Culture Friday - Faith in masculinity

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, November 19th, 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. It’s Culture Friday. We want to welcome John Stonestreet. He’s the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: John, the Supreme Court is considering a case involving the death penalty in a way that touches on religious liberty. Our colleague Mary Reichard at the beginning of this week dove into the legal details, and it’s worth a listen to Monday’s program. But I wonder what you think about the issue, the question about whether a condemned man has a First Amendment right to have a pastor with him, laying hands upon him as he’s executed.

I can see the religious liberty issue and I can also see the technical issues of interfering with the state’s obligation to carry out justice. How would Chuck Colson have come down on this question?

STONESTREET: Well, I do have to say that I appreciate the question. What do you think Chuck Colson would have said about this because I certainly get a lot of emails informing me what Chuck Colson would think about all kinds of issues since taking over the Colson center. Usually it's the exact opposite of whatever I had just said or whatever I just done. On the death penalty itself, Chuck Colson went back and forth. It was never about whether or not there was biblical justification for the death penalty. I think that much is clear.

On this particular issue, I think we have to allow religious liberty all the way up into the point of natural death. There's no question on that. I mean, of course, religious liberty is not a right that has no boundaries. So for example, if someone's religion encourages child sacrifice, there's a clear boundary there where, you know, your religious liberty cannot infringe on the rights of somebody else, you know, at that same level to that same degree, laying hands on during an execution process, obviously, that has implications for what method is being used to carry out the execution? And that's going to be a question that has to be answered and could potentially carry with it a restriction of religious liberty, but to have the right to acknowledge one's faith all the way up to the moment of death. I do think that's what the Constitution guarantees and I think the right to have a pastor with him or her, or a religious leader, religious figure of some kind, that's a no brainer, that should be part of the religious liberties that people enjoy. And someone who is convicted of a crime certainly has to give up various freedoms depending on the level of the crime, the level of conviction, the level of the sentence. I don't think that one forfeits complete religious liberty, even in the most heinous of crimes. This is not what Christians believe certainly, about where religious conscience fits in to life, that we do something that is beyond God's forgiveness. That's one of the things that we absolutely don't believe so. It's difficult because now you're talking about a question of degrees you're talking about the method of execution you're talking about all of those sorts of things that play into this religious liberty isn't unlimited however, it is guaranteed to all of us including those who are on death row.

BROWN: Well, I know I'm not a man—very clear on that—but as the mother of two young men, I do want to talk about masculinity. Specifically, the crisis of masculinity as described this week by WORLD Opinions contributor Samuel D. James. In his article on How to Save the American Man, he mentions the emerging generation of young men failing to graduate, failing to work, failing to marry.

I know you were complimentary a week or so ago about a baseball pitcher who left the game—and left a huge pro contract on the table—to go tend to his family. And I’m just wondering, that story certainly was the exception and not the rule. Do you see more signs of hope like that or fewer?

STONESTREET: Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing story about Buster Posey, one of the greats of our day catcher for the San Francisco Giants retiring early for family reasons and pointing to that, but there's also something else at work and that is his faith. Let me just be clear, a major league baseball in and of itself is not enough to make someone a man. What you have in Buster Posey's situation is other factors, faith and institutions of faith formation. That's exactly the feature of American society that gives me less hope than more in terms of your question. Here's what I mean. Government institutions cannot form masculinity. This is the task of pre governmental institutions, especially the family, especially houses of worship and religious communities, especially other organizations that are what folks have rightly called mediating structures, those things that help mediate between individual citizens and the big government. Probably the dominant headline of the last, I don't know, six decades is the increasing observation of these institutions that have served this purpose, one need to point only to the Boy Scouts. I mean, good heavens, how many young men became young men, because of the influence of the Boy Scouts, working alongside of churches working alongside of parents, but what we've had is churches becoming less important in the lives of families, families becoming less important, Dad figures, things like that. And now the Boy Scouts not even sure exactly how to proceed and a culture that doesn't have the clarity that you have, you know, you're clear that you're not a man, and that your sons our culture is not so clear about that. All of this points back to whether we have the other institutions, the other forces in our lives, the other entities within society that helped develop character. So Buster Posey story seems to be a one off. It's not a one off, there are others. But it this sort of thing never happens, and certainly doesn't happen systemically, unless, unless there are strong institutions that can lead us that way. And the headline of our culture over the last several decades is these institutions becoming less and less significant and American life and the government or the state taking up more and more of the air in the room, that doesn't bode well for the formation of masculinity or femininity in any sort of long term life giving way?

EICHER: John, here’s a story that came out midweek, quantifying a bit more what we’ve heard anecdotally. Carolina Lumetta reporting for WORLD in The Sift: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an estimate … that [more than 100,000] people in the United States died of a drug overdose between May of last year and April of this year. The number represents [a year-on-year] increase of nearly 30 percent. The death toll rose in all but four states: Kentucky, Vermont, and West Virginia reporting increases of more than 50 percent. The new estimates place the number of deaths from overdose close to deaths from diabetes, which is the seventh most common cause of death in the country.”

Just released…

STONESTREET: Well, it fits into the category of shocking but not surprising. I mean, those numbers should always shock us. If they don't shock us, then there's something wrong with us, but they shouldn't really surprise us this is fits into the category of what I have called a pre existing condition of COVID. Something that predates the pandemic. And now you have these factors of hopelessness, meaninglessness, addiction. I'm too far into the miniseries dope sick on Hulu, which is not something I can necessarily recommend. But it is something that will keep you up at night in terms of the opioid epidemic, the opioid epidemic in particular came from and the guilt of pharmaceutical companies, especially Purdue pharma, throughout all of this, this is not just one thing, it's everything and it created this perfect storm that existed pre COVID. Now add to COVID lockdowns, isolation, looking at too many screens, looking at too many reverse cameras, seeing yourself all the time not having any accountability and anyone else. You know, there's no other way this math was gonna work out. We have a culture of meaninglessness. This also, by the way, is a direct result of the loss of these institutions. The institutions that point us beyond ourselves, point us to higher powers point us to larger realities points to truth beyond our own happiness. The church does that the family does that the Boy Scouts have done that in the past. And those things become more and more obsolete. And even school itself becoming less and less tethered to truth and reality telling people to look inside. Everything on our culture points, people inside, but inside is empty inside is nothing. And so word is how is this going to work out any other way. So, you know, these were the numbers that are starting to emerge that we feared we had hoped, really beyond any sort of rational hope that they weren't true. But we really shouldn't be surprised now that these numbers are coming in as bad as they are.

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

STONESTREET: Thanks so much.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.