Culture Friday - Patriotism on the decline

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, July 8th, 2022.

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.

Let’s bring in John Stonestreet. He’s the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: I have a few questions for you, that arise from the Fourth of July mass shooting near Chicago. John, we could go any number of directions with this: we could talk about alienation, we could talk about gun culture, we could talk about the danger of copycat crimes, we could talk about how a kid with this many problems and specific contact with authorities somehow slipped through the cracks. But I guess, how does a young man get this way—short of mental illness—and is there anything to be done about it?

STONESTREET: Well, I think it's important to call it mental illness. And I think it's important to call it evil. And those two things aren't incompatible. Those two things aren't opposites. It's not one or the other. It's a fallen world. And we're fallen people and when fallen people are influenced by other fallen people, and hurt by other fallen people, and, and develop, you know, all kinds of issues with their own identity and their own moral compass and all of that sort of stuff, then look, what has to govern, if there's not an internal compass is some sort of external force. And we clearly do not have a system that is able to identify these folks, and then do something helpful about it. On one side, we want to defund. And of course, that's one of the cities in which, you know, some of these compromises were made to law enforcement funding. And at the same time, we can't say that law enforcement in all places are able to actually protect people like they should. This is a story that's coming out of the Uvalde shooting, this is a story that continues to come, when you have these sorts of situations where a young man should have been on people's radars, they should have been someone that stepped in - authorities - they should have known enough to do something, and apparently they didn't. But at the same time, it's not the state's job to do the job of the parents of the local community. I mean, this is the longtime analysis of American culture, is that there was more at play than just individual citizens and State forces, there were, you know, institutions of local community that were mediating structures in most people's lives that kept them accountable that kept them known, that kept them connected. And those things are radically dissolved in our culture, we just don't have them, many people grow up. When we say without a conscience, a lot of times what we mean is this kind of sense of individuality and the individual moral compass, which is certainly the case. But I mean, something different. I mean, we're growing up without a social connection, without a social life, and therefore, we're not thinking outside of ourselves. And when all of life turns in an interior direction, as opposed to an exterior direction, then the entire conversation we have in our own heads moves from one of responsibility. what good am I responsible for? Who am I responsible to be a part of? To conversation about rights that are just demanded, I want this, I want that. And that tends to devolve into a rights of feeling. And if you don't have that sort of interior exterior balance, or at least the right forces speaking to both areas of what it means to be human, then people get lost. And that's kind of the headline of the last 60 years. This is the Robert Putnam Bowling Alone headline, it just keeps going on and on. Where people are not responsible for each other. And you give everyone unlimited radical freedom and take away any sort of moral boundaries. There's only one way that math problem comes out.

EICHER: Another part of this: I was really struck this past Independence Day with the amount of disdain of country we saw in the culture. It’s even showing up in public opinion polling. Gallup said this: just “38 percent of U.S. adults … say they are ‘extremely proud’ to be American” and that figure “is the lowest in Gallup’s [20-plus year] trend.”

For reference, back in 2003, the number was 70 percent. Now it’s 38.

Beyond that, we had lots of stories and commentary on Supreme Court rulings deemed controversial, celebrities saying they hate the country, we had National Public Radio announcing it was “updating an NPR Independence Day tradition, the reading of the Declaration of Independence,” and the update was not to read the Declaration on the air.

This is a cultural shift. I’m sure I’ll be accused of Christian nationalism asking the question, but isn’t this alarming?

STONESTREET: Yeah, I think the headline here is much more about Christian or anti Christian, anti nationalist than Christian nationalists. You know, I think that's a much bigger trend. But you kind of have to ask, I mean, can you blame them? You know, where would they have learned a respect for American history? Where would they have learned a proper or any sort of analysis that takes seriously the ideas that underpin the founders, and when you have those words, like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the concept of what that means, and how that actually is dependent upon that other phrase there, you know, endowed by their Creator. You know, if you don't have a history class that teaches that and you don't have a critical thinking class that connects the dots, and you don't have, you know, at least even a kind of a sense of personal loyalty to friends, neighbors, and increasingly, even family, I, you know, there's not going to be any sort of reason to expect that number to go up, as opposed to continue to go down. And I think that's really where we're at. I mean, you know, what was really interesting is, you know, my son's five and we spent a lot more time just kind of, again, going back and reviewing that and there's a there's a really cool series that was done several years ago called Liberty Kids and it's a it's the cast is like, a who's who cast out of DC and mostly people on the left and you know, political left at the time. And you see the series and you think this is positive about American history, it takes seriously this the slavery question and the inconsistencies of freedom. But you just I just kept thinking, as I was watching this, first of all, America is a really cool place and what was being argued here, and, and that sort of thing, but, you know, at the Continental Congress and what people were trying to do, but at the same time, I was thinking, no one on the political left would dare make this today, they would not dare make a series like this, that spoke of American history positively. And this is a kid series, you know, so I think, you know, you can't have a national identity without a civic education, those two things are inextricably linked together. And I think that's one of the things we're gonna have to think about.

BROWN: Last week a masculine-looking woman, saying she’s an elementary school teacher, posted to social media the joys of confusing young students.

This is by way of a social media account devoted to publicizing things like this, “Libs of TikTok.”

Let’s listen.

AUDIO: A kid today looks at me and goes, “Are you a boy or girl?”

And I was like, “What do you think?”

To which she said, “Oh, a girl.”

And I was like, “Oh, why do you think that?”

“Uhh, because you have a girl’s voice.”

“Okay. And what if I dropped it an octave?”

And she just went, “So you’re a boy?”

Jamie, confusing children since who knows [bleep] when?

Some say this is difficult to separate from the practice of grooming, maybe you don’t go that far.

But it certainly seems as though the little girl she describes deserves some clarity from an adult who won’t make sport of confusing children.

STONESTREET: Well, I'm completely comfortable calling this grooming, I don't know why people aren't comfortable calling it grooming, what else on earth is it? Listen, the only way we're gonna get to pedophilia - and I used to be a skeptic on this and say, you know, the kind of slippery slope argument that if you start here, then it goes there and it goes there and eventually comes down to pedophilia. But look, we're encouraging kids, without giving them all the information to be completely autonomous over their sexual identity. Is it really that far of a stretch to give them complete autonomy over their sexual behavior? And what does that do to things like the age of consent? And what does that how do we do this, and we've already kind of dumbed down sexual morality to nothing, you know, connected to physical reality, but only kind of this internal mental category of consent, which has proven to be super squishy, particularly when you start hearing those who transitioned and were encouraged to transition as soon as they turn 18, now having regret and going well, wait a minute, I was only given one side of this. And this wasn't real consent or women who, you know, find themselves in sexually compromised situations and then turn around and figure out well, I didn't really mean to consent that way. But it would take it that way. And what do we mean and so this is the only category we have is a squishy idea of consent. We're applying it now to students and then forcing them to think thoughts and, you know, put them in kind of full autonomy over their sexual identity when they don't have the life experience, they don't have the mental maturity, they don't have the neurological connections, they don't have the moral instruction. They don't have the family support, they don't have any of this in place. And then it's like a free for all, after we force fed them Drag Queen story hours at the local library. I mean, you you do the math here, and there's only one way this goes. And the question is why? Why would you want to do this? It doesn't make them happier, we have all the data that we need to say that young kids are less happy than they used to be, they feel more stressed out than they ever have. And part of that is they're not just trying to figure out what they want to do with their life in 10 years, they're told they have to figure out who they are in these intimate categories that don't even know how to think this way. And we're force feeding them this, if this isn't grooming what is? It's only leading them one direction, and to a life of kind of a free for all experimentation, or complete fear of sex in general. And we're only leading them you know, with one set of information. So what's there to gain from any of this? And the only answer that makes sense. And please, if someone knows another one, you feel free to write, you know, tell me what the motivation can be, if not a group of adults hoping to justify their own rights, their own feelings and using this whole thing as a way to justify it.

BROWN: Well, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thank you, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you.

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