Culture Shifts

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

RICHARD LAND: Dr. Mohler, welcome to For Faith & Family.

AL MOHLER: Dr. Land, it’s great to be with you.

LAND: Now, there are lots of books on culture wars, why this book? Why now?

MOHLER: Well, you know the title really is something that fascinates me, Culture Shift, because I’ve been lecturing and talking about this for a long time and writing about it in different ways because I think most people, especially most listeners of For Faith & Family, are the kinds of people who notice that things have changed. You don’t have to be very old, you don’t actually have to be very perceptive to know that a lot of things have changed, but the tendency is for most people to think that these are disconnected changes. I really wanted to help Christians to understand that there are some fundamental shifts taking place in the culture on the big questions, what the older generations have called the fundaments. I mean, the way you consider the meaning of life, the meaning of what it means to be human, the reality of truth, the purpose of government, all of these things; they are all tied together.

LAND: The majority of our population is now not married. You talk about a culture shift.

MOHLER: Absolutely.

LAND: For the first time in our history, the majority of our population is not married.

MOHLER: And for the first time in history, except for poverty in some extreme form, pestilence, or war, the average 27-year-old male has never been married.

LAND: That’s right, and, of course, that has an incredible impact on 27-year-old females.

MOHLER: Absolutely, it has an incredible impact on everything from the economy to entertainment to what we consider the purpose of life and even the definition of adulthood beings.

LAND: Of course, George Grant and others have talked about the fact that marriage is a tremendously civilizing influence on males that, you know, most of the trouble that is caused in this society, the violent trouble, the socially destructive behavior is done by undomesticated males. Is it done by males who are not living either with their parents or their mother or with their wife.

MOHLER: You know, a very interesting point. I had to deal with someone today who threw some of the left-wing arguments at me and said, look, it is time evangelicals broaden the agenda beyond marriage issues and life issues to poverty and all the rest, and I said, well how in the world are you going to separate the marriage question from the poverty question; they are one question.

LAND: We have demonstrable proof of this, the single thing that would eliminate more poverty than any other single thing would be if mothers married the fathers of their children.

MOHLER: And required those men to marry them before they became the fathers of children.

LAND: That’s exactly right.

MOHLER: You know, Ronald Reagan said back during the 1980s what no one can disprove and that is that if you graduate from high school and you get married and you stay married and you have no children outside of that marriage, you are statistically incredibly improvable to be below the poverty line. It’s statistically insignificant, so, in many ways, the marriage question, for reasons Christians should understand, is the poverty question, is the juvenile delinquency question; every other question comes back to it.

LAND: The result of this culture shift is that, it was Aristotle that said that fish are in water and they don’t know they’re wet.

MOHLER: Yes, he said if you want to know what being wet is like, don’t ask a fish because he doesn’t know anything else, and that’s the way most people are in this culture. The are so deeply swimming in the culture, they don’t even have any impression of how the culture has changed the way they think, the defined reality, and created moral intuitions in them that, in many cases, are just incompatible with the Scripture.

LAND: Well, that’s right. Now, I know that Dr. Carl F. Henry had a tremendous impact on your life as he had a tremendous impact on mine and most evangelicals of our generation. You have pointed out that fact that he wrote a challenge to evangelicals to reengage the culture in his book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. It was really a call to reengage the culture. We had him in his latter years come and speak to one of our seminars on “Citizen Christians, the Rights and Responsibilities of Dual Citizenship” in 1992, and he gave a very provocative address there in which he talked about the vast changes that have taken place since he wrote that book in 1948 and that evangelicals have reengaged the culture and that evangelicals have seen in many ways, the evangelical revival that we’ve all hoped and prayed for. The percentage of Americans who claim to be evangelicals, who claim to be born again, has risen dramatically. Now, the disturbing thing that I think that Henry talked about, that your book also addresses, is when he was at our seminar he said that looking at this almost a half century later, we have to acknowledge that the culture has influenced evangelicalism at least as much, if not more, than we have influenced the culture. That’s really what you are talking about.

MOHLER: Absolutely. When you start looking at what evangelicalism means to many Americans, unfortunately, it not only means for them what they associate with being born again, it also means being American, middle class, prosperous, happy; it is a cultural ideal as much as anything else. That can be extremely seductive.

LAND: And, it increasingly does not mean, as it did a half century ago, being married to the same person for life.

MOHLER: Just look at the statistics.

LAND: Yes, you look at the divorce statistics that make it clear that on no other issue have we been as influenced by the culture. If you look at evangelicalism in 1950 and you look at evangelicalism in 2008, there is no issue on which we have been more influenced, I would say, compromised by the culture than the issue of divorce.

MOHLER: I had the opportunity not too long ago in an interview with Tom Brokaw to talk to him for a moment, and you remember his book, The Greatest Generation, and, you know, one of the things he points out in that book and I wanted to talk with him about is that the one big change that those who were the G.I. generation, not even just talking about Christians, just people who were in that generation noticed as the shift from their time to ours, and think about this, I mean, you are talking about everything from CAT scans to man on the moon to everything else, the one change they mention more than anything else was the breakup of marriage and the institutional acceptance, personal acceptance of divorce. You know, back when you look at that generation, they said the one thing we knew was that we could not divorce. That’s not in the background thinking of many who call themselves evangelicals. You know, Richard, you know this well because you are so deeply involved in ministry, as well as in dealing with these issues in terms of the public square, if people enter into a marriage believing that there is a way out, on one bad day they are going to take that way out.

LAND: And yet, if they know they are going to be in the relationship; they are committed to working on the relationship. And there used to be social penalties to pay if you got divorced. You might not get the promotion. Now, there are no social penalties.

MOHLER: I know, there are no social penalties to many things—illegitimacy, sex outside of marriage—all of the things that society used to penalize with social sanctions because it wanted to reward the right behavior and stigmatize the wrong behavior. We now have everything turned on the head, upside down. For instance, there was a study done just a couple of years ago at Penn State University looking at prime time television and prime time television actually is more about all the bad behaviors than any of the good behaviors. Try to find a happily married couple, try to find a nuclear family with parents raising children, try to find people who go to church, just on prime time television, try to find anybody who goes to church and more people go to church on Sunday than attend all professional sporting events combined, but you won’t find that in the culture.

LAND: Well, that’s right. Two hundred years from now, if anthropologists study this culture and they look at our mass media, they would have no way of ever comprehending that 85% of Americans claim to be Christian, according to the Baylor study, 91% claim to believe in God, and according to the latest Pugh research, 61% of Americans say that religion is very important in their lives. If you look at our cultural artifact, our main cultural artifact, mass media, it is impossible to understand that.

MOHLER: You know, one of the other interesting things is something even the secular authorities recognize. I was reading a work the other day that pointed out that most Americans claim to be happy. That also is not reflected in our entertainment. So, if you were looking at this, you know, it reminds me of what—do you remember Georgie Veens, the Baptist pastor who was brought out of persecution, actually Jimmy Carter as President intervened and brought him out of the…

LAND: …brought him out of the gulag.

MOHLER: …out of the gulag, and remember that he made some statement that from watching television, this would be back in the 70s, and I can’t perfectly repeat what he said, but he said, evidently watching American television, you believe the Americans are unhappy, constipated, but have very well-fed pets.

LAND: Yes, and, of course, I remember the story of the Russian soviet fighter pilot who defected with his MiG and after they had debriefed him, he wanted to go across the country. So they just gave him some money and said, have at it, and he said, I was absolutely amazed at this incredible country—the freedom, the choices, no papers to go from state to state, and he said nothing that his Soviet masters had ever told him about America was true until he got to San Francisco, and he got into the porn district and he got into all of the flesh stuff, the homosexual and heterosexual stuff, and all of the sexual degradation and he said, that was the only place where what my Soviet masters told me about America was true.

MOHLER: It is so interesting you bring that up because when you talk about a culture shift, this really does make the point. Let’s go back to the 1970s. He had to go to San Francisco to find that. When you look at where our culture is now, you don’t have to go anywhere to find it. It is in every community, it is broadcast, it will find you. Certainly if you have a teenager who is on the internet, there is nothing he or she does not have access to immediately, just a click or two away. No longer do you have to go to San Francisco; San Francisco is here.

LAND: And not only just a click or two away because our grotesquely irresponsible Supreme Court has determined twice now that an adult supposed right to see anything they want to see trumps society’s responsibility to protect children from seeing that which is damaging. The porn purveyors can find them and can try to intrude upon them and the laws that the Congress passed by large bipartisan majorities have been stricken down by the Supreme Court.

MOHLER: Let me give you a grotesque example of that because I just heard from a parent the other day whose 14-year-old son had become deeply involved in pornography at the computer at the public library. Because the librarians as well, even without the courts making their irresponsible decisions on pornography, groups like the American Librarians Association are so opposed to what they call censorship that they are really fighting for the rights of anyone, including teenagers, to view pornography at a public library.

LAND: Seventy percent of boys will have their first exposure to hard core pornography outside their own home and it used to be, back when I was a teenager and back when you were a teenager, that the average age of first exposure to hard core pornography was sixteen—that virtually 100% of American males have viewed hard core pornography at least once by the time they were sixteen, now it is eleven.

MOHLER: It will go lower.

LAND: And the damage that does, it is like spiritual and emotional toxic waste.

MOHLER: Just think of some of the things that have happened in this culture over the last fifteen years. We have had a specific sex act associated with an American president talked about so that, all of a sudden, eight-year-olds, seven-year-olds are talking about it asking what this thing is. When now, that seems so out of date, we realize that it works its way into the laugh lines of television and movies and all the rest and into the music, so what we are finding is that in this culture shift, nothing is forbidden except, and this is where the legacy of political correctness really comes in, the one thing that is considered really dangerous, really toxic and should be stigmatized and, you pointed at this just a moment ago, are those who will not go along and accept everything.

LAND: That’s right, the one thing that cannot be tolerated is those who believe that there are certain absolutes.

MOHLER: And you know, Herbert Marcuse wrote that exactly in his little book on tolerance, leftist whacked-out philosopher in the 1960s, and in the 1960s, no one took him seriously. Now in the twentieth century, now in the twenty-first, you don’t have to even question that he was right; that’s exactly the kind of mentality that is now widely accepted.

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