Friday, November 8, 2024

Part I

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Fox News America Beat MSNBC America: Trump’s Election Win and the Decentering of the Media in America

Well, as the nation prepares to go into the first weekend after the election, let’s just state the obvious. We’re in a very different situation after the 2024 election. And sometimes it’s important, I think, for Christians just to take pause and say, “Where in the world are we on the clock and on the calendar?” Because as we are now ending the week of the national election, we do recognize that the before and the after are absolutely huge. Just one week ago we were wondering who would be elected President of the United States, and just one week ago we were being told that it was going to be such a close race that we would have to get to the very bitter end, perhaps days after the election, in order to find out.

Turned out that was wrong, in both senses. It really wasn’t that close and it really didn’t take that long to develop a very clear winner in the presidential election. If someone were to ask me, “What’s the most shocking aspect of the 2024 general election?” It would be that Donald Trump not only won, but he won in the electoral college and in the popular vote. That’s what no one seems really to have envisioned. Now, there are some people who said we could see a scenario where it might happen, but there had not even been coming from the Trump campaign, any kind of consistent messaging that they were hoping to win the popular vote. Now, the former President had made some statements, but it was not clear that was part of a strategy. Now we know it actually was.

Here’s what’s really, really interesting. It turns out that those running the Trump campaign were running two simultaneous efforts. One, the most important was to win in the electoral college, but the second was to win the popular vote. This was a matter of great urgency for the candidate himself, who won the presidency in the electoral college, but lost the popular vote back in 2016. Now, at this point, I just want to insert a civics lesson and a bit of Constitutional reality. The popular vote is interesting, but it is not Constitutionally relevant. I come back to say, the popular vote is interesting, but it is not Constitutionally relevant. What’s relevant according to the Constitution is the vote in the electoral college.

Now, they’re not totally disconnected, but it has been since 2004 that the winning Republican candidate for the presidency also won the popular vote. And in moral terms, it is important. Certainly in moral terms and in morale, it’s very important. It was important to Donald Trump. Now, how did he do that? How did he run both of these campaigns or both of these strategies simultaneously? Well, here’s what we now know.

What the former President had detected, or at least his campaign staff, and it appears that Trump himself somehow detected this, it is that in today’s media environment, you can be in many places at once. And so President Trump was doing some things that didn’t make much sense at the time. For instance, he was holding some major campaign activities in the state of California, and he never really had a chance of carrying California’s electoral college votes. But here’s what he had noticed back in 2016 and in 2020. He ran up big numbers in California where big numbers are to be found, and if he increased those numbers and if he did so in other states he had lost in the past or won narrowly, he could win the popular vote. That’s exactly what he did.

And so looking back at it, this is something that future campaigns are going to learn. You’re going to see this come up again and again and again, the former President’s rather masterful use of social media and of podcasts and other alternative media. It turns out this is genuinely a go-around when it comes to the established media. And this goes back to say the 1950s when the established media would have been the major newspapers, especially during the late ’50s into the ’60s, add the legacy television networks, CBS, NBC, eventually ABC, then add to those in the age of cable, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC. But what happened in the 2024 election is that you also had the rise of the massive podcast audiences. And in that sense, you also had the rise of President Trump understanding that you can hold a rally just about anywhere and end up with people talking about it just about everywhere. That turns out to be the winning strategy.

Now, whether anyone other than Donald Trump can pull this off, that remains to be seen, because after all, we are talking about a man who was the star in a reality television program. He has experience in the media that no previous and likely no successive candidate is likely to have, with the singular exception of looking at Ronald Reagan, who of course had been a Hollywood actor in the great age of the movies going all the way back to black and white before he entered into politics. So it turns out understanding communications and understanding the media does matter.

Now, from a Christian worldview perspective, and especially as Conservative Christians look at this, what’s the big lesson? Well, it’s the de-centering of the media, and this is something that Conservatives have been calling for for a very, very long time. The de-centering of the media means that you deny the gatekeeper status to so many who have been able to control what Americans saw, what Americans heard, and thus to a considerable extent what Americans thought. You go back to the golden age, they might say, of the legacy television networks, you had CBS, Walter Cronkite, you had NBC with Huntley and Brinkley, and they were tremendously feared and prized. They were feared by Conservatives, they were prized by Liberals, because they were basically operating from a far more establishmentarian, more liberal outlook.

You add ABC to the mix, and nothing changes fundamentally, but when you add cable to the mix, things do begin to change. This is the rise of Fox News, and the fact that by the time you get to say 15 to 20 years ago, you did have Americans in the age of cable pretty much now coalescing around the conservative polarity of Fox News, but you would add to that the centrist, or at least supposedly centrist model of CNN. Again, I think it has leaned left, but it has leaned left less significantly than what became MSNBC, and that was of course a product of NBC. It was intended in the beginning to be a lot like CNN, but then they recognized there is no growth margin there and so they went left. Fox News already occupied the right lane, so they went left. Guess what? The Fox lane, the right lane is populated by many more viewers than the left lane.

And there’s a lot more to that, but just consider that when you look at the election map of 2024, that maps out. Fox News America beat MSNBC America. And to put a little bow on that, it wasn’t even close. The de-centering of the mainstream media, however, comes with a cost. So let’s just talk honestly. It is a cost benefit analysis. There are benefits. I think the benefits vastly outweigh the cost. The benefits are, that you now have the opportunity for alternative voices. You have the opportunity for Conservative media stars. You have the opportunity for increased Conservative access to reaching the eyes and ears of Americans. That’s a good thing. The media elite decreasingly can cut that out, can prevent that. Increasingly, they are unable to do any such thing.

But there is a loss, and I just want to underline the importance of this loss as well. We need to understand there was a loss in the sense that the old prestigious networks, the old legacy newspapers, they did follow a certain code of ethics. Now, here’s what’s interesting. More recently, those newspapers, news sources, television networks, they have all been trimming their sails. They have been modifying their ethical perspective. Journalistic ethics, well, it’s not what it used to be, and especially with a younger group of activist ideologically leftist journalists at The New York Times, but in some other forms of establishment media as well, the younger generation, they are claiming that the old journalistic rules are outmoded, patriarchal and oppressive. Sometimes they’ll even say they’re downright racist.

It’s another application of critical theory. It’s another application of the kind of critical perspective that says in a new age, we need to be far more opinionated, far more bare-knuckled in terms of our opinion driving news coverage as well as editorial comment. And this is where there is a gain and a loss. The loss is the loss of that kind of journalistic stability you had with that establishment, but the establishment basically ruined it itself. The establishment has no one to blame but itself. The media elite have no one to blame but themselves, because they have operated so far on the left, they have been so unfair to the right, they’ve been so biased in their coverage.

And frankly, the old Liberals, if they are being hounded out of the business, and they are, it’s not by Conservatives, it’s by newer even more leftist Liberals. Just ask the retired editors of The New York Times. But it does put on those who are relying on more non-traditional media the responsibility to figure out how in the world we ascertain what is true, how in the world we determine what is credible, because as Christians, we’re not out for the news that’s interesting. Interesting is important, but interesting is not enough. We’re also not looking for a perspective that necessarily always agrees with us. Although, we’re also not looking for a perspective that disagrees with us in terms of especially the news coverage.

But we are looking for a set of rules, and as I’ve often said, you shouldn’t trust a journalist who can’t be fired for getting it wrong. So again, the bottom line, the destabilization, the opening up of the media universe, it’s a very positive thing. The arrival of Conservative hosts, Conservative podcasts, Conservative alternative media, a very important check. At the same time, the loss of some of the credibility that at least in terms of legacy came with the mainstream media, the loss of that stability means we have to work harder to be certain that what we are hearing and seeing is accurate and true, because as Christians, we really care about accurate and true.

Part II

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Not Your Grandparents’ Weed: Tuesday’s Election, the Increasing THC Levels in Marijuana, and the Moral Confusion of Our Age

All right, so now I’m going to shift from the mainstream media and the destabilization of that world to the destabilization of another world, and I’ll just use one word in order to describe the issue. The word is marijuana. Now, many want to refer to it as cannabis, and of course that is the official name of the industry, but marijuana is the popular name for what we are talking about here, and we’re talking about something that was at stake in the election.

As you look at states across the Tuesday vote, there were several states that were facing questions about legalizing recreational marijuana, and the most important of those probably was in the state of Florida. You also had in the state of Massachusetts, by the way, a proposal to legalize the “therapeutic use” of certain psychedelics, including hallucinogenic mushrooms. Yes, that’s really a thing, and it’s a thing we have to talk about today. We’re not going to hallucinate about it, we’re going to talk about it. You also had one state, that’s the state of Nebraska, that did vote to allow more use of medical marijuana. Pretty tightly defined there in Nebraska, but not recreational marijuana.

Just to remind you of the distinction, so-called medical marijuana means you’re supposed to have a medical purpose and some kind of medical authorization or prescription license, medical card, something like that, that the state law recognizes. In the state of Nebraska, the expanded access to marijuana or cannabis for medicinal purposes, it did pass. But in other states, legalizing recreational marijuana or cannabis went down. As I say, most importantly in Florida, but also in North Dakota and in South Dakota. Evidently both of the Dakotas were facing the marijuana question this year.

Now, what makes Florida so important? Well, it is because the Florida-proposed amendment, it was known on the ballot as Amendment 3, if it had passed, it would be a basically unrestricted authorization for the use of recreational marijuana. That means it doesn’t have any medicinal purpose, it doesn’t have medical authorization. It is just smoked because people want to smoke it. And that is for its effect. That is now defined in opposition to medical as recreational. How’s that for recreation? But again, looking at the state of Florida, it’s important because it is such a big and populated state, but we’re also looking at the fact that that would have been a largely unrestricted access to marijuana.

Now, here’s the thing. It got, like the proposed abortion amendment in Florida, it got a majority of voters, but it did not reach the 60% necessary for the amendment to the Constitution. So it got a majority; it just didn’t get a sufficient majority. And what that tells you is that the forces behind both of these will be back. But there was another aspect of how this issue played out in Florida, and this has to do with the potency of the marijuana. As you had several newspaper headlines say, “Today’s marijuana is not your grandparent’s marijuana at Woodstock.” Or you had reports saying that, for example, “The marijuana that is now sold is a multiple of previous versions of marijuana in terms of potency.”

The news source, This Week, which does basically scans and summaries of the media coverage, tells us this. “The average concentration of THC, the intoxicating compound in marijuana plants was 4% in weed sold in 1995. In 2021, it had soared to 15%. Many products now have a THC concentration of 40-70%.” Now, The Week also tells us that one of the interesting things is that in many of the states that have legalized so-called medical or recreational marijuana, few of them have put any limitation upon the potency of the marijuana. Now, here’s the thing. You may be told that legally you can only have say a certain number of grams of marijuana, but in terms of the effect, you might have something more like what would have been a bushel just a generation ago.

But here’s where we also need to see that there’s an increased understanding of the dangers of marijuana, because it does have an intoxicating effect. You can call it whatever you want to call it, but it is a form of drunkenness. And this is now reaching the point that you have some states worrying about how exactly to handle this in terms of say drunk driving, because in some states there is more widespread problem with marijuana use related to driving than drinking. Just let that settle in for a moment. There are some jurisdictions in which police and law enforcement are saying the use of marijuana is now rivaling or even greater than the problems of drinking.

So, this nation has been talking about drunk driving for a long time, and it just shows you the moral confusion of our age that, yeah, people who say we need to put this to a stop, “Hey, let’s legalize marijuana.” The potency, the amount of THC in the marijuana that is consumed, that is a huge, huge issue. And by the way, this is one of the reasons why you have many in some states who are just warning this just might not work, because as that potency goes up, you’re actually talking about a different substance. You can say, well, there’s a continuity cannabis leaf to cannabis leaf, and there’s a continuity say joint to joint, in the lingo, but in terms of potency, like I say, one’s like a wheelbarrow full of what would have taken in previous versions of marijuana.

Now, what I want to note about these votes on marijuana is what this tells us about the larger culture. And I want to point to something you may not have noticed or you might not have thought about for a time, and that is that if you go back a generation, there are two moral judgments which basically were held in tandem. So let’s go back a generation, let’s go back 40 years. You could say in this sense, a generation’s 30 or 40 years in duration. Go back 30 or 40 years, what were two issues in which there was overwhelming cultural consensus? Number one, that marriage could be and could only be the union of one man and one woman. That was a near-cultural consensus even 30 years ago. Then you say what else was largely a cultural consensus at that time? And that is that marijuana should not be legalized. Certainly what we now call recreational marijuana should not be legalized. It’s just too dangerous.

But notice that right now by the Supreme Court of the United States, we now have legalized same-sex marriage coast to coast. And it’s also not coincidentally true that the vast majority of Americans say they think it’s just fine. And so you had a very fast process of moral change among Americans who said I believe one thing, and then come back 10 years later and say I believe something very different. And the same thing’s true in marijuana. Here’s what’s interesting. Those two issues went together. They went together in time and sequence. They went together in generation. And you say, well, the two issues aren’t related. Well, they kind of are. They’re related in the general sense of moral liberalization. They are related in the general sense that these things become potential, possible, and then real, only in a society that is liberalizing itself on moral issues and turning to personal judgment and personal autonomy.

So there’s a lot here for Christians to think about, but as you are looking at the actions taken on marijuana, just understand there’s more here at stake than marijuana. And with marijuana itself, there’s actually a lot at stake.

Part III

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To Whom Do We Pray?—"All of God" or God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Spirit? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from an 8-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

Okay, now we’re going to turn to questions. And my favorite question that I’m going to take first here is from Gabriel who is eight. And how encouraging is it that an eight-year-old wants to ask about prayer? And how encouraging is it that this eight-year-old is listening to prayer? He’s listening to the prayers at the dinner table. And this boy says, “I got to wondering who we pray to. Is it God as in all of God, or is it God the Father? Sometimes my parents and church’s prayers are in the name of the Son to the Father. So where’s the Holy Spirit in this?”

Well, my goodness, I’d say the Holy Spirit is in an eight-year-old boy asking this question. I’ll tell you that I am very thankful for this question. It says a lot about this home. And I just want to say to Gabriel, here’s the thing. The Christian formula for prayer, the Christian understanding of prayer comes down to this. We are praying to the Father through the Son in the Spirit. We’re praying to the Father through the Son in the Spirit. Those prepositions are just really important. We’re addressing our prayers to the Father, the Creator, and we know that God is one, but he is also, as he reveals himself to us, three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We are praying to the Father.

How can we do that, Gabriel? We can do it through the Son, because Jesus Christ is our Savior and he is the Mediator. He’s the one who communicates our prayers, who mediates our prayers to the Father. So we pray to the Father through the Son. Where’s the Holy Spirit? We pray, the New Testament word is, in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit indwells believers in Christ, and the Holy Spirit even helps us to order our words and our thoughts as we pray to the Father through the Son in the Spirit. Gabriel, God bless you. Thank you for such a good question.

Part IV

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Is There a Problem with Girls Participating on Boys’ Teams in Athletics? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from a Mom Listener of The Briefing

Okay, now a question from a mom, and it’s a really good question and it’s asking for clarification, and that’s always good. Where we have an opportunity to clarify, I think we need to do that. And this mom writes, saying, “You talk a lot about boys in girls sports, but I was wondering what you think about girls in boys sports. We are a part of a Christian school where there is a girl on the boys team. There is not a girls team for this particular sport, so this is why she is on the team. Is there a time to say that boys teams should be just boys? I see the benefits of teen boys having some time with boys, but I’m sure this is not politically correct right now. I picked up on other non-Christian teams in the league commenting on why there is a girl on the team.”

Okay, whatever I say here is going to make someone angry, but I want to say to this mom, I think you’re onto something. And I want to say the reason I most often talk about boys on girls teams is because I’m talking about male bodies among female bodies, and this is where it is overwhelmingly due to the transgender activism that that’s the reality we’re talking about. And so you have someone claiming to be either non-gender specific or gendered as female when this person is clearly biologically male and they’re making claims and they’re showing up on female teams, either girls or women. That’s a huge problem, and Christians understand that. And because of that, there isn’t that much going the other way.

There really isn’t much in the transgender movement towards those who are women claiming to be men or boys trying to show up on those teams. And a part of it’s just because of the difference in skeletal structure, muscular strength. That just really doesn’t work. On the other hand, if you do have a male body among female bodies, that male body, well, just look at that picture of the University of Pennsylvania swim team. It has some structural advantages.

Now, I noted this mom is saying that this girl is on this boy’s team because there is not a girl’s team. And I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I will tell you this has even shown up in high school wrestling, and I think that is a massive, massive problem. I think there’s a good reason why you have sex-specific sports, especially at this stage of life. I think there’s a lot good about it. And even though yes, there is a situation in which it may be considered unfair in some context, the overwhelming picture here points to health where you have girls teams and boys teams.

And let me just point out that when you’re talking about something like inter-school athletics, you could say high school, middle school level or whatever, but especially when you’re talking about high school, you’re talking about a boy’s locker room and a girl’s locker room. You’re talking about the camaraderie that happens when the coach is giving a briefing in the context of a locker room. You change this and you understand there’s just something here that just inserts an awkwardness which is really difficult to overcome.

And especially where you’re talking about contact sports, I can just say that there are very few circumstances in which I think parents are going to argue with a straight face that in contact sports it really doesn’t matter if there’s a girl on the boys’ teams. I think the boys certainly know it. And by the way, they’re not being discriminatory in that sense. They’re simply being boys who recognize the difference between girls and boys. And that’s a good thing.

Part V

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Do Unbelievers Get Eternal Bodies at the Final Judgment as Well? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from a 14-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

Okay, just due to the news load this week, no surprise there, we had less time for questions than I would otherwise want. But I want to end with a question in order to make a much larger point. This comes from a 14-year-old, a young man from South Carolina, and he asked this. “Do those in hell receive a new body free of diseases or special needs? For example, Stephen Hawking. We know for certain he’s in hell, but can he talk and walk again?”

Well, Stephen Hawking was an atheist. He rejected God. So I know exactly why this young man is making that statement, and I understand why he’s asking this question. It is because the Bible is really clear that those who are in Christ, those who belong to him, who will be with him forever in glory in heaven, our bodies are glorified, which is say they are perfected. And that’s something we look forward to, because right now our bodies are not perfect. For one thing, they’re mortal. They will no longer be mortal. And even as Christ was resurrected from the dead, and his body even in the incarnation underwent a transformation, that’s clear in the Gospels, as he is, so also will we in that sense be. So that’s the promise, but what do we say about those who are in hell? And this is why I took the question.

I took the question because I have no idea. I took the question because there is no biblical answer to this question. It’s not wrong to ask the question, it’s a good question. It’s one of those questions to look at and go, “It takes a very thoughtful young man to come up with this question.” But I took it in order to end this edition of The Briefing in terms of looking at questions by saying sometimes the most important answer we can give is that we don’t know because Scripture gives us no authoritative answer. There’s so many things that our curiosity may lead us to ask. We are given in Scripture all that is sufficient for our salvation, for our knowledge of God in this age, and for the edification of the church and our growth as believers. But there are questions that Scripture does not address, and this is one of them.

We are told that in the place of judgment, in Hell, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, and we are told of what theologically is called corporeal suffering. That is suffering in the body. What exactly is the nature of that body? Well, I want to say honestly, we don’t know because we have no biblical text to tell us what we should say here. And so as important as it is to affirm and to articulate everything that Scripture says and reveals, we need to be equally careful not to speculate beyond Scripture. So that’s why I wanted to take this question. It’s an intelligent question for which we have no biblical answer specifically to this question. So we will await the day when these questions will be answered by the only one who can answer them, and that is God himself.

All right, we’ll look forward to more time next week for questions. In the meantime, what a week. I want to thank you for listening, and let’s continue to pray for our nation at this strategic time.