Culture Friday: Breaking barriers

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 2nd of August, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

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.

BROWN: Well, John, last week, my husband and I were surprised by the invitations that kept popping up in our social media feeds, invites from supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris using the hashtags “Win With Black Men,” Women for Harris, and this week, I saw a post about “White Dudes for Kamala.”

Meanwhile, others are raising questions about Kamala Harris’s ethnicity…is she who she says she is? Donald Trump raised the question during a panel discussion with the National Association of Black Journalists this week. Here’s a clip:

TRUMP: So I've known her a long time, indirectly, not directly, very much. And she was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black. So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black?

BROWN: What is it with this campaign and ethnicity? A lot of attention seems to be on questions like, Is Harris black? Is she Jamaican? Is she Indian? Not so much on her ideas, policies, her character, intelligence, and what's even more interesting is the historical component, references to electing our first female, black, Asian president.

So John is being the leader of the free world about breaking barriers, or is it about leadership?

STONESTREET: Are you asking whether it should be about breaking barriers about leadership, or whether it is? I mean, I mean, you know, it isn't about leadership. It hasn't been for quite some time. So that's not really this particular candidate's fault, but there is something that has emerged, I think, during this campaign. You know, we we've called it the critical theory mood, in which people tend to see that the most important thing about somebody else is which particular group of people that they belong to, and that that particular group of people then either earns a kind of level of moral derision or a level of moral acceptance.

Obviously, the former president got in a lot of trouble this week by asking the same question, Myrna. I don't think you're going to get in as much trouble for asking the question here with all of us as he did there with the ABC anchor, I think. But you know, it is something that is at the heart of a lot of things in our culture. It's just a confusion about identity. It's not new. Theologians, social scientists, others were looking ahead to, you know, what was being called, kind of an identity crisis that would result in the modern era from kind of losing our place as anything distinct and unique, special among the rest of you know the world. And so then you're left with other identity factors. You know, that's the whole conversation behind the LGBTQ movement is that really what we do is who we are. What we do sexually in particular, is who we are. Our willingness to break barriers of our culture sexually is what gives us dignity, because it's an expression of autonomy. And this is even more highly reductive than than that.

It's really important, though, for this particular candidate to keep this conversation in this direction, because you dig up, for example, the last time she had to campaign, which was, of course, seeking out the presidential nomination in 2020 a lot of her ideas were surfaced, and they're not popular ideas. They're not ideas that can basically win the general election. And I think on just the political—I know this is culture Friday, not political Friday, but it is going to be really interesting to see whether this kind of honeymoon phase of this candidacy bounces back to any sort of, you know, connection to the actual views that she has espoused, then espoused publicly, that are, you know, far to the left of really, any other candidate we've ever seen run for president on a major party ticket in American history.

MAST: Well it’s back to school time–where I live in Georgia, some kids go back Monday. And this year, I’m seeing more changes to cell phone policy to ban or limit students from using cell phones. Among them: New York City, the Los Angeles Unified School District… and other smaller ones.

John, I’m hopeful this is the moment I’ve been waiting for. My husband and I are mean ol’ parents who kept our daughter off Instagram and the like until after she graduated high school–which was this year! I kept thinking more parents would do the same but we could only find one other family to lock arms with us on that. It was lonely for all of us.

So do these changes–states and school districts starting to outright ban phone usage– mean that we are turning the corner on this idea that you can’t separate a kid from their phone?

STONESTREET: I think, I think we are, and solidarity to all the mean parents out there like us, because we know we certainly did the same thing. The evidence is so overwhelming right now, particularly for teenage girls. I mean, it is ignoring of reality to say that this is not something that needs to be eliminated, really, from their lives, but at least their learning.

I ask headmasters of private schools this all the time. I'm like, Look, if there was a creepy old dude walking around whispering awful things into the ears of all of your teenage girls, would you be forced to do something about it as the headmaster of this school? And they're all like, yeah. It's like, well, that's exactly what Tiktok is, except it's a whole bunch of creepy old men, not to mention the whole communist party of China, whispering terrible things in the ears of your you know your teenage girls, and we now have the trend lines. And of course, Jonathan Haidt's book is is remarkable on this, but you just kind of lay down the incredible spike in mental illness of teenage girls with the onset of widespread cell phone use, and by the way, you also throw in the trend line of gender confusion, and these are identical trend lines. Basically, it's not, there's not a distinction worth the difference between these trend lines.

Now look, what I understand, and again, we've taken these same steps that you have as a as a family, but what I understand, whenever I talk to teachers about this. There is no fighting from the teachers on this point. They all want this ban. They all want this to be out of their kids lives. It complicates things. And when you say, Why? Why haven't you enacted this policy? It universally is parents. Parents are the ones that keep cell phones around, more than the kids do. The parents want to have this, this this tether, this connection to their kids. And, you know, look, we have enough stories coming out of mass shootings in schools and so on that. Having that there is sort of important, and it's understandable why it's important to parents, but the downside of this far outweighs any sort of, you know, potential emergency, you know, situation in terms of chances of damage that that's being done, and there's other things that can be done to ensure that sort of access to parents at those awful times.

It's not just that there's bad stuff, you know, on some of these social media platforms. It's the platform itself. It's the distraction from being all there. It's the perpetual sense of FOMO that happens when somebody else is having a good time and you're not. And you know about it. It is the inability to look real people in the eye because you're living in a digital rectangle. It's all of those things. It's the content and it's the means, it's the means and the message both.

And that's why I'm pleased to see we actually saw this story. And there's dozens of school districts that are making this hard choice and doing it, and you know what? It'll be popular when it's all over. It's something that it should have been done a long time ago. And finally, it's catching up. I do think we're becoming much more aware of the harms of these devices, particularly for young people.

BROWN: John, last question for today…It’s been a week since that awful part of the Olympics opening ceremony when drag performers parodied the Last Supper. But you know, I’ve heard mixed messages since then…I’ve heard what sounds like backtracking from those involved…saying Oh no, it wasn’t the Lord’s supper, it was a feast of greek gods.

So John, did Christians speak too quickly, or are the folks involved trying to backtrack their blasphemy? A week later, what do you make of it?

STRONESTREET: I mean, listen, whether or not the parody with the drag queens was of the Lord's Supper, you know, obviously the information we have is all over the place. And after suggesting, at least some of the participants suggesting that it was now suggesting it isn't. And I, you know, and I'm not putting it past anyone to to kind of gaslight those who who were concerned.

The best take on this, by far that I have seen is a YouTube analysis of this artistically from Jonathan Pageau. And Jonathan, of course, is a Canadian iconographer in the in the Orthodox Christian tradition. And he just walks through this as someone who understands art, understands history, understands culture, and understands performance. And I'm with him, I think, absolutely. I mean, actually, the title of that sort of segment of this program referred to it as referring to the Lord's Supper.

But let me be really clear here, whether or not it was, doesn't change the fact that it was, as many people pointed out, satanic. And it's Satanic in the sense of how Satan works, which isn't always being really creepy. And I'm not even talking about like the creepy karaoke with the Marie, the headless Marie Antoinette, singing the heavy metal stuff, you know, in the window of the building, apparently, where she was kept and beheaded. I'm talking about the fundamental message of the enemy from the very beginning, which is, "you shall be like gods."

To give a tribute, as it was, to the French Revolution and the ideals of the French Revolution, which are really anarchist ideals. One of the thinkers that most influenced the French Revolution was the initial editor of the very first encyclopedia, a collection of knowledge. Of course, this is coming out of the Enlightenment. He was a skeptic and a cynic, and this is Denis Diderot. And Diderot famously said that "man will not be free until the last priest is strangled with the entrails of the last king."

Now, clearly he had a way with words, but you see what this was, this was an understanding of freedom, which is freedom from an autonomy, freedom from constraint, freedom from design, freedom from responsibility, freedom from any sort of fixed morals and the ability to do whatever I want. It's reflective also in Rousseau's famous line, that "man is born free and everywhere is in chains." In other words, that in our in our innermost, untethered, unconstrained desires, is who we really are, and we need to be able to express those.

By the way, that's the whole message of the LGBTQ movement. It was clearly the message of the whole performance from start to finish, and it certainly as much as they might think that this is an expression of freedom, it's amazing how unoriginal it is, because it always goes to either sexual perversion or a direct attack on the Christian religion, or both. And of course, everyone's noted that you're going to attack the Christian religion for two reasons.

Number one is because you're not going to attack Islam. Paris has already learned that in all kinds of different I mean, listen, if that performance had had anything about Muhammad, do we actually think that the games would still be going on right now? Absolutely not. Everybody knows that. No, you know, you don't, you don't have to guess about that. But the other reason is because, you know, France doesn't owe its existence to Islam. It owes its existence to Christianity. It owes its laws to Christianity. It owes its best expressions of beauty, like the true art and the true architectural majesty of like Notre Dame and other things to Christianity. And all this other stuff is a perversion of that good stuff. It's a parasite on that good stuff, and that's what evil is.

So look, I think Pageau's take on the fact that it actually was a reference to the Last Supper is the right one. But even if it's not, it was still a horrible display of human debasement, and is not something then that was inclusive, as the director claimed. It excluded immediately, actually, 2 billion adherents of the world's largest, you know, religion, and that certainly is not in the spirit of the games or of competition or of internet or the history of France, really.

MAST: John Stonestreet is the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, thank you for your time.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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