Culture Friday: Erasing Churchill

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, March 13th. 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, John Stonestreet joins us now. John is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. 

John, good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

EICHER: Alright, well let’s begin in New York, John. Police say that two young men drove from Pennsylvania into the city and tossed homemade bombs into a protest crowd outside Gracie Mansion—that, of course, the official residence of the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani. 

Investigators said that the two were inspired by ISIS and that they hoped to carry out a major terror attack. Thankfully that failed, no one was hurt, but the media reaction quickly became part of the story. 

CNN posted the following summary on social media—later having to delete it after heavy criticism, and after I read it you'll figure out why. This is what it said: 

“Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during the abnormally warm weather. But in less than an hour, their lives would drastically change as the pair would be arrested for throwing homemade bombs during an anti-Muslim protest.”

It's deleted, you can't find it anymore, except for those who clipped it and hung onto it. 

John, you know, when something like this happens, what does it say about the moral framework our culture uses to interpret events—particularly when clear acts of evil just don’t fit the narrative?

STONESTREET: Well, it’s just another example that you wouldn’t believe if you didn’t see it yourself. But we also saw, for example, just the other night on CNN, on Abby Phillips’s show, where she also just falsely reported that this was a terrorist attack that had targeted Mamdani, which of course there was no evidence of. No one had ever suggested, certainly was not something that was said by the young men that were arrested here.

And this is kind of treated, in a sense, as if whatever happened to these boys, these boys kind of  stumbled into Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as they were taking a stroll through Central Park. It’s a bizarre sort of thing.

And I don’t know that we need more evidence of the critical theory mood that has infected so much of American elitism, especially when it comes to the media, but also how inadequate critical theory is in explaining good and evil. The thing about a worldview is it's got to be big enough for the world. In other words, it cannot reduce the world down. It has to be big enough for the things that you actually experience in the world.

You talk about intersectionality—this story has intersectionality written all over it. But it would be a funny example if it weren’t dealing with something so serious.

EICHER: Alright John, well here’s another symbolism story, this one from overseas: The Bank of England is considering redesigning its banknotes—one proposal would replace historical figures like Winston Churchill with images of wildlife typically found in Britain: things like hedgehogs and badgers.

Now, Churchill’s portrait on the five-pound note commemorates Britain’s leadership during World War II, its resistance to Nazi Germany. Churchill, of course, led Britain in its darkest hour, and I dare say he seems more significant to the U.K.—with all due respect to these fine creatures—seems more significant than small woodland mammals, let's just say it that way. 

John, when a nation moves away from honoring the figures who shaped its history—even in something symbolic like this—what does it tell you?

STONESTREET: The question of what is wrong with Great Britain goes well beyond what they choose to put on their currency. I mean, this is the same week that we heard that Britain was also going to name an anti-Muslim czar—someone to be in charge of stamping out anti-Muslim rhetoric and anti-Muslim hate in the nation.

I haven't been able to find anything here about whether the intention of removing Churchill is you know, some sort of historical correctionism, or you know, kind of the argument is the same used for tearing down monuments. It is weird to replace him with hedgehogs and badgers.

But I do think there's a group of Brits that are trying to solve this problem. They're telling a group of stories in those Wallace-and-Gromit claymation-style videos called proudofus.uk. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty cool, where they're going back and say: Hey Brits, we should be proud of our heritage, because you know, we fought the Nazis. We should be proud because we ended slavery. We should be proud, because in the name of educating illiterate children who were chained to machines in the Industrial Revolution, the man who invented Sunday school taught 250,000 kids how to read the Bible.

I mean, these are amazing stories in British history. And you don't have as big of a problem with one little step like saying, “Hey, let’s get a new dollar bill,” if you have all that history in place. But they don't, and that's the problem.

BROWN: Well John, I want to turn your attention to an Institute for Family Studies report published this week on the rates of loneliness rising, affecting four out of ten Americans age 45 and older. Now that’s a 5% uptick since 2018.

The report also points to a prediction that the number of Americans living alone in their 80s and in their 90s will soon skyrocket, doubling from 6% of all households in 2018 to 12% in the year 2028.

Now what seems to be driving this new data on increased loneliness? Research that suggests women below the age of 45 who voluntary decide to remain childless. So it's low fertility rates and rising life expectancy. Any surprises there?

STONESTREET: No, I mean, we've seen this script play out in Asia, especially in Japan, where the birth rate has been so low for so long that we started getting these strange reports of older women committing petty crimes so that they could go to prison so that they could have somebody to talk to. Or the growing industry of hiring yourself out as a family member for holiday celebrations—a kind of gig economy of Uber meets the fertility crisis.

These are the things that we have seen in other parts of the world for a while, and you're going to see it here as well. I tell ya, the Institute for Family Studies deserves an awful lot of credit for pointing this out relentlessly.

The fact of the matter is, you do not have a society that is strong, that is resilient, that has a future if you do not have a strong family culture. It's because of things like this. We are not meant to be alone. We are built as image bearers to help one another to build the kind of world that we were intended to do.

And God instituted marriage and put procreation in that context so that the children would be protected.

Just think of your own experience kind of growing up in a large family. We have millions and millions more Americans growing up where they are reaching a part of their life and they don't have grandchildren. And the math just does not work out. You cannot cultivate the kind of people you need in the long term this way.

And I think we are seeing that, and we'll continue to realize that there are even more areas that remain to be studied that will become obvious in the future if the fertility rate continues in this downward direction.

BROWN: Well John, one more story caught my attention this week. A high school teacher in Georgia died after a group of teenagers showed up at his house late at night to pull a prank—throwing toilet paper in the trees. 

Well, he went outside to catch them, slipped in the street, and in the chaos that followed, the teens—trying to drive away—accidentally ran over him.

But what’s remarkable is what his widow said afterward. She’s publicly asked prosecutors not to charge the boys, saying her husband loved those students and wouldn’t want their lives destroyed over what she believes was a terrible accident.

John, when people hear a response like that today, it almost sounds extraordinary, doesn’t it?

STONESTREET: Well, I think increasingly this is yet another example of a distinctive of Christianity that will set it apart when lived out, from our society. It's at the center of a Christian worldview and it has no place in wokeism. It has no place in progressivism. It has no place in Marxism. It's forgiveness.

And at the center of this Christian worldview is this great exchange: that God takes your sin and gives you, in Christ, His righteousness. It's a swap.

Doesn't mean it's easy, doesn't mean it lessens the tragedy one bit. But there is an understanding of the world that comes out of a Christian framing—that the world's not as it's supposed to be, and that forgiveness is actually something that is possible and can bring about great good.

I think that's why people continue to be so astounded by it. Because the more Christianity is pushed to the margins of society, the more this will seem remarkable. It's always remarkable, but it's really remarkable in a culture that has no room for it anywhere else.

And I think it's going to be a Christian distinctive. I think it's going to be bizarre to the watching world. It's going to be increasingly astonishing. It's going to be compelling, because a world with forgiveness is certainly better than a world without forgiveness, right?

But this is another example, and this list of stories is kind of stacking up here. 

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. 

John, thank you very much!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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