Culture Friday: Life under contract

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday July 24th.

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 Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good Morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning

BROWN: John, a WORLD Opinions piece this week reflects on a Canadian surrogacy case in which a couple allegedly sought to terminate a pregnancy because of a cleft lip and possible genetic concerns, and later sued the surrogate when she refused.

The piece argues that surrogacy does more than change the way children come into the world. It changes the way we think about them. She says contracts have a way of teaching us to think conditionally: I love you... if.

It made me think of something you've said before—that every technology carries with it “an anthropology.” Has reproductive technology trained us to think of children as things we produce rather than persons we receive?

STONESTREET: Certain reproductive technologies certainly have—not all of them have—but whenever technology goes beyond helping humans, assisting humans, to actually replacing humans in some degree, then that’s what takes place. Then you have to put a price tag on individuals, on people.

And when artificial reproductive technologies violate the sexual integrity of the way God designed children to come into the world, that’s what happens. It’s one thing to assist a couple to have a child. It’s another thing to replace the sexual act itself and to separate sex, marriage, and babies to the whole degree that it’s been separated throughout the history of the sexual revolution. Technology puts the final chapter to that book and leads to incredible consequences.

And we’re starting to see it. One of the things that’s really important to remember is this isn’t surrogacy gone wrong because there was a contract. This is exactly the process working out like it was designed to work out. In other words, you sign a contract hoping that the process will get you the product that you want, and when the process doesn’t get you the product that you want, then you get your money back. That’s the way commerce works, isn’t it?

And then we have to ask the question: Do we really want to take commerce and apply it to this most sacred of all things, which is one image bearer and another image bearer coming together before God, producing another image bearer? That’s about as sacred of an act that you can have this side of eternity.

And so, to compromise that, I think, has incredible consequences, and it does, without a doubt, turn children into a product. And products in our world have price tags.

Whenever I see stories like this, I think a lot about something that one of my seminary professors would say often, which is, whenever we put a price tag on something that, by definition, is priceless, you’re going to cheapen it immediately. There’s no way around it, and that’s really what we’ve got here in this story.

EICHER: John, there’s a remarkable New York Times profile this week. I don’t know whether you saw it. It was about the relationship author Laura Doyle, someone unfamiliar to me until I read the piece.

Twenty-five years ago, she had a book titled The Surrendered Wife. It was controversial almost everywhere, and now today, the Times is reporting that not only are evangelical and traditional women embracing it, but progressive women as well, even women who still consider themselves to be feminists. And the reporter throughout the piece just kept asking the same question: Why is this message suddenly resonating across such different groups?

And I think the thing that struck me wasn’t so much Laura Doyle herself—I knew nothing about her; I’m not exactly the target audience—but the tone of the reporter. She isn’t writing as someone who’s been persuaded. She’s writing as someone who’s puzzled. The evidence doesn’t fit the worldview she expected.

Is that often how cultural change really happens? Not because people are argued into a new philosophy, but because reality simply refuses to cooperate with the old one?

STONESTREET: Look, I don’t know Laura Doyle. I certainly don’t know the book. I do think that what’s happening right now is that you’ve got a group of individuals who have embraced this idea about marriage, about relationships, about being a man or a woman, and/or a woman, that have embraced a philosophy that treats all of these things as if they’re social constructs, as if these are things that should conform to our desires, conform to the kind of thing that I think I want.

And what they keep running into is gravity—that there’s something fixed in the universe about who we are, about the way that God created men and women to be, and certainly about marriage itself.

I think there’s a lot of examples of this, by the way. And again, I don’t know anything about this particular author or this particular book, but I’m struck, too, by what we’re seeing in terms of happiness studies, which is a new phenomenon recently. And I’ve got my quibbles about just the existence of happiness studies to begin with.

But the fact of the matter is, when you do the work and you say, “Who are the most happy people?” in terms of self-reporting, what tends to come back over and over is married religious women.

When you look at questions from having meaning in life, and even something as potentially selfish as sexual satisfaction, the group that tends to rate the highest are married, middle-aged, religious women, mostly with children.

And you think about that, and then you think about all the opinion pieces that decorate The New York Times, typically, or The Huffington Post or Slate Magazine or a number of these progressive publications, and they’re all these one-off stories about women who found meaning by leaving their husbands and their families, and women who hate their own children and are willing to say it out loud, and all kinds of things.

And you start to think, well, feminism maybe had something right. We need to have this vision of liberation that second- and third-wave feminism promised. What we’re seeing, second-, third-wave feminism has bearing fruit, and it’s not what all of these one-off opinion pieces say.

It’s more of the fact that if you believe that there are differences between men and women, and you live according to those differences—and even more than that, I think this piece isn’t really about submission or surrender, as she calls it, or anything like that, for women to husbands. It’s basically the fact that marriage is a mutual self-giving that should take place.

And we have thought about it as marriage is an institution, and all we should try to do is get what we want out of it. And so my husband should give me what I want. This should be a 50-50 arrangement. And the reality is, when you have a mutual serving that takes place of husbands to wives and wives to husbands, it all tends to work out better.

And now, of course, we can look at Holy Scripture and say, “Well, that makes sense, because Scripture is really clear that husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the church, and we treat each other as image bearers, and we see our serving of our husbands or wives in light of how we’re supposed to relate to God and how God has related to us.”

This is putting it in pretty highbrow stuff, but apparently this author—I don’t know what her religious background is—but it seems like she’s discovered these secrets not from Holy Scripture, but just by trial and error. And, of course, that’s what we mean when we say that the Bible and what it teaches is true.

It’s not just that it’s true for us, but that it’s actually true, and we’ll find it in Scripture, and we’ll find it in the real world.

And I think there’s more and more people finding the truth about who we are and about relationships and about marriage in the real world, and a lot of people, too, that are realizing that the lies that they have believed, that it’s not bringing the fruit that they were promised.

BROWN: This struck me because I spent more than a decade filing quarterly reports to the Federal Communications Commission in the 90’s…. to prove the TV station I worked for was following the strict children’s programming requirements handed down by the FCC…things like….how many hours per day was devoted to children’s programming.

At some point the FCC relaxed those rules, which brings us to where we are today. Forty-Seven House members wrote a letter to the FCC urgently asking for a review of the TV Parental guidelines. Why? Parents complaining of radical gender ideology indoctrination from the screen…backed up by a report from Concerned Women for America that shows four out of 10 G-rated series on Netflix contain LGBTQ+ content.

Glad lawmakers are paying attention, but seems to me the real power still belongs to parents. Control the clicker…or ditch the TV.

STONESTREET: Yeah, that’s the way it should work. That’s the idea, that it’s our job to parent our kids, and kids fundamentally belong to parents and not to the state. And, of course, that’s, I think, a very, very pointed debate happening right now in the American context.

Certainly when it comes to public education, the sheer lunacy of teachers transing kids without their parents knowing it, and things like that, and teaching kids certain things, and not letting parents actually know, not letting parents actually opt their children out of certain lessons because they put LGBTQ content, in particular, not just in a particular class, but they put it in every class, as if it has anything to do with history or math or anything else.

At some point, you have to appeal when the state in the past has taken the prerogative of educating our kids as if our kids belong to them. Then you’ve got to actually have the state put a stop to it.

And this reflects a framing that Abraham Kuyper offered about society and how society should work, called sphere sovereignty: that God has created society with different spheres of authority. There’s the home, there’s the church, there’s the state. And whenever one particular sphere abdicates its responsibility, another sphere has to step in. And whenever a sphere starts to overstep its bounds into another sphere, then things begin to break down. And we’ve got both of those things happening.

I wish we could rely on parents to say no to their kids, just to get them off of smartphones and social media. The fact that we’re having this conversation about television right now, when really the main culprit, or a culprit, is social media, and we’re not even about to have that conversation.

When the UK tried to have the conversation about limiting—and I think Australia as well—limiting social media to teenagers, people just lost their minds. We’re nowhere close to having that conversation, unfortunately, and I wish we were, because that’s a much bigger thing.

We’re talking about television. It’s like, hey, the ’90s called; it wants its public policy back. We should have been doing this a long, long time ago. But better late than never.

And you’re right. At the end of the day, parents should not rely on the state to do the job that they need to do. But because the state has overstepped, we certainly need the state to step back. Or at least here, what we’re talking about is maybe not the state itself, but state-sponsored actors, and we need those actors to step back.

EICHER: So the Kuyperian principle here isn’t simply, “Parents should parent.” It’s also that when they don’t, there is a legitimate—but limited—role for the civil government. The danger is when that exception becomes the norm.

STONESTREET: It’s absolutely necessary when parents don’t do their job for the next thing to step in, and it should be as localized as possible.

Like if my kid disobeys, I should punish him. It should be my responsibility. But if Hunter’s going crazy, selling drugs and doing drive-by shootings and all kinds of crazy, now the police have to step in.

That doesn’t mean we’re ready to call in SEAL Team Six to take out my son. You can see how this all works out. When there’s a breakdown, it should continue to be as local as possible.

So the fact that we’re talking about the federal government—yes, the federal government’s already overstepped its bounds, and yes, parents have already abdicated their responsibility—but that’s precisely Kuyper’s point.

When either of those things happen, you might have a necessary next step, but it doesn’t mean things are healthy. It’s actually a sign that things aren’t functioning well.

And then you look at the church and you say, “Well, what’s the best thing that the church can do right now?” And the church can step in and help parents be parents. That’s as local as it gets, right there.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, thanks!

STONESTREET: Thanks to both of you.

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