The World and Everything in It: October 20, 2023

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like us. My name is Marjorie Kaufman, and I live in Clark Summit, Pennsylvania. My husband Larry and I begin our day quietly with breakfast by candlelight and listening to this podcast. Thank you to our daughter Jennifer Figueroa who introduced us to this wonderful program. I hope you enjoy today's program.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! Today on Culture Friday, we’ll talk with Rosaria Butterfield, author of the new book Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age.

NICK EICHER, HOST: We’ll have that conversation for you here in just a few minutes on Culture Friday.

Also today: WORLD’s arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino reviews a true crime Western directed by Martin Scorsese.

AUDIO: Oh, I was, uh, sent down from Washington DC to see about these murders. / See what about ’em? / See who’s doin’ it.

And Word Play with George Grant. This month, the nonsense words that come from TV shows.

BROWN: It’s Friday, October 20th. 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: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

BIDEN: Good evening my fellow Americans.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Biden speech » President Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office last night about U.S. support for Ukraine and Israel.

BIDEN: Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common; they both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.

The president made the case that it’s “vital for America's national security” for Israel and Ukraine to succeed in their wars. He said if we allow Hamas or Putin to win “conflict and chaos could spread in other parts of the world.”

Biden said he’ll send an urgent funding request to Congress today.

BIDEN: It’s a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations.

It’s expected to call for $105 billion for the next year. That will include $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel and $14 billion for security on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Gaza aid » Meantime, in Gaza, it was still unclear early this morning when truckloads of humanitarian supplies might roll into the Gaza Strip.

CNN reported that a convoy of aid remained parked over the border in Egypt with conditions in the war zone too “volatile” to enter.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres reiterated the desperate situation in Gaza.

GUTERRES: Civilians in Gaza desperately need core services and supplies and for that we need rapid and unimpeded humanitarian access.

According to an agreement, Israel will not stop supplies from entering Gaza unless they are seized by Hamas.

Gaza hospital » A note of correction now following our report yesterday about a deadly hospital explosion in Gaza.

Despite the blast, the hospital itself remains standing.

And while local authorities had estimated the death toll to be close to 500, U.S. officials believe the number to be between 100 and 300.

President Biden last night reiterated a U.S. intel assessment that Israel was not behind the explosion.

State Dept. alert » Meantime the U.S. government has issued a global caution alert. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller:

MILLER: We issued a general travel warning for Americans all across the world to take caution and be on the lookout for increased tensions wherever they might be.

That comes on the heels of a warning by the FBI that terror threats against the United States have been on the rise since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Speaker » On Capitol Hill there’s a new wrinkle in the House speaker saga.

Congressman Jim Jordan, after two failed votes to become speaker this week, now supports a plan to give interim Speaker Pro-tempore Patrick McHenry more power for now.

Allowing McHenry to act as speaker would let the House conduct crucial business until January.

But some Republicans, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, say they don’t love the idea.

MCCARTHY: The more time we waste here, all that ability to get our bill to secure the border, all that ability to eliminate wasteful spending, all that ability to end the woke-ism, we’re losing it.

But Jim Jordan says he’s not giving up his campaign for speaker …

JORDAN: I plan to go to the floor and get the votes and win this race. But I want to go talk with a few of my colleagues. Particularly, I want to talk with the 20 individuals who voted against me.

The House has been without a speaker since McCarthy’s ouster more than two weeks ago.

Jay Powell inflation » Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell says the battle against inflation is not over yet. And the central bank could continue raising interest rates in coming months.

But he said it’s a delicate balancing act. Doing too little could further fuel inflation. But …

POWELL: Doing too much could also do unnecessary harm to the economy.

The Fed has raised interest rates 11 times since March of last year.

Sidney Powell pleads » Sidney Powell, Ex-attorney to former president Donald Trump, entered her plea Thursday on charges related to alleged election metaling in Georgia in 2020.

Clerk: How do you plead to the six counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties?

Powell: Guilty.

Judge: And are you pleading guilty today because you agree that there is a sufficient factual basis, that there are enough facts that support this plea of guilty?

Powell: I do.

With her guilty plea on misdemeanor charges, Powell will receive 5 years probation and $9,000 in fees.

With her plea deal, she avoids a possible prison sentence of up to 20 years. The agreement could require her to testify against her 18 co-defendants, including Former President Donald Trump.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Culture Friday with Rosaria Butterfield. Plus, Killers of the Flower Moon.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 20th of October, 2023.

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. A special guest joins us today, author and speaker Rosaria Butterfield.

She’s author of the new book that so many are talking about: Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age. Good morning and welcome. I’ve been looking forward to talking with you.

ROSARIA BUTTERFIELD: Good morning, Nick and Myrna. I'm so glad to be here with you today.

BROWN: I'm excited as well. Well, I want to start. Of the five lies of our anti Christian age, and I'm going to just list them: Homosexuality is normal. Being a spiritual person is kinder than being a biblical Christian. Feminism is good for the world and the church. Transgenderism is normal. Modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back. So all of those - destructive. I want to know from you, which one do you think is causing the most havoc in the culture and in families?

BUTTERFIELD: One of the things you need to know about The Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age is they all rely upon a similar paradigm. And I would say that that paradigm can be broken down into basically four different chunks of ideas. The first is that we have failed to realize that the seeds of the gospel are in the garden. That you cannot unhinge the Old Testament from the New Testament and still be a Christian. 

The second reason is that we don't seem to know what time it is. And you know, partying like it's 1999 just makes us look stupid and dysfunctional. So what does it mean to be a post-Obergefell world? What does it mean to be a post-Bostock world? What does it mean to send your kids to government school, when the Biden administration believes that the 14th Amendment supports the castration of your 14 year old son and includes an anti-bullying legislation mandated in all federal government schools that promote transgenderism? Well, know what time it is, Christian. 

The third reason is, we don't really love our enemies. We just don't. We're cowards. We're traders. We're hirelings. We need to learn how to love our enemies, and stop pretending that our enemies are our friends. And we do this when we act that common grace is enough. We're so glad that our neighbors who identify as lesbian water their lawn and walk their dogs. We think that's enough. And that means that we're cowards and traitors. 

And then finally, all of this really does rest on an error that feminism has entered into this paradigm that I would say many members of the Church believe. And that's this idea that there is a distinction between sex and gender. And that in order to be a decent person, you need to maintain the sex/gender distinction. And that has really run havoc.

Because, you know, the sex/gender distinction from a feminist perspective would say, “Now look, you know I'm a woman, but I'm really smart. I'm really articulate. I want to be really educated, I have callings that are going to take me away from my creational calling, and that's okay. And that should be reified. And that should be valued, because there's an absolute distinction between sex and gender.” And then transgenderism has simply taken that, quite frankly, to its logical conclusion. To where we no longer even believe that sex is true or valid. And all we have is gender. So all of the five lies rely on all of those paradigms. And all of those paradigms are shot through all of the five lies.

EICHER: I want to ask you about your recent turning away, your recent repentance from using transgender pronouns, Rosaria. You wrote an article that was widely circulated, and you touch on it in the intro to the book. What motivated you to accept the use of preferred pronouns in the first place? Was it rightly motivated in your mind and just wrong? Or were you wrongly motivated from the beginning?

BUTTERFIELD: Well, I'm a dirty, rotten sinner. So everything is rightly motivated in my mind. And that is really a big problem, you know, because I can convince myself that my feelings are indeed sanctified because I feel them. Let me tell you that I spent way too many years as a gay rights activist to trust my feelings on anything short of how I like to take my coffee. But I will say this: one of the efforts in the gay rights movement is you humanize sin or to empathize with the reasons that people sin, what that effect does is it yields the moral language to the left, which means we no longer have a biblical moral language to call people to belief, repentance, and victory over sin. Now, absolutely, we need to see other sinners, including ourselves, as image bearers of a holy God. Is that image of God in them? Yes. Is it marred? Yes. Is it marred in us? Yes. But yes, in an effort to humanize the trans experience, I used transgender pronouns. And I did that for a really long time. And the Lord convicted me that that was a sin.

EICHER: But you did it as a Christian, not as a non-Christian propagandist. But as a Christian, you did it. And that's why I asked the question that way.

BUTTERFIELD: Right. Well, my reasons, and I don't think these are good reasons, but I'll tell you what my reasons were. My reasons were, most of the people that I know from the transgender community have a number of comorbidities and mental health instabilities, and there is absolutely no reason to exacerbate someone's mental health crisis by having a fight over something that you don't think is a big deal. And you might say that before Obergefell, this was all just a matter of vocabulary. You know, you call me Rosie. Call me Rosaria. What's the difference? It's vocabulary. But after the three exchanges in Romans one become codified by civil law, we are not dealing with vocabulary. We're dealing with etiology. 

So for a Christian to use transgender pronouns in this particular climate is simply an act of carrying water for the other team. But more than that. Okay, then you might say, “Well, Rosaria, why didn't you just course correct? Because, you know, people learn stuff.” But Thomas Watson in his wonderful book, The Doctrine of Repentance, actually starts out by explaining what counterfeit repentance is. And you know what counterfeit repentance is? It’s course correcting. We want God to bless the church. And we want God to give victory over sin, to people trapped in homosexuality and transgenderism. Those are awful ways to live. But if I'm Achan in the camp, God's not going to bless what I say or do at all. So I had to just go full face plant and repent. Which, you know, really people, should it be that shocking that Christians repent of their sins?

I mean, quite frankly, what business do we have calling unbelievers to repent of their sins, if we're not willing to repent of ours? So the fact that that article became such a big deal was, and I'm not on social media, so I never know things are a big deal until like, somebody says, “Could we translate this into Korean?” I'm like, “Whoa, wait a second. I think this is a big deal, now.” So yeah, I think we should see more of this. Don't you?

EICHER: Sure. And forgive me if I read this wrong. But, again, going back to the intro to the book, you cited those Supreme Court decisions—Obergefell, Bostock—advancing gay rights as sort of turning you away from pronoun hospitality. But wouldn't it always be wrong, regardless of a Supreme Court decision? I'm just trying to get the distinction.

BUTTERFIELD:  Yes! You are absolutely right. And I think what I tried to say, I don't know that you were reading it wrong, because maybe I was writing it wrong. But what I was trying to say is that sometimes the pressure of the world forces you to see something in a light you hadn't seen before. So it was always true that that was a violation of the ninth commandment. And it was always wrong. And it was always harmful to my friends in the transgender community. Because what we have seen today is simply true, that there is a line that starts with social transitioning. Social transitioning is the using of false pronouns, and the dressing and clothes and that kind of thing. Choosing a false name. Social transitioning leads to cross sex hormones, which leads to surgery, which leads to medically destroyed lives.

And as someone who now speaks at school boards, and before the legislature about these things, I will tell you, it's crucial that we go and we speak as Christians. And that we hold out hope to this community. And here's the simple reason: it's not enough to just chuck in detransitioners. Put them before the limelight. Because you know, the same mental health complexities that caused a person to want to mutilate their bodies, it doesn't go away because they do.

But the other is that we're Christians. We don't throw people away. We don't hold up pictures of 14 year olds who have castrated themselves and their foolish parents as examples of what not to do. Yes, these are examples of what not to do, but these are human beings who need the gospel. And in the Gospel, if you repent and believe, you cannot mock God in heaven and in the New Jerusalem, you will be the man that you were meant to be, you will be the woman that you were meant to be. Your resurrected body will have no trace that you tried to mock God. There is no group more needy of the gospel, the real gospel—not the Side B, Gay Christian, Preston Sprinkle, “Let's-humanize-the-trans-experience.” That is just truly condemning them to a life of torment and potentially an eternity in hell. We preach a gospel of change, of liberty, and of victory. If not realized now, then certainly fully realized in the New Jerusalem.

BROWN: Author and speaker Rosaria Butterfield has been our special guest. Thank you so much.

BUTTERFIELD: My pleasure. Thank you, dear sister and dear brother, may the Lord be with you.

EICHER: We recorded this interview a few days ago and went way beyond our allotted time, because Rosaria is such an interesting person, and she has so much to say.

BROWN: Right, we went about an hour and, to tell the truth, we could’ve gone another hour if I had anything to say about it! But because this is taken from a much longer Q-and-A, what we’ll do is release an extended version of the conversation this weekend.

EICHER: So check The World and Everything in It podcast feed tomorrow to hear the full interview with Rosaria Butterfield. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, October 20th. 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 new motion-picture epic debuts in theaters this weekend.

Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese is back, and he’s exploring some of his favorite themes—love, greed, power, and violence. And like some of his other recent films, this one clocks in at more than three hours.

BROWN: Here’s arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino with a review of Killers of the Flower Moon.

ERNEST: You know, you got nice colored skin. What color would you say that is?

MOLLIE: My color.

COLLIN GARBARINO: Martin Scorsese’s new film Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of a string of murders that plagued the wealthy Osage Indians, and the fledgling FBI’s attempt to bring the killers to justice. It’s a true-crime western set in 1920s Oklahoma that adapts David Grann’s 20-17 nonfiction book of the same name.

TOM: I was sent down from Washington, D.C. to see about these murders.

ERNEST: Hmph. See what about em?

TOM: See who’s doin it.

The U.S. government had already pushed the Osage from their land in Missouri and settled them in Kansas, only to forcibly remove them again to a reservation in Oklahoma a generation later. But the seemingly worthless land in Oklahoma proved exceedingly valuable when the Osage discovered oil in the early 20th century. Money flowed freely among the Osage, and the formerly impoverished nation became the richest people per capita in the world.

CHIEF: When this money start coming, we should have known it come with something else.

Killers of the Flower Moon stars longtime Scorsese collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart. And the movie begins when Ernest arrives in Osage country after serving in the First World War. Ernest is an aimless ne’er-do-well who hopes his uncle Bill “King” Hale might provide him with an opportunity.

ERNEST: I do love that money, sir.

HALE: [chuckles]

Robert De Niro plays Hale– an enterprising businessman and benefactor of the Osage Nation. He’s learned their language and traditions and seems to genuinely love the people.

With some prompting from his uncle, Ernest begins courting an Osage woman named Mollie, played by Lily Gladstone.

ERNEST: They told me you was going with Matt Williams for a time.

MOLLIE: You talk too much.

Mollie knows Ernest isn’t bright, and she knows he probably just wants her money. But she also believes he’s funny and good looking and devoted.

MOLLIE: [Speaking Siouan]

ERNEST: I don’t know what you said, but it musta been Indian for “handsome devil.”

MOLLIE: [laughing]

What Mollie doesn’t know is how far Ernest’s seemingly supportive uncle will go to secure her family's mineral rights for himself.

HALE: When these women die, with how Osage suffer from illness, you have to make it the head rights come to you. You see?

DiCaprio and De Niro give typically strong performances. But Gladstone as the reserved Mollie provides the film’s emotional core as well as its narrative throughline.

Killers of the Flower Moon is rated R, but the movie contains no nudity, and strong language is infrequent. The violence is brutal, but it’s not pervasive. It sort of punctuates the slow moving storyline. The most unsettling thing about the movie is Scorsese’s willingness to linger on the grisly aftermath of the murders.

While some viewers might be put off by the gore, others will undoubtedly find the 3-hour-and-26-minute runtime to be punishing. The movie certainly could have been shorter, but the story doesn’t drag. I actually think it’s a better movie than the 3-hour-long Oppenheimer that came out this summer. Conversations feature pregnant pauses, and we get lingering shots of Oklahoma’s countryside. Jesse Plemons, who plays the federal investigator, doesn’t even show up until two hours have elapsed. Perhaps the long runtime serves as a metaphor for delayed justice.

ERNEST: You a detective?

TOM: No, sir. I was a Texas Ranger, now with the federal government. It’s called the Bureau of Investigation.

With Killers of the Flower Moon Scorsese sets himself up as an Old Testament prophet decrying the exploitation of the weak. The Osage had simple lives, neglected by the federal government, but when they finally experience some prosperity, the white man swoops in to take it away. During my screening, I was reminded of Nathan the prophet telling King David, “You are the man,” after he stole Bathsheba and had Uriah killed.

HALE: It looks like murder. It’s not supposed to be that way. You hear?

ERNEST: I promise you. I swear on my children. I swear on my children, King.

HALE: Calm down. Don’t swear on your children. It makes you look foolish.

The Tulsa race massacre and the Ku Klux Klan make brief appearances too, serving to remind us that the Osage murders were only one piece of a much broader deadly prejudice in America.

But this film isn’t merely about the destructive nature of racial prejudice. Scorsese warns us against resentment and envy of other people’s blessings. He offers examples of characters who misconstrue an idealized “fairness” into a sense of entitlement. In Killers of the Flower Moon, we see this sense of entitlement destroy individuals and the fabric of society.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, October 20th. 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. Up next: Commentator George Grant with this month’s Word Play. For October: TV words that have become part of our everyday speech.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: According to the media and technology critic of the last generation, Neil Postman, “We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.” Despite its nearly ubiquitous presence in our culture over the last two generations, it is not likely that very many of us would attempt to argue that television is now, or ever has been, significant. It has rather been little more than a cornucopia of undisguised trivialities. “With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present… Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it,” Postman asserted.

That is not to say that television has not shaped who we are, what we think, or even how we speak. The truth is our everyday vocabulary is now thoroughly peppered with words that originated on TV—though none of them are particularly eloquent or heady, they have nevertheless been engrafted into our common parlance.

SPAM is a canned processed meat product made by the food conglomerate Hormel. The name is thought to either be an acronym for “shoulder of pork and ham,” or a portmanteau for “spiced ham.” But as anyone who has an e-mail account knows, it has come to mean “unsolicited, often fraudulent, junk mail.” It gained that meaning from a 1970 comedy sketch on the Monty Python television show.

Cowabunga was first coined on the Howdy Doody show in the 1950s, and then popularized on the Sixties sitcom Gidget, long before it was picked up as a catch-phrase for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Today it is an expression of joyous amazement most often associated with beach and surf culture. Thanks to a 1994 episode of the animated TV show The Simpsons, the old Yiddish expression for apathetic indifference, meh, surged to popularity. It was eventually added to most dictionaries beginning in 2008. Binge-watching became the Collins Dictionary’s “2015 Word of the Year,” thanks to the sudden popularity of the Netflix streaming services where whole seasons of television programs could be consumed in a single, obsessive, marathon sitting. It was derived from the early 20th century expressions binge-eating and binge-drinking.

Groucho Marx once quipped, “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

I’m George Grant.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Well, it’s time to say thanks to the team members who helped put the program together this week:

Mary Reichard, David Bahnsen, Mary Muncy, Joel Belz, Carolina Lumetta, Onize Ohikere, Janie B. Cheaney, Cal Thomas, Collin Garbarino, and George Grant.

Thanks also to our breaking news team: Kent Covington, Lynde Langdon, Steve Kloosterman, Travis Kircher, Lauren Canterberry, Christina Grube, and Josh Schumacher.

And, breaking news interns Tobin Jacobson, Johanna Huebscher, Aidan Johnston, and Alex Carmanaty.

And thanks to the guys who stay up late to get the program to you early: Johnny Franklin and Carl Peetz.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Our producer is Harrison Watters. Our production team includes Kristen Flavin, Benj Eicher, Lillian Hamman, Emily Whitten, and Bekah McCallum.

Anna Johansen Brown is features editor, and Paul Butler is executive producer.

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, “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” —Psalm 103 verse 8

Be sure to worship with your brothers and sisters in Christ, in church this weekend. And Lord willing, we’ll meet you right back here on Monday.

Go now in grace and peace.

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