Culture Friday: The space we left

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday July 10th.

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 now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning, John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Carl Trueman writes this week in WORLD Opinions about the first reported euthanasia of a child under age twelve in the Netherlands.

He argues the real question is whether a culture of assisted death can ever hold the line once it decides some lives may be intentionally ended.

John, is Trueman right? Is there any evidence anywhere the line ever holds?

STONESTREET: No, the evidence goes the other way, that it’s never held, and more and more people are included either in some loose category of autonomy, having the right to decide for “themselves,” or into the category of those who need to have us wiser, more tolerant—I’m trying to remember whatever language that Justice Kennedy used in the Obergefell decision to describe us—we need to make those answers for them.

This is what C. S. Lewis had written about when he said that the controllers—he talked about those who think they know what’s best for everyone else and have the technological capability, because we have exerted this mastery over nature. He said that when that mastery is exerted, it becomes the power of some individuals over other individuals.

But it’s even more than that. I mean, I think Carl will probably regret that he hit publish on this article just, I think, a day or two before David Virtue, who writes about global Anglicanism, talked about the Church of Canada developing liturgy for MAID, developing liturgy for MAID procedures.

Think about what a—the Book of Common Prayer is just full of applied theological wisdom and applied theology to these scenarios: weddings, births, at the time of death, facing great sickness, after death. That’s directed at all parties involved.

And basically what the Church of Canada now has done is, without any sort of statement about dignity or value, taking the words of Jesus and turning them into a de facto endorsement over the killing by medical professionals of others, has developed this “liturgy.”

It’s blasphemous. It’s something that is essentially applying a theology of death. And so when you ask, can it hold the line culturally? It can’t hold the line intellectually. It can’t hold the line practically. It can’t hold the line politically. And it can’t hold the line theologically, right? Clearly.

And so, where can it hold the line? It actually is the equivalent of putting dish soap on a slippery slope, is what it does. It just makes it way more slippery than ever before.

BROWN: I’m familiar with birth doulas…some mamas in my church have utilized the services of these advocates for expectant moms. But, I was not familiar at all with death doulas. When it comes to end of life care, death doulas are on the rise. The National End of Life Doula Alliance reports its membership has grown from 260 to more than 1,600.

The industry also got a boost from actress Nicole Kidman. Following the death of her mother, she announced she would become a doula herself.

Now, this is how one writer describes it: “a hunger for a more expansive cultural conversation around the topic of death itself.”

Now, what comes to my mind: so much emphasis on non-medical, holistic end-of-life caregiving with very little attention to helping people realize the abundant life that is available to all of us through Christ. I feel like I’m preaching here, but that abundant life through Christ, by the way, takes away the sting of death, right?

STONESTREET: Yeah. Well, it does. I mean, obviously, your worldview determines what you think about everything, and that includes death.

And that’s why, by the way, in the history of particularly the West, in which Christianity rose to such prominence and influence, there was a different way of thinking about death because there was a different way of thinking about life and human dignity and human value. And that all made sense.

I mean, there was attention paid to how Christians should both think and act in the face of death, and to do it differently. There were theologies of dying that were written and that were applied, which is what makes the story in Canada so especially egregious, but also this one, where you have the growth of an industry.

Now, of course, what values are going to drive this? I think a way of making it more humane. This is natural law poking its head through the door when you overmedicalize it and ostracize it from others.

I think part of this is probably a reaction to the number of people who died alone during COVID, for example. And you just go through, “Oh, well, this is what it should look like,” and say, “Wait, wait. It needs to be more human than this.”

And it is interesting to me that we have a segment of the church—and I’m using that term loosely if speaking about the Church of Canada—that’s part of this tradition that’s already cared and tried to bring a Christian vision to death, now actually being those who celebrate the taking of life. I mean, it’s just backwards.

And then you have a group of me-centered secularists emerging to take its place. That’s something that should be shameful.

I don’t begrudge certainly anyone from trying to enter this. We clearly have a market need. That market need, on a pure economic level, was made obvious during COVID. We don’t know how to die. We don’t know how to die together. We don’t know how to help somebody else die.

But you’re right. This will not take the place of a Christian vision, because how is death going to be treated properly if you don’t know what life is all about?

And honestly, I owe that observation to my pastor for years, who I’ve watched walk people to death in a Christian way, in the tradition of the church, and the way that the church has been doing things and should be doing things today.

But whenever you see somebody enter into this cultural space from a different worldview and this kind of work—I mean, you think about education, or if you think about disaster relief, or charity—in some ways it almost always is the case that the space has become open because Christians have abdicated that space.

I don’t know the history here altogether and the specificity that would be required to make this judgment. So I’ll acknowledge that this is somewhat a postulation. But it seems to me that this is an area left open, and the church should be the ones at the front of the line here, and have been, but have abdicated that space.

EICHER: Death is on our minds this week as the Charlie Kirk trial goes on. Some of these preliminary moves are pretty startling as you consider the evidence for the man accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk. So we’ll stay on the topic here.

The defense is doing its level best to try to keep politics out of this. Prosecutors are saying that the political motive is absolutely central to this.

Now, Charlie Kirk was killed, as we know, while doing politics in public. He was arguing and debating. He was trying to persuade. That’s how he did it. He went to college campuses and said, “Who disagrees? Bring them on up front. Let’s talk about it.”

And frankly, he was doing politics, I think, the way you want it done. But what happens to a free society when violence becomes a way of answering an argument or silencing the person making it?

STONESTREET: We are. And Charlie himself said that when the conversation stops, when the argument stops, when the debate stops, that’s when the violence begins.

And he was prophetic in that, in an eerily self-fulfilling way, which is really, really terrible.

But it’s interesting, even as this narrative has continued, because if you remember the conversation he was having specifically, it wasn’t about politics. It was about identity, what it means to be human, whether we’re created by God, and what that means.

Now, of course, you’re not wrong to call it politics because politics has become everything. We’re all political creatures.

At our recent conference, Carl Trueman quoted another writer who said, “We’re all Marxists now.” And not that we all believe in Marxism, but Marx reduced everything to economics and politics, and we reduce everything to politics.

So even something when we’re talking about anthropology, which might be a discipline of the sciences, or certainly, if you’re talking about it in a philosophical way, as a discipline of the humanities, this is actually what he’s talking about. You could say he obviously was doing some theology and biblical studies in how he’s doing it, but it’s all called politics.

And so part of it is not just about the fact that we stopped having arguments and therefore the violence begins. But that’s the inevitability when everything gets reduced down to politics or gets identified as being a political thing.

Because if everything ultimately is a political problem, then what’s needed is a political solution. And political solutions run out because political solutions are matters of pragmatism: What can I get away with? And they’re matters of power.

And what happens if you lose power? How do you regain power? And you have to have something outside of politics guiding it morally, or it’s every man for himself, or might makes right.

And I think we’re seeing so much of our experience reduced in a violent way primarily because we have enthroned politics over everything else. We’ve allowed the political distinction to become the defining aspect of our culture.

We’re thinner in the middle than we used to be. We used to have all kinds of pre-political aspects of our lives that stood in between the citizen and the state. But now there’s not a whole lot.

So all we have is politics and the manipulation of the state. And that’s an inherently volatile business because you only have a limited amount of tools at your disposal. And if you are losing, then lashing out becomes the obvious next step.

So I think it’s both of those things. It’s not just no longer having an argument. I think it’s politics sucking all the air out of the room.

BROWN: Well, 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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