The World and Everything in It - July 23, 2021

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

As events in Cuba continue to unfold, a conversation about the one group the communist government seems to fear the most.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Culture Friday.

Plus a new trilogy of horror films targeting teens. Spoiler alert: they’re plenty scary for Christian parents.

And George Grant returns with this month’s Word Play.

BROWN: It’s Friday, July 23rd. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

BROWN: Now, news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Summer Olympic Games open in front of empty seats » The Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo officially begin today.

But for many fans who were hoping to attend this year’s games, the opening ceremony will be a bittersweet occasion.

AUDIO: And when we first moved to Japan I was so excited for this day. So I’m still excited. I’m trying to be very hopeful, even though we can’t go to any of the events.

Some events have already begun with athletes playing in empty venues, including entire stadiums with no fans.

A spate of athletes and staff have tested positive for COVID-19 in recent days.

But Tokyo Olympics officer Hidemasa Nakamura said the ratio of positive tests has been “extremely low.” He said officials have conducted about 96,000 tests and have had fewer than a hundred positive results.

But while Olympic Village has not been hard hit, Tokyo hit another six-month high in new cases on Thursday. The 2,000 new cases are the highest total since January.

COVID-19 death rates soar in Southeast Asia » Still, Japan is faring quite well as compared to other parts of Southeast Asia where death rates from COVID-19 are soaring. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has more.

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: India was the first major nation ravaged by the delta variant. But in the last two weeks three Southeast Asian nations have now all surpassed India’s peak per capita death.

Indonesia has converted nearly all of its oxygen production to medical use to try and keep up with demand from COVID-19 patients struggling to breathe.

Hospital staff in Malaysia have had to resort to treating patients on the floor.

And in Myanmar’s largest city, graveyard workers have been laboring day and night to keep up with the grim demand for new cremations and burials.

The spread of the delta variant coupled with low vaccination rates is devastating the region.

In Indonesia, at least 1,400 people are now dying from COVID-19 each day. That’s up sevenfold since the middle of June.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Biden administration reportedly mulling change to mask guidance as cases surge » In the United States, the death rate has not increased significantly. But hospitalizations have doubled since late June as new COVID-19 infections continue to spiral upward.

On Wednesday, new daily cases topped 56,000 for the first time since April.

That reportedly has health officials within the Biden administration debating whether to change the federal guidance on mask wearing in public.

At the moment, that guidance still states that vaccinated Americans generally do not need to wear a mask. And White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday…

PSAKI: The head of the CDC, our public health arm, just spoke to this earlier this morning and made clear that there had not been a decision to change our mask guidance.

The American Academy of Pediatrics this week recommended that all students over the age of 2 wear a mask when they return to school in the fall.

China rebuffs WHO’s terms for further COVID-19 origins study » China is once again blocking a full investigation into the origins of COVID-19. WORLD’s Sarah Schweinsberg has that story.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: The Chinese government Thursday rejected the World Health Organization’s plan for the second phase of a study into the origins of the pandemic.

The plan would further probe the possibility that the virus may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. A senior Chinese health minister called that unacceptable.

A team of investigators from the WHO conducted the first phase of the probe earlier this year. Despite only having access to very limited information, the team declared it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus escaped from a lab.

But last week, WHO director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus conceded that there had been a “premature push” to rule out the lab leak theory.

The Biden administration reacted, condemning China’s continued stonewalling. In a statement, the White House said “We are deeply disappointed. Their position is irresponsible and, frankly, dangerous.”

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg.

U.S. imposes new Cuba sanctions over human rights abuses » The Biden administration announced new sanctions Thursday against a Cuban official and a government special brigade. That in response to human rights abuses during a government crackdown on protests in Cuba earlier this month.

State Dept. spokesman Ned Price…

PRICE: We will stand with the Cuban people who are exercising their universal rights of peaceful protest, peaceful assembly, freedom of speech.

The Treasury Department said the sanctions will target the Cuban Interior Ministry Special Brigade and military and political leader Alvaro Lopez Miera.

U.S. officials say he “has played an integral role in the repression of ongoing protests in Cuba."

Cuban forces have attacked protesters and arrested or disappeared more than 100 protesters.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: the rise in deaths of despair.

Plus, politics and poetry.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, July 23rd, 2021. 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 Culture Friday.

We are watching—as best we can—events in Cuba.

And when I say “as best we can,” that is to say, not very well. Cuba is, after all, in the grip of a totalitarian, communist government—so information flow is a big problem.

What we do know is that everyday Cubans, the people who have to live under that crushing system, have become restless and a few weekends ago took to the streets, chanting “Down with the dictatorship,” “we want liberty.”

This week on this program we heard from a Cuban pastor who happened to be in Miami just as the unprecedented protests broke out. And so he was able to speak freely.

Talking with Onize Ohikere, reporting for WORLD, Pastor Alexis Pérez spoke about how the Cuban church is responding to what’s happening around them.

PEREZ: “… we have a lot of limitations in Cuba, we have a lot of persecutions, and things like that in Cuba. So it is difficult to be a Christian in Cuba. We don’t have the open persecution that you will see in other places. But the government is always trying to limit what church can do. So I think that most of the Christian they are, they are okay with what is happening, if this is coming to an end of the government. I will say that. Most of the Christians, because we have been suffering. Though, I think that most of the Christians also in Cuba, we don’t think that we should be involved in these kind of violent events and trying to take over a government. So we think that we need to wait on God, pray, be peacemakers. And see what God is going to do.”

BROWN: It’s Culture Friday. John Stonestreet is here. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Good morning, John.

JOHN STONSTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: Pastor Pérez told us that among those arrested as a result of the protests in Cuba were pastors. He was saying most Christians have not gotten involved in protests, but some pastors have. And what the government seems to fear is pastors getting involved and then the parishioners getting involved, too—trying to stamp that out. But I wonder whether it’s too late. What do you think?

STONESTREET: Well, it is hard to know exactly what's going on. It's notable, though—isn't it?—that someone like this, a government like this is afraid of Christians, afraid of the church, and that's because the church has been among the greatest forces of liberty in human history.

It often goes in unexpected directions. I think it's also notable, too, the silence that we've heard from progressive liberals in America who, you know, spend time telling us how great Cuba's, you know, literacy rate is, or you know, in the case of Bernie Sanders, Cuba's health care system, or you know, anything else.

Earlier this week, Rod Dreher carried the letter from a Cuban Catholic named Maria Victoria, Ola, Marietta, I think is her name, writing to the Pope and basically said, you know, the Pope's silence on this has been notable, and I'm going to quote her here. “It hurts a lot, that while they repress the people who took to the streets asking for freedom, you have words to congratulate Argentina's triumph in the Copa America, you talk about plastic waste in the seas, but have not made it even a public prayer for the detainees, the disappeared and all who are frightened in their homes throughout our country.”

And there is a remarkable silence, here from a lot of people that are the first to, you know, tell us that silence is violence in any other context. You know, whether or not the issues that they're talking about are anywhere near the moral and cultural and historical gravity of this event. I think one of the most interesting things here and of course, I can say it's interesting from the safety of our perch here in the United States, and it's brutal on the ground, you know, will this be the end of communism in Cuba? May it be so. But boy, whenever these things fall apart, there's an awful lot of victims in the blast radius, you might say, the damage affects a lot of people.

The last thing, Nick and Myrna, and that is whenever you see something like this in other parts of the country, you can almost sense there's got to be Christians involved. There's got to be Christians who care about the truth about reality that communism denies not just their suppression of you know, theism or their denial or the celebration of Christmas, but just the way God made people, that there is a yearning for freedom in the human heart that was put there by God. And that's what we're seeing in Cuba. I think.

EICHER: I want to go back to a report a week ago by the Centers for Disease Control, sadly interesting piece of data, and it’s this: Covid, of course, was the big health story in 2020, but here’s another: deaths from overdoses spiked up 30 percent year on year. The number was 71,000 in 2019 and 93,000 in the Covid year 2020. Is this a continuation of a deaths-from-despair trend we’ve talked about before? Have you seen analysis on that?

STONESTREET: Yeah, I have. And I think it absolutely is, because this is something that I worried about, from the very beginning. These are the pre existing conditions, culturally speaking, for COVID. They are clearly co-morbidities, the numbers you just read are just the overdose numbers.

When you talk about the suicide numbers, particularly of students in schools, this is something where, you know, the push of teachers unions everywhere to keep students home, it actually made being at home that much more dangerous. In terms of suicidal ideation, we saw it up close and personal here in Colorado, having had to deal with a dramatic spike in suicides among high school students, even in El Paso County, where I live, and the work that was done to address that in partnership between the public schools and the churches, it was a remarkable thing. And of course, COVID hits and all that gets put to a stop.

You know, you look at this, the CDC and themselves released a number a few months ago saying 25% of school aged children had suicidal ideation during COVID. I can't even believe that that could possibly be true. That number is so outrageous. And yet here we are. Look, the physical conditions don't define who we are, the physical conditions affect who we are in the in the context of our cultural moment. And there were plenty of pre existing conditions that have to do with isolation that have to do with the lack of accountability with other people that have to do with the the lack of meaning, and purpose, which is often found in being able to accomplish something to be live out on the creation mandate, in biblical terms. COVID left room for none of that.

And so staying home is not a solution. When screen time isolates us from real relationships, real friends from being known, takes us deeper into addictions than to just increase the time on screens might keep us physically safe and put us far more emotionally, spiritually relationally at risk, I expect all of these numbers that are just now coming out from COVID to be really bad, I hope I'm wrong. But I don't think I will be, unfortunately.

BROWN: I’ve spent a lot of time telling the backstories behind the music of a number of Christian singers and songwriters—that's why these next two stories caught my attention.

First one: Matthew West, whose voice we've heard here on WORLD, wrote a song called Modest is Hottest—a fun little song on modesty, which he pulled down after a Twitter protest! He said, sorry, guess I’m just an overprotective dad, or some such.

Switching gears to another award-winning singer/songwriter, Amy Grant—and I heard about this one from you, John. But for the listener I’ll summarize: Grant appeared on a pro-LGBT podcast and when asked about gay artists in country music, she said, and I’ll quote: “I think it’s important to set a welcome table for people of all sexual orientations because none of us are a surprise to God. Nothing about who we are or what we’ve done.”

So here are two hugely popular Christian artists—and maybe they’re really doing what they believe in—but I want to ask the question Van Morrison is asking in one of his new songs: Where have all the rebels gone?

STONESTREET: Yeah, that's it. That tells you an awful lot about cultural pressure, doesn't it?

And who knew Van Morrison is releasing new songs. God bless him. That's a that's kind of you know, success of Mick Jagger proportion. So you know, how's that still going on?

Look, the Matthew West thing I don't even want to talk about. I think it was a fun little song. And the controversy was a foe controversy. And this is ridiculous. And I'll just say that and leave it there.

The Amy Grant story was an interesting one because she's legendary in the industry. And she didn't say anything technically wrong, did she? “You know, it's important to set a welcome table for people of all sexual orientations. None of us are surprised to God nothing about who we are what we've done.” I agree with that.

What I said in our short commentary on this, which is concerning is that it is very easy to say the culturally acceptable truths, and then not say, the culturally unacceptable part of the truth. And to think what we've said the truth, the pro LGBT podcast host took her words as an endorsement of his lifestyle.

Those of us who communicate have a responsibility into the ins and outs of communication. And that means, I have a responsibility to think clearly about what I say. I have a responsibility to articulate clearly what I say. And I have a responsibility to understand the listener, the audience. In other words, when you telegraph a culturally acceptable truth, and are silent, forever, on culturally unacceptable truths, it's very clear what you're doing this is called tickling ears in the New Testament, the omission is intentional, and it communicates something to the listener that we need to know is being communicated.

Now look, I get it, I mean, none of us want the conversation. To end none of us want, you know, lost people to walk away from the table. And I you know, I'm not saying there was any sort of nefariousness or that, you know, she herself has become pro LGBT. I don't know. I have no inside knowledge of that. I don't know at all. I just, I just know that there's an easy way to do this. And the easy way to do this often communicates the exact opposite of what is true.

In this case, you know, you're going to be asked these questions. And you can decide whether the goal of answering is to be liked to be invited back to be accepted, to not offend anyone or to honor Christ. And you don't always have to choose between those options, but increasingly in our culture, you need to be prepared to choose between these options.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

EICHER: Good to chat, thanks so much and have a great weekend.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

MUSIC: “Where Have All the Rebels Gone?” by Van Morrison

NICK EICHER, HOST: At my house, certain words trigger immediate action.

AUDIO: Minka. Squirrel!

Yeah, four seconds from asleep to on the hunt.

But when some others see a squirrel, they get out of the way.

A teenage driver in Massachusetts swerved so as not to hit squirrel in the road.

But what he hit instead was a house. And not just any house. It was a cottage constructed in the year 1650 by an ancestor of President Abraham Lincoln.

No one was injured, but the historic home was.

Police arrived at the Samuel Lincoln Cottage to find an Audi SUV parked mostly inside—after ploughing into a wall outside.

Samuel Lincoln was President Lincoln's great-grandfather. A team of specialists is working to carefully repair the damage.

As for the squirrel—so long as my faithful doberman is nowhere near—looks like it’s going to be OK.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, July 23, 2021. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a scary new film series targeting teens.

Earlier this month, Netflix released a trilogy of horror films adapted from R. L. Stine’s Fear Street books. Some teens may be familiar with the series, which Stine himself rates as PG. But the R-rated films include occult elements and woke values not in the original stories.

And reviewer Emily Whitten says that makes them dead on arrival for Christian families.

EMILY WHITTEN, REPORTER: In terms of blood and gore, the Fear Street trilogy offers nothing new. It’s rated R for “for strong bloody violence, drug content, language, and some sexual content.” Over three installments, the films look a lot less like R. L. Stine’s Fear Street books and more like financial blockbusters Scream and Friday the 13th.

HALLOWELL: It’s a billion dollar industry at this point. The fear industry in Hollywood. And that has been a number that has been growing.

That’s Billy Hallowell. He’s a spokesman for Pure Flix. And he’s written about Hollywood’s financial incentives in his book, Playing with Fire.

But money isn’t the only factor influencing these films. With Christian faith declining across America, Hallowell says spiritual confusion is driving interest in occult themes. Movies like the Fear Street trilogy tap into real spiritual hunger—just not in a wholesome way.

HALLOWELL: We innately know there’s something more, most of us, the vast majority of human beings. And so we sometimes go the wrong way to figure out where that is, and not going towards Christ which is where we’re called to go.

That spiritual vacuum also leads to deconstructing traditional Christian morals. And I don’t just mean the usual sex, violence, and bad language. Fear Street may be the first “woke” horror movie. In an interview hosted by Comingsoon.net, director Leigh Janiak explained the ideology driving the script.

CLIP: It was kind of the reason I thought we could make Fear Street now. So we could tackle things like systemic oppression, police violence, and police planting evidence, like you said, homophobia, all of the things, but it was baked into the idea, the central kind of conflict of Shadysiders and Sunnyvale.

To get what she’s saying, you need to know a little about the Fear Street world. It’s basically divided into two separate towns—Sunnyvale and Shadyside. Sunnyvale is the affluent, white town, and Shadyville is the poor, diverse town next door … with a murder problem. Here’s a clip from Fear Street Part 2:1978, in which two characters discuss a recent death.

CLIP: ‘Deep down you feel it, don’t you? In Shadyside, there’s something here that’s just holding us down, cursing us.’ ‘That’s enough.’ You know, you’re just too scared to admit it.”

The plot centers around lesbian couple Deena and Sam who both come from Shadeyside. In the first film, Sam disturbs a witch’s grave, and soon, the witch and her henchmen begin to hunt Sam. Eventually, the witch seems to possess her. In the second film, Deena and her brother try to cure Sam. They visit a woman who survived a 1978 killing spree by the same witch.

CLIP: You saw her and you survived. Please. Maybe something happened to you. Something that can help us stop her...

In the third film, the teens go back to 1666 to discover the origins of the witch and her curse. Spoiler alert here: turns out the witch wasn’t a witch at all. The Goode family—upstanding white Puritans—are the real source of all the evil and carnage. The second half of the film jumps back to 1994 where Deena finally figures out how to save Sam and Shadyside.

CLIP: We need to kill Nick Goode.

Nick Goode is the white sheriff. So, in this fantasy world, lesbian love is good. Stupid, prudish Puritans are evil. And the only way to stop that evil is to kill the white sheriff, who confirmed his forefathers’ deal with the devil. Although, actually, it turns out that the devil isn’t all that scary. In this clip from the third movie, Deena explains what she really fears:

CLIP: “I don’t fear the devil, Hannah. I fear the neighbor who would accuse me. I fear the mother that would let her daughter hang. I fear Union. They lead us like lambs to the slaughter and expect us to just follow.”

By going back to the Puritans, the filmmakers connect modern day politics with the sin of our forefathers—things like the Salem Witch trials and slavery. They also present extreme caricatures of Christians as judgemental and cruel. For instance, here’s how one mom sounds when she finds her daughter in a lesbian relationship:

CLIP: I see what you really are, girl. An abomination.

That’s pretty extreme. But before we hit back, I think it’s worth asking, are Christians doing all we can to live down this caricature? Too often, I see social media posts by folks who claim to be Christians that sound a lot like that caricature.

Of course, the woke solution for evil isn’t just misguided—it mirrors the same kind of cruelty and blindness it decries.

Fear Street filmmakers rightly perceive love at the center of man’s fight against evil. But they put disordered sexual love in the place of God’s divine love. As with any idol, a deadly mistake.

Here’s Billy Hallowell again:

HALLOWELL: Hollywood has often spent a lot of time ignoring, denigrating or ignoring the only solution we have to evil in this world. And that is the tragic part, and I think, sort of the call to Christians too, of  how do we engage with this in a way that reaches people? Because, not only are people not being reached, they’re being given an opposing ideology that slashes anything that would be a solution for them.

If you're a parent who can keep your teens from watching these films, do it. But let’s face it, millions of teens—including Christian teens—are going to see them. That means parents, grandparents, and pastors need to be willing to talk about their troubling themes. If we do that humbly and prayerfully, seeking to listen as well as instruct, we have nothing to fear. As the apostle John reminds us, “perfect love casts out all fear.”

I’m Emily Whitten.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, July 23rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

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

Time now for Word Play. This month, George Grant dives into one of the most-significant works of the English language.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: Just as it is axiomatically assumed that politics and religion do not make for particularly pleasant dinner table conversation, it is likewise assumed that they do not make for particularly pleasant poetry either. But, John Milton sunders both assumptions in his masterful work, Paradise Lost. It is a work that is explicitly political and inescapably religious. Indeed, it is a prime example of the most unbending ideological and theological dogmatism of the zealously partisan 17th century. And yet, it is magnificent poetry. Its beauty and grace are undeniable. Its majestic cadence, its lofty vision, and its soaring images have earned Milton a place in English letters second only to Shakespeare.

According to Samuel Johnson, Milton’s work is “a treasure of unbounded breadth and depth and height.” Walter Scott agreed saying, it “set the standard against which all future epics might be judged.” Harold Bloom has asserted, “If Shakespeare is the center of the Western literary canon, Milton is its anchor.” And Thomas Macaulay said, “Milton’s poetry acts like an incantation. His words are words of enchantment.”

It is astonishing that a work should come from the pen of an author as controversial as Milton who lived in an equally controversial age. A bloody Civil War sundered what was once Merry England. That calamitous time was followed by the regicide of King Charles, 10 years of Puritan parliamentary rule, and finally the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. These events were not merely the background to Milton’s life: they were his life. He was an active, passionate, and crucial player in those revolutionary events. And his poetry is indelibly marked by his activism and devotion.

Milton’s intention in Paradise Lost was to explain the world of conflict in contemporary England through the lens of the Great War in Heaven between Satan’s infernal minions and God’s providential kingdom—in an astonishingly beautiful epic poem to rival Homer and Virgil. In order to accomplish that aim, he not only controversially recast the Biblical narrative of the Fall, but he also controversially recast the English language as well—contributing more new words, or neologisms, than any other writer in history. He imposed new meanings on old words (like: space, goose, and fragrance); he transformed verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs (like: stunning, enjoyable, and irresponsible); he created a host of new compound words (like: arch-fiend, self-delusion, and lovelorn); and he invented a veritable catalog of entirely new words (like: pandemonium, terrific, sensuous, dismissive, complacency, liturgical, debauchery, padlock, and didactic).

Milton died in 1674, just after the second edition of Paradise Lost had appeared to mild critical acclaim. During his life, it sold well enough to earn Milton a total of about 10 pounds. But over the next two decades, the book went through six editions, including one published in 1678 with large, engraved illustrations. Since then, it has never lost its status as a classic, and it has never stopped being a source of controversy. Milton would not have had it any other way.

I’m George Grant.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Well, I received a nice note suggesting we shake up the alphabetized Friday thank-you routine—and it’s a great idea—so a special thank-you shout out to our team, in order of appearance this week.

Mary Reichard, Kent Covington, Katie Gaultney, Kristen Flavin, Anna Johansen Brown, Josh Schumacher, Kim Henderson, Onize Ohikere, Janie B. Cheaney, Sarah Schweinsberg, Caleb Bailey, Steve West, Cal Thomas, Emily Whitten, and George Grant.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Johnny Franklin and Carl Peetz are our audio engineers who stay up late to get the program to you early! Leigh Jones is managing editor. Paul Butler is executive producer. And Marvin Olasky is editor in chief.

And you! Thank you for supporting independent Christian journalism.

The Bible says: Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching.

Mindful today of the struggle for freedom for Cuba, let’s be sure to give thanks for the freedom we have to worship with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Lord willing, we’ll meet you back here on Monday.

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