Some Truth About the Media & Layoffs

One of the greatest thinkers of the last century, Thomas Sowell, wisely noticed: “in life, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” This should be more obvious than it is. Let me give just a couple of examples. For every household’s savings efforts, they trade the loss of an additional vacation. For every choice to work more hours, we trade the loss of family time. Life is trade-offs.

This understanding is a mere repackaging of the concept of “cost-benefit analysis.” That skill, understanding costs and benefits, is fundamental to being a functional and thriving adult.

The lack of that skill has been on abundant display in major media sources over the last couple of weeks. Before I get there, though, let me provide some historic context on the duplicity I have noticed.

Let me take you way back to 2010. President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March of that year. In the proceeding years, in an effort to get employees under the 30-hour-per-week threshold that would require employers to provide health insurance, millions of jobs were made part-time or eliminated altogether. The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond estimated the country lost about 3% of paid hours as a result. One year later in 2011, President Obama initiated an effort to shrink the active military force by about 40,000 troops.

Now fast forward to 2017. The Biden Administration announced that development on the Keystone XL Pipeline will end, eliminating what would have been a few thousand jobs (the exact number is hotly debated).

Now, in news coverage at those times, the BENEFIT of these decisions became the fulcrum. To the people creating our national narratives, the BENEFITS of these decisions were so obvious that we need not discuss the costs. The COSTS were real. People lost jobs they had, lost hours they worked, or were unable to pursue jobs slated to be created. However, our cultural betters determined that their desired outcomes: more people with insurance, a smaller military, or some perceived environmental outcome were worth the costs.

One final time-jump: come with me to February 2025. The Trump Administration is eliminating government jobs with alacrity. I’ll admit my own unpleasant surprise at how imprecise and uncareful some of those cuts have been, but that is immaterial to main my point. Those COSTS are real. People who had jobs are losing them. The difference now is that our narrative-setters have flipped their script.

Now, ONLY the costs matter, and they provide no context for the benefits. While the costs are real, so are the benefits. Beyond identifying and eliminating inefficiency and waste, wise administrators should also seek to eliminate bloat or unnecessary positions. Those actions benefit the tax-payer and helpd to defang federal government power going forward.

All of the policies I have itemized over three administrations can be argued on their merits or lack thereof. All of that is fair. My main thrust is to encourage you in this: don’t allow media narratives from any direction demand that you analyze events only by costs or only by benefits. Discerning, deep-thinkers must recognize both and use wisdom from there.

The (bad) Sermon Heard Round The World

The newly-inaugurated president and vice-president participated this week in the tradition of attending a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral. The event is one that has followed Inauguration Days for decades and mostly transpires without much attention.

Notable at this event, though, a local Episcopal Bishopess spent a portion of her 15-minute “sermon” to implore the president directly to show “mercy” to “LGBTQ+ people” and to immigrants illegally present in the country during his new administration. In what seemed like an odd and demeaning argument to me, she reminded the new executive branch leaders that these people, migrants, “pick our crops, clean our office buildings, labor in poultry farms,” and “wash our dishes after we eat.” But, I digress.

As part of her entreaty, the Bishopess loosely quoted from Leviticus 19, saying, “God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger.” I had several – unrelated – reactions this event and proceeding debate. Those reactions follow.

 

A BLATANT HYPOCRISY

Generationally, I’m an elder millennial. I was formed in a time where just about everyone left-of-center had a hypersensitive, negative reflex against any proposal or policy that even hinted at being motivated by Biblical values. The entire secular, progressive regime of my lifetime demanded a strict  “separation of church and state,” and vigorously demanded we all keep our faith out of politics.

I’ll re-visit another time why that demand is incoherent. For now, worthy of note is that the same subsets of people who have spent their lives demanding that Biblical commands play no role in public policy are now lauding what they perceive as a pastor encouraging a politician to “do what the Bible says.”

In what other scenario does the secular left encourage a pastor to invoke God’s law as a demand on a politician? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question – and one that lays bare a gross hypocrisy.

 

BUT WAS SHE RIGHT?

Brazen hypocrisy aside, I do find it worth while to at least ask, “but does she have a point?” That answer is interesting, complicated, and requires precision.

Take the passage in Leviticus mentioned in the sermon. In verses 33-34, God’s people are enjoined not to do the stranger wrong and to treat him as a neighbor. We have good truth here for the individual Christian citizen: treat all your neighbors with honor.

However, a directive for individual behavior does not inveigh for a particular policy from a government. The citizen has his role (treat your neighbor well), and the government has a different role (enforce laws – Romans 13, I Peter 2:13-14).

The Bible is well balanced here: to individuals, don’t mistreat your neighbor. To governments, take care of your responsibility and love your citizens by being orderly and enforcing laws. Further wisdom on this would also suggest that sometimes, with wisdom, a government will seek out and admit foreigners for the benefit of that country’s own citizens.

CONCLUSION

 In the coming months, to varying degrees, the citizens of the US will wrestle with what to do with millions of people present in the country illegally. I want Christians to be free from the guilt trips like the one laid out by this bishopess (who would, by the way, despise and reject almost every other command in the book from which she quoted). I also want to encourage Christians to let their attitudes be charitable and kind toward fellow human beings, all the while seeing the sense and justice of laws and good order being enforced.

Andrew Tate, Ecumenism, and Masculinity

The right-of-center online atmosphere was heavy this week on discussion surrounding the self-styled masculinity influencer, Andrew Tate.

If you were focused enough on real life to miss out on this phenomena, the Cliff’s Notes version of events follows. Andrew Tate, one-time kickboxer and now-popular internet personality was platformed on a conservative (and self-identified Christian) YouTuber’s relatively large show. Tate is controversial for myriad reasons.

Aside from his controversies, he argues that modern Western men are weak, and he advocates for a masculinity that uses its strength and cunning to amass materialistic affluence, hedonistic pleasures and general self-interested experiences.

Beyond this unbiblical version of “masculinity” that he promotes, he is also a purveyor of pornography and is in some legal jeopardy now in Eastern Europe for potential sex crimes.

Thus, the controversy shouldn’t be difficult to spot. Why is a person of this sort being uncritically platformed and defended by some self-professed Christians and conservatives? The question has brought me two lines of thinking.

 

CO-BELLIGERENCE ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH

First, Tate’s support among the rightwing ecosphere emerges from what I have witnessed as a growing system on the Right of co-belligerence. What I’m seeing is that many Christians and conservatives are willing to partner with just about anyone – as long as that new partner has the same enemies.

In Tate’s case, he is lauded as an advocate for young men, dispossessed by the excesses of feminism and as a bombastic voice against political correctness. Because his enemies include feminism and cancel culture, many conservatives and Christians are willing to overlook his transgressions – including his identification as a follower of Islam.

The common enemies – the  co-belligerenta – are strong enough ties to bind for these folks.

You can probably tell: I disagree. A common enemy isn’t a good enough reason to partner with evil – even less so when plenty of other, better allies are available and capable. That brings me to my second line of thinking.

 A CRISIS IN MASCULINITY

Andrew Tate and his supporters have rightly identified a cultural crisis of masculinity. Men and boys in the West are in something akin to a crisis (https://www.brookings.edu/books/of-boys-and-men/).

That crisis is the exact reason why conservatives and Christians especially should not be pointing to or platforming Tate for anything other than derision and condemnation. Yes, men are in trouble, and we do not offer any aid at all by uncritically allowing Tate to model masculinity for them. When we do, we allow the wild pendulum swing from secular Leftism trying to shape feminine men to a secular Rightism shaping men bent in on themselves, intent on using their God-given vigor for their own flesh.

Instead of partnering with Tate, we should be teaching and modeling godly masculinity. Biblical masculinity doesn’t deny the authority, power, and potency men have as they image God in the world. We embrace all those qualities, but the purpose and end of those qualities vary wildly from the Tate image.

Tate’s mode teaches men to practice and perfect all the features of manliness so that the man may have an easy and pleasure-filled life. Christian masculinity calls men up, to be their masculine best selves, instead, for the good of those for whom they have responsibility.

Biblical masculinity sacrificially offers its strength for the flourishing and cultivation of the people around them. Further, I suspect this masculinity will not be best modeled by internet figures.

It will be modeled best my men in local homes and churches, faithfully and consistently leading and loving households and who have the sense not to platform voices of vice like Andrew Tate.

About that Joe Rogan Episode . . .

I saw it too – or at least many of the clips. The most-listened-to entertainment property in the English-speaking world, The Joe Rogan Experience, just featured – for more than three hours – one of the most articulate and doctrinally sound Christian apologists of his generation.

I can’t believe I’m about to write these words, but here it goes. Because of Rogan’s enormous reach, it’s quite possible that the broadest Gospel-declaration in the history of the world just happened on . . . Joe Rogan’s show. The FearFactor guy? The MMA fighter guy? The lifelong skeptic of religion who called Christianity a “crutch”” for weak people just a couple years ago? What is happening?

Plucked from relative YouTube obscurity, Wesley Huff, a Christian, a Canadian, and a brilliant academic presented the Christian faith with clarity, joy, and winsomeness to an audience much broader than any Billy Graham ever enjoyed – even on TV.

This event, The Rogan/Huff Episode, struck the loudest note in a cultural song I’ve been hearing lately. It’s a song I have found encouraging and refreshing. At the same time, it has created a consternation in me.

Christianity and its compatriot ideas and ideologies are certainly having a moment. You can see it just about everywhere.

ASLAN IS ON THE MOVE?

Celebrities like Russell Brand seem to be growing in genuine faith. Famed atheists like Ayan Hirsi Ali are making statements in favor of cultural Christianity.  The most prominent atheist of my lifetime, Richard Dawkins, recently said he highly prefers a Christianized culture.

Arguably the most influential business in the world, Meta, is returning to its pre-2020 standards for the dissemination and discussion of ideas.

More broadly, many businesses are diminishing their DEI programs while even institutions of higher education are reducing their DEI staffs. In advertising and even in the pageant world, we seem to be witnessing a reembrace of traditional beauty norms and a rejection of the body-positivity-at-any-cost regime.

I say all of that before recognizing in the last couple of years, governments in Italy, Germany, Argentina, and the United States have swung in a traditionalist direction. Canada is soon to follow in their election this year.

ALL GOOD NEWS, RIGHT?

In this cultural song, yes, I am encouraged by these notes. Still, something haunts me. Too many times and in too many cultures, some cultural or civic version of Christianity takes hold in a place while, tragically, hearts remain unchanged.

Of course, when even unbelievers see how the Kingdom of God looks compared to the vapidity and depravity of their own cultures, they desire the Kingdom.

But one cannot have the Kingdom and reject its King. That brings me back to Rogan.

Rogan admitted something profound in his conversation with Wesley Huff. In summary, Rogan said that living the Christian life is “true” – that it works to make humans happy even if we don’t know why. Then, let me quote the key part next. To get this better life, though, “you have to submit to this concept that this guy [Jesus] was the child of God, came down to earth, let himself be crucified, came back from the dead, explained a bunch stuff for people, and then said, ‘all right, see you when I come back.’”

Yes, Mr. Rogan. Yes indeed.

CONCLUSION

Of course I’m encouraged to see the decade-plus-long fog of wokeness and secular humanism clearing in the minds of unregenerate men and women. We’re living in a unique moment where people seem genuinely open to something other than this secular progressive ideology that has driven the Western world for my entire adult lifetime.

I am now prayerful that we, Jesus followers, are all as clear as Wesley Huff was – and as effective as communicators with our extended families, co-workers, and neighbors. A cultural Christianity will indeed make your life better for a time, but those effects will fade without real conversions. Intergenerational flourishing is going to require prayerful, Scripture-saturated, and Spirit-empowered Gospel proclamation.

 It will require a Gospel proclamation of King Jesus – not just his Kingdom.