Culture Friday - The poison of racist ideology

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday, May 20th, 2022. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday.

Let’s bring in John Stonestreet. He’s the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast and he joins us now. Good morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: Let’s talk about the tragedy and outrage of Buffalo, John, the sickening violence we saw there, and the pointless loss of life. And I’d like to hear your response to that and to the round of reporting and commentary that we’ve heard on the size and scope of white supremacy.

Depending upon how you define it, it’s everywhere or it’s nowhere. Hunter Baker, writing for WORLD Opinions, says it’s out there, but as a “low-status ideology,” it’s been driven underground and into corners of the internet.

So what to do about this? He wrote that racist ideology not only can turn violent but it is poison to the soul of the adherent. I’ll quote:

“What has happened in Buffalo and other places will likely happen again as those working out frustrations … seek to vindicate visions of racialized supremacy and survival. The ideological poison they are injecting into their spiritual veins is potent and requires the anti-venom of the true gospel.”

How do you respond to all this?

STONESTREET: Well, I really appreciate Hunter's take. Especially that last line: “the anti-venom of the true gospel,” because that's the real inadequacy that we're seeing in all the responses to this, that Christianity can respond to this but critical theory cannot. Critical theory is going to draw this line, not down the middle of the human heart as Alexander Solzhenitsyn did, but between groups of people. And that's the problem as I think there was a take in National Review earlier this week looking at that manifesto. This guy doesn't fit into a category. Now clearly, he fits into a category of someone who had horrific, evil, racialized beliefs, and that certainly contributed to it. But you can't put them on the right or the left. And that's the dominant thing that we're hearing. We have the right trying to put them on the left and the left trying to put them on the right. And, you know, the racialized ideology in and of itself isn't the only factor here. It is a primary factor here and it is something that is always awful whenever it shows up, whenever it's lived out, whenever it's acted upon. And worldviews like these do have real consequences. It doesn't do anyone any good to ignore the fact that these sorts of ideas are poison and awful. It also doesn't do anyone any good to try to use this, and use this shooting as a means to an end. It also tells you, I think, something that's really important, as you see the overall reaction to this, that critical theory, in all of its forms, is an inadequate vision of what it means to be human and an inadequate vision of our culture. But it really does have a stronghold and the more we punt to this cultural mood, this critical theory cultural mood that is dominating, the more we're going to miss the problem. And if you miss the problem, you can't have a solution. But you know, what does have a great analysis of the problem? The Gospel, because the gospel tells us who we are. It starts in creation and goes to restoration. It gives us a vision of what things put back together looks like and then also a vision of what things were intended to be in the beginning. It doesn't highlight personal guilt versus structural guilt. It has categories for both of those things, and it has a fully orbed vision of the human person and the ideas that are dominating our current cultural mood, do not.

EICHER: I want to pursue another point from this column, which is the idea of how to reach these hyper-alienated people.

“They must be reached,” he writes. “We cannot dismiss them. … Tragedies such as the one in Buffalo indicate that the task of missions extends to those who have become so disconnected from any kind of legitimate Christian belief that they either never have had the ability to think in Christian terms or have forgotten how."

How do you think we go about that?

STONESTREET: You know, I think Hunter is exactly right. I mean, you look into the 20th century, late 1800s, early 1900s, and these cultural factors of industrialization and what this created in inner cities and what did that do? The church responded. The church responded with rescue missions. And the church responded with a Salvation Army. And the church responded trying to help wives keep their husbands from going to the bar with a paycheck and losing all their money. And the church responded in so many ways. And yes, with evangelism too, but it was all of this because of the social ills created by the social conditions. Fast forward to today, what do we have? We have an infinite capacity for distraction. We have a whole lot of immediate gratification, services, and things in our lives. But we've lost meaning and purpose. We have a catastrophic loss of meaning. We have a catastrophic sense of despair across culture. And many people are writing about this, including psychologists who are saying, maybe we need to go back to religion just so people have something bigger than their humdrum everyday lives. And you know, listen, we've got the highest standard of living ever in human history, and we don't like ourselves. So in the long term, this is a calling for the church. We're called to this time and in this place. And part of this requires that we recognize what's actually happening. And I think one way to think about it is these deaths from despair, which we have talked about in terms of addiction and suicidal ideation and just utter meaninglessness. But also the anxiety, the anxiousness, the acting out that we have seen, what I call acts of desperation. And once you start looking at culture in those two categories—despair and desperation—then suddenly these things of mass violence, this willingness to self mutilate in a never ending quest for identity, this acting out on airplanes, Americans behaving badly, all this stuff just starts to make sense. And the reason is because we don't have a why. We don't have an ultimate why in our culture. So, yes, this is a missionary calling for the church to address this.

REICHARD: There’s church and then there’s state. This brings to mind the old state mental institutions. My mom worked as a registered nurse in one in the 1960s. Those places had problems—what human institution doesn’t. They began to be shut down because states wanted to cut costs, public attitudes changed, and psychiatric drugs came out.

So mentally ill people who’d been there and looked after were handed back to families who couldn’t handle them or they resorted to living on the streets. We just don’t have long term care options for the mentally ill.

Is it time to bring those places back? What do you think?

STONESTREET: Oh, man, this would exceed my paygrade in terms of expertise, but the current situation isn't enough. And if we want to go upstream from this, we're not going to decrease the supply—and I'm using kind of crude economic terms here—of those who need this sort of help as long as we have a culture that denigrates the family in every single way. So, in other words, a culture with strong social bonds, a culture in which we care for each other, a culture in which there are institutions that catechize people and kind of cultivate them in a way of thinking and living towards flourishing, you don't need that many institutions when those things are present. But the more that these other institutions fall apart this is the thesis of a lot of recent books, including Coming Apart by Charles Murray. But the more that these other institutions become irrelevant or fall apart, then the more you're going to have people's lives falling apart. And mental illness is going to be one expression of that. And, in other words, it's like we're flooding the market with supply, and we don't have any institutions to meet that demand. And it's unsustainable, certainly in the long term.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you.

EICHER: If you’d like to dig deeper and stay informed, several resources we referred to today are available to you by way of WNG.org. You can sign up there for free email newsletters at WNG.org/newsletters, three mentioned today—the Liberties newsletter by Steve West on religious liberty, the Relations newsletter by Mary Jackson, and the daily WORLD Opinions newsletter. Very simple sign-up at WNG.org/newsletters. They’re free. We just need to know your email to make sure you receive these.

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