Culture Friday: Poison and antidote

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday, November 7th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday! Joining us is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, good morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Two conservative thinkers are warning about the same figure—but for very different reasons.

Thinker 1 is Ross Douthat, writing in The New York Times. He writes that anti-Semitism on the populist right is not a fringe problem anymore.

Douthat argues that figures like Nick Fuentes tap into real theological and generational drift—especially among younger evangelicals. Douthat calls for conservatives to rebuild moral authority, to reassert theological clarity, and to engage young people before skepticism, for example, about Israel hardens into something darker.

I mentioned two conservative thinkers. Thinker No. 2 is Christopher Rufo, writing in City Journal. Rufo writes that everyone’s taking Fuentes too seriously. He calls him a performance artist of the internet age. He says Fuentes is someone who doesn’t believe half of what he says but manipulates outrage to gain attention.

In Rufo’s view, debating or denouncing Fuentes just feeds the spectacle. The only winning move is to starve him of attention and focus on reality instead of online provocation.

So the two agree Fuentes is poisonous—but Douthat says we must engage and correct him; Rufo says we must ignore and outgrow him.

What do you say?

STONESTREET: Well, I don’t know if they can both be right, but I think at some level you have to engage the young men and rebuild some foundation in the young men who seem to be attracted to Nick Fuentes, while at the same time realizing that he is a performance artist and he’s actually, in many ways, not even making arguments—he’s just saying really outrageous things in order to gain an audience.

But the problem that we have here is that the pure strategy of just kind of not making a bigger deal out of this than it really is, and just moving on, would be completely legitimate if we were talking about a different kind of audience. But we’re not. Lewis said, for example, that we need good philosophy, if for no other reason than bad philosophy exists. That would apply here.

But I think there’s actually another step. I just re-watched one of the great movies of all time, Hoosiers, the Indiana basketball movie, when the town guy says to the coach—and of course he ends up being one of the bad guys in the film—but his line is: there are two types of people. There’s the guy who goes crazy, gets naked, and howls at the moon, and then there’s the one who does it in your living room. The one you shouldn’t care about; the other you’re kind of forced to deal with.

We’re a culture in which, in our living room, so to speak, is a bunch of disaffected, untethered, ungrounded, uncatechized young people—particularly young men. One of the things that they’re not real clear on is cultural memory. We have to understand that we at least have the first-generation report, and maybe some of us eyewitness information, of the evils of Nazism and anti-Semitism. We’re now talking about two or three or four generations down the line, in a culture that does a pretty lousy job at teaching history—much less civic loyalties.

And it’s the same thing with Mamdani becoming mayor of New York City. You have a bunch of young people that voted for him. The numbers were crazy from the polls, right? Everybody under 40 and everybody over 40 didn’t—not because they were conservative, they were going to vote for Cuomo. But the point is that one remembers communism and one does not. And if you do not pass down these important cultural memories, then you have a very susceptible audience—and Fuentes clearly has a very susceptible audience.

We saw the text messages that came out of the Young Republicans. Obviously, some people were watching him like they watch a car wreck—you just can’t turn away. There’s plenty of that. But listen, we have to pay attention to it, if for no other reason than that we haven’t paid attention to it up until this point, at least in terms of teaching young men what’s true.

EICHER: I want to return to Douthat’s argument and his engagement with the delicate question about Christian support for Israel. He points out that older evangelicals still tend to see Israel through a theological lens—the “those who bless Israel will be blessed” framework. But many younger conservatives, including younger believers, don’t share that view. They’re more willing to question Israeli policy, especially after the Gaza war.

Douthat warns that without careful teaching, that skepticism can slide from reasonable critique into something darker — from political disagreement to anti-Semitic conspiracy.

So here’s the question: How should Christians critique Israeli policy without drifting into the anti-Semitic conspiracies Douthat warns about? What’s the line between discernment and denial of Israel’s legitimacy

STONESTREET: I mean, look, we got tons of reaction this week to a commentary that I put out along these lines—condemning Fuentes, condemning anti-Semitism on the right, and specifically Tucker Carlson’s soft-pedaling of it through this interview—and we got that immediately: “Oh, you’re just a dispensationalist.”

Now, for the record, some of my best friends are dispensationalists, but I am not one of them. And so that particular view of theology or the End Times is not required whatsoever to have a favorable position on the State of Israel.

Let me just say clearly, there is an enormous gap—a Grand Canyon-size chasm—between the things that Fuentes says about Jewish people as Jewish people, and a hatred of individuals that has nothing to do at all with whatever one thinks about particular policies, or even whether they overdid it in Gaza. And we immediately got that sort of reaction as well: “Well, listen, if you’re accusing Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson of anti-Semitism, then you are completely uncritical of the State of Israel.”

I’m like, What are we even talking about? Listen, the difference between saying, “You know what, these sorts of actions or the level of retaliation by the State of Israel is a problem with the world,” and saying, “Jewish people as people are the problem with the world,” is an enormous gap. And that’s what you get from anti-Semitism—whether it’s on the critical-theory left or whether it’s coming from this kind of far-right basement faction of that side of things—because you’re not answering the question of what’s wrong with the world with a “who.”

But the line of good and evil doesn’t run between nations or groups of people or states—it runs right between the human heart. But it’s worse, because you’re identifying a particular grouping of people and then saying that the world would be better and there would not be these problems if only these people did not exist. That’s hatred. That’s violating the tenets of the Western world, which is built on an understanding of human dignity and human value.

So I just think these things are so dramatically different—criticizing Israel’s policy and then saying the world would be better if there were no Jewish people and mocking in that way. And let’s also be clear too, Fuentes has never reserved his juvenile, thoughtless, cruel, and just flat-out evil rhetoric just for Jews. If that’s the only evidence that we had, he would be guilty on dozens and dozens of counts. But what he’s said about Blacks, what he’s said about women, what he’s said about conservatives who disagree with him, what he says about everything—yeah.

REICHARD: Yeah, well, I don’t want to leave Rufo in the dust here. I want to give him his due. So let’s talk a bit about the argument that Nick Fuentes isn’t really driven by conviction at all but by provocation, as you said. In other words, when society says something over here is just forbidden instead of saying something over here is false, then it makes that taboo more alluring to some personalities—let’s just say it that way.

So that raises a challenge for the church: How does the church form believers who reject anti-Semitism not just because it’s taboo—which just feeds into that rebel impulse—but because it is false, unbiblical, and contrary to reality? John, how do we ground that conviction deeply enough that it can withstand both outrage and irony?

STONESTREET: Yeah, well, listen, I think Rufo does deserve some credit here for this really important point. I mean, Fuentes is a showman. He wrecks cars in the middle of the media sphere so that everyone will stop and look at the car wreck. But I still think he has pretty committed convictions about race, about the Jewish people, about women, and so on.

So how do we respond? Number one, I think we start where any sort of catechism on human dignity and human value starts, which is: Where can you ground it? You can’t ground it in a particular ideology. You have to ground it in timeless, eternal truth. And the only system that has ever given that is the Judeo-Christian vision communicated in Genesis—that we were created a particular way with inherent value.

Now I think if we went from church to church to church today and we asked people, “Hey, everybody, fill in the blank: humans are …” everyone would probably say, “ …the image of God,” like they should. But if you said, “Well, what does that mean? What is the image of God? What difference does the image of God make?” you’d hear a lot more crickets.

So we need to actually turn the image of God into deep catechism and formation, as opposed to just a trivia point of quoting a verse in Genesis. We’ve got to teach that.

Second, to go back to a point we were making earlier, we have to teach history. I have a friend who works with us—Dr. Glenn Sunshine at the Colson Center—and he said, as a historian, “I cannot explain the survival of the Jewish people.” The conspiracies that some group of people just called themselves Jewish so they could claim the land? Look at the history of persecution against the Jewish people—who would suddenly say, “That’s who I want to be”? There’s no explanation why this isn’t an extinct people group like so many others through history unless something else is going on.

So I think the Biblical story in which the Jewish people have a very unique and specific role—and again, I say this as someone whose best friends are dispensationalists, but I am not one of them—explains both the hatred and also the survival. So give me theological grounding, give me historical fact, and I think we’re going to be a lot further down the line.

And then finally, we need to look at the unique way that this attracts young men. It is a fascinating time we live in—if it weren’t so consequential—that we have a flow of young men back to church and a flow of young men to ideological extremism like this, and sometimes it’s the same men going both directions. So we need to be really clear about how we disciple, how we clarify the expectations that God has put on young men to lay down their lives, to love their neighbor as themselves. I think we have to raise the bar there.

So if we did those three things, that probably would help, I think.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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