Culture Friday: Redefining better outcomes

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 3rd of January.

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, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning and Happy New Year to you!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning, Happy New Year!

EICHER: This was not widely reported, but it seems hugely significant: A new study in Europe is trying to find a new way to measure the success of so-called transgender medicine.

Now, why would that be important?

In a few words, because there are no success stories. The report is urging the medical community to toss out what it calls the “logic of improvement” that demands measurable benefits in the well-being of patients.

In other words, we’re losing the game, so we need new rules.

I heard about this by way of a social media post by the author J.K. Rowling.

She argued that this shift covers up failure and redefines success to justify pushing these irreversible interventions. Rowling likens the study’s logic to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil,” accusing it of hiding harm in the fog of academic language. I’ll put a link to the report in today’s transcript online if the listener would like to read it.

Remarkable.

STONESTREET: Well, J.K. Rowling has been so good on this issue, and her shout out to the “banality of evil,” that whole concept is so rich worldview-wise.

But you know, this whole thing just hit me in a couple different ways: One is, this is a different age than it was even two years and three years ago. The way this sits is even more offensive than it would have been two to three years ago—and I think with more people.

This also tells you about the shifting norms of culture: when something becomes abnormal, when something gets on the wrong side of the zeitgeist, it’s kind of like that politician whose campaign has turned and everything they say sounds worse and worse. It’s like, “Hey, dude, you’re in a hole. Stop digging.” This is what this sounded like to me.

It wasn’t unlike, although on a much bigger scale after the election, on CNN, when a commentator brought up the fact that, the American people have rejected the men-in-women’s-locker-room thing. Another commentator basically tried to shut down the conversation with an accusation of transphobia, and even the far left-leaning panelists were like, “No, we have to have this conversation.” It just sounded so weird on that day.

I am always fascinated by how cultural norms change, but this is significant.

What’s happening is that this movement has progressed along just fantasy, fairy-tale stuff, the thought that by making up words and creating concepts, we can change reality. It was always absurd, but it sounds more and more absurd almost month by month as we go along.

Again, shout out to JK Rowling for pointing this out. But I, I think for a lot of people, it was just like, “Yeah, this is as bad as we always thought it was.”

Maybe even worse.

BROWN: John, much has been written and said about former president Jimmy Carter. Carter’s legacy, which includes his presidency and his post-presidential life of faith and service is … a little complex.

STONESTREET: Yeah, well, you know, theology matters, and that’s what I think is the fundamental lesson for Christians of this former president. The theological replacement that’s happened in mainstream evangelicalism and Christianity in general reflects what happened in mainline liberalism a generation ago, which is that some form of niceness replaced truth.

One of the last interviews that Chuck Colson and I did together was with the former president, and it was such an interesting conversation. There was no question about, for example, the humanitarian work that Carter did through Habitat for Humanity. It was something that Prison Fellowship had been able to connect with him over the years.

But what emerged in President Carter, both as a president and as a former president, was that he had adopted a view of the world that comes from mainline theological liberalism. It underestimates the fall and the impact of human sinfulness on individuals. It downplays God’s created design and God’s role as a ruler in the universe with moral expectations. Then it assumes things about human nature that is not reflected in it.

I think that’s why his presidency was so marked by so many stark failures. Honestly, a lot of his political work after that was as well.

It’s impossible to deny how nice and kind he was. But as CS Lewis pointed out, even that niceness and kindness can become a source of pride. It’s kind of a false humility—and you actually think, “I’m going to do what I think is right, even if everyone else has rejected it as wrong.” There were so many times in President Carter’s public career that he did that.

I think that points to a really important lesson for all of us, how we live out our faith, how we treat other people really matters, but what the substance of that faith is matters as well—maybe more so. Because if you have a wrong understanding of the gospel, it’s because you have a wrong understanding of God and a wrong understanding of people.

That is the big failure of theological liberalism everywhere it has been tried. What’s unique about President Carter is that he applied it to the public square, and it does not have a good record.

It’s been interesting to watch various voices and publications of evangelicalism that sound so much like mainline liberal Protestantism, including voices that would have denounced that just yesterday—and using the former president’s story as a way to do that.

So evangelicalism, when it’s untethered from truth, theological truth, risks the same way forward as does mainline Protestant liberalism, and I think his life should warn us about that.

EICHER: Over in WORLD Opinions, A.S. Ibrahim writes on the New Year’s morning terror attack in New Orleans. He highlights the ongoing presence of Islamic extremism in the United States. Quoting now, “[The dead attacker’s] full name indicates his Arabic-Islamic heritage: Although he was born in Texas, his name is Arabic with a distinctly Islamic meaning, as ‘Shamsud-Din’ means the bright star of the religion, while [the surname] ‘Jabbar’ is a name of Allah, which means ‘the mighty one.’”

The writer Ibrahim is from Egypt. He is a Christian and holds two PhDs on Islam and its history. He writes that Jabbar’s actions were apparently inspired by ISIS and reflect the group’s Salafi and jihadist ideolog y: one that seeks to impose Islam globally using violence.

He says the New Year’s attack should raise alarms about radicalization within Western societies, emphasizing the need to address extremist preaching while safeguarding freedoms. He writes: “Unless the preachers of hate and the ISIS sympathizers … are identified and controlled, and at times deported, we will always live with a bomb ready to detonate.” End of quote. That’s a bit alarming.

STONESTREET: Well, I agree with just about all that analysis. I think at some level, with some of the other global conflicts over the last 10 years or so, the role that radical Islam is playing on the world stage was forgotten by people in the West—especially in the United States.

This goes back to Samuel Huntington’s thesis in The Clash of Civilizations, which hasn’t proven to be completely correct. But he got that part right: the real clashes that we’re going to face in our current age are not between nation states, although that would still be there, he said, but it would really rise to the level of civilizations. Sometimes those fault lines between civilizations run within a particular nation state, and the mass movement of people through migration over the last decade is going to expose that on a big scale.

I also think that there needs to be at least some reckoning with the dominant narrative through which we see these things. It immediately popped up in the wake of this terrible evil, the emphasis being placed on the fact that he was an American citizen and was in the military, as if that was the dominant thing that drove his behavior, his values, his worldview.

When more details continue to emerge—and, you know, even as we’re talking right now, there’s more details emerging: How big is this network? Is it a network? Is that the right thing to call it and all of that?

[The narrative points away from] any sort of radicalization within the United States. Of course, those on the left have pointed to things like Christian nationalism and white supremacy as the, and I quote, “biggest danger in terms of terrorism that our nation faces.”

It’s just not playing out in real life at any level. It’s a narrative looking for a story, but this story is pointing to the fact that Islam as a worldview, particularly in its more radicalized forms, is a great threat to the world order. It’s a great threat to national sovereignty, peace, and the safety of individuals. So I think the analysis of WORLD Opinions was right on.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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