Culture Friday: WORLD’s 2024 Books of the Year

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 27th of December, 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: WORLD’s Books of the Year are out, John, and I know some of these books you really got a lot out of—two in particular I’d like you to comment on, first the Brad Wilcox book Get Married. Per our books editor Collin Garbarino: the Wilcox book demonstrates that, no matter what cultural elites say, marriage provides the foundation for a healthy social order.

Then second, Life in the Negative World by Aaron Renn. But I want to start with Wilcox. What do you say?

STONESTREET: Brad Wilcox’s book was really, really important. It’s making a case that the church, by and large, hasn’t made for a long time. We’ve done a whole lot on things like “how to do marriage,” but we don't talk about the good of marriage. Of course, we miss the whole conversation on the definition of marriage but even the good of marriage.

You have this narrative promulgated around the culture: that marriage is the ticket to misery, that marriage is the ticket to bondage, particularly for women. It’s the quickest way to be unhappy, we’re told, the quickest way to be sexually unsatisfied (and poor and everything else), and that you can’t be your true self, especially if you’re a woman.

None of that’s ever been true. There’s never been a shred of data that could be considered legitimate and universal to back up that narrative. But it has been really, really powerful.

I guess we could blame the shows of the 1990s, you know, after ’80s television was dominated by The Cosby Show and Family Ties and Family Matters. The 90s had Friends and Seinfeld and Will and Grace, and then it just went downhill from there. And that narrative stuck in all kinds of different ways.

It needs to be unseated because it’s profoundly bad for people to think that marriage is bad, because marriage is profoundly good.

Nobody’s done this research better than Brad Wilcox and the Institute for Family Studies. He is the expert I look to on this fantastic book. Two thumbs up.

EICHER: On the Aaron Renn book, Life in the Negative World, our reviewer Hunter Baker says: Renn’s insights remain relevant despite the unexpected political success of Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Some might see it as a reversal of the “negative world” thesis. Not Hunter Baker. He argues that Trump’s win, achieved as it was with a diminished pro-life focus and a post-Christian Republican Party, rather highlights the complexities of Christian cultural engagement in modern America. What do you think?

STONESTREET: I appreciated Aaron Renn’s thesis when it was an article before it became a book.

I think it's always helpful when people, especially in a time of great cultural upheaval, try to do a “you are here.” They lay out the timeline and try to give you the ideas that are dominant, where those ideas are going to take you, and where the present situation came from. Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.

Ideas also have histories and antecedents. Knowing that frame, it can be really, really helpful. I think that's what the Bible tries to do. Jesus talks about that sort of thing when he refers to the signs of the times. So I always take any attempt as helpful—even if it’s something that I ultimately think is misguided, inaccurate or imprecise, or just misses some some details, because I see things differently.

That probably is where the thesis comes in for me, the negative world thesis that Renn wrote about in the book. I’d have a different timeline. I might use a couple different adjectives. I might change the framing of it a little bit. But honestly, this is the sort of project that has created so much conversation, it’s like The Benedict Option (Rod Dreher).

I joke with Rod that I’m for “Kuyper option.” Benedict and Kuyper have a baby, which I know is a loaded reference today, but that’s the thesis that we need to go to in terms of cultural engagement. But the fact that he wrote The Benedict Option has stood up to time and created the sort of conversation that the church needed to have, and was long overdue.

I think Renn’s work has played that same role, just the punching bag that he threw it out as, let's take this seriously, and he defends it, and people push back. That's made us all better. So, two thumbs up on that. 

As far as Baker’s analysis that the election of Trump doesn’t negate that, and that’s because not all of life is political, I would agree with that. There’s a whole lot more to culture and cultural hostility than politics.

To be honest, at least on a couple really important cultural issues for Christians, it's not clear where Trump’s going to land in the long run. So, you know, I don’t think it disproves Renn’s framework, but that also remains to be seen.

BROWN: So from books to basketball … just this week, Caitlin Clark was named the AP Female Athlete of the year for her impact on and off the court. A few weeks ago, Time Magazine honored her with its Athlete of the Year.

I want to get your take, John, on Clark’s comments after the Time Magazine recognition. Here’s a snippet of what she said… “I’ve earned every single thing, but as a white person, there is privilege. A lot of players in the league that have been really good have been black players. The league has kind of been built on them…”

She goes on to say, “ The more we can elevate Black women, that’s going to be a beautiful thing.”

Before you weigh in, let’s listen to a pastor in Chicago…his name is Corey Brooks. Here’s what he had to say about Clark’s comments.

BROOKS: We’ve been through all this before. I remember a reporter asking Red Auerbach, the legendary Celtics owner, if Larry Bird was the new “great white hope.” Auerbach looked at his cigar and then said, “No, great hope.”

Bird himself had to deal with these questions his entire career. Most people my age remember when Isiah Thomas said that if Bird were black “he would just be another good guy.” I remember the way Bird handled it with great character—he refused to take the bait and rose above it all. That is the discipline that we’re missing from our hyper-racialized society.

BROWN: Some people took as an apology. But John how did Clark’s comments about white privilege leave you?

STONESTREET: Well, I mean, I don't think she owed anybody an apology. I do appreciate that a number of times through her career, she's taken credit. She’s actually said, even in that interview that raised so many hackles—including my own—she did say, she would refer to her run as historic.

It was.

There’s nothing like what she did, other than the Larry Bird/Magic Johnson entrance into the NBA. It remains to be seen whether it’ll have that sort of long-term financial impact, and whether there’ll be a Michael Jordan of the WNBA to follow the Caitlin Clark—whoever she is.

Listen, she’s a product of the University of Iowa. Maybe she got those ideas honestly from there. They’re bad ideas. That’s part of the critical-theory mood. But maybe she’s being humble and trying to thank the people that she feels needs to be thanked.

I wouldn’t use terms like “white privilege.” You know, that’s one of the things we talk about all the time at the Colson Center around world view: that the words you choose to use, and what you mean by those words, smuggles in ideas all over the place. I think that’s why so many people had problems with what she said.

But she’s a 20-some-year-old kid, and in our celebrity driven culture, one of the problems we have is putting people up on pedestals way too early. Because someone’s a celebrity, you know, somehow it’s “historic.” I was watching TV after the DNC, when someone announced that Taylor Swift was going to endorse Kamala Harris and called it historic. She’s a singer! I remember when Johnny Depp condemned the invasion of Iraq during the Bush administration. I thought, “Well, he can have an opinion, but why do we care what the pirate of the Caribbean says about the war in Iraq?

Part of me wants to go back and say, “let’s not expect too much.” But because we do, maybe we should all go back and read Neil Postman a couple more times. I sometimes think about that line from Narnia, where the professor is saying, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato.” I look at these stories, and I want to say, “It’s all in Postman, all in Postman”—just in terms of how we kind of think in a celebrity-driven way.

But listen, I'll keep watching her remarkable talent. Never followed women’s basketball, other than my daughter’s basketball team, of course. But Caitlin Clark has changed that for me, and it's a lot of fun for a big basketball fan when you see somebody bring that level of innovation to the game.

Hopefully she’ll get some some wise voices in her life too.

EICHER: If it’s a matter of accuracy, if it matters, I just want to say, “hey, kid, how about some thanks not so much to the black women of the WNBA but the black men of the NBA who are subsidizing the WNBA?”

There’s no free lunch and the only way the WNBA can keep losing money—even with the boost Caitlyn Clark brings—is because the NBA is covering the debt. You know?

STONESTREET: It’s completely legitimate. You don’t have a WNBA without the NBA. You don’t have an NBA without an awful lot of money that has been generated and raised around the world. You don't have that without Michael Jordan. I was looking at some of the growth that he brought to the league around the world. It's just unbelievable. I haven’t even been close to having any sort of way forward that was profitable or even break-even, until Caitlin Clark. It’s just unnecessary for her to talk about white privilege or anything like that. She's doing something that nobody else did and doing it really well.

EICHER: Well, what a year, John. We don’t talk again until 2025 … so goodbye to 2024 and Happy New Year, my friend.

STONESTREET: Well, yes, goodbye to 2024 I agree, in some ways, good riddance, but Happy New Year. There is hope. Christ is risen!

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