Culture Friday: Taking a stand

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 28th of June, 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.

Hey, before we get to Culture Friday, we are at the end of our June Giving Drive. We've been talking about that all month here, but I thought it'd be good to have a little bit of feedback on how all of that's going.

And so I'm here in Asheville, so I was able to just go across the street and see my friend Andrew Belz, who happens to be one of the development officers here at WORLD. And Andrew, you know, we're behind a microphone. We don't always get to see who we're talking to, but you do.

ANDREW BELZ: That's a wonderful thing, Nick, and there are four more people other than myself, that get to do this across the nation, and we are privileged to do it. We get to talk to people who are pretty well read, very earnest, godly, resourceful, even generous people. And that's our job. We get to talk to them about WORLD.

EICHER: And so how are we doing? How is the drive going?

BELZ: So last week was very inspiring, as you remember.

EICHER: We talked about that.

BELZ: So last week was very inspiring, as you remember, we talked about that, yeah, and glad to see the success of that, but that still left us one week to accomplish the rest of the goal. And the rest of the goal is about $400,000 before Sunday night, and we believe it can happen. And that's the management's goal that keeps us improving and always ahead of the game a little bit. We want WORLD journalists to be the very best that there are.

EICHER: So let me just say this. I'm adding up some numbers. That seems like a lot of money to operate a podcast, but that's not all we do here. I mean, as we were coming across the street, the way we get in here to this studio in Asheville, we've got to go through another studio, and it's TV studio for WORLD Watch. There's a lot that goes on at WORLD, not just a podcast.

BELZ: It's a great point. It's the point I love to make with WORLD Movers. Got to pass through the WORLD Watch studio, on the way into this little audio studio. Got to pass Mary Muncy's desk. Mary's a favorite on The World and Everything in It. Got to pass the marketing people and everybody knows about WORLD Magazine, its history, the kids news that we put out, the World from A to Z, WORLD Opinions, the list goes on.

EICHER: Indeed, I have to tell you, Andrew, it is just great to sit across from you, but to listen to you in headphones, you sound so much like your brother, Joel, whom we both miss dearly, but you're just as passionate as he is about this work, but you do it in a different way. You've got a different role here. I just want you to interact with that a little bit. Why you do what you do?

BELZ: I love to be an advocate for this cause. I believe in this cause. I believe Joel had a great vision, and I want to sustain it, and I want to advocate for the sustaining of it over as many years as I can.

EICHER: Amen. You do a great job. Thank you so much.

BELZ: You're welcome.

EICHER: Time now for Culture Friday. Joining us is John Stonestreet. John is President of the Colson Center, and he's host of the Breakpoint Podcast. And John this week is in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. He's with his denomination, the Anglican Church of North America in a beautiful part of the country, and so nice that we can hear the birds singing to us so close to where you are. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Right outside the window. And I am in a beautiful place. I had never been here before, St Vincent's College, known, by the way, for a memorial and museum in honor of Fred Rogers, who was born, apparently, in this area, and Arnold Palmer was born near here. So yeah, really interesting kind of collision of different cultural realities for us here this week.

BROWN: Well, John, in addition to your denomination, this month lots of Christian denominations have their annual meetings, and so much of what they have to deal with are cultural issues. But this week, the Christian Reformed Church voted to draw a line on member churches and the approval of members who identify as LGBTQ.

Now we've seen other church bodies either not address this or make peace with it, but here the CRC got to a decision point. Some were saying, you risk tearing the church apart by forcing congregations out, and others saying you can't make peace with grave error. And in the end, the CRC chose to draw a line, and so be it. Whatever happens, happens.

John, I'd like for you to imagine yourself as a member of the CRC. How would you vote?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, listen, there is a good bit of encouragement in this story, mainly because it seemed like the CRC was almost destined to go the direction of the mainline denominations towards the full embrace of the homosexual error, and then, you know, whatever follows that. And boy, it would have been something.

We saw just how far that can go in the closing ceremony, or whatever they called it, of the United Methodist this year, when all the delegates got up and announced their pronouns and their closing worship service was a conga line singing “Love Train.” You know, this is stuff you can't make up. If somebody made a movie, you know, mocking Christianity this way, I may not have believed it. And yet, and yet, there it was.

The CRC has been working really hard, I think, to try to make these lines clear, and it's created conflict, certainly, with its main college partner, Calvin College. At least the faculty there have made their wishes clear, by and large, not every single one, but many of them, that they don't want to now be aligned with the CRC because of the decisions made about these things.

And you know, one could certainly say that this is an attempt to correct things that should have been clear years ago, and so that's why this is so hard. Maybe that's the case, but I am always going to root for those who are trying to return to faithfulness and realizing just what's at stake in these creational issues. These really aren't issues, at the end of the day, fundamentally about what should count as sinful. These are issues about whether God created the world and the nature of God's created design, and whether we're going to align with that or misalign with that. So I appreciate what they're trying to do here.

EICHER: Well, John, there's been a flurry of activity around the Supreme Court, lots of decisions coming down in these final days, but I'd like to focus on just one decision that the court made that may have gotten lost in all of the activity. It got a lot less emphasis than it otherwise would, and that's the court's decision to hear a case next term that poses the question: does a state have the authority to regulate transgender medical interventions for children? From a cultural standpoint, this has got to be on a par with the decision to give states authority to regulate abortion, wouldn't you say?

STONESTREET: Well, sure, I mean, the state steps in on the rights of children when those rights aren't protected by those who are closest to them. This is the principle of subsidiarity, a Catholic idea that comes out of understanding the various authorities that God has put in place over his created order. Abraham Kuyper had a version of this called "sphere sovereignty." It's a little bit different than that, but basically, subsidiarity, actually to really understand this, you can put these two ideas together: Subsidiarity is the idea that, all things considered equal, those closest to the problem should take care of the problem, right?

Like, if my kid disobeys me, my seven-year-old, you know, son, I don't call the police. I need to take care of it myself. But if I don't do the job, and my child is in danger, or he's posing a danger to others, now the next layer has to get involved. Kuyper talked well about the ordering of society around these spheres, and that each of these spheres has the authority within their own sphere to exercise that authority and and if they fail to do so, another sphere has to step in. But that's a note that something has broken down.

So when the state has to step in and take care of a child who's been abandoned, that means the sphere of the family has broken down. The fact that children are at risk from being targeted with terrible ideas that make them hate their bodies, question who they are, and actually seek out harm to themselves in order to try to figure it out, if parents are encouraging that, and schools are encouraging that, and leaving parents powerless to step in, then the state absolutely needs to regulate this.

Now, I think what the state could do is to give parents the power, and I think that would be the next best step is to give parents the power on this. But no doctor should be doing this stuff. No counselor should be telling kids they were born into the wrong body and that it's actually justifiable for them to hate themselves. We have to understand that when we're talking about this kind of transgender ideology that is aimed at children, this is a group of adults perpetrating harm on minors who actually are not able to defend themselves.

So that's what we're talking about, fundamentally. And in any other scenario then, of course, we would say, yeah, the police have to step in. The state has to step in. We shouldn't have, we shouldn't have to have a law against doctors performing unnecessary surgeries to amputate or mutilate perfectly healthy body parts on children, because it seems unthinkable, and it was unthinkable 50 years ago, and so here we are. So yeah, the state has to step in on this.

BROWN: Well, last question, John. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law a bill that requires Ten Commandments posted in all public school classrooms in the state. It took a New York minute for the lawsuits to commence. But would you like to weigh in on the Ten Commandments law in Louisiana?

STONESTREET: Well, look, I think that there's a lot to this issue, and you know, whether or not this should be kind of the priority right now is, I think, a valid question in terms of, you know, conservative lawmaking.

But look, a culture that's lost its religious symbols is a culture that is losing its religious identity. A culture that's shamefully backing away from religious symbols is one that's backing away from its religious identity and seeking to replace it with something else. So this is going to be a really tough sell right now, because we have backed away from these symbols. I mean, we certainly have seen it on university campuses. We've seen it in academia. We've seen it certainly in the state and, you know, strange understandings of the First Amendment, keeping anything religious out of the state.

So it's pretty far down the line to turn around and push on displaying the Ten Commandments. But look, you can't understand Western Civ without understanding the Bible. You can't understand Shakespeare. You can't understand American history. You can't you can't walk around Washington D.C. and look at all the monuments and see these phrases that were, you know, appealed to in the memorials, to soldiers and to great leaders without understanding the Bible. You can't understand the idea of written law that outweighs the fiat word of a ruler if you don't understand the Ten Commandments and the history of the Ten Commandments.

You certainly don't understand the idea of a limited state without the Ten Commandments that begins, "You shall have no other gods before me." So suddenly there's something higher than the state. There's something higher than ethnic identity. There's something higher than nationalism, and that is an appeal to God. You know, historically, that's the role it's played, even if you don't believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and the Ten Commandments actually came down written by the finger of God on stone tablets, like I do. It still is something that is part of our history, and we're a people untethered from our history.

So it is a good idea to post them again, absolutely and to start introducing them again, but it's going to be a tough sell.

EICHER: Alright. John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center, and he's host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, thanks so much.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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