Culture Friday: Replacement religion

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 5th of April, 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.

Time now for Culture Friday. And joining us is John Stonestreet. He's president of the Colson Center, and he's host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, John, you have heard, no doubt, that Scotland has a new hate speech law. It took effect on April Fool's Day, so read into that whatever you wish. Reading Ross Douthat in the New York Times, he notes that this new law in Scotland criminalizes public speech deemed insulting to a protected group. Now this is a legal term of art, "insulting," as opposed to the higher legal standard of "abusive," and a prosecutor would need only prove that the speech was likely to encourage hatred, rather than being explicitly intended to do so. Ross Douthat saying, "a plain reading of the law seems like it could license prosecutions for a comedian's monologue or for reading biblical passages on sexual morality in public."

Now, the famous author J.K. Rowling has weighed in; she's objected to this. She's even dared Scottish authorities to put her in jail over it. But Douthat makes the point and I'll quote here, “Speech police tend to prefer more obscure targets, which of course, is the normal way for mild sorts of authoritarianism to work. Exceptions are made for prominent figures, lest the system be made to look ridiculous, but ordinary people, they are taught not to cross the line.” That's Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

WORLD Opinions writer Carl Truman puts it this way. “It's tossing out an old blasphemy law, and in effect, bringing in a new blasphemy law, implying this new ideology is very religious indeed.” John, what do you say?

STONESTREET: I think Carl Truman has been writing some of the most helpful stuff on really what this expansion by force really either culturally or legally or politically of the sexual agenda, what it really means, and it is a replacement of a religion. It's fascinating that in response to President Biden's announcement that Easter would be the Trans Day of Visibility, the non Christian British writer, Louise Perry, who's talked a lot about the sexual revolution, called it "repaganizing." All this fits in here.

And so for Truman to call this a new religion is exactly right. I tell you, what I don't think is necessarily the case, is what Douthat wrote, that the police won't actually go after J.K. Rowling. I think she called their bluff. I think she challenged them directly. I think she has won the first standoff. But if you think the side that pushed this law forward is going to stand by and even let J.K. Rowling get away with it? Now look, the police, they'd rather not mess with this, no question at all. But immediately when the police issued a statement saying, "Oh, yeah, this doesn't really count as what we had in mind," when by all observable---I mean, did you see the Twitter thread? It was unbelievable. She named names, she pointed to transgender, particularly men who pretend to be women actually causing abuse and damage in public and prisons. I mean, it was a direct challenge. There's no way it doesn't fit this definition.

You know, it's like what we've said for a long time, you can be as winsome as you want to be, and it's not going to keep this kind of movement from trying to enforce compliance. So we'll see what happens. I'm not sure Douthat's necessarily correct. One thing I did appreciate is somebody else brought that up saying, Well, you know, you'll get away with it, but other people will not. But at the same time, J.K. Rowling turned around and said, If somebody unknown gets in trouble for something they tweet, let me know, I'll tweet it and force the police to choose. She's not messing around.

I’ve got to say one more thing, if that's okay, Nick, and that is there's at least something that has to be noted about the number of conservative leaders and religious leaders and pastors in the United States that refuse to be really clear on this issue in case they might get in trouble. And for JK Rowling to actually come out and do it, expecting to get in trouble, there's a misalignment of courage in this comparison, and I can't help but see it and I'm sure others are too.

BROWN: What we talked about, John, with respect to Scotland, seems to be an example of politics being upstream of culture, instead of the other way around, which brings me to a point argued by Eric Teetsel in WORLD Opinions. Teetsel used to be with the Manhattan Declaration, and now he's at the Heritage Foundation. He makes the argument that the saying "politics is downstream from culture," although containing a nugget of truth, does real harm by minimizing the role of politics and policy in society, and providing an excuse to shrug off the responsibilities of citizenship. He says at the end of his article, "with so much in the culture going awry, we need to take seriously the role that law and policy play in shaping who we are, what we think and what we value." What do you think, John? Is he right, or is he wrong?

STONESTREET: I think the answer is yes. He's both right and wrong. I love Eric, I've known Eric for a long time. We both worked with Chuck Colson about the same time here, the last years of Chuck's life. And Chuck was the one who popularize - he didn't coin it, for the record, although he's been credited with that on the internet, he did not coined the phrase "politics is downstream from culture." But he did really like it. And he did really promote it. And I think he probably overstated it.

But I think, you know, Eric is overstating it as well, by saying that that idea does real harm. Look, most of the time politics is downstream from culture, or more accurate to say would be politics is downstream from the rest of culture, because politics and our laws, these are part of culture, they're inseparable from culture. But when you ask, you know, what leads what, it's the kind of cultural imagination that's oftentimes shaped primarily through ideas advanced in education and art, that leads the way, that's upstream, for the kind of laws that people can imagine having. It's just as potentially problematic to think that passing a law can change hearts and minds.

Now, there certainly are examples of both throughout history, so let me give those. The first: the Civil Rights Act. There was a whole lot of American culture not ready for the Civil Rights Act. It was upstream from the rest of culture. But let's take the Dobbs decision. There's a law now one could argue it hasn't worked its way into culture yet. But the response immediately from the electorate, and seven states, including red states, since Dobbs, has gone in a pro-abortion direction. So when people thought that the end of the law meant the end of abortion, then you're thinking that law is upstream, and it's gonna then, you know, make abortion unthinkable. And it didn't. What was unthinkable, what's proven to be unthinkable for a significant majority of Americans, is taking away that kind of final option.

Now, what's that have to do with? That has to do with this notion that the unborn are unseen, by and large, and therefore, don't merit the same value, that has to do with the constant barrage of attack from cultural institutions against pro-lifers, since the Roe decision was overturned. I think you have a basically a deep-seated culture of moral relativism, that really shapes how we see things. And so I think you have examples of both.

Now, most often, the laws passed that are thinkable, that are conceivable, and so it takes a while for the cultural imagination to make those things actually a possibility. But it does also take real moral courage for political leaders, particularly in a situation like ours, to jump ahead of culture, and to say, "This is what the right thing is to do." And then if we see it shape the rest of culture downstream. I think there's a whole lot of factors at play, right?

So I love Eric, and Ryan Anderson, by the way, also has made this case, but maybe he's overstating it a bit, just like Chuck Colson did when he said it.

EICHER: Well, John, I'd like to pick up on something that you said earlier, about the collision of Easter Sunday and the Transgender Day of Visibility. A lot of people got upset about that, as you know, but we were told there is nothing to get upset about because it's Easter that bumped into Transgender Day and not vice versa. Is there anything further to say on the subject?

STONESTREET: Well, look, I think there's a lot to say. Now how and whether and how we should be upset, I think is a legitimate conversation. But this is a moment in time. This is a marker. This is something that actually says you are here in the cultural scheme of things. But on a practical level, the excuses that this really isn't a big deal that we hear, there's a number of things that came to mind.

Number one is the voices on the religious left that told us that, and there were plenty on at least on Twitter, that said, you know, you guys get upset about nothing - that's been the response at each stage of people being concerned about these things. And it keeps getting worse and worse and worse. So you keep telling us to stop being upset about nothing. And then nothing keeps becoming more and more and more and more of a something, right. I mean, this all started, you know, with like, don't be too upset about you know, rock music with long hair and short skirts. And now we've kind of it things have escalated a bit, I guess is what I want to say.

The second thing I want to say is if this is the Trans Day of Visibility, what are the days of invisibility? Like, seriously, I mean, this is every day, and this is what happens every time we get a new kind of day that we're supposed to remember, or a month of recognition for various groups, I think, Well, isn't that what every other day is about apparently? And there was a Twitter thread that actually summed all of this up, how many days there are that are set aside specifically on the gender confusion issue in one way or another. And we're talking about three dozen days, and three entire months. So look, you know, enough.

Third, the idea that this has always been on March 31, this is a day that doesn't actually exist. Easter exists in history, because the Son of God rose from the dead. That actually happened. There has actually never been an individual who has changed their chromosomes, or their hormones, or their fundamental identity as male and female. That's never happened in the history of the world. This is a made up day. This is like the word cisgender. It's a made up word that doesn't actually exist in real life, or refer to as something that needs to be distinguished in real life. But it's used to advance an entire way of thinking about things. There's so many of these days. This is a made up day. Easter happened, this doesn't happen. But you know, other than those things, I don't have really any thoughts about this particular topic.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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