Leadership vs. Celebrity (Part 2)

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, Tracy Devitt Griggs. Today we bring you part two of a two-part show with Joel Gruhey, Executive Director of Generation Joshua, an organization focused on assisting parents to raise up the next generation of Christian leaders and citizens. How much emphasis, though, do you put on how young people communicate their messages? Because people of all ages seem to have lost the ability to have reasoned and measured conversations. So how do you get this point across to these young people? Well, we do it a couple ways. For Generation Joshua, we do a couple different events throughout the year that are designed to help particularly underline that challenge and help kids get practice in addressing that. The first one we do over the summer, except for this last one, thank you, COVID, was a program called I Govern, and we are planning it for next year.

And it's a summer camp of all things. We do them in different spots around the U.S. where kids come together and we give them essentially a mock-up of the U.S. government that they have their hands on the levers of to try and advance policy. But we divide them into teams, like we have different political parties in the U.S. They get to decide what those teams stand for.

We're not copying the two parties. But then they go at it, hammer and tongs, trying to get something solved or fixed. That can be anything from balancing the budget to foreign policy. They tend to be weighty issues with serious implications. The challenge, of course, is these are people that you have to have debates with on the House or Senate floor in the Cabinet Room or wherever the place happens to be. But then you have to interact with them outside of that at dinner and you have to, you know, you might be in Bible study later that night or a chapel, something like that. And it's someone that you can have a strong disagreement with and then have to deal with them later and not just be yelling at them online or in some other one one vector format.

I think that's actually one of the advantages of small town politics is someone that you're yelling at the town council chamber. You will see at the store later and you'll have to figure out how to interact with them outside of that. The downside of social media is that you can scream at people all day and you'll never see them in person or you'll never know if you do. And so what we try and do is to start with to have those conversations, you have to humanize the other person, making sure that they know who they are, that they are, from our perspective, someone made in the image of God and worthy of his love like you are. Right.

So if you're both worthy of his love, you're worthy of each other's respect at the minimum. And and that happens best when you actually interact with people. I was talking to one of the one of our local public school teachers a week or so ago, and she said the level of of back and forth and backbiting and vitriol in the online education attempts they've made is spectacularly higher than what it is traditionally in person.

Why? Because you no longer build a new relationship with each other and thus you can't respect someone that you disagree with. It's just yelling at each other.

That social media that's online. And I think to get off of that and to humanize people does wonders to rebuild that idea of civic discourse. So that's one part of the other part, I'd say, is political advocacy.

When you're actually advocating for politics and policy. We were in North Carolina a couple of weeks ago doing that involved in a Senate election and a few other things you guys had going on there because you had a rather busy state. We we did door to door campaigning.

I mean, granted, this year was covered rules and masks and all the different procedures. Right. But we did it. And you would not believe the the positive reaction we were having when we knocked on doors because we come up to someone and we have a 15 or 16 year old walk up and say, hey, our 15 year old, for example, say, hey, I can't vote yet. But I really care about the future of our state. But you can. Can you make sure you bother to do it to actually go vote?

And they're like, oh, yeah, totally like like, I mean, you know, you should go vote. Right. Everyone knows that. Right. But we get busy.

We don't. And then when a 15 year old bothers to knock on your door and says, I can't actually legally do it yet, but I care enough to make sure I ask you, will you please do it? They go vote. But the other thing they have is they say, you know, I've been wanting someone to talk to about these things that actually have a conversation with not a Facebook shouting match. And these kids had fabulous conversations with people of depth about policy and politics in the state.

And people loved it because it felt human and real again. And I think covid has really exacerbated the vitriolic tendencies we have in politics because we removed the face to face interaction. Yelling at someone face to face is quite a bit different than typing in all caps on your keyboard. And I think that in person interaction with serious policy disagreements. But in person, in a way, you're going to keep interacting with that person does wonders to reintroduce the recognition that each person is human and valuable and should be respected even when we disagree. And that helps heal that particular problem in our country, although it's not an easy challenge. And there seems to be this this fear of listening.

You know, there seems to be a sense that I'm afraid to actually try to understand you because you might make sense. Yes. Are you finding that with your kids as well?

Yes. I will say the advantage of working with kids is that they don't actually care as much if they're wrong. It's wonderful because they're wrong all the time.

Right. In a sense, as a kid, when you grow up, you're constantly trying things and you're constantly discovering new stuff. And that learning process means regularly bumping into stuff and realizing you're wrong. The problem we have as we get older is we start to associate the some fact we believe with an aspect of our core person. We exist dependent on that reality. And the problem is we tend to attach our realities to things that aren't permanent. So in my case, I would say reality is attached to a creative, loving God.

And as a Christian, that is a safe place to attach it because I know it doesn't change. But when you start attaching your reality and your understanding of what is true or not to things that aren't that to political positions, for example, then anything that can threaten that threatens you because you are now wrapped up in that idea. The left recently, I would argue, has done a and to be fair, this isn't this isn't just the left.

The right does this to do a degree. They wrap themselves up in being identified with a particular belief that must be true. And if you threaten that, you threaten them. And so the result is you may not speak to that. And I won't listen, because if I listen, my my actual sense of identity has been endangered in politics. That is terrifying, because what you end up getting is you get acolytes, zealots, even on either side, because they've attached what they believe so firmly to a thing that may not actually be true. Now, that's not to say there aren't things that are principles that are true. I mean, our our right to life, our our belief in freedom of speech and religion.

Those are good things. But you'll see people attach it to like policy stuff, procedural matters, things that aren't even big principles. They're technical things. And when you debate the technical, all of a sudden, they personally feel threatened and they'll shut you down or ignore you. And that's really dangerous. And it's not healthy as a culture.

Talk about the endgame. What happens if we continue down that road? Well, generally, if you keep going down a road where one side is calling the other side, you know, communist or socialist, and the other side is calling them fascist, you end up justifying in people's mind violence. That does really bad things for our country.

Let's call it what it is. OK, that dissolves, you know, a union. You know, we have our idea of our culture, you know, e pluribus unum, right out of many one. We have this idea of that we have the freedom in our country to have diversity viewpoint and and respect each other and still do what is good and right relative to each other. But if we don't take steps to preserve that, and part of that is how we interact with people we disagree with. In fact, it's most important in interaction with people disagree with people we agree with is easy. But it's the people we disagree with and how to do that well and rightly.

But it's crucial. One of the things that I found personally just running for local office that was a mind blowing experience was that one of the people that I worked with best was as politically to the left as I was to the right. So we both didn't like, for example, Hillary Clinton for president.

He thought that she was far too conservative. I had a slightly different view. And the result was people who were, again, far to the left, far to the right.

At least I would I would some people would identify me that way. Fine. Who found common ground on a bunch of practical issues until we approached views and big philosophical issues very differently. We could find points of agreement that helped us maintain the fact that each person here was both human and beautiful and someone that is worthy of respect and honor, even when we strongly disagree and diligently work to prevent the other person's policy from being put into practice. But we do it in a way that respect the other person that builds our union in even within disagreement.

And it lets us absorb disagreement. But when you can't do that, when the response to someone like that is that they are fascist or communist, then you really quickly get toward violence. And I think we saw some of that. And that was not healthy. That was not healthy. And unfortunately, when people don't believe they can be heard or respected or listened to and that the other side is literally just evil, violence is not that far from an acceptable response.

It shouldn't be. But unfortunately, it can be. That's why I go back to that initial principle of humility and the importance of that for anyone going to work in politics. Like you need to be firm and passionate, engaged and principled. But you also have to have enough self-awareness to say, sit down and go, OK, what's the impact of going at it this way? We talk about it on our side all the time that we try to motivate people to get involved in politics because it's absolutely crucial for our country, but we never want to do it from a position of fear. So do we have reason to hope, Joel?

Always, always. And part of me says that because I'm firmly grounded in a sovereign God who has a master plan and is good and is faithful and even when I don't know the plan. So in one sense, I can hope without even needing to have the evidentiary aspect of it.

But since we like having the evidentiary reasons for hope, yeah, we have several reasons. First of all, we're seeing in this generation, unlike others, for example, on the life issue, we're seeing a young generation that looks at it and goes, no, this isn't a necessary thing. And for the first time in a long time, we're seeing a trend nationally to saying that life is better than choice. That's an amazing thing.

And people look at it and going, yeah, no, we don't buy those reasons anymore. That's not, of course, the national consensus, but it's now the majority of citizens. That's an amazing thing. That gives me great hope. I'm very much hoping and believing that the generation I see right now will be the generation that sees the end of Roe v. Wade.

That would be spectacular for our country. And as an adopted kid who statistically should have been one of the victims of Roe v. Wade, I'm very thrilled of that. So that's one thing that I see. The next thing I see is, frankly, I see kids looking at the political, not the political, but like the cultural dialogue on politics today in America going, oh, this can't be good. There's got to be a better way. So I have kids coming to me, I have high school students, I have parents, et cetera, saying, please tell me there's a better way for my kids to engage with people. The end result is thousands of kids to come through what I do that are wanting a better path forward, principled, determined of their convictions and holding those, but with a better method of engaging each other. And willing to look at, call it a lot of fear mongering, a lot of panic inducing and saying, you know, we don't need to do it that way.

There's a better route. And I think there's people on both sides looking for that. But at least for the young men and women I work with on the right, they certainly are looking at it that way. That's a good thing. The other thing I'd say is I think there's been a there's been some awakening of people going, this isn't good long term. You know, panic or fear may work in a short term.

And this is one of the permanent challenges of anyone who works in the political field. You can get farther faster with panic. It's kind of the adrenaline fight or flight. But if you run on adrenaline too long, it burns out your body, right?

It's not good for you biologically. Same thing works for a political system. You run on panic or fear too long and it burns out your political process.

And I think at a certain point, people are no longer willing to give in to the panic or the fear because they're like, I'm sorry, I just can't do this anymore. And I've been seeing that. And that's a good thing, honestly, because it needs to be toned down.

So I would say those are both good things that are coming. And then I think, frankly, the people willing to sit down, have conversations with people they don't normally interact with. That's a great thing because it builds that sense of of common disagreement.

The dangerous people who are unwilling to do that. But I think the people that are willing to have those conversations, it's a beautiful thing and it's a good thing for our country. And it gives me hope. Great.

Well, we are just about out of time for this week. Before we go, Joel, where can our listeners go to learn more about your work and the kinds of things that you offer there at Generation Joshua? Well, the easy place is generationjoshua.org. That's our website. If you have a young teenager who's interested in learning more about the civics or policy process and how to approach it from a Christian perspective. And we do both. We do politics and policy. Most groups, they tend to like one or the other.

We think that you have to learn the bridge in between the two. Have them take a look at joining there. It's a high school program, a little bit of college stuff, but mainly designed for high school students from middle school.

We'd love to have them participate in it. If you're a parent interested in stuff like this, I would actually have you take a look at our parent organization, which is called HSLDA Action. HSLDA, the Home School Legal Defense Association, Generation Joshua came from that. So it's HSLDA.org.

HSLDA Action is the one that does the policy. So great talking to you. Joel Grui with Generation Joshua. Thank you so much for being with us on Family Policy Matters. 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 the show online and to learn more about NC Family's 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.