This week, Sean and guest co-host Rick Langer discuss:



Episode Transcript

Sean: A troubling trend in teenage sex. The organs of slogans such as "from the river to the sea" and why they often shut down debate. Further fallout from the cast report as journalist Andrew Sullivan calls this a decisive moment in the debate over affirming gender care for children. These are the stories we'll discuss today and we'll address some of your questions. I'm your host Sean McDowell and this is the Think Biblically Weekly Cultural Update brought to you by Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Now Scott Rae, my normal co-host, is healthy, he's good, but we'll be back next week. We're joined by the one and only Rick Langer. Rick, thanks for coming back my friend.

Rick: Thanks for having me back Sean.

Sean: Yeah, well let's jump into this story, which is one I've actually been holding onto this for a few weeks, for a few reasons. And we've got to let listeners know that you probably want to listen to this first. If you have younger children in the car and then decide if you think it's appropriate for younger kids. This is an article in the New York Times and it's an opinion piece and the title is "The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex." And here's what it writes. It says, "For the past four years, Dr. Herbenik has been tracking the rapid rise of 'rough sex' among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women, two-thirds in her most recent campus survey of 5,000 students from a major Midwestern university, said a partner had choked them during sex. The rate of those women who said they were between ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened has now shot up to 40% from 25%." Now the reason this jumped on my radar Rick is I wrote a book in 2020 called "Chasing Love” for students on teenage sexuality. And at the end of each chapter I took on the toughest, thorniest topics that kids were asking and I won't list them here but example like, "Is it okay to have sex with a robot?" These are the real kinds of questions that are being asked. The question of choking was not even on my radar in all my research. And the author of this, Peggy Ornstein, says the same thing. She says she was startled in the early 2020 when during a Q&A at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl said, "How come all the boys want to choke you?" She asked that. In a different class, a 15-year-old boy said, "Why do all the girls want to be choked?" And of course she's thinking, "They do." Now she rightly attributes this to just the ubiquity of pornography. And I think we are seeing come full circle that this is clearly portrayed over and over again in pornography. And she points out that pornography, a lot of these free sites, is now the default source for teens on sexuality, sadly. So she points that out. She says that this has hit popular culture. So Tina Fey's new "Mean Girls," I think that's a redo from a movie maybe a couple decades ago or so. You see it a punchline in there. The chorus of Jack Harlow's "Lovin' On Me," which topped Billboard's 100 chart for six non-consecutive weeks this winter, and has been viewed 99 million times on YouTube, starts with, "I'm vanilla, baby. I'll choke you, but I ain't no killer, baby." Now one of the things they put out in the article is that there's still relatively few studies on this, which makes sense because it's really a newer phenomenon. She says a few things like alcohol might be involved, of course. A quarter of young women said partners they'd had sex with on the day they've met also choked with them. I mean, a quarter, Rick. This just kind of blows me away. Now it said either way, most of the partners, most said their partners never or only sometimes asked before grabbing their necks. There were many moments where they couldn't breathe or speak, compromising the ability to withdraw consent if they'd even given it in the first place. Now she watched in this article a couple quick things, how there's this neuroscientist who was one of the key people who worked on CTE in football, has shifted towards studying this new phenomenon and basically raises some huge red flags about what it does to the brain and potentially long-term in ways we don't know. According to the American Academy of Neurology, restricting blood flow to the brain even briefly can cause permanent injury, including stroke, cognitive impairment. I mean, they go on and on about how it affects psychologically as well. They said women who had experienced more than five instances of choking were two and a half times as likely as those who'd never been choked to say they were depressed. Now they rightly say we don't know how much cause and effect is here. There's correlation. I think that's important to bring in. But then they write here, they say women's bodies and brains don't distinguish whether they are being harmed out of hate or love. The body doesn't distinguish that. And this is an act of harm. Now they go at the end of this article out of the way to say we are hardly some anti-sex wait-til-marriage crusaders, which I guess describes you and me, Rick.

Rick: Hey, what can you say?

Sean: I don't really want to go into their solutions here. Some we would agree with, some I would take issue with. But I felt like this was a trend significant enough how common it is that it's growing that parents, educators, the kind of people that listen to this podcast need to be aware of it. So in your honest reaction, when I sent you this article to discuss this week, tell me what you thought when you saw it.

Rick: Honestly Sean, I was shocked. I teach a class on money, sex, and power. I've taught it every year, a couple times a year for 19 years. We've talked kind of like you were talking about in your book. We cover a lot of territory. And other issues like this had come up. I had never heard of the choking thing. That was just not on my radar. So I am just exactly the way the author of the article was when they first had that kind of question from the audience going, "What in the world are we talking about here?" The one thing that hit me as I read this article is I remembered Trevor Bower, the pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers who had this big scandal associated with him doing apparently something like this to a woman. You know, a couple years ago he lost his job pitching for the Dodgers. And I was just appalled and then the whole discussion was about her doing it voluntarily. And I had this thought in my mind that said, "Don't be ridiculous. What a bogus claim." And then I'm reading this article and I'm like, "I guess I'm out of touch." I might call it gleefully out of touch with current reality. But yeah, it was a shocker to me.

Sean: One of the things that's important to highlight is that pornography offers a script for how to teach and how to treat somebody in the bedroom. Just like, not like a movie script, but you and I have a script in our minds how you act in an elevator, how you act in a library, at a sports game. And we pick up those scripts just by what we observe. Some of them we don't think about, we just adopt them subconsciously at times. Well what they write in this article is when you see this over and over again, and apparently it's ubiquitous in pornography, it just desensitizes you. Now the people that are doing it, they describe in here some kind of euphoria that at times can occur in the act of sex from doing this. Fine, I'm sure people are doing it because they think it brings a kind of pleasure. But really what hit me, and honestly Rick, when I read this, it just saddened me profoundly. Because we're moving so far away from God's design for sex, which is about giving and loving and caring for somebody, and seeing sex not just as a physical act for pleasure, but it involves emotional trust. There's a spiritual bond, there's a relational bond, and God has designed this force in a way that we flourish when we follow His script. Now the script comes along, and it's captivating a huge amount of our society, and it literally is causing harm to people, and we probably won't know the fallout of this for years later. So just when I thought I've seen it all, this comes up, and I think we're just moving further and further away. So it's a reminder. I just finished two months, you know I teach this high school class outside of Biola, I spent two months talking about sexuality. And like the day after that unit ended, this came up and I was like, "Oh, I was talking with high school students, I would need to talk with them about it. I need to talk to my kids about it." This is a phenomena we're thinking about biblically, and in our teaching now, sadly, we've got to be willing to address it. Because when we don't, it kind of sends the message to people that they're going to go somewhere else for their information, and take their cues from the script of our culture, rather than a biblical worldview.

Rick: And just one comment on this in terms of a general principle about kind of thinking biblically about things. This is, it reminded me of the book by Carl Truman, where he asked this wonderfully interesting question about, you know, what had to happen in a culture. He compares himself with his dad, and he said, "If you'd asked my dad in 1995, when he was about Truman's age when he was writing this part, you know, what do you make of a person who says, 'I'm a man trapped in a woman's body'?" He said, "My dad would have just thought you were A, not serious, B, you know, crazy, ridiculous." And he mainly just wouldn't have had any categories for making sense of the whole statement. Fast forward 25 years, and Carl Truman makes the point that that statement is almost ubiquitous. I mean, everyone's heard it, it's the thing that you expect, it's become normalized, and in fact, in many circles, if you can't kind of honor the sexual ethic that sits behind that, you're sort of a pariah. You're a social outcast, you're a moral failure. Well, that is a crazy thing to happen, and he asked the question in the book is about, what do I, what had to happen in a culture to make this sort of a thing possible? And I asked the same question here, what has to have happened in a culture to make choking a favored activity among teenagers in the midst of consensual sex? Because the thing she's talking about is all in the context of consensual hookup kind of sex. Everybody might not have liked everything, but it was all happening within a context where the sexual encounters were invited. And I'm like, one of the things about it really is the glorification of gratification in our culture. There is no higher good than having a desire gratified, and with that, all desires are sort of self-validating in the sense that if I have the desire, then by definition, that desire is good for me. And if you have a desire, it's by definition good to gratify it. So whatever you want is sort of in this chain of self-validation that has to be culminated in the ultimate glory of gratification, and if it happens to include strangulation, well, so be it. The point is there's no context or criteria for judging one of our own desires to be a ill-formed desire, to be a disordered desire, to use like the language of Augustine and people like that, and I think that's one of the interesting things that, you know, being provoked by things like this in our culture, the phenomenon, it's good to take that step back and think, "What is going on? What are the cries, pleas, and pains of our culture that are reflected in these kind of behaviors, even if the people themselves are quite happy with them?"

Sean: These are two just good questions to leave with, folks. How did we get to the point in this culture where this is ubiquitous and viewed as good, and what does this phenomena tell us about the brokenness of our culture and the deeper heart cries behind why this is taking place, and of course, how can the church meet those deeper needs that people have to love and be loved? So man, we could do a whole episode on this, but let's shift to this next one. You sent me this, Rick, and I've been intrigued, because I think this is timely. We hear this slogan being passed all the time, such as "From the river to the sea," but you have some insights about where this came from and about how slogans in general often shut down the kind of discussions and debates we need to have.

Rick: Yeah, what got me thinking about this, Sean, was that we often think about issues kind of the way we do Google searches. We just want to find a good article or a blog post that tells us what we need to know, and we want the answer quick and clear. And this works great if we're wondering who won the 2020 Super Bowl, right? I mean, you just Google it, you found out, good. We're all great with that. But it doesn't work so well when you're talking about the kinds of issues we talk about on this podcast all the time. And it's good to say about things like this, well, we should think biblically. I'm all in favor. But thinking biblically isn't just finding a Bible verse that applies. It's actually thinking the ways in which the Bible commands us to think. So in other words, we need to think in such ways to discern the mind of Christ. We need to be quick to listen, slow to speak. We need to be open to reason, James says. We need to seek peace and pursue it. These are all things about kind of our process of thinking, our motivations for thinking. And it deals with what you might call a biblical process of thought, not just a biblical product of thought. And the point, of course, is you want both and. It isn't like one replaces the other. You just need both. So there's these problems. My concern is we have things that keep us from thinking what you might say is maybe clearly more to the point deeply about issues, because they're surprisingly complex at times. So Google thinking is pretty much inimical to doing this, even if you begin your Google search with the phrase, "What does the Bible say about..."

Sean: Sure, Sure.

Rick: So two things in particular I just want to put my finger on, the kind of short circuit, deeper thinking. And one is the issue of slogans that you mentioned. And one of the great examples is the slogan, "From the river to the sea, all Palestine will be free." And that has been chanted all over college campuses and things like that. You'll often just see the shorthand, "From the river to the sea." And it's mostly brought to our attention, people in the United States' attention, from chants on college campuses. And we hear the slogan when we immediately think either of Palestinian activists or more often progressive students at an elite college campus. That's who pops to mind. But the interesting thing is when you dig around a little bit, you realize, "Oh, that slogan isn't as simple as I thought it was." The Likud Party, which is a far right-wing party in Israel founded by Menachem Begin, who you may remember from the Camp David Accords with Anwar Sadat, they got the Nobel Peace Prize. He was one of the founders of the Likud Party. And the current prime minister of Israel is a member of the Likud Party.

Sean: Yeah.

Rick: And the founding platform of that party talks about the right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable. Between the sea and the Jordan River, there will only be Israeli sovereignty. And you suddenly realize, "Oh, wait a minute." So this phrase, the slogan, has been used both by Palestinians and Israelis. And there's substantial factions in both cases that absolutely reject any notion of a two-party, two-state solution. Now, I happen to think there's important differences between the Likud Party and the Hamas organization in Palestine. But the problem is the slogan keeps us from unpacking that. We hear the slogan and we immediately think, "Oh, I know what that is. That's those progressive elite kids who cares about Israel and it's all about Palestine." I'm like, "Complex. More complex than that." And one of the things that popped up in my mind was a story in The Guardian about a British politician who was suspended for this following quote. And he was at a Palestinian rally, but he said, "We won't rest until we have justice until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty." Well, I hear that and I go, "I don't know anything about the politics of this particular -- I mean, he's a member of the Labour Party, so it's a mainline party in the UK." But the interesting thing was he used this slogan to argue that all people should be free between the lands, and it wasn't a thing that was actually incompatible with two-state solution or anything else. You don't know exactly what he's thinking with that slogan. And it doesn't sound like one that is clearly any kind of a call for genocide or even the necessary sovereignty of one group over the other. There's all kinds of ways you can have everyone be free between the river and the sea -- well, in theory at least.

Sean: Yeah, in principle.

Rick: But three days later, this guy's suspended from the -- he's kicked out of the Labour Party, he's now operating -- I don't know, he may be back in the Labour Party by now, this is a few months ago, but he was kicked out, he had to be hopping as an independent. And you can just see how the slogan short circuits our thinking, it stops it before we probe any of it deeply. And we have a ton of slogans like that that function this way, and particularly in issues like that's going on right now with Israel and Palestine, I'm a huge fan of saying, you know, think carefully. Think deeply, and don't just short-circuit your thinking because you happen to hear a cool slogan. So that's one of the big issues that I've seen with this.

Sean: That's really helpful, because the positive thing about slogans are that people remember them.

Rick: Yes.

Sean: Right? We can pass them on easily.

Rick: They tweet very well, right?

Sean: They tweet well, I think of the creed in 1 Corinthians 15, it's almost kind of a slogan, "Jesus died and was buried, rose on the third day," so it's not to toss out a slogan necessarily, it's to ask, "What does this mean? Where does it come from? How is the person using it?" And then when we go deeper than that, we can have meaningful conversation and not just cancel quickly because of a particular slogan that's used. I think that wisdom to go deeper and pause is going to serve Christians well. Now can I ask you this? You said both Hamas and the Likud party have used that phrase, "from the river to the sea." What are just the differences, so people understand, kind of in your mind, between how they use it, what they mean? Is there necessarily a moral equivalence there?

Rick: Yeah, so the thing you need to do is ask the second level question when you hear that. When you're saying, you know, whatever you want to attribute to between the river and the sea. I think you would find Palestinians who are not part of Hamas would sometimes use a slogan like this, just as I pointed out, you find this absolutely in kind of more mainline Israeli politics. And they're simply saying, we don't... Usually what they're saying is, we're not really... We don't want to be excluded from the land that is properly ours. That's the heartbeat of that. And of course there's a huge conflict about what land is properly whose. That's the debated question. But the key claim of saying is, look, we have... They're claiming mutual overlapping rights to the land between the river and the sea. And that's kind of the minimal concern. The Hamas context usage of it is often associated with obliterating the nation of Israel, wiping it off the map. And that rhetoric is indeed found by Hamas, you know, members of Hamas. Some Christian today recently had an article describing some really pretty terrible things that the Hamas soldiers who crossed into Israel on October 7th did to other people. And they showed pictures, sent text messages to mom, saying, mom, look, here I am killing a Jew. So that version of from the river to the sea does seem to have these connotations of genocide. We want to obliterate all Jews who live in our territory between the river and the sea. I don't think... I am unaware of Israeli politicians who are advocating for that side. I'm sure there's people in Israel who might advocate for anything, but I don't see that in the broader parties. But the main thing I want to do is say, don't just hear the slogan, ask the question of, what are you meaning with that? Are you meaning that we want to go back to pre-67 borders? Are you meaning that you want to go back to pre-1947 borders? What is it that is being argued for? And then what do you say about the other side once you've made that statement about, you know, the competing sovereignties? Because there's plenty of ways you can still have a sovereign nation that still allows for the freedom of different people within it. It's not always easy, but that's what most pluralistic democracies are trying to do.

Sean: Okay, that makes sense. So Christians being wise in the phrases we use, asking for clarification from other people, that's the larger point here on any issue of which slogans are thrown about in a Twitter type culture.

Rick: That just happens to be a particular hot button at the moment.

Sean: Got it. That's a good word and helpful to know some of the origin of where that phrase came from. We're going to move to the third story. Anything else you wanted to add on that one before we roll? That's good. Okay, now this one, I got to be honest with you, this one also really surprised me, Rick. Not because of the CAST report, which we've talked about on this program, I think twice, but because Andrew Sullivan came out and has basically said this is a definitive kind of decisive moment in the debate over gender-affirming care. Now let me just remind folks really quickly before we get to his article, some things that are in this report. So in 2022, an initial report was released and this was by Hilary Cass, who's a pediatrician who was in clinical practice until 2018. She specializes in children and young people with disabilities. She was also president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. So this was commissioned by the NHS in England and you can read it online, the initial report and then the full 388 page report that's online. It is written like an academic. It's sober. It's not agenda driven. It's fair. As far as I can tell, it's written well. Now she interviews a ton of experts from different fields and gets up to so many different voices that she weighs in. Here's some of the findings they said. For example, primary and secondary care staff have told us they fell under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach that is at odds with standard process of other similar types diagnoses that kids would typically face. So it's like there's a unique way that when it comes to child-affirming care, these experts were pressured into taking an affirming care position. So many have spoken out with that. She said another significant issue is that one of the diagnostic is one of diagnostic overshadowing. Many of the children and young people presented have complex needs, but once they are identified as having gender related distress, other important healthcare issues that normally would be managed are overlooked and set aside. So they put in the report that about a third of people who come for gender-affirming care children have autism. And that's ignored, depression ignored, other psychological issues ignored. Now again, talks about puberty blockers and says they may have a range of side effects of headaches, hot flushes, weight gain, tiredness, low mood and anxiety, short-term bone density. Then they ask this question. They say the most difficult question is whether puberty blockers do indeed provide valuable time for children and young people to consider their options. So in other words, people said, "We'll give puberty blockers to allow this individual, male or female, to figure certain things out before we force them into living out as male or female, their gender identity. Or does this lock children and young people to a treatment pathway which culminates in progression to feminizing, masculinizing hormones by impeding the usual process of sexual orientation and identity development?" So in other words, they're saying, "If we start this, are we actually putting young people on a trajectory that is potentially harmful in the long run?" And they said here, they said 96.5 and 98% respectively, data from the Netherlands and a study conducted in England demonstrated that almost all children and young people who put in puberty blockers go on to sex hormone treatment. So it does begin this process that keeps going. Now finally at the end, they just give a few kind of quick suggestions how to navigate this. And one is to move towards kind of holistic care. That's really important. Ironically, they're not saying we are totally against any kind of puberty blockers ever being used. They're just saying people are rushing to this and it's affecting kids and doctors are feeling like their options are minimized and they're not allowed to give the kind of care that children actually need. They even talk about social transition. There's no evidence that just socially transitioning like with pronouns and your name, that doesn't result in positive care as well. So that's just kind of a summary of the CAS report. Now this week, Andrew Sullivan, actually I take that back. This is from a couple weeks ago. Andrew Sullivan came out and he said, "Will big trans be held to account?" And Andrew Sullivan, of course, a journalist who's taken contrarian views on a lot of issues. He describes himself sometimes as conservative. He's also gay. So very interesting voice. Here's basically what he argues. He says for years there's been this rigid left position of just giving kids puberty blockers, sex hormones, giving them certain kind of medicine that is potentially and now we know dangerous. And he says, let me jump in here. He says, "For years, many of us have expressed concern about this. We've been vilified, hounded, canceled, and physically attacked for resisting this narrative. The reason we were told that children couldn't wait and mature was that they would kill themselves if they didn't." And Rick, I can't tell you how many parents I've talked with that contacted me. And they are at the most vulnerable state in their lives trying to figure out how to love their kids and told, "If you don't affirm this gender transition, your kid's going to commit suicide." Andrew Sullivan says, "This is one of the most malicious lies ever told in pediatric medicine. The man spares no punches, so to speak." He says, "While there's a higher chance of suicide among children with gender distress than those without it, it's still rare. And there's absolutely no solid evidence that this kind of treatment reduces suicide at all." Now, the question he kind of asks in here, he goes, "How on earth did American medical authorities come to support this?" Now, what's interesting is we're seeing this divide because in Britain and in Finland and in other places, they're putting a serious pause on this. As far as I can tell, we're moving full throttle forward in America despite where the evidence points. And he suggests one answer from Megan McArdle, who said, "The doctor and activists who have conducted these many sex reassignments for children, sterilizing them, removing their capacity for orgasm, or rendering them patients for life, they can hardly now admit they have no solid studies to back it up. But they didn't have studies, and they have no excuse." He talks about the lawsuits that are coming for the ACLU, GLAAD, Human Rights Commission. I think he's on to something, and I think he might be right that we are seeing kind of the crack in the edifice come and the shift that those who have pushed this kind of care on children just can no longer do it because the evidence is so glaring. And now we're seeing voices. New York Times, we're seeing voices. Andrew Sullivan, we saw at USA Today, kind of pushing back on this. I think we're at that decisive moment. Do you agree with Sullivan? What's your take on his analysis?

Rick: Yeah, I very much agree with Sullivan on this point. And I think you're right about this potentially being one of those moments that will awake people enough to rethink. And really, I wouldn't have been that optimistic about saying that if it weren't for the fact that basically that exact thing has happened in the UK, Finland, Netherlands, these other European countries, the Tavistock Institute, whatever the phrase was there for that place here in England, they were as committed to this kind of gender reassignment surgery and then the puberty blockers and all these things as anyone in the US would have been. I mean, my perception was I'm no expert, but it wasn't the thing where they were kind of iffy about it. And the bottom line is the brute force fact of the matter is that there is not scientific evidence to support this. Now I would want to point out the number one thing that the CAS report kept saying was there is an extreme lack of evidence. And it's easy for guys like you and me to read that there is an abundance of opposite evidence. In other words, it's been proven that this makes it worse. It's been proven that it doesn't help kids. What they're really saying is these folks have not, they've been giving these treatments without doing the kind of studies that we normally demand for these sorts of treatments. And so the people in them should be going through all the protocols associated with informed consent for research studies. All of the qualifications for doing that should be applying to them. It should be very limited if you're going to do this research. And all those things have just been, they've blown right by them and the results that have come from that have been at best ambiguous. And at worst, I think most commonly just saying all these interventions from pronouns to puberty blockers have not actually produced the desired outcome of radically changing the suicide rates, statistically significantly changing suicide rates and things like that. There just isn't evidence. So there's, I mean, we've kind of been lying to people and at some point you wake up one day and you're like, "You know what? We keep saying there's this conclusive proof. We keep threatening that you're going to lose your kid. Would you rather have a trans kid or a dead kid?" That's another one of those bumper stickers that gets thrown around. And the bottom line is it isn't that kind of a trade off. However traumatic it is, both for the child and for the parents, that isn't the way to frame the question because that's not apparently what's actually at stake in reality.

Sean: That's a really fair distinction that she doesn't come out and say in the report, "Here's all the evidence showing this fails." Although there is some pushback saying puberty blockers, for example, has some negative effects. That's a piece of it.

Rick: Well, in particular, the puberty blockers, one thing they really have found is that they aren't a short term solution, gives kids a chance to sort it out. Once you start on those, you are having lifelong consequences. That I think is one of those things that comes out pretty strongly in the CAS report.

Sean: I think that's right. No, no, this is great. The point being that we've launched into this experiment on kids, which has long term effects and arguably in the follow-up CAS report, the 388 page one, to make the point that we've kind of taken the easy, quick route with puberty blockers with no thought for what happened to somebody in their 20s and their 30s and their 40s because they say most kids don't understand what it's like to be 25 and 35 and want to be a parent. All they're doing is watching stuff on YouTube, connecting with their friends. They're struggling in their bodies trying to figure out life and they're looking for a solution, understandably so. We've launched into this again. It's really an experiment on young people without the long term data to back it up. Minimally in this report, she's saying we need to treat this topic like we do other psychological issues that kids have. They call for a multidisciplinary approach. They talk about how when kids go on hormones, they would actually visit a doctor less. We need to visit doctors more. We just need effective, evidence-proof diagnoses. Now what's it going to take in the States? Sullivan points out that there's a lot of money behind this, what he calls big pharma. I think there's some truth to that, that there's money behind promoting some of these cross-sex hormones, etc. That's a piece of it. But he also says people should come forward and just retire in shame given how terrible this is. He doesn't mince his words. It's going to take either lawsuits or some people with just unbelievable courage to speak up and say, "You know what? I bought this false narrative and I'm a doctor. I signed up for this to help people. And either I was bullied into this or I didn't do my homework or I feared for my job and I regret it. I wish I could change it, but I didn't. And I'm calling on other medics and doctors who did the same thing to follow my lead for the sake of children." It's going to take some people to say that and wow, that person is going to get blasted more than JK Rowling was. And I understand how hard that is, but it's going to take some of these moments of courage to get us there for the sake of kids. Anything else in that story?

Rick: No, very much agreed.

Sean: Okay, good. As always, we've got some fascinating questions here. And this first one is actually kind of more of a comment that I thought was really helpful. It said, "On last week's weekly cultural update, you discussed the HPV vaccine. While I appreciate responses, I think your answers were lacking in one area. Specifically, we cannot control our children's future spouses and the decisions they make before marrying our kids. We made the decision to give our 11-year-old HPV vaccine. We've taught our children to save sex for marriage and hope they choose to be sexually enacted before marriage. But if their future spouses were at some point sexually active before marriage and contracted HPV from someone else, the vaccine could prevent our children from contracting the disease and providing peace of mind in their marriage around that specific issue. What do you think about this line of reasoning?" I would plead completely guilty on this one and say the person is absolutely right. That didn't cross my mind. They said our response was lacking in one area and I'd say, "You're right. I didn't even think about this." So assuming, and again, I can't speak to this, I haven't done a deep dive, assuming it's safe and wise to do so, speak with a medical doctor. That's another good reason that should be added in the column of taking the HPV vaccine. I'm not sure where that came from. So I think this listener just makes a great observation. Anything you want to add to that one?

Rick: No, I think that is, I didn't hear what you guys said about it originally, but I think that makes a lot of sense. And you can imagine any variety of other factors that go into this that can complicate what the practices of your, you teach your kids one thing, they may do another. The other thing that I think a vaccine is a little bit different than distributing condoms or things like this that are almost more evocative and create an imagination for what do I want to do sexually. Does it foster those sorts of things? A vaccine, I don't think a kid thinks twice about a vaccine. I think it just kind of happens to them. And so I would imagine that that would be another reason why the line of argument that the listener gives here would also be particularly valuable because you look at this and say probably the downside of some of these things is different with a vaccine than a lot of parallel issues.

Sean: So two things, you didn't listen to our weekly cultural update last week.

Rick: I'm sorry about that.

Sean: I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I'll let that one slide a second. I think you're right. Most students or kids are thinking about the pain of the shot and then move on. You got it. Well, well said. So my thanks to that individual for reaching out. And I would just remind those of you listening, if you have additional points that you think help make a case that we're making or push back against them, send them our way. This helps give people even better ways of approaching questions like vaccines. So much appreciated. All right. This question came in. It says, Does my personal belief that an action is wrong require me to believe that the government should make a law against that action? Does believe something is good requirement to believe that the government should make a law protecting it? In other words, how should Christians think through whether or not to seek and cry out for government intervention on particular issues? Now I can give some general thoughts here, Rick, but really want you to weigh in here. I would say we definitely do not want everything that is morally wrong to be regulated by the government for sure. So even certain, you know, we talked about sexuality a couple of times in this. There could be certain issues we could talk about that are morally wrong, sexually speaking. But do we want the government regulating that? Well, in some cases, maybe yes. Some cases, maybe no. A lie to a friend. Well, that's wrong. But I certainly don't want the government regulating that. So there's a distinction between what is moral and between what is legal. And everything legal, we don't want to say is necessarily moral. We could come up with examples that counter that, where laws have been codified. Extreme example is just in Germany, how you treat Jews. An example could be abortion. But just because something legal doesn't mean it's moral. Because something is immoral doesn't mean we want to make it illegal. I would say in general, we just ask the question related to the objective good and flourishing of society more through natural law than through, say, biblical law. And also, that's one component. And the other one would just be even the ability to judge something. So coveting was ruled out in the Ten Commandments because that was a theocracy. But we certainly don't want a thought kind of police in our culture today because that's not the kind of thing we could remotely regulate anyways. Your thoughts on this question.

Rick: Yeah, a couple of things I'd probably add to that. So number one, I would absolutely reinforce your perception that not all moral issues translate readily into a legal codification and response. And you gave some good examples of that. I have done some writing, thinking, teaching on some of this. And one of the things that I do, trying to think, you know, kind of, what do you learn about what I call the Bible and the good society? What is it biblical teaching tells me about how to form a good, well-functioning society? When it comes to legislation and social policy, one of the things that I realized as I was studying scripture on this is that there's kind of a twofold bit of advice that you learn, and that's roughly speaking, don't try and make the law do the job of the prophets. And don't try and make the prophets do the job of the law. In other words, the law tends to be coercive in nature, and it keeps people from doing all kinds of things. And so generally speaking, you set the laws kind of at the outside borders of what's permissible. If you think of the good, the bad, and the ugly, the laws prevent the ugly. The prophets have this wonderful opposite sort of a technique, which is to say, who cares where the walls are? Who cares what's bad? I'm saying this is what's good. And if you want to do what's good, follow me. No coercive power. They aren't forcing anyone to do anything but saying, this is what the Lord says. And if you want to please the Lord, follow me, because I'm going to go follow that, and you can follow with me. So those are two different dynamics that help regulate a society. One is offense, the other is a guide. And the phenomenon are two really different things. They're both valuable, they're both needed. And I just want to say, with any moral issue you hit, I think that should be your first question is, huh, is this best treated by the prophet or by the law? And they can certainly both cooperate on that, that's not a problem. But some things work well that way, some things don't. And you've pointed out a batch of things that I would be quite happy to have prophets address, things about don't lie to your friends and don't covet, but I don't want the law to. There's certain things that I would like the law to worry about, don't kill. I mean, that would be a nice thing to enforce. I would like to have that not be a thing that would just tell the prophet, say, hey, I'm thinking it's time to stop killing. So that's sort of a dynamic, I think, is one big issue. A second thing, and here's an interesting thought experiment. To take an example of something that is not in the category of lying or coveting, per se, so it could easily be regulated, think of the issue of adultery. So there's a long, long list of adultery laws that have been on the books for centuries in various places, actually, believe it or not, there are still anti-adultery laws on the books in the United States. So those laws have been around, they've been, you know, they've functioned, and it's certainly possible for there to be an adultery law in any particular culture or time and place. There's lots of them as you go around the world. I wonder, would you campaign for making adultery illegal in the modern United States? And my worry about that is not so much that it's a thing you can't regulate, but rather the moral fabric of American society today is not going to be able to sustain that law. It will end up functioning a lot like prohibition did in the 1920s, where you create a law that says you can't drink, but the bottom line is you didn't have a culture that didn't want to drink. And so everyone found a way around it, you suddenly ended up with all of our famous criminals were basically guys like Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, these were all people who were making money off a law that wasn't sustained by the moral fabric of the society, and so they just exploited it. And I think the same thing might likely happen with a law like an anti-adultery law. I don't think we could get it on the books, number one, but if we could, I don't think our fabric would sustain it. Now that's an indictment in some ways of American culture. I'm just making the observation, though, that it's also a brute fact about American culture, is we don't view it the way we need to view it in order to make a law to add to our enforcement of anti-adultery-ness. Now that, I'm sure, is a debatable issue. People can see that differently, but I'm just saying complex issue, and it isn't just easy to say this is a thing that obviously isn't subject to law, this is a thing that obviously is. I think there's plenty of things that you have to make a wisdom decision about. Is this a time and place where the profit can do the job? Is this a time and place where the law can do the job?

Sean: Well, there's black and white issues, like we said, lying to a friend, and then there are issues like adultery, given that marriage is a public contract and society flourishes more and has a vested interest in successful marriages and resisting adultery. Even the effects on kids and the prison population and education and mental health, is that wise to do? Is that practical to do? Those are questions. Now, you raised a question earlier about the book by Carl Truman, and how can a person, the phrase, "I'm a man trapped in a woman's body," how did that become even considered coherent today in a way it was in the past? Well, he tells a story in that book that there's a lot of lines of evidence behind this. There's thinkers that contributed to it, Rousseau, he would argue Marx, he would argue Said and others, Freud. There's technology, things like the pill that divorced sex from procreation, but there's also laws that contribute to the sexual revolution, things by a Republican governor by the name of Reagan in California, no-fault divorce. Now without even saying we should be in favor of that legally or not, that had cultural windfall that was a piece of contributing to the move towards adopting certain ideas of sexuality that are not unrelated to the story we talked about in that troubling trend. So whether or not the government should do it or not is not our point in answering this here, but these kinds of questions we need to look at not just scripturally, because the Bible says marriage is defined one way, but what is best for society, what is best for education, what is the collective objective good? And some issues are black and white, some are a little bit more gray.

Rick: Yeah, and a lot of things I think God, well, there's a lot of things that have to be changed, but they're only going to be able to change over the course of time. You think of William Wilberforce abolishing slavery, it was a 40-year project. And the first big victory that we tend to celebrate was like 27 years in, I think it was, where they abolished selling new slaves, they abolished the slave trade. And it's like, well, I'm sorry, that feels like a bit of a hollow victory if we keep having all the slaves who are here. That's not exactly emancipation. The emancipation took another 20 years. Some of the key legislation was laws about, maritime laws about can you board a vessel at sea, flying a particular flag that sounds, what does that have to do with slavery? All of that was because the culture at the time that Wilberforce saw so clearly the evil of slavery, he saw that it could be treated by legislation, which is again, like I say, with adultery issues, it isn't that you can't legislate that way, but he realized we have a long ways to go to get to the point where we could actually do that. So he took the long 40-year road to make that change. And I think a lot of changes are that way, and it's wise to say, I see the vision clearly, what's the next best step to get there? How do I move one step closer and one step closer again?

Sean: Good word. I love it. Well, we've got a final question from a Biola grad, no surprise, it's an excellent question. It says, "A while back, you discussed different versions of Christian nationalism. When discussing the view that America is a chosen nation, the same way that Israel was a chosen nation, you mentioned that this is an area where we could and should offer the most theological critique. I wholeheartedly agree with you, but I recently learned that my parents hold this view. Could you please provide a more detailed theological argument against the view that America is a special, like usual, nation chosen by God?" Well, I would reframe this for starters. I understand this Biola grad is having a conversation with parents who hold this. But I would frame it to them, I'd say, the burden of proof is not upon the person to prove that America is not a chosen nation like Israel. The burden of proof is upon those who say America is akin to Israel to offer the evidence that they do so. Now, it doesn't help that some of our earlier framers at times would use language reminiscent of a city on a hill, God's chosen people, and they saw the American experiment kind of advancing that. So I realize there's some historical questions there. But if you look at Israel, what do we have? We have God calling Abraham and did certain miracles even through sending angels to him. We have the law delivered to Moses after doing profound miracles in the plagues parting the Red Sea. There is clear supernatural communication that the nation of Israel was chosen as reported in the scriptures. I would say to somebody who advances, I'd say, "Give me the equal level of clear supernatural evidence that God has chosen America in the same way that God has chosen Israel." I don't see that evidence at all. And that's one of the distinctions that we made, Rick. There's a big difference between saying America rooted in certain Judeo-Christian ideas, although it failed to practice it out undoubtedly, but borrows through ideas of equality, dignity, justice, freedom that are deeply Judeo-Christian ideas, and saying America is akin to, has relation with God akin to Israel did in the Old Testament. I just don't see any positive supernatural evidence supporting that. So if I'm in a conversation with these people, I would put them on the burden of proof insofar as they're willing to have that kind of conversation. Your thoughts?

Rick: Yeah, two quick things I'd add to that. One is just, if you think about who are the people of God in the Old Testament, it is clearly an ethnic people of God. It is an ethnic national people of God, the nation of Israel. And as you were tracking not only the miracles, but the whole seed line issue. I mean, this was a big deal.

Sean: Right, right.

Rick: It is a particular people. There's a particular land, and there was a promise and a covenant associated with that that was ethnically defined. So if you were to talk about a nation of God's people in the Old Testament time, that would be a very accurate way to speak. The exact difference that a Christian believes is the answer to the question, who are the people of God in the present age, is roughly speaking those who are baptized by the Holy Spirit, those who have faith in Christ, which is exactly and explicitly in the New Testament crossing national and ethnic lines. It is for both Jew and Greek, slave and free, Jew and Gentiles. You know, that whole distinction is explicitly dismantled in the New Covenant, and we live in this New Covenant time. So there's a pretty significant theological difference in the answer to the question, who are the people of God between Old Testament and New Testament, in throwing that label onto a particular political nation in this New Testament era. I think it's pretty problematic in that sense theologically. One other note that I would make is that, back to your history point, from our earliest days as an American nation—so Roger Williams came over on the boat in 1635, if memory serves, landed in Boston, immediately ran into conflicts with John Cotton and the other Puritans who were there at the time over a variety of issues. One of them explicitly on this issue of, is this new country—obviously it wasn't America they were talking about, I mean, it was that piece of dirt, but there wasn't an American nation—but is it right to talk about this as somehow any nation at that time as a, you know, God's nation, God's people? And Roger Williams in the 1630s was absolutely explicit about this, and it was a matter of contention like you pointed out. But the point is, this is not some kind of thing that's happened in the 2020s to kowtow to progressive forces or things like that. I'm saying, look, theologically, people for a long time have been pushing back on those who make their nation a Christian nation in some kind of a meaningful theological sense.

Sean: So it seems like there's two big barriers. One, just given the supernatural evidence that the U.S. was chosen, akin to the evidence Israel was chosen, but second, that God even still works through nations as He did in the past, that's a big theological leap, and of course the future, working with Israel in the future is a separate question. Those are two theological assumptions built into the idea of Christian nationalism, and I think are both profoundly theologically suspect. Now Scott and I did a review of a book, gosh, probably been three or four years, we'll link below, where we talked about Christian nationalism, and it was just kind of coming up on the scene, so the conversation has changed. But if you search to think biblically, Christian nationalism, that will come up. And I've actually had a couple separate conversations on YouTube, had R.R. Reno on with Paul Miller talking about what is Christian nationalism. Is it a big deal? Because Paul and Miller has written a detailed critique of Christian nationalism, and that might be a text that I would turn to for the in-depth critique that our guest was asking for. Good stuff. Anything else on that, Rick?

Rick: Nope, I think we got it.

Sean: All right, as always, good job, appreciate you filling in. Scott will be back next week, and we will look forward to that. This has been an episode of the podcast Think Biblically, Conversations on Faith and Culture, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. We have programs in theology, Bible, apologetics, spiritual formation, marriage and family, some fully online, some on campus. We have loved your questions and comments for today. Keep them coming. Please send them to thinkbiblically@biola.edu. That's thinkbiblically@biola.edu. Please give us a rating on your podcast app. We are close to 1,000 ratings. We're like a few away, which is kind of a fun milestone. So if you've enjoyed this podcast and it's helpful, even just a couple moments to do that would make a big difference. We appreciate you listening, and we'll see you Tuesday when our regular podcast episode airs, a conversation with Nijay Gupta on why Christianity is a strange religion. You will not want to miss that one. And in the meantime, remember to think biblically about everything.