Culture Friday - The father controversy

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday, April 15th, 2022.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

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.

BROWN: John, the social-media mob is at it again, this time accusing Hall of Fame head football coach Tony Dungy of attacking children and the LGBT community over his association with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis signed a bill into law this week promoting fatherhood in the state. According to the U.S. Census Bureau—19.5 million children—more than 1 in 4 live without a father in the home.

Dungy thanked DeSantis for helping craft what he calls a playbook to tackle the issue. Let’s have a listen.

DUNGY: Thank you, Governor, and thank you, Speaker Sprowls.hank you for this bill. First of all, this is going to be tremendous and be such a big help to fathers in Florida, agencies that support fathers in Florida. But I want to thank you for your example, bringing his girls out here today, it just reminds me because this is kind of my field. And I used to bring my kids out here to work.

And as I said, social-media came after him and Dungy pushed back. I’ll quote:

“14 years ago President Barack Obama said the same things about children growing up without a father… almost verbatim. I’m assuming people were outraged at him, too.” Then he added, “I am serving the Lord so I’ll keep supporting dads and families.”

What does that say about us that this is a controversy at all?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, this is really downstream from a whole lot of ideas that have taken root in our culture, most fundamentally that things like sexual distinction, and marriage and family are speed limits, not gravity. And we talked about that before. But that's the way we're approaching marriage. Except it's not based on any realities. It's based on essentially, the internal desires of adults, adults want same sex relationships, adults want to pretend that there's no distinction between men and women, and therefore, between fathers and mothers and husbands and wives. But this is a flat out denial of everything we know from reality itself, there are a few things that have been more well researched than the family. And what the research tells us unequivocally, is that the single greatest predictor of a child's long term success, the situation that is best for children and nothing else comes close, is when they're raised in a home with a married mom and dad. President Obama did say this, although he said kids need mom and dad, the research actually shows kids need married mom and dad, and that moms and dads parent differently. Now anybody that has parented with a mom or a dad with him, realizes this as a matter of observable fact, kind of like gravity. And that's really the point, right? Is that, that these things, sexual distinction and the consequences of sexual distinction, which is children. This stuff is baked into reality. This isn't stuff that's up for grabs. This isn't stuff that we can legislate away. This isn't stuff that we can pretend doesn't exist. It is the equivalent of stepping off the roof, and then wondering why we hit the ground. This is a non-negotiable, so good for Tony Dungy and good again for Ron DeSantis. You know, this shouldn't be controversial, but, you know, when you deny created norms, you start to call up, down and down, up and that's what's happening in the area of family marriage. And certainly it happens on social media, you know, these days.

EICHER: John, here’s some alarming news. According to government research, a significant number of American teenagers report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness”—those are the words of the report—and the number reporting these feelings represents the highest number since the Centers for Disease Control started measuring back in 2009.

Admittedly, not a huge data set, but the trendline is what should have our attention. The first time that government researchers looked into it, a little over a quarter of American teenagers admitted “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.”

A decade later, 20-19, the figure jumped 40 percent. But CDC wanted to look into it since Covid-19 and found the number in just that period ticked up again 20 percent.

So we went from just over a quarter to more than a third and now we’re closing in on half.

I learned this from an article in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson. He dug into these numbers and proposed four reasons for this rising tide of sadness among teenagers. They’re interesting and I’d like your thoughts—and I’m going to list these out back to front: Thompson says American parents in general are too protective, they baby their kids too much. That’s one.

Two is, our times are particularly stressful. That’s his view.

Three, and this is where we start getting into pandemic-related stress, teenagers are socially isolated.

And I think the final one is related to social isolation, ironically: Social-media use.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Thompson’s article in The Atlantic. This is the money quote and I’ll let you respond:

“Social media places in every teen’s pocket a quantified battle royal for scarce popularity that can displace hours of sleep and makes many teens, especially girls, feel worse about their body and life.”

STONESTREET: It's true! Social media has proven to be really, really bad for kids, particularly for teenage girls.

There's a book called The Content Trap. And the author there tells the story in the very beginning of the biggest fire in Yellowstone Park history and the traditional wisdom, the explanation for what happened that sparked this wildfire that destroyed hundreds of 1000s of acres is that a cigarette was dropped. The author of the content trap as though, weren't hundreds of 1000s of cigarettes dropped that day, all over America. So what was it about this particular cigarette and this particular environment that created this devastation? We need to ask that same question. Because social media doesn't affect every kid the same way. Again, I think it in and of itself has proven to be a bad thing. But social isolation is not just a consequence of social media, social isolation is at least the consequence of something that we've already talked about. Whereas kids used to get a lot of their social connection from a strong social institution like their family, they don't. Whereas kids used to have a level of social connection, and religious institutions, they don't. In other words, we have had the abject catastrophic failure of social institutions around the board. And now we dropped the match, which you could call Instagram or Tiktok, or whatever. And that's the explosion. And of course, students are going to be a primary victim of this. And that's what the CDC numbers and other things say. But let me just say, we have seen a rise in deaths of despair across the board, especially in young men, not just teenagers, but actual 30, 40, middle aged men, the suicide rates are up across the board. In other words, the crisis of meaning as the larger context, social media, and the other causes that Thompson referred to in the article which is a stunning article and I think it's a noble article. And these, all four of the things that he points to need to be deeply considered. But we also need to think hard about the context, the dry, you know, lack of humidity that makes any match dropped explosive

EICHER: Let’s go out today reflecting on what today is, Good Friday, and bearing in mind what Sunday is, Easter Sunday. I thought Kevin DeYoung—writing for WORLD Opinions—had a great piece yesterday thinking about Holy Week. He made the point that we are not theoretical sinners but real sinners in need of a real savior.

“The fundamental story of the world is not the story of good guys and bad guys, or of oppressors and the oppressed,” DeYoung writes, “but of sinners and a Savior.”

John, anything you want to add?

STONESTREET: Just an amen. This means a lot to us this year at the Colson Center, because Chuck loved Easter, Chuck Colson loved Easter, he spent every Easter in prison, carrying out this mission that he got from the Lord while He was in prison. And a week from yesterday, is the 10th anniversary of Chuck’s homegoing, the ultimate resurrection for him. So he's on our hearts and minds a lot. And what he loved to talk about is that Christianity was personal. But it wasn't private. It was public, it was public truth. That's what I love about what Kevin DeYoung wrote. It's the fundamental story of the world. So when we all say to each other, as Christians have done throughout history, Christ has risen, Christ is risen, indeed, let's all be clear on what that means. It's not a statement of personal preference. It's not a statement of even personal faith. It is a public proclamation about the life in the world. It's the most true thing that's ever happened in the world. It's the defining moment of human existence. And when we say Christ is risen, that means that the world is a place of hope. And I think that's a particularly important thing to remember. In light of the the other things we talked about already on today's program.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John, and Happy Resurrection Day.

STONESTREET: You too.

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