Culture Friday: Disagreeing over reality

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Friday the 6th of December, 2024.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

It’s time for Culture Friday, and joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: We’ve obviously devoted considerable airtime this week to the landmark case at the Supreme Court. The question is whether states can ban doctors from attempting sex-change procedures on children—whether surgery or using drugs.

I know you’ve been following this. But what hit me were the advocates before the court, arguing that protecting children in this way is unconstitutional.

Quite a contrast of characters.

What you had was the solicitor general of the United States, Elizabeth Prelogar, a beauty queen 20 years ago. She was the 2004 Miss Idaho before going to law school.

And next to her making the same argument slightly differently was the attorney for the ACLU, a mustachioed woman who goes by the name of Chase Strangio, and billed as the first-ever transgender lawyer to argue a case before the Supreme Court.

This will no doubt go down as a significant cultural moment.

STONESTREET: Oh, it was, and part of it was just how different the two sides argued. People on the opposite sides of this issue aren't just disagreeing about an issue. They're disagreeing about what they think the nature of reality is. It was really, really stark. And as you pointed out, those who were representing each side, and even before you get to what happened in the courtroom, the fact that the mustachioed, is that the official way to say that is that the adjective form of mustache?

EICHER: It sure is, John. I looked it up.

STONESTREET: I didn't know that. I learned something new here on Culture Friday.

The mustachioed woman was called and heralded as being historic. And this, of course, is a forced narrative that has been the case over and over and over when it comes to those who announce to the world either their sexual orientation or their gender identity, and then do something new: That basically the attraction or behavior that someone displays somehow makes them different.

It doesn't, actually. Because all of us have twisted desires. To celebrate one form of them and then to be heralded as historic tells you everything you need to know about how far apart we are.

You could also see how far apart we are in the behavior of the justices themselves. Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito asking questions very specifically on, really, “Is the science settled on this issue like we've been told?” Compare that to the line of questioning from Justice Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, both of whom ask questions along the lines of critical theory—being committed already to a narrative of identity and a narrative of discrimination.

I'll say one more thing, and that is the difference of worldview here goes to the depth of what counts as child abuse. Because essentially, you have each side accusing the other of child abuse.

So when Jim Sire wrote his book years ago, The Universe Next Door, that you could be right next door to someone and not just disagree on specifics, but disagree on the nature of reality itself. You know, this is about as far apart as we can get.

It underscores something that even if the good guys win on this one—and make no mistake, the good guys are those who are trying to prevent the abuse of children in the name of so-called gender-affirming care—what's obvious, given how far apart we are is that you're going to have pro-child abuse states and anti-child abuse states. We know there's 20 some-odd states that have passed laws to protect young people from this harm. That means you're going to have a double down from the legislatures of the most progressive states that's going to leave a lot of children vulnerable. So we're going to have another issue of incredible moral gravity, and it's going to divide our nation further.

EICHER: Another cultural moment, John, and you alluded to the dramatic differences among the justices …

But isn’t it significant that Justice Alito brought up the Cass Review and we’ve talked about this before the research review that led to the UK backing off of these procedures on children? That came up and it seems significant.

STONESTREET: It is. I mean, look, the Cass Review is as significant as we said it was, and it absolutely countered the "science-is-settled" narrative. And I think Alito had a very important question to the solicitor general, which is, “Why isn't this mentioned? It's only in a footnote and it's significant?” And her response was essentially, “Look, I didn't mention it because it didn't go as far as the Tennessee law.” In other words, it said that there's still more research to be done. I mean, she really downplayed the results, but said even these nations that have backed off of this care haven't made it illegal.

But that's exactly what a government supposed to do: to make illegal those things that are harmful to its citizens, especially its children, which are its future. So Tennessee is completely within the realm of common sense, natural law and the mandate given to it by our nation's laws, both at the state and federal level, to do this sort of protectionary legislating. So that's exactly what a government should do. So good for Tennessee for doing it

MAST: Another massive story from a cultural perspective, John, is the movement in Britain to bring assisted suicide to that country.

The New York Times story was interesting. It had a Labor Party member of parliament who voted no and a Conservative who voted yes. Exactly what you would not expect. But one Labor MP who’d worked in medical care openly worried about people being coerced into killing themselves … saying “People often recognize coercion only after years have passed, yet within a month someone could be dead. … As a clinician working at the fringes of life, I heard my patients frequently say, ‘I don’t want to be a burden,’ or ‘I’d rather the money went to the grandchildren than on my care.’”

Then the conservative MP Kit Malthouse argued in support, saying, “The deathbed for far too many is a place of misery, torture, and degradation, a reign of blood and vomit and tears. I see no compassion and beauty in that — only profound human suffering.” A conservative. WOW!

STONESTREET: Yeah, wow is right … and it underscores just speaking of the conservative lawmaker of the great crisis of conservatism around the globe right now, because conservatism only makes sense as a political philosophy if you're absolutely clear on what's worth conserving.

But even so, the doctor-assisted suicide, or the new nomenclature “medical assistance in dying,” which is none of those things, narrative here actually doesn't advance autonomy. Because the situation that Kit Malthouse, this conservative lawmaker, described, is the situation for people who are forgotten, who did not make it up the list in time for the nationalized health care system in the UK, or who are relationally disconnected from anyone who will care for them in their latter years.

Those are the people who face a deathbed that looks like that because we have remarkable palliative care in the West. But even so, a deathbed that is like the one that's described is still a death of an individual made in the image of God and of infinite value.

This UK thing, the whole debate, would be interesting to watch if we weren't talking about something so grave as we are, because there were two audiences that the lawmakers and those who were trying to promote this bill were trying to appeal to: the old and the young. For the old, it was all about autonomy. But the other thing that was fascinating, if it weren't so serious, was that the same sort of pitch was made to the young, and it was made in the same way as kind of lifestyle choices. Like really cool cars, that you can have the career that you want, you can travel, and you know what, when it's all done, you can choose to die on your own terms. So because this was being sold to the public, this was new for me. But there was a big push in the UK, not just on the grounds of so-called compassion, which is not compassion, but also on the grounds of the young. Don't you want the right to have life completely on your own terms, and that means also having death on your own terms?

So we've already redefined possessions along those lines. We've redefined work along those lines. We've redefined marriage along those lines. We've redefined parenting or having children along those lines, and now we're redefining death along those lines. That's a tough reality, and it tells you about the Triumph of the Therapeutic that Rieff wrote about so long ago, or the triumph of radical expressive individualism like Carl Trueman wrote about in recent years. It was front and center in this debate.

EICHER: Interesting piece in WORLD Opinions, John, don’t know if you saw it. I do know you’re familiar with Aaron Renn’s “Negative World” thesis … where there are these periods of time ranging from positive world, pre-1994, to neutral world for 20 years, then negative world from 2014 to the present … where “Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order.”

So this piece by Seth Troutt suggests we’re in “Ambivalent World,” highlighting the diminishing influence of legacy media and the rise of podcast-driven paradigms. He points to Joe Rogan and calls him a “Reality Respecter,” and Jordan Peterson as a “Meaning Maker.”

I want to read a bit of this: “Those who respect reality won’t stand for the erasure of biological facts, and the Meaning Makers won’t settle for nihilistic existential answers to questions about meaning. They’ll be open but cautious about the Bible.” Seth Troutt writes: “[T]oo many pastors read The New York Times and The Atlantic instead of listening to the podcasts that are shaping the minds of the future converts who will be the next generation of elders in our local churches.”

Is that of interest to you, John?

STONESTREET: It is of interest, but it's especially true of young men. And you know, that's one of the you-are-here lessons of the last election season—and really, of the last three or four years, is that men and women are headed in opposite directions in terms of their worldview, in terms of who they think the good guys are and the bad guys are, and so on.

It's not because one's listening to the traditional media and one's listening to podcasts. They're both listening to podcasts. They're listening to different kinds of podcasters.

But I think it's important also to realize both the opportunity and the threat here. The opportunity is that many of these podcasters, these reality respecters, as was described, it's coming out of not appreciating the truth of Christianity. It's coming from looking at what happens when Christianity gets pushed out of the Western world, and the world is remade along the lines of various forms of postmodernism. Because postmodernism basically ends in a denial of reality, the only way to enforce it is through big government, through authoritarianism, and that's what people are pushing back on. It hit its pinnacle, kind of post COVID, 2021, 2022, and that's what people really reacted against. In a sense, they were then going to some of the historians that had recognized—historians like Tom Holland—Christianity is the source of human rights and human dignity. They wanted cultural Christianity, even somebody like Richard Dawkins, who I don't think is really less hostile to Christianity. He's just now more hostile to kind of the woke culture that has infected his own reality.

But that's the opportunity. There's also going to be the Ayaan Hirsi Alis who maybe get to Christianity from cultural Christianity. But because God is gracious and kind, you realize, “Oh, wait, cultural Christianity is because of Christianity, and Christianity's influence is because of Christians, and Christians are the people who really believe this stuff that Richard Dawkins calls nonsense.”

So we should not settle for halfway cultural Christianity, but we shouldn't condemn it either. We should welcome it and then point to its source over and over again. So I, you know, it's an interesting analysis. I will say that the negative world thesis still has an awful lot going for it. In other words, you can't look at what happened in the last four weeks politically in one country. I think there's more to point to, and I think there's a lot more that we're going to need to have happen for a culture not to retreat back into a level of hostility.

MAST: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thank you John!

STONESTREET: Thank you both!

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