Culture Friday: Food, health, humanity

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 22nd of November, 2024.

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 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: John, we’ve been talking quite a lot about cabinet picks for the new government coming in in January, and now that the Matt Gaetz nomination is out of the picture I’d like to get an overall sense from you one pick that I think easily crosses over into your beat, the cultural beat. And it’s Health and Human Services with the choice of Robert F. Kennedy Junior: I’m curious what you think.

STONESTREET: Well, it's been escalating quickly. Let's just put it that way. It's like every time we turn around, there's another one or two or five names that have been dropped. And clearly the president is trying to get ahead of what happened in 2016.

At one level, it underscores something that we said in the days leading up to the election, which is, you know, when you are electing a president, you're electing about 4,000 people. And we're also seeing that there's a kind of a cultural aspect to this. I mean, listen, RFK has started a national conversation about food, and that is a conversation that is vast. It goes to farming practices, it goes to pesticides, it goes to a whole variety of lifestyle issues. Goes to bad behavior on the part of what might be called big food, and that's going to be a fascinating discussion.

We're also going to be having this conversation at the very time when America is very skeptical of scientific and medical authorities—where we just don't believe, you know, what we have been told on things like vaccines and that aspect of health. And many people are starting to question this over specialization in medicine that tends to treat this symptom and that symptom and fails to see the human being as a unified whole.

What you're going to see emerge in this conversation on a worldview level, I think, is going to be fascinating. It's going to be super consequential. And it's already kind of taken the form of what kind of creatures are human beings, and so much of public policy and politics are rooted out of that question, what does it mean to be human?

One of the challenges here too is that RFK and some other advocates of his view do not see humans as necessarily exceptional, not something outside of the kind of normal categories of nature. So you hear, you know, people talking about human beings as if they're just another part of nature, and our inability to realize that has caused the environmental problems. And so it's a very kind of mystical, pantheistic way of thinking about the human being. The creation story puts a hierarchy to creation that, yes, we are part of the creation, but we're also made in God's image, and we also have been given an ability to impact and affect the world around us. And look, I mean the temptation here, also, without making this answer too long, I just think all of these things are going to be super worldview laden. We all got to pay attention.

EICHER: I don’t want to leave the RFK Junior question, though, to make sure we don’t gloss over this. You talked about how he’s starting a big conversation on health that we’ve not had before, but I don’t want to leave out the life issue. For some pro-lifers—not all, but some—it feels like there’s a bit of a rift.

And now, I’m not aware RFK has had a change of heart on abortion; he’s expressed very strong pro-abortion views, and H-H-S sets a lot of abortion policy in this country.

STONESTREET: Oh, it's a huge deal. It's absolutely significant.

I think it's, you know, part of what we think about on a worldview level, or that Christians should think about, is that a lot of Christians don't have a world view W, O, R, L, D, view form. It's more of a whirled W, H, I, R, L, E, D, all whirled up.

RFK's vision about food directly conflicts, and his trouble to figure out what humans are is in direct conflict with what he thinks about pre-born children. It's inconsistent, and it will create bad policy. And it also, too, is based on the fact, you know, listen until yesterday, he was a progressive in a lot of ways, and on the abortion issue, that's been clear.

It's going to have huge consequences, particularly because this position not only determines how do we think about our own health as Americans, but how do we export our help around the world? And you know, we have a bunch of policies that are like volleyballs from one administration to the next, like the Mexico City Policy, in which we export abortion around the world in a really damaging way under progressive administrations, and we pull that back under Republican administrations. So we'll see what happens on those.

BROWN: John, there’s another big issue that’s being tossed around: Men in women’s bathrooms. It’s no longer just at the state level, It's made its way to Congress thanks to the election of a confused congressman who goes by the name Sarah McBride. McBride is the first openly so-called transgender member of Congress.

I want you to listen to this Q&A between Representative Nancy Mace and a network reporter. Mace is defending her proposed bathroom bill.

REP. MACE: This is not okay. I'm a survivor of rape, I'm a survivor of sexual abuse, and I'm not going to allow any man in any female private spaces. Speaker, end of story. And by the way, I'm getting death threats from men pretending to be women. Why is it that these crazy people, the insanity of the radical left, are willing to kill women over a man's right to be in a women's restroom?

ABC: Speaker Johnson has said he wants to treat every new member with the words dignity and respect. Forcing this congressperson to go into a male restroom, is that dignity and respect?

MACE: Forcing women to share private spaces with men is not dignity and not respect. I'm absolutely going to stand in the way of anyone who thinks it's okay for a man to be in our locker room, in our changing rooms, in our dressing rooms and women's bathrooms. And in fact, if you agree with that, you're crazy, because that's not okay. It's not okay.

John, Could she have been any clearer? What do you think?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, at some level, this reminds me of a conversation we had last week about the spiral of silence.

I'm not sure just a couple years ago whether we would have seen the same sort of pushback from even the Republicans on this, maybe some, but not across the board. This has been, you know, very clear, very true, and it needs to be said out loud.

I think another important part of this is, as all this gets reported on, that even headlines are worldview-loaded. Right? Whether this is a transgender woman who's being discriminated against, or a man who claims to be a woman, you know, claiming to be discriminated against. I mean, that's just a few words' difference, but it's all the difference in the world in terms of meaning.

And I think a big part of this, I'm grateful for Ryan Anderson's clarity on this. He's the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He's like, you know, we gotta use the right words. And I think that's a subtle but important way that the rest of us can live not by lies in the same way that in this case, Nancy Mace is. Good for her for being clear. And I also think it's important to know this is an issue that is losing steam, so backing off now, while still not being, you know, disrespectful, or, you know, anything like that to individuals, I think is really important.

EICHER: Tony Campolo died this week at the age of 89. He was a sociologist, a pastor, and prominent voice in progressive evangelicalism. He founded the so-called “Red Letter Christianity” movement—which Campolo himself admitted roughly five years ago that it had run aground due to finances, an inability to get its message out, and, basically, biblical illiteracy on the part of the progressives drawn to the movement. For his part, Campolo became very widely known in the 1990s as a spiritual adviser to President Bill Clinton and got lots of attention again when Campolo famously endorsed same-sex marriage shortly before the Supreme Court ruling in 20-15.

But I would suggest he was a liberal evangelical that many conservatives liked personally. What do you say?

STONESTREET: Tony Campolo was a man of very strong convictions. But he did actually treat those on the other side—as wrong as he often was, in my view—with a great deal of respect. I appreciated, a friend of mine noted, too, just what a fantastic public speaker he was. I mean, he had to respect the guy could just hold an audience in kind of rapt attention. He was really, really, funny, and in that way, he was a force to be reckoned with.

You know, it's hard for me, though, to talk about some of these folks who were the fountainheads of a progressive Christianity that we've really seen come to fruition in the decades since. And listen, I didn't know Tony Campolo, never had this conversation with him. But I've often wondered about individuals like him, who were so formidable and trying to push evangelicalism in a particular direction—whether they were always happy with the success, whether they were always happy with how far it went, whether they were always happy with what you ended up seeing in terms of the full on kind of woke, progressive way of talking about things, especially in the area of sexuality.

I wish I would have had an opportunity to ask that, because, you know, it really gets to the heart of something, that whenever somebody brings it up, it's accused of being a fallacy, and that's the slippery slope idea, and it's called a slippery slope fallacy: It's not necessary that once you slide down the slope, you'll keep sliding. But the problem is, in reality, that's the way it works.

And when you saw that with progressive Christianity, starting to question, you know, Did God really say? Is the Bible really where God said it? And ending with, did God even really make us, or are we self made, at least in our identity and sexuality? So it really went a long way, and it did so in a hurry. And that's the question I would ask if I could.

BROWN: 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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