Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Part I

---

Australia Bans Social Media for Children Under 16 – Why are Some Pushing Back Against the Legislation?

Well, we need to look at social media again, given the big news coming out of Australia that the government there has passed what is considered to be a pretty simple to understand ban on social media accounts for Australians under age 16. Now, consider the fact that we’re just talking about under age 16. So even between, say, 16 and 18, you’re looking at the fact that these are young people, presumably in the home, they are teenagers. And even when you look at 16 and under, we’re looking at a long way under when you consider this. And so this isn’t really radical legislation, but it’s being treated as radical legislation. And one of the places where it’s being treated that way is in Australia where the government has adopted this legislation.

So just consider the fact that we’re talking about social media. Consider that if we were talking about, say, raising children 30 years ago, no one would think to add social media to the agenda for conversation. It simply wasn’t a thing. Now, it’s not only a thing. In the language of social media, it is an extremely big thing.

The ban’s an interesting story in and of itself, and I’m going to argue that the most radical thing about it is that it isn’t very radical, but it’s being treated as if it’s very radical. That, in one sense, is the most interesting aspect of this legislation. You have people for it and against it who are over claiming what it is all about and the difference the law is likely to make. On behalf of the legislation, you have the Australian government saying that it has acted upon the very real and credible evidence of the damage that social media exposure is doing in the lives of adolescents and children.

And so this ban, at least according to the Australian government, a ban in which the platforms can be found liable and can be sued in individual cases for millions of dollars, we’re looking at virtually unlimited liability, the majority who passed this law in the Australian government are coming back to say, “Look, this has teeth. This is big. It is a major statement. It is going to limit the damage of social media and young lives because it’s going to limit the access of young lives to social media.”

On the other hand, you have the opponents of the legislation who are also saying this is a very, very big deal and it’s going to be a very, very big failure. Their argument is that this is actually not even going to do what it’s advertised to do. It’s not going to prevent teenagers from having access to social media, and that includes, they will concede, damaging access to social media. But on this side, what you have are the absolute social media determinists who say there is simply no way that social media is not going to be in the lives of teenagers and even older children. And if you think you’re going to stop it by legislation, you are just fooling yourselves.

Now, I’m going to make the argument that this legislation does mean something, but it doesn’t, in all likelihood, mean as much as its proponents are claiming, but it also probably means more than its opponents are alleging here. But let me just tell you what’s missing from this entire equation. It’s a very interesting argument, and I think as Christians listen to this argument, we’re going to recognize there’s a far deeper problem here than social media.

Here’s the interesting aspect of the argument. The argument is this. Those who are for this legislation, who brought the legislation successfully argued for it, they are saying not only that Australia as a government needs to prevent access to social media platforms by those who are under age 16. It’s going on to say it’s doing this in order to empower parents in the equation. And the equation evidently includes parents, children, and social media. Put an equal sign of the other side of that equation, parents plus children plus social media equals… well, equals what?

So the proponents of this legislation, those who are all for it and brought it precisely because they said they had seen how much damage is being done in the lives of young people, they’re saying, “Look, this is going to empower parents to more effectively parent their children.” Now, in a certain generational sense, turning parent into a verb is something that would jar some ears, but we do understand what we say, we need parents to parent. And this legislation, the proponents of the legislation claim that this will enable parents to have more influence, more authority, more effectiveness in limiting the damage of social media when it comes to their children under age 16 and even to limit their access.

On the other hand, the enemies of this legislation are saying, “You’re fooling yourselves. You’re fooling yourselves if you think that the government can come between teenagers and social media. You’re fooling yourself,” they’re also saying, “if you think that parents can have much say in the matter.”

Okay, let me just state, from the Christian worldview, what we have at this point is a five alarm fire. Social media is in itself not the five alarm fire. It’s a fire, I think. Several alarms are going off. But the big alarm is about parenthood. And what we see on both sides of this argument is that parents somehow are incapable of parenting in the year 2024 and presumably going forward.

So the proponents of the legislation are saying, “Look, we have just given parents a big tool.” They’re going to be able to say to their kids, “Look, it is illegal for you to have a social media account before you’re 16.” And the other side of the equation is saying, “Who is fooling whom here? Because if parents think they’re going to be able to prevent this, they’re fooling themselves.”

And so why are parents in the equation at all? Basically, because parents are going to be ineffective at limiting social media exposure for their own offspring, presumably right down the hall or maybe even in the same room. And so their argument is, “Look, parents are ineffectual and they’re just now permanently ineffectual.’ The proponents of the legislation are saying, “Hey, we’re the big friends of parents. We’ve just given parents the tool they need to make the decisive difference.”

I just want to say that from a Christian perspective, both of those have to be fundamentally wrong. I’m not saying the legislation is wrong. I think in the main, it’s probably headed in a very good direction. But I think the assumption that somehow this is going to empower parents, well, that’s a false assumption. The idea that parents cannot control, cannot influence, cannot exercise authority over their social media exposure of their children, I think that is also a lie, and a lie that will come with severe consequences not only when it comes to the exposure of social media when it comes to children, but in the general sense, what in the world it means to be a parent. What does it mean to be a mother and a father? What does it mean to have responsibility for the raising of children in this generation?

Evidently, we’re now being told parents need the government in order to give them support or parents can’t do it at all. I don’t think either of those from a biblical perspective are tenable. So why are they untenable? Well, I’m going to say very clearly that a biblical worldview tells us that parents have this assignment even before there is a government. And this takes us back to a form of Christian argument. We just have to see now as a reflex. That form of Christian argument comes down to this. The Bible makes very clear what is more basic than something else. And in the Scriptures, what you have even in the Book of Genesis is the understanding that parenthood, the authority and responsibility of a mother and a father with their children, that is pre-political. It is pre-governmental. It is not that families have to accommodate themselves to the state. It is that the state must accommodate itself to the authority and role of parents.

So do parents at times need help from the state on this kind of issue? Well, let’s just put it this way. We take the law seriously as Christians. We believe that the law teaches, that the law inevitably makes a statement about what is right and what is wrong. And so in that sense, it is good that the government would pass a law that would acknowledge the righteous authority of parents and frankly make very clear that the larger society also believes that this kind of social media exposure is wrong. That is not unhelpful and it’s not irrelevant. Parents do not raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord in a vacuum.

From a Christian biblical perspective, the problem with that first argument coming from the government is that the government can’t solve this problem. It cannot make bad parents, good parents. It cannot make weak parents, strong parents. And so even as, yes, it is a good thing, I believe, that the law is making a moral declaration about the exposure of children and young people of social media, it turns out not to be quite as strong an expression, not to mention as powerful a tool as its advocates indicate.

The Christian biblical worldview clearly understands that parents are in the position of authority over their own children. And that’s not just found in creation order in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. It is also found, narrated throughout scripture in the historical books of scripture, in the historical narratives of scripture, in the familial portraits in scripture, in the pictures in Scripture of the good father versus the bad father, the pictures in Scripture of the good mother versus the bad mother, the understanding of what it means for God to give children a mother and a father inside the context of the home and for those parents to have responsibility for the nurture and admonition of their children. And remember, both of those words are important, nurture and admonition.

Nurture means taking care of them. Admonition, well, that’s a word that’s not used as often as it should be. That means the discipline and teaching of children. It means that the family is the first hospital, it is the first kitchen, it is the first society, it is the first court, and the parents are the law.

Now, is it right for society to put laws in place that will help parents and support parents in the larger context of teaching what is right and teaching what is wrong? And the answer to that has to be yes. We have to be very glad that society has any number of laws that make very clear moral judgments. And let’s just take the most outlandish example here that would have to be proved. Let’s just take the case that it is wrong for a human being to kill another human being. It turns out to be the crime of murder. And it turns out, of course, that that is wrong. And every sane society comes to that conclusion and legislates it, makes it a matter of law. But you have to teach children from their youngest ages that it’s not right to hit your brother, that it’s not right to hurt your sister. You just have to go down that list and make the consequences clear because we don’t start as if all of a sudden there’s this period in which there is no moral issue and then all of a sudden you’re looking at murder.

In the same sense, social media exposure cannot be, for parents, something that’s categorically different than everything else. And by that, I do not mean that this is not a massive challenge. I fully understand that it is. Honestly, we just need to accept that it is a big challenge for all of us, and that includes mom and dad, grandmother and grandfather in most cases these days. It is a huge problem for human beings. But we also understand that there is a particular vulnerability to young people.

Part II

---

The Problem of Social Media for Teens is the Smoke, Not the Fire: The Real Problem is That Parents Aren’t Parenting

And here’s where you face the amazing thing that becomes clear in this Australian argument, and that is that the assumption is that parents just don’t have that much to do with the lives of their children. And parents certainly don’t possess the authority to say to their children, “Put that thing down. You can’t have that in your hand. You can’t have that in your room.” But this is where we need to understand that if Christian parents are not actively and constantly in the lives of their children, and by constantly, I don’t mean 24/7 with teenagers like you can be with them every single minute. But I think we woefully and sadly underestimate both the responsibility of and the power of parents. And yes, it does mean that parents have to say no.

The sad assumption to me in this Australian legislation is the sense in which it says, “If we don’t say this is wrong, parents are going to have no authority to say that it’s wrong when they deal with their own teenagers, when they deal with their own children.” And of course the arbitrary line here is drawn at 16, just forget that for a moment. Let’s just say the insinuation here is that parents need some external authority to say this is wrong so the parents can say, “Look, the government says this is wrong. The government says you can’t have a social media account until you’re 16. That’s what the government says.”

The other side of the equation are the pro technology folks who were against this law and came back and said, “No, the technological imperative is so strong you can’t keep a teenager from a social media account. You can’t protect children and teenagers from the damage that comes with social media exposure. You’re fooling yourself if you think that you can.” And as a matter of fact, you had people almost immediately opposed to this legislation who say, “Look, teenagers are not stupid. They’re smart. They’re going to come up with ways to lie in terms of the registration process.” And there’s plenty of evidence, by the way, not just in Australia, but universally. Let’s just say certainly here in the United States and in Europe, there is plenty of evidence that the social media platforms have everything to gain by figuring out a minimal way that they can say they’re honoring this kind of legislation, when actually they’re going to wink as much as your children want you to wink.

And it’s also interesting that it is said that the wife of one of the proponents of this legislation had been reading Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, and had used the data and the argument from that book, very persuasive I would add by the way, in order to say you need to do something, the government needs to take a stand, the government needs to take action in order to use the law, to make it much more difficult for children and teenagers under age 16 to have access to social media.

And so again, we live in an age in which there are people who say, “Look, parents need to be backed up, not only by the law, they also need to be backed up by experts.” A generation ago, Peter and Bridgette Berger, a very prominent sociologists at that time, they wrote about the family being encroached upon by other authorities, and they spoke about parents being encroached upon by a universe of experts. And the experts are going to tell you how to raise your children. They’re going to tell you exactly when to stop nursing your babies. They’re going to tell you exactly how you should discipline teenagers. They’re going to tell you exactly how you should discipline toddlers. They’re going to tell you exactly how, because they’re experts after all, you should approach dealing with your own teenagers. And they’re going to be backed up with all kinds of degrees and all kinds of expertise.

Now, I think one of the interesting things we could do, not today, is just to set a lot of this expert advice alongside other expert advice and even look at different times when societies are saying, “Look, this is a smart guy. This is a smart person. This is a smart professor. He or she has the absolute insight on this issue” until of course someone writes the next book. But the point is that for parents, we can’t go book by book. We can’t go expert by expert. We have a responsibility given to us by God, not delegated to us by the government.

And I do think this requires some tough talk to parents, Christian parents, and among Christian parents. And it has to do with the determination that even if the rest of the world sees the technological imperative as applying to children and teenagers, or for that matter to ourselves, we have to recognize it is simply not faithful for Christians to surrender to that kind of technological imperative. Yes, your teenager will survive without a social media account. Your children will survive without even some technological expertise. It’s amazing how fast they can pick it up when the time is right.

Part III

---

Parents in a Universe of Experts: The Technological Imperative is Part of the Challenge

And there are two things missing here. After the bigger issue of parental authority, there are two things missing from this equation, and you see it very much in the Australian debate. Number one is the active, timely involvement of parents with children, because the exposure of children and teenagers to this kind of social media only works in its most devastating impacts that these teenagers are basically alone, apart from the family, outside the view of parents, staring at a screen they hold in their hand, or sits on a desk. Either way, it’s a very, very dangerous picture and one that Christian parents need to understand we can’t allow.

The second big issue here that certainly comes to mind is the fact that parents are assumed in this societal moment to have neither the will nor the power to say, “You’re not going to do that. Your friends do that? You’re still not going to do that. And I’m going to make certain you don’t do that. I’m going to make very clear that there are consequences for even trying to do that.” And if that sounds extreme, it is just an extreme picture of the problem of contemporary parenthood. And by the way, I do not mean to minimize these challenges. These challenges are real. The challenges are big. But I just want to say that parental authority, parental responsibility is a lot bigger. A biblical theology drawn from the scriptures concerning the role and responsibility of parents, it is bigger and more powerful than any of these issues that can be thrown at us, but it does involve actually functioning as parents. And that means not only saying yes and no, but making it stick and then making it certain.

Well, we’ll be tracking this story with you, but at least at this point, I hope that Christian parents, not just in Australia, but in the United States, in Europe and elsewhere, Christian parents are paying heed to this conversation in Australia not in order just to go along with the conversation, but certainly as Christians to observe it, be shocked by it, and then act accordingly.

Part IV

---

The Real Agenda: Yet Another Cry of “Book Banning” Revealed for What It Really Is

But speaking of issues current in the society around us, one of the things I want to point to is the fact that you have mainstream media and others. We just had, of course, Banned Books Week, which is falsely advertised, but very popular in the culture. You saw the cultural elites making very clear the mainstream media, Hollywood, all the rest, there’s solidarity, the teacher’s unions solidarity with the opposition to banning any books. And again, I say to Christian parents, one of your responsibilities in your own home is to ban a lot of books.

But it’s also interesting that when you speak about these elites and how they think and how they work, they sometimes congratulate each other. Sometimes they congratulate themselves. Again, Christians understand that is a human problem. But when we look at this past Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, it’s interesting that the editorial board, so this is not just an editorial columnist, this is the editorial board of the New York Times, ran a piece entitled Books about Everyone, for Everyone. And it is about a nonprofit that is supported by the New York Times Communities Fund, and indeed what is known as the Neediest Cases fund there at the New York Times and one of these organizations is known as First Book.

What is this organization and why does the New York Times want you to know it supports it? Well, here’s how the statement begins, and I quote, “Book banning is on the rise in the United States, a growing number of communities are trying to take reading choices out of the hands of children and families by declaring some books off limits. At least 220 public school districts imposed bans last year on more than 4,200 books according to [P-E-N,] PEN America. The targets of these bans,” says the New York Times, “are often books that feature people of color or people who are not heterosexual, or books that deal with difficult subjects like sexual violence and substance abuse.” First Books” say the editors” is an antidote to these bans.”

Wow. Sometimes folks just say out loud what you know they’re thinking and maybe they don’t even listen to themselves talk out loud. So notice how they describe the process here. They describe it as book banning. And by the way, this means that if as a parent, for instance, you say to your child, “You’re not going to read that book,” you’re a book banner. You belong back there with some kind of dark force in ancient or medieval history. You would burn books if you will ban books. It’s just a sign of intentional ignorance and repression and wrong thinking and all of that. You can see just how this is presented.

And if you are, say, running a public library or if you’re a librarian in a school library, or if you’re a school board, and you take some action to restrict any book from the student body, then all of a sudden you are, again, you are a banner of books. You are one of those people, and your action is described as a book ban.

Well, let me just state the obvious, and this is so obvious it just has to be stated out loud. One of the responsibilities of parents in any age, at any time, is to ban certain books within their home. And a certain responsibility of every community is to ban certain books from the community. It is certainly the case that when you talk about schools, it is a very important responsibility that there is a limitation on the books that are presented to children and to teenagers in a school library.

Now, those are not the same thing. I would state just rather commonsensically that your home is more restrictive than the school library. But the school library, I think any sane person would recognize, needs to be, must be more restrictive than, say, the general public publishing industry at large.

But you know that logic that I think just about any American citizen would have to recognize at some level is true for their own family, for their own children, if for no one else. That is the logic that you see absolutely debated here. Absolutely refuted here. Absolutely contradicted here. No, the logic here is that experts will decide what your children should read.

And I just want to go back to the language of this statement, “The targets of those bans are often books that feature people of color or people who are not heterosexual, or books that deal with difficult subjects like sexual violence and substance abuse.”

The group that the New York Times Editorial Board is bragging about supporting financially is a group, they say, which is an antidote to those or these bans. So let’s look at this for a moment. Again, the bands are often against books that feature people of color. Okay, now that would be wrong. And yet I don’t think that’s actually what anyone’s going to find is a frontline issue. I’m going to argue that I would not see why any Christian parent would want to discriminate on the basis of a book in its presentation of people of different races. I just don’t believe that that’s a real thing when it comes to these book bans. And even when it comes to some of the books when they say this is the motivation, it turns out that in those books, there are often other things that are a far greater priority and concern to parents. And that gets to the second thing here, people who are not heterosexual.

Now, honestly, I have never seen the New York Times, and I read it every single day, I’ve never seen the New York Times make that kind of statement, describe a class of people as people who are not heterosexual. And I think they’re doing that as intentional shorthand, but I want to tell you, sometimes their intentional shorthand ends up telling the truth in a way I don’t think they meant to tell it. So when they all of a sudden say that one of the problems is that some of these bad people who would ban certain books, and again, I’m not even accepting those words, that’s just what they say, but they will say that some of these people want to ban books about people who are not heterosexual, now, I just want to say, I think some of these very same parents, and I’m confident about this, don’t want everything heterosexual in the library. Let’s just make that very, very clear. That would include all kinds of stuff no parents would want a child to see.

But when they turn that around and say people who are not heterosexual, oh wow, you see what the true agenda is here. And it’s because their effort is not just even to, say, speak the truth about people. It is to make a moral judgment. And that moral judgment is the affirmation of people “who are not heterosexual.” And you know what that means. And it often comes down to a depiction that in truth, by any sane, moral judgment is not only explicit but pornographic. And they’re not going to tell you that when they make this kind of editorial statement, congratulating themselves for supporting this kind of organization and inviting you to do the same.

I have to come to a conclusion, but I’m just going to go out on a limb here and I’m going to suggest that I don’t think they’re going to be many listeners to The Briefing who are going to go immediately to the website in order to donate to that organization. Or at least I have to say, I hope not.