Culture Friday: The cost of caving

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Friday the 14th of February.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

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MAST: And now, Culture Friday! Joining us is John Stonestreet … president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

EICHER: I wrote a piece in the new issue of WORLD Magazine, it’s online this morning and I’ll have a link in the program transcript. In the column, I’m borrowing a term from pastor and scholar Joe Rigney about “anxious leadership,” the kind that prioritizes cultural approval over mission.

I’ve got lots of examples from churches and academia … but also in the wider culture. No doubt you remember this from a few years ago. This viral ad cost a lot of money.

MULVANEY: Hi! I got some Bud Lights for us. So this month I celebrated my Day 365 of womanhood and Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever: A can with my face on it. Love ya! Cheers! Go team!

That was a $27 billion dollar ad: not meaning the cost of talent and production, meaning that’s how much market cap Anheuser-Busch InBev lost over the Dylan Mulvaney catastrophe. They’ve been trying to win back lost market share ever since.

Fast forward to Super Bowl Sunday:

AD: “Cul-de-sac party!”
“Party at the sac!”
“This is incredible!”
“How many Bud Lights can you fit in that puppy?”
“As many Bud Lights as it takes.”

So you can read the column for yourself, but the idea here is that this is the price of leadership that merely reacts to pressure from culture, when it places that fear above mission.

And we see that big time in the evangelical world: recent example, John, the short-lived congratulations on social media to a Wheaton College alumnus. Russ Vought won Senate approval to be President Trump’s budget director and Wheaton put up a nice message. But then bunch of people got all bent out of shape how could you? How dare you? He works for Trump!

It wasn’t even a day and Wheaton took it down. I did try engaging the school and I got an emailed statement, but no answers to any of my questions.

So I’m assuming you saw the Wheaton College dustup. What do you think that reveals about the broader challenge of institutional backbone in an age of online outrage?

STONESTREET: I did. I think obviously there is some guilt to be claimed by leaders, but this is endemic in the evangelical institutional space on an institutional level.

I think it’s especially true when it comes to evangelical institutions of higher learning.

Can you, for example, imagine Wheaton, who certainly would have caught flak had they celebrated on X or Instagram an alum appointed to the Biden administration? Can you imagine them ever pulling that because of the complaints of those on the right?

Now, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it would go a different way than I’m predicting, but I just can’t imagine that from any of these institutions.

Part of this is the idea that many have noted that we punch right and coddle left. That’s kind of an evangelical tendency.

I do think it’s kind of built into the missiology of evangelicalism, which has really been infected by this desire to be palatable, to be relevant, to be accepted. But it just doesn’t go anywhere. That does create a high level of “anxiety,” to use the word that you use there in the question, because you can’t keep up with what it takes to be palatable.

Cultural norms move so fast. Pretty quickly, you find yourself off orthodoxy without even noticing it.

Look, I think the slippery slope fallacy is indeed a fallacy, but this is one of those examples where it always tends to work out the other way.

I’ve talked about the slippery slope reality of doctor assisted suicide, right? Okay, it might be a fallacy from a purely logical perspective, but culturally speaking, if the slope is slippery, you’re going to end up at the bottom. This is just another way.

You know, you don’t see these institutions becoming more conservative. You don’t see the institutions, for example, suddenly turning around going, you know what? I went too far.

It just keeps going in a leftist direction. Maybe there are some exceptions to that. I can think of a couple, for example, evangelical colleges that I think have moved further away from the slide that they have taken.

But it just seems to be the narrative, you know, to the point that this is endemic of leadership, I think it is, but I think it’s also of institutions. And I think it’s something within the evangelical world that is such a reality that it has to be dealt with at some point.

MAST: John, let’s turn to the Paris AI Summit. Vice President JD Vance spoke there this week about the Trump administration’s approach to artificial intelligence—framing it as a tool to improve quality of life, not something to replace humans. Let’s listen:

VANCE: We refuse to view AI as a purely disruptive technology that will inevitably automate away our labor force. We believe, and we will fight for policies that ensure AI will make our workers more productive. We expect that they will reap the rewards with higher wages, better benefits, and safer and more prosperous communities.

Now, we also recently saw a “Family and Technology” manifesto from more than 30 conservative leaders, covering everything from AI to reproductive technologies and digital addiction. It’s a comprehensive list of concerns about ethics keeping pace with rapid tech advances.

Is this a sign we’re getting serious about preventing technology from outpacing morality? And if so, how do we ensure it’s more than just talk?

STONESTREET: Yeah, that’s a great question.

I don’t know if I have the answer to that, but I do think we’re seeing something new. I think it has to do with more than just the technology outpacing our ethics, as the statement that you referred to earlier said, which I signed as well.

I didn’t agree with each policy proposal all the way down the line, but I did think that just the thoughtfulness of it warranted attention in this way: that our real challenge with technology is not just because we have ethics lagging behind, although that certainly is the case.

But I think that’s the fruit, not the root.

At the end of the 20th century, there was an article in Time magazine talking about technology and where it was going to go and what it meant. Interestingly enough, this manifesto written back then said that the great irony is that secular humanism never gave us humanism—that basically our techno-scientific, technocratic way of thinking about life has only accelerated since then - dramatically - basically, what it did is it reduced humans down to just being part of the machine. So we lost human exceptionalism. We lost an understanding of what gives humans value.

This is obvious in how humans think about work, particularly Western Americans. This is why we had The Great Resignation. This is what David Bahnsen has written about in his wonderful book, Full Time, about the connection, as he puts it in the subtitle, “between work and the meaning of life.”

So what happens is we try to fill that God-shaped hole with convenience and efficiency and choice. So that’s what drives technology, but it can’t fulfill that meaning gap. And pretty soon, as that statement says, we can’t have this technology at the cost of our humanity.

When you start looking at which technologies are dehumanizing us, well, you got to go to artificial reproductive technologies. You’ve got to go to how screen time has interrupted the family. You’ve got to go to artificial intelligence. The holistic approach that Vice President Vance took in that speech that was taken in this statement are both warranted.

We have to have a reckoning. Will we?

That’s your your last question or some form of it. And this reminds me of an opening dialogue of Saturday Night Live. There was a comedian who made this observation: “Do you know how much time we spend proving to robots that we’re not robots?” You know? That was five years ago, right? You know, we had to open every website the way we now just take as normal: Are a robot? No. But how do we prove ourselves?

Look, there’s an awful lot of unraveling to do. Will we be able to do it? I don’t know.

Are the threats as real as the statement? I think so. And I think that statement is worth everyone’s read.

EICHER: Let’s switch gears, John. Did you catch that Secret Service ad during the Super Bowl?

STONESTREET; I did not see that one.

EICHER: Got it right here. This was produced by Michael Bay, the Hollywood producer known for his big-budget action movies.

AD: America was founded on an idea.
Our heroes are humble.
Protectors are born, they’re not made.
America’s Secret Service protecting this Super Bowl is asking a few more to step forward.
America’s Secret Service protecting this Super Bowl is asking a few more to step forward.

Clearly a return to the classic masculine ideal—facing fear and defending others. I can’t wait to see the new military recruitment ads—but even without them, recruitment’s way up. Having a war fighter at the helm of the Pentagon probably doesn’t hurt, right?

John, you’ve said politics is downstream from culture, but sometimes it feels like the political scene can also shape the culture, there’s a symbiotic relationship. Do you agree with that?

STONESTREET: Well, we need cultural change in order to secure political change.

Otherwise, you’re governed by executive order, which is what we talked about in recent weeks. But I think that Secret Service commercial offers a striking image, right? I mean, all this messaging reflects our vision of what it means to be human, specifically what it means to be male.

It was gone for a long time. I see a contrast even between that commercial and the halftime performance, right? Because I just think we’re just kind of done with this kind of uber-artistic, like this was a historic performance, we’re told.

No one got it. Well, some people got it. And it had to do with a beef that he has with another rapper or something like that. But when you compare that to real acts of heroism and greatness, it’s a stark contrast and it needs to be a stark contrast.

So I’ll at least grant that we have that image making its way back. And I think it’s because there’s been an awful lot of cultural pushback and political pushback. But cultural pushback at least on the vision of “greatness” that we’ve been given, that because someone who has a weird sexual fetish does something, it’s supposed to be “historic.” I think we’re just kind of all going, “No, I don’t buy that anymore.” But that image of heroism, you know, running into the fire instead of running away from it, you know, that’s heroic. That’s historic.

That’s the kind of life that we were made to at least honor if not emulate.

MAST: John, here’s one more for you: Worcester, Massachusetts, just declared itself a sanctuary city for “transgender and gender-diverse people.” It’s mostly symbolic—essentially thumbing its nose at President Trump’s new executive orders on gender definitions.

Do you see people actually moving based on these kinds of local proclamations? Or is it more about confirming where a place already stands socially and politically?

STONESTREET: It’s certainly a sign of where certain locales are, and it’s also a sign that, again, you live by executive order, you die by executive order. You live by federal mandate and you lose by it. That is a departure from the founders. Now, you might need it to some degree, and I think we do to correct some things that have gone wrong.

But, you know, you’re talking to a guy who lives in in Colorado.

You know, this week, the rare conservatives in our state House proposed an anti-trafficking law so you couldn’t take minors across the border to secure an abortion in this very abortion-friendly state. That was killed in committee, like day one. What went forward was requiring emergency rooms to have abortion services at no charge.

And by the way, if you take the ER and the emergency language and the “at-no-charge,” that also gets around parental notification. Then they also, of course, somehow hitch transgender rights onto all that and the abortion things, too.

So what you’re describing in Worcester is popping up in different places and it does talk about the importance of Christians being involved locally.

I mean that in two senses. Number one is not just looking for salvation from the top of the federal government. Now, I’m the first one to say that there has been a strategic speed and effectiveness of what Trump has done in his first couple months that has been necessary to turn back the tide.

But it’s not long-term sustainable unless it’s also propped up culturally. But when you talk about government and legislation, you also have to do it locally. I had a bunch of people, you know, write me about these bills that were being kicked around in committee in the Colorado legislature.

I want to do something. I want to say something. I’m saying something to you guys, but the real situation on the ground politically means there’s absolutely nothing that pro-lifers can do to stop this because it’s that bad politically.

So look, that salvation is not going to come from Air Force One or from the Supreme Court, you know, for our state. What are we going to do?

That’s what we have to get back and talk about. And I think that there is this tendency to see the good things happen and then to abdicate responsibility. I think being culturally and politically engaged has to be more local than it is national.

That’s just kind of the reality of it, I think.

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

STONESTREET: Thanks to both of you.

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