Culture Friday - Evil of scale

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, August 27th, 2021.

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.

We are now four days away from the Taliban deadline for the West to leave Afghanistan. Just a reminder of the actual stakes here—what we may be leaving behind even as the Taliban engage in media spin that this is a kinder, gentler terror group. Our WORLD colleague Mindy Belz—from a conversation a few days ago on this program—on the difference between words and actions.

BELZ: The people that I've talked to, none of them believe that this is a gentler Taliban. And one example I'll give you is that one of the first directives that the Taliban Cultural Commission issued as it started retaking the provincial capitals a couple of weeks ago, it was a directive to the local Islamic leaders saying, “Please identify and send to us the girls aged 15, and widows up to age 45, so that they can be married to Taliban fighters.” I’ve seen the actual order itself, and that is what the women in Afghanistan are going [through]. They are all trying to get out. And it's just because of the kind of fear and the actual reality of what the Taliban is doing on the ground.

It’s Culture Friday. I'd like to welcome John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: Of course, Afghanistan is swamping all the news, and probably rightly so. But considering that Taliban deadline of August 31st coming on Tuesday, I think we’re all mindful of the possibility that many people may be left behind—maybe not American citizens, we’ll have to see on that—but Afghans who simply cannot live under Taliban rule.

Our latest WORLD magazine just went up online—maybe ironically dated September 11th 2021, 20 years to the date since 9/11—and we’re saying on the cover, “Squandering American Sacrifice.” That’s a bitter pill.

STONESTREET: It's hard to believe it's been 20 years, it's hard to believe that the circumstances over the last year on the ground in Afghanistan have changed so quickly, and have become so dreadful on so many different levels. It's hard to imagine just short of the Taliban targeting and executing more people. And now we're just talking about evil of scale, that it could be much worse than it is right now. And putting it in the light of that history is even harder to swallow as an American. But of course, for Islam, this version of Islam in particular, the 20 years isn't the story. That's just the most recent chapter of a story that goes back centuries. And that's really one of the reasons that we're seeing, you know, what we're seeing 20 years after 9/11 is because our historical memory is not good enough. It's not big enough, it's not seeing the world in the same sort of categories. Also, our secular categories of seeing nations governed on economic terms or just purely political realities, misses a whole section of life in the world that the Islamic world, particularly this kind of Muslim, takes very, very seriously. And that is kind of eternal commitments to things that are believed to be true, even if they're not. I will say, you know, I had a long conversation with Mindy Belz about a week ago. And I asked her the same question. Obviously, we've heard about many people who have served in the military over the last several decades, feeling like what was all this for? Who were on the ground there, who had to go door to door there, who had to face down the Taliban, at their worst moments, who lost friends loved ones, asking the same question, What was it all for? And Mindy pointed out to me that, you know, it's not a nothing. I guess it's it's worth saying that there hasn't been another attack on that scale in the last 20 years. And a big reason for that has been just simply the fact that the war was taken to the Taliban to al Qaeda that was being harbored in Afghanistan. So are we creating another context which can make another 9/11 sort of attack possible? In the next several years, that could possibly be true, but we have had 20 years of living in a place where there were expected attacks, and they never actually happened here, at least not to that scale.

BROWN: John, I wonder whether we’re looking at a terrible humanitarian situation unfolding in real time here—especially for Afghanistan’s Christians or any religious minority for that matter—and we hear this often whenever we contemplate violent, open persecution of the church: We hear that the religious liberty battles here at home just pale in comparison to what Christians in openly hostile lands have to suffer. So, in other words: How can you worry about lawsuits or loss of livelihood when other Christians are looking down the barrel of a gun? John, what do you think about that observation?

STONESTREET: Yeah, we are looking at a terrible humanitarian situation and a terrible potential martyrdom. Actually, there was some reports posted on Facebook this week that suggested that there was a kind of a vast martyrdom of a young but growing and courageous church in Afghanistan, and I haven't seen those reports confirmed. So I'm not ready to say what the scale has been. And it is something that should, I think, drive us to lift up our brothers and sisters and ask that their heroic courage and example will be a testimony to their persecutors. as has been the case throughout so much of history. That's what's so crazy: By losing you win, by dying you live. That's the back to front narrative of Christianity. And it's not really back to front. It's the world being put right side up because of the work and the resurrection of Christ Jesus.

But your question is a good one. And it's an important one. And a few weeks ago, I was on a panel talking about that very question with a religious freedom advocate who had actually grown up in an African nation that his parents had fled in order to flee just great persecution. And he actually was very comfortable using the word persecution for what was being seen in America—the loss of rights, the loss of livelihoods, Jack Phillips, Baronelle Stutzman being examples of all of them. And and it struck me that the people who are most comfortable using the word persecution, even though at a different scale, for what we're seeing in the West, the growing intolerance of religious belief, the growing intolerance, of Christian belief, in particular, and behavior and moral belief, are those who have actually experienced real persecution that we would call and we're the ones that are most uncomfortable using that word. I'm really uncomfortable. I mean, I'll be honest, I mean, there's no comparison for what our brothers and sisters in Afghanistan and Nigeria, in particular, those are two nations front and center in my mind, and what we're dealing with. But those who have actually gone through it, I think of the stories that Rod Dreher tells in his book Live Not by Lies. And I've said for a long time that I think that the best contribution that book makes  is it introduces us to heroes of the faith that will go down in history, but it hasn't been that long ago in history for them to make the history books yet. And he went and met with so many of them, and they're comfortable looking at what's happening in America and saying this looks an awful lot like what we have seen in X, Y and Z in the past. I think that's an interesting observation.

I say that and still say, I'm still uncomfortable, you know, making any sort of comparison, and that we should be driven to our knees and care about what's happening to our brothers and sisters, especially in Afghanistan. We talked about that before that one side of why we should care about religious freedom in America is that there's no other ally of religious freedom that has both the influence, the voice, the, and the ability to actually do something about persecuted religious minorities like America. So if we don't care about it here, then it's not only you know, the impact is not only to private citizens here, it's our ability to actually advocate for those who are facing incredible persecution around the world. Most of the world just doesn't come to this fight. It just doesn't, you know, stand up and step up to this challenge, like America has the ability in the history of doing. That's a big loss. And, man, I can't think of certainly any event in my lifetime—and maybe I'm being short sighted here—but I can't think of another event in my lifetime that would have done more damage to our worldwide reputation as standing for keeping promises than this one.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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