John Stonestreet – Page 29

Guest Column: A Critical Error

Oct 18, 2023John StonestreetCurrent EventsCurrent Events, Israel

One of the more ridiculous images to make its way around social media sites in the wake of the horrific attack in Israel was a photo of four Westerners with a sign, “Queers for Palestine.” There’s also a Twitter page with that name. The banner photo insists, “Allah Loves Equality.”

Statements like these are so out of touch with reality, we can only hope that they are satire. Given what we know of Hamas, ISIS, and the Iranian regime, it’s safe to assume there won’t be any “pride” parades in Gaza or Ramallah anytime soon. Progressives looking for ideological sympathy among the rulers or people of Palestine are fooling themselves.

A week ago, all of this would have been sadly amusing. Now, it’s terrifying. Ever since the October 7 attacks, protestors across Europe, America, and Australia have denied, excused, justified, and even supported the murders, rapes, and beheadings of babies perpetrated by Hamas in Israel. It makes a kind of barbaric sense for radical Muslim groups to take such stands. It’s harder to fathom why Western progressives offer such affinity for radical Islamism.

After all, this is a religious ideology that is openly theocratic, misogynistic, violently anti-LGBTQ, opposed to free expression, free press, and nearly everything on the progressive agenda. The radical Islam that the far-Left wants to embrace is far worse than the morbid fantasies they hold about Christianity.

On the same American college campuses where you can be silenced for refusing to say that a man is a woman, Jewish co-eds tearfully begged school officials to stop speeches of those wishing their people dead. In Philadelphia, a speaker applauded “Hamas for a job well done.” At George Mason University, students chanted “They’ve got tanks, we’ve got hang gliders, glory to the resistance fighters!” Before they issued an incredibly paltry half-apology, the BLM organization chapter of Chicago tweeted an image of a Hamas killer parachuting into battle.

As strange of bedfellows as they make, radical Islam and the far-Left share hatred for the Western tradition. They cannot stomach free markets, objective morality and knowledge, or the uncompromising priority of human liberty, especially religious freedom.

Especially, in academic contexts, the Left’s hatred is grounded in the ideological capture of our ivory towers by Critical Theory. This way of thinking reduces the complexity of human existence to pre-determined categories of oppressed versus oppressor. Based on these categories, moral virtue and moral guilt are pre-assigned.

The matrix of this dynamic determines who is right and wrong. Anything done for the sake of the oppressed is just, even mass murder and rape. Anything done on behalf of the oppressor is vile, even warning civilians to get out of a war zone. In this case, all that matters is that Jews have been cast into the role of oppressor and their opponents as victims; all actions are either justified or condemned according to this simplistic schematic.

In his book on the Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes described a foreshadowing of this trend:

For intellectuals of this kind, the criterion of truth was not life: they created their own reality, or rather, sur-reality, subject to verification only with reference to opinions of which they approved. … It is only by reducing people of flesh and blood to a mere idea that one can ignore the will of the majority in the name of democracy and institute a dictatorship in the name of freedom.

Decades of Western decadence have numbed us to the power of beliefs. Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims. That’s true on college campuses and in Gaza. By rejecting objective morality as tyrannical, believers in the ideas of Critical Theory embrace tyranny as moral.

Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer unpack these ideas and expose them in their new book Critical Dilemma. With a gift to the Colson Center this month, you can request a copy. The authors will join us on October 26 for our next Breakpoint Forum to discuss the ideas of Critical Theory in light of some of these current headlines. The forum begins at 8 p.m. EST and will be hosted by Colson Center resident theologian Dr. Timothy D. Padgett. The forum is free, but you must register at breakpoint.org/forum.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.

Guest Column: Lessons From the Soviets about Sexual Morality

Oct 16, 2023John StonestreetMarriageMarriage

The Soviet Union was well known for rejecting so-called “bourgeois” morality in ways that led to rejecting reality. Economically this meant squashing human self-interest in favor of state control. So, basic modern commodities like cars and plumbing could take years for the average Russian to secure. Marxist-inspired agricultural science rejected “Western” science and led to the deaths of millions as crops were planted in the dead of winter, too close together, and without pesticides in the mistaken belief that they could be “educated” to take on more beneficial traits.  

In the 1920s, Revolutionary Russia rejected “bourgeois” sexual morality by attacking the institution of marriage and the nuclear family.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed the nuclear family was, like religion, just another means of keeping the working class oppressed. According to the Marxist dialectic version of history, prehistoric humanity lived in a state of free love, and the nuclear family only emerged to protect the property rights of the rich through inheritance, keep workers content with less, and enslave women to the home.  

Engels, who spent a lot of time in Manchester’s red-light district, was more specific than Marx in his condemnations of the family.

He wrote, “[W]ith every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the foreground.” Together, Marx and Engels attacked “bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child.” In their view, family was a social construct that stood in the way of revolutionary progress.  

When Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they put these anti-family theories into practice. In 1918, the Soviets issued decrees “on the abolition of marriage” and “on civil partnership, children and ownership.” Marriage could be declared without the involvement of the state, and divorce could be obtained just as easily. As one Russian journalist summarized, “Divorce was a matter of choice. Abortions were legalized. All of that implied a total liberation of family and sexual relations.”  

Madame Smidovich, a leading Communist propagandist, put it this way: “To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup, and we did.”  Almost immediately, however, this experiment began to spiral the nation downward.  

Men across the country divorced their wives and sought new sexual encounters. The number of illegitimate children swelled by hundreds of thousands. Women with children were abandoned, while the more enterprising among them blackmailed multiple men for child support. Despite the State’s decree that fathers must pay alimony to their children regardless of marital status, thousands of children were kicked to the curb because they could not—or would not—be cared for. From there, an ungovernable criminal element developed in Russia’s largest cities. Given Russia’s dismal economic situation, the idea that the state would care for these children proved laughable.  

A Russian writer of that time observed, “It was not an unusual occurrence for a boy of twenty to have had three or four wives, or for a girl of the same age to have had three or four abortions.” 

The status of women devolved as well. As Madame Smidovich described in Pravda, the Communist newspaper: “If a man lusts after a young girl, whether she is a student, a worker, or even a school-age girl, then the girl must obey his lust; otherwise, she will be considered a bourgeois daughter, unworthy to be called a true communist.”   

As the 1920s wore on, however, Russia’s Soviet leaders were forced by reality to change course and desperately attempted to stem the tide of fatherlessness, crime, legal confusion, and economic disaster.

In many ways, the Russian family never recovered. Even today, Russia’s birth rate continues to plummet. As late as the 1990s, and despite decades of government propaganda encouraging population growth, one study found that in some parts of Russia, there were 770 abortions per 100 births—“by far the highest rate anywhere in the world.” 

In 1920, on the other side of the world, G.K. Chesterton prophetically wrote that “[t]his triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilisations which disregard it.”   

History is full of examples of societies that tamper with God’s design for marriage, sex, and the family. It’s no coincidence that en vogue progressive ideas today, ideas with distinct roots in cultural Marxism, also decry marriage and the family as oppressive institutions that should be reimagined and sexual morality as outdated and even harmful.

These things are not mere “social constructs,” however. They are laws of reality, like gravity. As Dallas Willard once observed, “We can’t choose to step off the roof and then choose to not hit the ground.” That’s true for individuals and societies alike.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.

Guest Author: If You Give a Kid a Phone, You Give a Kid …

Oct 9, 2023John StonestreetDecencyPornography

In an article at The Guardian, theater director Abbey Wright described talking with 10,000 children and teenagers about the impact of pornography on their lives. She was careful not to tell young children more than they knew, asking them simply, “What is bad about the internet?” Still, she was shocked how many described pornography finding them.

Children as young as six recalled popups and ads placed in otherwise innocent content. Some were shown porn by friends or siblings. Yet many parents remain naïve about what their kids are seeing.

One teenager offered this reality check: “If you put a phone in a child’s hand, you are putting porn in a child’s hand.”

There’s more to the fight for the souls of our kids than keeping phones and tablets away from unsupervised children, but there is not less. The average age of porn exposure is 12, and the availability of internet browsing devices is the most reliable predictor that a child will be exposed. Don’t take the risk. It’s not worth their innocence or wellbeing.