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: John, let’s start with the Southern Baptist Convention—and the big sexual-abuse investigation. The Nashville Tennessean reports this week that a two-and-a-half-year federal investigation into alleged abuse has ended without additional criminal charges. Former SBC pastor Matt Queen pled guilty—but not for abuse. His crime was to lie to the FBI about document destruction. Meanwhile, our friend, journalist Megan Basham, says this outcome simply shows there was no “abuse apocalypse” in the SBC, contra the reports, that the crisis was overstated. What’s your take on all this?

STONESTREET: Well, I do think the sense in which this crisis was overstated is as if there was something about the Southern Baptist convention that made it unique among all the other institutions made and populated by fallen humans.

The guilt that was assumed on behalf of the Southern Baptist convention, was directly connected with their advancement of certain ideas. These ideas that were assumed by critics to be harmful then was necessarily used as obvious proof that you were going to uncover something dramatic and drastic here.

It’s the game plan we see from the left by and large, and this time it was a game plan that was employed by left and left-of-center Christians.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been incidents of abuse in Southern Baptist churches, of course; that there haven’t been cover-ups, of course. But the scale that suddenly this was going to be something that was found that was unprecedented in human history made an assumption that really is a critical-theory assumption: that if you’re on the wrong side of these ideas, then you’re going to be guilty—because your ideas are really that bad. Your ideas politically supporting particular candidates or a view of women in ministry or any one of these things that were kind of all strung together and used essentially as the justification to go after this sort of thing.

I think this whole investigation and this whole story points to two things. Number one is that Christians really do self-flagellate. We do.

We have an awareness of our sin and we talk about that, and we want to hold our own institutions accountable. Human nature shows that as long as we do that well and a lot of times we don’t do that well and when individuals have unaccountable positions of authority and power, they will try to protect that. All that’s part of the story, but it’s all part of the human condition, nothing unique there for Southern Baptist.

But the other thing is that there’s something built into Christians and Christian communities where we are willing to admit fault. You don’t have that sort of same thing—and I’m using that on a very grand scale—you don’t have that at the same degree when it comes to something like public schools, when it comes to something like government overreach or government abuse and corruption. It’s not built into the ideas and then for built into the system.

So this isn’t unlike the nation of Canada going on this huge hunt for mass graves at religious schools who were coopted by the government to take care of native children, and none were found. The reputational hit is hard in those cases. It’s hard to recover what everyone then assumes happened.

But of course, Christians believe that humans are made in the image of likeness of God and every single one is infinitely valuable, so the reputation of a denomination is still worth questioning for the sake of children.

I know there’s a lot there and a little bit of time, but to me, all of those things seem to be huge factors.

BROWN: Over in Washington, D.C., city workers have painted over the giant “Black Lives Matter” lettering on what used to be known as BLM Plaza. The organization’s X account posted, “Painting over a street won’t change a [blank] thing.” That’s a cryptic comment. Are they saying a coat of paint won’t stop them … or are they saying the original BLM paint job didn’t change anything? It’s an odd thing to say.

STONESTREET: Well, yeah. I’m wondering which way that was intended as well. Like in the sense of painting over this won’t stop the movement or painting over this, you know, won’t do a thing to overturn the corruption that has been exposed in the BLM organization.

That, again, gets to the heart of why this framework, this critical-theory mood, this critical-theory framework is such a terrible framework for determinant morality.

If you assume that because of anything other than the human condition and human character that moral guilt should be assigned, you’re going to misread the situation. So we have an organization that could do no wrong because they had claimed the oppressed status doing an awful lot of things wrong—and getting really rich by doing an awful lot of things wrong. We also have the corruption that it brought to things like education, to things like corporate America, and we have seen in the last several months, a dramatic departure from those things.

Just this week, Chase Bank announced that they are no longer going to be canceling organizations that are deemed to be on the wrong side of some of these issues. So good for them to make that change. We’ve talked about how Target changed their DEI policies and all the other things that are associated with this.

In a sense, I guess that statement that painting over this street in DC really won’t change a thing because it won’t change the actual human condition. But hopefully it is a mark that some things have changed, which is the tyranny of this really bad idea.

EICHER: Before we go, I want to talk about the U.S. Department of Education. It just announced layoffs affecting nearly half the workforce—part of President Trump’s stated plan eventually to close the department. Education Secretary Linda McMahon says it’ll free up resources for students and teachers—but union officials complain this undermines public education. John, what do you think? Is the Education Department fixable? Should it be scaled back or even shut down completely, as the president wants—and if so, what happens next?

STONESTREET: Well, I think it is endable and I think that’s really where this is headed. Whether it’s reformable in between now and then is going to be another question.

But really, what you have is this sense—and that’s the outrage that you’re hearing in response—you’re not really hearing any outrage based on facts or evidence. You’re hearing excuses.

The New York Times covered this in a podcast this week about, you know, the history of the Department of Education. It was so selective and it really just missed the fundamental point, which was this was an experiment started by President Carter and it has failed.

But part of this is this kind of cultural narrative that you’re never supposed to critique anyone associated with education. You’re never supposed to look and say, “this isn’t working.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because it is an odd reality, especially when it comes to teachers. We’re all supposed to assume that all teachers have the best interests of the students at heart and in mind, that they’re really good at their job, that they’re victims of low pay and high hours and hard work, and all that sort of stuff.

You know, I think that we went through this phase when I was a kid where we started to say, you know what, everyone needs a participation trophy and the teachers started to believe this about themselves—and that should never be challenged. Look, I have family members that are educators and a lot of them do great jobs. (All my family members do great jobs. Let me tell you that.)

But I’m just going to tell you this. There’s a lot of educators that aren’t good at their job. And some of it’s not their fault.

It’s because they went to college and university and they learned how to do quote unquote education from people who didn’t know themselves how to do education that taught them instead how to do experimental social conditioning on children and that’s what they’ve been playing out.

The whole thing is built on this thing that I think at the end of the day, the secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s trying to undo, which is that this is fundamentally the government’s responsibility and the parents aren’t welcome or they’re only welcome on our terms.

That gets it completely backwards.

Children belong to parents. Sometimes parents don’t show up. Sometimes parents don’t do a good job. Sometimes parents don’t teach their kids to behave. That makes it really hard for the teachers in the classroom still doesn’t change that all things considered equal.

It’s the government that’s been invited into this process and probably doesn’t belong. Local officials have more of a place there certainly than federal officials, but it’s not the parents who are the unwelcome guest here. You’ve got to flip that whole mentality completely around and hopefully that will be at the heart at some level of the sort of control that the Department of Ed wields—and, by the way, it’ll go a long way to accomplishing the goal of cutting out government corruption and especially government waste. Clearly this has not been a successful experiment since President Carter imagined it.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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