The World and Everything in It: November 7, 2023

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like me. Hi, my name is Laura Mennen and I live in Oregon, Illinois, where in the sweet Providence of the Lord, I have the privilege of attending the church where today's Book of the Month author Chris Braus is pastor. I hope you enjoy today's program.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! War in the Middle East is sparking protests and attacks on American university campuses.

AUDIO: I don't wear my Star of David around my neck anymore because I'm scared someone will attack me.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And WORLD’s Classic Book of the Month. It’s about forgiveness:

BRAUNS: It's only when the grim reality of the justice of God is hanging over the heads of your enemies, that you are moved to compassion.

And WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney says modern America and the Roman empire share similar ideas on unwanted children.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, November 7th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

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

REICHARD: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Trump trial » Former President Trump says the civil fraud trial that threatens his real estate empire in New York is the work of political operatives.

TRUMP: It’s a very unfair situation. This is really election interference. That’s all it is. This trial is ridiculous.

Trump heard there just before taking the stand in the trial on Monday. And there was more than a little friction in the courtroom. Judge Arthur Engoron repeatedly chastised the former president … as Trump blasted the proceedings from the witness stand, calling the trial a “witch hunt.”

Engeron told Trump to simply answer the questions, adding “this is not a political rally.”

It was New York’s Democratic Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the suit against the Trump Organization. She told reporters Monday:

JAMES: Mr. Trump has repeatedly and consistently misrepresented and inflated the value of his assets.

But Trump says he’s done nothing wrong, and James “should be ashamed of herself.”

HALEVI: [Speaking Hebrew]

Israel offensive » Israel’s top general says the Israeli military is “inflicting severe damage to Hamas.”

Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi said Israeli Defense Forces—or IDF— are successfully targeting terrorist leaders and “destroying Hamas’ infrastructure in Gaza.”

SOUND: [Israeli military blast]

An Israeli field cannon heard there taking aim at one of those targets.

The IDF has severed northern Gaza from the rest of the besieged territory to isolate Hamas. That’s ahead of an expected ground battle with militants in Gaza City that could mark the start of an even bloodier phase of the war.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says terrorist forces must be destroyed.

NETANYAHU: That battle is now being waged by us against Hamas in Gaza. There is no substitute for victory.

Biden-Netanyahu » President Biden spoke with Netanyahu by phone on Monday.

The White House says he reaffirmed U.S. support for Israel’s defense, but also reiterated the need to minimize harm to civilians.

The Biden administration is still pushing for a so-called humanitarian pause in the fighting, but has yet to sell Israel on that idea for fear that it would allow Hamas to regroup.

But National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters:

KIRBY: This remains something that we are actively discussing with our Israeli counterparts, and we consider ourselves at the beginning of this conversation, not at the end of it.

Blinken, deterrence » Meantime, Secretary of State Tony Blinken is back in Washington after a round of high-stakes diplomacy in the Middle East. Blinken visited Israel, and then met with leaders in several Arab countries.

BLINKEN: We had very important conversations throughout this trip with countries in the region on the role that everyone can play in making sure that the conflict doesn’t expand, doesn’t spread to other countries.

CIA Director William Burns is now reportedly in the Middle East, meeting with world leaders and intelligence partners.

And the Pentagon has dispatched an Ohio-class submarine to the region through the Suez Canal. It’s the latest in a series of U.S. military moves designed to deter Iran and its proxies from expanding the war to other fronts.

U.S.-China talks » President Biden and other top US leaders are set to meet face to face with their Chinese counterparts in California this week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. WORLD’s Lauren Canterberry has more.

LAUREN CANTERBERRY: The summit kicks off on Thursday in San Francisco amid growing friction between the U.S. and China over issues ranging from trade to national security.

U.S. leaders say they want to keep lines of communication open and keep those tensions from boiling over.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will host Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng for two days of talks. And …

President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to meet during the summit next week for the first time in nearly a year.

For WORLD, I’m Lauren Canterberry.

Election preview » The Virginia State Senate and House of Delegates are up for grabs tonight. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been working to help his party take control of both chambers. The election could have big implications for pro-life laws in the state.

Youngkin told ABC’s This Week:

YOUNGKIN: I really feel that this is a moment for us to come together around reasonable limits where we can protect life at 15 weeks where a baby feels pain with full exceptions in the case of rape and incest when the mother's life is at risk.

And in Ohio voters will decide today whether to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.

Among other elections, voters in Kentucky and Mississippi will decide whether to reelect incumbent governors or choose a new chief executive.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Tensions rise on campus as the Israel-Hamas war unfolds. Plus, November’s Classic Book of the Month.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday, the 7th of November, 2023. This is WORLD Radio. Thanks for joining us and good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up on The World and Everything in It: rising anti-semitism in higher education.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of people in Washington D.C. protested in support of Palestinians with a chant that means the elimination of the state of Israel.

CROWD CHANTING: From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

REICHARD: Meanwhile, university administrators are being pulled into unwinnable situations. Pro-Palestinian professors and students demand the right to protest Israel’s war to root out Hamas in Gaza …while Jewish alumni and donors threaten to pull their funding if schools continue to tolerate antisemitism.

EICHER: At Columbia University, school officials have created task forces to respond to allegations of antisemitism on campus and doxing of students. Doxing is the practice of publishing private or identifying information about specific people with the intent to intimidate.

REICHARD: WORLD Radio Reporter Mary Muncy visited the Ivy League school in New York City to see what’s happening.

BERNARD FRESHMAN: I don't wear my Star of David around my neck anymore because I'm scared someone will attack me.

MARY MUNCY, REPORTER: This Jewish freshman is standing in Columbia University’s courtyard… at a vigil for people kidnapped by Hamas. For security reasons, she and other students at the vigil didn’t give me their names.

BERNARD FRESHMAN: I don't walk around Columbia's campus without being with someone else, or being on the phone with someone.

She keeps thinking about a Jewish student attacked on her campus last month. That student was placing posters of people kidnapped by Hamas when another student yelled and hit the student with a stick. Police arrested the student on charges of assault and harassment… and classified the incident as a hate crime.

But this freshman decided to show her support at the Columbia vigil.

She and about 20 other students stand around a display of roses representing the 242 people Hamas has kidnapped in the war.

Nearby, a Jewish upperclassman says she is here for more than a vigil.

BERNARD SENIOR: I guess I'm here just just for some, some support just to be around people who can sort of understand what I'm going through.

SOUND: [Protest]

About three weeks ago, students gathered in the courtyard and held Columbia’s first large pro-Palestinian demonstration. Columbia closed the campus to outsiders during the event for safety concerns. That’s really unusual. People from outside the school had been joining protests, and they have joined several other protests on campus since then.

Two weeks later, a group of more than 100 professors at Columbia signed a statement supporting the students’ right to express their views.

I contacted the pro-Palestinian groups on Columbia’s campus and more than 15 professors who signed the statement. None agreed to speak with me.

But Jewish students from campuses across the country did want to talk.

PNINA: My name is Pnina. I'm a freshman at Tulane.

SOFFER: I'm a junior at the George Washington University...

DAVID FRISCH: My name is David Frisch. I'm in my first year at Harvard Law School.

These students watched with alarm as pro-Palestinian student organizations started releasing statements.

At Harvard, 36 separate student groups signed a statement blaming Israel for the terrorist attacks of October 7. Almost all of them have since removed themselves from that list.

Other campuses have seen violence related to the unrest—everything from protests that turn violent, to students harassed individually. Cornell even canceled classes on Friday due to death threats against Jewish students.

Meanwhile, the conservative media group Accuracy in Media has been revealing the identities of pro-Palestinian students at Harvard and Columbia, a practice called doxxing.

WCVB: The names and faces of Harvard students are displayed under the title “Harvard’s leading antisemites.”

WCVB: This billboard truck was here on Mass Ave just outside campus for about two and a half hours.

NEWSNATION: This has gotten insane, and these are students.

But those are just the loud things, the ones that grab media attention, and that journalists have open access to.

While the Jewish vigil was taking place in the courtyard at Columbia last week, some law students were attending informational sessions on the conflict hosted by the group Columbia Law Students for Palestine.

The event organizers refused to let me attend, and declined to share recordings of the events with me. That said, one of the event speakers was Peter Beinart. Here he is in an interview with MSNBC from October 10th.

BEINART: If Palestinians don’t have basic rights, new Palestinians organizations will grow up, and they may do terrible things too because brutalized people do brutal things sometimes.

A few days later, Beinart wrote in a New York Times column that the Oct. 7 murder of 1,700 civilians, including women and children, was a natural reaction to not being able to peacefully protest and resist Israeli oppression.

At George Washington University, Jewish student Sabrina Soffer says a few days after the war began, The Elliot School of International Affairs put together a panel on the conflict with five or six people.

SOFFER: So students are coming in here looking at five different people thinking that this is a balanced panel. But none of them supported Israel.

Soffer went to the panel and said the speakers used what she called catchy, intellectual language like what students would hear in class.

SOFFER: This is, I think, actually the most subtle and dangerous and almost, I would call it insidious, way of-of molding the minds of young people.

But this isn’t just an intellectual issue.

SOUND: [VIGIL]

Every Jewish student I talked to knew someone in Israel, and many of them are scared to wear outward signs of their faith in public.

The question of how administrations will respond is still largely unanswered. so for now, this Columbia upperclassman says she’ll keep going as always:

BERNARD SENIOR: We're all just people who are just trying to get through our days and like, keep up with school and with work.

She’s grieving her friends who died in the first attacks and hoping conversations about Hamas’s actions change for the better.

BERNARD SENIOR: I don't want to have to be fighting for like, to try and convince people that their death isn't justified.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy at Columbia University in New York.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Free speech on campus.

As we know, speech rights and obligations can be complicated. Private universities are facing legal questions that are different from the questions government institutions face. It’s difficult to know what’s protected and what’s not.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Joining us now to help sort it out is Tyson Langhofer. He serves as senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom with Alliance Defending Freedom.

Tyson, good morning.

TYSON LANGHOFER, GUEST: Hey, good morning. Thanks for having me.

REICHARD: Glad you’re here. Well, let’s start with the baseline. What is the legal definition of hate speech?

LANGHOFER: There actually isn't a legal definition of hate speech, which is what really creates the problem in First Amendment context, because what might be hateful to one person may not be hateful to another person. And so we have taken the approach in America to have a very broad protection of speech so that the government doesn't get to define whose speech they think is hateful and thus prohibited and whose speech they think is okay and thus not prohibited.

EICHER: Okay, so going beyond the legal definitions which don't exist, are there uniform policies about hate speech on college campuses? Or is this just an ad hoc kind of case by case thing?

LANGHOFER: It is an ad hoc case by case thing, which is what creates the problem. So what the Supreme Court has said is that the government cannot look to the content or the viewpoint of somebody’s speech in order to prohibit that speech. And so when a government official looks at somebody's speech and says, “Well, that viewpoint is hateful, therefore, I'm going to prohibit it”, the government or the Supreme Court has said that that is unconstitutional. And so what you see is there is no uniformity across the college campuses, because it is a subjective determination, which is what the Supreme Court has said the First Amendment prohibits.

REICHARD: You know, we've heard the chants "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" from those who are supporting Hamas, meaning Palestinian control over the entire territory of Israel's borders, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Now, some say that is not anti-semitic, it's only anti-zionist, Tyson, what do you make of that argument?

LANGHOFER: Well, I mean, I think that if you're advocating for the complete annihilation of a people group from a certain, you know, country, that that makes it difficult to argue that, you know, your that your argument against simply a country as opposed to, to a people group. But I mean, I think that the debate that we're having here, about what type of rhetoric that we can engage in, in a very, very politicized and highly inflammatory environment, is the very debate that the First Amendment is designed  to protect. And what the Supreme Court has said, is that the highest principle of our First Amendment jurisprudence is to protect the thought that we hate. But I think that's what our First Amendment calls us to, is to protect those things. Now, obviously, there are certain limits. So if there are people calling for imminent violence against anyone, regardless of who they are, that's not protected. But if they're arguing in general for broader principles, then that is protected, even if we think that principle is hateful or wrong.

EICHER: So maybe that's the way to do it, because I intended to ask, how do you sort of make that balance between protecting free speech but also condemning ideas that justify abhorrent action? So that's the line whether it's sort of inciting or how do you make that distinction?

LANGHOFER: That's absolutely the line as the Supreme Court has drawn it. They've said there's there's very narrow areas that are unprotected speech, one of them would be a true threat. So if I'm threatening somebody in the moment and saying, I'm going to commit some act of violence against you that's not protected, you know, actually engaging or encouraging people to go engage in imminent violence that's also not protected, but advocating for principles that might lead people in the future to take some acts which are unlawful, that is protected. And that's sort of the line that we've drawn. And I think it's really important to understand that if you have a conservative originalist view of the Constitution, you have to understand that it is going to require us to allow people to say things that we vehemently disagree with, that we think are wrong and immoral, but that also protects us as Christians to engage in speech that we believe is consistent with our biblical worldview, that many people would say it is hateful or shouldn't be protected as well.

REICHARD: I have to ask this question: why are some of our most prestigious campuses inundated with these pro Hamas views? What's going on?

LANGHOFER: Well, I think when you see that they have been taught this the issue of of critical theory, where everything is intersectional. And and it's all about who we deem as the bigger victim. And there's not a broader justice, there's not an absolute, that's it's the victim, and it's based upon identity rather than actual actions. And I think that has led them to stop looking at the actual facts on the ground, and just looking at whose identity do we believe is more oppressed? And in that, in that framework, I then determine who is the victim and who we should be supporting, as opposed to looking at it broader, what is the truth of the situation, and what is just in this situation, regardless of what their identities are? Everybody should be, you know, advocating for a just result, regardless of the identity of the individual who's being victimized.

EICHER: Tyson, I know you've been paying very careful attention to this for many years. What is your assessment of what's missing from the conversation about free speech and mitigating harm on campus? What's missing?

LANGHOFER: Yeah, I think what's missing is this. There's a large and growing portion of campus which is advocating for social justice. And we want justice as well as Christians, we desire justice. But what they don't understand is that you cannot achieve justice without obtaining the truth. What is the truth, truth and justice are inextricably linked. We must arrive at truth and then we can get the justice and everybody I think can agree we want a just society. But shutting down certain viewpoints is not going to get us to truth. And it's not going to get us to justice. And I think that's what's missing is this ability to to engage with people that we very, very much disagree with, but to do it in a way that where it's a dialectic rather than a debate, right? It's the ability to learn and to listen to the other side, and explore what they're saying. All right, at the same time, of being able to give them your viewpoint and recognize they're both created an image of God and that they're both we all have that inherent human dignity and we should respect them as a person, even if we disagree with their viewpoint.

REICHARD: Tyson Langhofer serves as senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom. Thanks for joining us!

LANGHOFER: Thank you for having me.

NICK EICHER, HOST: In China’s Hunan province, in a nature park, you’d find many natural wonders: like waterfalls and mountains.

But also a quite unusual man-made wonder: the world’s most-inconvenient convenience store, as it’s called.

There’s a 21-square-foot shop bolted to the side of a mountain about 400 feet up, selling bottles of water and snacks to the passing clientele, exclusively rock climbers.

Judging by the look of the place, you’d have to be a rock climber yourself to work there.

But I don’t buy the “most-inconvenient” label.

If you’re hanging by a rope and your fingertips with a convenience store hanging right there with you, this is the very definition of convenient.

I’d think the markup, though, would have to be — wait for it — pretty steep.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Even in communist China?

EICHER: It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 7th. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

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

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: our Classic Book of the Month for November. WORLD Executive Producer Paul Butler introduces us to a book on forgiveness you may not have heard of. We start with a reading from that book.

BRAUNS READING FROM HIS BOOK: If we're to understand how we should forgive one another, we must begin with this key principle: God expects Christians to forgive one another in the same way that He forgave them.

PAUL BUTLER: Fifteen years ago Pastor Chris Brauns wrote Unpacking Forgiveness: Biblical Answers for Complex Questions and Deep Wounds, published by Crossway Books.

BRAUNS READING FROM HIS BOOK: Understanding what the Bible teaches about forgiveness should not be unpacked with a sense of dread. Rather, there should be a confident certainty that those who unpack forgiveness and put it into action will reflect and show the brilliant beauty of Christ finding their maximum joy and happiness in him.

Chris Brauns is senior pastor of the Red Brick Church in Stillman Valley, Illinois. He originally wrote Unpacking Forgiveness for the people in his church. He started with the scriptures and a collection of deeply theological but often academic books on forgiveness. He wanted to make those resources more approachable for everyday Christians in light of the Bible. He had no idea where it would eventually lead him.

BRAUN: I just spent a lot of time with victims in Northern Ireland who have family members who were murdered.

This past summer a group of survivors of “The Troubles” invited Pastor Brauns to Northern Ireland—where over 30-years, hundreds of people died in bombings and other acts of domestic terrorism.

BRAUNS: I picture a man I met with in Northern Ireland, whose father was murdered during “The Troubles.” And the most well known tell all book was a book called Killing Rage. And chapter one is “The killing of Ivan Toombs.” Can you imagine picking up a book and reading about how the murder of your father was planned and carried out? What do you say to someone in that situation? It's not about what I say. It's about what the Lord Jesus says: “Come to me all you are weary and burdened, and I'll give you rest.”

In Unpacking Forgiveness Brauns offers help and hope—both for those who have experienced devastating trauma, as well as those harassed by the everyday smaller hurts of life. With great pastoral care, Brauns offers practical suggestions on avoiding bitterness, knowing when to overlook an offense, and learning how to forgive.

BRAUNS READING FROM HIS BOOK: Jesus taught that we must work out differences with the greatest sense of urgency.

The 235-page book is broken up into logical, bite-sized chapters that make it well suited for study as individuals or as a group. The 8-question forgiveness quiz at the start of the book sets the stage well for what follows. There are also a handful of discussion questions at the end of each chapter. At times, the answers feel a little too obvious, but by and large they are helpful in summarizing the most significant points of each chapter.

There are plenty of self-help books available today that deal with forgiveness from a pragmatic or clinical perspective. Brauns tries to bring a more theological treatment, particularly shaped by the gospel.

BRAUNS: So one of my goals with Unpacking Forgiveness was to contrast Biblical gospel shaped or biblical forgiveness, with the modern therapeutic understanding of forgiveness.

Here’s how Pastor Brauns defines Gospel-shaped forgiveness:

BRAUNS READING FROM HIS BOOK: Forgiveness is a commitment by the offended to pardon graciously the repentant for moral liability and to be reconciled to that person, although not all consequences are necessarily eliminated.

And that’s one of the key distinctives of Brauns’ book. He points to God’s forgiveness as the model. God offers forgiveness to the sinner, but we aren’t forgiven until we act upon it…Forgiveness and reconciliation are uniquely connected.

BRAUNS I think that's an echo of the gospel, right? We, all of us, offended a holy God. God didn't say it's okay, I look past it - it's automatically taken care of. He graciously gave his only begotten Son, that if we would repent and believe in Him, we are forgiven. That no longer stands between us and God. That's what forgiveness is.

So what if the person who perpetrated the offense doesn’t seek reconciliation or forgiveness. Or when there is no opportunity for reconciliation…what then?

BRAUNS: The biblical answer is clear: love. We’re to love them. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Christ demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for you. So I think the New Testament would call that love. We’re to love them.

One of the most helpful parts of the book is Brauns reminder of divine justice. He writes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was compassionate toward those who ultimately killed him.

BRAUNS: Bonhoeffer said it's only when the grim reality of the justice of God is hanging over the heads of your enemies, that you are moved to compassion for them. He understood that they would face a just judge. And see, this is I think one of the errors of the therapeutic. It turns everything in on me. It's all about what I do and who I am. And I say what you do with all this offense is give it to God. Give it to God.

Unpacking Forgiveness has the photo of a suitcase on its cover. Brauns believes it’s an apt metaphor for the on-going call to forgive, like coming home from a trip and dealing with the dirty laundry. But a decade and a half after he first published the book, he thinks there might be a better image. He says it’s a lot more like moving houses. There are always a few boxes that still need to be unpacked years after the move.

BRAUNS: And then you're down moving the ping pong table and you come across this box of junk that you got to work your way through. And that's how forgiveness is. And listen, that's a lifelong project. And I wish it were only one suitcase. It's not. It's a lot of boxes. It's a lifetime of unpacking.

For WORLD, I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 7th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. A quick note on the commentary to follow: some details may be unsuitable for children. So you may want to hit pause and come back later. You’ve got about 20 seconds.

EICHER: Today in Ohio, voters will decide…among other issues…whether to amend the state constitution to include a right to abortion. The debate may seem new, but it really isn’t.

WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney says modern America has a lot in common with the Roman empire when it comes to killing children.

JANIE B. CHEANEY, COMMENTATOR: “How often do you think of the Roman Empire?” That was a question posed on TikTok last September, a surprising number of men answered, “Every day.”

Author and journalist Louise Perry has been thinking about Rome, in particular the similarities between ancient Roman paganism and today’s social trends. She began a recent article in First Things with a poem by Hollie McNish, called “Conversation with an archaeologist.” How, asked the poet, did the man know the ruins at last night’s archeological dig was a brothel? His answer: “a pit of newborn babies’ bones.”

A classicist friend of Perry’s later confirmed that brutal fact—abortion and infanticide were common practice in Roman brothels. Today, the tiny bones left behind are mostly male; female infants born in the brothel would grow up to supply the brothel. Sex was for sale everywhere in the city of Rome, and throughout the Empire. The slave population, estimated as anywhere from twenty to thirty percent, was ever subject to the appetites of freeborn men. The emperor-worship established by Caesar Augustus aimed to reinforce strength and virtue, but it was impossible to hold those two together, especially while offering sacrifices to less-than-virtuous deities.

The appeal of gods and goddesses, with their spectacular powers and outsized flaws, lingers today in popular children’s books and Marvel and DC heroes. But aside from spectacle, there’s a practical appeal of paganism: you get what you pay for. Whether it’s good crops and a male heir, or a supermodel date and a corner office, there are ways to appease the gods for a dollop of divine favor. This works best for those who can bring something to the table, like an Ivy-League degree. To the pagan mind it only makes sense: winners win because they are winners.

The shock of Christianity was in elevating the weak. That’s one reason why enlightened Romans despised it. Even enlightened Europeans like historian Edward Gibbon and poet Algernon Swinburn saw the gods as nobler, braver, and more inspiring than Jesus the “pale Galilean.” Why shouldn’t the strong control the weak? That was the Nazi ethos, which (not surprisingly) drew inspiration from Wagner and Norse mythology.

I’ve heard many comparisons from the pulpit of Roman decline and modern cultural rot. Louise Perry hears echoes of Roman brothels in the dumpsters behind abortion clinics: the weakest humans sacrificed to pagan utility. Though agnostic about both Christianity and abortion, she’s troubled by our culture’s willful ignorance about the stakes. With infanticide under serious discussion in Canada, and that country’s “Medical Assistance in Dying” law being stretched to influence the decisions of people who aren’t terminal, are we drifting closer to a cultural decline and fall? For all our hand wringing about oppressed groups, what do privileged minorities do once in power but exercise their own forms of oppression? That’s the story of history, after all.

Paganism was officially put down by Christianity but never went away. The “elemental spirits of the world,” as Paul describes it in Colossians, reflect humanity’s default setting that Christ came to defeat. And he will, but in the meantime the battle is ours to fight.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: What’s the science behind presidential polls, and are they trustworthy? We’ll talk with an expert on Washington Wednesday.

And, we’ll meet a stained glass artist who put together the pieces of his family origins.

That and more tomorrow. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says: There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. —1 Corinthians chapter 12, verses 4 through 6.

Go now in grace and peace.

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