The cost of conviction

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday July 17th.

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

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good Morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: John, did you see Rod Dreher’s latest piece on Päivi Räsänen? She’s a Finnish member of Parliament who was just blocked from entering the UK, even just to catch a connecting flight at Heathrow. Why? Because back in March, Finland’s Supreme Court convicted her of hate speech over a Christian booklet she wrote 22 years ago, and because of that conviction, the UK canceled her electronic travel pass.

Now she can’t even get to Northern Ireland, where she was scheduled to speak at a conference on, of all things, freedom of speech. Dreher calls this a clear slide toward a new totalitarianism in Europe. John, what are your thoughts on this?

STONESTREET: First of all, having been at a conference just recently with Päivi Räsänen, I can assure you she’s completely safe. In fact, she adds an awful lot to the atmosphere, and they’re the ones losing out on her presence, not the other way around.

Now, look, I think this could actually be, at some level, a computer glitch, where you basically build into the system of this new ETA program, but then you have these little things that trigger off: “Oh, we don’t want these people here.”

And it’s interesting what it is that can get you into that kind of trouble for a hate crime. When you think about the citizens of London and what they have protested in terms of the immigrants that have been allowed in and the behavior that Britain was willing to welcome for so long, and now you have someone who actually questioned her own church as a Christian with a religious set of beliefs, holding her own church to those religious convictions, and that’s what’s worse than Pakistani rape gangs and everything else that’s been let into Britain.

You look here, and up is down, and down is up, and right is wrong, and it’s all super confusing. And you can actually build totalitarianism into a computer system like the ETA. That’s how this is enforced.

So to me, if we’re going to go back to Dreher’s own analysis from Live Not by Lies, where he talks about soft totalitarianism and hard totalitarianism, at some point these two things merge. The soft totalitarianism of the system is leading to a harsh totalitarianism where you’re keeping Christians out and welcoming in Muslim rape gangs.

So, good luck with that, Britain. We’ll see how that project works out in the long run. But you can’t say that this is not an apocalyptic sign for Great Britain. Of course it is.

EICHER: John, kind of a different story here. The National Institute on Aging is studying a rare phenomenon called terminal lucidity, where some patients with advanced dementia briefly regain coherent speech or memory near the end of their lives.

One scientist compares it to a decaying highway system. So imagine roads deteriorating with potholes and narrow bridges and uneven pavement. In that case, traffic ought to get worse and not suddenly better just before the whole thing collapses. And yet that is precisely the mystery that researchers are trying to understand.

John, does this remind us that one of the assumptions of our age—that consciousness is nothing more than brain activity—is not nearly as settled as many people assume? The Christian worldview has always insisted that we are more than the sum of our physical parts. So how does that shape the way we think about a story like this?

STONESTREET: I think a couple ways. Number one is the brain is such a remarkable thing. The capacity of the human brain just so exceeds anything that we could measure or map. That in and of itself points to something beyond itself, because the explanation for the origins of this thing has to include some kind of intelligence, some kind of designer that gives us the capacity to know and gives us the capacity to think in these kinds of grandiose terms that the brain can do when it’s perfectly healthy in the first place.

A lot of us are in relationships with individuals and watching dementia, Alzheimer’s, other things take place, and how the brain works is such a mystery. The memories that stick and the memories that don’t—these things are things we don’t understand to begin with.

There may be a physical explanation for this phenomenon that we find out at some point. But still, given the capacity of the human brain to begin with, and the sorts of things that the human brain cares about—questions of meaning and purpose, questions of eternality, things that you don’t find in the animal brain, questions of beauty and aesthetics—we eat. Animals eat. We’re the only creatures I know of that garnish. We decorate our food.

We have apartments. Squirrels have apartments. We hang pictures on the wall. We want to have memories like this. So there are ways that the human brain works that are unparalleled by others. So there’s something else going on.

And even if there’s a neurological or completely physical explanation for this particular phenomenon, just as neurological researchers have attempted, for example, to explain why it is that the human brain thinks about things like God and eternal things, listen, if you could even find a physical explanation for that, you’re still left with the question: Do we believe in God because of what our brains do, or do our brains believe in God because of how they’re made?

You still have the question of origin that haunts the whole thing and everything about the human body. But especially when you start talking about something like language and knowledge and eternal thoughts and the transcendent, none of this stuff can be fully explained from a completely horizontal explanation.

You’ve got to go vertical. You’ve got to say, where did this stuff come from, and what explains this added dimension to how we think and how we know?

Because, as C.S. Lewis said it, I think, very well: If the universe had no meaning—and I’ll add on to that, if our thoughts really had no meaning—we should have never figured out they had no meaning. In other words, we shouldn’t have the category of meaning that gets imposed on the thought. And I think that applies here, as it does in so many other areas of life.

BROWN: One of our reporters, Juliana Chan Erikson, shared a fascinating article today that I really want to get your take on, John. The author argues that it’s not just money or housing keeping people from having kids; it’s actually peer culture.

So get this: For Americans under 30 with the least supportive friends, the desired family size is not quite two children. But for those with the most supportive friends, that number jumps to nearly three.

Think about that—an additional child just because you have trusted friends who’ll show up with a meal or volunteer to babysit. As the author puts it, real-world friends lead to actual births. A society can be full of pro-family influencers and still be barren if nobody is willing to babysit.

But John, do you buy that? When you and Sarah were having babies, did having a peer group doing the same thing make all the difference?

STONESTREET: At least our fourth baby had to do with the fact that the older siblings were all praying for another one. So I think God just answered their prayers.

I think family size and what motivates, especially the young right now, to have children is such a fascinating topic. And it would just be a matter of fascination, kind of sociologically and anthropologically, if we weren’t talking about something that was so absolutely important, which is the fact that we’re facing, across the Western world, a grand demographic winter.

And I’ve been tracking the birth rates in the Western world for about 15 years in the United States, from when we were at 2.06 and rounding up to this past year, when it’s pushing down even around 1.6 and 1.5.

But it is interesting because we are so alone and we are so isolated. We’re experiencing things like college and high school and all kinds of things that used to be very much community events, that were defined by their relationality, in increasingly isolated ways, either online or by yourself.

The number of high school principals who tell me their kids don’t start driving right when they’re 16. The day I turned 16, I was getting my license, then in the car, then going to hang out with friends and hoping some girls would be there.

So there’s a whole cultural reality there that’s circling around that just doesn’t exist anymore. And so you think about who are the people with a whole lot of supportive friends. Where do they get those friends?

I don’t think they’re getting them on Facebook or certainly Instagram or Snapchat. So it’s not social media that’s delivering those friends. They’re not getting those friends in professional situations, where you have to go and sit in a cubicle, or you’re actually working from home virtually.

So where are you getting these friends? You’re not getting these friends in big cities. Maybe you’re getting some, but you’re not getting large groups of them. And if you have young professional friends, my guess is they’re probably not willing to babysit, unless it’s your dog. Everyone seems to love pets these days more than kids.

You think, listen, if these are the people that have lots of friends, many of them are probably going to church. And the other corresponding factor here that we have seen from Brad Wilcox talking at the Institute for Family Studies is that religious people have more babies. Religious people actually are happier and more relational than others too. They have more friends.

In fact, it’s fascinating because what we see is all these kinds of corresponding markers. The happiest people on the planet right now are middle-aged, married, religious women, and they also are the ones that are the most connected and have the most friends, against all the narratives that we hear.

And so you put all this together, and there is a joy of relationality that is unique. It’s unusual. It’s weird.

EICHER: Weird, but in a good way.

Hey, I don’t know whether you caught this, but yesterday was the 75th anniversary of the great American novel The Catcher in the Rye. You’ve got Holden Caulfield, the character who became the patron saint of adolescent alienation, turning 75, and somehow he’s never really gone out of style.

Why do you think that our culture became so captivated by youth and so hesitant to celebrate growing up? And, by the way, I do think this is connected.

STONESTREET: It is very much connected. Diana West years ago wrote a book in which she explained where all this came from, and we can blame it all on Chubby Checker, because Chubby Checker is the one. He gave us the Twist.

And the difference was that prior to the Twist, kids went to the adult dances and dressed like the adults and danced like the adults. But then they had their own dance. And when the Twist came on, then the adults would go to the side of the room.

Then you have this group of evil people that entered the world about this time: advertisers. No, I’m just kidding. Advertisers aren’t evil. But they realized there was this whole new demographic by which you could make an awful lot of money. You could sell a lot of things.

And, of course, it was only a matter of time when you could figure out, “Oh, I could sell to adolescents, that I could sell to pre-adolescents, and maybe we should extend adolescence.” And this thing has been an evolving reality that’s taken over the West ever since.

It’s created things that are now part of our nomenclature, like Peter Pan syndrome. How common it is for young men, in particular, not to grow up.

And it’s a sociological reality where this adolescent stage of life, which historically was considered between 13 and 18, is now sociologically considered to be the age between 11 and 30. And you have extended marriage or delayed marriage from that. You have delayed childbearing from that. There are all kinds of other effects.

It also becomes a very, very difficult place for young people to stay sexually pure, and it becomes a very difficult thing for young women who themselves are seeking the sort of thing that the culture is not providing.

So adolescence has not been good for us. Adolescence is a made-up stage of life that did not exist prior to the latter part of the 20th century. We always had teenagers, but it was never a remarkable thing to be teenaged.

This has been a dramatic shift and a marker, I think, of the decline of the West. What we should do is go back to the rite of passage, and particularly the way that Paul talks about the older women calling the younger women to account, the older men calling the younger men to what matters—to be productive, to work hard.

And I think that kind of vision of what it means to be human is baked into the biblical story. It’s baked into the description of what it means to be human.

Look, it was an adolescent girl who bore the Messiah. She was probably 14, 15, 16 years old when we’re talking about Mary. So this is a cultural reality that has not been good for us.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, thanks. See you next week.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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