Culture Friday: Satan’s greatest hit

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s the 10th day of February 2023.

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.

Morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: Let’s quickly touch on the State of the Union. There’ve been lots of political takes, but I think there were some cultural moments, too, John. And what jumped out to me was this was likely the opening salvo of Campaign 2024 and President Biden branding himself again as a moderate. But that’s what I find significant: “moderate” means codifying Roe versus Wade and the equality act. He didn’t even mention the Respect for Marriage Act. It was straight on to the Equality Act. The center is moving. What do you think?

STONESTREET: Well, I do. But I think that’s one of the punchlines of our cultural moment: It’s really impossible to separate the political from the cultural in any meaningful sense anymore. I’m not trying to say that all of culture is political, but that more and more the power of culture in our lives has a political flavor to it. When politics sucks all of the air out of the room, that tells you a lot about the health of the moment, and it’s not healthy when so much bends to political developments and our media openly grasps for political power. The center of our culture has moved a long time ago. The center of the Democratic Party has clearly moved. There’s no such thing as the moderate left anymore. The reason is because the whole thing has been hijacked by this critical theory mood.

What I mean by that is this cultural understanding away from the standpoint that there are multiple legitimate positions to be taken on certain issues, towards the belief that there’s always a right and wrong position on issues. All these cultural issues now have been framed as good and evil; if you’re not for completely unfettered abortion access without any limitations whatsoever, you are an enemy of women. Of course, this from a party that refuses to define woman out loud, but you know what I mean.

This move on from the Respect for Marriage Act to the Equality Act… Some of us predicted that. Some of us told the religious supporters of the Respect for Marriage Act that this is just a repeat of the civil unions strategy from before Obergefell, which promoted civil unions and said “we just won’t call it marriage.” Once the right to civil unions was achieved, they were used as the grounds to argue that those couples are being discriminated against in their being denied a right to marriage. This was just a repeat of that strategy, some of us pointed that out. Others didn’t care to listen to that.

Even if there was any doubt of where this was going—and where this will go if Biden’s administration carries on for another four years—it is harrowing what is at stake, and that’s not a political statement. Some of us remember how aggressive the second term of the Obama administration got on social issues. Acting as if there wasn’t a legitimate opposing view, as if there wasn’t room to disagree. They acted as if Justice Kennedy had actually been wrong in the Obergefell decision, because of his statement that “people of good faith disagree.”

That is not something that’s allowed now, so there’s not really a center anymore, not fiscally, socially, politically, or culturally. The left is a radical left and the last night was additional proof of that.

BROWN: John, I’m old enough to remember watching Saturday morning cartoons, like Scooby Doo and Fat Albert. Today, they’re called animated television series, but the target audience is still the same: kids. One cartoon in particular has caught my attention and is also making the rounds on social media.

The Proud Family was a cartoon series that originally aired on Disney, twenty years ago regarded as a lighthearted depiction of a Black suburban family. It had a four-season run. Then, last year Disney + revived it, calling it The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder.

Believe me, this reboot is living up to its new name. Listen to this excerpt from again, what’s described as a kid’s show. This a song, performed by cartoon kids, that covers the history of slavery in this country and the need for reparations.

AUDIO: [Proud Family clip]

Granted, slavery is part of history, just like the Holocaust is, just like the Killing Fields of Cambodia, just like the African slave drivers who sold other Africans to the transatlantic slave trade. It’s all evil. All sin.

But putting what looks like a cartoon, but sounds like political activism in front of children, seems like a new low, even for Disney. What do you think, John?

STONESTREET: Oh, I just think you’re a conspiracy theorist, Myrna. I mean, if you say that this is being advanced in our culture, that’s what you are. Ignore it when you see it.

It reminds me of something that Rod Dreher had written about years ago, I think it was called The Law of Merited Possibility—I don’t know where the name came from for him— it goes something like: “it’ll never happen, but when it does, it’ll be your fault.” And that is kind of a "you bigot" sort of thing. And that’s really what we’re seeing on the CRT thing.

All of this just brings to mind back the 90s, when some of us were trying to address post-modernism on an ideological level and trying to help students in particular prepare for postmodern professors that they would have at college. We were told, “Oh, that’s not really post modernism, because that’s an academic theory, and it’s complicated, and it’s scholarly, and you just don’t really understand it.” We’re being told the same thing about critical race theory.

I remember thinking back then, “Well, you’re right! I mean, most people aren’t really being forced to engage Derrida Foucault and the depths of their idea about language or literary criticism or something like that. But that’s okay because we have a postmodern mood that is taking over the culture because of Britney Spears and Kurt Cobain and Eminem and the Matrix movies.” It’s kind of like that again, isn’t it, right? We’re told over and over again that we need to teach history. There’s a difference between teaching history, including the history of slavery—which is an important subject to teach—and teaching the history of slavery only to jump into a prescription about the need for reparations. And you know what? That smells like critical theory, it looks like critical theory, talks like critical theory, it walks like critical theory; that’s because it is critical theory. When you divide people according to characteristics, then make immutable moral proclamations over who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, without there being any hope of change or redemption on the other side if you happen to belong to the wrong party? That’s a critical theory mood.

EICHER: I can’t imagine you watched the Grammys this past weekend, but I also can’t imagine that you didn’t read about or see the clips of the Satan performance. What I found interesting was the media reaction: not that this happened, but that people were complaining about it. Vice News had a headline that was typical: “The Christian Right is Having a Meltdown over ‘Satanic’ Grammys.” Did you have a meltdown about it, John?

STONESTREET: No, not really. They should be thankful if the Christian right is having a meltdown over the Grammys because that means somebody’s actually watching the Grammys, which hasn’t really been the case for quite some time. No one really cares about this.

Now, at the same time, I will say, I think this one mattered, I think this performance mattered. And I think it taught us a lot. There’s a lot of extremist artsy things in the industry. I mean, the whole history of the MTV Video Music Awards is one year after another of trying to outdo in some new extremist fashion what Madonna started when she rolled around in a white wedding dress and sang “Like a Virgin”. Man, those were the good old days. And so now here we are, and this is the Grammys, and there’s a performance that would make Ozzy Osbourne blush. You know, he bit the head off the bat back in the 80s and represented all of the Satanism in heavy metal of that era and you knew that because you could play all their records backwards and they would tell you something about the devil. This was my youth group upbringing.

This isn’t heavy metal. This isn’t the corner of the record store. This is a song that topped the Billboard charts back in October. This is a song that somehow was called historic. Why? Because a man who identifies and presents as a woman sang it. Let’s put aside the fact that making history these days is pretty easy. It used to involve actually making history and now you can just wear a dress as a man and suddenly it’s a historic performance.

Listen, before this performance happened, CBS tweeted, "We are ready to worship." If you want me to stop me in a conspiracy theorist, stop making this so believable. CBS tweeted, and I quote, "We are ready to worship." Now do I really think they think that they were worshipping Satan? No. Were they? Absolutely. There’s a direct connection—and maybe we should thank Sam Smith and the Grammys for making blatantly plain that there’s a connection between transgender ideology and Satanism. Because Satan doesn’t usually jump out and go, “Boo!” What Satan does is he creates doubt over God’s goodness, and doubt over the goodness of creation. If we don’t think God’s good, and we actually think we’re in charge, that is a satanic tactic that goes all the way back to the garden.

That’s the satanic philosophy at the heart of how you know Uncle Screwtape dealt with The Patient. And Lewis’s wonderful take where we realize that Satanism isn’t always creepy. Satanism is ideological, and transgenderism meets that definition. And the advance of this perceived autonomy from biblical morality, from reality itself, is the Satanic move. People might listen to this and say, “Man, John’s still having a meltdown over this.” I do think it matters because I don’t think it was just shock value, I think it actually revealed. When the heavy metal movement back in the 80s was accused of being satanic, it served as this illicit invitation to look further into the darkness. It was like this invitation to go further. All we saw from Sam Smith the other day was a marker. Not an invitation to go further, but a marker of where we are as a society. And so it says a lot if you ask me.

EICHER: Yeah, this reminds me of Babylon BeE headline about this. I think they had Satan saying, Hey, you blew my cover. So, yeah, we do have to thank Sam for that.

John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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