Culture Friday - Ukraine’s real-life heroes

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, March 4th, 2022. 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.

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. Morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: John, now that we’re all rightly paying attention to Ukraine, I think it’s clear enough that a major theme is the heroism of ordinary people. It’s heartbreaking to watch a country attacked so mercilessly—this is war-crime-level stuff, targeting civilians like this—but at the same time it’s inspiring to behold the resolve of the Ukrainian people in these early days of this conflict.

It’s an interesting cultural phenomenon, really, that true adversity tends to bring out the best in a people. Are you seeing that?

STONESTREET: Well, yeah, I think it brings out both the best and the worst. And that's one of the hard things about navigating some of these challenges.

There are things that people would never be guilty of doing—grave evils—if they had never been given the opportunity. There's a lot of wisdom there, isn’t there, in Joseph, when being tempted day by day by Potiphar’s wife, eventually realized he wasn't going to say no, and just got out of there.

Geography has a lot to do with morality, I think, sometimes where you find yourself in the opportunities that you have. But it is inspiring to see not just everyday people in Ukraine, pick up arms, you know, newly married couples, new parents, saying goodbye to kids. Just really incredible things. I mean, this is the stuff that we make movies about now having to do with Dunkirk, or, you know, something in World War II, you know, standing up against the British or, you know, some sort of call to national defense and honor.

And we just, first of all, we don't have a kind of a civics curriculum in America, that necessarily endears us to our own history. So if we have it, we get it elsewhere. And we think of that sort of heroism as a thing of the past.

But you know, here's the thing we got to watch, though, Nick, to your point into your question, is, we have a really clear idea, I think most of us do, who the good guys are and who the bad guys are in this fight. And it's a danger then to think that our good guys can do no wrong and their bad guys can do no right. And we're going to have to keep that kind of up close and personal. It doesn't mean that everyone's on the same moral grounds. You can believe that we share some level of moral guilt without being, you know, ambiguous at all on who the aggressor is who is completely unjustified in his vision of ruling and tyranny and invading a neighbor and who are the victims of that. We can be very clear eyed on that.

But you know, this is why Christianity is so good. Christianity is not just true in its individual tenets, like Jesus died, and rose from the dead, and the Bible's true, and things like that. But the Christian worldview has an explanatory power, particularly about the human condition that we’re made in the image of God and susceptible to self deception, self rationalization and grave acts of evil all at the same time. And no other religious worldview has that sort of solid grounding that explains both human goodness and human evil, the human propensity for grave acts of heroism and grave acts of tyranny—sometimes even the same people. And we've seen that throughout history. So Christianity is a worldview that makes sense of even things like this.

EICHER: I was struck by something in the president’s state of the union this week—again, rightly starting by addressing the Ukraine situation, having the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States in attendance, but it felt like it undermined the seriousness of the moment to pull into the same speech sort of boutique culture-war concerns with a plug for the Equality Act and highly unpopular abortion legislation that couldn’t even attract a majority vote this same week.

This is the kind of stuff that pulls at the fabric of society, and I thought of this piece by Kevin deYoung this week at WORLD Opinions, saying, and I’ll quote, “the life most of us enjoy today is not normal—not normal in society and not normal for millions of people around the world. The more we recognize its abnormality (and our blessing), the better equipped we are to preserve this civilizational inheritance for ourselves and pass it on to our posterity. If we fail at this task, future generations will never know these blessings.”

Are we failing at this task?

STONESTREET: Oh, good heavens, yeah. I mean, the level of privilege on display, in other words, the level of kind of historical anomaly that you'd have to have reached in order to even have the conversation that the Equality Act implies—much less the terrible timing of it being thrown into a speech that was clearly, you know, ‘before I'm off the air and out of energy, let me see how many issues I can just pile into the same bucket and promise that I'm going to fix the world,’ which is really my quick, very, as you can tell, somewhat cynical view of the speech.

You just have to be at a special place in history to even have the debates that we have. And it just kind of violates common sense in so many ways. And to begin by essentially taking credit for the heroism of the Ukrainian people, which was really the tone that the president struck that while he began talking about the right things, what he talked about, and trying to turn it into some sort of personal accomplishment was not appropriate at all.

Yeah, we are failing at the task. And one of the signs of a culture that's lost its way is the inability to prioritize, to make distinctions between those things that are noisy and those things that matter. So yeah, I think it's a good indication that we've lost our way.

BROWN: We haven’t talked since the president named Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee for the Supreme Court. There will be time to talk more about her, but I found it interesting that from 2010 to 2011, Judge Jackson was on the board of a Christian school in Maryland that had a statement of faith pretty similar to what we have here at WORLD. It included statements on the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of traditional marriage. Now, when this came up in a confirmation hearing less than a year ago, she suggested she didn’t really know about the content of the statement of faith and didn’t agree with it. But does it make you feel a little better about her likely confirmation to the court that maybe she’d have some level of respect for the religious freedom of the school founders?

STONESTREET: No, not really. You know, at some level, I guess I am far more confident on those who are very clear on where they stand on issues. Now, maybe she legitimately has changed your mind. She's a highly credentialed, highly experienced justice. She has great academic credentials, of course, those academic credentials would traditionally be understood to be endorsing a worldview that would be counter to anything that respects religious liberty, as we need to define it in order to preserve the freedom of conscience, you know, going forward.

But this particular part of the story about the Christian school, I think there's two things. Number one, that the cultural mood on religious liberty, especially as it pertains to issues of sexuality, has shifted. And to assume that because one agrees with us here, they agree with us, here, here, here, here—or even agreed with us 10 years ago, or five years ago, they still, I don't think anybody can make that assumption anymore. And that kind of goes to the second thing, which is if back in 2010, 2011, a Christian school was not really concerned whether its board was up to speed on its statement of faith and everything that it implied. And I don't know, by the way, if this is a, you know, retelling of history, by the Justice, or whether this was a legitimate drop of the ball from the Christian school, who knows? I don't know. But you have got to be as explicit as possible. On a statement of faith at the board, staff, student faculty level, you have to be as explicit as possible. You've got to make all of those connections. And by the way, you've got to connect statement of faith issues to statement of behavior issues. And you have got to be really clear on how the faith that you say you believe in informs the lifestyle standards you expect from your employees. And as it pertains to schools, to students as well.

So I think, you know, without trying to analyze what's really behind this, I think it's clear where her judicial philosophy is, where she stands on issues of religious liberty. I think that part no one's really doubtful about. I think, though, what this does tell us is that Christian institutions need to be thoroughly Christian, and the days of kind of lying low and, and hoping that you won't get in trouble and no one will target me. Those days are way over.

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

STONESTREET: Thank you Myrna. Thank you Nick.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.