Culture Friday: Calling evil good

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Friday, September 5th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday! Joining us is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and Host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Good Morning John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: Let’s start with Take Us North. It’s a “socially conscious” indie game that’s described as a blend of art and technology to ignite positive cultural change. Here’s the developer, Karla Reyes, talking about it.

KARLA REYES: The game that we’re currently developing is our debut original project, which is a narrative adventure/survival game about the migrant journey through the desert to cross the US/Mexico border. So it’s a very heavy-hitting topic, but it’s one that we’re trying to tackle sensitively and authentically.

To keep it authentic, Reyes says they’ve partnered with an anthropology lab at UCLA that specializes in clandestine migration. They’re also collaborating with undocumented immigrant filmmakers with lived experiences of crossing the border. In other words, they’re working with people who are in this country illegally.

People on social media are calling this an illegal immigrant simulator posing as a video game.

It caught my attention, John, because I had just read one of your recent Breakpoint articles where you pointed to a number of disturbing instances of unchecked violence against girls in the UK by immigrants. The story is that authorities in the UK are failing to protect these girls out of fear of being called racists and in the name of social cohesion.

Admittedly, we are talking about two different stories…but both seem to have a common thread: And I’m not talking about the immigration issue. It’s calling evil good and good evil. How do you see it, John?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, I'm not really familiar with the game to speak of, but it is interesting. I've thought for a long time, ever since reading Neil Postman, which, you know, became one of those frameworks by which I almost see everything about entertainment. His book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, just in terms of the intersection between entertainment and the wider culture, and sometimes our art reflects culture, and sometimes our art leads culture. And so much of our art and entertainment has become activist art and entertainment. You know, it's not about just kind of laughing and having a good time anymore. Everything has to have an activist bent.

It's interesting because that's not something that Postman would have ever imagined, I think, when he was writing about the power of entertainment to shape culture and how it exactly does that, he was talking more about distraction and about becoming silly. You know, I remember basically that was one of the big punch lines is, you know, entertainment makes us silly. And so when entertainment becomes culture, we become a silly culture.

Well, we become an activist culture. I mean, you know, education is about activism. It's not about learning. And now our art is about this as well. And I know we're gonna get some emails about people who resist the idea of gaming, video gaming, being considered art, but it really is an expression of human creativity. It's something that goes after the imagination and not the brain.

But of course, you see then that there are ways in which ideas get embedded into societies and usually not through debate. And that's really what the commentary was about. This, you know, epidemic in the UK of the grooming gangs, the rape gangs targeting UK young women, and then the police really either not doing anything or penalizing anyone who complains because it's a racist or a racially insensitive thing. And you see how these ideas really get embedded, and when you see it played out, it's so absolutely absurd, there's no way anyone would argue. Oh yeah, it's actually worse to have an opposition to illegal immigration, than it is to, you know, rape a young girl. I mean, no one would actually say that out loud, and yet this is kind of, in a growing sense, what's been embedded in UK culture in terms of what the greatest evil is. And you end up kind of becoming all upside down on it, you know, completely.

And so, you know, I don't think you know, the stories are identical at all, but at the same time, it is interesting that in the form of the imagination, you quote, unquote, explore things to become sensitive to someone's lived experience. But you can't do that without making a moral statement of some kind, and this is no exception to that.

MAST: Well John, next week the Temecula Valley Unified School District in California is set to address a new bathroom policy exemption plan. The bathroom policy there allows students to use the one that aligns with their gender identity. So the gist of the policy is this: if your daughter doesn’t want to share bathrooms or locker rooms with a boy claiming to be a girl, she needs to sign a document claiming she either has a religious objection, or a mental health problem. So rather than protecting girls’ spaces, they are asking girls to either take on a religious label or admit some sort of mental health problem. This seems to be setting up girls to be ashamed of having very normal desires for modesty to have to reveal their own private problems: a whole host of issues.

Now, there are some devout Christ-followers on that board and in that community fighting back against this–including one of them publicly ask for prayers for wisdom and unity among school board members, protection for students and teachers, discernment.

JOSEPH KROMOSKY: We just go back to Genesis three and say, we just want privacy for our students now, and that's what we want. So that’s what's happening behind the scenes. You have site administrators, district administrators, teachers, board members like us trying to come up with a solution to deal with this wokeism, because that's what it is.

The California Family Council says that earlier this week there was a middle school walkout over this at a school where girls are being asked to share a bathroom with a boy, we’re talking 11, 12, 13 year old girls here. Middle school bathrooms and locker rooms during puberty are already sensitive areas, and now to essentially tell girls they have a mental problem because they want privacy. How would you advise parents to talk about the effects of this on girls if it moves forward or God forbid, spreads?

STONESTREET: Well, listen, this is a better example, I think even, of the game of, you know, calling….Scripture says. Woe to those who call right wrong and wrong, right. And we often think about that as being true of individuals, which it is, but it can be true of entire communities. It can be true of entire societies. It can be true of entire civilizations who call up, down and down, up. I mean, think about how this has reversed. Now the way this law is being written and implemented. The normal posture is that boys should share girls private spaces, and girls should share boys private spaces. And if you disagree with that, that's abnormal. This is the first time in the history of the planet where anyone's ever even thought about this crazy idea, much less implement it, much less enforced it on adolescent and pre adolescent young women. I mean, this is, this is the definition of losing touch with reality.

And you think about all the language games that have taken place in the entire LGBTQ movement, I remember the first time I heard the word cisgender, right, the idea that we need a word that refers to the fact that someone would continue to identify with their biological sex for their life, which is exactly where 99% of the population through the history of the world would fit into that it's like, why do we need a category for normal? Well, you need it so that you can redefine normal. And this is exactly what this law does. It flips it upside down. I mean, listen, it's offensive enough that the religious objection is being put into the same category as a mental health problem. I mean, that's offensive. But the bigger question, believe it or not, that, yeah, I trust me, I want to blow a gasket over that one, but, but, but to actually just flip the definition of normal is what this entire movement has been about from the very beginning, and it happens then in the form of law and policy.

I appreciate you, by the way, mentioning the believers in Temecula some of those I know. I certainly know the California Family Council. I'm so grateful for their courage and their voice, and they are showing us what to do.

So to go back to your question, which I know was a long time ago, about, how do we advise parents? There's just so much about this moment where I think that we live in an age of deception and an age of confusion. And George Orwell famously said, in an age of deception, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. I believe, as I've said many, many times here, that God determines the cultural moment in which we live. In other words, we're not just called to a job or to a ministry or to an act of charity and kindness, although we are, but we're called to a particular time in history, and if that time is like ours, where up is being called Down and down is being called up, and right is being called wrong, and wrong is being called right. Then it is our calling to be truth tellers.

As a parent, my job is to prepare my kid for the world they're going to actually live in, not the world I want them to live in. So part of it is not just cultivating discernment, although it is not just helping them understand and embrace the truth, although that's true, but it's also to cultivate courage. And courage is a virtue, and virtues have to be practiced. We have virtue muscles. These aren't like helmets that we put on. They're muscles we have to exercise. And so I would say this is an opportunity to exercise that muscle of courage. That's a really hard thing to think about as a parent with a kid, but that's, I think, what it means to be called to this moment.

BROWN: I love that verse, “Be strong and courageous,” and by the way.

We’ll wrap up with a story about Graham Linehan. He’s an Irish comedian, writer and co-creator of two popular sitcoms in the United Kingdom.

He’s also one of Britain’s most outspoken critics of trans ideology. For taking that stand he’s been sued, banned from the social media platform, X and ostracized from the showbiz community. In fact, it got so bad he says he had to leave the UK and move to America.

Here he is talking about the state of free speech in England.

GRAHAM LINEHAM: The country is almost impossible for someone like like me to live in. Um you cannot tell the truth without the police coming to your door. Uh I actually have to come back at the start of uh next month to be to go on trial uh in an absurd case that you you you'll see just how stupid it is when it happens.

That was just a couple of weeks ago and then earlier this week, while traveling from Arizona back to London, he was arrested by police at Heathrow Airport and tossed in a cell.

As I read Linehan’s ordeal, I couldn’t help but think of Babylon Bee creator Seth Dillion. He’ll be featured in today’s global streaming premiere of the documentary, Truth Rising. I can’t think of a better time for this documentary, about standing for the truth to be released.

STONESTREET: I can't either. I think that's exactly the point of truth rising. And as the Focus on the Family and the Colson center, as we started kind of going down the path to create this, this film, along with our friend and as the guy that I call the Gandalf of our age, oz Guinness, that is what really emerged, that this is what it means to live out our calling, at bare minimum, is to be someone willing to tell the Truth.

But this story about Linehan is just so absolutely incredible. One of our my colleagues, pointed out the fact that in his as he described it, five UK policemen came to arrest him armed. Now, you know, a policeman being armed in the United States is not unusual, but in the UK, you don't know, and not just one, but five.

And you also think about what a bully move this was. How pathetic, how sad. You think about kind of the initial cost that people sometimes have to pay for being willing to speak up and say the truth. The story of Seth Dillon the Babylon B is one of those. Certainly the story of Jack Phillips, which we also tell in truth, rising is one of those. And then you watch how God used those particular acts of courage, and there's no way you could have ever imagined everything that would line up because of that.

Soren Kierkegaard famously said that life has to be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards. You know, Seth Dillon the Babylon Bee, they're looking backwards right now watching God's hand. Jack Phillips has become an expert at recognizing how God orchestrated and pointed out and arranged his obedience and brought about good in the name of Christ. And you know what this comedian will at one point, I think, be able to see that as well. He's not at that place now. He's looking forward, and it looks crazy, because we do live in a culture that calls up, down and down up, which tells you just how important it is, how effective it can potentially be to tell the truth.

MAST: John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, thanks, John.

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