Culture Friday: More than a scheme

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s the 7th day of April 2023.

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, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, good morning.

STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: Well, John, here we are on Good Friday, and I’m reminded of something Chuck Colson said about the resurrection, and I’d like for you to talk about it. He said he knew the resurrection of Jesus had to be factual, because Watergate proved it to him.

Talk about how those two go together—the Watergate conspiracy and the resurrection of Christ—how that logical proof works. and whether you can think of any contemporary examples where conspirators simply couldn’t hold it together.

STONESTREET: Oh goodness, that's a loaded question after this week, isn't it? What happened there is that Watergate featured some of the most powerful men in the world working together with all the resources of power and the resources of influence, and they couldn't hold the story together at all. And so what you have with the Gospel accounts or, you know was, Gary Habermas calls it “the minimalist facts approach” that one of the facts that we can largely accept is that the tomb was empty. Because this whole thing could have been upended. And the whole theory of the resurrection would have been so quickly squashed had we just had a body that had been produced by those who were in charge. So here you have a group of men who had reason to explain the empty tomb away with a story. If they all had the same kind of story of this is what happened. And they're not just claiming a spiritual resurrection, that would have been an easy thing to do. Right? Just, oh, you know, he ascended into heaven. In fact, I think the New York Times said, That's what Christians believe. That's not what Christians believe. That's what they said last year, if I remember, right. That's not what Christians, we believe that Jesus who was dead, rose again, walked around in a physical body and was seen by an awful lot of people. And if that was just a conspiracy, a common explanation that a group of men came together and decided that they were going to articulate even though they knew it wasn't true. Well, that's what Chuck was talking about. With Watergate, you had powerful people, with the disciples, you had people without power. And if the Watergate conspirators couldn't hold their story, their explanation together, then the disciples weren't either. And I think that's why so many people find it so powerful. I share this every year on social media, and it's by far the most shared thing that I do on social media. So if you want to get that and share, you can go to my Facebook page, or you can go to Twitter, and you will, you will find it pretty quickly. And it's a wonderful thing to share. You know, either that, or one of the BC comics by Johnny Hart, the Easter ones, those are two great ways Christians can be redemptive on social media this time of year.

EICHER: Last week, John, when you weren’t here we talked with Katie McCoy, who’d just sent off a book to the publisher, so it’s months away from getting out to the public. But it was on the subject of gender confusion among females, and so we spent our entire time on the attack on the Covenant School in Nashville. And it was appropriate we talked with an expert like Katie because the attacker was gender-confused.

Now, we don’t have the full story because we don’t have access to the manifesto. At WORLD we are making legal efforts to get it. But we ran into a roadblock, because now the F-B-I has the manifesto, and that’s a different level of difficult. So we’ll see. We are going to do what we can to force a timely release.

What I’ve noticed, though, in the meantime, is that this story has really fallen out of the headlines. Why do you suppose that is?

STONESTREET: Well, I mean I, you know, I don't want to be cynical, but it seems obvious enough that it's the same reason that the Club Q shooting dropped out of the headlines in the days after that here in Colorado Springs, you had members of the LGBT “community” you know, widely condemning the Christian voices here in town, which of course are many. Focus on the Family's entrance, the sign was vandalized. 'The blood is on your hands' is what was said. And this was a narrative that had been repeated in maybe more articulate language by opinion writers in the New York Times about was something that was repeated over and over and then suddenly it went absolutely quiet. The moment it went absolutely quiet is when the shooter in the Club Q tragedy identified as non-binary. And there was evidence that he had frequented the club, and then it got quiet. We haven't heard a thing. This is, I think, the same story. Now the Christian community in Nashville, the people who had children at that school, who are trying to help assure their kids that how many rounds did we find out this week were fired within the buildings, over 150 They've got some long term things there to deal with. I heard that many of them, one of the police officers who told their account this week, I don't know if you saw that, Nick basically saying, you know, what we see in these kids is that they believe in eternity. They believe in heaven. They believe that their classmates, though they miss them, and that they love them are in a better place. They're doing better than we are. That's what the police officer said. So why is it then that even in continued attention by children is being handled one way in a media who can't push forward the narrative, and this goes in the face of that even more than the Club Q shooting did suddenly are silent? Well, I think it has to do with the power of worldview. What you see has an awful lot to do with what lens you're looking through. And to a you know, somebody wearing yellow glasses, the world looks yellow. Someone wearing Buddhist glasses, or Muslim glasses, the world looks Buddhist and Muslim. To a Christian, the world looks Christian. Now, let me just say definitively: a trans person did do this. That part is clear. That's not the same thing as saying that all trans people did, and they were motivated by something. And we have that motivation, in a manifesto that hasn't been released, it needs to be released. It needs to be released. And that's going to help I think make even more sense of, if there is silence or if there's not silence, we're going to be able to see it even more acutely at that point.

EICHER: Okay, John, Dylan Mulvaney, corporate pitchman, playing the part of an overexcited teenage girl. I don’t want to talk about that, per se. Everyone’s had a hot take on that, and Babylon Bee is the best at that.

What I want to talk about is the sophisticated, behind-the-scenes work that makes things like this happen. We’ve heard of diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI. It’s a huge thing in corporate America. ESG, environmental, social, and governance. It’s a big thing in corporate finance.

And it dovetails well with the Human Rights Campaign and its Corporate Equality Index. If you don’t know, the HRC is an LGBT pressure group, $40 million dollar nonprofit, and it punches well above its revenues weight.

The Fortune 500 companies, more than half of them have perfect, 100-percent CEI scores from the Human Rights Campaign, and Anheuser-Busch InBev is one of those. It’s no coincidence. You don’t get a perfect score without paying attention to it. And that’s how you get Dylan Mulvaney. It’s really quite a genius strategy.

STONESTREET: Well, it is genius on behalf of those who are trying to promote an agenda. And the reason has to do with how we think and understand culture. You talk about the success of a movement, the steam at which the LGBTQ movement gained power. And I'm not talking about gaining prominence or gaining adherence, I'm talking about when it really gained power, had to do with the business and corporate community. You can go back, we're all old enough here go back just 10-15 years, and there was a dominant presence of this ideology or various forms of it in media and in movies. But if you think about culture as being a you know, made up of various spheres, the you know, business sphere and a church sphere and estate sphere, when everything started to click was when there was an influence that was garnered over corporations. And the HRC has been the tool through which this movement has actually gained power over these corporations to such an extent that, although I think there is some financial just pure calculation happening on behalf of, you know, Anheuser Busch, and Disney and some of the things, money is no longer the ultimate guide to the right thing for them to do. Now, I think profit at some level has to be, but it's probably less how many beers are we going to sell to How hard are we going to be hit and hurt if we don't do what they tell us to do? And so that's what you have. It is a genius move on one side and it's a just a calculating move on the other side. I'm not sure that it's a true believer sort of thing. Although I think HR departments in businesses and corporations across America are stacked with true believers. And those true believers are able to leverage kind of these weapons. But look, it is no small thing to consider the fact of how every single group bows on the gender issue to transgender activists including the other letters of the acronym. There hasn't been a successful trans movement on its own terms yet. It was a hijacking of the L the G and the B. It was a hijacking of the Black Lives Matter movement. I mean, what other movement was able to take the Black Lives Matter movement and say, Oh, no, no, no, you have to add another word. We got black trans lives matter. That's what we got in sort of an official name. So that even the the official movement itself has to include this language and, and now, of course, at the government level, all of these post-Dobbs pro-abortion laws like what we have now in Colorado, which has still yet to be signed by the governor, but passed without much resistance, radical, radical pro-abortion laws that take Roe v. Wade, three steps down the road, and you know, what's there? Trans rights are reproductive rights, which makes no sense, because trans is actually a denial of biological reproduction. But trans rights are reproductive rights is in Massachusetts, Michigan, Colorado. It is an amazing sort of thing. I'm tempted here just to quote the Babylon Bee. One of its more funny headlines was about this issue, where it said a beverage that pretends to be a beer employs a spokesperson that pretends to be a woman, that was a pretty again, not satire that's actually an accurate headline.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, I hope you have a wonderful Easter, I know it’s Good Friday today, but let’s look forward to Easter Sunday and sign off by saying, He is Risen!

STONESTREET: Thank you, and He is risen indeed. And that's something that we should all celebrate. Take a break from the headlines, and lock in and let that reground us again this week.

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