You're listening 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 Secretary of State Marco Rubio's speech at the Munich Security Conference and lessons from Rubio on how to view history and the future. We're glad you're with us this week. Please 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, let's start this week in Germany. Marco Rubio. the Secretary of State gave a speech to a standing ovation. About really the partnership between the US and Europe and including our shared history.
and a vision moving forward. You know, I think I could read between the lines that he's trying to, you know, promote. Good vibes. That would be my take on it. He's trying to promote a stronger relationship in trade and defense.
It was much less of a scolding that, you know, as Vice President J.D. Vance's speech at the same conference, I think, a couple of years ago. But it was a really uplifting and powerful speech, I thought. Did you read any kind of cultural signaling into some of the things? things he was saying, for example, about immigration or about history or about, you know.
It not being xenophobic, for example, to want to preserve your way of life and your people.
Well, all that was in there, and I think it all matters, and it certainly matters from a political point of view, which is somewhat unusual because I think political speeches used to matter a lot more than they do.
Now, I mean, you can really count on one hand the number of political speeches that have moved the needle, you know, since the middle of the 20th century, maybe. President Obama's first acceptance speech or inauguration speech or election night speech, I guess is the one that's the word I'm looking for. But but even then, I think it was very moving and didn't probably move the needle a a lot, but but it was, you know, well received. I don't know that this one will or this one won't, just because of the way political speeches go nowadays. It's kind of like, you know, in a time past, you would have a speech that would.
Be remembered forever. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall kind of speech. And I'm not ready to put this one in that category. Maybe not, not necessarily because it doesn't deserve to be, but just because.
And by the way, I do have a great podcast recommendation from John Meacham, who does a lot for the History Channel. I don't always agree with his take on history. But he did a kind of a sub-podcast series called It Was Said. That's got some of the great speeches and how they kind of move the needle. And each of these speeches typically are remembered, you know, because of a line or two, which is pretty cool.
This one had a pretty powerful line that the United States is not interested. or willing to participate. In Europe's slow decline, that was, or in the Western decline, that's a really powerful line. What made it though to me really interesting And were the kind of here, because we try not to just talk about political highlights here or anything like that. Is really he directly engaged a conflict, a conflict of ideologies or a conflict of interpretations of history.
He went after Fukuyama's end of history thesis, which is. A view of civilizational history that is based on Hegel. And that basically there's and you hear kind of tones of it in various places. President Obama talked about the long arc of history toward justice. It's essentially an evolutionary theory of history where we're inevitably getting better and better and better.
And when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union fell, Bukiyama famously wrote that book, The End of History and the Last Man. In which he argued that essentially history had evolved and proven itself to Democracy. At the same time, there was another one, another thesis that was written, which was Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Huntington's view was that Even though the world had reached peacetime, which it had at the time, That it would not stay that way, that there were civilizations that would clash. For primacy in the years to come.
And the fault lines between those civilizations. We're now not just nation states. And he was, of course, writing that at the end of the 20th century, in which the whole world went to war at least twice. along those fault lines of nations and states, but now and empires.
Now it was civilizational.
Now it was values.
Now it was ways of seeing life in the world. Essentially, world views applied on a civilizational level.
Sometimes that would correspond with nation-state lines, but that would also take the form of conflicts within nation-states. And Huntington's thesis, oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah. And the third thing is that, you know, the hottest civilizational clash would be between the West and Islam. You know, and and this is at the time when Fukuyama's thesis was that everyone was going to evolve towards this democratic way of thinking about life and the world. I think Huntington's thesis has held up really well.
I think The view of history that Fukuyama's thesis was built on is fundamentally flawed. There's not a moral evolution. to humankind either individually As Justice Kennedy wrote about in the Obergefeld decision, or civilizationally. As Fukuyama's thesis. Advanced.
The other thing that struck me about Rubio's speech is not only that he went after. The Fukuyama Thesis The End of History Thesis. But then he really clearly, I think, articulated that in that clash of civilizations or the civilized the other thesis of history. that civilizations face decline. if they could not handle both enemies within and enemies without.
The idea here is that it's not just the clash of civilizations from the outside. It's you have to maintain a robustness. on the inside. You have to be able to. Govern yourself against decline.
You have to be able to continue to animate a civilization. And of course, all of this, and this is what was so remarkable to many of us, all of this.
sounded an awful lot like the the kind of thing we we had been talking about for the last year in Truth Rising and Oz Guinness' idea of a cut flower civilization. And civilizations usually aren't m murdered first. They commit suicide. They decline to the point where they can't defend themselves and they're just simply overwhelmed either by some other forces. But reducing history down.
Too materialistic. Kind of mindless causes upon which we're just kind of riding the wave and have no. Power. This is the thing that Rubio went after, is that our choices actually matter. And we choose not to decline what he said.
And that's a powerful application of ideology. And when we talk about ideas having consequences, we usually were talking about, you know, if you believe this idea as an individual, it's going to have this consequence for you as an individual. He's talking about it at a much larger level than the individual, and he's right. And so I thought that's what made it so interesting, at least for our purposes. And then, of course, we should talk about AOC, you know, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also went to the Munich Security Conference.
Which was uh a an odd choice. I think unsuccessfully tried to push back on that thesis. We can talk about that in a second. I it was a master class and taking an awful lot of very important ideas, boiling them down. To the moment, which Secretary Rubio did.
And I think. It was probably one of his best moments as Secretary of State. I always admire. Kind of slow and methodical and articulate speech. And I thought that's what this was.
I had not really encountered the idea or like heard it in these terms before, that some of the challenges we're facing today were not so much, they didn't begin out of this weird Kind of illogical critical theory idea of like. You know, I see globalization and, you know, things like open borders and the loss of manufacturing. I can see the causes of that being something like the false humility of like, we never want to claim that our way is better than anybody else's way. And therefore, we need to have open borders. Otherwise, it's xenophobic.
And, you know, globalization is the future because anything but globalization would be to suggest that one way is preferable to another way. I guess that's kind of how I had imagined we arrived at this moment. And I think that certainly played a role. But It was really interesting to hear him paint this picture of like the post-war world having more of a globalization mindset in a very pragmatic and morological way. Like, this is what's going to help us.
Is that if we all just work together, we agree, you know, we'll just agree on this sort of international rules-based order. We'll never do the war thing again. And we'll all just choose, you know, the right things. We'll just make the right choices day in and day out. And what that's inevitably led to without a firm structure like Christianity, which he mentioned and associated as being part of the identity of the West.
But without that firm structure, then you get to where we are now. And maybe critical theory is like a grandchild of that globalization idea, but it wasn't the first idea, which makes sense to me. But I also appreciate that, you know, even though I'm with you, like, speeches like this anymore just because of the way we consume content. We don't We weren't all watching this at the same time. We're not going to remember this the way we remembered the great speeches of the 60s or the 80s, maybe.
But it helps to create norms, and especially when the person giving the speech is someone like Marco Rubio, who's not known for being particularly bombastic or off the cuff. Or like needlessly petty. Not that I'm thinking of anybody else in particular, but he is not known for those kinds of things. He made it normal, he made it seem normal and respectable to say things like. There is a way of life that is more conducive to human thriving than other ways of life.
And we would like to pursue that way of life. And in order to do that, We have to do things like protecting our culture and our borders. And I hope that that starts to create norms where people feel comfortable believing and saying that in public again. Yeah.
Well, I mean, most nations in Europe are doing that, even though they're. condemning the United States for doing that. And the United States, the way we've done it, has been so schizophrenic and, you know, in terms of not doing it and then all of a sudden doing it and you know, i i it's going to create a little bit of you know whiplash around the world. That that I think that much is inevitable. You know, what's the line?
America sneezes and the rest of the world gets a cold kind of thing. You know, is pretty true. But but but it is interesting to know where ideas come from. I ideas do have consequences and they grow feet and walk out into the real world and really matter for real people, but they also come from somewhere. And certain ideas make other ideas plausible, possible, or at times even necessary within a kind of a cultural framework, right?
So the Darwinian vision of Of the w where life came from has incredible implications on society if humans are nothing more than. Animals, and if the world is evolving in a particular direction. And so That's what kind of that Darwinian view made possible. But even beyond that, there was the Hegelian. Understanding of history, which, you know, really is a way of talking about history as a as the Product of a mindless set of forces that just kind of move forward in a particular direction.
And, you know, in a humanist mindset, we'd like to think that that's going in a good direction. That's why I think Frederick Nietzsche was so acts you know act it was so absolutely brilliant and predictive. And he's like, look, you want to get rid of God because you you don't want kind of all the the things that you see as kind of petty and authoritative of the church and tradition and that sort of stuff on your behavior. But what that does to the entire cosmos, what that does to the world, what that does to the flow of history, suddenly we're talking about undirected, unpurposed, and so on. And so I This stuff, you know, again, sounds really nerdy and really philosophical because it is, but it's also very practical.
And that's what I think Rubio was getting at. What was interesting is, and you brought up something too, that is very much worth mentioning. is that he uh shamelessly proposed that Civilization then is made up of, is the product of a vision of reality and human choices that we make. And that those choices in terms of the West though not perfect, were built on Christian assumptions, Christian assumptions about human dignity, human value, human flourishing. And now we have a track record.
We can look at one versus the other and say, hey, this one works, the other one does not. Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez came back in then and said, Western culture is thin. And it was an interesting proposal. And basically said, really all culture is, is. And this isn't an exact quote, but basically, what she argued is that all culture is.
is is is is basically humans butting up against the the the the class the class struggle. It's interesting to think, okay, all that other stuff that Rubio said really, really matters in forming culture, our decisions, the values that we hold, how we think about life and the world. She just dismissed all that as thin. I mean, what a move to kind of look at that and say, and then she proposed. Oh no, all this really is is class struggle.
Now, if that sounds like Marx, because it's Marx.
Okay, so in other words, at some point we have to believe people when they tell us what it is that they believe. I don't think, and I think this became clear in her answer. There was Noah Rothman on the editor's podcast said a lot of her comments was. Was her mouth chasing a thought that her brain hadn't put together yet? Oh my gosh, that's so good.
It's a great line. And it really, and it sounds really demeaning, but if you go back, it basically you have this kind of. Framework, this hammer that you have that you're looking to beat things with. And you have to aim at a specific corner and she couldn't quite get it there. Um, because that's what she had.
She had a a A Marxist framing that she had inherited, absorbed, learned at some point. And she just thought, oh, that's big enough to handle the sort of thing that we just saw, both in terms of the speech, but also in terms of the conflict. Of the early 21st century, and it just wasn't a big enough framing. And so to say something like, oh, Western culture is just thin, and really all culture is, is the reaction of humans to class struggle. It's a mechanistic reductionistic vision.
And you see. You know, why it's not big enough to explain. the kind of things that we're living through right now. I just don't understand. I mean, I can't imagine Frankly, I don't know her personally, but the ego that it would take to be a woman and a woman of color, she's reached a level of obvious influence in our political system.
She's overseas to speak on a national stage, an international stage, and she's suggesting that Western culture is failing its people. I would like to see anywhere else in the world where she would be able to accomplish what she's accomplished. as a woman and as a woman of color and The the idea that she would call that I'm just trying to wrap my brain. I I think you would ha if you were her, you would have to think that you were so exceptional and so special to have reached the level she's reached in such with such an impoverished view of the culture that made her. That it kind of boggles the mind.
I don't imagine she thinks of herself that way, but. If her brain caught up with her words, like you said, then it would have to, I think. I just don't understand that. How can she have that view of the world when she has the position that she has? But I think fortunately, the human spirit just generally is bent towards optimism in a corporate way.
And when you have a speech like Rubio's that says we actually can influence The way that we move forward, and then you have a voice like hers that says basically, we're screwed. I think most people will just tend toward hoping and believing in the first vision, which Would be my hope moving forward. What this conversation has been about is culture and whether culture is just itself driven forward by. mechanistic, mindless, purposeless. Flow, whether humans themselves are just part of that process, or whether we have some role to play.
Determinatively, in other words, if we were created in a sort of hierarchy of creation. And I think that civilizations, of course, are cultures that have reached kind of a size or a scope where they shape life for an awful lot of. of people But again, it comes back to an anthropological question: what are human beings? And that's based on a theological question: is there a God? Is there.
Someone who has created us in a particular way and to have a particular role. and the planet and all this sort of stuff is worldview stuff. It's interesting. The Christian view is, is that history is not. Fundamentally guided just by human action, but it's fundamentally guided by God.
But that human action actually matters, that there's actually something about what we do and how we live and the choices that we make. Which makes sense of the kinds of things that God asks, for example, of Israel in the Old Testament: choose you this day whom you're going to serve. What kind of people are you going to be? You're not going to be like those people who live out of appetite, you're going to be like these people. And I've just in recent days been going back to a framing of civilizations.
that comes from a guy who had a remarkable life. He was a A dissident that was expelled out of Russia, founded the sociology department at the University of Petersburg, and then at Harvard University. In the early part of the 20th century, Paterum Sirokin. And Sorokin, you know, basically looked at cultures and civilizations and put them into categories. If you're a civilization or a culture that lives out of an ideal, He called in ideational cultures.
You're thinking about the future. You're building for the future. You're acting in such a way, kind of like someone who says, you know, I want to buy X, so I'm going to save up the money so that I can buy X. A sensei culture, on the other hand, is one that lives for immediate gratification. This is the one that says, I don't have the money for X, but I'm going to spend it all on credit and go into incredible amounts of debt, which debt is, by the way, a bad indication.
for a culture, a s society, a civilization, or an individual for that matter. And he just put so much weight on whether we are here to just do what we want, get what we want. And just kind of consume out of the world around us, or whether our. ideas and visions can build for the future. And that would be the other kind of framework that I would lay over Rubio's speech, where he's basically saying: look, we want to be a an ideational sort of place.
And Marxism At its root, it reduces people down to senses, to consuming, to meet their appetites, whether that's Physical, a lot of times in Marxist countries, it gets basically the choice about food. Do we have enough to eat? But also sexuality. It's interesting how. Marxist governments so often violate the family, separate the family, encourage infidelity, and all kinds of things.
It's a way of reducing people down to their basest instincts. All of this stuff is the stuff of of worldview and it matters. kind of how we think about the human person and whether we realize that they're is a way that we've been made. By God, and history's headed in the direction that He wants, and we join that.
So Fascinating speech, lots of worldview stuff. We did a commentary on it this past week that has some more stuff on it as well that you can check out on the website. That's awesome. Let's take a quick break, John. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week.
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John and his family have been at Summit every summer for the last Last several years because we know the impact it makes. Grab your spot now at summit.org/slash breakpoint. We're back on Breakpoint this week. John, I want to talk now about the President's Commission on Religious Liberty.
So he talked about this in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast recently. And he has set up this commission filled with faith leaders from the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church and some Jewish leaders to talk about the state of religious liberty in the country and then to ultimately come up with a report on how it's going and maybe what the federal government can do to either get out of the way. Or to promote religious liberty. But there's been a little bit of a dust up there in recent weeks. Carrie Prajan.
Who was, I think, a former Miss America pageant. Her last name now is Carrie Prajan Bowler, I think, isn't it? Yeah.
She got married somewhere. Carrie Prajan Bowler. That's right. Yeah.
Former Miss America pageant contestant and kind of an influencer now, and she's been politically vocal. She was asked to join the commission and has now been asked to leave the commission. There was kind of a fiery hearing where she. really hammered home. You know, charges of anti-Semitism that she found to be unsubstantiated.
And she she went really hard on some of the panelists about their views and support of Israel. She accused people of saying that unless you are Zionist, her words, then you it if you are Zionist, then You can't be anti-Semitic, but if you're not Zionist, then you definitely are anti-Semitic. She was kind of. Trying to split some hairs and kind of derailed this hearing of the Religious Liberty Commission and has now been asked to leave it. I know you were watching some of these exchanges, and we have friends, some of our friends on this commission.
What are you hearing about kind of the behind the scenes of this?
Well, the commission is interesting. It's got some wonderful leaders on there, as you said, evangelical, Roman Catholic. Jewish and so on, some really intellectual heavyweights, as well as some popular figures. And they have Picked a number of topics to address in their meetings. And so they've talked about those who have been canceled, and they've talked about kind of hostility from the state towards.
individuals and And here, the topic of this one was anti-Semitism. And the kind of acts of anti-Semitism that we've seen on college campuses, that we've seen justified and protected. under the guise of more progressive leaning states. Certainly, the question about Hamas and Israel's response to October the seventh and And Kerry Prajan Bowler was not on the Panel. Until this one.
It's not clear why she was brought on to this one. There's not, you know, she doesn't do any of this work. I think she's a She's a pretty Smart. person. Um she is a you know mother.
She's Been on a couple podcasts recently talking about her story. Many people might remember her name. where she was part of the Miss America pageant and had a dust up with Perez Hilton. About the definition of marriage, kind of right at the height of it, and said on stage. Uh that marriage was between a man and a woman and Perez Hilton.
in the name of tolerance, said that If she'd have won, he'd have ran up and stole her crown and thrown it on the ground and stomped on it because she is, and I quote, a dumb. B word? And that remember how tolerant that movement was?
So there's a history here, but it's not clear why she was invited on the commission or certainly why she was invited on the commission. for this particular topic of which she apparently cared deeply about and What was Part of the conversation was basically a defense of Israel. is Zionism. In her view, and she wore a Palestinian flag along with an American flag. on her outfit.
She defended Candace Owens. She went after Seth Dylan. From the Babylon B? Uh pretty harshly. And kind of like an accusatory questioning sort of way.
Do you think this is anti-Semitic? Do you think this is anti-Semitic? And basically taking the Groiper line that any critique of Israel is Is accused of being anti-Semitic, and everybody's in the pocket of the nation of Israel. And it was a bizarre exchange. Ryan Anderson, who is a Roman Catholic, brilliant guy, the head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
She basically claimed that as a Roman Catholic, her view is not that. a defense of the state of Israel at all, uh because she doesn't see it in the prophetic. Uh Ryan. Was really good to clarify the facts of the Roman Catholic position. Which is that a defense of the nation of Israel and a defense of the Jewish people.
is not based in prophecy, as it might be, for example, for some evangelicals. uh that the christian position is different and quoting you know theological leaders from the Roman Catholic side of things in order to defend that. And at this point, it's just not fair. Anytime really anybody goes up against Ryan Anderson, it tends not to be fair intellectually, but it really wasn't. Especially if you're talking about Catholicism and theology, yeah.
Well, yeah, almost anything, except farming, which his wife knows way more about than he does. But it's just a, it was just odd. The other thing that struck me, and this is going to be important here in a second when we talk about what Colorado legislators are trying to do. There was just a way of arguing. from Prajan Bowler, that just was, I just, we need to get past this way of this kind of line of accusatory questioning, kind of gotcha, like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, and kind of a moral superiority, and then act offended, you know, immediately.
This is a way of arguing that owes itself to Twitter. Because it is a uh it's it and it is you're after a sound bite. It is indicative of a particular age demographic in America. that in some cases are being given a microphone now. and you never get to the actual substance of something.
There is an assumed moral superiority in the questioning. We often hear it from the progressive left. But you're increasingly hearing it from kind of the Graper or graper adjacent right. this kind of you know If you have any sort of defense whatsoever, that means. We got it in response to our critique of the video.
That was posted on the president's true social account, although I don't think it was from that particular age demographic. But there's a defense of everything that the president does that says, oh, I guess you want AOC to be president. Right. Which is just like, it's just a dumb thing to say out loud. But that's the way this line of questioning goes.
And we're all poorer because of it, I think. And that's what emerged in this. People should watch the exchange because what is true becomes pretty evident and pretty pretty clear. In terms, one side has substance, the other side had a lot of accusatory questioning with a moral with an air of moral superiority. And that's just not the way.
To have an argument. It made me think, I'll tell you what, it made me think of something G.K. Chesterton said about his brother. He said, my brother was born and he listed the year and I don't remember the year. And he goes, and we immediately started to argue.
And we argued every single day until the day that he died. but we never once quarreled. And he said the problem with a quarrel is that it ruins a really good argument. And it's like the whole public discourse has become this kind of. impoverished way of quarreling.
It's why knowing kind of how to think and how to argue, and this is the point why I'll recommend a new series we have coming out on the What Would You Say video series about how to make an argument and how to think. Because it's just important to know how to do that and not to be reduced down. It was really kind of sad and embarrassing on this stage to kind of see it unravel the way that it did. Yeah, I think that's super insightful. If you find yourself in the middle of a discussion or you're watching one.
Where it's clear that at least one person's aim is not to get to new information. But to get the other person to say something? That they're all, you know, that the questioner is set up to criticize, then that's just never a worthwhile pursuit. I mean, that's not a real, that's a quarrel. That's not an argument.
I love that because my husband and I's love language, we frequently joke about this, is 100% arguing. We were visiting friends last week and I was about to go on a run. I'm trying to train for a half marathon. And I walked in and said, Oh, I just feel like I can't do this. And Aaron just off the cuff just goes, You probably can't.
And I was like, you know what? I'm about to go do it. And our friends that we were with were like, you guys are so strange, but that's how we make each other better, you know? But that is, I would say, argument on behalf of building each other up and not in pursuit of trapping each other, which is certainly what this felt like.
Well, Don, let's switch gears from the National Commission on Religious Liberty to your home state of Colorado.
So what are you weirdos up to now? This is a new thing that I did this was a bill that was introduced this week. And it is the first of its kind in the country. Congrats once again. You guys are such pioneers.
In Colorado, there are some lawmakers who would like to legalize what they call sex work.
So, the selling of sex via prostitution and the purchasing of sex through prostitution. And the idea is that we've just been really unfair and petty in the way that we've enforced the laws that are currently on the books. And that really sexual autonomy, I guess, is true self-actualization.
So, we should make this legal. Do I have that right?
Well, yeah. I mean, to be clear, obviously, Nevada has some version of this. And I think Maine is kind of. Debating it. It's strange.
It's like you can sell it, but you can't buy it. Yeah.
Well, and that's really what the goal is, is to, I think, at some level, it it's the weird conflict that the sexual revolution has gotten us into, right, which in which women are always the victims, but they also have to be autonomous. And then to try to reflect some of that vision of life in the world into law. And whereas the woman has historically been penalized for prostitution. Let's have equality by penalizing no one. And it is just.
It is just kind of a weird thing. But it I guess the deeper point That is interesting to me is that this is another way of Colorado. Pushing forward a vision of kind of individual autonomy, which can only be maintained by having an incredibly intrusive, big, an annoying state. I was texting with a political activist here in Colorado who Has just done a lot of work and been involved. And he said, you know, it's amazing to me.
Just how fast we've come in such a short amount of time. I mean, Colorado is just demonic in terms of its speed. of what it is trying to legalize. And we talk. You know, Californians are always like, oh, it's so bad here.
And then you go, it's just not right now. And compared to Colorado, like, we are just finding new ways. California is like the the the college student who talks a big game, but then kind of lives a little bit more conservatively than you'd think. And then Colorado I mean, not with regards to taxes, but Colorado is like the weird hippie who's actually living that way. Right.
Well, and I think it's worth noting that if you look at the four sponsors of the bill. Senator Heinrichson, Senator Cutter. Representative Garcia and Representative Stewart. That whole age demographic thing that we talked about in the last segment. And again, I don't want to make too much of that.
Are they men? They're not men. One is a man. Three are women. But they fit a particular demographic.
In which they receive the super loud education from every different direction. About human dignity being sexual autonomy, and especially that women are always the victims here, and therefore the only way. To free that up is not to protect them, but to empower them to be more autonomous. And because there's this sense that to protect them is derogatory. It is, what is the word, patronizing?
It's still going to be patriarchal in that way, right?
So it's a vision that there's no difference between men and women. Men and women are fully interchangeable, and women have to be empowered. And even now, because you have to take the victim and give them the power of oppression over the past oppressor, then women have to have kind of even more power. In order to kind of re-even the playing field across the board, it's a whole vision. Of autonomy being dignity, that we should be able to do whatever we want and so on, which is why, by the way, when you have a bill like this, this is the way Colorado has gone.
We were also texting about this, this. This gentleman that I mentioned earlier, myself, that Colorado, when we both moved here, was still really purple, if not red, politically speaking. And all this stuff went forward, this vision of autonomy, this vision of, you know, so on, and it was aided and abetted by the libertarian impulse. The libertarian impulse, which is that freedom should never be ruled. Freedom should never, in other words, we should be able to do whatever we want as if you can secure.
Brand new kind of frontiers of individual quote unquote freedom. without bringing the state in to do it. And when you do that, when you give people all these rights to do whatever they want and they start abusing it, like for example, we have a history of this with marijuana and edibles and all that sort of stuff, not to mention doctor-assisted suicide and all the other ways we've tried to ensure that people can just do whatever they want. The state has to be there to clean up the mess. That grows the state.
Right. The other half of this that doesn't make sense to me is that If even if they're saying you have to let people do what they want. Where are they exactly getting this idea that this is what women want? Aside from a I don't know, a small group of voices, it strikes me as a similar argument to the legalization of abortion, which is it's pushed as if this is empowering for women. But when you encounter individual people who are either pursuing an abortion or who are working in prostitution, Are these empowered women?
This is they are 99 times out of 100, the least empowered women at the least empowered moment of their lives when they're doing this kind of thing. And I just don't understand where they get this vision so warped and why they get away with it. In the PR world. Yeah, I mean, I think you have to have been convinced deeply of a particular understanding of. sexuality and freedom and autonomy and That ran so deep.
For so many years. And if you look at, again, I don't want to be reductionistic here, but there's a type, there's a stereotype. Of progressive lawmakers and age demographics for those progressive lawmakers, that they're just. They're just honest products of what they learned, I think, in some ways. But we're in a, we are currently watching the unfolding of the Epstein files.
Oh, I saw that. Yeah, that makes an important connection. In the middle of this, you know, reckoning where all these people are performing outrage about this, we're going to push this kind of bill. And they'll say, the sponsors of this bill will say, well, this has nothing to do, we're not going to touch any of the laws against human trafficking. But what precisely would be the line?
And how do you argue it exactly? If you have a 15-year-old girl that a group of men would like to, you know, engage in whatever Jeffrey Epstein was up to and his friends, and she says that she would also like to do that. Are you going to tell her she's too young? Are you going to tell her that she can't choose that? By your own metrics here of autonomy and sexual dignity and all of that, how does that not fit?
I mean, I don't understand how you can't see that.
Well, that is, I think that's going to be a conflict that's to come, right? Um in two ways. One is is that the the it decriminalizes adult commercial sexual activity. And by the way, all this always happens with brand new made up language, right? Commercial sexual activity is the new word for And so pimping is still technically illegal.
So the the the ordinances under this bill and by the way, this hasn't passed. It's it remains to be seen whether it will be. Basically what involves in and pimping remains illegal. But We don't keep underage people. From participating in the economy.
We don't keep them from getting a job, right? They can get a job when they're 15, I think, in Colorado. But the age of consent is 18. How do you align that if this is legitimate business activity, if somebody legitimately wants to do that? Suddenly, do you say, oh, well, it's a different rule here, kind of like bartending.
You have to be a particular age or whatever.
So, anyway, I think it, but that violates the kind of the autonomy. And remember, we're still trying to figure out how to grant teenagers that level of autonomy while still protecting them with kind of an age of consent and all that sort of stuff. But it really is in a again, all of these laws reflect the particular vision of the human person and where our dignity. comes from And wood. You know As a conservative, I want as little government intervention as possible.
But I also think the government has a very, very important role. laws at flourishing human activity. And not just at some kind of random vision of freedom. There are some things that we do that we have to be protected from ourselves in. Because we do wrong things.
And that's why the libertarian impulse, people ask me all the time, how did Colorado make that shift? And I came in the middle of the shift when it was happening in 2007. And the answer is the libertarians. The libertarians were co-opted. in this vision by progressives.
And promised basically freedom, and what they got was a really big state. And it used things like this, used things like doctor-assisted suicide, used things like the legalization of marijuana. Yeah.
Well, so do you think that similar to the legalization of marijuana, I think when you hear arguments for things like the legalization of prostitution? It usually centers on, you know, our attempts to curb this have caused all kinds of problems. It never is, here's what's intrinsically good about this thing we're legalizing. And I think we're seeing that more and more with what's happened with marijuana legalization as well. Is that I'm wondering if that's a convincing rule of thumb.
Like if you see a law being put forward and they're not able to argue for the intrinsic good of what they're promoting, but it's simply because Having restrictions on this thing before caused other problems. Is that a good reason to think to be skeptical of it? Yeah, maybe. I mean, I think you could apply that to gambling. I think you could apply it to marijuana.
You could apply some of that. I still think the framework that I mentioned earlier from Paterum Sirokin is pretty. Helpful, the difference between something, a society, a culture that's ideational, and a culture that's sensate. And then kind of using that as a grid. Is this something that is a way of ordering liberty for a Long-term good, or is it a way of removing restraints?
for immediate gratification. I think a lot can fit into that category. And also. They're is the reality that both Civilizations and cultures, but also individuals and communities and families can become sensate. How do we become sensei by losing the ability Or never cultivating in our children the ability to say no to something now in order to work for something and bring about something.
Long term. And I think that's really brilliant. By the way, he that. Family For Sorokin and also for some others who wrote about this stuff back in that same time period. W w was one of the ways That individuals could cultivate that sort of thing, right?
Families give us kind of this ordered sense of existence. And then It's how we are best kind of cultivated into a vision of life.
So, when a culture has a strong family, Culture, or there's a strong family culture within a civilization or within a society. then that really helps kind of perpetuate that vision of life. In a way that really nothing else can.
So I think that that's a helpful thing. I think it's notable we are getting a lot more attention now on buyer's remorse, buyer's regret about marijuana in particular. Because I think that the um uh the the results Have been so negative.
So, even the New York Times editorial board now is now against. marijuana. They were for it before. Um all of our predictions were wrong. We said there's no evidence that legalizing it will lead to increased use.
Or there's no evidence that legalizing it In conjunction with it getting way more potent, it will have deleterious effects on people. And now they're writing this editorial saying, We should probably put the brakes on because it turns out we were wrong about all these very obvious and very predictable things that everybody else said would happen. But back to what you were saying about the family, I think that makes sense. you know, even in looking at marijuana use, like One of the things family does is it calls you to lay down your own needs. on behalf of the needs of others.
You know, kind of from moment to moment.
So things like your immediate comfort or pleasure. just take a back seat. It doesn't mean that they completely exit the car, but It takes a back seat. And there's not many things like family. That force you to do that, or that call you to it.
Even chosen family or friends, it just isn't as powerful as a pull of. No, it's not. You're not having your own children. And it's not as consistent. It's so habitual.
Not as relentless. You have to create space for others. I mean, that's it's really that simple. If you have, you know, two or three brothers or sisters, you have to, you know, that even adds to it. You have to create space for each other.
and learn how to do that. I would wager my life savings that the majority of people who are using marijuana habitually or who are struggling with it or whatever. You know, it probably starts out, it's much more common among people who don't have families. You know, because there you know, you need a reason to not do something that offers you I I don't know, whatever they're pretending that marijuana offers you. But this piece from the editorial board in the New York Times is fascinating because they they walk through the statistics on the number of people ending up in the hospital because of hyperemesis and long term chronic psychotic Conditions That can absolutely be traced back to marijuana use.
The number of people who are causing car accidents and getting in car accidents, who are unable to hold down a job, who are not dating and getting married because of young men. Who knew? Not going great. You should not encourage young men to do less work. But what's fascinating, though, about their argument is that they're arguing for some policy prescriptions.
Some of them I think would be pretty helpful, but to try and put the brakes on this thing. But I feel like in the long term, it's going to be really hard to have success in the policy arena if you can't make. An ideological argument for why marijuana is probably bad for you and why this kind of sensei living is not the best foot forward. Do you agree?
Well, I don't think that's something that the law can do. The law can enforce it, but the culture. Has to, what a culture does is communicate a vision for life, which goes back to the Rubio speech. If you assume, culture is just basically a thin reaction to class struggle. And it's not actually made up of how we actually think about what it means to be human and who we are.
And that culture catechizes. It catechizes into a vision of life, which is why it perpetuates and why disrupting it is such a remarkable thing. And um that you know that that that's what The culture's job is, and Law's part of that, don't get me wrong. But it takes a lot more than that. You got to have a lot of.
Yeah.
Trains pulling in the same direction, I think. I just mean the editorial. I mean, an editorial board of the New York Times is an agent of culture. They're trying to make a policy argument and saying this is bad. And if they're not going to go far enough to say this is a bad idea because we weren't made for this kind of thing and we were made for something better, then they're going to, you know, they're trying to.
They're not going to have high expectations in the New York Times. I just don't see that happening. But good luck on that one today. As John Calvin would say. Applications are now open for the 2026-2027 Colson Fellows Program.
Participants take a 10-month deep dive into Christian worldview and learn how God's story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration explain the world better than any other worldview. They study how Christianity is more than a privatized individual faith, giving them confidence to see all of life through the lens of God's Word. Listen now to Kathy, a 2025 commissioned Colson Fellow, share the program's impact on her faith. I loved God before I started the Colson Fellowship program. And I wanted to live for him and I did share him with others, but I didn't feel equipped.
and the Coulson Fellowship. gives Christians that don't feel equipped hope. Our culture today can feel chaotic for Christians, but the Colson Fellows program wants to equip you with confidence for it. Like Kathy said, request more information today at Colsonfellows.org. That's Colsonfellows.org.
Well, John, let's get to some questions today. This first one says, I finished undergrad. I have a grad degree from a well-known Christian school. And discussion with some leadership at the school on the topic of taking stands on cultural issues, the reply is usually something like: well, that would be controversial because of the minority American population at the school. Maybe he also means a minority Christian population.
I'm not sure. I've seen the same kind of response in churches in the area. How do you think the church should address this without being called, for example, racist?
Well, I think it's a hard question. This is one that was sent from an old friend who's in this situation. I think it's. It's a hard thing for a lot of Christian institutions that have adopted to some degree a racial framework that they didn't get from scripture. They got from kind of DEI or critical race theory.
As a way of deciding what it is that we can and what it is that we can't talk about. And I think we have to talk about the image of God, we have to talk about things like human flourishing. That's why it's. Such An important thing to get those categories of what it means to be human down. And maybe there's some theological pre-work that needs to be done.
about who we are and what race is and what it is not. And the idea of partiality And so on. You know, will it work that you can do it without being called racist? Oftentimes, not in my experience. No, you'll be called racist.
If you are called racist, Unfairly, make sure that it's unfairly. In other words, if we impose a purely political lens, We we we we do, I think, risk I embracing categories of what it means to be human. from what would be considered the right. that would also be racist. And I think we need to show how policies from the political left are racist and policies from the far right tend to be racist as well.
And let's come up with a real category. I'm really uncomfortable and I wi with kind of the dismissal of the history of of racism and racial abuse and and so on. In American history, that's happening from some quarters, even of Christianity. It's just. Partiality does take many forms.
Racism is one of those forms. That is a part of the original sin of America. and to try to reframe it somehow and to repaint Is it you know the history as if it never really happened or if it wasn't that big of a deal or something like that? That's just a reverse application of critical theory, that our guys are the good guys and their guys are the bad guys, and now we're the oppressed ones, and so therefore we can get away with believing and saying whatever we want. I wish I had a roadmap.
I wish I could point you to a book where it said, like, here are the three steps in order to get there. And I don't know that I can, but lay the groundwork. of the theological framing of what it means to be human. and what it means to be human together with other people from other ethnicities and so on. uh first and foremost, understand the history of nations and how that's different from the history of partiality.
And sin, one of them's created, the other one's what happens in a fallen context. And I do think we need to call. When false accusations of racism are leveled, which will happen, we need to stop and call it. But I tell you the other thing: don't do it on social media. Right right now there's so many conflicts that that are taking the form of this Well, what we were talking about earlier in the program, this reduced form of quarreling.
which you never get to the real ideological conflict and and we need to do that very, very clearly. I think listening goes a long way. I think listening to the accusations. Goes a long way asking questions. Parsing, showing difference.
And then the other thing is, it's a lot harder to accuse someone. falsely, if you know that person, love that person, and develop a relationship with that person. And I and I I think that We want to be able to have these kind of robust arguments that are important and necessary culturally. That shouldn't take the place of actually loving our neighbor, right? Actually doing that hard work of loving our neighbor.
So I think that needs to be part of the equation, too. I wish I had. I wish I had an easy solution. It's a tough time because of that, because of that framework that's been imposed on everything. I mean, without knowing the specifics of why this person is asking this question, I would just say: like, if you're.
Frustrated that your institution is not willing to put itself out there by saying things that. You know, maybe weren't controversial 10 years ago, but because we're in today, it is controversial, whatever. I would say remind your institution that they are making claims. That would have been controversial at some other time. I mean, every institution, in order to survive, has to have values, whether they're stated or not.
And then maybe help your colleagues or your leaders parse out why are we more comfortable making some claims than others? And it's probably going to force them to reckon with what are we trying to accomplish? What is our goal or mission as a company or an organization or a school or whatever? And isn't part of that just making value judgments and then being clear about what those are? Every other school and corporation and organization is doing that.
You absolutely have the right to do that. You know, on a personal level, like I, John, you and I host a podcast that a lot of people listen to, which is such a gift, and I don't take it lightly. But I'm also aware that some people just are going to take things that we say uncharitably. And it, you know, Earl, I've been doing this with you for several years now, and I feel like I've gotten more confident the more I've kind of sat under your teaching. Part of my growth was just accepting that some people are going to take this uncharitably, and I can't own that for them.
Like I can't let that, I want to be open-minded about criticism, but also just recognizing that some people are going to accuse me of things and read into things that I just can't take the time or the energy to worry over. And I can only, if that's true for me on a very small personal level in this kind of small sphere that you and I have, I can imagine how true that's going to be for someone running an institution. All right, well, John, this last question is a really, really good and frankly urgent one. This is Jeff. From Green Bay, Go Packers.
I lead a Bible study group at my church. We're kicking off Truth Rising, the study, on this Thursday with Lesson One. I was watching the intro to the Lesson One video. I couldn't help but notice that John nailed every shot he took on the basketball court. Is he really that good at basketball?
And were there any outtakes of missed shots? that didn't make the final cut or should I say How many outtakes were there? I mean, inquiring minds. We need to know. What I really wanted to talk about with this question is the incredulity that is inherent in this question.
It is just dripping with incredulity and disbelief. No, and listen, there's a trend here because listen, last month we had somebody write in. And doubt that I even went to South Korea when I talked about visiting that pastor. I mean, the incredulity, people just don't believe it. Rude.
It was really something. Yeah.
Now, this is funny. I am not that good at basketball. The camera does is remarkable. Where there are outtakes, I will never tell. I will say that.
Like, you see, John shooting it, and then the result is like Stefan Curry shot. No, listen, I can shoot the ball. I'm just going to tell you right now, I can shoot the ball. That day, I was shooting in boots and a big quilted vest and a long sleeve shirt. And I was still shooting the ball pretty well.
Do I leave the floor on any of the jump shots? Was the next question? And the answer is: heck no, I'd never leave the floor at all. And then he challenges us to a two-on-two, and absolutely not. If you want to do a three-point contest where I don't have to move and play defense, I'm all in.
But those days are long gone for me. Don, if I tried to shoot a basketball, I'm afraid it would end up being granny style. That's just the sports that I chose to pursue in my life had nothing to do with any kind of ball. I ran track and I swam. And that's the extent of my my talent is endurance.
And get it. I don't think when the challenge was two on two, it involved you, just so you know. Good, okay, because that's it. I don't know. I don't think that that was it.
Thank you. Maybe. But the more important question is: when are you, Maria, going to complete the Colson Fellows program? Which I think is a really good question too.
Well, I think we are out of time for the program today. Appreciate the question, Jeff, from Green Bay. It's on my to-do list. I'm still going to use my young children as my get out of jail free card. I have young kids and they keep me extremely busy.
And also I'm training for a half marathon. Did I mention that yet? Do you know how you know someone's training for a marathon? Because they tell you about it all the time. Yeah, you don't have to wait.
You don't have to wonder. They just tell you eventually. I don't know what that is. I got to give a recommendation. It's really good, remarkable thing that's worth all of our time.
Especially in past weeks, we've talked about kind of the art of dying being a part of Christian theology, and that that hasn't been something that. Christians have uh come back to nearly enough now. Um At the Hoover Institution, there was a long long conversation on one of their podcasts with former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, also the former president at the University of Florida, who announced a couple weeks ago. that he had a terminal cancer diagnosis.
SAS is a brilliant guy. Principled guy, strong believer. And what he offers is really a masterclass on a lot of things, including. how he thinks about the intersection of faith. And politics, the art of the responsibility of a statesman.
as a whole human being. And then specifically, what does it mean to Redeem the time, as the scripture says, to die well. There just hasn't been anything like this in a while. It is absolutely worth the conversation. worth the time to stop and to meditate.
On the things that he is challenging us to think about.
So, um, Incredible conversation. With former Senator Ben Sass on the Hoover Institution podcast. Awesome.
Okay, I'm looking forward to that.
Well, I'm going to let us end there because I have no doubt that's going to be extremely powerful.
So, please do go listen to that. I look forward to listening to it myself. Thank you so much for being with us this week. For the Coulson Center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stone Street. As a reminder, go to breakpoint.org and click on contact us and you can send us your questions or comments or feedback and we'd love to interact with those on a future episode.
Have a great week. We'll see you all back here next week. God bless.
