Culture Friday: Mocking God

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 23rd of August, 2024.

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, and joining us now is John Stonestreet. He’s president of the Colson Center. He’s host of the Breakpoint podcast. And he’s here now. Good morning, John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: To bring closure on the major-party conventions, John, you know we did talk about the GOP last month. What’s your take on the Democratic convention?

STONESTREET: Oh, man, you know, listen, it's hard to get past the mobile abortion and vasectomy clinic that they have parked outside. And reports are that abortions are actually happening, and you kind of look back, and one of the things we talked about with the RNC is that the RNC has become the party of choice, from a pro life party to a party of choice. The DNC now has gone from being a party of choice to being absolutely pro abortion, and we're actually going to provide it at our convention.

EICHER: Well, but John that wasn’t actually the DNC. Granted, it’s a major Democratic donor, Planned Parenthood, and a major campaign theme to invalidate pro-life state laws. But to be fair, the DNC didn’t directly operate the abortion pill dispenser. Does that change anything?

STONESTREET: No, I don't think it changes it at all, as well. I mean, they're not there unnoticed. They're still parked outside of a gathering in which, any time abortion is actually mentioned, it's mentioned along with the euphemism that covers up the fact of what it actually is. It's promoted as a way of caring for women, ignoring the data that says that it's actually harmful for women. And it ends with not only a push for legalization, but really by many of the voices for taxpayer funding. That it needs to be actually free and available. And it's actually talked about as if it's a good thing.

And of course, that's been the slippery slope here. And that's the thing about slippery slopes: they're slippery, and you end up in a place like this. And that, of course, is how Proverbs most commonly describe sin—as foolishness, as folly. And it's a blinder to a point, where you end up kind of celebrating, and then going, again, what are we doing? And when you stop and look at it, it's crazy.

And I do think that you have to say, I mean, I think we were really clear that the RNC this year, on its platform and in its expression, moved from a pro-life party to a pro-choice party in a lot of ways. And if there was ever any doubt the DNC has moved, perhaps they were once a pro-choice party, it's now a a pro-abortion party, top to bottom, with—and I'm trying to figure out, what other ways could they possibly be more pro-abortion than what they are right now, and I'm struggling to come up with other examples. I'm sure there are some examples. Because whenever you think you can't go further than this, you know, some sinner somewhere goes, “Hold my beer,” and there it goes, you know. So, I'm sure of this, there's another place this is going. But, my goodness.

BROWN: You mentioned the Proverbs about folly, but I’d like to dig a little deeper on this theme, John. You know, where we see perversions of sexuality portrayed in the Scriptures, it’s so often associated with perversions of worship, idolatry, and sacrificing children. Maybe we scoff at that in modern times, but I’m not sure I see the difference between what we read and what we see even today!

STONESTREET: Oh, listen, I think it's, it's kind of like the difference between a eugenics that happens in a concentration camp and a eugenics agenda that's carried out in a lab with people wearing white coats. It's still eugenics. And you could also say the same thing.

I mean, we talked about this in terms of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, where a lot of people were like, it's satanic. Well, it is, and not necessarily because it was creepy, although it was. It's satanic because it was celebrating a vision of freedom that literally was articulated by Satan in the garden to our first parents.

Sexuality is intimate and public at the same time. How humans engage in sexuality has this remarkable kind of ripple effect. Paul talks about, if you sin, you sin. If you sin sexually, you sin against your own body. And you know, pagan worship has always been based on this, a worldview that dramatically separates the body and the spirit, as if that part of us can be torn apart, whether it's in the Greek understanding of, you know, that there's some sort of kind of idealistic world, and then there's the the actual world, or whatever, there's all kinds of ways. And the early church fathers rejected that sort of dichotomy as being Gnostic, and said the body matters. And Paul talks about the body matters. You know, they really wanted you to know that Jesus was human, and that meant he had a belly button, you know, like super physical, and not just some sort of spiritual being.

And so, sexuality, in a sense, reflects the fact that we bear God's image in a unique way. And then when sexuality is desecrated, think about in the Olympics. Think about at the many drag queens. You know, remember the nuns last year at the LA Dodger Stadium that were, you know, having the unholy rites. There's a reason why kind of acts of desecration almost always are kind of, you know, a way of mocking God, and it's because the closest thing to God on the earth, outside of God's own presence, are human beings made in His image. There's just so much here.

And you're right. That's why we see in fertility cults and pagan worship, and in modern paganism, which has no clearer expression than the LGBTQ movement and our push for sexual freedom. These two things are inseparable.

MUSIC: [Donahue theme]

BROWN: Well, you hear that? Maybe you’re too young to remember Donahue, the mid-morning TV show.

But the host after whom the program was named died this week at age 88. In three decades on TV, he left a mark.

Phil Donahue influenced culture and two generations of daytime TV viewers, particularly his rapport with women viewers. He was seen as non-threatening, paternal, widely syndicated, and he mixed interviews with heads of state down to fringe personalities like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the atheist who argued against school prayer.

His shows really pushed boundaries on premarital sex, homosexuality. And what a platform he had. He was the forerunner of talk shows aimed at suburban women—like Oprah, The View, even shock TV like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich—and I’d say he had a hand in undermining worldviews of otherwise conservative women.

Talk about the impact of this daytime TV on our overall culture, John.

STONESTREET: Yeah, I mean, it is interesting, when you put it that way, how many different expressions today that you can trace back to Phil Donahue. And you know, social revolutions of whatever form always are built on ideas, but ideas alone aren't enough. You have to shape the imagination. And nothing is more powerful in shaping imagination, a collective imagination, around an idea like artists and educators. And in a sense, he molded those two.

Now, again, that's kind of loosely using the word education and loosely using the word art, but at the same time, you know, Lewis talks about how the imagination is kind of the back door to the heart and soul, and the reason is kind of the front door. And if you can get around the back door, you don't need to get in the front door. And I think Donahue and his impact is going to go back, now, of course, he did expand the imagination of dissatisfaction that was part and parcel with late feminism in the home.

And I think—Myrna, you said it, so I'm gonna blame you when we get all the emails—that it did have an impact on the particularly women able to watch at that time. And, of course, now the access is, you know, highly enhanced and it takes a lot more forms of, you know, kind of going after the imagination of, you know, women and changing, in a sense, the definition of what it means to be loved, and what it means to fulfill a purpose, and where joy comes from, and satisfaction. And, you know, I think the way, if you're indeed right in your conclusion.

And let me remind everyone, this was Myrna's conclusion, that it specifically dealt with the worldview of women. You know, that's how it did it. And of course, we see tons of examples of that in all kinds of other media today. And you know, really, the person who opened up those conversations for better, for worse, and often for worse, was Phil Donahue.

EICHER: Hey, now—to come to Myrna’s side here—I always saw it as a lefty women’s show, but he also had conservatives. I just remember when I was in college, we always gathered for Donahue on the student union TV whenever William F. Buckley Jr. was a guest, or with fellow econ students nerding out when Milton Friedman was on. But, but! Always a little self-conscious watching a women’s show, you know?

STONESTREET: Hey, as I said, for better, for worse, mostly for worse, but maybe a couple betters. Yeah.

EICHER: Hey, I do want to hit the Title IX ruling of the Supreme Court. Last week, the court let lower court injunctions stand, blocking a Biden Administration effort. Specifically, a rewrite of the rules around the major anti-discrimination law to help women in education, to work in transgender provisions that were never a part of the law approved back in 1972. So, how big a deal do you think that is?

STONESTREET: I think it's a big deal in a couple ways. Number one is, is that the transgender push, the gender ideology of this movement, is not inevitable. And I think there has long been this narrative, and I think the T at the end of the long acronym, embraced the inevitability, or the narrative of inevitability of the gay rights movement.

And it's not a legitimate claim that's been made, and this is an example. But at the same time, I think, it's important that the Supreme Court didn't settle this issue, and there's a lot more to be done. And in a sense, this ruling collides a bit with Bostock, and so there's going to have to be some reconciliation as this stuff kind of plays out in the future. And it's going to have a lot to do with the rights of children and the rights of parents, particularly as those rights rub against the way that schools want to operate and the way that teachers have been told that either they're supposed to operate.

So, this is nowhere near the end of the story on this, but it is clear that the inevitability narrative is flawed and that the court is willing to jump into this. Now the other question on this is, just how willing, then, does this indicate the court's going to be with these regulatory agencies that just make interpretations and enforce them like law, and it goes from one, you know, administration, to the other, and it's impossible to keep up. That stuff has to be reined in.

And of course, the court seems to be wanting to do that, given an earlier ruling, you know, basically trying to rein in the power of the law from these regulatory agencies that are unelected and not going through Congress and all that sort of stuff. So that part's out of control, in principle, even if we're not talking about the specific issue of gender identity, so-called gender identity, which is going to have to be resolved as well.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center and Host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Thanks!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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