Culture Friday - Unhealthy relationships

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: It’s Friday, June 3rd, 2022.

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

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

John Stonestreet is away this week and so we’ll bring in Andrew Walker.

He’s a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Seminary and managing editor of WORLD Opinions. Hey there, Andrew, good morning!

ANDREW WALKER: Hey, Nick, it’s good to be with you.

EICHER: This’ll be new to you in the sense that you’ve not fielded culture questions from our student journalists, but not new to you at all in the sense of fielding student questions. You do that all the time.

So we’re on the last day of our annual World Journalism Institute collegiate course. Dordt University has been a terrific host here in beautiful northwest Iowa, in the welcoming town of Sioux Center.

Andrew, I have four students for you today. They’ll introduce themselves and pose their questions and you can just jump in.

Sound good?

WALKER: Absolutely.

ANNA MANDIN, STUDENT: Hi, my name is Anna Mandin. I study at the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and I'm from Canada. My question is, do you think there's an unhealthy relationship between political and religious identities in America?

WALKER: That’s such a good question. I think there’s a lot of various ways to think about the relationship between religion and politics in America. And I'm hesitant to speak categorically that there is just overall an unhealthy relationship between the two. Because I think that can be often in the eye of the beholder, to some extent. But there's a couple of things we should say about that. First is, at the very heart of the American project has been an appreciation for the role of religion in society. We see that from individuals such as John Adams, from our first president, George Washington, and even political philosophers like Alexis de Tocqueville. And so I think we need to recover better understandings of how religion and politics relate to one another. And I think that begins with resisting the tendency to make religion and politics everything, and making religion and politics nothing. And so what I always like to suggest people kind of adopt as a framework is what St. Augustine would refer to as ordering our loves. And what he means here is, it is good to love your country. But he says it's more supreme to love your God. And so when we have those loves, properly ordered, according to the Christian tradition, loving God allows us to actually be better citizens, because we're not making the state, and government and citizenship, the end all be all of our existence. And so how we apply that on the day to day, there are a lot of wisdom and prudential issues involved there. But I think we just need to think about how do we order our loves in such a way that as Chuck Colson once wrote to me, in a book, he said, “Andrew, love your country, but love your God more.”

MADISON GREVEN, STUDENT: Hi, my name is Madison Greven and I graduated from the University of Northwestern in St. Paul. In the past few months, Disney has been in the news regarding their agenda to produce more LGBTQ material in their content meant for kids. How should Christian parents choose what movies to show their kids with understanding that every outlet has a worldview or agenda in some way?

WALKER: Oh, yeah, that's such a very important question. And I think it's important to realize, at the outset, that parents need to understand that there always is a world view, there is no such thing as total viewpoint neutrality. God made us habit forming creatures. He made us affective creatures, meaning what we put into our body, by way of media and consumption can impact us. And so I would say to the parents, first off, recognize everyone is trying to say something to your kids. And if you don't catechize your kids, someone else will do so for you. And with greater urgency, and with greater desire, even perhaps. So I would say, without drawing a hard and fast rule for every single parent, parents need to think through what is the maturity level of their individual child involved in this question. They need to think through, how are they going to intervene when something on the screen pops up? Are they just going to kind of turn a blind eye to it, or are they going to pause, discuss the issue, offer Christian truth and then continue it, the movie or are they just going to turn the program off? And I'll tell you what my family does. We were recently watching something on Disney actually, where the show was treating divorce like it was this completely normal and routine thing. And so we paused the movie, and we said to our daughters, hey, you know Disney is presenting that divorce is a normal thing. That's not God's plan for marriage and for family. Divorce happens, is the result of heartbreaking, sinful situations. And so we don't want you to think that this is normal, or natural. And so now that we've talked about that, we can watch more of the movie. But I just want you to hear that from your mom and dad about what we think about this type of issue.

So I think, again, the bigger picture is, we need prudence. But you also have to have a principle of intervention of actually getting involved. And let me say this, as well, there's some material that you simply should not be exposing your children to. And I'll just speak candidly, for myself and my own family. Some of the things we're learning about Disney right now have been so troubling to me that it does make me consider whether we want to continue contributing to Disney's bottom line. And so that's a decision my family will have to make, I can't make that for your family. But just to recognize there are certain thresholds that might be crossed, that you shouldn't be allowing your children to be exposed to.

ALEX ELLISON, STUDENT: Hi, my name is Alex Ellison and I go to the University of Guelph-Humber. My question is, with social media being so prevalent in today's youth culture, how can we as Christians be mediators in protecting youth from the hyper sexualized content on apps like Tiktok and Instagram?

WALKER: So I'll just be very, more precise in my answer here, and to say, I don't think that children should be on Tiktok and Instagram. I think what we're learning by virtue of the social science that has been leaked in such outlets as The Wall Street Journal, is that there are some algorithmic behavioral manipulations built into the very structure of social media that is designed to reconfigure how the brain responds to certain media. And so I think I am on the ultra conservative side on this question, who would say you need to delay the introduction of social media into your children's lives as long as you possibly can, not simply from the vantage point of what they might be consuming, by way of illicit material, but the very fact of how social media forms and shapes how people think, how it impacts their attention spans. And so I just think we need to be delaying social media introductions as much as possible.

LAUREN SHANK, STUDENT: Hi, my name is Lauren Shank. I go to Liberty University. Is there importance of getting married in the church. Traditionally, people get married in the church, where the presence of the Lord is. So after all, marriage is a God thing. But with culture nowadays, you can get married anywhere in a barn, you can elope in a national park. And you see this among Christians to where they often get married outside of the church. Is this wrong?

WALKER: Lauren, what a great question. It's a good question to be thinking about as a Christian, and I love the instinct that marriage is a God institution. So it has to be done in the church. So a couple things I would say here. I think this is an issue of, of prudence and wisdom, meaning Christians of good will can disagree on this. As far as the requirements involved my own position is, I don't think it's a particular space that defines where a wedding must be. The Bible in the book of John talks about how Christians worship and spirit and truth, and we don't collapse the divine, into limited spaces. Now, that's not to say that we disregard the importance of architecture and sacred spaces. But it does mean that I don't think that we can elevate this type of issue to the level where we say, one must get married in a church, if they are Christians. I think that there is enough wisdom, and enough Christian freedom, frankly, where if two Christians want to get married on the beach, insofar as the wedding on the beach is a Christian wedding, I think God can be glorified in that venue as well, because God is the creator of the cosmos. Psalm 19 tells us he's the God of creation. And so whether you're inside a church, or you're on a beach, if your motive and your intentionality and your goals are all the same, which is to honor God and honor Christ in your marriage, I think where the wedding occurs is a little less significant.

EICHER: All right, thank you. And thank you to the World Journalism Institute students for excellent questions. Really good, weren't they?

WALKER: Yeah, absolutely. I love these questions. The types of questions I get asked are often indicative of, you know, what students are wrestling with, and the types of questions I just heard demonstrate a lot of great maturity.

EICHER: All right, Andrew Walker. He’s a professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at Southern Seminary and managing editor of WORLD Opinions. Thanks, Andrew!

WALKER: Thanks Nick!

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