Culture Friday: Cultural preoccupation with race

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It's the 19th day of August, 2022. 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 Culture Friday!

Joining us now is Andrew Walker. He’s a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Seminary—and managing editor of WORLD Opinions. Hey there, Andrew, good morning!

ANDREW WALKER, GUEST: Hey, Nick, and Myrna. Great to be with you.

BROWN: I want to talk about two different stories, both pointing to what seems to be our preoccupation in the culture with race.

The first involves an agreement between the Minneapolis teacher’s union group and the school district. The agreement ended a brief teacher strike and here’s the gist of it: white teachers will be laid off before teachers of color—regardless of seniority. The stated purpose is to solve “past discrimination” by the district.

So that’s story one.

Story two involves a post on social media from Stacey Abrams, who’s running to become Georgia’s next governor. She writes, “I’m running to make history and serve as the first Black woman governor our country has ever seen.”

In one instance, skin color apparently makes someone qualified to hold office. In the next instance, people can be let go based on their skin tone.

Lots of chatter about both of these stories—lots of divisive stuff. What should our response be as Christians?

WALKER: Well, I can certainly appreciate the motive that is attempting to create policies that are trying to undo past wrongs. Where we can identify past historical wrongs, where we can we should repent. Where we can't, we should lament.

But fundamentally, the problem with a policy like the one that you just mentioned is, it's basing a criteria for a job based on a set of characteristics that ought to be irrelevant to whether or not someone can do the job or not. And I think this is the implication of rejecting a principle that we are to do a job based on competence and ability, not some secondary characteristic of our personality.

But I think as Christians, one of the reasons this is particularly problematic is because it shows that we are basing our criteria for employment, for worth, for ability, on something other than the image of God. And one of the reasons I think the image of God is such a valuable concept and truth for the moment that we find ourselves in, is that it takes this issue out of our hands and places the issue in divine scripture and special revelation.

And so we have to refer back to Scripture, we're not referring back to a multitude of possible human opinion, that are the form of human opinions that can err and I think, in their own way, end up creating their own form of injustice, especially when you're removing or terminating teachers based on skin color. That serves no one. It doesn't serve the district's own integrity, and it doesn't serve students either.

EICHER: You’ve certainly seen the videos that have been making the rounds on social media: videos of doctors at the Boston Children’s Hospital discussing—in some detail—so-called gender-affirmation surgery. I’m struck by that because it’s going in a very different direction than what I read this week in WORLD Opinions about the shutdown this summer of the world’s biggest pediatric gender clinic, the Gender Identity Development Service in England in Britain’s government health service. What accompanied that were some statements by the clinicians expressing doubt about things like puberty blockers and the damage they may do to kids.

So Britain seems to be going one way and the United States going another—but both are what we think of as Western nations, certainly English-speaking.

How do you interpret these two stories and what do they tell us about which way the cultural wind is truly blowing?

WALKER: It reveals so much, Nick, and thanks for bringing this up.

I think what's fascinating is Western Europe—whether in the UK or there are places in Scandinavia as well—that have begun to second guess themselves on the practice around puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapies, and these very, very invasive surgeries. And here you have Americans playing catch up, because there's always kind of this desire to want to be as progressive as Europe. And then lo and behold, we see progressive Western Europe second-guessing themselves, and second-guessing themselves in such a way that there are vulnerable individuals who are being experimented on with very novel medical practices.

What few people realize who don't study this issue professionally, is how exploratory this medicine is. And we have physicians on the record, physicians, I would add here in America on the record, who are confessing to the reality that the medicine on this has moved faster than our understanding of gender dysphoria and gender conflicts themselves.

I'm not a historian, I can't tell the future. But my expectation is that in five to 10 years, the standards of treatment and the protocols that are recommended here in America are going to look a lot different than they are even right now. And I think this is yet another example of the impossibility of fighting nature, the futility of trying to fight our nature, and saying to ourselves, that our bodies don't matter. And we can carve up and slice and dice the body to fit the mind, when in reality, we ought to be encouraging these individuals in the direction of psychological treatment that helps individuals to bring their minds into conformity with their body, not altering the body surgically or hormonally to fit the needs of the mind.

This is one of the great tensions of the whole transgender worldview: that psychology is subjective, it's internal, it's discrete, it's known only to the individual who is making the claim about their so called gender identity, whereas biological sex is objective. And for the pure kind of clear thinking around this, it seems to me that we would want to bring what is subjective into alignment with what is the objective.

EICHER: This is Culture Friday, not politics Friday, but bear with me for a second: I want to talk about the big spending bill that just got signed into law, the Inflation Reduction Act, talked about it on Monday.

Now, I’m not wanting to talk about what’s in it but what’s not in it. The Wall Street Journal had a piece that made the point that there was no abortion in it. This would’ve been the easiest political vehicle for tucking in some dollars to promote abortion in abortion states or to facilitate travel between states for abortion-minded moms who live in pro-life state. But not only is there nothing in there along those lines, but this Wall Street Journal writer made the observation that the proponents didn’t even try.

We’ve been hearing lots about the ascendant pro-abortion movement, but this seems like a contrary data point, doesn’t it?

WALKER: I think that's right. I also think, you know, I want to believe that they're afraid of kind of awakening a pro-life contingent. But I also think that the Democrats are probably just playing smart politics. And that is trying to get across the finish line or the goal line as much as possible. And so removing any one of these headwinds that could potentially cause them from scoring the win that they so desperately need to win in the polls.

If we're looking at the November midterms, things are not looking good for the Democrats. And so I can see in their thinking, let's do whatever we can to just get the clearest victory possible so that we can go on that messaging win and not get bogged down in the culture-war issues.

BROWN: Alright! Andrew Walker’s a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Seminary and managing editor of WORLD Opinions. Andrew, thank you!

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