Culture Friday: Defunding common sense

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s the 12th day of May 2023.

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

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday.

Joining us now is John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: John, here’s a new chapter (so to speak) in the debate over what’s appropriate in public or school libraries. The state of Illinois will become the first state to hold back funding from public or school libraries that remove certain books from circulation, and I’m not seeing qualifiers. But we know there’ve been battles over books aimed at young readers that emphasize sexually explicit material or that have graphic LGBTQ content.

Basically, the state will financially punish any library, it seems to me, that is sensitive to legitimate parental concerns. Public libraries, public schools, you cut off state money and they don’t survive. This is a new line in the sand, it seems to me, John. What do you say?

STONESTREET: Oh, absolutely. I mean, what a bizarre sort of thing. I mean, there's two ways really to look at this. Number one is, if there really are all of these requests to remove books, why are there so many books that are sexually explicit? The vast majority, the top 10 list from the American Library Association, are all sexually explicit material. Why are there so many more sexually explicit books being written? Why are there so many more sexually explicit books been written for children? Why are there so many more sexually explicit books written for children being put in public school libraries? And the vast majority of these requests are going to public school libraries. So to see this progressive pushback now, where you basically penalize parents in a new way, is really just another conflict that's being created. And at some level it is real, but it's really being created and fed between parental rights and children's rights. And when you create that conflict, what you do then is put the state or some state agency as the adjudicator of this conflict of rights, and rights, if they're really rights don't conflict if they're properly understood and properly ordered, right? That's the key, you know, and the rights of children have to take precedent over the rights of parents, but the rights of adults to be able to force feed ideology into the heads of somebody else's children is not really a right. You're just calling it a children's right so it's being misidentified, and misordered. Well, what happens when you create this conflict and, and really feed it between children's rights and parents rights, then it naturally leaves the state or some state agency as the adjudicator of that right, of those rights and of the one position to better protect children's rights than the parent. And that's a really scary thing. So this is not just what this move from Illinois is not just a chapter in this made up book ban crisis of 2023, which, for example, 2,571 total books and resources challenged last year out of 117,000 libraries like this isn't that much to begin with. Right, right. And it just points to the fact that they're all having to do with sexually explicit material that parents don't want, you know, to be accessible. The other thing I thought about this too, Myrna, is if that's all the request, in 117,000 libraries, then the real headline here is why aren't people reading more? Because apparently people don't care about what books are in the library nearly enough.

EICHER: That's a good point. John, Hey, long time, no talk to. How you doing?

STONESTREET: And that's been a while, doing well, thanks. Good to be back.

EICHER: I’m sorry to bring up an old story, but I found it so interesting and I wanted your thoughts on it, given that we haven’t talked in so long. Author Rosaria Butterfield, I know you know her, about a month ago had an online article in which she publicly repented of so-called “pronoun hospitality.” It wasn’t that she was just wrong, she said, she was confessing it as sin and as a well-known author and speaker, she needed publicly to repent. Specifically, and she laid this out, the sin of bearing false witness, sinning against the creation ordinance, failing to love my neighbor as myself, and much, much more. It’s very comprehensive, and she’s talked about this in other settings.

But Rosaria Butterfield is calling on other public persons to join her in this repentance, and I’m not seeing much of a stampede. Maybe you are seeing that. How’d that article go over in your circles, John, what’d you think?

STONESTREET: Oh, I thought it was a tremendous piece. And, and this is what happens when someone actually takes the notion of sin seriously. And see, this is the way this issue has corrupted our thinking in the church. It's actually turned around and corrupted our theological thinking. So we don't think about these issues, primarily. And you don't hear it from the pulpit where people are actually saying, you know, this is actually a Genesis 1 issue, this is actually a matter of telling the truth or not. So those who are willing to venture into this territory at all, which isn't nearly enough pastors and Christian leaders, do it, almost primarily by apologizing to the LGBTQ community for not being nicer. Now, look, do we have things to also repent for in our treatment of people that are struggling with sexual orientation or gender identity issues? Yeah. But we also have to repent whenever we've embraced the false ideas, the categories of identity, of humanness, that just really aren't true. This was a big part of my mind, for example of the entire debate over a piece of legislation that was attempting to secure religious freedom protections called Fairness for All. And I never thought it would work. And even if it did, in any sort of pragmatic sense for any period of time, it was still granting a category of existence that didn't actually exist, that violated you know, who Scripture says we are as human beings and how Scripture says we should behave as human beings. And I think Rosario is actually absolutely right. As I was reading the piece, what I just kept coming back to is, how different it was to read someone who was just so committed to thinking theologically, and and taking the notion of sin seriously. But I think the reason you're not seeing a line behind Rosaria Butterfield is is less having to do with people disagreeing over pronouns and more having to do with the inability of people to think about sin anymore. And so this is just an area in which the idea of how God actually created the world and our willingness to acknowledge that being described biblically as a big deal, and that our denial of creation is the example used in Romans 1 to describe what happens when we fully get captivated by sin. And Rosaria seems to be taking that seriously and others don't.

EICHER: You know, it might have been better John to ask a Southern Baptist but I do know that you're quite a, an astute observer of the religious scene. And I'd like to hear what you say about what Southern Baptists are calling this week the biggest single year drop in membership in more than 100 years.

Ryan Berge is a statistician and political science professor who studies religion. He says it's more than just even that. He says, “the scale of decline in the last three years is staggering in comparison: a total loss of 1.32 million members.”

Now, those are massive numbers to those of us who are in small denominations. But when you think about that from the perspective of let's say, the mainline Presbyterian Church, so the PCUSA, it has a total of 1.1 million members, the Episcopalians have 1.57 million members. And Berge says, “It's like the [SBC] has shed the equivalent of a smaller mainline denomination since the year 2020.” Now, this is all quantitative stuff, not qualitative. We don't know why from the numbers alone. But what's your sense of this is what do you think is going on here?

STONESTREET: Well, for the record in my, you know, lifetime of denominational tourism, you know, I had a stop over as a Southern Baptist, at least for a while. But you know, there's, I mean, Southern Baptist has been, you know, one of the largest religious bodies in the world for quite some time in its ability to spread across the globe missionally. And you're going to hear all kinds of punch lines, like you certainly going to hear those that say, oh, it's because you know, they didn't, you know, become affirming. You know, the problem is, is all these mainline denominations that have been affirming have been shedding members now for decades. And you know, the answer to the Southern Baptist issue here, if it indeed is an issue, and I'm not sure that it even is but if it is, is not to become more like NPR because what happens is, is when you basically your Sunday morning sounds like NPR, people choose NPR over getting out of bed on Sunday morning and every mainline denomination, and every church has learned that lesson in mainline denominations. Well, they haven't learned the lesson but they're an example of this. I think some of this is the COVID shakeup that you know, there is a big COVID shakeup, and they're not the only the ones that are seeing a decline. In fact, my understanding in a story that I looked at not too long ago, is that really it's the Assemblies of God that has seen a growth that is they're actually an outlier, you know, and some of this is a winnowing, I think there's clearly a lot of conflict that certainly is very loud and frequent on Twitter. And it's important to remember, Twitter's not the real world, but it does, I think it is pointed to something that is a real part of Southern Baptist life. The other thing is, you know, look, there's a hyper-secularization that has taken place across the West. And this is, this means that the Gospel comes across as less plausible to younger generation. So as an older generation, you know, dies off and the younger generation, you know, is it going to take its place? I mean, these are just math numbers that have to do with demographics, it has to do with shrinking populations, it has to do with missionary efforts being less effective. So look, I think this is part of a larger headline of the shakeup of religious affiliation, the willingness to religiously affiliate, the growth of, you know, non-sectarian religious identification, so the nondenominationals and, and then just the lack of return during COVID, which really was certainly a winnowing time. So it's probably not one thing, it's probably all these things all at once. And we're still talking about a juggernaut of a religious body that's very, very important. And city after city, community after community, and nation after nation and praise God for it. And, of course, their return to orthodoxy in the last generation is one of the most important religious stories in American history in terms of its impact, and so that's all part of the history of this denomination too.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John!

STONESTREET: Thanks so much.

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