Culture Friday: Shifting ground in 2025

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Friday, December 26th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I'm Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday! Joining us is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Welcome back, John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, this is the last Friday before the end of the year, if you can believe it. So I thought we ought to take a look back and try to wrap things up into nice little packages, little boxes. Maybe put some wrapping paper on it and have a day-after-Christmas opening here.

But I think we certainly saw some really radical changes in 2025 and you can't not attribute that to a national election. I don't think. I do think in the early months, you know, I remember talking with you about the vibe shift, you know, on everything from transgenderism to wokeness, or, as you put it, the critical theory mood.

Would that be the big takeaway for this year, 2025 culturally? And do you think at this point there's kind of a backlash to the backlash going on? How do you see it?

STONESTREET: I think it’s the big takeaway, and also think it’s the big question, as we come to the end of 2025: What is the state of the vibe shift?

I think from the very beginning the question was, Is the vibe shift a turnaround from really bad ideas like transgenderism and the critical theory mood that permeated so much of culture and dominated so much? Or was it just a detachment from those things, and we were still kind of looking for the truth to ground our feet in, culturally speaking?

I think it’s more uncertain now. I mean, we heard, for example, at the beginning of the year about the return of interest in church, and young people going back to church, and even at Easter, you know, we talked about record numbers of baptisms in places like France and other Western nations, a quiet revival.

Then you had the catalyst of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and funeral, and now we’re seeing numbers, and the numbers are really uncertain.

Ryan Burge, who I look to a lot for some of these numbers, says really what the numbers are: more young women are going away, but not that many young men are coming into the church.

And I think young men and young women going opposite directions is one of those uncertainties and headlines that’s part of the vibe shift. But I also know that from my own church and from a number of denominational meetings that I was able to speak at this year, there’s more young men there than there were a year ago or two years ago.

So it’s hard to make sense of this math, and I think there’s a lot more details to come in.

And of course, near the end of the year, we have seen the rise also of an alternative view of masculinity. That’s not good, right? That’s either Groyper or Groyper-adjacent, and a Groyper apologist.

And we’re really at an interesting time. We’re certainly not headed off the woke cliff, which seemed inevitable just a year or two ago. Those things seem to have changed.

But it’s, I think, far from clear what ideology is going to save the day.

Maybe a way to put this is, I sense a lot more buyer’s remorse for previous bad ideas than I do, kind of, let’s rebuild around, you know, things that are true and good.

I do think it’s an incredible opportunity, especially for the church, though.

EICHER: We do culture and not politics as much, but there’s a lot of political positioning going on, and lots of in-fighting. Vice President JD Vance put out his marker ,delivered a major speech.

The speech’s core thesis emerges mid-address: Americans are “hungry for identity,” and Vance argues that Christianity—not race, gender, or ideology—has historically provided the nation’s shared moral language.

VANCE: The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been and by the grace of God, we always will be a Christian nation.

He insists the United States is a “Christian nation” in creed. The erosion of Christianity from public life, he contends, has produced moral confusion, social decay, and violence. Do you agree with that? Would you edit the speech in any way? What do you think?

STONESTREET: Well, I think he had some very important things to say, including the historic source of the United States on a cultural and civilizational level, which has been Christianity.

And because Christianity is true, those associations, those reliances, are going to bring about good things. And when you separate from those things and try to get the animation of a culture or the life of a culture from some other source, it’s just not going to happen.

I mean, this is the language of the prophets. You know, why go to those things that won’t satisfy when you have these things that will satisfy that are really right in front of you?

I do think, though, that the conflation of Christianity and America is a complicated thing.

The Bible, on one hand, talks about Christians being people, not Christians being a nation, and at the other hand, it talks about all nations learning to obey Christ and the Great Commission.

And so for those who say, well, we shouldn’t talk about America that way, the Bible talks about every nation in the world eventually coming and bowing the knee, and those that are in it. And so these are complicated things, I think, to work out.

The thing also that I think is going to have to be an important distinction is, is that if we are going to understand, for example, the moral framework from Christianity, then we have to take seriously the fact that right and wrong is not drawn in between groups of people.

It’s drawn, as Solzhenitsyn said, right down the middle of every human heart.

So to say rightly that, you know, trying to get our moral framework from the progressive left has been an absolute disaster for America is obviously true.

It’s also going to be a disaster if we try to get that same moral framework from the political right as the political right, as opposed to from letting, you know, Christianity engage the political side.

I mean, we already have examples from the political right of lines being drawn in completely the wrong places between groups of people, and that’s why we have now an antisemitism on the right and an antisemitism on the left, and both of those things are completely unacceptable.

And they’re based on a wrong framework about what is right and wrong and where the moral understanding of the nation is going to come from.

So I think he’s right in the analysis. I think as we’re playing this out, we still have a lot of correcting to do on this.

And whatever framework we’re going to apply when it comes to our public lives, when it comes to our public morality, when it comes to our national creed and our national identity, I don’t think we’re there yet.

MAST: You know, John, another speech from the TPUSA event that made big news dealt with a culture question that has been looming large late this year, and that's been about Islam and Western culture, specifically in terms of Christianity. Of course, so much news coming out of Nigeria over the last few months, but closer to home, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, warned that Islamist ideology is the greatest near and long term threat to American freedom and security. Have a listen.

GABBARD: The bottom line is this, when we talk about the threat of Islamism, this political ideology, there is no such thing as individual freedom or liberty. As Charlie said over and over again, it is fundamentally incompatible with our nation's foundation of freedom. [applause] And at its core, when we understand that our freedom comes from God and no one else, we understand the seriousness of this Islamist ideology threat, because it means they deny that God is the one who has bestowed this right to freedom in every one of us.

Now, we ran a story earlier this week from one of the Muslim majority cities, Gabbard mentioned in her speech, Dearborn Mich., the culture there has changed as the electorate there has changed. Calls to prayer being broadcast prayer mats in the stairwell at a local public university, and the culture has certainly made evangelism look different there as well. We encountered Christians in Dearborn who were hesitant to talk about it on the record. They wanted their voices or their identities disguised. So John, what do you make of the director's comments? Is this as big of a threat as she says

STONESTREET: Every bit as big and even bigger, not because we’re an immediate threat that the rest of the nation will become like Dearborn, but it should alarm every American that there is such a clear departure from anything historical that you can trace in terms of the kind of nation we are, the kind of people we are, to something like this, where you have people actually afraid to identify who they are in their religious belief and their religious convictions out loud.

I mean, you know, what is this, the UK? I mean, that’s what’s happened there. And we see the departure over there as being a real departure from kind of the nation that it historically was.

But, you know, listen, Gabbard is really reminding us here of something much bigger.

And when you talk about civilizational level forces at the end of the Cold War, there were two basic competing explanations for what the world was going to look like now that communism was dead.

One was the end of history thesis, which basically democracy has won and will never go back. That sounds so quaint now, doesn’t it?

The other was the clash of civilizations thesis, which is: we had come out of a time where the primary clashes in the world were between nation states, and now we were entering a time where the primary clashes were civilizational.

And the most important clash civilizationally, Samuel Huntington wrote, was between Islam and the West, and that these civilizational clashes would sometimes be not just between nation states, but between regions.

That’s where the fault lines were, and at times, within nations.

So you would have conflicts within nations, like, for example, we’ve seen in Nigeria.

Huntington also predicted that the civilizational clashes between Islam and the West would be the hottest of all of them. There would be others, but it would be the hottest one, and that Islam would eventually win because of the birth rate, because of the cultural momentum, and also because of being true believers, the idea of deeply being committed to a way of life and a future idea.

And many of the great sociologists in history have talked about the difference between a civilization building for the future and a civilization that was trapped and seeking the immediate gratification of the moment.

And if you look at both high levels of debt in the West and the very, very, very low birth rates, which, of course, children represent a vote for the future, then you have a civilization that certainly looks like it’s focused on the moment and not focused on the future.

And the ones that are focused on the future, at least according to Pitirim Sorokin and Joseph Unwin and some of the other old dudes that wrote about this, they tend to win.

So this was the larger analysis.

And of course, 9/11 happened, and the years after 9/11 and Samuel Huntington sounded like a genius, because he seemed to get it right.

And then something else happened, you know, the last couple years, but it certainly seems to have emerged in 2025.

And if there’s a story in my mind that rivals the vibe shift story, and where are we on the vibe shift, it is the resurgence of the clash of civilizations, because we’ve seen that in the United States.

We’ve certainly seen that in Nigeria, and we’ve seen that in other parts of the world as well. And I think that is going to be a growing thing.

So I think Tulsi Gabbard is right on that point. To her credit, she has been paying attention for a long time.

I know this. Even as far back as a COVID year, I was able to participate with her on a webinar on the issue of Nigerian persecution, and that was 2020.

Oh, and by the way, what was the worst year of Islamic persecution of Christians in Nigeria? 2025.

So we’ve been on an upward trajectory in the wrong direction since then, so I appreciate her bringing that up.

It’s kind of like we forgot about this, and now it’s front and center on our attention, or at least it should be.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, it's been a great 2025 we'll see you in '26. Thank you John!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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