Friday, August 9, 2024

Part I

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Teenagers are Discovering a Good of Work: Friendship – Teens Find Reprieve from Loneliness Epidemic in Summer Jobs

We’re going to get pretty quickly to your questions, but I want us to look at a few very interesting cultural indicators that cross our screen and every once in a while come to our attention. But I want to start with something that’s a little sad on the one hand, but more heartwarming on the other, and I think particularly may be helpful to American families, Christian families, Christian parents, and others who work with Christian teenagers and even college students.

It comes down to this. It is very interestingly and perhaps conveniently blamed, especially on COVID-19 and the pandemic, but the fact is that most American teenagers and even young adults are reporting that they have a friendship challenge. They are missing friends. They seem to lack a lot of the friendship structure that has been honestly so crucial to American adolescence for so long. And frankly, not just American adolescence, but looking at adolescence over the span of something like human history. And we understand that at least part of what takes place in adolescence is a necessary, this can go off the rails of course, but a necessary broadening of the young person’s world, and there are other social actors who loom pretty large in that world.

Now, when it comes to American teenagers, America’s Christian parents have often been more concerned that there would be too much peer attention, there’d be too much peer concern; that friendships might in some sense compete with the family, and peer influence compete with parental influence. And those are very legitimate concerns, certainly over the span of American adolescence in the 20th century, and maybe even more urgent toward the end of the 20th century.

But things do appear to have changed. I’m going to say that I think far more to blame here than the pandemic, which was actually fairly brief in terms of even the lives of American teenagers now, the fact is, I think the rise of social media, and the fact that you’ve had the withdrawal of so many teenagers from structured relationships, I think that has a lot to do with the problem.

But I want to point to how you see this kind of problem emerge in a report about something else. In this case, it’s a Wall Street Journal report. The headline was “Isolated Teens Crave Friends on the Job.” So here’s something, and I do think this is heartwarming because it tells us something about human nature that is, I think, according to God’s design. It tells us something that Christian parents and all those who love teenagers and young people should keep in mind. The report in The Wall Street Journal says that rather unexpectedly, an awful lot of teenagers who took summer jobs this year, and you could say young adults as well as teenagers, college students can be included in this, but a particular focus on high school students, it turns out that a lot of them said the best part of the job was the fact they worked with other teenagers. They worked with friends. They had someone to talk with. They looked forward to going to work because they were there with other young people.

One of the things that also comes out in this is that employers needed an awful lot of adolescents, especially during the summer season. There are amusement parks, there are theme parks, there are all kinds of events at the local, county, state level that need an awful lot of teenage labor during the summer months. You’ve got pools open, you’ve got lifeguard positions, you’ve got waitress, and just all kinds of things that come up. Summer camps, you go down the list. And when you look at this, an awful lot of these teenagers said, “It was actually the friends that I made at work which were more important to me than the pay.” One teenage boy who’s looking very responsible in terms of his comments here said, “The pay was really a secondary issue. It was getting to be with these people that I enjoyed, as I think about the job.” The summer work context actually informed a lot of these teenagers about the lack they had been experiencing, but perhaps didn’t know how to articulate.

Terell Wright is the reporter on the story. The story begins, “When 18-year-old Helena Florek was ready to find a summer job, she had plenty of choices. Employees were eager for temporary help during the peak vacation season and the money was good. But after years of school over Zoom, a canceled field trip to Washington, DC, and an axed eighth grade formal, she had something other than just a paycheck on her mind: friends. ‘I wanted to work somewhere where there’s a community,’ she said. She ended up working at a restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire that employs 48 teenagers.” Now, just imagine that. And the teenager said she’s made new friends and she’s also made money. She has also learned a lot through constant interaction with customers while working as a cashier, “which she said has improved her problem-solving skills and patience.”

The co-owner of the Goldenrod Restaurant there in New Hampshire said that he had to hire the teenagers pretty quickly. If he didn’t call them back, “they’ve gotten a job at the local grocery store at Hannaford pushing carts, cleaning up the aisles, making sure everything’s stocked correctly.” In other words, if you wanted to hire teenagers this summer, you had to be pretty fast.

One poignant comment was made by a 17-year-old boy who after playing “hundreds of hours of video games during the pandemic, and during that time and afterwards growing farther apart from his friends,” he applied to work at Typhoon Texas Waterpark in Austin after turning 15. Today, he says, he’s more confident in talking to people. He said, “It was a bit rough. You go from talking to hundreds of people every day to basically nobody within the span of two weeks.”

Another teenage young man was reported in this story to sometimes go to the workplace on days he’s not scheduled to work just to say hello to people he now calls his friends.

I want to say that from a Christian Biblical worldview, there’s just so much here to celebrate. For one thing, it’s just the fact that God made us social creatures, and adolescence is one of those periods of life when a lot of that sociology really comes to the forefront. But it also tells us there’s something healthy about teenagers wanting to have friends. It also tells us something that isn’t emphasized in this report, and that is that work is a really good place because work is a really good moral context for teenagers as well as the rest of us to make friends.

It’s quite natural that when we give ourselves to work, because God made us to work. When we work in the right sense and for the right cause and in the right place for the right reasons, doing everything the right way, we actually learn a great deal, we mature a lot, and we do so in a social context in which we are together. I think you could simply say, by the way, you could look at a lot of adults who have been working remotely, and you look at the fact that there’s so many offices empty because people are working just at home. And you recognize that the crisis of loneliness, which was considered an epidemic in American society in the middle of the last century, you can imagine how that epidemic has become a true relational pandemic when it comes to friendships, not just with teenagers, but also among many adults. And the work context I think is something that Christians need to see. It really has a Biblical resonance.

And by the way, I’ve got skin in this game. I started working at a local grocery store the day I turned 14. It was legal then. I had to get a work permit, but the work permit at the county office was simply given to me when I asked for it. And there was a quick approved stamp on it, which meant that day, the day I turned 14, I could go get a job. I can affirm just about every good thing that is either mentioned or even hinted at in this article about that experience. I’ll also say that early on when I started working in a grocery store at age 14, I’m not sure I contributed a great deal, but I learned how to do so and I learned how to do it fast. There’s also something about the romance of a first job. Honestly, I grew up in the grocery business, given the fact that my father was in the grocery business, and I still find a thrill going into a grocery store.

Part II

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Do Expensive Toilet Paper and Cheetos Make It in Your Grocery Cart? Economists Hope So: Investors Look to Unexpected Data to Determine Health of Economy

Well all right, Just a couple of other cultural indicator matters that I think come with some worldview significance, but they also come with a bit of fun thinking about the economy and the society around us. Honestly, we can be absolutely inundated with economic indicators. You can look at a business channel on cable news, streaming news, and there’ll be a ticker tape at the bottom. And there’s some people who evidently are watching that minute by minute, if not second by second. You understand how the stock markets work. Well, then again, you look at the larger economy, most people are probably most influenced by just looking at a graph. Is it going up or is it going down? Too much data is simply a matter of overload for an awful lot of Americans.

But it also turns out that there are economic indicators you don’t have to have a PhD in economics or an MBA degree to understand. Here are a couple that came up in recent news reports in which the point wasn’t that this is an unusual indicator. The point was, well, the indicator’s telling us something.

Indicator number one, the sales of Cheetos. Here’s how it works. PepsiCo and Frito-Lay, just a part of a giant conglomerate that has an international reach, it includes the brand Cheetos. Cheetos is a big brand. A lot of folks like Cheetos. They like them a lot. So what’s the indicator? When sales flag on Cheetos, something is endangered in the economy. Things may be going badly for the economy. Because if people are giving up Cheetos, they’re giving up something they want. If they are switching from Cheetos to a local store brand, well, you just might have an economic problem on your hands, or at least that is an indicator of what could be trouble. Now, clearly, if you’re Frito-Lay, the numbers ought to be going up, not down. And if they are going down, the big question is, is this telling us something about the larger economy?

But then the second indicator, it might be a little more direct. It turns out, and I’ll credit The Wall Street Journal again with this report, it turns out that economists, at least some of them, are looking at another indicator to see when the economy might be entering a downturn and when consumers really are changing their behavior. And in this case, it’s not about snack food, it’s about toilet paper. Headline: “Cheap Toilet Paper Triggers Alarm Bells Among Investors.” So there are investors who look to the brand sales of toilet paper, and when the more expensive brands are giving way to the less expensive brands, when people are voting with their toilet paper purchases, their confidence in the economy, well, it turns out that the toilet paper could be a pretty important indicator if people are buying cheap toilet paper, there just might be an economic problem.

But this report in The Wall Street Journal also tells us that there’s something of a bifurcation in our economy. There are some people in our economy who are economically protected. They’re economically secure. They can afford whichever brand of toilet paper they want. They’re largely immune, at least to this point, from some of these trends. But there would also be an increasing number of Americans who are toilet paper conscious when it comes to making consumer decisions. And those decisions can tell at least some investors and economists more than you might think about the economy.

And that points to a bifurcation in the economy between those who are consumer price point sensitive when it comes to toilet paper, and those who, according to this article, reflect the alternate reality of premiumization, a word I hadn’t seen in economic terms before, which means they can afford an even more expensive premium product. And when it comes to toilet paper, they are gung-ho for premiumization.

One final thought about all of this as we turn to questions, yes, they are watching us all the time and they know exactly what is in our cart. They’re watching us because they are looking at big trends in the economy. So if your cart includes both Cheetos and Charmin, some people are getting pretty excited about it.

Part III

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What are Signs a Romantic Relationship Should End, and What are Signs God Intends It to Lead to Marriage? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

But next I’m going to turn to another question, and I’m simply going to acknowledge that in the dating process, things can get complicated. So here’s a complication. A Christian young woman writes in, identifying as a lifelong Southern Baptist, “I’m currently dating a young man who grew up in a Roman Catholic Church and school. We’ve talked about theology and are in agreement about core beliefs, and currently he goes to my Southern Baptist church. However, I’m sure the opportunity will come up when visiting his family to go to Catholic Mass. So my question is this: Is there any reason I should not participate in Catholic Mass as a Protestant?”

She asked more in explaining the question, but let me just say I can answer the question right there. No; an evangelical Christian should not participate in the Roman Catholic Mass. Let me just be really clear. This is not brand loyalty. This is not anti-Catholic prejudice. I have so many wonderful Catholic friends. It is simply the objective acknowledgement that the Roman Catholic Mass is a form of a repetition of the substitutionary atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. The doctrine of transubstantiation means that, according to the official theology of the Roman Catholic Mass, the elements of the bread and the wine are actually transformed into the Body and the Blood of Christ. And in effect, as Martin Luther said, “Christ is crucified again.”

Now the doctrine of transubstantiation and the entire context of the Catholic Mass is far more doctrinally detailed than that. But in this context, I just have to answer in the economy of time and say, no, I do not believe that a gospel Christian, I don’t believe that a confessing Protestant can participate in the Roman Catholic Mass. Now, I don’t think it means you can’t be present when Roman Catholics are worshiping in terms of a certain context. For instance, you’ve got families, you’ve got others. But participating in the Mass is a very different thing. That is clearly where I would think you’d need to draw a very understandable and very clear line.

I simply had to come back and say, I think in consistency with the great reformers of the Protestant Reformation and in consistency with evangelical principles, I could not participate in a Mass, period. I could not take the elements of the Mass, period. I could not affirm the declarations that are made by the priests, period. Honestly, there is no way I can go much further in answering this question and assuming that I know anything about this young man and his actual convictions. I’m very encouraged to know he is with you at a Southern Baptist church. I think that’s very encouraging. I hope he’s moving towards a full affirmation that would even lead to the full confession of Christ in believer’s baptism.

And in terms of the family complexities, let me just say that going all the way back to some of the questions faced by the earliest Christians, and certainly specifically since the Reformation in the 16th century, you’ll hardly be the first couple to try to wrestle with some of those complications.

Part IV

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Should Christians Participate in Catholic Mass? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

But next I’m going to turn to another question, and I’m simply going to acknowledge that in the dating process, things can get complicated. So here’s a complication. A Christian young woman writes in, identifying as a lifelong Southern Baptist, “I’m currently dating a young man who grew up in a Roman Catholic Church and school. We’ve talked about theology and are in agreement about core beliefs, and currently he goes to my Southern Baptist church. However, I’m sure the opportunity will come up when visiting his family to go to Catholic Mass. So my question is this: Is there any reason I should not participate in Catholic Mass as a Protestant?”

She asked more in explaining the question, but let me just say I can answer the question right there. No; an evangelical Christian should not participate in the Roman Catholic Mass. Let me just be really clear. This is not brand loyalty. This is not anti-Catholic prejudice. I have so many wonderful Catholic friends. It is simply the objective acknowledgement that the Roman Catholic Mass is a form of a repetition of the substitutionary atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. The doctrine of transubstantiation means that, according to the official theology of the Roman Catholic Mass, the elements of the bread and the wine are actually transformed into the Body and the Blood of Christ. And in effect, as Martin Luther said, “Christ is crucified again.”

Now the doctrine of transubstantiation and the entire context of the Catholic Mass is far more doctrinally detailed than that. But in this context, I just have to answer in the economy of time and say, no, I do not believe that a gospel Christian, I don’t believe that a confessing Protestant can participate in the Roman Catholic Mass. Now, I don’t think it means you can’t be present when Roman Catholics are worshiping in terms of a certain context. For instance, you’ve got families, you’ve got others. But participating in the Mass is a very different thing. That is clearly where I would think you’d need to draw a very understandable and very clear line.

I simply had to come back and say, I think in consistency with the great reformers of the Protestant Reformation and in consistency with evangelical principles, I could not participate in a Mass, period. I could not take the elements of the Mass, period. I could not affirm the declarations that are made by the priests, period. Honestly, there is no way I can go much further in answering this question and assuming that I know anything about this young man and his actual convictions. I’m very encouraged to know he is with you at a Southern Baptist church. I think that’s very encouraging. I hope he’s moving towards a full affirmation that would even lead to the full confession of Christ in believer’s baptism.

And in terms of the family complexities, let me just say that going all the way back to some of the questions faced by the earliest Christians, and certainly specifically since the Reformation in the 16th century, you’ll hardly be the first couple to try to wrestle with some of those complications.

Part V

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What is the Biblical Position on Globalism? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay, how’s this for a big question? “I hear a great deal about globalism in the media today,” he says, this listener, “for and against. How are we to understand it, and what is the Biblical position on it?” Well, I appreciate the fact that this man sent in the question. He’s 75 years old and he’s in the United Kingdom. He’s in Great Britain. And this is a question that, honestly, is faced by evangelical Christians just about everywhere. In one sense, this is a very new question.

And so as a listener asks, “What is globalism?” Well, it is basically the argument that we should shift our worldview into a context of a single global reality, and we should make moral and political economic social adjustments in that global context. Now, there’s a sense in which this of course is something that’s only possible in hyper-modern times. I mean, we can look at a globe, but we remember that even the vision of planet Earth was only possible since the manned space expeditions allowed even photography looking back at Earth. The reality is that globalism, first of all, just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because even though there is some weird sense in which you could call something a global community, it’s really a fiction. The United Nations is proof positive of that. There is no global community.

You can argue why this is, but I’ll simply go back to the Biblical worldview that begins with the most important relationships not being global, but being local; so local that this gets to the Christian principle of subsidiarity, that it begins with marriage and family, parents and children, and then local community, local church. You can just imagine. The larger the abstraction, the less efficient and economic the social unit is.

So let’s just say that in our understanding looking at planet Earth, globalism would be the least efficient system of trying to meet human needs and actually conceive of a human community. But if you are abandoning a Biblical worldview, and honestly, if what you want to bring about is some kind of social transformation, then doing it in the name of some kind of mandate of globalism would be a pretty smart way to try to bring it about. That’s why so many conservative Christians raise so many concerns about globalism, because that ambition will basically run counter to almost everything that I’ve just argued that is implied or explicit in the Christian worldview. That’s not to say that we don’t have any responsibility to people on the other side of the earth; clearly we do. But the point is, we have a primary responsibility to those who are much closer to us, which is to say, our own children in our own home that need to be fed, our neighbor right down the street who needs our help. You can imagine what we’re talking about here.

The rest becomes something of an abstraction. It’s not to say that with national emergencies we don’t send relief efforts and all the rest, but it is to say it is very difficult to imagine the abstraction of the administrative state of the federal government of the United States of America. I think the last thing that any American citizen would say is that it’s efficient. And my assumption is that the listener in Great Britain would have an at-home analogy to what I’m talking about here. So if indeed our national governments are not hyper-efficient, why would we think that extending that to a global reality would be?

I think ideologically, theologically, the other thing I want to point out is that even though Christians of course affirm that every single human being is made in God’s image, and so we start from that, there is a human community in that sense, the reality is that most who are pressing the ideas of globalism are doing so because of specific power and political ambitions. They want to do things in the name of “the people.” And I think it’s also honestly very important we recognize there’s some people who no doubt mean this sincerely, but just because they’re sincere doesn’t mean they’re right.

And so we owe something to people virtually everywhere in the world. It’s hard sometimes to know exactly what that something is. The larger imperative is helping someone who might be just a few feet from us or a few yards from us, a few miles from us. You can just understand how this works. You can also understand why if you want to bring out a vast reordering or reconstruction of society, doing so in the name of globalism and the world would be a pretty powerful argument for those at least for whom that’s a pretty powerful argument.

Part VI

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Why Is There Talk of a LGBTQ Revolution When Americans View Revolutions Positively? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Finally, a very interesting question. An intelligent question coming from a listener in California who asks why do folks talk, and that would include me on The Briefing, why do you talk about an LGBTQ revolution? “My point is that we Americans seem to think revolutions are positive. Who’s against a good revolution? Maybe a less complimentary label would be more accurate.” Well, that’s a smart question, but I simply say it’s a limitation of language. But it is also because those of us who refer to the LGBTQ revolution are trying to point to the fact that it is indeed that. It is a revolt. It is a revolution.

And so what’s interesting coming from this listener is the assumption that a revolution is a good thing. And he says it in a smart way. He said, “For Americans, revolutions are a good thing.” Well, you know what? That’s an interesting point. And the point is also I think to be made that there’s not a good word as a substitute for revolution. That’s what it is. And I think in the course of human history, Christians would have to say revolutions have to be justified, and few of them turn out to be justified.

Now, I’ll just cut to the quick and tell you I think the American Revolution was justified, but that requires an argument we don’t have time to make today on The Briefing. But I’ll also say that deep in the Christian conscience is the understanding that few revolutions in all likelihood are morally justified.

And that takes us all the way back to the first revolution, which wasn’t called a revolution, which is in Genesis 3.