Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 407 | Why Religious Liberty Isn't Enough | Guest: Ryan Anderson

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Today's conversation is with Ryan Anderson, an expert on family, social, and cultural issues and how they affect our highly politicized world today. Anderson has advice for how Christians can face the increasing opposition to traditional values in America. He also argues that simply standing by and hoping for the best is no longer good enough — it's time to stand up and join the discourse, actively speaking in favor of the ideas and values we Christians hold dear. --- Today's Sponsor: Patriot Mobile is calling all patriots! If you switch now, and bring your own phone, you get 50% off your first two months plus a free patriot starter kit. Go to PatriotMobile.com/ALLIE to learn more! --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Today I'm talking to Ryan Anderson. He is an expert in all things, family, social, cultural issues and how it affects our political sphere. We are going to talk about how Christians can face the current political, cultural, social challenges that we are facing. He argues in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that fighting for religious liberty, while so important, isn't quite enough. We've got to be fighting. for the issues that we care about. For example, the sanctity of life and the protection of girls in what are supposed to be gender exclusive spaces. We have to be arguing for these things in the private sphere as well. Having conversations and changing hearts and minds is going to be just as important, if not more important than winning religious liberty cases at the Supreme Court or even protecting religious liberty in our legislative bodies. And so I'm really excited for you to listen to his insight. There was so much more I could have talked to him about.

But we were on a short time limit. Hopefully I'll be able to get him back. But he's going to give a lot of encouragement as well. I think that you'll end this conversation feeling very optimistic. And I will have a little outro at the end of the episode as well. Without further ado, here is Ryan Anderson. Mr. Anderson, thank you so much for joining us. If you could tell everyone who may not be familiar, though I think a lot of people who

listen are who you are and what you do. Sure. So as of last week, I just became the new president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, for nine years, I had been a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation focusing on life, marriage, religious liberty, gender identity, political philosophy writ large. And more or less, I'm carrying that portfolio with me over to EPPC. So I'm going to be doing the same work just at a different organization and then with more leadership responsibilities. And tell me what you've seen. I'm interested over the past few years, however many years that you have been dedicated to this work, I'm sure you've been dedicated for a lot longer time than

you actually been in the fight professionally. What have you seen change most or what has surprised you most about the cultural and sexual and political changes that America has undergone in the past few years? Sure. I mean, well, Lots to say there. I guess I would start with saying was this beliefs that every one of our grandparents would have taken as utterly non-controversial. Beliefs like water is wet, sky is blue, all of a sudden have been redefined as a form of bigotry, as a form of discrimination, a form of intolerance. And I think this has taken a lot of American Christians by surprise because they weren't prepared for this. They didn't see it coming.

and they don't quite know how to respond to it. These are, you know, good people, their hearts in their right place, and all of a sudden they're being accused by their kids or their grandchildren or by their neighbors or by New York Times op-ed columnists, whomever as being part of a basket of the plurables, the bitter clingers. So I think that's part of it. Another thing that I would mention is just the inability or the unwillingness of our elected leaders to really defend

these viewpoints on the merits. Just the inarticulateness of so many elected Republicans, for example, to be able to explain why they believe what they believe about marriage or why Jack Phillips, the Baker, didn't do anything wrong to begin with. Before we even get to a religious liberty battle, how about we defend him on the merits of why what he believes about marriage is true? I mean, those are the sorts of changes that I think for many people they didn't see it coming.

Some of this I saw because I was an undergrad at Princeton, and so this hit the Ivy League well before it hit mainstream American culture. But it is shocking how quickly after Anthony Kennedy and Barack Obama evolved on marriage, everyone else was expected to evolve. Yes. You touched on something that I've thought a lot about, and I actually pressed a lawmaker, a Republican lawmaker on this recently, and I didn't get a satisfactory answer. Why Republicans are so hesitant to stand up for conservative social values, like the traditional

definition of the family or the traditional scientific definition of sex and gender, like you said, on the merits. But leftist lawmakers, Democratic lawmakers, are not afraid to do that at all. That's always where they start on the morality and the rightness and the absolute truth that they believe their position represents. and Republicans, you know, they'll just talk about, oh, well, legally or constitutionally, but like you said, they won't actually talk about the meat of the argument. Why do you think that is?

Oh, my gosh. That is such a great question. And there are so many reasons why. And for any given politician, it could be, you know, any one of the reasons. So I'll just lift off a whole bunch. Sometimes it's a staffer problem. They're staffed by, you know, recent college graduates, recent people coming out. of the academy. And while they might be fiscally conservative, they might be, you know, foreign

policy, hawks, whatever, their own staffers don't share their commitments on social issues. Sometimes it's a donor problem that their biggest financial supporters care more about cutting taxes and deregulation and free trade and things like that. And their own financial supporters aren't socially conservative. Sometimes it's a hypocrisy problem, right? That they're living a double life and so it makes them a little bit hesitant to speak out on moral issues, social issues. Sometimes it's just an inarticulate problem. They don't know how to do it. They want to do it. But all of the training that they've received in their kind of political career was how to speak like a pro-life libertarian, right? So many of the training programs that

we have, it's kind of a pro-life libertarianism rather than a true conservatism. which I think, you know, we have to own some of that, you know, we need to create our own training programs, our own kind of high school seminars, college seminars, and then even kind of Capitol Hill programs for staffers and members of Congress. I could probably give you more and more answers as to, you know, why this may be. But I think those are some of the biggest ones. Yeah. It seems like it's, you know, a lot of it has to do sometimes with fear, with. With feeling like, okay, if the GOP are really solid on these social issues that we feel like, okay, they're kind of a given now, the culture has already accepted the new definition of marriage and the family.

We've already accepted that gender and sex are separate. We've already accepted that at least sometimes women should be able to choose to abort their child. So we're not even going to go there. We'll kind of go with these issues over here in the hopes that will be this kind of big tent party that can then accept the. younger generation and attract some people who are socially liberal, but economically conservative. It's a fear probably of being called the bigot, but it's also maybe a hope, I would say a misplaced hope in getting social moderates and younger people and economically conservative people over to our side. I just don't see Democrats doing that, and they seem to be,

they seem to be gaining a lot of influence. They don't do that at all. And what's amazing is, I don't know, you had to have seen this. There was a scatter plot that was published analyzing the 2016 election. You're nodding your head. You know exactly what I'm talking about. And all of the red dots were solidly north of the equator of the chart, which meant they were in the socially conservative half of the chart. And then they were equally distributed on the left to right axis, which was the economic axis. And the quadrant that was empty was the socially progressive fiscally conservative quadrant, right? The one that all of the D.C. talking heads and consultant class and like the Cato Institute, right? That's what they focused on as a non-existent quadrant of potential voters. Right. While we ignore the bread and butter of where our voters actually are, right? They're socially conservative, culturally conservative, but they want an economic agenda that supports families and workers and small communities, right? They don't want their jobs outsourced. They don't care as much about what the Chamber of Commerce cares about.

And so I think that's part of it. And then I think the fear thing is very real. And I think the fear thing is connected to the not knowing how to do it. People are afraid of having a Mike Pence moment. Remember when Mike Pence went on this week with George Stephanophilus, he was asked five different times about Indiana RFRA. He couldn't answer the question and everyone thought his political career was over. Many politicians fear that they are one kind of foot in the mouth moment away from their political career being over.

And the foot in the mouth moment will only come on social issues. They won't have a foot in the mouth moment on economic issues. Right. I don't think that's right. I think Mitt Romney's comment about makers and takers and the 47 percent, you know, alienated him. It didn't alienate him with kind of the Hollywood elite or, you know, the, New York Times crowd, but it alienated him with his own base. And that's something we can learn from Trump.

Trump didn't talk down to his base. Trump said that he was going to protect them. He was going to craft policies that would support them. I don't think he always delivered on that. But at least he spoke to the concerns of what he referred to as the forgotten Americans. And I think that needs to be the future of the movement. Yeah, definitely. Speaking of Mitt Romney,

And where most conservative Americans lie, like you said, might be economically moderate, but are socially conservative or are either economically conservative and socially conservative. Mitt Romney, he proposed a measure, proposed a bill that would, I'm not sure even all the details on it. You probably know more than I do. I've just seen headlines proposed, I think it's like $3,000 to families with children to try to incentivize making families and families staying together. I'm wondering what you think about, maybe not that bill in particular, but just something like that to try to economically and legislatively support family togetherness. Yeah, this is, this is to my mind, the debate on the right worth watching. And I haven't looked into the plan all that closely either. So I won't

speak to the merits. What I'll suggest for our our viewers right now is look at Ross Douth. column in yesterday's newspaper. And what Ross does is, look, there's a debate about how to do the policy wonkery. There's a debate about, you know, Mike Lee and Marco Rubio have one plan to expand the child tax credit, and then Mitt Romney has a different way of doing it. And, you know, the wonky policy people can figure out what the best way of doing it is. What's worth noting is that you now have Mike Lee, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio all proposing ways of providing financial assistance to families raising kids. And this is something that the Republican Party has been divided over in the past. And now you have three kind of leaders of the party saying

we can do more. We can debate the best way of doing more. But working families have financial burdens and we can help alleviate some of those burdens with a child tax credit, either expanding the current one or tweaking the program entirely the way that Romney does it. This is the sort of creative policy making to my mind that's going to be attractive to those young families. The budget is tight. And is there something with the tax code that can help them? And I wish that there was more focus on those kinds of debates. Those are the kinds of the debates and the policy conversations that I think people in good faith, Christians in good faith can disagree on. We can disagree on maybe the different details of it, but we all agree in the

preservation, perpetuation, protection of the family, and debating the question of where the government comes in, where the tax code comes in, on all of that, I think, is a very good debate in discussion to have, like you said. What isn't a good debate, in my opinion, what we talked about at the very beginning is these fundamental questions that we thought that we would never have to ask. For example, when does life begin? Do all humans have value or do some humans not have value based on their size and location and development? What is a man? What is a woman? You've talked a lot about that latter question of this transgender movement and transgender moment that we're in. And obviously, there are a lot of people who are worried about this right now, especially in regards to

the expansion of Title IX, to allow boys to intergirl spaces and sports teams. Tell me just kind of your encouragement or your advice to Christians in particular who are worried and don't even know how to engage in that debate because it almost seems so ludicrous to us and it's so hard to believe that we have gotten to this stage of dystopia so quickly. Sure. I mean, a lot to say there as well. These are great questions. I mean, one starting point is that we We shouldn't repeat what to my mind was we oversaid things during the Obama years in which we talked a lot about religious liberty. And there were religious liberty challenges, right? When the Obama administration is going after the owners of Hobby Lobby, you know, the evangelical Green family, when they're going after the little sisters of the poor, you know something's gone wrong with religious liberty and we have to engage there.

But we shouldn't think that religious liberty is the only thing that we care about. Religious liberty is important, but other things are important as well. And so that's why we also got to be engaged. Nikki Haley had a great op-ed today about women's sports. We have to be engaged. That's not a religious liberty issue. I don't care if the athlete is religious or not religious. It's unfair if she's losing a track competition to a high school boy who identifies as a girl.

The same thing is true when it comes to homeless shelters. There's a Christian shelter that was sued for not allowing a middle-aged man to spend the night in a woman's battered women's shelter because he identified as a woman. Well, that partly it's a religious liberty issue because it was a faith-based homeless shelter, but it wouldn't have mattered to my mind whether or not it was religious.

Secular homeless shelters should be able to keep men out of women's safe spaces. And if the battered woman who's going to a shelter, she doesn't need to be religious to not want to have to have a male in her safe space. These are human issues, human nature issues. which also suggests that like Christians in our culture right now need to be defending, need to be defending not just faith, but also reason itself, right? We have to be defending not just revelation and kind of how Jesus redeems us,

but even like the very aspects of our creation, the natural law. These are truths that are true not just for fellow believers, but for everyone who's made in the image and likeness of God. And that's everyone, right? God creates all of us. and his image in likeness. Male and female, he creates all of us. And so, I mean, I think it's going to be a particular challenge for Christians in the Biden administration to, one, be defending religious liberties.

So our ministries, our schools, our houses of worship, our businesses can all be flourishing. But at the same time, not give up on being an engaged citizen who's concerned with the common good of the political community as a whole, not just our particular spot in the political community. And so we have to be able to do both of those things simultaneously. I think where a lot of Christians get caught up or maybe they're engaging on this subject with a friend and their friend says, well, separation of church and state, which they take to mean, obviously, we know on this show erroneously that your Christian worldview is not allowed to influence what you think about politics. It's not allowed to influence policies. And like I said, we know that that's an erroneous argument on this show. but a lot of people feel stumped when they hear that, that, oh, you just got, the only reason you're against abortion is religious. The only reason that you're against, you know, transgenderism is because you're religious.

Well, that has no place in the public sphere. You cannot influence law based on what you think about the Bible. What would be your response to something like that? Sure. I mean, two things to say in response to that. First is that if the only good argument against homicide is a religious argument, then so much the worst for secularism. Right.

So if the secularist who is harassing you, saying, you know, you can't impose your religious morality on me, separation of church and state, well, if they're using that as an argument, you know, against something like abortion, then what they're really saying is that there are no good secular arguments against homicide in general. Right. Because it's the same argument that explains why it's wrong to kill the baby in the womb that explains why it's wrong to kill you or me right now. And if it's wrong to kill you and me right now, it was wrong to kill us 20 or 30 some years ago when we were in our mothers. And so it's just,

you know, all the worst for secularism, if that's the case. The second thought is that, thankfully, that's not the case, right? That's when God created us, he also created our intellects. God created nature and he created the natural law so that there's a law written on the heart that we can know because we're made in the image and likeness of God, which means that we're created as rational creatures, and we can participate in God's own rationality. I mean, this is part of the Christian claim of creation is that we actually share in God's providential care for all of creation, and that this is what allows us to be able to engage in reasoned discussion with nonbelievers.

God hasn't left us kind of abandoned where it's just a war of all against all and might makes right. And no, that's not the situation here, which is why on something like the transgender issue, I've been able to form all sorts of alliances with women who don't share my conservative or Christian beliefs, but who take biology seriously. They take science seriously. Or women's rights. pro-lacers do the same thing. Yes, absolutely. I was just saying, or they take women's rights seriously.

There's been a lot of feminists who wouldn't agree with me on many things who I feel like I am in alliance with, like you said, on this issue of whether or not boys should be able to access girls' spaces. I do think it gets harder and harder to have these kinds of rational discussions the further we get into this kind of postmodern post-truth world because you're absolutely right. who don't believe, like you and I do, that everyone's made in the image of God, and therefore they have value who are not trying to conform their lives to the truth of God's word would still say, most people would still say, yeah, murder is bad, theft is bad, without really knowing why they believe that. But I think the further we get out of any kind of idea of absolute truth, the harder it is to have those rational discussions, which is why it seems like so much of our discussions and so much of the debate, whether it's about abortion, whether it's

about transgenderism, so quickly devolve into emotionalism that, for example, I said something on Instagram about the difference between male and female and how, you know, there's a reason why women have to defend ourselves in a different way when we are, if we're attacked by male or whatever. And someone messaged me and told me that the only reason I see men and women that way is actually because of internalized misogyny. And so when you've just decided that everything is arbitrary, that there is no truth, that there is no moral lawgiver, what is biology, what is science, those kinds of ludicrous retorts are really all that you have. And so we do kind of also, I guess, have a responsibility to bring people back to the very basic questions of like,

what is true, where did we all come from, and where are we going? It's because we can't answer those questions that we can no longer tell each other what a man or a woman is, don't you think? Yeah. So it strikes me that what we have to do here is both evangelize the culture, right? So evangelize the various culture war and politics debates that we're engaged in. But then also just evangelize, period, right? We have to be women converts. We have to be spreading the faith. We have to be convicting people of the truth of the gospel. And there, I think, a key asset in our toolbox will be living the faith joyfully, particularly in families. That is so much of America is turning more and more individualistic, atomistic. We see the breakdown of families,

fragmentation of families. I think happy, joyful Christian families will be one of the best advertisements for the church. People say, what is it about that family down the street? They have all of the same struggles that we have, all the same burdens that we have. And yet there's this underlying serenity and joy. And so this is where the encouragement for our listeners is it's strictly that one of the most important vocations you can have is to be a husband or a wife, a mother, or a father. More so than being a think tank president or being a journalist or being a podcast host or a radio show host, as important as all those professional activities are.

The most important thing I'm doing in my life is being the husband to Anna and the father to Jack and Eddie. And if I don't get those things right, none of the other stuff matters. Yes. And it strikes me getting back to basics will be really important because we're going to be having a challenging, I think for the rest of my life, I don't see things getting particularly easier for people trying to live vibrant Orthodox Christian lives. Yes, absolutely. We have to have that hub. We have to have that place where we're deriving our values and provision and care other than the state.

I think a lot of times people try to separate social conservatism. the family from economic conservatism. That's kind of what we were talking about earlier. But they really go hand in hand. If you are depending on the family and the church for much of what you need, not that there's no place for the government ever, then that replaces what the state in a socialist society is trying to be, which is your caretaker, which is your parent,

your moral arbiter, your value system, your provider. And so strengthening the family and making sure that our church communities are strong, too. A lot of people, especially right now, are really looking for intimate friendships and are looking for that connectivity that they're not finding in the world that they're being told is dangerous right now. The church should be a place to provide that, don't you think? Amen. I think that's exactly right. I think what COVID has exposed were underlying realities that were already there, and COVID just accelerated them. We have a loneliness crisis in the United States. We have a kind of discarded elderly crisis in the United States, we have a meaningful relationship crisis.

And the church could be the hub, an intergenerational, multi-ethnic hub for people to form meaningful relationships with each other and with God, right? The most meaningful of all relationships. And it strikes me to a certain extent that this is a condemnation of the church, that it's not already fulfilling that purpose. And so this should, you know, encourage. us to kind of like redouble our efforts to make our local church community a place that's welcoming, you know, to people at all ages of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and particularly people who feel like they're on the margin of society. They don't fit in, but they don't have close friendships. They don't have close family relationships. That their church community could

become those relationships. Absolutely. Can you tell everyone where they can follow and support you? Sure. So the think tank is called the Ethics and Public Policy Center. It's right in Washington, D.C. The website's eBPC.org. And then you can follow me on Twitter. It's at Ryan T. And so Ryan T. Anderson, but just the A&D part of the last name. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. This was very insightful and encouraging. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Happy to be with you. All right, guys. Hope that you enjoyed that conversation. Like I said at the beginning, there so much more I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to ask him, and we just didn't have time, was how do we kind of live in this pluralistic society and still advocate for what we believe as Christians is good and right and true? Because we don't believe in establishing a theocracy.

Yes, there are some fearmongers on the left who think that all Christians who are also engaged in culture and politics want to establish some kind of theocracy where we don't allow people to live the lives that they want to live or believe what they want to believe. But that is absolutely not true. It was the Protestant Reformation that laid the groundwork for the inherent rights that are outlined in the Bill of Rights. And so we have a long history of believing in and respecting, not perfectly, but ideally other people's way of life and other people's beliefs. And so it is always a discussion of how to balance that. Because as I've argued before, everyone has a worldview and everyone's view of policy, everyone's view of

political, social, cultural issues is affected by their worldview. And it should be. Everything is downstream from theology. So what you think about the government, what you think about politics, and what you think about culture and social issues are going to be downstream from what you think about God, whether you believe in God or not, what we believe about where we come from, why we're here, who made us, who says what right is, who says what wrong is, where truth, absolute truth comes from, is all going to affect what we think about these horizontal issues. So what we think about interpersonal issues, what we think about policies that affect us and affect the people around us. And so, you know, people who say that Christians shouldn't

have their worldview affect what they think about politics and culture. Well, why shouldn't, why shouldn't we? Like, why shouldn't Christians have our worldview affect what we think about those things? But people of other faiths, including atheism, should have their worldview affect what they think about law, for example. Secularism is a worldview with its own rules, with its own definitions. It's not a neutral worldview. It's got its own dogmas and its own directions and its own belief system and value system that is contradictory to the Christian worldview. And so what I always advocate for is that let the best idea win. Like, Christian should be willing to debate, should be willing to discuss. I know the other side so often is not willing to debate and discuss. Like I said,

not advocating for living in a theocracy. There is no New Testament precedent for that. And even the Old Testament doesn't say that people outside of the faith of Christianity should be forced to follow the laws of Christianity. So that's not what I'm advocating for. But I do believe that Christians, just like everyone else of every other faith, is going to have our worldview affect what we think about things and let the best ideas win. Whether you want to believe this or not, the fact of the matter is is that America's ideals and ideas were founded upon a Judeo-Christian worldview. That's just the truth, even though many of the founders were simply deistic themselves. I wouldn't call Thomas Jefferson. Any kind of, you know, true Christian.

Certainly his theology was quite wonky, but they come from a Judeo-Christian ethic, a biblical understanding of human nature, how power works, the role of the government. That is the basis of self-governance. And that is the basis of America, this idea that all of us were created equal by God endowed with certain unalienable rights that were not given to us by the government, but are meant to be recognized by the government, all of those things, and perfectly implemented throughout history. But when they have been, when they have been implemented well, we have manifested those founding values that, again, were based on the Christian ethic and the biblical worldview.

We have manifested them very well. And so saying that, though, we still live in a pluralistic society where this country that was based on Christian ideals and has allowed for the freedom of all different kinds of belief systems. We exist with people who don't believe the same things we do. And so it is always a debate and it's always a conversation of how we balance that. Like, yes, of course as Christians, we believe in the biblical definition of marriage. We also believe that people who don't have that belief system or don't live in that way, that they have rights, that they were made in the image of God, that they are protected by the Constitution just as much as we are.

But that debate and of that balance of religious liberty and what is a right and what is a privilege and is marriage something to be sanctioned by the government, that's a conversation that, in my opinion, it just went by way too quickly. Like we weren't even allowed to talk about what is the place of religious liberty or what is the place of the government? What is the definer of all of these things? We just kind of ran straight into it. So I just want to make clear that when I talk about Christians affecting and influencing the culture and changing hearts and minds on certain subjects, I am not talking about forcing everyone to live how I think people should live or to believe all the things that I want them to believe. I believe in a free country in which people of all different kinds of backgrounds and

lifestyles and faith should be able to live in tolerance and peace. But we've got to be able to agree on some big things. And that's what we're debating right now. Can we agree on the big things at all? Can we agree on what truth is, where morality comes from, what right and wrong is, what rights are versus what privileges are? It seems like those things are what we disagree on. And until we agree on the big foundational things, it's going to be very hard to debate the other issues as well, which is why I think, like I said, having those debates and discussions is so important and why Christians should not shrink back from those conversations, but be prepared to have them and to handle them well. And I think following Ryan Anderson is a really great way to do that because he has a lot of information and a lot of insight and a lot of eddiscite. and a lot of education for all of us on these subjects. All right.

I hope that added, you know, just a little more of my analysis and perspective and some clarity on that conversation. All right. We will be back here soon.