Culture Friday: Losing the plot

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, November 21st. 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! Joining us is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: New data from Barna (State of Today’s Family) reveals a striking contradiction inside Gen Z. On the one hand, a strong majority of young adults say they value marriage. But they’re also the generation least likely to believe marriage is important for raising children. In other words: Gen Z affirms marriage, but seems unsure what marriage is for.

It’s a curious kind of confidence—believing in an institution without a clear sense of its purpose. And it raises a bigger question for all of us: if you detach marriage from its mission, what exactly are you valuing? How do you make sense of this, John?

STONESTREET: Well, listen, we have been in an era where we have tried all kinds of things with marriage. We’ve replaced marriage with other relationships. We have substituted it out for cohabitation. We “expanded” it. I mean, there’s all kinds of things that we’ve done to marriage without actually asking first and foremost, what is marriage for?

Now, that actually is not just an indictment on what’s happened in the Western world. The church has spent an awful lot of time talking to its people about how to do marriage. And in a sense, it’s been Gnostic. It’s been Gnostic from the very beginning, because it’s treated marriage as if it were merely an institute of personal fulfillment, and that it didn’t actually have a created structure to it.

And there’s just so much evidence of the fact that we have tried all kinds of things with marriage, but have lost the plot. We’ve lost what marriage is. We’ve lost what marriage is for. And this study, I think, just points to that, and it even points to it in the church. In the past, it was seen as something not as a capstone, but as a cornerstone of building an adult life. You do it with someone else, and you do it with some of these thresholds into adulthood, such as moving out, living on your own, getting married, having babies.

These aren’t things you do to complete your personal fulfillment. These are things you do because it’s what humans do. There was an inherent sense of purpose here, and I just think that there’s so little of that here.

And I mean, when Jesus was asked in Matthew 19 about whether something should be done to marriage, he went right back to the creation narrative. Talked about men and women being one flesh, bringing in the things that we should learn about marriage from the human body. And if we do not recover what marriage is for, then we will not be able to fix it—certainly fix it to what it should be. Which, first and foremost, should be an institution that advances the creation mandate to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and is the best place for raising kids.

You know, even the way some of these questions were framed betray this understanding that what marriage is really about is adult happiness and we need to fix it so that we can fix adult happiness. None of that’s the point—or it’s not not the point. It’s the secondary point. There’s a primary purpose for marriage given to how God created us, and keeping the primary and the secondary purpose is something that’s missing in the way we think about marriage. This study both reflects that and it reveals that.

EICHER: You know, John, your point about losing the plot on marriage makes me think of something I heard recently. Allie Beth Stuckey was interviewing Frank Turek, and Frank mentioned a conversation he’d had with Charlie Kirk just a day or so before Charlie was assassinated. Kirk told him that rebuilding a healthy marriage culture was absolutely central to what he was trying to achieve culturally—to preserving the West.

So let me connect that to this Barna data. If Gen Z says it values marriage, not even for the right reasons, isn’t that still a meaningful opening? In other words, is there a sense in which the instinct to value the institution—even without the framework might be a kind of bounce-back we need? Get married and get your on-the-job training.

STONESTREET: Oh, I think it’s good news to like marriage rather than not like marriage, like it’s better to be in a place where people actually value it. I mean, just a few years ago, another study pointed to the fact that the majority of young people at the time—which I guess at that time we would have been talking about older millennials—basically thought marriage was an irrelevant institution.

And you know, it’s one thing to think it’s good, it’s another thing to think it’s bad, like the feminist. That’s another thing to think it just doesn’t matter at all. And I think there has been a bounce back from that, and part of that is just the challenges of reality.

But there has to be clarity on this, right? I mean, when you live in cultural waters that treats everything having to do with adult relationships and adult sexuality as primarily a purpose of happiness and self-fulfillment, then you’ve got to do some recatechism from the top down. You’ve got to talk about it differently.

And there’s other trends too that this study in particular didn’t reflect. But we know from other places, for example, that if you actually dig deep on young men and young women, more young men now want to get married than young women do. This is just another way of reflecting the trend lines, which seem to indicate that young men and young women are moving in the opposite direction about fundamental values, about what they really believe.

So the fact that there is some sort of return, kind of a bounce back from the myths, that’s good news, but we have to clarify what it is. I mean, part of it, it’s like, man, if young adults right now actually value marriage for anything other than kind of personal fulfillment, then God bless them. That’s God’s grace. Because we can’t take any credit for what we’ve done in building the cultural norms, and churches should be at the lead of this.

And I think if you look at some of the things that Charlie Kirk said, particularly in the last couple years of his life, and his mission—as his widow put it in her memorial tribute—to save the lost boys of the West. There’s not a saving of the lost boys of the West outside of rebuilding the institution of marriage. If you have a broken-down marriage culture, you have broken-down young people, and eventually the need outgrows the ability to meet the need. It’s just impossible to keep up with the brokenness.

And you know, we’ve certainly seen that breaking point achieved in many communities, and there’s not a way forward in terms of saving the West or saving the young people of the West unless we get back to what marriage is and what it’s for.

BROWN: In Germany, the Christmas season is colliding with a new reality, John: several towns have cancelled their traditional Christmas markets. These are events that typically draw millions of people.

This is not about lack of interest or bad weather. Nothing like that. It’s about these small towns’ inability to afford the security measures now required.

I learned about this in an article in The European Conservative. Evidently localities are looking over their shoulders because of last year’s likely terror attack in a small city in the center of Germany, on the Elbe River. The memory is still fresh of a car-ramming at a Christmas market that killed five people and injured more than 200.

Local organizers say the cost of barriers, surveillance, and extra guards now outweighs what small towns can pay.

Here’s the question: Christmas markets are not church events; they’re civic events rooted in Christian tradition. What happens when public expressions of Christianity in Europe require extraordinary security just to continue?

STONESTREET: Well, they die out. And I think that’s what happens. Most civilizations do die out. I mean, that’s the history of the world. Civilizations don’t last forever. The West has largely been a Christian civilization. And it will have Christian cultural markers, Christmas being probably the most visible and important one historically, in many ways.

And the fact that this choice is being made is another aspect of this. In other words, the choice is that it is not important enough to maintain these traditions, to maintain these markers, to make the kind of hard decisions that need to be made. For example, I don’t know on immigration policy, in order to maintain the kind of civilization you are, and to even bring this sort of thing up then gets one accused of racism, nationalism, and things like that.

But okay, maybe it does. It’s still the observable math. It’s either you get Islam on Islamic terms, or you have some expectations culturally of those who want to join your country. And you have expectations of citizens, and you have expectations of those who want to become citizens from another place. And that has to be demonstrated. And that, of course, was known up until yesterday as common sense, and now it’s called something else. And so that’s just kind of the place that we’re in.

I do think also this is another example of something we realized—that we were indeed in the midst of a clash of civilizations. Samuel Huntington’s classic thesis post–Cold War about how the world was going to be made up and where the conflicts were going to be. And boy, that guy really got a lot right, and we forgot a little bit about the prediction about Islam and Islam in the West, because maybe we got distracted by this or that or the other. But the cultural fault lines remain between Islam and the Christian or post-Christian West.

And this was a victory. This is a victory for Islam. You know, it’s what fear can do. And then the legislatures of these nations make their decisions. And so there you go.

I do think there is more than a little bit of a groundswell among the citizens—pushback in many European nations. We’ll see what happens in a place like this. How much will people miss these traditions that are such an important part of their lives? And maybe we’ll see a return to some of those traditions, like we’ve seen a return—people going to church, for example, in England and in the United States.

So, you know, it’s hard to know what the future will hold. There’s a lot going on beneath the surface here.

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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