Culture Friday: Comparing two generations

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 7th of June, 2024.

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. It’s time for Culture Friday, and joining us now is author and speaker Katie McCoy.

Morning, Katie!

KATIE MCCOY: Hey, good to be with you both.

EICHER: Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day. June 6, 1944.

President Biden was on hand at Normandy to salute the veterans who gathered. French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed the Americans …

EMMANUEL MACRON: Here you came to join your efforts with our own soldiers and to make France a free nation. And you are back here today, at home, if I may say.

I read one story basically saying this is almost certainly going to be the last round-number anniversary for the Greatest Generation. According to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, we now have less than 120-thousand World War II vets still living, and it makes you wonder is America capable of producing another generation like that?

MCCOY: Oh, they're not called the greatest generation for nothing either, Nick. You think about that time in American history, the commitment to family, faith, country, the willingness to lay down your life to protect your freedoms. We still have that today, thank God, and especially in our military forces. But that generation was truly special, and it's special to me, as well. It's part of my family history. So my paternal grandfather, my dad's dad, was part of the decoy unit for D-Day, and he was captured as a prisoner of war. And as a prisoner of war, he prayed that if the Lord would allow him to survive World War Two, survive the Nazis, that he would dedicate the rest of his life to serving God in ministry. He preached his first sermon on Easter Sunday in the infamous Stalag III in Luckenwalde as a prisoner of war, and survived, came back to the United States and devoted the rest of his life to ministry. It changed our entire family tree.

But that's just one story, one story of thousands upon thousands of, here I am two generations removed from World War Two, and we're still talking about the heroism of that generation.

BROWN: Well, Katie, let's move from the greatest generation to the current generation. There is a cultural trend out there—I found a story about it in The Wall Street Journal—this phenomenon of "stay at home girlfriends." Slick videos are showing up on social media depicting young women supposedly living the life of a wife, but without the Biblical blessing that comes with marriage. It's really just a repackaging of what we used to call back in the day, shacking up, cohabitating couples.

So nothing new there, other than the social media campaign that seems to have grown up around it. Katie, one of our young female reporters, put it this way, the world is recognizing a hole and trying to fill it in sometimes unfortunate ways. What do you think?

MCCOY: Myrna, I'm still scratching my head on this one. So, I mean, yeah, talk about a contrast between generational characteristics from our previous topic, stay-at-home girlfriends. Now, few things to boil down though, to look at this trend. First, they have to constantly be producing content that is talking about how fabulous their life is. So, there's that kind of influencer life of trying to show everything is perfect and they have this enviable existence. But along with that, the article also talks about how women have this sense of boredom or aimlessness, and I think that's wrapped up in the 'girlfriend' part of the stay-at-home girlfriend.

So not only is it cohabitation, you have two people that have essentially an emotional contract of a relationship, who are linking up their lives and yet wanting to keep one foot outside of the door in case they want to dart. And yet, Myrna, on the other side of that, here's where this story is even weirder: it's an oddly traditional throwback, and that's something else that we're seeing with Gen Z; there's these really interesting trends of wanting to go back to relatively traditional ways of thinking about life. And girls are describing how they like generally to be able to stay home. One girl talked about how she gets a dopamine high cooking and taking care of the house, and she feels that sense of contribution.

But here's the fascinating thing: contribution is what I would go back to when you have a woman who is staying home, devoting her life to raising her children and molding those little minds and souls. That is contribution. It's not just a coexistence, it is a collaboration together to contribute something to the Kingdom and to the world and to create something that the two of you individually could not and that you can together. It's an interesting moment that we're in. We're seeing this odd throwback to times of generations ago, and I'm still scratching my head over it. Myrna here, I've talked about it for a few minutes. I still don't think it makes any more sense than it did when we first started talking about it.

BROWN: Because, you know what we're missing. We're missing the the Biblical mandate. You know, marriage is God's idea.

MCCOY: And it's as we are designed to be - this relationship without the covenant and commitment. There's an emptiness. There's something that is missing with it, and we're seeing that generationally since cohabitation became an accepted thing in society. But now it's a little bit like people are sort of trying to dress it up and give it a more fun social media spin.

BROWN: Well, no spin on this next story, Katie. Methodists in Africa, 1.2 million members strong, have taken a stand. The Ivory Coast annual conference declared that the United Methodist Church, and I'm going to quote now, "is not based in any Biblical and disciplinary values, and that it is now based on sociocultural and contextual values which have consumed its doctrinal and disciplinary integrity." You cannot get any clearer than that. And so they left. Do you think we in the West could learn from the African church?

MCCOY: This was such a remarkable story. So you'll recall that just a few weeks ago, the United Methodist Church had their massive conference in which they very clearly broke from a Biblical teaching on a Biblical ethic. And you saw a lot of different expressions not only of that, but of general critical theory that had been adopted into their, I guess you would call it, Christian teaching and practice. Really, it was a syncretizing of doctrine. And the African Christians who are were part of The United Methodist Church, they have drawn a line in the sand.

They lost. The United Methodist Church lost a million members in a day, and they just said, we're not going to be part of this. Here's what I love about that statement, Myrna: they juxtaposed two different influences in how they are going to relate, not only to develop their sense of self, but what they believe in society. They juxtaposed Biblical disciplinary values with sociocultural and contextual values. And it doesn't matter what country, culture or continent you are a part of, we are all going to be formed by one of those two sets of values: Biblical or disciplinary, or sociocultural and contextual. And what this group, this Ivory Coast Annual Conference, has determined is that it is absolutely incompatible. They're precisely correct.

And one of the things that we should take note of is the ways that perhaps traditions in the West, here in the West, are trying to amalgamate, syncretize, or sort of make peace with those sociocultural and contextual values. Secularism is like every other "ism." It is a worldview. It is a way to understand who we are, what went wrong with society, and how we fix it. And the truth is, it is fundamentally incompatible with the philosophy and the worldview, the way of Jesus, that is Christianity. So I applaud our brothers and sisters in Africa, and I hope that we too will have that kind of backbone and courage when it comes to drawing a line in the sand on what we will be formed by.

BROWN: All right author and speaker, Katie McCoy, Thank you, Katie.

MCCOY: Thank you!

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