Culture Friday: Heroes and villains

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday the 13th of December, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

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.

BROWN: Well, John, for the first time, Muhammad is the most popular name for baby boys in England and Wales, overtaking Noah and Oliver. That’s according to the U-K newspaper The Guardian. This data, from the Office for National Statistics, did find the influence of pop culture shaped some naming trends, but Muhammad’s popularity topped charts in four regions of England. John, is this development concerning? Is this how civilizations die?

STONESTREET: Well, we've seen these kind of stories before, so it's not the first time, at least regionally, that this has popped up. But this is not just a story about the growth of Islam in the UK—as something that we continue to hear a lot about from various corners, and have for a while. It's also about just the declining birth rate. In other words, these numbers of boys names would not be nearly as significant if the overall number of children born were not declining, and had been in steep decline.

You know, we don't have a single nation in what would be called the Western world that is meeting replacement rate and have not for quite some time. Some are so far behind the rate that it's questionable whether they'll ever be able to recover. So, you know, as a good friend of mine likes to say, this ain't magic, it's math. You know, this is just where the future lies. The future lies with the fertile.

Now, the other part of the story, of course, is that the secular West typically fails to consider the significance of religious conviction and religious belief. When you presume that religion is nothing but a personal, private fantasy, which is the kind of the dominant modern to post modern narrative about religion, then it's hard to really reckon with a group of people who take their religion this seriously—including seriously enough to order life around, like having babies.

It's not just the number of children born in the UK that have an Islamic name. It's the number of children born in Islamic countries as compared to Western countries. All of these factors play in.

Secularism is an infertile religion. It is a religion that lives for the now, not for the future. A religious worldview, one particularly that takes the creation mandate seriously, is one that prizes fertility and actually sees the building of a religious culture—not just a personal, private religion, with some buildings you can go to when, when you want.

What babies are named are not the root of the problem. They're the expression of the problem. The lack of fertility being one and the inability of secularists to take religion seriously being the other.

BROWN: OK, Jordan Neely, John. Sad, sad story. This young man, after his mother was murdered by her abusive boyfriend and her body stuffed in a suitcase, a teenage Neely had to testify in court on his mother’s behalf.

Talk about trauma.

He’s placed into foster care as an orphan.

From there began a decline fueled by homelessness, mental health issues, and multiple arrests.

This does not excuse Neely’s actions. Where was Jordan’s absentee father, Andre Zachary when his son needed him?

Well, we know where he is now, filing a lawsuit against Daniel Penny, seeking a payday!

Question: Why won’t the same voices claiming Penny is racist say something about Neely’s father? Isn’t that just part of enabling this culture of fatherlessness?

STONESTREET: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great question. It's a question that a lot of people aren't willing to ask, and it's because the dominant mood of the left is one of critical theory: basically, that this has to be explained in racial terms. It certainly doesn't explain the thing that's universal to the human experience, and that is that we're born with moms and dads. Children, no matter what the race is of the child who have moms and dads in the home, overwhelmingly outperform on almost every measurable category, children who are subjected to being orphaned or fatherless.

Look, the system itself failed after that. You know, this progressive idea that we don't actually address mental illness, we don't actually address anti-social behavior, we don't actually call it that. It just escalated over and over and finally, you know, reached this point. This example, this story, is an example that this inability is not just with individuals, it's on a societal level. It's tragic.

EICHER: I wonder about the Daniel Penny side of the case, John. I wonder, really do, even though he was acquitted, I wonder whether the message sent is, don’t get involved. Too costly.

Of course, the jury heard all the evidence and acquitted him, but consider the cost, the risk. To listen to him tell his story, he restrained Neely because clearly people felt threatened. Penny had training, knew how to handle himself. But I wonder whether this ordeal, and others like it, changes the equation.

STONESTREET: Well, you know, I keep thinking of the biblical narrative of "woe to those who call right wrong and wrong right." The Bible says that that's possible, not only for individuals, but actually entire societies. Romans 1 certainly gives that implication.

I was thinking about that this week, in light of this case, and in light of C.S. Lewis's argument in Mere Christianity for the existence of moral norms that are universal and knowable. Remember, he uses this example where he says that some societies might fight for this, some societies might fight for that, but no society rewards someone from running away from the battle instead of running to it.

Now, this is an example of us, right? I mean, here you have somebody running into the fight instead of running away from it, and he's called the bad guy. You kind of think, well, Lewis's example here falls apart now. You know, early 21st century modern culture, I think it testifies to the truthfulness of the scripture that we actually can when we're untethered from God, the untethered from reality itself. So it is stunning that, you know, kind of a classic argument for the existence of universal morality can be shown to be incorrect in our context, because we are that untethered to begin with.

EICHER: Do you think Penny is a hero?

STONESTREET: You know, I don't know that I know all the details, or anyone knows. I mean, I think we jump sides, you know, pretty quickly on this. I think he was willing to do a hard thing. I think he was willing to step in and protect. Did all of his actions pass muster? That I can't say, but the impulse to protect other people, yeah, that is the right thing. That is what civil society is really made of. It's not just made of the state acting on the state's behalf. But actually people taking personal responsibility, both for themselves and their neighbors, and that impulse was at least present in what Penny did. So I guess I don't have to think that he did everything right, to think he did the right thing in this situation. In a fallen world, sometimes the right thing has tragic consequences.

That's my best read on this without knowing all the details.

EICHER: All right, now let’s look at a clear case of vigilantism, if the reporting turns out to be accurate, and a trial establishes the facts: The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The news this week is the arrest of the prime suspect, Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer. But the response, my goodness. Senator Elizabeth Warren … a U-S senator saying, you know, these rich CEOs, they can only push people so far and then they start to take matters into their own hands. Really sounded like a justification. We had a piece in WORLD Opinions this week saying it’s not just the left but some on the right saying things like this about the elites better watch their backs. Now, Warren walked this back, but she said what she said. Something of the same I heard on Piers Morgan former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz saying she took joy from the killing. This is a little frightening.

STONESTREET: Well, look, I think when this story of the murder of the health United Healthcare CEO is put together with the story of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, it is a striking critique on the fact that we are clearly untethered from reality. I thought that the most powerful media coverage this week, in addition to hearing someone like Taylor Lorenz actually say that seeing someone murdered brought her joy, and that that is supposed to be an acceptable position.

EICHER: Well, of course, she was fired from Vox for saying that.

STONESTREET: She did get fired. I mean, you know, look, and I, my guess is this was kind of the last straw, and a whole series of just upside down ways of saying things.

But Scott Jennings on CNN, you know, basically said, I'm gonna make this as simple as possible for you. You know, here's my chart. And he had good guy and bad guy, good guy being, you know, Daniel Penny and bad guy being, you know, this murderer—seeing that that actually is not the way a lot of people see it.

An underpinning of this, both for Taylor Lorenz, but also with this murderer, is the bankruptcy of education as a solution to our problems. In a kind of a scientific and a post scientific age, there's this sense that, you know, ignorance is the real source of evil, and education is the real magic.

Now, education is a magic of which the world kind of hasn't seen in terms of lifting people out of poverty and so on. But make no mistake, the greatest thinkers on education, from the very beginning have been really clear: Getting a great education, or getting an elite education, as is in the case with this murderer, does not make you moral. Your moral problem is not ignorance. Your moral problem is deeper than that. Therefore, education does not fix your moral bankruptcy. It can actually worsen it.

There's the classic line from D.L. Moody, if you take someone who steals railroad ties and you give them an education, you've taught them to steal the entire railroad the next time. And Luther said something you know really similar, is that it can basically make us just a whole lot better at being bad.

You think about what we know—which isn't much yet—but what we know about this shooter and the arrogance and the elitism by which this person knows better, and so therefore I'm not subject to your laws.

There's a whole tradition to this. Clarence Darrow, the attorney in the Scopes Monkey Trial, made his name by defending two brothers who murdered their parents, and he got them off of the death penalty in 1920s by basically saying, This is how they were educated. They read too much Frederick Nietzsche. I mean, this is an astonishing sort of history that there is a fundamental flaw in modern education.

The word education means to lead out of. That's educare, that kind of Latin root. So historically, education has been understood to mean to lead someone out of ignorance and into truth. But that assumes there is an objective truth. You get rid of the objective truth, then education is not leading someone out of themselves, out of their ignorance. In fact, education today is leading someone further and further into themselves. Follow your heart, you know.

Turning ignorant students into activists and thinking that's what gives them an education. Well, this guy just thought he was the ultimate activist. Now, don't get me wrong, a whole lot of people go through that same education and never end up doing this, but the ideas that he embraced were consistent with what he had been taught. He just took it to the extreme.

So I think we have an indictment here with these stories on both how we think about morality and how we think about education.

EICHER: Again, again, nothing’s been proven. We have to put “alleged” in front of “killer.” Don’t get us in trouble here. He gets a trial.

STONESTREET: No, that's fair. Sure that's absolutely fair.

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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