Culture Friday: Insanity ebbs and flows

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 29th of December, 2023. 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. Today, a 2023 Culture Year in Review.

The year began with a Chinese spy balloon.

RYDER The balloon continues to move eastward and is currently over the center of the continental United States. Again, we currently assess that the balloon does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground at this time.

It would cross the United States and once it was over the Atlantic Ocean. The U.S. military would shoot it down.

And LGBT pride night in the National Hockey League suffering the same fate after a Russian Orthodox defenseman said Nyet to wearing a rainbow warmup sweater. Ivan Provorov, then of the Philadelphia Flyers.

PROVOROV: I respect everybody and I respect everybody’s choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion.

BROWN: The following month, the sparks of a hoped-for revival on the campus of Asbury University in Kentucky.

AUDIO: President Brown sent out an email saying that worship was still going on and that anybody who felt called to join could do so, and I was there for 12 hours that day.

What began as a regular chapel service in the dead of winter would go on for 16 days straight.

EICHER: A horrific attack in March in the Nashville suburbs at Covenant Christian School … where an attacker fatally shot three adults and three young students before police killed the shooter.

CHIEF DRAKE: There were maps drawn of the school in detail of surveillance, entry points, etc.. We know and believe that entry was gained through shooting through one of the doors.

Faith and courage was one theme, another theme centered on motive which was kept out of the public eye until policemen leaked parts of a manifesto portraying a killer driven by rage over white privilege.

BROWN: Vermont became the first state in the U.S. to allow suicide tourism, opening itself up to nonresidents to come and take advantage of its liberal laws and receive a doctor-assisted suicide.

WELBY: God save the King!

EICHER: Across the pond, the U.K. got a king, and the keeper of the Anglican faith saw the state church allow priests to bless same-sex marriages.

Also, Britain’s National Health Service blocked parents from attempting to get treatment for their very sick child who would die shortly afterward despite the promise of treatment from Italy.

BROWN: From sea to shining sea, Florida’s Ron DeSantis and California’s Gavin Newsom sparred over abortion, education, crime, and COVID. Then the governors met on a debate stage.

DESANTIS: He's just throwing stuff out to see what sticks against the wall. This is a slick, slippery politician whose state is failing.

EICHER: Drug overdoses would remain at record highs again in 20-23. AI would come of age this year, and by the end the year The New York Times would sue ChatGPT.

Joining us now is John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning, that’s quite a list!

EICHER: Yeah, anything float to the top for you, John, from that list? Or do you have your own top cultural story for 2023?

STONESTREET: Oh, I think I have my own, although that's a heck of a list. And it's hard to remember that all those things happened in 2023. And a lot of them are really big stories. Man was the spy balloon really in 2023? That was the one that threw me right off the bat. I was trying to do the math. Wow. No, I think that the major story of 2023, or the one that I think even though it was international, revealed so much about where the world is, and so much about where the United States is, and so much about the ideas that we have talked about, at various times, and with various stories, including, for example, the covenant Christian school shooting in Nashville, and why we don't have a manifesto yet, and what explains any of these things is the October the 7th attack on Israel by Hamas. And then we had the response by so many folks within Western elite institutions. So if you want to know, for example, whether or not these Western institutions have in fact been captured by what we've called here, the critical theory mood that we know who the good guys are and the bad guys are going in, I think this was one of those incidents and then the ongoing response and that just revealed an awful lot about you know, look, if the idea of chronological snobbery. Do we think that somehow folks today are better than folks in the past simply because we have technology? The answer's no. If we think that the world still has an appetite for what it takes to suppress real evil like that, for most of the world, the answer is no. Do we think that the critical theory, remember, remember how much we were told in 2021 that, oh, this is an academic theory, you don't really understand it. And I said, you know, look, I agree like, you know, nobody read the postmodern philosophers either. But in the 1990s, what we had was Kurt Cobain and Britney Spears and the Matrix movie. In other words, people who never read Derrida and Foucault there was this mood, this postmodern mood that had overtaken and I thought the same thing about the critical theory mood, and I think that the whole Israel Hamas thing has revealed that. And then, of course, we had the debacle. And this was another part of the story that you didn't list, which is the three university presidents, the three presidents before Congress, basically saying that calling for the genocide of the Jewish people does not count as bullying and harassment. I just think that this incident, and it's not really an incident, right. It's this entire story about Israel and Hamas has revealed so much, not just about Hamas, and not just about Israel, but about the rest of the world and where the West is.

EICHER: You know, there was also something of a life theme in the top stories in 2023. You had the advance—and maybe that’s the wrong word—maybe unraveling is better. But assisted suicide took deeper root in the culture. The denial of treatment we mentioned in the U.K. Authorities there, arresting people simply for praying outside abortion centers. You mentioned the critical theory mood, there was also kind of a pro-abortion mood in the country in 2023, so it wasn’t a great year for life.

STONESTREET: No, and we didn't even mention there, Canada. And you know, every story that comes out of Canada after the medical assistance and dying legislation passed, what are we in year three? It just feels like things have escalated there so quickly. I think there's a connection, by the way, between the critical theory mood that we've seen on the life issue, but you're right, and I'm not sure that people changed as much as there has been an exposure of just morally where people are, and so committed to kind of this internally referential idea of identity and morality. You know, I just think that the relativism that that reflects, and it's a relativism not just of morality, but of reality. Carl Trueman's very helpful book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self has kind of given folks like us categories to talk about these things like what is really at the root of this ideologically. And it's basically when we make ourselves the center of the universe, this really has taken place. And so we solve, you know, I think, troublingly six or seven states in a row, including some otherwise, conservative red states, just absolutely refuse to place further restrictions on abortion when the vote went to the people. So you just put it all together, and I do think that this reveals that the understanding the embrace that people have, that there are moral norms and moral realities outside of our hearts, outside of our own minds, outside of our own kind of sense of self as being rejected. To the extent that even if that allows us to take another's life, that's the sort of quote-unquote, rights we want, or at least the options we want to have in place.

BROWN: My question for John makes good on a promise we made last year. One year ago today John, I asked you if 2022 would go down as the year we all were gaslit on the question, what is a woman?

Here was your bottom line:

STONESTREET: It's something actually that Romans one talks about, is that when you choose to worship something other than God, the creation rather than the Creator, then you just lose touch, you lose any sense of, of permanence, any fundamental reference point by which to define reality and to orient yourself.

Let's schedule a date for a year from now and see if we've settled on this definition of woman.

I think we've hit the limit. So that's the deal a year from now, we'll gather together somebody, remember, we had this conversation, and we'll just see if the culture is going to rein us back in on this kind of insanity.

So, here we are, one year later. What say you, John?

STONESTREET: I mean, that's scary to hear your own voice. And interesting, though, you're right. Last year's word was gaslit. This year's word was authentic. To me, it's so, it's true. It's so interesting. And, and then, you know, a child of the 90s, I was like, Well, that was the word of the decade in the 90s, right? It was such a postmodern, sort of, we need authenticity. And, you know, it's like the 90s called wants its word of the year back, but I think we have some really interesting developments. where there is at least a decent amount of pushback. It's not as much as it needs to be. I don't think it's as much as it needs to be particularly from people of faith, particularly people who should have vested interest in this and they haven't expressed the pushback. But if you think about, you know, the closing of the the Tavistock clinic, think about the closing of the gender clinic in St. Louis, you think about the abandonment, at least by some companies of DEI sorts of officers, which is the office where a lot of this is being driven. You think of, you know, Dylan, how do you say his name Dylan Mulvaney or Dylan, whatever, the Bud Light story, and, you know, that kind of disappeared, and then you have sports bodies that are pushing back and at least trying to put a little bit of clarity, at least in the United States, on athletics, not as many as need to be but basically realized that this is an unworkable problem. You had courageous folks like, you know, Riley Gaines, and Billboard Chris and the Daily Wire folks that I think basically said, Yeah, you really can push back on this and, and I think he had a whole lot of people going, I'm just not on board, you know, with this stuff, Bill Maher, Barry Weiss, people that aren't politically on the same side as others in this area. I think we have to quote myself, a year later, we have some evidence that this conversation went so far, and there's a little bit of reining back on this insanity. There's a lot more work, I think, to be done on this. But it is interesting to hear myself and go, I wonder what's going to happen. But I think there's some signs of hope here, at least enough that, you know, for example, parents who don't want to offend their neighbors, pastors who don't want to offend anybody that have been really hesitant to be really clear on this should have enough courage to say yeah, I can be really clear on this now.

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

STONESTREET: Happy New Year to you guys!

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.