Leadership vs. Celebrity (Part 1)

Welcome to Family Policy Matters, an engaging and informative weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, this is John Rustin, President of NC Family, and we're grateful to have you with us for this week's program. It's our prayer that you will be informed, encouraged, and inspired by what you hear on Family Policy Matters, and that you will feel better equipped to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here is our host of Family Policy Matters, Tracey Devette Griggs. Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters.

President Ronald Reagan famously said, freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. Well, this sobering reality is one reason why the work of Generation Joshua is so important, as the folks there assist parents in raising up the next generation of Christian leaders and citizens, equipping those young people to influence the political processes of today and tomorrow. Joel likes to say they teach through the doing, and doing they did here in North Carolina in the months running up to the elections. 325 young people made 977,000, that's nearly a million, voter education contacts across our state in October and November. Joel Gruhey, welcome to Family Policy Matters. Thank you so much, Tracey. It is a pleasure to be here. Joel, start off by telling us, in your experience, how much are the youth of America interested, knowledgeable, and better yet, involved in politics?

Okay, so the answer to those questions, it's a great question by the way, is actually, it's different on different pieces. The interest of American youth in politics is actually rather high, higher than it's historically been. That has worked its way into the high school aspect of governance where people are very much tracking what's going on. What I find fascinating is that although the interest has grown, the knowledge of it has declined. So we find people that are more interested and less knowledgeable today about our American political system. And then as far as engagement, it depends on how you count it.

If you're looking at engagement as how often do you protest or change the cover of your Instagram or Facebook profile, that's pretty high. If you're looking at how much they actually know how to engage the system in a productive way, that's unfortunately rather low. What do you blame this lack of knowledge on? Well, in part, it's because we stopped bothering to teach students about our civic process. And partly that is because we don't agree on what the process is as a nation.

We don't like the process. And when we explain the process at a certain point, someone raises the question and says, why is that the process? And frankly, even our teachers don't know. It's funny how often I'm working with people that teach government and civics because we as a national nonprofit, we teach that around the country, but we work with other people who do as well. And how often we find people, particularly in the public education sphere, who don't actually know why our government works the way it does. And the terrifying thing is that they're the ones charged with teaching our kids how it works and how they're involved.

And if they don't understand it, it's unlikely anyone they're going to teach is going to understand it. And that's a real tragedy for our country. How much of the blame, if any, goes to social media and the way that kids engage on what seems like a very surface level, especially in, say, Instagram, which is all about that quick quote and hit and share?

I wouldn't put the blame there. I think the problem with that is that it is more of an echo chamber of bad content. Instagram and any other social media platform essentially just replicates things you got from somewhere else. It doesn't normally originate content. But the end result is that bad content is a lot louder than it was because it travels a lot further. What's that quote about truth and lies? A lie can travel around the world before truth puts its shoes on or something like that. There's an aspect of that where disinformation or misinformation rapidly moves. And it's hard to correct it when it gets out there. It truly is.

And frankly, that's one of the perpetual weaknesses of social media. It sounds good. It's instinctually something I want to hear. Great.

All of a sudden, it's out the door moving and we never even got a chance to say, but it's not right. So I would say that's actually one of the recurrent challenges. That and people want something to be true. And as a result of that, they often assume it's true because it sounds good, but it rarely is. And we're talking right now about young people, but actually this applies to people of all ages, doesn't it?

We're all guilty of this. And one of the things about Instagram is I think, or any of the social media platforms, is that it gives especially young people a sense that they've done something, right? They feel like they're involved.

Right, right. And it reinforces the fact that I'm making a difference whether they are or aren't. The really hard part that comes as a result of that is when they think they've made a difference and they didn't. Or they're making a difference to try and do a good thing, but the result of their action is actually doing the thing they're trying to stop. And that I find particularly troublesome is how often you will have good intent paired with really bad policy, but not enough critical reasoning skills of the person advocating it to realize they are actually bringing about the thing they're trying to stop. That happens, unfortunately for our friends on the left, sometimes a lot more than they'd like.

And it's a recurrent thing we deal with. And we did it, there's a study that came out, I think it was a year or so ago, where they were measuring the civic awareness of our college graduates, the seniors, and we gave them basically high school curriculum questions. And most of them were getting somewhere between a D and an F. They couldn't identify the father of the Constitution, or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or that a senator's term is six years long. These are basic facts and figures that you need to know before you can even get to talk about policy.

And they don't even have that, which is really sad. Well, you have a statement on your website that says many of today's leaders do not actually want to lead. They just want to be the top person in charge. That is not leadership, it's celebrity, you say.

Correct. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about leadership. Is this Generation Joshua designed to be an antidote to this kind of philosophy in our nation?

Well, that's our hope. We've had our organization described as essentially America's life insurance policy. And the idea is that we train thousands of high school students every year on how our government works, why it works that way, which is a crucial piece of it, and then we give them the basic skill set to change it. Now, back in the day, way back when, having basic citizenship skills was just the assumed minimum of every American. It was the responsibility of being a citizen. Today, that idea is gone. So when you walk in with basic competency and citizenship, suddenly you're leading, because you're the only one who knows how it works.

And so what we had was we started teaching basic skills and discovered those rapidly turned into leadership skills. Because if you can move people in a direction and give them a productive route going forward to change what they view as an evil or a wrong, people will follow them. The downside with many of our celebrities today is they like to call attention to stuff they don't like. They rarely have carefully thought through what a good solution to that is. Or more often, they thought they were solution and then never thought about what the cost of that solution would be.

Because everything you do has a cost, right? It can be time. It can be money.

It can be something else. But for most of the people, they're like, this is bad. We should fix it.

We should do this. Well, yeah, but what's the result of that? A practical example of that today is when people are mad about the Electoral College.

It's not the popular will, right? Well, the end result, however, of that objection is usually that you minimize or muzzle the voices of people that do not live in urban areas. Now, they don't intend to do that when you talk to them. But they haven't thought about their idea long enough to realize the harm they're about to try and perpetrate in the idea of pursuing something that is a reasonable thing that everyone's voice is heard, right? That sort of critical reasoning and the lack of it is terrifying when people that have huge amounts of influence are not wise. Can you give us another example? That is a great example about the Electoral College. Do you have another example in your pocket there about ways that people are moving where they don't really understand the consequences?

Sure. Practical example. In my spare time, of which I don't have that much, but in my spare time, I serve as a member of my local town council. Practical result, you're dealing with local governance stuff, right? And a lot of the local governance in our country tends to actually tend pretty conservative. People like to have their budgets balanced and they like their bills paid and they don't want to be taxed more than they need to be.

Right? And it's a pretty straightforward approach to governance. And frankly, my friends on each side of the political aisle, we generally agree with that.

We differ on how to get there, but we like our end goal. However, they also like a calm, peaceful environment to live in. End result, we had a local committee about a year ago now that tried to put together a music and arts festival in our town in a park. This is calm. It happens all across America today. And they decided they wanted to make it peaceful. So their solution to doing so, not peaceful, but pleasant, was to ban from a government festival at a park any and all forms of political speech. You couldn't be a candidate. You couldn't be a political party. You couldn't advocate for policy.

Actually, that's not true. A nonprofit advocating for policy could show up, but none of the candidates and none of the parties could show up. Either side didn't matter.

They just banned them all. But they wanted everyone else to attend. But what happened was they missed the fact that they rolled right over top of something we call the First Amendment, which is our freedom of speech. And freedom of speech, particularly in a public venue that is open to the public, that is public land, you can't ban that sort of conduct. In fact, that is a clear violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution. Now, did these people intend to do that?

No, they had no idea. In fact, it got brought up at council and they were like, guys, we can't do this. And the attorney, one of the town attorneys, myself, were rushing to get in front of this committee to stop them before we got ourselves in a lawsuit. And so we did it. And they were like, we didn't mean to. We weren't trying to violate the Constitution. We were trying to have a party at a park. But they didn't know.

OK, fine. But then I was talking to the attorney afterwards and we were looking at some facts and figures and realized that the majority of violations of our First Amendment speeches happened by local towns. Local committees, local counties, et cetera, not federal stuff, which we talk about federal stuff all the time. But it happens on the local level because, frankly, people are not educated into how these master governing principles, like our Constitution, apply to them. And they give us some trouble all the time. And that lack of civics awareness, this was a bunch of 40 and 50 year old folks on a committee for the town trying to work in the park. But they still bumped into our U.S. Constitution, not even realizing it. And that sort of stuff happens all the time. Right.

I mean, the most famous religious liberty violations have come at the hands of state government. So. Exactly. Very interesting. From the Electoral College to your local park, the lack of civics education runs across the gamut.

It really does. Talk about what you teach as important leadership qualities that you hope to see in young people. There's a fair number of those. One of the first ones and this sounds odd to be listening as a leadership quality, but one of the first ones I'd recommend is humility, because if I'm working with young students very quickly, they will grab a piece of information and discover that they know all the things or at least they think they do. It's a common failing of high schoolers, but it's also a common failing of adults. And the result is that they try and then take their bit of information they know, which may be true, and apply it to everything, which is probably not how it ought to go. And the end result is that they they lose their ability to learn. And if you look at our founding fathers, they were avid students from the very young to the very old. They were constantly working to learn, understanding that they were finite beings who did not know all things.

And so their goal was to be hungry to learn at the same time being true to their convictions. And so we pair humility with principle. Take your principles, know them, own them, hold them tightly.

Do not necessarily hold your function as tightly because there may be better ways to do something. And there's a lot of innovation and learning that can happen there, particularly with some humility. But hold those first principles dearly.

Don't let them go. And the problem we end up having is that leadership, the idea of moving people in a direction, moving people in a direction for a purpose. But you're going with them like there's an aspect of team that goes in there. So there's an element of leading people, but there's also an element of principle or a direction that you're trying to go. And that requires listening to people that aren't like you.

Even in your team, you'll find there are people who know things that you don't. And a wise leader will listen to them and understand that they fill in areas that are your gaps. It requires some self-awareness on your part to know what your weaknesses and what your strengths are. And it requires a love of learning to develop those areas that are weak or to enhance those areas that are strong.

And then, frankly, lastly, and probably most importantly, is good communication skills. Because if you have great knowledge and great wisdom, but you can't tell anyone what that information is, you can be useless. And I don't mean to be insulting, but the inability to communicate that wisdom or that good information to anyone else, frankly, hampers any of the knowledge and wisdom you have. It ends at you.

It doesn't continue. And so if you want to be a leader, you have to both gain that wisdom and understand those principles and the direction you're trying to move in, and then learn how to communicate that to other people. Because until you can take all of that good and share it with others, it's not doing very much.

It's just sitting in you. So I think those are some of the things that we try and teach our students how to do. And that includes practical stuff like how does government work and how does policy get made? And what is our Constitution? And why are these principles important? And why do we believe in innocence before proven guilty or in religious liberty or freedom of speech or even freedom of the press?

All of those are good things. And then we teach you not only what those are, but how to communicate them to others. Because if you can't do that last part, I'm having to repeat myself over and over, and we're not changing the nation as a whole.

We're just repeating ourselves. This has been part one of a two-part show with Joel Gruhey, executive director of Generation Joshua. Be sure to tune in next week for part two.

You've been listening to Family Policy Matters. We hope you enjoyed the program and plan to tune in again next week. To listen to this show online and to learn more about NC Families' work to inform, encourage, and inspire families across North Carolina, go to our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. Thanks again for listening, and may God bless you and your family.