Culture Friday: Christianity and liberalism

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday, February 20th. So glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Joining us now, John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the BreakPoint podcast. 

John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, John, I'd like to begin in Texas with a State Representative who is really gaining quite a national profile, his name is James Talarico, he's running for the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. Early voting is underway as of last week in what Democrats hope could eventually become a competitive statewide race.

Well, this week, his campaign got another jolt of national exposure—after a scheduled appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was pulled from the CBS broadcast over the FCC’s "equal-time" rule that applies to politics. 

Colbert protested this on the air, and then released the interview online, and of course it quickly went viral.

So the controversy had the affect of amplifying the candidate—as if that wasn't the idea all along—but beneath the media drama, John, Talarico is attempting something more ambitious: presenting progressive politics framed explicitly in Christian language.

Now let's listen to a sample from that interview. The first voice you hear is that of Colbert, then you hear Talarico at the end: 

COLBERT: The religious right is, it’s a largely political movement that references spirituality, but it’s a political—What do you, what is your, what is your heartfelt hand out to the people who want to use religion as a tool of political power?

TALARICO: Well, for 50 years, the religious right—a political movement, that is the perfect description for it—they convinced a lot of our fellow Christians that the most important issues were abortion and gay marriage. Two issues that aren't mentioned in the Bible, two issues that Jesus never talked about. Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I and every one of our fellow believers, how we’re going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger. Nothing about going to church, nothing about voting Republican; it was all about how you treat other people.

Alright John, is this a genuine theological argument entering politics—or do you think it’s something else?

STONESTREET: Well, I mean, it’s not valid. It might be genuine, but it is a very selective argument based on very few things that Jesus said, as if Jesus couldn’t care both about sexual morality, the sexual abuse of children, and feeding the hungry at the same time. It’s illegitimate in the sense that the words of Jesus that were given to individuals, given to people, given to churches, are then turned around and used to justify progressive government policies, whether they work or not in accomplishing the objective that these folks say that Jesus cares more about than anything else.

So it’s really selective. I think it’s obviously easily refuted, but it’s easily refuted by people who can think theologically, or even just kind of at a very basic level biblically. And I don’t think we have a very biblically literate culture. So we’ll see how effective it is, but I don’t suspect it will be very successful in the end, and that is because that progressive party has become more and more anti-religious across the board.

I mean, listen, the fact of the matter is Talarico’s version of the integration of faith and politics is just thin, and honestly, a little silly. There’s not a lot there. It shouldn’t be hard to pick out and discern, but it is for a lot of people.

So look, thankfully, we also had a gift this week, and that is a conversation that took place from the Hoover Institution with former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse. It is a hour-long conversation in which Sasse, who of course just announced he’s facing a terminal diagnosis, wrestles through his faith, his life, where politics fits into all of this, and it is a Masterclass. It is honestly one of the most thorough and thick framings of the integration of faith and politics and the limits of that integration, that you will hear.

So if it’s not immediately clear to you what Talarico meant, just watch that thing over at the Hoover Institution and compare, and it could not be more obvious.

EICHER: You know, and John, I'm wondering though whether you think there is an audience for what Talarico is selling in Texas, even if it’s not all that large, because as we know, in politics, a percentage point or two can translate into a landslide.

STONESTREET: Oh, I think so, but I mean the fact of the matter is, at best, you’re going to find those folks in mainline churches, and you don’t find very many people in any mainline churches because people don’t go to mainline churches because they don’t teach anything that sounds any different than NPR. And so if you listen to NPR six days a week, why go to church on the seventh day a week? 

And religion is not something that is a protected class category in the critical theory breakdown of intersectionality. So you’re just talking about a small demographic.

EICHER: Well, John, now I want to shift gears to a rather difficult story. I know you’ve heard it, but for the listener who has not: Authorities in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, say that a youth hockey game became the scene of what police describe as a domestic violence tragedy, and that's probably an understatement. 

Police identified the suspect as 56-year-old Robert Dorgan. They said he shot and killed his ex-wife, Rhonda Dorgan. He also killed their adult son, Aidan, inside the arena. There was another son playing in the hockey game at the time of the attack. Three others were injured before the suspect took his own life.

Now there’s an additional detail to this story, John, but you’ll hear the police chief say that this particular detail is irrelevant and police simply have no idea why this happened. But the additional detail that is "irrelevant" to the ongoing investigation is that the late Mr. Dorgan had undergone a gender surgery about 5 years ago and was using a female name, though he hadn’t officially changed his name with the state. 

Here is the Chief of Police,Tina Goncalves, at a media briefing. And here she’s answering a reporter’s question: Was there some sort of transgender process happening?

GONCALVES: So that really is, is kind of irrelevant to our investigation at this point, what I can tell you is the identification was in the name of Robert. And then we also know that the suspect went by the name Roberta. It appeared that the suspect was in female clothes yesterday. But again, that's nothing that had swayed the investigation one way or another, we're just trying to kind of factually put the pieces together and let that lead us on to obviously why this occurred yesterday. Everybody's looking for answers. The police department obviously is looking for answers too, we want to know why it happened, especially in our community, so that's what we're trying to do, trying to put together that timeline and answer those questions.

Alright John, well there does seem to be a pattern here, and this is not the first such violent incident involving the gender-confused, but this man was no kid, he was not a child, he was not a teenager; he was a grown man. Do you think we're at the point where we just need to stand up and say it?

STONESTREET: Well, I think it’s past time to stand up and say that there is a trend here. And yet, what do we have now? We have a pretty consistent run of killers who questioned who they were, that they had been born into the wrong body. So when we stop kind of covering up what this whole thing has been about with nomenclature, with language, and say things as they actually are, we have five or six or seven indications of this just in the last couple years. 

And I guess if we were talking about literally any other common characteristic, we would have already drawn these connections. We would have already made these headlines. The only reason that we’re not is because of the special class status of protection and a whole lot of culture of fear.

But thankfully, in the last couple years, we have seen more and more people willing to break what Chuck Colson often called the spiral of silence, you know, unwilling to say it, but because one person or two people said it, more people are willing to say it. We just need these media outlets to stop reporting on "women shooters" when we’re actually talking about men who have been mutilated physically, emotionally, or chemically in some way.

REICHARD: Well talking about words, John, how should Christians—especially journalists—resist adopting language that isn’t biblically true?

STONESTREET: Well, and there’s a lot of it. This whole movement would have never gone anywhere without made-up words or misdefined words. And I think we just have to stop playing by those rules. I think we have to just reject them wholesale, starting with a word like "cisgender".

We already have a bunch of words that tell us what "cisgender" is supposed to mean, which is normal, ordinary, mentally healthy, 99.9 percent of the human population in the history of the world. And these things kinda can get snuck in, especially when they come through the “experts” that tell us how we’re all supposed to behave, and we’re just going to have to be a lot more discerning than that, I think, because really, the damage done by mainstream media outlets playing along with these games unnecessarily I think is incalculable.

But I will also say, look, every single one who is a Christian, in any sphere that they are in, should commit to be truth tellers. God hates a lying tongue. This is just what the Bible says. If the lie goes forward, it must not go forward through you.

And I think that sounds maybe too simple, and we need to kind of check each other and keep each other accountable as much. But a whole lot of lies have gone forward through a lot of Christians because we were told that it’s the loving, caring thing to do.

But I tell you what we cannot do is basically make peace with “same-sex marriage.” And so I know whenever I talk about same-sex marriage, I put the quotes around “marriage,” I put the “so-called” in front of it, because there is no such thing as same-sex marriage. There is marriage, and marriage has a definition. We used to understand that and used to believe that, or at least many of us did, and I think some have just kind of been worn down to embrace the language.

But I’d say we fight for language. I go back to something, I believe it came out of G.K. Chesterton, who said, “If words aren’t worth fighting for, what on Earth would be?” And I agree with that wholeheartedly.

REICHARD: Well,  meanwhile in New York, NYU Langone Health has shut down its transgender medical program for minors.

A hospital spokesman cited leadership changes and what he called the current regulatory environment, as the Trump administration investigates hospitals offering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors and threatens federal funding for those that continue doing it.

Now this isn't the first institution to scale back pediatric gender services in recent months.

Are we now seeing institutional retreat here—and what do you think's driving it?

STONESTREET: Absolutely it is, and there’s a number of things that are driving it. It’s not an accident that this is NYU. I think the Trump administration’s actions—I think now this week we had an announcement even that the FTC is getting involved in this. So we are seeing a pullback, and that’s really great. 

What I like about this is, I always watch, because we are so divided politically that it can feel like we’re going from one extreme to another depending on who’s in the White House. In other words, you live by executive order, you die by executive order, all that’s really stuff we’ve talked about in the past.

But when you start seeing it outside of the political sphere, in other spheres, like in this case in the legal sphere, or in the actually the institutional sphere in terms of health care, and you have structural changes that are taking place, then these are things that are going to be really hard to reverse.

You’re going to have a hard time convincing a hospital board they should get back into this business, because the risks are not going to go away, and the success rates are not going to get any higher.

And so yeah, this is certainly good news, but it is something to say about our culture that we are celebrating the affirmation of the obvious. So that just tells us kind of where we were yesterday.

EICHER: "The affirmation of the obvious."  

John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the BreakPoint podcast. John, thanks! We'll see you next time. 

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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