Culture Friday: Loudest isn’t largest

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 23rd of May.

We are on campus this week and next at Dordt University, up in Sioux Center, Iowa, and we’re 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. Our radio and television teams have been up here this week the news and magazine team are headed up this weekend, and we’re working with 32 talented young men and women helping them learn to honor Christ in their journalism careers—with skill and faithfulness. This is always the most exhilarating, and most exhausting, two weeks of the year for me. It’s good for the heart to meet these young people—

What’s the slogan, a newborn baby is God’s opinion that life should go on. I think of faithful Christian students the same way—a very positive sign about the future. It’s really an honor to be a part of it.

BROWN: I’m the same way. I’d like to see someone try and keep me away from this. I just love these kids, and we can call ’em kids, Nick, lots of people are kids to us at this point!

EICHER: Right, my kids are older than these kids!

BROWN: Well, it’s a busy, busy time here at WORLD, not only with WJI going on, but we’re entering giving season, and today we kick off a one-week New Donor Drive.

EICHER: It’s interesting, Myrna, thinking about investing in the next generation of journalists. I think this is a good theme for what we’re doing with the New Donor Drive: We have longtime WORLD donors who are investing in the next generation of donors. And what they’re doing is saying that every single new gift given today will be tripled. A first-time donor puts in a dollar, and our long-time donor puts in two. So one becomes three. Fifty becomes 150, a hundred becomes 300, you get the idea.

BROWN: Yes, and to sweeten the offer, we know that many listeners save up this Friday program for the weekend. We don’t want you to be listening on Saturday, for example, and saying, “Oh, no! I missed out.” Well, we’re accounting for that reality and offering today and up to the time the clock strikes midnight and becomes Monday.

EICHER: Again, we’re asking you, if you’ve never given before to WORLD to make this the year you do. And today and this launch weekend, every new gift gets tripled, each dollar becomes three. No better time than now to cast a big vote of confidence for sound journalism grounded in facts and Biblical truth.

Your support keeps this program going. It supports WORLD Watch, WORLD Magazine; it supports our faithful news-gathering team working for you every day.

It’s our longtime donors giving alongside our newest ones. Let me give you a special address that I hope you’ll visit, this will make it much easier to keep track … WNG.org/newdonor …

BROWN: That’s the place! WNG.org/newdonor and thank you for making trustworthy, biblically grounded journalism possible.

Well, it’s Culture Friday, John Stonestreet joins us now … John, of course, is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning to you.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

EICHER: John, we have four WJI students lined up with good questions for you, sound good?

STONESTREET: I’m ready, let’s give it a shot.

HEFFRON: Hi, John. My name is Caleb Heffron, and I am a student at Taylor University. And my question for you today is, what does godly masculinity look like in the modern day? Masculinity has kind of been taken over I feel like as a word to something that's only meant to be bad. And so how do we embody godly principles as a man, especially for someone going into the world as a young adult?

STONESTREET: Yeah. Well, since this is a Culture Friday segment, I’m tempted to go down the rabbit hole of why we are seeing trends of young men, more and more young men becoming religious, coming back to faith. I was talking to a group of folks just this morning about this.

It’s funny. I’m old enough to remember when we were worried that young men didn’t have an attention span, that they were playing video games and couldn’t think longer than a tweet. Now they’re listening to three-hour podcasts on really, oftentimes deep subjects. So to me, there’s some good news here to be found, but you’re right.

Listen, I think a lot of masculinity has for a decade or more have been portrayed as toxic—things that aren’t toxic at all. There are moments when that becomes obvious, times when you need a man to be heroic, when you need a man to self-sacrifice, when you need a man to be strong and a disciplinarian.

So, listen, I think we need to start with design. What did God create men for? Before we know what a man should do, we need to know what a man is for. I think the fundamental thing communicated in Scripture—in the creation narrative—is that all humans, but men in particular, were created to leave things better than they found them. To be fruitful, to multiply, to make things flourish.

That turns our attention from looking inside and instead looks at turning outward. How do I turn my attention, first and foremost, to loving God? Then from the perspective of loving God, then loving others? Now, of course, what Scripture says is that He empowers us to do that. So when we are related well to God, then He actually equips us with the Holy Spirit.

The whole gospel is a gospel of renewal and redemption and resurrection. All these re- words point us back to what God intended by creation. We’re not saved to become less male. We’re saved to become truly and fully male.

There’s also, I think, some wonderful wisdom through the ages of the cultivating of virtues. We’ve kind of substituted values for virtue—as if having the right belief somehow is the same thing as loving the right things. But we have to cultivate the right loves, the love for truth, the love for justice, the loves that actually do contribute to the rest of the world, and then that has to shape how we then engage.

I think if we cultivate those virtues, in the end, we’ll have the kind of courage that portrays true masculinity. Chesterton has said courage is the testing point of all the virtues. And hopefully, if we cultivate those virtues with the right priorities in mind, that will emerge

ATKINS: Hi, John. My name is Sarah Atkins. I'm a student at UNC Chapel Hill, and I just wanted to ask you, from what I've seen, there has been a movement of young Christians going from more low church denominations such as Baptist toward more traditional high church denominations like Anglicanism and Catholicism. And I was wondering, why do you think that is?

Well, I’m tempted to make a joke about the Tarheels as a Duke basketball fan. But I will not! I will not do that—

EICHER: We’d have to T-you up, John, technical foul!

STONESTREET: Haha! I think what you’re noticing here, Sarah, is accurate. I just want to point out, though, this is something that people have been noticing for a while. When you look at the numbers, it’s not just folks going from low church to high church, or less liturgical to more liturgical, although it is. It’s just a whole lot of movement going on

Some, by the way, are coming not out of a low church, but coming out of no church—and that’s what they’re gravitating towards.

There is a stability in doing something that the church has always done from the beginning. There is a stability of not just saying we’re a church of the Bible, but actually reading the Bible as a church, as a liturgical congregation. There is a stability amidst the post-modern chaos and confusion of a creed that kind of grounds your feet into truths, and you’re not looking for how does this apply to me? Or how can I experience this in a new way?

But just no matter what the experience is that we’re going through, either as individuals or as a civilization. They’re solid ground. I believe in one God, the Father and Jesus Christ, his only begotten son. You know?

I mean, these are truths that transcend times and transcend cultures. And there’s a reaction, I think, at some level, to the constant need for innovation that draws people to this way.

I think that maybe explains the front door. We still have to have a conversation at some point in many of these denominations about the back door. Of course, we want to distinguish between those congregations that say the creeds and believe them and those that say the creeds and don’t believe them—or make up new creeds, right?, which there’s a whole lot of conversations to be had about mainline denominations.

MACKEY: Hi, John. This is Grace Mackey from Palm Beach Atlantic University. It seems to me like over-consumption of media is a problem. So as a professional media How would you encourage your readers and listeners to manage their media consumption responsibly—more specifically, news and social-media consumption?

STONESTREET: Yeah, Grace, it’s a great question. If I could channel the professor from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when he said, “Plato, Plato, it’s all in Plato,” I’ll say “Postman. Postman, it’s all in Neil Postman,” who warned about this when it came to newspapers and the emerging entertainment society that was being driven by television. What you kind of have to do is think about, okay, what are those dangers?

There’s a couple of things. Number one is that it would drive an ethos of style over substance. Second, that it would make us completely captivated by news that was happening in another part of the world, and make us not engaged in our own backyards.

So what do we do? You know, we talk a lot on Culture Friday about culture through the lens of habits, and the need to have different habits. You have to be weird, and the weird has to be not having that same sort of media diet that everyone else does.

Over-consumption is a problem. Second, over-consumption, if you don’t have strong foundations, is a real problem. I had the same conversation years ago with praise and worship leaders. In other words, just because you are really good at playing the guitar doesn’t mean you should make up your own theology and put it in your songs and then make people sing it.

But the separation that we’ve done at the church between those who are kind of celebrities and the need for those celebrities to have good theology is a real problem. So that’s really the conversation, I think, for producers.

You also have the conversation for consumers: We need different habits as well. I would really recommend a Sabbath lifestyle, not just days, although I think a 24 hour Sabbath from social media is probably a good habit to start now. But Sabbaths when you’re at the dinner table, Sabbaths when you’re in the car and have the opportunity to either reflect or pray or learn or have a conversation. These are different habits. Sherry Turkle, who’s not a believer, warned about this years ago. She talked about the need for “sacred space,” where you just have tech-free parts of your life. To me, that’s a bare minimum.

The last thing I’ll say is just this. One of the things that’s very important when it comes to any kind of cultural analysis is that the loudest thing in culture, often, is not the most significant. The most dangerous ideas, C.S. Lewis said, are not the ones that are argued, but the ones that are assumed. I think the most dangerous ideas in culture and the most significant stories, and the most prominent and important trends within a cultural setting are not the loudest, but the ones that are normalizing our beliefs in particular ways. So having that discernment when everyone’s chasing to be the loudest will make you different as well.

MONSON: Hi, John. My name is Catherine Monson, and I attend the University of Montevallo. My church is currently praying for a missionary who could be drafted by the Russian army any day. So my question is, how should Christians think and pray about wars, especially when there are Christians serving on both sides—for patriotic reasons or by compulsion?

STONESTREET: Oh, man, what a fascinating question. It would be “interesting” if we weren’t talking about a real person here. That’s the thing: This is a real-life situation. What I mean by real life is when we remember that our the Christian faith deals with public truths.

One of those is the lack of children that necessitates the draft for the Russian army to begin with. Russia’s been inflicted by the demographic crisis that we’ve talked about on this program before. You know, that has real-world consequences when you have a leader like Putin who wants to take your people to war. But that’s another question for another time.

This is really hard. You know, Jesus spoke to a Roman soldier and did not say the only way to follow me is to get out of the army. Neither did Paul, and now you’re talking about people who clearly were involved in a state force that wasn’t driven, you know, by Christianity or by doing it the right way.

The conversation of “just war” developed through Christian history and Christian influence, where you started to wrestle with, oh, not just on pragmatic terms, can we win this? But should we be engaged in this war? Then once you are engaged, how should we be engaged.

More closely to modern times, you have a guy like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who led a underground seminary for the confessing church, and some of his former students who he kept in touch with all the way through. You can see some of their correspondence and letters and papers from prison. He wrote to them about what it means to be co-opted at that point in the German army, and they did not have a choice.

It’s fascinating to listen to him say, Go, be the best German you can be. But for him, that also meant Don’t be the best Nazi you can be, because that’s not being the best German you can be—and you might even get in trouble with it. I think that there is a lot of space when you do not have the choice, and you’re conscripted into that, but can you actually obey and do the right thing in the process? Of course, there are other views on this that say you can’t at all.

I’m not a pacifist for a lot of reasons, but there is a Christian tradition there, so there’s a lot of reading to be done in this space. I think what you could do is encourage him that whatever his hand finds to do, he does it all for the Lord, and you pray to that end, and in the middle of being perhaps co-opted into something that isn’t ultimately just and is full of problems, that he can do it in the right way and point people to God as he does it.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast! Thank you John, I love this time of year, I bet you do, too!

STONESTREET: I do, these are great questions as they always are and I guess we’ll get to another batch of them next week.

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