Culture Friday: Back to Minneapolis

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, January 30th. 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. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, President of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well John, what’s happening in Minneapolis right now with federal immigration agents and clashes on the streets, you know, how one describes those things tends to reveal where one’s assumptions begin. 

Now, some describe these as “protests,” others will take a look at the same thing and call it "interference with immigration enforcement." In both cases, you've got polarization, you've got partial video narratives, you've got people deciding what happened before all the facts are in.

So let's go back six years: same city, Minneapolis, it was at the center of heated debates over George Floyd and policing. And now, after two people were killed by federal officers, many are saying this “feels like 2020 all over again”—not just the unrest, but the snap judgments the deep divides...

So from your vantage point John, what do you think this moment says about whether we actually learned anything over this time? Or are we just doing 2020 all over again?

STONESTREET: I think that’s an accurate take, that we’re doing 2020 over again. There was no evidence that we learned lessons after 2020. We still are infected as a culture with what I’ve called, in other places, the "critical theory mood"—just kind of seeing everything through these divisions between groupings of people—where the mistakes in immigration policy over past administrations has to now be reckoned with.

And we’re also seeing that that critical theory mood that I mentioned a second ago, is live and active in the way many people think, not just the left—although it’s most obvious, I think, from the left—but on the right. You know, there’s the idea that if an ICE officer did it, then it must have been done right.

And I think what we have is two incidents where American citizens were killed. That’s tragic, that should always be tragic, and we shouldn’t immediately decide to make the victim some kind of terrible person up front without knowing all the details any more than we should make the shooter that way.

But we haven’t learned any of those lessons. I mean, we’re back to calling everybody Nazis, and we’re back to justifying violence. And it reveals something beyond the events themselves—the deep brokenness, the deep lawlessness that are affecting our ability to know what actually happened.

When you’re dealing with such a broken situation—dealing with criminals, trying to get them out of the country—then you have a big mess. We shouldn’t expect—when you also have a group of agitation that’s taking place to a whole other level than just protest,  protesting is absolutely a protected right—the kind of things that we have seen create an environment where, of course, something’s going to go wrong.

Of course, people are going to do—we shouldn’t excuse it, we shouldn’t say that if someone is killed unjustly, then just because they’re on our side, then it’s okay. But you can’t also just look at the event. And both sides have looked for specific anecdotes to prove that they’re right.

And so it’s just a mess. And the reporting of the events reveal just as much about the kind of culture we have as the events themselves.

EICHER: Well John, just to clarify though: had we learned lessons from back in 2020, what would they have been, and how might the current situation be any different?

STONESTREET: Well, I think one of the lessons we can learn is not to be duped by media reports of virtue immediately from people who actually are being kind of coordinated, orchestrated, funded, and sent out on various missions.

The second lesson is that you have to keep the law in a lawful way. And when you allow a situation to get to such a high level of stress as this one has in that city, you’re creating the situation where there’s going to be a misfire, there’s going to be a mistake. And you’re creating anger.

And we ought not assume that law enforcement officials are perfect any more than we should assume that protesters are perfect, right? I mean, that’s what I mean when I say the critical theory mood. We have to understand good and evil. We have to understand right and wrong. And instead, we’re divvying it out by groups of people, and then the math doesn’t work and our simple analysis doesn’t really explain it.

We have to get the immigration issue in hand. The Trump administration is doing something that it has every right to do, but it doesn’t have a right to do it, you know, in every way that it has.

And so we’re going to have political calculations in light of particularly the second shooting—which doesn’t seem to be justified—and whether that means it will embolden those who are trying to hold the whole process hostage or not, that’s a great question. That’s usually what happens, right? I mean, isn’t that kind of how we got in the mess to begin with? The immigration process was held hostage and the deportation process was held hostage, and so now here we are. 

And that’s the way cultures can break down. And so that’s what I mean in terms of the lessons learned. And it’s going to be really hard to go forward. 

At the same time, the administration is trying to get immigration in hand in all kinds of places, not just in Minnesota, and we don’t have the same stories coming out of other places. so that should tell us something.

BROWN: Well John, I want to shift gears and talk about a new campaign you’re involved in that was announced this week—it’s called the Greater Than campaign.

It brings together a number of well-known voices, including Katy Faust, Albert Mohler, Jim Daly from Focus on the Family, Allie Beth Stuckey, and others.

The campaign is aimed at re-centering the conversation about marriage and family around the needs of children. So since this is so new, tell us more about what the campaign is and why you think this moment calls for it.

STONESTREET: Well, I don’t know if I resemble that remark or not, or deserve to be in the category with many of the others that have jumped into this campaign.

In a sense, this is just following the pro-life playbook after Roe v. Wade. The idea here is that Roe poisoned everything, and so has Obergefell. Sometimes law is actually upstream from changing people’s hearts and minds.

And yet, we have seen some cracks in that myth of unfettered progress toward full acceptance of "marriage equality," or all the other taglines that we’ve heard in the years since Obergefell.

And I think Katie has effectively put her finger on why it is that people are increasingly uncomfortable with so-called same-sex marriage—is that we’ve seen how it has really undermined the rights and well-being of children, especially the rights of children to their mom and dad.

As I say in the video, moms don’t dad and dads don’t mom. That’s the one thing we know from research: kids need both.

And so what’s the goal? The goal is to make it both illegal and unthinkable. And right now it’s both—right now, same-sex marriage, so-called same-sex marriage, and I say that because it’s not marriage.

Of course, the Obergefell decision was largely decided out of thinking that marriage was something malleable. It was really a bad process, because we heard demands for so-called marriage equality without ever deciding what marriage was. So how do you have something that’s equal to if you don’t know what it is to begin with?

And the whole point of Greater Than—it’s a direct counter to that idea of equality. In fact, if you look at the logo for the Greater Than campaign, something that I’m really fond of, it takes that old equal sign that became a meme and was posted on everybody’s social media for so long, and turns it into a greater-than sign.

Because what we’re saying is kids are greater than adult desire, and kids have been treated as less than.

So I’m excited about this campaign. We’ve all signed up for the long haul. This isn’t going to be something that’s solved by this time next year or the next year or the next year. We know how long it took to overturn Roe. We know after we overturned Roe how much cultural baggage remains even now, and the same thing is true here with Obergefell.

So it’s a big thing to overturn Obergefell. It’ll be hard, and then it’ll take even longer to unravel the cultural destruction that it has wrought. And that’s what the movement’s about.

BROWN: John, you know, I’m struck by the comparison to Roe v. Wade—where reversing the decision mattered, but didn’t by itself change the culture. And even setting aside whether the same could happen with Obergefell, there’s a lot of cultural work that still has to happen beyond the legal questions, don’t you think?

STONESTREET: That’s right. Well, we need a kid-centric way of thinking. And that’s the thing about marriage, is that marriage was designed by God to be life-giving. In other words, the point of marriage for Adam wasn’t Eve, and the point of marriage for Eve wasn’t Adam. And that’s how we treat marriage today, and that’s what I mean when I say we elevate adult desire.

So the inherent connection between marriage and procreation is built into the fabric of the universe. The more we have elevated the rights of adults to be able to do whatever they want, be whoever they want, behave however they want, the more we have victimized children, right?

I mean, we say this all the time—ideas have consequences, bad ideas have victims. The disproportionate victims of the sexual revolution have been children.

Every stage of the sexual revolution has come along with a promise. It’s a myth, it’s a lie, but it’s been promised: the kids will be fine. Kids aren’t fine. They haven’t been fine in a long time. They weren’t fine with no-fault divorce, they weren’t fine with cohabitation, they haven’t been fine when it comes to intentionally single parenthood.

And for the Christian who’s wondering whether they should join this campaign, every single Christian community that we have history of, when they confronted a pagan society, it was always protecting kids. I can’t think of a Christian community that didn’t feel like their calling was to protect kids.

And so when Christians turn around and say—like one youth pastor said to my co-author, Brett Kunkel, back in 2015—“same-sex marriage, oh, that ship has sailed, I’m not even going to talk about that anymore,” that is an abdication of duty. That’s an abandoning of the children.

And I think we’ve actually done that for the last 10 years. And it’s time to get on the right track.

BROWN: Mmm, you know, we’re running long, but real quick: Have Christians ever actually done this well before? You know, pushing back against cultural norms that harm children?

STONESTREET: You know, there are wonderful models throughout history of Christians taking on cultural norms that victimize children—foot binding, child prostitution, child sacrifice; pre-Victorian England, getting kids out of the machines when they were tied to the machines during the early Industrial Revolution; sending them to school, universal education.

There’s all kinds of examples of protecting children. And of course, the pro-life movement is an example of this.

The first Christians going out into the wilderness and saving the kids, especially the little girls who had been abandoned just to die, because that was a completely normal thing to do—just like same-sex marriage, so-called, has become completely normal in our time and place.

EICHER: Alright, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and he's host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, thanks, we'll see you next week.

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.