Culture Friday: Drawing the line

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, December 12th. 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 and we begin with Australia ., where the government has just implemented what it calls one of the biggest changes in the country’s history: a nationwide ban on all social-media accounts for children under 16. Anika Wells is the communications minister:

WELLS: For many years, the world has allowed the idea that the internet can have different rules from real life, that somehow it can be a free space, unregulated by any of the values by which we govern ourselves.

That means no Instagram, no TikTok, no Snapchat, no YouTube accounts — nothing. And this is not a school rule. It’s the law. Platforms can be fined up to thirty million U.S. dollars if they fail to remove underage accounts.

BROWN: At the unveiling of the law were the prime minister, government officials, and families who lost children to cyberbullying and online predation. Parent advocate Wayne Holdsworth:

HOLDSWORTH: Our kids that we've lost haven't died in vain, because today they'll be looking down very proud of the work that we've all done.

Meanwhile, teenagers told both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal they plan to ignore the ban entirely, using VPNs, older siblings’ accounts, or face-scan workarounds. Three-quarters of Australian teens say they don’t think the ban will work.

EICHER: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.

GRANT: We're not expecting flawlessness. We have built in allowances for that. ... These isolated cases of teenage creativity, circumvention, spoofing and other ingenious ways that people will inevitably push boundaries will continue to fill newspaper pages, but we won't be deterred. We're playing the long game.

And then there’s the other debate: some analysts argue that banning kids from these platforms doesn’t fix the deeper problem—that social media has become the default environment where young people form identity, relationships, even their sense of self.

Joining us now: John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning John.

STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: John, what do you see here? Is Australia recognizing something true about the formative power of technology — that these platforms shape kids in ways families can’t overcome?

STONESTREET: Well, I don’t think they’re recognizing, I think a lot of people have recognized that. I’m not even sure that’s a debate anymore, that social media is bad for teenagers, and it’s especially bad for young teenagers, and it’s really, really bad for young teenage girls. I mean, all of that is so overwhelmingly proven that there’s not a whole lot else to say about it.

The question is, will people actually act on it? And here, the nation of Australia has acted on it, and not just by kind of passing this law, because not a lot would be done if the law were there, but the fines would not be there. And the fines directed at the companies themselves to take care of policing their own platforms, that really has, I think, another level of bite. Because we know that platforms can do more than they have been doing, and the fact that this requires them to do more.

I mean, consider, for example, pornography websites, where basically all these websites have to do and there’s no real penalties that are enforced on these companies if their method of and by the way, the method is just basically a gate like it allows people to lie and to say whatever they want, and there’s no penalty. This adds a penalty that adds bite. So I think it’s really interesting to see now. Will teenagers try to get around it? Of course. Will fewer teenagers do it because this is in place, yes. And basically we have a government that has recognized that this is a source of evil.

Is social media the only thing to blame for the radical identity crisis that inflicts Western young people, of course not, but it is the most direct source of a particular type of confusion, sexual confusion, gender identity, confusion and other things, and it’s been a source of self harm. So listen, cutting this off is way better. You’re not going to fix a kid’s identity crisis in our culture until you fix the family. But good heavens, let’s stop the one thing that’s pumping more poison into their veins than really anything else.

BROWN: Actor Kirk Cameron is in the news this week. Cameron’s known for Growing Pains, Fireproof, and the Left Behind movies. He’s facing criticism for some heterodox theological views. In a recent podcast with his son, Cameron rejected the traditional Christian teaching of eternal, conscious punishment of those who reject Christ. He’s embraced a controversial view that’s called annihilationism—the belief that those who die without Christ are simply destroyed rather than tormented forever. Here’s how Cameron put it:

CAMERON: I used to hold the position of conscious eternal torment, because that's just what I was taught by people that I love and trust. I've learned that there are other positions, and a very robust argument can be made for conditionalism or annihilationism, as Edward Fudge posits here. And it fits the character of God in my understanding more than the conscious eternal torment position, because it brings in the mercy of God together with the justice of God. It doesn't leave judgment out. It is just, but it also fits with the Old Testament picture of the fate of the wicked, which is to be destroyed, it is to die, and it is to perish, not live forever in an eternal barbecue.

Theologians from Augustine to Calvin to modern-day confessional churches have long taught otherwise—that the Bible describes punishment as both eternal and conscious. That's the view of The Westminster Confession of Faith. It’s also the teaching of Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and most Protestant traditions.

Yet, here’s a professing Christian with generational influence. Is this a cause for concern?

STONESTREET: You know, I saw a lot on this this week, and Kirk Cameron is not the first conservative theological voice to struggle with the idea of conscious, eternal punishment. I mean, you’d be surprised at some of the more prominent theological voices that have embraced this kind of a view, one being John Stott, you know, who might be the last generation’s greatest pastor theologian. And so I was really interested to see where this reasoning comes from.

The debate about what exactly Hell is is more robust in church history than a lot of people understand, or a lot of people give credit for. But it’s the conscious part, really that has, I think, a lot of consequences here, because that has to do with something that the Bible clearly seems to teach, that the righteous will go to this eternal, conscious fellowship with God, and the wicked will be in an eternal, I mean, you know, it doesn’t use those words, but it certainly seems to describe that kind of an existence.

And now we’re getting at something like I get the tension, and if you don’t feel the tension really, between the extravagant grace and love that is described and attributed to God in Holy Scripture through Christ, Jesus the free gift of salvation, the surprising people that end up being accepted by Christ, like the thief on the cross. If you don’t feel the tension between that sort of thing and this sort of description of divine judgment, then you’re not taking the Scripture seriously, because that tension is there in the Scripture. It’s very much there in the Scripture.

And you also have a description of a new heavens and new earth, basically where God’s creation is restored. My eight year old asked me about this the other day, unrelated to Kirk Cameron. Well, you know, if there is a new heaven and new earth, will there be a new hell? That’s what he asked me, which I thought was a really great question. And I was like, Well, no. And he’s like, Well, is everything being made new? And that’s a tension in Scripture. When you understand that narrative that the Bible describes from Genesis to Revelation.

I don’t think this is a sign that Kirk Cameron is, you know, lost the faith, or is headed into heresy, struggling with the kind of punishment that the Bible describes is a big deal, mainly because it points back to whether the Bible in its plain reading, can be understood by us. So that, to me, is the bigger question, because the Bible does seem, in its plainest, straightforward way, to describe an eternal existence of the wicked under the wrath of God, and it is because of what we understand about that that we understand what Jesus endured on the cross on our behalf. And so a lot of these theological themes really are connected, and it’s important to understand that.

EICHER: John, the big media story this week is at CBS. The network has just named Tony Dokoupil the new anchor of the CBS Evening News. It’s one of the most visible jobs in American journalism. And what makes this remarkable is the arc that got him here.

Just a year ago, Dokoupil was censured by CBS leadership for an interview in which he dared to challenge Ta-Nehisi Coates for the way he portrayed the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Here’s little bit of it …

DOKOUPIL: I want to dive into the Israel-Palestine section of the book, the largest section of the book. And I have to say, when I, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist. And so then I found myself wondering, why does Tanahashi Coates, who I've known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much. Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it. Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits. And is it because you just don't believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?

COATES: Well, I would say the perspective that you just outlined, there is no shortage of that perspective in American media.

So this sparked a newsroom uproar. Executives dressed him down for having fallen short of quote-unquote “editorial standards.” Defending him was Bari Weiss’s Free Press. She published leaked audio of that CBS meeting and argued that honest questioning is becoming endangered in legacy media.

Fast forward ... and now Bari Weiss is calling the shots at CBS ... and her first big move is to tap Dokoupil.

Her stated goal in naming him was to restore lost trust in mainstream media. I think that’s a very tall order. But what do you think, John: does appointing a journalist who refused to play the narrative game signal a real institutional shift—or is trust a much deeper problem than one appointment can get at?

STONESTREET: It’s certainly deeper at this time in history and the history of journalism, particularly the last 20-30 years, it’s a much deeper problem than one appointment. At the same time, there’s a couple industries in particular where personnel is policy. The personnel change at CBS News is so dramatically upside down and different than it was just yesterday.

I mean, I’m just kind of thinking what it must feel, feel like for the progressives in the newsroom and the rest of us are like, Oh, well, this is way better, you know, because I think that’s one of the things that that Barry Weiss absolutely understood when she first resigned her position at The New York Times was that her identifying there made a statement that she didn’t want to make, and that she had an ability to do something dramatically different and to change the game, and she was going to do that, and you saw how she did it by bringing the people that she did in the Free Press.

I mean, what an interesting lineup, what an interesting diverse group of voices. You know, there’s plenty of people there that I would absolutely disagree with, but they came over there because they thought that they would be able to do the job that they had always dreamed of doing, and that they could be a part of a news outlet that actually was trying to do news in the way that journalism is supposed to be done. And man, if she can pull that off at one of these kinds of legacy media things, you know, what an interesting thing.

And I think you’ll see it in the ratings, because it’s clear that the American people don’t trust anybody. I mean, is it even possible to even approach the good old days if there ever was one of, you know, a common, authoritative kind of big set of media personalities that people on both the left and the right will at least listen to? That would be quite something, wouldn’t it?

BROWN: It would! John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center. He is host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, thanks! See you next time.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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