Culture Friday: March on Washington without faith

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s the 25th day of August 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. It’s Culture Friday. 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.

BROWN: John, this weekend is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington.

Several days ago, a story crossed the wire about preparations for that anniversary. The piece quoted a co-chair of the famous Poor People’s Campaign, the Rev. William Barber.

He says, the spirit of the March on Washington is much broader today than it was then. Listen to this: Many different faith groups, he says, are “pro-civil rights and pro-LGBT community — that care about immigrants and women’s rights and voting rights. Any efforts today that are not engaging all these issues on an every-day basis is not truly moving in the spirit of the March on Washington.”

And you know what they mean by “women’s rights,” they mean abortion.

Interestingly, AP noted this: “It is perhaps a sign of the times that there is no single faith-based group listed among the organizations serving as co-chairs [of the anniversary].”

So, John, what happens when you rip the moral authority out that powered the civil-rights movement? What are you left with?

STONESTREET: Well, I think you kind of buried the lede there, because that's exactly what a statement like this does. It rips the moral authority out that powered the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, look: Dr. King was very, very clear on what he understood powered the calls that he made for racial justice at that time. And that was an understanding of the human person, as created in the image of God and therefore created in a particular way, with rights. When you start adding in some of these other causes, not only are you allowing something that doesn't relate to hijack the cause, but also you don't have any ground for it.

Take, for example, the ever-growing acronym of LGBTQIA. This is fundamentally, in all of its forms, a denial of some aspect of the fact that we were created by God in a particular way with a particular design. That's exactly what Dr. King went back to, and he made his argument based on that. And so, you do rip out the moral authority—and even more than the moral authority, any kind of solid foundation upon which to build a movement in the first place.

I think it's also important to note, historically, that we don't have anybody who's actually done this yet, but—in particular—the trans rights movement has never been able to make an argument on its own from the very beginning. Most of the so called rights movements of today hijack the Civil Rights Movement, and hijack it in a way that Dr. King absolutely would not have been okay with. I think it's also an important thing to note that at least some of Dr. King's relatives’ descendants believe that he would not have supported abortion as a right of women, and that he would have had a different view. So I think that it's going to undermine the cause. And it's going to compromise the history. And I think they're incompatible and inconsistent to put these various “rights movements” together with the civil rights movement.

EICHER: Speaking of moral authority, John, here's a big cultural story. Out of nowhere a country song hit the top of the Apple iTunes chart, "Rich Men North of Richmond," by an artist called Oliver Anthony.

MUSIC: [RICH MEN NORTH OF RICHMOND]

I'll play some playable parts, had to edit around it, as I know you'll appreciate.

MUSIC: Livin' in the new world / With an old soul / These rich men north of
Richmond / Lord knows they all just wanna have total control / Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do / And they don't think you know, but I know that you do.

It's touted as an angry working man's anthem, lots of words we won't repeat here. But suffice it to say he's fed up with DC, these are the rich men North of Richmond. He's fed up with high taxes and high prices.

But more than that: He's fed up with welfare. He's fed up with low-pay jobs. He's fed up with hopelessness. And I did take note, this song was in the setup for the Republican debate on Wednesday night.

So anyway, this is a real cultural phenomenon. It's tapping into something, John, and I wonder what you think of it?

STONESTREET: Well, first, I think he's a talented guy. And he really does have that kind of old school country crooner's voice, which you don't hear much in country anymore. As a fan of the golden age of country music it resonated. But you are right. It's not a song you can necessarily play, at least not for very many lines.

I think there's a couple things to note. I think it's been interestingly compared to JD Vance's book that was very, very important in the year 2016 in the run up to the election, “Hillbilly Elegy”, which is basically trying to articulate at some level what's happening on the ground in an awful lot of America. The part of America that most people are telling us every day they have never visited, or ever met anybody from there, or have any sort of ability to relate to.

Now, I went to college in East Tennessee: The sort of place that this man could sing about pretty easily. I grew up in Virginia. So I grew up in a town where we could have talked about the rich men north of Richmond pretty easily. Where I went to college in Tennessee, if a young person were graduating from there and wanted to teach in an inner-city context, they would student teach in a little town called Graysville, Tennessee. And that is the kind of situation that was described in Hillbilly Elegy. That's the sort of community that this man who wrote the song “Rich Men North of Richmond” came from.

The reason you would go student teach there is because the situation was very similar on the ground: Very little upward mobility, very little cultural motivation to think about the future, high rates of fatherlessness and broken homes, high rates of addiction and substance abuse, opioids, alcohol. You had high dropout rates, high teen pregnancy rates… in other words, there are an awful lot of cultural factors that are present in some of the poorest white communities in America or poorest rural communities in America that almost look identical to those in the urban centers.

And so I think we just need to be really clear that when we talk about the collapse of the family for example, it has a devastating effect whether you're talking about downtown Chicago or about downtown Graysville, and there's not a downtown Graysville. We're talking about the same effect on lives, we're talking about the same inability to cultivate young people to think about the future. And so I guess I don't want to take everything about this song as gospel truth. But yet at the same time, I don’t understand the hate that it's receiving even from other Christian publications, saying things that were just bizarre critiques of a real life on the ground situation that people were dealing with. And yet I think we have to think about it from a Christian worldview, and not just from a disaffected, angry, impoverished perspective.

EICHER: So do that, John. I don’t expect you’ll hear a CCM song address these kinds of themes, but doesn’t the Christian worldview speak directly to them?

STONESTREET: Well, I think so. I think that any time that we allow people to either see themselves or to see other people as perpetual victims—as if what they deserve to be is the objects of our compassion or our scorn, rather than actual subjects within their own story (and I owe that thought, by the way to my friend, Michael Miller at the Acton Institute)—then we're fundamentally thinking about people the wrong way. And when you have systemic issues like this man is singing about, like working more hours than you should so that it separates you from your family for the kind of pay that he describes (which we can't repeat here), you're talking then about a way of shriveling dignity. But then you can’t turn around and just say, “Well, everybody's a victim of the state, and there's nothing we can do for our own situation.” We've seen that take place in terms of how different parts of America respond to natural disasters, there are people who can't help themselves. But when you treat an entire community as if it should only be helped by the federal government, like we've seen in past calamities, you're dehumanizing an awful lot of people, and it leads to actual dehumanization in real terms of an awful lot of people.

So it starts with seeing people as made in the image and likeness of God, describing them as God describes them. Not just as consumers, not just as victims, not just as objects of pity, but as actual people with dignity. And part of that dignity is the ability to work and to contribute and to move forward. Then you also have to then look at communities and take seriously where the family is in those communities. If you have strong family in a community, you have an upwardly mobile community. If you have a community in which the majority of young people, the future, are being raised by one parent instead of two, in fatherless homes, then you have a community that's been categorized into not having strong trust, not having strong reliability, and all kinds of other things.

In other words, it's an unsustainable future. That's, of course, what we're dealing with in many major cities and in the poorest of the poor zip codes in America. You're talking about now three to four generations of the vast majority of homes being fatherless in these communities. That is a very similar phenomenon to what you see in towns like Graysville, Tennessee and certain parts of Appalachia. And it's because what people in downtown Chicago have in common with people in these mountain communities in Appalachia is that they're all made in the image of God. So the analysis can work both ways. That's where I would start the analysis: With a thought about who people are, what gives them value, and what the role and significance of the family is within their communities.

BROWN: John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Thanks John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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