Welcome to Breakpoint This Week, where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian worldview. Today, we're going to talk about the continued cultural fallout after the murder of Charlie Kirk, including concerns about free speech and the shooter's motives. We have a lot to get to this week. We're so glad you're with us. Stick around.
Welcome to Breakpoint This Week. From the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer, alongside John Stone Street, president of the Colson Center. John, last week we devoted most of the show to the news of Charlie Kirk's murder. And there have been a lot of cultural fallout since then. Of course, people are still reacting to the news and dealing with it.
Mourning, there have been a lot of vigils. His memorial service is going to be in Arizona this coming weekend. But there have been a lot of developments in the investigation since then as well. And with a lot of worldview implications. And so I wanted to talk with you about that to start the show this week.
We've, of course, found out a lot more this week about the shooter, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old man in Utah. And text messages have been now released as part of the investigation between him and what most news media are still calling his roommate, which is incredibly confusing. Because in the text messages themselves, Robinson is calling this person my love and whatever. It was a boyfriend who allegedly was transitioning socially to look like a woman.
So there was some trans ideology likely involved here. And in the text messages, Robinson says, you know, I just I had to do it. I had an opportunity. Charlie Kirk had too much hate and you can't negotiate with that kind of hate, basically. It's been one thing to watch news media and some politicians, particularly people on the ideological left, try to grapple with this, but just the news itself of these text messages is incredibly scary and troubling.
I think this was a lot of people's suspicion at the front end, given how outspoken Charlie was as a conservative commentator and as a Christian, it seemed likely that ideology played a big role, and now we know that it did. Right, but which ideology is the question? Years ago, there was a fellow speaker at Summit Ministries that coined the phrase worldview as a way of describing what most people have, not W-O-R-L-D. That was coined way earlier by Immanuel Kant and the German word Weltenschung, and then taken by Abraham Kuyper and James Orr and all the nerdy stuff that I care about. But he meant W-H-I-R-L-E-D.
In other words, that Americans are particularly susceptible to a kind of a buffet approach.
Now, back when we were talking about this and using that phrase, it was more of just kind of the what came out of a postmodern culture that prioritized entertainment. And, you know, when you had a lot of self-help and you had, you know, Christians and churches adopting various practices, whether it's transcendental meditation on one side or, you know, self-help things on the other side. And it was all, I don't want to say harmless because it wasn't harmless, but it was all rather benign, I guess, you know, where it was just also inwardly focused in a way that, you know, you were still kind of borrowing on old categories of what it meant to be nice and what it meant to be good. you know, this kind of cultural capital that Francis Schaeffer talked about, although we were talking, you know, 10, 20 years after Francis Schaeffer. And I have been really captivated for the last two years, really, with this idea that some of the predictions made by the worldview theorists about the Western world.
In other words, when you embrace certain ideas about life in the world, that there is no God, that there's no ultimate morality, eventually you run out of that capital, you spend it all, you shake it all off, and then what happens next? This is something that I think I've often pointed to, Friedrich Nietzsche's parable of the madman, as someone who first kind of talked about this, where Nietzsche talks about the death of God, how big of a deal it was to a group of people who didn't believe in God, but didn't think it was a big deal, actually thought that God was holding us back. Nietzsche realized something way more complicated, although he didn't believe that God existed either. He just believed that the belief in God came along with a lot of other beliefs about meaning, about trust, about living together with one another, about seeing the value and dignity in each other, certainly about morality. and that when that got shook off, finally, when we realized, as he put it, that we had unchained the earth from its sun and we started to see all those consequences, that it was gonna be a big deal.
And it's a very poetic way of talking about this, but there's so many different ways in which what was hypothetical yesterday has become actual or existential today. and I think you talk about Tyler Robinson's roommate. You know, you have someone who himself identified as transgender, apparently part of the furry community, which is something that I don't know that I'll ever understand. But he also liked Jordan Peterson, I read this one. You know, and you're like, what is this worldview kind of thing that's inflicting him?
Tyler Robinson, I think it's a little bit different. And we are so quick to talk about political ideologies that we might miss an ideology that is from the left and has become weaponized and politicized, but what really seems to have animated him. These are existential realities now of what were hypothetical predictions and our critiques of critical theory. critical theory in which you group someone into a category based on tribe, based on identification, something like that, usually based on some trait or thing that no one chose. And then that gets either them moral superiority or complete moral guilt.
And there's no changing. There's no forgiveness. There's no salvation. There's none of that's available within critical theory. And when you, you know, kind of hear the, this person no longer decides to live sort of statement that has emerged in Tyler Robinson's confessions and his writings and how he talked about the shooting right after.
There's such a numbness, you know what I mean? And that, of course, also reflects the gamer community that apparently that he was a part of. But you just see that all of this stuff ended up shaping this guy's worldview and did it really profoundly. But that there is a group, a growing group, particularly of young men who there's no cultural capital left in their hearts and minds. There's no boundaries.
There's no obstacles of Christian morality from yesteryear that continue to hold them back. There is the full on ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims that are, I think, illustrated in what they say. And there's a deep seated nihilism, right? And that nihilism is a particular kind of nihilism. It isn't just a kind of nihilism of the 90s, you know, which was kind of a Beavis and Butthead kind of nihilism.
I'm in that show where everything is to be made for a Seinfeld kind of nihilism. It's a show about nothing. Nothing matters. But it's a joke. You make fun of everything.
This is a critical theory kind of nihilism where there is no moral norms and there's no inherent value in any other or in life itself or in a moral action. You just do what you do as a way of imposing this view on the world. And again, all of this was highly theoretical. And this is certainly an extreme version of the applied ideology. But there are other ones, right?
There are other ways that we dehumanize others. The laughter at somebody being shot, that he deserved it, that's the same expressed idea only by someone who didn't pick up the gun and maybe wouldn't for some reason or another. And so I think that's really what's emerging. And that's the problem with this kind of chaotic sort of evil. I don't wanna say it's chaotic in the sense that there's no purpose.
There's clearly a point and a purpose behind what he was attempting to do, but chaotic in the sense of this kind of, I often thought that you can kind of talk through this. I never wanted to talk through this about real life issues. But if you look at the way the Joker character in the Batman movies have been portrayed, there has been a clear movement, right? From I'm gonna get mine, I'm gonna serve myself to the chaotic sort of, I just wanna hurt other people. Watch the world burn, yeah.
Right, to the loneliness and the isolation and the nihilism that serves oneself. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's what clearly emerged in these confessions. It's not like this guy was a thoroughgoing disciple of progressive economic theory or even Karl Marx or something like that. Certainly there's a cultural Marxism, but this is a deep-seated, nihilistic, critical theory-ish sort of framing that has such incredible consequences is if you take it at face value, then now we're seeing people take it at face value and live it out, I guess. Yeah, so I have a handful of questions about that.
And I wanna be clear, like I think it's really critical to have these conversations, not because we're doing some kind of like Sherlock Holmesian, like let's just, let's try and get to the root of this because it's fascinating, but because the truth of this is gonna shape how we respond to it and how we should or can even respond to it.
So my first question is, when you reference Nietzsche, I think about this every time we talk about him and what he said about unchaining the earth from the sun. He obviously was not a Christian believer, but he, let's start with that.
So number one, that he recognized how chaotic it was going to be socially for people to give up their belief in God. I see so much truth in what he said. And I think you do too, that once you give up that belief in metaphysical reality of God, the creator. You really can't consistently lay claim to lots of other moral claims, which are currently keeping society together. I would say that that's true because these beliefs are interdependent.
In order to believe that there is a designed way people should act, you must believe that there was a designer and that we can know something about the way we were designed. Nietzsche believed that things would be chaotic after giving up belief in God, but he didn't believe in God.
So did he just not believe that those things were interdependent? Like, did he prefer the chaos?
Well, he just thought it was inevitable. He just wanted to be realistic. I mean, listen, Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra is advocating for the death of God. In the parable of the madman, he's essentially warning other atheists about the death of God. In other words, the implications of it.
But does he have a prescription? Is he like, so let's do that? Yeah, the prescription is in their Zarathustra, which is you have to have essentially a strong man. It's the strong man way of doing it, the Uber match, the Superman, the new definer. Basically, somebody's got to emerge in the place of God to do that.
So he just thinks that the rest of his atheist friends are naive. And not friends, by the way. I'm not sure if you look at his, So he didn't have too many friends, but no, he just thought there was a naivety to it. But here's the other thing that he thought. He thought it was going to take a while.
So the end of the parable of the madman is really instructive, right?
So the madman goes on this epic rant and then he looks around and he's like, oh, you guys aren't ready to hear this. It's coming by the way, right? But my time is too, I think my, he says, my time has not yet come. Deeds though done take time to be seen and heard. This is a deed that's been done, but it's still more distant than us than the most distant stars, he says.
Now, part of that too is not just because, and if I would nuance something that you said a second ago, that this, you know, is the logical consequence. It is the logical consequence, but life doesn't proceed always logically, and people don't always live in a logical, consistent way. I think most people don't. No, no, and I know that, but I think it's an important thing that one of the ways that people do not fully live out, or one of the reasons that people do not always fully live out the consequences of these particularly consequential ideas is because social institutions are built around other things, right? You may think that life has no point and you're not really connected to another person in any meaningful way.
But if you grew up in a strong family eating dinner around the table, your experience is different than that. And if you have a teacher that you happen to really like in high school, then you're different than that. And, you know, it's kind of like the everyday life is built around a different set of ideas and you have to either explain that away or resist the pull of that. And I think that that is what we have seen in recent years. Why is it that these ideas that were in the water for so long are suddenly bearing fruit?
A lot of it has to do, you know, with what we teach and people feeling vindicated by everything from education to media and some of these ideas are people feeling further and further down the rabbit hole with isolated incel communities on Reddit, disconnected or these institutions tend to, these social realities kind of put these moral norms in the water, but those institutions eventually themselves become untethered and become changed or maybe intentionally embrace completely different things.
So I think there's lots of explanations for how we get from an idea to its consequence and from a bad idea to its victim. There certainly is an inevitability, even if it's not a straight line. And I don't think this has been a straight line. And I also think, you know, to your point, the question is, is this an outlier or is this a fulfillment? I don't know.
I think it's both. And like, I think that most people, including me, would fall into the camp of what Jonathan Haidt wrote about in The Righteous Mind, which is that we think we live as people of reason, that we're making logical decisions from one moment to the next, but most of the time we're not. It's incredibly important. And for certain I would say temperaments people are just different And for certain temperaments it matters more to people whether they are thinking through like they living an examined life as Socrates would have put it And some people are just more comfortable not doing that. I'm not ready to say that one of those is definitely morally superior to the other because there's lots of variables involved.
But I think for a certain temperamental person who is examining their life and maybe does try and live logically and then signs on to the sort of cynical nihilism, this would be of like this kind of violence, maybe not this specific target or whatever, but this kind of violence would be logical. Like it would be, it is a logical form of evil. And it's interesting. Like I, if you accept the assumptions, if you accept, if you accept the false assumptions, but if you accept them, then yeah.
So it's interesting.
So I'm reading notes from underground by Dostoevsky right now, and he's writing kind of tongue in cheek satirically from the point of view of a person who's become enlightened. And he calls this consciousness. I've gained consciousness. And towards the beginning of the book, he has this quote where he says, I have discovered what consciousness is. It is a deliberate folding of the arms.
and he's basically saying like it is when you finally accept that nothing has any point there is no point in doing anything that history is on this trajectory of inevitable human progress and we will get there eventually and you might as well just sit by and do nothing about it and I was I'm reading that at the same time as I'm reading I just finished Eric Hoffer's true believer which you recommended several weeks ago and he says at some level you know he's writing about why people join radical movements. And he says something I'm paraphrasing, but basically the most dangerous men on the planet are the board. And he doesn't mean like I'm bored, like I don't have anything to do this afternoon, but he's like existentially bored. Like, and so I think we have, we're seeing a combination of the two where people don't have a, they don't sense a meaning or a purpose. And when they reach for it intellectually, they also can't find it because it's been taught out of them by a lot of these social institutions like higher ed, which suggests that to believe there is a higher purpose is kind of backwards and stupid.
Right. Yeah. And that's, of course, that's been in the water for a really, really long time. And one of the questions is, why has it been in the water for so long? And now it bears fruit.
And part of that is shaking off some of the residue of the capital that, you know, precedes it. But there's a lot of people that are bored in that same sense. Dostoevsky's brilliant in kind of tackling ideas that were very theoretical at the time, and he puts them in an existential character, and you can see it worked out in literature, which is amazing. And so when you actually see it in real life, what does that mean? There's two reasons I hold out hope for this being an outlier and not normalized.
One is because the predictions of where history is headed are just really foolish because God can always intervene, and he already seems in some ways to be doing that. And amazing, amazing, millions and millions and millions of people have been exposed to the gospel through this. Praise God. And this is Hebrews 11 working itself out. But the other thing is it's one thing to be bored.
It's the other thing to be bored and then be filled with hate. Most people are bored and not interested enough to act. They're going to go the path of comfort. They're going to go the path of ease. And there's something else that sparks a level of absolute hatred in the middle of it and goes forward.
And that's where I think some of – we still need to learn more, hear more about this particular one. But I do think that we are seeing enough signs. Even if this is an extreme example on the end of the spectrum, whatever the spectrum is, it should be instructive to the church, right? This is the kind of people we're dealing with. This is the kind of questions that they have.
This is the kind of loss that they feel. This is the kind of hole that's in their heart. This is the things that they're attempting to fill their heart with and why it's not working out. This is the kind of conversations we need to have, the kind of relationships we need to cultivate and foster.
So I hope that there's at least something we can learn missionally from this. And part of it to me, and part of this, I also get from Chloe Cole's story as a way it's told in the Truth Rising film.
So this is where this thought is coming from. And now I'm applying it over here is to stop thinking that we can't talk about anything important because we might offend them from the gospel. You know, in other words, like we're having conversations about really, really important things. And so don't hide away from the hard truths because it's precisely the hard truths that people need and don't have. Yeah.
I think boredom does breed contempt in a logical way, because if nothing matters, then no one matters. And that's kind of the definition of contempt, right? It's like viewing others with a sense of worthlessness. But then I think it probably is logically, it expounds when you encounter someone who's telling you, there is meaning and probably you're not maybe living up to it right now. You know, I just watched a talk that Charlie gave at a church and he was talking to young men and he was like, stop being boys.
You need to get married and you need to have children and you need to serve your community and you need like that. Sure. That's a hard message. It's also exactly what most of us need to hear, which is you have a purpose and you should try and live into it and live up to it. That's the opposite of being bored.
But I could see that when you're in that sort of nihilism soup and then someone comes along and says, hey, you do have a purpose, but you've got to live into it. I don't disagree at all. I just think it's super interesting that in this particular case, his roommate, apparently like Jordan Peterson, for those reasons that he told boys to grow up. Because everybody wants to hear that. Clearly he missed some of it.
And then, you know, this would be- Everybody wants to hear that. They just, I completely agree. It's like kind of a toxic mix of- Whether they want to or not. You want to hear it, but you prioritize comfort like all of us do.
So it's harder to do something than it is to not do something. But what we really need is to do something. No, no, no question. To me, I just don't know that we have fully reckoned yet with the complete disconnection, the disconnection that people experience from reason, from God, from value, from meaning, from trust, from love. you know, all of these things require something that's fixed and we can live in a culture on a whole lot of past cultural capital.
And I think that's kind of what we've seen. But when eventually that capital runs out that again, the hypothetical becomes the real. And that to me, this is an example of that. I think there's still a lot more to, you know, to figure out. Yeah.
Well, let's take a break, John. And then I want to talk with you about some of the free speech concerns that have come up in the last week.
So we'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week. I triggered a huge dog pile. Within a couple of days, it was in all the newspapers. And under considerable duress, I published an apology letter. The band made me take time away to examine my quote-unquote blind spots.
And yes, I might have gone against the prevailing thought of the industry, but it was more important to stand by my principles. When musician Winston Marshall spoke out against far-left ideologies, the public backlash and the effect on his bandmates left him with a choice. Either retract his sincerely held beliefs or stand for the truth, even at the expense of public approval. Marshall's story is told in the new documentary film Truth Rising. Truth Rising is brought to you by the Colson Center and Focus on the Family.
It can be streamed totally free at any time. Go to truthrising.com slash colson. That's truthrising.com slash Colson. This is a confusing civilizational moment, but ultimately it's just the moment. It's not the whole story.
We can be confident that the story that we're actually living in is the story that God is writing of human history. Jesus Christ is Lord of all.
So he will take care of us when we make the decision that we need to make to stand for the truth and be faithful wherever he has placed us. Truth Rising is an invitation to see the civilizational moment we're in, understand it from a perspective of a Christian worldview, know that God has called us to it, and then act with courage. Please watch Truth Rising with friends, families, churches, school communities. Go to truthrising.com slash Colson. That's truthrising.com slash Colson.
We're back on Breakpoint this week. John, I wanna read a question to you that we got from a listener after our conversation last week. that both you and I felt was really well written and kind of gives us a jumping off point to discuss this issue. We're talking now on Thursday afternoon and everybody right now is talking about this news of Jimmy Kimmel, who was basically fired from his, I'm not going to call it a comedy show because it absolutely was not, but he was a late night host who has been fired now for making some really stupid comments about Charlie Kirk and his killer. And people are coming to his defense and saying that this will have a chilling effect on free speech.
And of course, there were comments made by Pam Bondi earlier this week and several other instances online, let's say, of people calling out other people for making negative or distasteful or in some cases really gross and evil comments about Charlie Kirk and then whether these people should be fired from their jobs, whether they're doctors or teachers or whatever it is. And then, of course, this has brought up a whole conversation about whether this amounts to cancel culture or kind of the policing of speech, which you and I have raised concerns about before.
So let me read this question to you and I'll let you take it from there. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how conservatives are calling for the firing of teachers and journalists and others for expressing their thoughts about Charlie Kirk's death. He was obviously polarizing. Many felt he was full of hate, while others felt he was so very right. I've watched many videos of him.
Sometimes I fully agreed with him and sometimes I thought, wow, I'm not sure Jesus would have been so unkind to that young woman. I feel like conservatives are doing the same thing now that liberals have done since 2020. As a conservative in 2021-22, I was personally careful about what I said and where because I felt that it could cost me my job. Clearly, liberals feel the same way now. Can you please discuss a better way?
Is cancel culture now a weapon of the right? This is from someone named Rob. You want to tackle that for us? Yeah, it's a super easy one.
So let me just get right on it. No, I loved how this question was phrased, and I thought it was very, very thoughtful. And it is, I think, the right question to ask. How is it that we need to go forward right now? And there's so much anger from the right, and rightly so.
There's a lot of hurt and so on. And now there's a level of power that wasn't the case in 21, 22. We rightly complained about cancel culture back then. and we shouldn't then take the form of the thing that we detested and thought was wrong now. The firing of Jimmy Kimmel is an interesting case in point because there's a lot of factors.
Because America guarantees free speech doesn't mean that free speech guarantees you a job on late night talk shows. This is a firing that has many factors, including local outlets saying, we don't want anything to do with this. they're making both probably decisions out of that, the feeling of addressing such a high profile assassination, but they're also making decisions based on local business markets. And there's local business markets where this, you know, would be a real problem for them. The question is when the FCC now leans in and says, you know, now that Trump is president, this is what you need to do.
This is where it gets a lot more problematic. But there's a big difference of standing up on a college campus where they're supposed to be about education and the wrestling with ideas, particularly public funded ones, and say, hey, listen, men cannot be women and women cannot be men. And then basically not be allowed, the view not be allowed on campus. And the person who utters the view then is subject to violence and not allowed to speak even at a sponsored event, not protected in the same way as others. It's a very, very different thing than to stand up and say someone deserved to be shot or that an intentional misleading, which is the case of Kimmel in which he suggested that the shooter was far right, not far left.
And at that point, enough evidence had come out where at the very least, you can't say that definitively as he did. And it was pretty obviously true at that point that no, the ideas that were motivating Tyler Robinson came from the left, not the right.
So freedom of speech means that you have the right to say things. It doesn't mean that you have the right to say things without consequence. Free speech says that you have the right to say things and make your case for it, not have the case dismissed and preempted as being kind of hateful rhetoric right off the bat. This is a problem that I have with something that came out of Pam Bondi. She was trying to address this in which she said hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.
Hate speech is absolutely protected by the First Amendment. The creation of the category of hate speech is an innovation that threatens the First Amendment itself. And then using government force in order to protect this kind of made-up category has been a real problem. And so wrestling through this is huge. Jimmy Kimmel, Scott Jennings, I thought, put it really well in this last night because he was challenged.
You don't believe in free speech. I said, I don't believe Jimmy Kimmel has the right to say anything he wants. I don't believe Jimmy Kimmel has the right to host a late night talk show. Right. And if he has that right, he doesn't have the infinite right to keep that position while saying things that are obviously not true, particularly if it's in the name of, of quote unquote journalism or informing the public or something like that.
He just doesn't have that right. I don't like the leverage of government power in order to enforce this. I do think that if an institution like ABC makes that decision and has reasons to the decision, losing business, concern about profitability, wanting to be a truth-telling institution, not a lie-telling institution, all that's completely legitimate for canceling this show that really wasn't all that good to begin with. The irony of all this too.
Sorry, let me say just one thing. This is a very specific point on Jimmy Kimmel And the question has more to do with what is cancel culture and what is not By every rule that was applied to every single person for the last 20 years on this Jimmy Kimmel would have never gotten that opportunity because of his degrading awful treatment of women back when he was on the quote unquote man show. And the man show became disgusting. I mean, it was, I don't know if it became disgusting or always disgusting, but it was disgusting, right it was all the stuff about kind of the 90s snl movies uh you know that we reject the howard stern beavis and butthead you know eminem jackass culture i don't know if i can say that out loud but that was an actual show and then you have this guy who kind of emerges in that that world and uh never apologizes never acknowledges it and somehow he sneaks under uh there's other actors by the way that fit into that same category that now apparently it's completely okay that they did Well, okay. And, and by the way, I really couldn't care less.
Like somebody participating in something like that early in their career, I'm just like, well, this, that's fine. I just never want to watch anything that you're in. I just don't care to consume any, exactly. And I don't feel any, I'm not like, man, my life would be so much better if Jimmy Kimmel had apologized for his treatment of women in 1995 or whatever. I just really, I just know that I couldn't care less about Jimmy Kimmel as a person and I don't care to consume any of his media.
So like that, I didn't like that impulse back then, but it is ironic that by his own standards that he's now trying to uphold, he would be completely out of a job. I feel like, so I was thinking about how many times have you and I talked about, and you've coined this theology of getting fired, right? And like that we need to have that if we're willing to say things we know are true, like for example, men can't be women. We have to adjust our, like calibrate our expectations with a knowledge that it's possible we'll get fired.
Now, I know you were never saying, and that's great. And this is a good way to be. And this is where these are great conditions. I just accept it. No, I never said you accept it.
No, exactly. But it was like, don't be surprised by it, right? And then on the other side of it, too, that it is still worth saying true things.
So I guess to, you know, Jimmy Kimmel and anybody else who's worried about it, you're going to have to adopt a theology of getting fired. And I actually don't mean I'm not actually kidding around. Like if you think it is important enough to say and you think it's true and it is important to you to talk about a young man's murder, a political assassination. It is like a core tenet of your personal philosophy that you have to be able to talk about it in crude, hateful terms. Then, yeah, I suppose prepare yourself for the consequences of getting fired from your show.
Now, I'm with you. Like, I don't like the impulse. I think it's wrong to leverage the government or even to suggest that the government would leverage its influence and power over citizens based on things that they say that are not explicitly illegal, right? Like a deliberate inciting of violence or calling for violence. I don't like that.
And I don't really understand all the mechanisms at play here. Like the FCC gives licenses to these comedy shows or to the airwaves of such and such network. And there's all these kind of inner workings here. But hey, we've had to adopt a theology of getting fired for the last 15 years. If we all want to share it, that's fine.
There was a woman on Barry Weiss' show a couple days ago, the day after the shooting. She had Ben Shapiro on and then another woman. I apologize. I can't remember her name, but she was a member of the board at the Free Press. And she said something like, this woman was Catholic.
And she said, I think we all need to be martyrs in the way Charlie was. And then she went on to define it. And I thought she's defining this like John's theology of getting fired because she quoted, I don't know if it was Augustine or she quoted somebody who said, martyrdom is basically a deep desire to live with a willingness to die.
So it's not like a suicidality kind of martyrdom, but like I love life and I love truth, but I'm also willing to die for it. And I think she was kind of saying... Yeah, we should believe in what we're doing enough to get fired for it or get hurt for it.
So there's the point in this where it's a reality, and I think that's what you're talking about. And then it's also a point when it says when we've reached this state of reality, it's not a good thing. And that's kind of what we've been saying before. Like, you know, it was really hard because to me, when all the cancel culture was happening, there was a remarkable difference in my mind at the time between, you know, somebody being their speech being canceled or not being allowed to come on the campus of, say, Vanderbilt University. Right.
Which is privately funded and they have already set their ideological direction and they don't want anything else. That's a different thing than the University of Tennessee, right? Because that is this institution that the state should protect the diversity of opinions there because it's taxpayer funded. And so, you know, there's so many of these nuances. One of the nuances you just mentioned, particularly on the Jimmy Kimmel thing, which is the FCC and how they treat network television and how they treat now cable television.
And that's always been different, you know, based on how many expletives you can show and what you can show in terms of anatomy and all kinds of things. And it's just become a big confusing mess that the big three have basically lost the size of their cultural influence. Barry Weiss is an incredible example. She actually left the New York Times not because she suddenly became a rightist, but because she thought that the progressive, the left liberal vision of the New York Times, which she endorsed, had become a cancel culture place. And so she started a new institution.
And I think she should have the absolute right to both critique the cancel culture of the New York Times and start her own thing. And we actually saw that, oh, there's an incredible audience of people who also don't like that and they actually want something new. And I think that that is the, you know, something we want to preserve in terms of the marketplace of ideas. But let me say two things, specifically because of the question. I think what we've basically done is gone around and talked about how hard it is to answer this question.
I'll say this, it's absolutely impossible to answer this question in a meaningful way, ultimately, in a culture that rejects the notion of truth. I'm not even saying a culture that rejects that this is true versus that is true. But when you reject the very notion of truth, all you're left with is power. By the way, Frederick Nietzsche said that too. And that is true on an individual level.
and when you try to coerce somebody else to believe what you want. And that is also true on a cultural level. And so it becomes really, in other words, there is a context in which cancel culture is almost unavoidable today. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm just saying that's a thing.
I'm saying that that is something you have to understand, which is why making a case against cancel culture on one side or the other becomes so hard. The idea of conservatism should always be that they're eternal truths and principles and realities based on those truths that are worth conserving. That's why conservatism should be separated from the far right because the far right takes that same critical theory approach, as many people have pointed out, and basically said, no, it is completely justified for us to use power because it was justified for them to use power.
Now, I think I'm not talking about kind of tactical politics where you use the options that are actually available for you to stop things that are not true and bad for us and promote things that are true. That's the decision of the voters, and that's not cancel culture. But it is very, I think, possible to lean into that. The second thing that I'll say is where do we fit in this culture? If this is a cultural reality like it is, and I think it is, do we need to resist it?
Yes. and I would really, it would really be a missed opportunity, especially now, especially when you have so many people asking the questions, willing to have the conversations. You know, you have a bunch of loud people that aren't and they want to preempt it. But I think, I mean, if you put it to the vote, people are going to vote for Charlie Kirk more than they're going to vote for Jimmy Kimmel right now, right?
So what do you do? That's not miss our opportunity to persuade. The servant of the Lord, Paul told Timothy, must gently persuade. And we ought not miss our opportunity to make the case that we can make. And this goes back to something we said before, right?
Which is in the story of Chloe Cole keeps bringing this to my front and center. I mean, in the Truth Rising film, right? Where we were told you shouldn't talk about those sexual issues because that will keep people from the gospel. Chloe Cole's story is, is that coming to truth about who she was in terms of her sexuality and made in the image and that her body was actually real and so on and that she wasn't born into the wrong body, that eventually pointed her to God. In other words, she didn't have to come to God first to come right about who she was.
She came to what's true about who she was and that pointed her to God. And sometimes God works all those ways. And it would be a real shame if Christians relied on cancel culture. And I'm talking about Christians, right? If we relied on cancel culture and missed the opportunity to make our case and to change hearts and minds and to treat people with dignity and that sort of stuff, this is not, you know, what you can do to prevent evil in the realm of political structures requires that you have a clear and the right sense of evil, right?
But Christians, we have an opportunity right now. Let's not miss that opportunity and outsource it to people who can cancel others. I would say too, John, tell me if you agree. The opposite of cancel culture, the answer is no. The opposite of cancel culture is not not saying something.
It might be doing what Charlie's doing. Like, so I, you know, I, I think it's, it's a, it's a strange marker of the strange times we're in that, for example, I can somehow know what my pediatrician thinks about Charlie Kirk's murder. That's just, we're in a social media age, right?
So that's given rise to a lot of these conundrums because it's like, you know, suddenly people are calling for this nurse to be fired or this teacher at the school. But it's because everybody's posting their every thought online. But I also can tell you with complete confidence, if I found out somebody in my kid's school, for example, or my kid's doctor or whatever had posted something vile and hateful, I'm at the very least the next time I go to the doctor's office going to be like, hey, I didn't like that. And I would like a different doctor. And I think that's completely reasonable.
That to me is not cancel culture. That might be the opposite of it, which is let's talk about it. I'm glad you brought this up because this is actually one of the, the, the, the, um, when you don't believe in a truth, then you can morally equivocate all kinds of claims that have no business being equivocated.
So you said vile and hate hateful, right?
So if, if your doctor posts, I don't want to speak for you, but if my doctor posts, you know, I think Charlie Kirk's ideas were wrong and, uh, he doesn't deserve to be celebrated as a martyr. Is that violent hateful? And I want to cancel him as my doctor. No. If he said, if he's a good doctor, I hope he's one that I would talk to and talk about the ideas.
Sure. That's different than saying he should have died. And I'm not going to, I would have treated him if he came in my office. Oh, gosh.
So I don't think that's cancel culture. You have somebody who has, you know, made an oath and then violated that oath. It's kind of like the guy who got fired off MSNBC, Dowd. What's his first name? Matthew Dowd.
Matthew Dowd, you know, he basically just flat out said things that were not true, you know, and your job is. You're a reporter. You're a reporter. You actually have a role to play here. Not things that you believed were true and were not, but things that, you know, it just was a failure.
So does MSNBC have the right to fire him? Yeah. Is that cancel culture? No. and so, but we also, I think, this is one of the problems is that, I keep thinking this, you know, yeah, people on the left called Charlie Kirk a fascist.
They called Donald Trump a fascist. They also called Mitt Romney and George W. Bush a fascist. When you start throwing everybody that's to the right of you as if they're not only wrong, that they're evil and you have that same approach either direction and that not agreeing with my statement about who, for example, Charlie Kirk was and what he did and what he believed that's equally evil and vile as saying he deserved it or all the other celebrations that were despicable and came out of certain places. And then you got to look and say, if you do actually say this, If you do actually justify it, how many?
Are we talking about thousands? Are we talking about millions? How many are we talking about? And I tell you, the poll that's the most damning right now is the number of people on the left who think that violence is acceptable against people they disagree with politically and the number of people on the right who think that. And it's not equal, folks.
It's just not equal. And that is a profound reality that I think is reflected in the kind of posts we actually see. but we have to have that moral conscience. We have to have that moral framework. We have to be able to tell the difference between right and wrong and despicable and deceived.
These are very, very different things, and that'll determine what it is, but make the case. Like, what a calling, you know? Make the case, make the case, make the case. The servant of Christ must gently persuade. Always be ready in season and out of season.
I was joking with Bob, our producer. I don't know if we're in season or out of season right now, but either way, we're supposed to be ready, right? I don't know. I don't quite get that analogy, you know, seasons are basketball seasons for me.
So I don't understand that analogy, but either way, you got to be ready and be ready to give the answer for the hope that you have, right? That people who ask you.
So I'd hate for us to punt to cancel culture right now. Certainly it would be such a squandering miss if we, if we just punted to the reverse form of cancel. I'm going to, and I'm going to credit Charlie with this. I have somebody who's in my life, a member of my family who is very progressive and left-leaning and likes to wear all the buttons and the shirts and has all the flags and the slogans and to every family event is always wearing this stuff. And I knew I was going to see this person today.
And I thought I might call them this morning and just say, hey, could you please just today? Could you not? And then I thought I think Charlie would have the opposite view which is I not going to tell you you can wear that I not going to make a thing about it But I think what I do is if they do wear it I going to be like tell me about this Let talk about it Because before I just you know I don know out of an effort to keep the peace and I don want to get into it We just I just don't bring it up. Roll your eyes and move on. Yeah.
But I was just like, what's the, what's the Charlie version of this? Just after watching so many videos of him in the last week, which I know so many people have been doing. I'm like, I don't want to set up a scenario where it's like, I don't think you should be allowed to wear that. And I don't want you to wear that in front of me because it'll make me feel bad or whatever. I don't want to be a part of that.
I'm not going to say that. But let's talk about it, though. I'm also not going to just let it hang out there and not say anything.
So, yeah, let's take a quick break, John. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week. In a culture that's facing a crisis of mental illness and suicide, Christians, of all people, should be able to point people to hope. But you have to learn how to bring Christ's hope to those who are around you and are suffering. In the free online course, Hope Always, Dr.
Matthew Sleeth equips Christians to understand this current epidemic of mental illness and suicide and learn what the scripture says to those who are suffering and to those helping those who are suffering. Especially if you're a parent, a pastor, a teacher, a friend working with the next generation, Hope Always will help you break the silence and offer real hope to those who need it most. Sign up today at colsoneducators.org. That's colsoneducators.org. We're back on Breakpoint this week.
John, I promise we had planned to touch some other topics today. There was a couple different news stories that we wanted to talk about, one out of Kentucky, with some different topics that we will get to next week. I'm grateful for the conversation that we've had so far. But I do want to take these last few minutes of the program and talk about some other questions that we've received from listeners, which you can send in, by the way, by going to breakpoint.org and click on Contact Us. Fill out that form with your question or your feedback, and we would love to get to that in a forthcoming program.
But for now, I'm going to read a question that we got from somebody who says, he was the principal of a small Christian school for 13 years, an assistant principal for several years before that, now a pastor of a small church in Indiana. He's basically asking about how Christians in education, whether they're teaching in a Christian school or a public school, how you would advise them dealing with parents that maybe aren't fully on board.
So we've talked about schooling a lot, especially recently, and we're typically coming at it from the standpoint of, you know, whether schools are giving parents their full rights in their child's education. But this is kind of coming from a different angle. He says, I noticed it was a common occurrence for parents to openly resist what we were trying to do to form Christian character. For their child, they would refuse to accept punishment for obvious acts of sinful disobedience and defiance. They would demand high grades for substandard work.
They would walk out of awards programs because their child didn't get a certain award.
Some parents wanted to control the classroom as if their child was the only one in the room. I firmly believe in a Christian education. We homeschool now, but what can a Christian school do when parents are not sharing a biblical worldview or are attacking the teaching methods for trying to instill one in its schools? I don't know that there's a magic formula on this, and it is something I hear very frequently from leaders at Christian schools all over the country and have for decades now, is that it's really hard to deal with parents and get parents on board. I think part of it is that I think that there has been a tendency and I think there's a widespread problem in Christian schools where they don't actually articulate and communicate well what it is that they're trying to accomplish and why.
In other words, I think there's a lot of blame that can be obviously put on parents and it's an easy thing to do. And you certainly see parents misbehave and we certainly have entered the, you know, past the phase of the helicopter parent to the lawnmower parent. where you mow down everything. You go from hovering to mowing down all obstacles for your child and so on, and there are big issues. But I don't, and it's really difficult.
But I also don't think that schools have done a great job defining things. You know, I'll give you two examples. There are two of the most common claims on Christian schools' websites everywhere is that we offer a Christian education. but there's not a definition really of what a Christian education is. There's not a definition on how a Christian education is different than another education.
And because that vision of education hasn't been adequately communicated, then a Christian education is often confused with a moral education. And I mean by the school, that they're not doing anything different. They're just adding longer skirts and shorter hair and demerits. Or I think that's been more of a historical problem. or there's not an integrated approach to making parents understand that what you're getting here is actually something fundamentally different.
I think there are schools that do an excellent job of that. And what's interesting is, is that there's two types of Christian schools. One is a covenantal school. In other words, where the parent or the two parents, or at least one parent have to openly acknowledge that they are Christian and the child does too at times. And then the other one is, you know, more of an evangelistic model.
in which you don't have to, but you have to be really clear on what it is that we're doing here. The second one even can work on this front, and I've seen it work in a remarkable way. I've got a good friend who runs a tremendous school in the Southeast, and he has figured this out. And you know what he does? He communicates, communicates, communicates.
He's clear on what he means, and then he's clear in how he communicates. And I get the task of communication is not easy, but the problem in too many covenantal schools is that there's just way too much assumed. And I think in a lot of these schools, there is a violation of a biblical worldview. And here's what I mean by that. Saying I'm a Christian school somehow justifies an approach to education in which you see parents as being in the way.
And you don't feel as a school that you are obligated to the parents. The primary educator in the life of your kid is the parent. I understand this complicates things, but there are dreadful examples of this. I have personally experienced dreadful examples of this. And it makes the second thing that schools claim so pointless.
I just saw somebody else write about this, and I thought that nails it. I hadn't thought about how to say it like this, where schools absolutely say, this is a partnership between the home and the school. And it's complete nonsense. There's no partnership. It's a transaction.
You pay us money. We do what we want. And if you complain, you're the bad person. And this is coming in a context where too many schools are Gnostic in how they think about Christianity and spiritual formation. They're academically not excellent.
They're not integrated. But then, hey, we're the school. We're the Christian school. We're the so-called experts. That is an absolute, to think that because I'm the headmaster or the principal or the athletic director or something like that of a Christian school, and therefore I know what I'm doing, and you don't, and when you complain, you're going to get in trouble about it because we're in a partnership.
It's a nonsense statement.
So I appreciate the impulse, and this guy who wrote the question, I think, it sounds like he's really thoughtful. and there is certainly a problem on the parental side. And you're going to do everything right and not always solve the problems on the parental side. But my goodness, to think that just because I have good intentions and I call myself a Christian school, there's no problems on my side. No, no, no.
And this goes back to the board level, the inability of leaders to lead, and oftentimes you get leaders at Christian schools who actually aren't good leaders, and they don't have the capacity for the size of a task that they're taking on. And then you get this sort of confusion.
So, you know, communication, you have to be really clear on what the mission is. You have to be really clear on what a Christian education actually is. And that's what's often missing. And if you don't have these two things, you certainly aren't going to communicate it well, but you've got to communicate it well. And there's such a communication barrier there.
I would say coming from the other side to just being, just volunteering at my girls' school as much as I do, I do see the issue like you can there are some kids and some families who clearly are like they're reinforcing, you know, the behavioral expectations and the worldview that they're learning at school is getting reinforced at home. And or you would say it vice versa. It's getting reinforced at school just as it is at home. And then there are kids and families where that's clearly not happening. And that is really challenging because then they're all held to the same account during the school day in the school building.
And that can be really hard. And I would, one of the things, just really quick, I'm gonna let you finish that thought, but just to be really, really clear that the fundamental premise here has to be, it's not that the, it's not the parent's job to support the school. That's what I mean. It's the school's job to support the parent. The school is reinforcing.
Yes. Yeah. But what I'm saying, what I'm saying is it is, it is very clear. It becomes clear quickly, which kids are getting what they're learning at school at home as well.
Okay. And so from a parent's point of view, you would say it the other way, but I've been really blessed just from the periphery to see how our school administrators clearly consider it part of their duty to disciple parents as well as discipling kids. And that's where the partnership part of it comes in because there are, yes, there are families. And I know of situations where, you know, the families will request like, well, we don't, we don't do negative consequences at home. We only do positive reinforcement.
So please only do positive reinforcement at school and the school in a very lovely way is like, I'm so sorry, but we just can't, we have too many kids here and we can't do it that way. But here's why we think we should do it this way. And here's the kind of behavior and, you know, like over communicating, clear thinking exactly. Yeah, exactly. And you can still do all that and still it's still it blow up, right?
It's still not working. I mean, it's just, you're talking about dealing with people folks, and it's always going to be messy. I think this is going to sound unrelated, but I really don't think it is get your school to get rid of phones if they haven't already. And a lot of certain behavioral issues I think will be mitigated and helped. This is the kick that I'm on.
Go to Delay Smartphones. That is an incredible organization that you can get a lot of help from. But lastly, I'll say, John, I really think pastors, gosh, I'm going to become the kind of person I get really frustrated with, which is somebody who just armchair quarterbacks, churches and pastors everywhere and just says what everyone should be doing when I'm not a pastor, but I do wish pastors generally talked about parenting more. Like we just need help parenting. We've, we really are a generation of lawnmower parents.
And I think we can be very fooled into thinking that's the, the truly selfless way to do it is to get over-involved and to over-manage your kid's life because it feels very self-sacrificial. You're basically giving up your life to live your kid's life for them, but it's hurting them. But it's, That's a hard—it's hard. It's really hard. I wish we had more, like, shepherding on a big level.
There are certainly probably pastors doing that really well. But I think Christian parents need help. I don't know if it's just pastor's job, but yes. No, I think you're right. Christian parents need help, yeah.
But part of this is the order of institution. I mean, listen, God didn't ordain Christian schools. He ordained the family, the church, and the government. And so the school has to serve those other ordained. I think they're good.
I've supported them for years. And, you know, you've heard me say this. Right now we can destroy the status quo. I'm okay with schools that belong to the home and schools that belong, you know, to the church and partial. Never schools that belong to the government because they tend to become a problem.
By the way, good on the Department of Education for smacking Loudoun County this week. you know, which they deserve to be smacked down again and again and again. But I think, you know, the order of that is super important.
Well, John, let's talk about recommendations for the week. What do you have for us this week? You know, I want to recommend my friend Frank Turek's podcast radio show. It's called Cross Examined. It's also on YouTube.
Frank was about 20 feet away from Charlie Kirk when he was shot. if you're on Twitter too much or X too much, you may have seen him identified, you know, in a conspiracy theory of, you know, bodyguards that were signaling for the shooter, which is just dumb up one side, down the other. It's really dumb when you know Frank. Frank would have taken a bullet for him. And, you know, for a whole lot of other people, he's just that kind of a guy.
But there's a wonderful hour that he spent and helping kind of put the whole incident in context, but also as the way Frank does in a wider theological context of what's true about God and true about people and true about Christians and true about friends. And it was just a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I can't imagine how difficult it was for him to do that.
So I want to recommend that. Just go to crossexamine.org. I think it's probably something you can find there really quickly. Last name is Turek, T-U-R-E-K. and a lot of people know him as the co-author of a really good book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
He was, by the way, a mentor of Charlie's in terms of going to campuses. His emphasis was completely on apologetics and not so much on politics, but he is a brilliant, great communicator. How he did this is just worth watching. Thanks, John.
Well, I'm just going to recommend, I think I've recommended this before, But a beautiful album of songs from my friend Bethany Barnard called All My Questions. She wrote most of these songs in the wake of her father's untimely death. But there's a lot of just beautiful songs of like mourning and hope. And I was re-listening to it this week and it just felt very apt and just beautiful.
So the album is called All My Questions by Bethany Barnard. Can't recommend it enough. Beth is married to Shane Barnard of Shane and Shane.
So they are worship powerhouse over in that family. But one of the Shanes. I interviewed them once in college and I thought I was so clever. And I said, my first question is on a scale of one to 10, how much do you like the name Shane? And they both just looked at me like I was super weird.
But I've gotten to know Shane Barnard a little bit better over the years. And I think he would laugh at that now. But well, that is going to do it for the show today. Thank you so much for listening to Breakpoint this week. From the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stone Street.
Wishing you all a great week. We'll see you all back here next time.
