Culture Friday: The crowded sphere

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Friday the 5th of June. 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.

Before we get started today, a quick update on WORLD's June Giving Drive.

As we wrap up the first week of the month, we are very encouraged by the response. So far, more than 600 listeners have made gifts of support for WORLD's journalism.

And here's something that especially caught our attention: About one in every ten of those gifts was from a first-time donor.

MAST: Yeah, and that’s a reminder that new listeners are still finding WORLD and deciding this work is worth supporting.

We are grateful for every gift, grateful for every listener who starts each day with us. 

So, what a great start to our June Giving Drive! 

That gives us strong momentum, yet plenty of time for you to get involved as well. Please visit WNG.org/donate and be a part of our strong start this week. WNG.org/donate. And thank you!

Time now for Culture Friday, and joining us is John Stonestreet. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast … and he’s here now. 

Good morning John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

MAST: Well, John, last weekend, Backrooms, a small-budget film by a 20-year-old, earned eight times what it cost to make—so $80 million so far on a $10 million budget.

The little film wiped out The Mandalorian and Grogu movie, which is evidence that the age of the spin-off may be mostly dead.

An article in The Free Press makes two great points: (1) that Backrooms could be both an allegory for the way art has been devouring itself in the digital age, and (2) a parable about how the internet feeds into remake culture.

So John, what do you think Neil Postman would say about the culture’s obsession with reboots, remakes, and remasters?

STONESTREET: I can’t speak on his behalf, but I do know that, you know, when art becomes something of the trivial, then it loses its hold and it has a pretty limited shelf life. Because at this point, what you’re doing is just trying to capture people’s attention, but it’s notoriously hard to maintain that attention, especially when we have so many different things now claiming our attention.

I do think it’s a real shame. I mean, I’m all for building off of old stories. I don’t think we need to start from scratch every time. But you have these centers of power that are really out of ideas, and so it does have to rehash, and it does have to reboot. And I think part of it is that you get kind of boxed in by rules—rules that change from one generation to the next.

Certainly the rules that have boxed in these two centers of storytelling in the West have been boxed in by critical theory in some ways or another. There’s things you can’t talk about, there’s things you have to talk about. There's people you have to include and people you’re not allowed to include.

I also think too that there’s something here, and maybe almost no one’s interested in this except for me because I’m the president of the Colson Center, that years and years and years ago Chuck Colson got into a pretty dramatic argument in the pages of Christianity Today and others with James Davidson Hunter, who had proposed a particular theory about how culture changes in his book, in which he really advocated for a top-down method.

Now Chuck was a populist, he wanted to do a grassroots-up method.

But what I thought, even at the time and especially in the years after, that after Hunter made his very strong case that you have to go to the centers of cultural power in order to get anything done, right after that social media took over the world, and the internet took over the world.

And those things didn’t come out of the centers of cultural power! Those things came out of college students’ garages.

In other words, I think culture is primarily sustained by these institutions, but disruption comes from the outside. And the story of the Backrooms film is an example of that. That a whole lot of people can make movies today that couldn’t just a generation ago.

And then, of course, we’ve got the ever-present threat that a whole lot of computers now can make movies that might be better than anything coming out of Hollywood. 

But that’s probably a question for a different Friday...

EICHER: Yeah, I think so. But you know, those computers certainly made a lot of good political commercials, and I think we saw that with the mayor candidate in LA, Spencer Pratt. But yeah, another question for a different Friday...

John, I know you saw this one though: This week, the New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart found himself in the news in a rather unwanted way. He introduced President Trump at an event. Afterward he got flushed out of the pocket, started having to scramble around to evade the media blitz of, "How dare you introduce this president?"

In the meantime, one of his teammates, Abdul Carter, joined in on the sacking instead of doing a little blocking for his bro. 

So the whole episode, you know, got Ted Kluck's involvement at WORLD Opinions—he likes to write about sports whenever he can—and what he said was this was really a display of the unwritten rule of modern public life that some political opinions are treated as normal, other political opinions require much more explanation. 

So boiled down to that, John, what do you think is the real issue here?

STONESTREET: I think there’s two things.

One is this imbalance that is described here by Ted Kluck is exactly right, but it’s not new, right? We’ve known this for quite a while.

Let’s reverse the roles. Had Carter chosen to introduce a progressive president or a progressive politician, then there would have been no controversy.

But not only that, but Jaxson Dart, as a conservative, would not have written on social media about his decision to do that.

Right? In other words, it goes in layers. One side of the political aisle is acceptable across multiple spheres of culture, and the other side is not. And not only that, you’re allowed to question it out loud in one situation, and you’re not. But none of that's new. 

But I think there’s something else here as well. And that is something that was said this past weekend at the Colson Center National Conference by Carl Trueman, talking about how and why politics has taken over so much of our culture.

In other words, there’s a place that politics should have in our life, in our brain space, in our bandwidth, in our imaginations, and it’s way bigger now than it should be. And it’s really hard to avoid that temptation, whether you’re on the left or whether you’re on the right.

And I would really hope that Christians can model a better way; both because we have a higher set of loyalties, so that we don’t just let everything become politically adjudicated in popular culture or every aspect of life, and we also have an understanding, hopefully, of the created order, that things were created to have a particular sphere, to borrow the language of the Dutch Reformed folks, especially Abraham Kuyper.

And when things leave their sphere or when things do not properly fill their sphere, then things get out of balance.

And I think there’s just no question right now that on every level politics has sucked all the air out of the room. We put way too much weight on this political table, and the legs are certainly wobbly. And we see the outcome of that kind of overweight everywhere. 

You know, this is the great contribution of Christian theology: a, that it centers things not just on beliefs but fundamentally on loves, and then it puts those loves in an order. And when those loves get out of order, then things, you know, really begin to break down.

MAST: Well, John, a member of Finland's parliament testified this week before the Canadian Senate about a proposed hate speech bill there, known as C-9.

Supporters say the measure is aimed at protecting vulnerable groups from hatred and intimidation.

Critics say, though, that it goes much further, removing protections for religious speech and potentially exposing people to criminal penalties for expressing traditional Christian views on sexuality.

The witness was Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen, who knows something about that firsthand. She spent seven years fighting hate speech charges in her own country over statements about Christian teaching on marriage and sexual ethics.

So here's the question: Is there something about the logic of hate speech laws that makes that outcome almost inevitable?

STONESTREET: Yeah, there is. And there's something about the foundation of hate speech laws and the foundation that lawmakers bring to the table that also makes this outcome inevitable.

I think we can understand it really in two ways: The first is, thank God for the First Amendment. Thank God for the Bill of Rights. 

I don't think we can overstate just how differently these things play out, even if it takes a while, like it did in the U.S. in the case of Jack Phillips, like 13 years.

But eventually, you have this thing that courts, that lawmakers, that individuals have to reckon with, and that is that there is a freedom of speech. And that includes both the freedom to say what one wants and not to be forced to say what one doesn't want.

And yes, there are limits, it's not unlimited. But those limits are very very generous. But the Bill of Rights really is a remarkable thing, and the First Amendment is a remarkable thing.

And to hold that is a real gift. So hey, it's the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, the 250th birthday of America, let's celebrate that thing, because it's worth celebrating.

And because it does point to the kind of creatures that humans are. And that is that we're free thinkers, we can't be compelled. Of course, that vision of the human person comes out of Christianity pretty dramatically, and that comes to the foundation of these rights.

If you think about those that are trying to push hate speech laws that do not have these hard fixed boundaries that the First Amendment has, is that very often there's an illusion here that law is a social construct. That in order to deal with the social conditions that we're faced with, we now have to move the goalposts.

Now the fundamental difference between that and something that is way more stable, is where rights come from. Chuck Colson used to say it this way: Either our rights come from God or they come from the State.

If it comes from God, then the state's job is to recognize the rights, not to make them. But the social construct theory says that no, rights come essentially from those that are in power. And now if the government gives those rights, the government can change those rights, remove those rights, and take away those rights.

And so it just is a dramatically different vision of jurisprudence.

So I think we need to tip our hats to those who not only gave us the First Amendment, but those who are willing to defend and define the First Amendment, and also educate a new generation of lawmakers.

And it comes back to worldview: What is it that you actually believe about the nature of reality, the nature of speech, the nature of language, the rights of man, the kind of creatures that humans are?

All this is wrapped up into that.

And God bless Päivi Räsänen. You talk about someone who has just been unbelievably mistreated and is willing to stick it out and stay in the game. She's an impressive, impressive leader.

Thank God for her, too.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. 

John, thanks! 

STONESTREET: Thank you!

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