Culture Friday: The supporters’ dilemma

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, December 5th. 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, this is one of those moments that frustrates even a lot of the president’s own supporters. There’s a legitimate issue on the table — in this case, the documented fraud scandal in Minnesota’s Somali community, which even the Wall Street Journal editorial page says was massive and long ignored by state officials.

Trump starts there. But then — as he often does — he dials it up to an eleven.

The context is a cabinet meeting this week with the media present. And according to The New York Times and the raw audio transcript, he goes way past the fraud story and launches into a broad tirade about Somali immigrants. He says their country “stinks,” that they “contribute nothing,” that they “came from hell,” and that he doesn’t want them in the United States.

Here’s a clip that captures the escalation:

AUDIO: We’re at a tipping point. We could go one way or the other — and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage, just garbage. Her friends are garbage.

Now, Ilhan Omar is an open anti-Semite. Her insults are profane and nasty. But then the president goes off and turns her into a martyr, and the policy issue is gone. Suddenly the whole debate is over his insult, not the underlying problem.

What’s the story here for us, and what’s a good way for Christians to think about this pattern?

STONESTREET: Well, I think this is another example that any time in history we have tried to advocate even or define in any way human dignity along the lines of any other foundation, other than the fact that humans are made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore value and worth is intrinsic to who we are, not something that we earn, or something that we acquire, or something that we’re born into or born out of, anytime you base that, even if you’re trying to advance human dignity, but you do it without that solid ground, you’re going to go wrong. You’re going to end up leaving certain people out.

Now there have been times that the President’s concerns have aligned with those who believe that every human is made in the image and likeness of God. We see that in some of the pro life things that he did, but we also see the opposite, that it did not align with some of the other things that he has advanced. For example, quote, unquote, fertility in the name of IVF or whatever else.

Why is it that we align on some things and we don’t align on other things? It’s because we believe that humans are made in the image and likeness of God. And the President might say that, in fact, he has said that in a speech which was pretty moving when we heard it. But it’s not where he’s coming from in his worldview. He’s not coming from that perspective.

And anytime you advance any understanding of human dignity or human worth or human value, even if you’re trying to reacquire it, you know, for a group of people, and in this case, I think for the presidents, the American citizens, those who’ve been defrauded, he might even be trying to get to the right end here, or a right end here, but he’s not doing it based on the right foundation. And this is what’s so dangerous about an untethered conservatism.

This is why so much is at risk within the conservative movement right now. When you talk about the Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson incident and all that it represents from those on the right who are basically on the right as nihilists, they’re coming from a Nietzschean perspective, that the goal is power and the goal is to get what one wants by any means necessary, and it’s not grounded on any principle. It’s not grounded on any eternal truth.

The Christian believes in eternal truth. It’s not because we want to. It’s not because it works. Although both of those things are true, we should want to and it does work. It’s because it is. It’s because the Christian worldview begins not with something that we think up or imagine or want to accomplish. It begins with what is revealed. And what is revealed is this fundamental truth about what it means to be human.

So whether you like it or not, you have to begin there, and if you begin there, you can’t go down these roads that the President sometimes goes on. And I think that explains why sometimes we align and sometimes we don’t.

BROWN: John, before we get into the story, just a quick note of context. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — or Secretary of War, as he likes to be called — he does have a cloud of allegations swirling around him right now over possible war crimes. Nothing proven, and he should be presumed innocent. We covered that on Washington Wednesday, and I don’t want to pretend it isn’t out there.

But with that noted, there’s another story brewing, and it’s this: According to a memo leaked to the media, Hegseth’s Pentagon may cut ties with the Boy Scouts—or “Scouting America,” as it’s now called. The memo says he’s alarmed by what he sees as the Scouts’ moral collapse: the LGBTQ overhaul, the gender-neutral policies, the whole cultural rebrand.

And assuming the memo is genuine and the reporting on it is accurate, he’s prepared to go further. He may ask Congress to pull Defense Department support from one of their biggest events, the National Jamboree. He actually does have the authority to do that if he believes it touches national security.

So John, you’ve been critical of the Scouts for many years—is this the kind of line-drawing moment we need?

STONESTREET: You know, that’s a good question. I do think it is a line drawing moment in the Department of Defense, and this is something that Secretary Hegseth has done on many occasions. And some people think he’s crossed the line in some ways, and other people think he’s just finally coming through. I tend to lean that way, although I’m not making a statement again on these kind of recent accusations.

I have been a critic of the scouts. Every time I am a critic of the scouts, I get a flurry of emails and letters defending the scouts, and I appreciate those. And I think actually the defensiveness about the scouts and the pushback whenever anyone is critical reflects just how important the scouts have been in the American context, I mean literally, there’s not a better example of what Edmund Burke called mediating institutions, these institutions of civil society that are voluntary, that are non governmental, pre political, and that actually connect us as individuals in ways that the state cannot.

And when they function the way that they are supposed to function, then they produce enormous goods for a society. And you know, it’s hard to measure in the life of scouting what has been done. But what do we have now? We have a real crisis of young men. We have young men who are not doing well by every measure. We have a critique of masculinity, as if masculinity itself is always toxic, without any sort of distinction between the good things and the bad things.

And now we have this rising movement, which I had really hoped was just four or five young men in somebody’s basement, but tends to be a pretty dominant or a rising force within the American right, particularly in politics of young men embracing this kind of Nietzsche and nihilistic vision of conservatism that’s unhinged and untethered, and it’s not built on formation as a man, but is actually itself a reaction as a victim to everything I was talking to some folks this week, and I’m actually convinced that Nick Fuentes is actually a form of radical feminism for men, where vices are turned into virtues and and somebody’s always a victim.

So if we see the rise in this sort of thing, then I think it actually points to the fact that Scouting is not doing what scouting should do. There is a crisis here. And to be honest, whether you like it or not, whether you want to be defensive of individual troops and individual leaders as a movement? Scouting was designed to be one thing and to produce a particular kind of young man. Those things are no longer the case.

And Secretary Hegseth came in with the promise that he was going to remove for lack of a more sophisticated or specific term, wokeness, from the military and from the things the military supports. If that is a priority of his, which it has been, and he’s followed through one, then this would be a logical next step. And again, I think there are wonderful leaders and wonderful troops, but as an organization, it’s just not what it used to be

EICHER: John, Spotify Wrapped dropped this week — that annual ritual where Spotify tells you what you listened to, who your top artists were, how many minutes you streamed, all wrapped up in bright graphics people share online. On a hunch, I went to see whether Apple did the same and, suffice it to say, I'm a classical music fan, I'm also such a big Andrew Peterson fan that I made it into Peterson's Top 500 listeners (how about that?!).

But evidently these personal years-in-review have become such a big deal that not only is Apple copying Spotify, but so is Goodreads, wrapping your reading, food-delivery apps wrapping your eating habits, fitness apps wrapping your workouts, even party-invite apps wrapping your social life. Evidently, I don't have one.

The New York Times quoted a woman who said she felt so boxed in by all this saying she can’t tell whether her “taste” is really hers or just the algorithm shaping her choices. What do you think is going on here culturally? Why do these little digital rituals carry so much weight for us, and does it say anything about how technology is forming us?

STONESTREET: Well, I think then my wife might be the most eclectic person on the planet, because my daughters did that for her over Thanksgiving, and she hit every genre that you could possibly hit. And it was pretty impressive. And at least two of my kids would fall into the top 500 listeners of adventures and Odyssey so so there’s some of that stuff going on in our family.

Listen, Aristotle said that we are what we habitually do, that we are creatures of habit and a digital age, our digital habits are those things that are obviously forming us. Because our habits form us. They form us in ways that go beyond what we think or what we say. The problem is, is when we think we actually don’t have freedom over this.

I’m just really stunned by this quote from this woman, because, just because there’s a report of how much she listens to, it doesn’t mean she has to hit play on those same things next year or tomorrow. None of that makes a whole lot of sense, but it does tell us a little bit about kind of how we think about ourselves, that we are fish that don’t know we’re wet. You know, these are the cultural realities in which we swim, and the ability to step outside of those cultural realities is a really powerful and important thing that we’ve got to be able to do.

I also think it’s important at times to evaluate our habits and to say, what are those things that are habitually forming me? I may want something else to be forming me. I may want to read more books, but you never pull on a new habit without taking off an old one. And so you have to decide, I’m going to now re budget my time. I’m going to re budget my energy.

The thing that scripture adds to Aristotle, other than a whole lot of other things, is that we are not just what we habitually do, but what we habitually do shapes what we habitually love and what we worship. And love and worship are used in very synonymous ways. In Holy Scripture, it’s what we give our allegiance our heart to. That’s why the author of Proverbs says to guard your heart.

And so it’s even a little bit deeper than Huh? I wonder. You know, how many times I listen to this particular song, or how big of a fan am I? It really does point to something deep, to what I’m actually giving my time, my energy, my talent to and that’s a question of spiritual formation. That’s a question of what kind of lover I am. Because to be human, St Augustine said, is to be a lover. It’s to love not only loving the right things but loving the right things in the right order.

So, you know, I wouldn’t get too involved in all these things, but they’re helpful, particularly given the amount of time we spend in front of our glowing rectangles on a daily and weekly basis.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center. He is host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, thanks! See you next time.

STONESTREET: Thank you both

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