Culture Friday: Untethered Reality

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 1st of November, 2024.

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 time for Culture Friday, and joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: John, the New York Times and other outlets have reported on this incredibly dark and tragic story of the death of a teenager, a 14-year-old boy who’d been led into a deep, emotional relationship with an AI-generated chatbot, a character modeled after a character from the show Game of Thrones.

This online platform is Character AI, and the boy’s mother is suing, making the case that the chatbot led her son to take his own life. Among her claims: that the platform’s lack of safeguards and manipulative features encouraged her son’s detachment and despair.

Question for you: Do you see these AI companionship apps reshaping concepts of friendship and reality for younger generations?

STONESTREET: I don’t think it actually reshapes them at all. I think actually that what it does is worsen a pre-existing condition.

This is the disembodiment that is a feature, not a bug, of early 21st century, late- to ultra-modern Western culture.

We have created our digital worlds. We have created them with replacements for real, embodied existence—from, you know, thinking for us, to feeling for us, to relating for us. And, you know, these are habits that are deeply ingrained, and, you know, the same sort of stories can be found at almost every stage of the digital revolution.

This is tragic. It’s terrible. And there may very well be some sort of guilt that Character AI, this platform, has.

But there’s a particular sort of kid who is vulnerable to this sort of influence. There’s a particular sort of kid who has a kind of pre-existing, elevated likelihood of self-harm, and that doesn’t have to do with AI. AI comes and worsens the situation. AI comes and spreads the infection. AI comes and becomes an even more compelling substitute for reality, but not a sufficient substitute for reality.

There’s so much about modern life which makes us relationally inept. And, of course, there’s also those bedrock relationships that people are supposed to have, which gives us our real sense of identity, our understanding of meaning, our basic worldview, and those things are in crisis. And we’ve seen especially young men become lost in this particular cultural milieu.

And it makes sense, because it’s an untethered existence. We’re untethered from the body. We’re untethered from our most essential catechizing relationships. We’re untethered from truth. We’re untethered from community.

You add all that together and say, “well, what could go wrong if we add in, you know, a direct kind of intravenous influence of a disembodied conglomeration of the worst that’s on the internet? You know? What could possibly go wrong?”

Yeah, we should have seen this one coming, and it won’t be the last one, tragically. It’s terrible, but this has been in the works for quite some time.

BROWN: John, just a few weeks ago, you, me, Nick, all of us were talking about a final victory for cake artist Jack Phillips. He’d won his long fight for religious freedom. I remember categorizing it as a very big victory, but I don’t go as far as New York Times columnist David French goes. He put up an online video, basically saying, not to worry, things are just hunky-dory.

FRENCH: By any reasonable definition, American Christians are not persecuted. And the legal protections for religious liberty are stronger than in any time American history. People of all faiths or no faith at all enjoy an immense amount of protection against government interference. That doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges or injustices. But it remains the case that the American Christian community is arguably the freest Christian community in the world.

Does he state it right, John?

STONESTREET: No, I think that’s a misstatement, and I don’t think it’s true at all, unless you think that religious freedom and our basic freedoms rely only upon Supreme Court decisions.

Has the Supreme Court repeatedly come down on religious freedom, especially since the court was remade by President Trump’s first term? Yeah, but why did it have so many decisions in front of it?

Let’s take Jack Phillips. Does anyone really think that Jack Phillips would have faced these challenges to his personal freedoms 25 years ago, or 30 years ago, or 40 years ago—before this string of Supreme Court wins?

The answer is, of course not.

And what’s the difference? It’s not the Supreme Court. The difference is culture, and culture either serves to help sustain our freedoms or it works against them.

So no, it isn’t.

And I’ll give you the number one reason I think that David French’s statement about religious freedom being more safe now than ever before is flat out not true, and that’s because it’s not only opponents of religious liberty that don’t understand religious liberty. It’s the general cultural imagination in which the idea of religious liberty has been defined down.

For example, about the rights of people of faith to not participate in same sex weddings and not fully endorse and affirm alternative lifestyles. Then suddenly, in a whole lot of people’s minds, and you might even say the cultural imagination is clearly and unequivocally headed this direction, religious freedom then becomes not a net good, but a net bad.

It actually is, in the cultural imagination, thought of as a “license to discriminate.” And you know what? That is a devil’s bargain right there, if I ever heard one.

And I think that’s what a lot of people of faith think of religious liberty: that, yes, it’s our ability to be bigots in our own homes, in our own hearts, in our own houses of worship.

But it really doesn’t belong in the public square. We don’t really need a robust marketplace of ideas. That’s the classic understanding of religious liberty. That is not the current understanding of religious liberty. And as long as it is the current understanding of religious liberty, religious liberty is not safe, certainly not safer than it used to be.

EICHER: Well, here we are, going into the final weekend before Election Day, or with all the early voting and mail-in voting we do nowadays, we should say the final weekend before the election deadline on Tuesday. Nevertheless, I want you to reflect on Christian stewardship of the vote.

What do you hope will be the outcome of the 2024 election? And I don’t mean, Who do you hope wins? I mean, what long-term outcomes should Christian voters prioritize beyond immediate political wins?

STONESTREET: Well, look, I think in a democratic system, including a democratic republic like ours, elections are more mirrors than anything else. In other words, they reflect more than they determine. In fact, I wrote that in a contribution to the WORLD Opinions symposium on this. And I think that the reflection is, we’re not okay, and what we’ve got currently is not sustainable. And so our most significant problems are pre-political, and our most significant solutions have to be pre-political as well.

It has to be upstream in the kind of the cultural work.

Now, I absolutely think this is the most consequential election in our lifetime. And I think it’s a bad thing that it is the most consequential election in our lifetime, because elections should not be that consequential. They should not be this consequential.

When so much is up for grabs, that means that a society is weak and it’s shriveled, and it’s in decline. This is what we know. So that’s one thing.

The other thing I think I would love to say is, I hope that, you know, even though the Democratic ticket was replaced, in a sense, we are still in the same race that we were in 2020 and in 2016 and for that matter, 2018 and 2022. So just as a citizen, on a purely pragmatic level, I hope that this election means we can all collectively move on.

It is true what Solzhenitsyn said in his speech at Harvard, that the sign of a declining culture is the lack of great statesmen. And it is time to move on from the sort of statesmen and women, therefore, that we’ve had, to new ones. And I hope that this marks a turn, at least, to “Everyone take a breath and go, ‘Yeah, we really don’t want to get stuck again.’”

I hope that’s the case. That’s my thought on a purely pragmatic level.

EICHER: Careful there. We may look back 4 years from now and remember these days fondly. Things can get worse, you know?

STONESTREET: Haha, those were the days!

EICHER: Well, I’ve mentioned ballot measures in 10 states that among other things would potentially liberalize abortion laws, and in my home state of Missouri we have a proposed constitutional amendment that would legalize abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy with virtually no restrictions. The way it’s written–that’s how judges are going to have to interpret it when the lawsuits start–it would end up nullifying parental consent laws. It would leave parents powerless to intervene when their children seek permanent and life-altering procedures known as so-called gender-affirming care. The scope of this thing, I’ve never seen anything like it. Which is why I wrote about it in the November WORLD Magazine.

Anyway, John, a big prize for the pro-abortion side is Florida and we offered an opinion column to a pastor down there … William Rice … who said, and I’ll quote him here: “Pastors must awaken and find their prophetic voice and spiritual courage. This is the time to get political because politics just got theological.” I’ll put a link in our transcript to that column and the one I did on Missouri if you want to read those.

But I thought Pastor Rice really said it well.

STONESTREET: You know, last week in our staff meeting with all of our writers at the Colson Center, we had that same observation: that for years, people have been saying, “You know, keep your theology out of our politics.” And we’re saying, “Keep your politics out of our theology.”

In other words, every single one of these issues that people say are too political for Christians to care about are fundamentally moral issues. They reflect deeper realities. And no, they’re not purely political issues, but they are moral and theological and anthropological and ontological issues with a political face right now.

And again, this isn’t the sort of thing that people should be voting on, but here we are. So, sit it out and somebody else’s theology or lack thereof takes over these issues, and that’s what we’ve already seen.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. You’ve been really great to keep coming back and speaking to WORLD’s listeners, so well and so faithfully, all these years, and I’m grateful. I don’t say it often enough. Thank you, John. We’ll see you next time.

STONESTREET: Thank you both. That was very kind.

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