Narratives and consequences

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Friday May 29th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. 

It’s Culture Friday! Joining us now is author, speaker, and cohost of our Reality Check feature on WORLD Watch, Katie McCoy. 

Katie, good morning to you. 

KATIE MCCOY: Good morning.

EICHER: Well Katie, I know you saw the big report in The New York Times this week: some of the most alarmist climate projections that shaped years of public debate, they are now being walked back. And this was of course one of those “worst-case” global warming scenarios that influenced research papers, and media coverage, and policy planning, and just a lot of apocalyptic rhetoric about the future. 

Critics of course, had pushed back, they argued for years these assumptions were never especially realistic. But now that it's walked back, Katie, it seems to me the bigger issue here may be the erosion of trust in institutions. Because when Americans see experts, and journalists, and universities, and government agencies speak with this certainty just for years and then quietly revise or retreat from those claims, what do you think it does to public confidence in our authorities?

MCCOY: Yeah, this was shocking and not surprising, I suppose we could say, because this isn’t the first time in recent memory that we’ve seen major institutions backtrack on things that they have reported as indisputable fact.

And I’m old enough to remember when we lived through COVID—what was it, six years ago now? Feels like a lifetime ago now, in some ways.

Well, now here, that’s just six years. Think, though, about all the damage that was done to people in the medical community in that six years—their reputations that were destroyed. Now magnify that, and I think we can get an appreciation for the scope of this New York Times article.

I think about how our world is so tribal, so politically motivated, that to just challenge an accepted narrative, it makes you just persona non grata. It makes you a lunatic, not worthy to be listened to. It makes you some parochial fundamentalist on the fringes of society.

I also think about how two things come to mind; when Professor Carl Trueman described how in our world today, truth is defined by the political purpose it fulfills, not the degree to which it corresponds to reality. I think we see that at work in a lot of these narratives that suddenly get shifted.

And then, we’ve talked about this on this show before, Nick, about how a generation of young adults has “climate anxiety”—things that they are seeing in the news about how we may not have a planet in 10 years, and so it’s actually affecting their life choices, like whether or not they think they could actually get married or have children.

Well, if you think that the world is going to be half the population wiped out within your lifetime, and the seas coming up into the shores, of course you’re going to be anxious!

So just think about the many ramifications of what this one narrative has caused, and now people are just quietly trying to backtrack it without considering, you know, this may have done a lot of damage to an entire generation of Americans.

MAST: Well, speaking of the younger generation, I want to talk a little bit about Alex Cooper. She's a multimillion-dollar podcaster who's built an empire on telling young women to sleep around in their 20s instead of settling down. But here's the rub: now she's married and recently announced they're expecting a baby, and people are calling her a hypocrite.

There was an article in The Free Press where the writer argues that Cooper is proof that women can actually have it both ways. So I want to ask you: Can they really?

MCCOY: Okay, well, Lindsay, let me just tell you, I only recently became aware of who Alex Cooper is—before today, but relatively recently—and I’m very grateful for that.

MAST: Same. 

MCCOY: So she has built an entire brand that she has told women to avoid the very things that she is now living in and celebrating—marriage and maternity.

And on the one hand, that’s wonderful! I’m so glad that she got married. I’m so glad she’s expecting a baby. She’s celebrating that baby, that is wonderful. I mean, talk about a vibe shift, right?

But she is going to represent a very small minority, a sliver even of the pie graph, of all the women who have lived exactly how she told them to live and now wake up in their 30s and want to have a steady marriage and the hope of children.

You know what’s happened as a result of the hookup culture is—and we could talk about the sociological things related to pornography, divorce, fatherlessness, lower rates of marital satisfaction. All of these things are the results of hookup culture.

But along with that, let’s just think personally: what other relationship has God created, other than marriage, where you are daily dying to yourself?

You don’t prepare for a relationship that was created for covenant selflessness by living a life of personal selfishness. That’s incongruent. You don’t just switch that off when you have a wedding.

So what would be the worst thing, Lindsay, is if a young woman hears this and thinks, “Oh, I can live exactly how she lived, and look, the outcome is exactly what I want it to be.”

I hope women realize how rare it is that the outcome would lead to happiness. 

Everything that women like Alex Cooper do, the way that they live in their 20s, it sets them up for incredible heartbreak and frustration.

MAST: Well, and besides the outcome, it also seems like this influencer mentality ignores the process that she may have gone through, or someone who does end up where she is. 

But the process, the damage, whatever can happen in that mentality, that hookup culture is no longer being seen, because the image is, "Here's the end product, and you don't have to see what I'm dealing with mentally or otherwise because of what I've done in my 20s."

MCCOY: Oh, 100 percent. Just because she got married doesn’t mean that she isn’t going to have some significant problems. I certainly hope she stays married, but the data is in about how the more sexual partners that you have before marriage, the less satisfied you are within that monogamous marriage. Not saying it’s impossible, Jesus redeems all things. But the fact of it is the way God created us to live is how we are best designed to live.

And speaking of things that you don’t see on the other side of the Instagram filter—talk about resources that other women don’t have. They don’t have millions of dollars, they don’t have events that they put on, they don’t have a staff, they don’t have book deals or whatever else she has. They just have their lives.

And there’s a generation of women that have been told that this is the way to empowerment. And in reality, it is the way to total disillusionment.

EICHER: So, Katie, you can probably see we are at World Journalism Institute, wrapping up week two, and maybe it’s not so much the backdrop but the droopy eyes here as we work with these young people, work hard. 

They have some questions for you, and we’ll consider this at the end of our segment, the lightning round.

PACK: Hi, I'm Savannah Pack. I go to Bob Jones University, and I live in Greenville, South Carolina.

My question is: America is a nation built on Christian principles, not a Christian nation. If religion were to be included in public schools again, i.e. prayer before class, reading from the Bible, and literature or history, should other religions or religious texts be included as well?

MCCOY: Okay, great question, Savannah. This is a perfect example of how culture and law have an inextricable relationship.

So, from the founding of the United States, we were predominantly a nation made up of Protestant Christians. Yes, Catholics, and yes, Jewish Americans, but predominantly Protestant Christians.

And so that Protestant Christian moral ethic formation was brought into the school system as a way of forming well-adjusted, prepared citizens.

And then in 1962, that all changed when the Supreme Court ruled that it violated the Establishment Clause, and that by teaching a specific religion in public schools, it violated the First Amendment principle that Congress should not establish a religion.

So now, since it is unconstitutional to teach one religion, if one religion were to be taught in the public school system, yes, all of the others would have to as well.

Now, as I understand it, there may be education, almost like sociologically or from an anthropological perspective, of what different religions teach, but we do not have any religious education in the school system today.

Shout out to homeschooling parents, to classical Christian schools, to cohorts.

And then also, fun fact—you can nerd out on this policy—but in the Big Beautiful Bill, there is something called the Federal School Choice Tax Credit, which allows people like you and me can take a portion of our taxes and tell the government where we want those tax dollars to be applied, and those tax dollars could go to supporting scholarships for children who want to go to Christian schools.

So you can start googling that about how to do it.

But this is one of the reasons why we have things like school choice initiatives, vouchers, and tax credits, is to remedy the very problem that you’ve brought up.

ABETTI: Hi, I’m Elizah Abetti, and I go to Union University and I’m from Concord, Vermont. I was just wondering how you would recommend we talk to a friend who is having an ideology shift towards the progressive side and claims to be a Christian?

MCCOY: Well, this has to be really painful.

The first thing I would do is keep the dialog open and keep asking that friend a lot of questions, like: how long has he or she been feeling like this? What has caused it?

You know, a lot of times it is people feel torn between the faith of their childhood and what they know Scripture teaches, and then also another relationship—could be a friend, could be a family member.

Sometimes it is dealing with the hard realities of what Scripture teaches, particularly about human sexuality.

And so having conversations similar to the one that we just had about Alex Cooper, and looking at, are people really better off living just completely according to their feelings, or did God design us for something more?

I would encourage you: first keep that dialog open, keep asking questions, keep praying for her.

And then also, shout out to ministries like our friend Alyssa Childers. She’s got a ton on progressive Christianity, and I cannot recommend a better source.

STILSON: Hi Katie, this is Tyler Stilson from Bend, Ore. I went to Colorado Christian University. 

Do Christian universities have an obligation to mandate student attendance in chapel and Bible specific courses? I have heard the perspective that this approach benefits students in their faith walk. I have also heard the opposite. 

Is it the role of universities to mandate these things in pursuit of discipleship, or is discipleship the obligation of the church? Thank you!

MCCOY: So, I went to a really good Christian school, and we did have mandatory chapel attendance, and I’ll just be honest, I kind of sat my way through a lot of it. Thankfully, we didn’t have smartphones like that, as we do now, or else I probably would have been streaming Instagram.

Unfortunately, a lot of chapel attendance for college kids is just sitting and enduring.

I can, however, tell you that there are a few standouts, and those standouts have stuck with me today—of deep spiritual lessons that met me when I was at a point when I didn’t know what my future was going to hold, and the Lord really used it in deep ways.

In terms of whether a Christian school should or should not mandate chapel, there’s no law on it, obviously, in Scripture.

I think the real question is: how do Christian universities best form the intellectual and spiritual discipleship of their students? And that can include chapel. It could include more integrating theology into their courses.

So, it’s a good conversation worth having. I don’t think there’s one right or wrong answer.

EICHER: Katie McCoy; author, and speaker, and cohost of WORLD Watch's Reality Check feature. 

Katie, great to talk with you. 

MCCOY: Always good to see you guys.

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