Culture Friday: The great unlearning

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, October 17th. 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 is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast … good morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: John, I want to take you back two years, to those first days after the Hamas attacks. You told us then that the Western world’s shock — the disbelief that anyone could commit that kind of barbarity — revealed a deeper misunderstanding of human nature. Let’s go back and re-listen.

STONESTREET: You know, the inability to really understand this, I think, stems from a couple worldview truths.

First, this idea that somehow the more technologically advanced we get, the more morally progressive we get, has proven to be just a wrong vision of human nature.

Second, most warfare was carried out like this throughout all of human history. And the only thing that changed that was Christianity. Literally the only thing that stopped the inability of distinguishing between civilians and combatants.

By the way, that's a worldview thing, right? Why are civilians and combatants seen the same throughout most of human history and by Hamas, is because people aren't seen as individuals, they're not seen as individually valuable, they're seen as part of a group, and therefore all are guilty. And that's why there's calls for extermination.

Now, after two years of war, with hostages finally home and the fighting shifting into what Churchill might’ve called ‘the end of the beginning,’ what—if anything—have we learned as a culture? Anything at all?

STONESTREET: Well, it’s a good question. First, I want to just bring up that in my contract it states that you can never replay my words back to me, especially ones after a year—statute of limitations. That’s a frightening thing to see.

No, listen, I think that at the time we were trying to communicate the importance and power of worldview—those things that are the software on which a culture, the hardware, runs.

When the hostages were released—praise God—Hamas celebrates this end of the war by killing Palestinians in Gaza. Israel celebrates their loved ones coming home. This is the power of worldview.

Islam really is, on Islam’s own terms, a framework that dehumanizes the other. It has a description of what’s wrong with the world as being the other, a solution as being death to the other. All this is inherent; it’s baked into the worldview.

This is not to suggest that Israel did everything perfectly or right or well. We spent a lot of time over the last couple of years in various programs talking about just-war theory—which is both: Do you have a right to wage war? And secondly, how are you waging that war? I think there are real questions that need to be asked.

But the moral equivalence is just an astonishingly amoral take. Color me cynical or skeptical—it seems like the same sides are still on the same sides on this one.

EICHER: Speaking of worldview and where it leads, there’s another kind of cultural clash underway. Not long ago, Gen Z was described as the most gender-fluid generation in American history. But new data from political scientist Eric Kaufmann suggests that may have peaked.

A large-scale survey shows sharp declines in both transgender and non-heterosexual identification since 2023—especially at elite universities. Kaufmann calls it a ‘cultural correction,’ saying it’s not driven by politics or religion but by the fading of an online social contagion tied to mental health.

When you look at this dramatic spike—and equally dramatic decline—what do you see behind it? What’s really going on here?

STONESTREET: Well, I just feel like there’s more data that needs to come in, but we all feel like the train has been slowed down, maybe stopped, and in some areas of culture even reversed. It shouldn’t surprise us that that’s also happening among the vulnerable, who themselves were the most likely victims of these really terrible ideas.

Look, we had schools that were teaching this stuff. We have fewer schools now teaching it because of realigning Title IX and other things the Trump administration has done. We had a whole group of people absolutely fearful to say anything in opposition to this ideology.

This is what Malcolm Gladwell himself admitted just a couple of weeks ago. Now, thanks to high-profile people willing to speak out—from J.K. Rowling to Riley Gaines, certainly those willing to go to court—I think we should see a reversal in this number.

I also think there’s a similar reversal happening in smartphone usage. If Dr. Jean Twenge and others have taught us anything, it’s that there’s a direct correlation. I don’t think smartphones and social media are sufficient to explain the crazy spike, but they certainly contributed to it in an incredible way. More people are realizing that smartphones and social media are a terrible idea for teenagers, period.

I don’t usually do a whole lot of preaching here, but listen: if you have your kid harming themselves with a knife, you take the knife away. Doesn’t mean there aren’t other issues to deal with—there are—but you at least take the knife away.

This whole story of social contagion, self-harm, the smartphone and social media has been the knife. I don’t usually say it that definitively, but there you go.

The other thing worth mentioning is that this is just more evidence—as if we needed any—that this was indeed a social contagion. When you see this crazy spike that just came out of nowhere and then it falls off a cliff, that tells you there’s nothing natural about it.

Next time there’s an ideologically driven movement and we’re all gaslighted—“We were born this way,” “The science is settled,” and all this other nonsense we knew wasn’t true but felt social pressure from the highest realms of government to medical establishments to educators and everybody in between—don’t believe it, right?

The crisis of trust in American culture is in a really bad place, and it was made incredibly worse by transgender ideology and transgender ideologues. Abigail Shrier got it right early on. That’s who we should have believed. Don’t believe the gaslighting the next time it happens.

BROWN: John, I want to turn to something Politico uncovered—private group chats among young Republican leaders from around the country: New York, Kansas, Arizona, Vermont. Messages spanning months, and not intended for public view.

It’s a revealing glimpse of what some of them say when they think no one is listening. It reminded me of Luke 8: “Nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest.”

What light does this shine on the next generation of political leadership? What stands out to you in these conversations—about integrity, character, or the cultural forces shaping young some conservatives today?

STONESTREET: They were horrific and vile and racist comments—laughing about things that shouldn’t be laughed at. In there you see a mark of something we’ve struggled with in the West for a long time: this cult of adolescence.

This was written about years ago in The Death of the Grown-Up by Diane West, in which she noted that for the first time in history we had teenagers—and she wasn’t talking about teenaged people. In most nations in history there was a rite of passage and then they were expected to act like adults. Now we have this stage of life called adolescence in which we expect them to act like idiots for five, six, or seven years.

She pointed out—and it’s only become more pronounced since—that the age of adolescence not only became normal but expanded, and it’s not been good for us. Most people who study this identify adolescence as a stage between 11 and 30.

Years ago, at a Christian college where I taught, I had a run-in with freshmen who dressed up like the KKK to interrupt a forum I was hosting on race. When I stopped and confronted them, they all said, “We just thought it was going to be funny.”

And you just kind of go, What makes you think this is funny? Listening to the chat was a flashback to that: What makes you think this is funny?

One of the things that makes you think things are funny that aren’t is a category Carl Trueman has introduced, which I think is really important. He talks about the language of disenchantment of the modern world—looking to technological and political solutions for things that are actually spiritual realities. But there’s another stage called desecration.

It’s further—not just treating God as if He doesn’t exist, but actively attacking religious symbols and the sacred. The ultimate act of desecration is the profound dehumanization that takes place. We know that through trans ideology. We know that through acts of actual violence, as in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We know there’s a dehumanization that comes out of radical Islamic ideology—that’s clear from Hamas—but there’s also been an attack on the human person that’s come out of secularism and critical theory.

In other words, we laugh at things that aren’t funny, and that often requires profound dehumanization. That’s embedded in the text.

So, look, I think this will be dismissed by some on the right—“boys will be boys.” We’re not talking about them; we’re talking about young adults. In other time periods, they would have commanded troops and managed entire farms.

So by the young Republicans, that should not be an excuse—“boys will be boys”—because we should have higher expectations of them, and they should have higher expectations of themselves. The fact that neither of those things are true is an indication that our society is not well—that we’ve been captivated by this cult of adolescence, too.

BROWN: Well finally, Britain has named its first woman Archbishop of Canterbury—the first woman ever to lead the Church of England.

What does that signal about where the Anglican Communion is heading? And what, if anything, can the broader church—especially here in the U.S.—what can we learn from the courage we’ve seen in Nigeria … where we’ve seen costly stands taken for Biblical truth?

STONESTREET: Well, we can learn a lot from our Nigerian brothers and sisters—and honestly, the bishops that are part of the Global Anglican Futures Conference. They’ve been protesting and standing against the positions of the Archbishop, pointing out heresy in the Church of England, the Church of Canada, the Episcopal Church, and other places for a really long time.

For 20 years now, when the Archbishop has called a meeting at Canterbury—which, by the way, is the primary job of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to get all the primates together—they don’t go. But when GAFCON calls a meeting, the Archbishop shows up at their meeting. That tells you a lot about where the situation lies.

This is a disaster of an Archbishop appointment, and I say that as an Anglican in America whose church isn’t really connected at all with the Church of England in any formal way anymore. The last several Archbishops have been pulled left; Sarah Mullally is already starting left.

The problem with this appointment is not just the question over women’s ordination—an enormously controversial issue across the Anglican Communion. There are five, six, or seven other theological, doctrinal, cultural positions she’s on record about that are heretical. They’re heterodox at best, heretical at worst, and it’s a tragedy.

It’s obviously been going this direction for a long time. I think the Archbishop of the ACNA certainly needs to be very, very clear about where the authority of the Church lies—how the position of Canterbury is different from what keeps us grounded in an evangelical, orthodox, historic Anglican space.

If we need a place to look, let’s look to the leaders of GAFCON, who have been really clear on this.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you, both.

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