Disrespect for the dead

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It from WORLD Radio, celebrating 15 years. Today is October 23rd.

Thank you for making us part of your morning routine. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

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

It’s Culture Friday, John Stonestreet. John Stonestreet is here. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Good morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: Well, John, there is an article making the rounds about Elisabeth Elliot, the late Christian missionary, author, and speaker. I hate to bring it up because it strikes me as especially unfair, but it’s out there, and now it’s in the New York Times. But the piece raises questions about a relationship between Elisabeth Elliot and another woman decades ago. The account is disputed, and Elliot isn’t here to answer, nor is the other woman. And just a personal note, I’ve kept a prayer journal for 30 years, half my life, and I would be horrified to have the worst or most confusing moments in those journals pulled out for public examination.

And I say all that to ask this: When does pursuit of the truth become speculation at the expense of someone else?

STONESTREET: Well, this particular article was speculation at the expense of someone else. It was unverified. It was something that was based on insinuation and innuendo, and I do think the practice itself of publishing a piece like this is very, very odd.

It’s particularly odd for an evangelical publication. I think those that claim to play by biblical standards one day and journalistic standards the next day, and don’t see any conflict between those two is the problem we have in a lot of evangelical institutions right now, because we live in a culture that has particular rules within different disciplines. Think, for example, if you’re a historian, the rules of history are that you have to seek all horizontal explanations for the events that you’re trying to talk about. You can’t insinuate that God exists, or that God is leading in a particular way, or that God entered into the account in some sort of miraculous way. Well, I get that that’s the rule of secular historians because secular historians play by the rules of secularism.

The question is, can Christians do that, or should Christians play by a different rule? And I think in the accounting of this story, we saw the conflict between the rules of journalism and the rules of being a Christian. There are rules, for example, that we have in terms of telling the truth about someone. There are rules that we have in terms of not slandering. There are rules that we have about what’s considered slander. I know that in our day and age, insinuations about sexual attractions aren’t considered to be slander; they’re considered to be breaking news. But that’s not the case when it comes to Holy Scripture. Scripture talks about how believers should talk about other believers, and that insinuations of sexual perversions are nothing short of slander.

So even if this was published as it was in a journalistic air, it doesn’t make it any less slander. It was flat-out slander. And what good is it doing anyone? It’s not doing us any good.

At the very least, the whole idea that if we find out that this evangelical heroine had some perverted sexual attractions, you know what we saw in her life of refusal to live by those attractions. What we saw is that even though if she had these attractions, she must have been quote unquote born this way. She was able to actually live in marriages, tough marriages, and actually show fidelity and faithfulness.

I think it actually undermines the whole narrative of LGBT life that you have to actually follow your attractions no matter what. She’s proof that you actually don’t, and you can actually have children, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Look, this article did no good. This article betrayed the fact that this evangelical publication doesn’t play by evangelical rules. Hasn’t for a while, but that’s another conversation for another time. But this was slander. It was just slander. You can call it whatever you want, but it was slander.

EICHER: Hey, John. Different gear here. National Review writer Abigail Anthony thinks we may be seeing the return of something that we saw that we wish we hadn’t seen, but something we did see from 2020.

She’s calling it woke 2.0. Now I’m going to offer new woke, like new Coke, although woke classic, if you’re old enough, wasn’t any good either. But Anthony in National Review points to three specific controversies to make her argument. The first is the Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism and falsifying credentials. The second thing is the Cornell Seven case, and the third is the Lindsey Clancy murder trial. Obviously, very different stories, but the National Review piece notices a similar woke classic pattern: inconvenient facts just waved away, institutions lining up behind an ideological narrative, and crucially, the punishment of those who challenge it. So, did you see this? Do you see this? Is this new woke, or did the original just never really lose its fizz, so to speak.

STONESTREET: Right. I mean, I think it was AOC, right, who talked about woke 1.0 as if a woke 2.0 was coming. And if this author sees that it is here, she’s probably not wrong. But a lot of people actually ask this question when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threw out that woke 1.0 as being what did she say? She said it was kind of that got crazy kind of thing—crazy, right and then a lot of people asked, I think, the legitimate follow-up question which is, well, how is woke 2.0 a new woke or whatever you’re going to call how is it going to be fundamentally different than woke 1.0. And of course we didn’t get an answer to that yet, but this argument I think that is made in National Review shows that these are the same fundamental premises: identity politics. Someone is deemed to be the good guy or the bad guy in this story based on self-identification, based on claiming victimhood status, and then there’s this gaslighting that we should all play by these rules that we should all know upfront, even though the grounding of these rules is in question to say the very least.

So I would just encourage everyone: you don’t have to play along. You don’t have to play along to these rules. You can say out loud what it is, and we had in the time frame between woke point 1.0 or old woke and new woke or 2.0.

We had plenty of examples that the threats that you will be run out of public society, that you will be canceled, those things have lost a lot of their bite, and I think that we can stand up to those. And so I hope we don’t play by those rules. And of course we have to understand what the rules are, and at the same time, have to understand what the biblical categories are that we need to evaluate individuals. So we maintain and preserve human dignity across the board.

That we don’t have special status based on these ideological categories. That there’s a sense of moral accountability to which we all both are responsible, and to which we all fail, and the possibility and potential of redemption and forgiveness, which is what makes the gospel the gospel. So I don’t want to give up any of those things, and I don’t think we need to give up any of those things as we look at our own lives, our own hearts, but also some of these big stories.

BROWN: Hey John, real quick, I want to talk about one of those examples. Cornell, two weeks ago, Katie McCoy addressed the issue and made the point that consent just doesn’t work as a sexual ethic. Well, since the story has broken, we’re starting to see more campus rules, written consent pledges, sober monitors, restrictions on fraternity activities. So imagine, John, or should I say, Dr. Stonestreet, you are a university president. And well, thanks for that promotion. I’m not a doctor, but no, I think something has gone wrong. Actually, here.

So go along with me for a second. You’ve got serious allegations to look into as a university president. Students to protect, accused students to protect too. How do you do that? Rules like I just described, or something.

STONESTREET: Isn’t it interesting that you have this culture on university campuses that’s been built around this understanding of no sexual restraint, the idea of sexual experimentation, the expectation, really, if you go back not that long ago, less than a decade, certainly, that there were fears about this, the hookup culture and what that meant. And we had think pieces in the Atlantic and the New York Times, even celebrating this as a way of experimenting sexually, and that people should be able to do that, and where that has led us is to consent pledges, sober monitors, and the cancelation of all fraternities, and for the rest of the year at Cornell.

In other words, this poorly defined understanding of freedom has led to the restrictions on freedom, more restrictions, restrictions that you see here that you wouldn’t see in the same way at many campuses that have moral expectations of their students. Think about many Christian colleges going into this. Isn’t that the irony of freedom? And Os Guinness, of course, talks about the difference between freedom from and freedom for. And if you live only in terms of freedom from, like, don’t tell me what to do, let me do whatever I want, let me behave whatever I want, as long as I don’t hurt anyone else. That’s the quickest way to tyranny because you become a slave to yourself.

And Chuck Colson often talked about the conscience or the constable that if you can’t actually govern yourself, you actually have to be governed from the outside, and all of that informs what I would do as a university president, which I will not be, and I have no interest whatsoever in being a university president. I don’t know of another job that has to meet the expectations of a more diverse set of constituents than a university president, so I’m not interested in that job. Please don’t call me for any of that, because my goodness.

But I will say, Katie is exactly right about consent being just a failed moral framework. There’s just no way that it can navigate this, and we see that in the Cornell case itself, where there are even in New York law, an inability to adjudicate the cases if both parties are inebriated, right? I mean, that’s actually in the law.

So you don’t have consent as a big enough idea to navigate these sorts of behaviors. You know what does help is clarifying that there are moral expectations ahead of time, what those moral expectations are, and holding people to an honor code, to sign on themselves to this is the how I’m going to behave, and it can’t just be morality understood in terms of don’t cross these fences, it’s got to be morality understood in heading a direction.

I remember 25 years ago as a young intern in a youth group talking about the concept of purity, and this incredibly smart student that I had said, “Purity is making yourself presentable to God,” and I thought, man, that is a beautiful big definition of purity because it’s not purity as don’t cross these lines. It’s purity as heading towards God, and honor codes that tell students to head towards justice, head towards purity, head towards honoring one another’s inherent human dignity, are that are based on absolutes and that clearly have a no and that clearly have a defined set of categories. Those are big enough ideas to which you can hold students accountable because they’ve placed themselves under those categories going in, that’s the only way this works.

I don’t know if I want to say this. For example, I think Hillsdale College right now is an example of this. Students buy into an honor code. The rules are far shorter. The list of rules is far shorter than the honor code. This is the kind of people we want you to be. And I’m not saying that there’s never any problems on that campus because, of course, there are, because there’s people there. But that’s the understanding you got to bring into it to begin with. I’ll end with the story.

STONESTREET: It’s a story with far less consequence than this Cornell story, which is absolutely horrible and horrific. And now we’re adjudicating this only on legal lines, and when the behavior of everyone involved was absolutely despicable, and shows the lack of character and the lack of moral framework in the institution and these students, and it’s just horrific to begin with.

But years ago, I was asked to be a part of a tech committee at the Christian College at which I was working, and I was invited to one meeting and never invited back to any other meetings. Now, whether that was an administrative oversight or not, I don’t know. But this was the early days of the internet, where students were having access to campus-wide networks, and what are we going to do to keep students away from porn? And every decision, and every part of that conversation was built around how do we keep them away, keep them away, keep them away. It was never how do we help them understand and govern themselves as part of this whole process. So I asked the question, what are we going to do to teach about pornography and the harms of pornography and sexual wholeness and how this impacts sexual wholeness? And it was like a record scratch in the room. Maybe that was a better administrative detail for another committee that I wasn’t a part of. But the tech committee certainly had no interest in dealing with this, and I was never invited back.

And I thought it was a moral shortcoming. Why? Because we’re dealing with people. The fundamental entity here are not rules that ought not be broken. They’re people who are made in the image of God and thus morally accountable. And the question always is formation. But if you abandon the moral categories, if you abandon the definition of what it means to be human, and if you abandon the task of moral formation, which higher education has done across the board in so many different situations, I don’t know where else you go from here.

EICHER: Myrna, I knew that hypo about a university president was going to get a reaction. Now, for a guy who doesn’t want to be a university president, he’s making the case. But I’m sure glad that John is where John is.

BROWN: All right, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Thank you, John.

EICHER: See you next week.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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