Culture Friday: The fever breaks

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Friday, October 31st. 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. It’s Culture Friday! Joining us is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, good morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: This week another domino fell on one of the most controversial questions in culture and medicine.

Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, writing in The Wall Street Journal (gift article link) on Wednesday, says the numbers now back what many were once punished for suggesting—that the boom in transgender identification among teens wasn’t biological discovery, but social contagion.

He points to surveys showing trans identification among college students dropping by as much as half since 2022. If that’s true, the “trans moment,” as Wright calls it, may already have peaked.

Is this a full-on cultural corrective after an ideological fever, or the calm before a new storm?

STONESTREET: Well, as Yogi Berra once said, predictions are dangerous things to make, particularly predictions about the future.

EICHER: [Good St. Louisan]

STONESTREET: That’s right. I mean, it’s clear that the brakes have been put on, and you kind of think about what counts as cultural progress. And Peter Kreft years ago wrote that when you’re on the edge of the moral abyss, the best way forward is backwards. And we’ve certainly put on the brakes as we were once heading over the edge of the moral abyss.

But there are two things, I guess, that give me pause before I give too much celebration. Number one, that this should have been obvious from the very beginning. I think the second thing that gives me pause is that Romans 1 is so clear that a culture that denies God is a culture that will always, to some degree, deny reality. And that reality includes the obvious stuff—the stuff that should be clearly seen, as Paul writes in Romans chapter 1.

So I never want to underestimate the ability of a culture or an individual to suppress the truth in unrighteousness. And it’s not like we’ve gone right-way-up on all the parallel confusions—morally, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and other very clear, observable biological things. We still have a group, even those who fit into the co-belligerents with those of us who want to oppose transgender ideology, still wanting to promote something like same-sex marriage, which is every bit as much against biology, against observable reality, as the trans issue.

So I’m a little hesitant to say it’s a new day in America. It’s a better day, right? When you’ve got the gas to the floor and you’re headed straight off the moral cliff, it’s a good day when you hit the brakes—it’s better than the day before when you’re still heading that way. But that doesn’t mean we’ve turned around. So I guess that’s my hesitation.

EICHER: Let me follow up on that, John. If social contagion really is the best explanation, what does that say about the responsibility of schools, doctors, and the media that helped fuel it?

STONESTREET: Well, look, again—something we should have known from the beginning—when all the progressive politicians and education officials stood up and said, “We know better than parents. And maybe parents are domestic terrorists, and maybe they’re the enemies of this and that or the other.” That’s what they really thought, and we should have believed it.

And then we should have believed that everything then that came out of their mouths after that was a way of backing up this assertion, even if it was saying things that were obviously false, not true, and harmful—and then saying something like, “The science is settled.”

So, you know, we’ve talked here a lot about the loss of cultural trust, and what does that mean—particularly for Christians. I think also that it says something for the Christians who said, “Well, we should just go along with this because the science is settled,” or, “We should just go along with this because it’s too controversial and it’ll keep people away from the gospel.”

You know, again, since the release of the Truth Rising film, I’ve been thinking about all those people who told Jack Phillips, “You should just bake the cake,” and how absolutely wrong they were. But we’ve got a million examples like that of people, particularly Christians, saying you should just go along. The church doesn’t remedy the loss of cultural trust by then just trusting who’s untrustworthy, right? We become the truth-tellers. We become the ones who have—as Paul prayed for the church at Philippi—discernment. That’s the kind of people we need to be.

MAST: Here’s another falling cultural domino: There’s a sharp turn in the climate conversation. Former alarmist Bill Gates used to say things like this, from PBS:

GATES: The beaches disappear. You have you know trees dying off and lots of wildfires. You have the ability to grow food in the Southern part of the U.S. is dramatically reduced.

And so it makes the pandemic look small. The death rate by the end of the century would be over five times what we have had in this pandemic.

Well as of this week, he now says climate change won’t end humanity—that people will live and thrive for the foreseeable future.

Free Press commentator Lucy Biggers calls it too little, too late. She points out that years of “climate doom” messaging have taken a toll: half of young people report feeling anxious or helpless about climate change, and one in five say they’re afraid to have children because of it.

So now the billionaire who helped spread the fear says it’s time to focus on improving lives instead of obsessing over carbon counts.

Are we watching a larger cultural correction—where elites walk back the panic they once stoked?

STONESTREET: I think one thing we know from history is that panic doesn’t leave the culture just because the elites who preached it walk something back. I mean, think about The Population Bomb, which was, you know, an early form of this catastrophism, but that’s been one of the stickiest zombie ideas that you can think of.

And what I mean by sticky is it won’t go away. And what I mean by zombie is that baby should have died a long time ago, but for some reason a whole lot of people still think that the world’s overpopulated, even while we’ve hit a tipping point and are headed into a demographic winter that we see across Europe and much of the Western world—what a birth dearth will do to you.

Well, this is the same thing, and I’m so glad you brought up the panic that young people point to. The climate-change catastrophism has been put into the cultural water. We have so many of these sticky zombie ideas in history that continue to still wreak havoc in people’s peace of mind and very real habits—like the kind of money they spend, the kind of things that they spend it on, what they do with family and relationship and having babies and everything else. These ideas have consequences.

I’ll just give you one example, right? One example was this: climate-change catastrophism was actually leveraged by the Biden administration to downplay the persecution of Christians in Nigeria—chalking it up to a land dispute and saying that it was made worse over climate change. Okay, so none of that’s true. You know what’s still happening? You still have Muslims killing Christians there like they have been for years. This is by far the worst year on record, and under the Biden administration that kept the United States from labeling Nigeria a country of particular concern.

I hope it still doesn’t, right? Because climate change has proved bogus. So now we’ve got to figure out what’s the real cost. And, you know, here’s a sign: all the perpetrators in that crisis are Muslim, and all the victims are Christian.

EICHER: John, we’ve been watching signs of possible revival across the country, and this story caught our eye. Sunday night in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, players turned the North End Zone of Bryant-Denny Stadium into a worship service they called Audience of One

The sound that you hear is from one of the many online videos of that event. A wide receiver led, the quarterback and teammates shared testimonies, and more than a thousand students and fans joined in. Christian worship led by star athletes on a flagship SEC campus. What do you make of that, John: Does it point to a wider shift among Gen-Z men, or might it be just a one-off moment?

STONESTREET: Well, it’s not just a one-off. I mean, we saw similar videos at Ohio State certainly last year, but we’ve seen them again this year. We have reports on all kinds of college campuses. A friend of mine has sent me the similar reports from the University of Kansas.

And as a Duke basketball fan, it’s really hard for me to say anything good can come out of Kansas, but it’s way better what’s coming out of Kansas on this point than what’s coming out of Duke. That’s, by the way, not coming from the sports program but just the student-ministry group.

These student-ministry groups are absolutely huge, and they’re attracting people who weren’t believers before. You know, they’re also doing a better job at giving safe haven, so to speak, on these college campuses to these students.

So it’s not just a one-off. It’s been going on for now more than a couple years, and it is very, very widespread. I do think there’s some uniqueness coming out of the South, particularly the SEC—when you’re talking about, you know, truck beds lined with plastic swimming pools where they’re holding baptisms and all other kinds of things that, you know, maybe can only happen in the South. But at the same time, it’s a lot of fun to watch. It’s a lot of fun to see this in athletes.

Listen, I think there were some seeds ahead of time that at least need to be acknowledged. It was probably about maybe seven or eight years ago where I started to notice a change in coaching. Now, I grew up in sports. I played small-college basketball. My freshman year, I played for a coach who was insane. He had the Bobby Knight kind of, you know, scream at you, yell at you.

I remember one time we’d gotten beat really bad and played bad, and all of a sudden we were all sleeping on the bus on the way back from an away game, and all of us sat up at the same time because he had pulled off into our parking lot. We’re like, is he going to kill us? Is he going to make us run in the dark? Thankfully, he had just taken a wrong turn. But all of us had the same thought there—just how.

And that was a pretty normal way of coaching, right? You shame somebody into obeying. And I remember it was before the national-championship game in college football where the players were being interviewed, talking about how they love each other and how they love their coach. And I’d only seen that one other time before, which was Jim Valvano and NC State.

But this was different. This was like, “We tell each other before we go play, we love each other, that we’re in this together.” So you saw coaches not being drill sergeants; you saw coaches being dads. You saw coaches who had a sincere faith—not only a different coaching style, but a sincere faith.

But there is an ability within college football and college-basketball programs right now for coaches and players to be people of faith, to be good guys. There’s an expectation. The cultural norms have changed. And I don’t think there’s been enough history done on the change in coaching that took place probably about 10 or 15 years ago. That’s just my thought, though.

MAST: Well, John, it seems Christian-influencer turned deconstructionist-influencer Jen Hatmaker has a new god … and it’s her body. Hatmaker wrote as much for Oprah Daily. She’s upset about a number of things, including the patriarchy, capitalism, and Christians who oppose Hormone Replacement Therapy. Now that’s a bigger issue than we have time to deal with adequately, so I’d like to focus on her argument: that her body is the most knowing source of wisdom.

I found audio of the article, and thanks to capitalism, had to pay $25 to access it. And then found out it was AI-generated, so there’s the further oppression. Let’s have a listen, anyway:

HATMAKER: So as we consider interventions for perimenopause and menopause, it is no surprise that women raised in patriarchal Christian environments have an outsize resistance to HRT as unnatural. These same women oppose reproductive rights, as if their daughters couldn’t experience a rape or ectopic pregnancy and be forced to turn septic in the hospital parking lot before a doctor could legally save their lives. Forget supporting run-of-the-mill agency over our bodies simply as their rightful owners; these heavily controlled women ceded autonomy before fourth grade. Shouldn’t everyone else have to?

John, care to take a stab at unraveling that illogic?

STONESTREET: Absolutely impossible. No one could do that within the time constraints that we have. What a strange leap, but it actually makes sense—and it’s not because it’s someone who actually values the body too much. It’s actually someone who devalues the body.

I know it sounds strange, because of how she said what she said. What she’s actually claiming is that the body itself is a canvas, and the body itself is a way of projecting oneself to the world. It’s the medium you use to project your true self—but your true self is really who you are inside, and that’s your own feeling, your own, you know, here’s what I want out of life.

And it’s how she’s explaining a lot of her own moral framework right now in this new book—and has really for quite some time. It, by the way, is very similar to ancient paganisms that talked about femininity in a particular way. There’s this inner spirit—that’s what’s really real—and then the body becomes a projection.

It’s very easy to see how that’s a very similar idea to the transgender ideology: that this is my true self, and the body is a projection. It also believes that the body then can be changed, it can be altered, it can be violated. If it’s another body, it can be killed, because it’s not my body—that’s the abortion argument. You can just kind of go down the line.

It’s a very Gnostic view, and it sounds like someone who is elevating the body. She is elevating the sense experiences that come through the body, but she’s actually devaluing the body. It’s a Gnostic position—that the body is pliable, the body is basically how I portray my true self, and that’s the most important thing in life.

Carl Trueman identified that as the idea of expressive individualism. “I have to have the right to portray whatever I want to the world,” and giving up that autonomy—which is what she has just argued here in this piece that we just quoted—is the greatest crime that you can do against yourself, because this inner voice is who you really are.

MAST: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thank you, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.