The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Friday, August 9, 2024

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.Part I (00:13 - 08:27)Teenagers are Discovering a Good of Work: Friendship – Teens Find Reprieve from Loneliness Epidemic in Summer JobsAfter the Lockdown Years, Teens Want One Thing From Their Jobs: Friends by The Wall Street Journal (Terell Wright)Part II (08:27 - 12:33)Do Expensive Toilet Paper and Cheetos Make It in Your Grocery Cart? Economists Hope So: Investors Look to Unexpected Data to Determine Health of EconomyWhy Cheap Toilet Paper Sets Off Alarm Bells Among Some Investors by The Wall Street Journal (Aaron Back)Part III (12:33 - 16:26)What are Signs a Romantic Relationship Should End, and What are Signs God Intends It to Lead to Marriage? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The BriefingPart IV (16:26 - 19:25)Should Christians Participate in Catholic Mass? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The BriefingPart V (19:25 - 23:56)What is the Biblical Position on Globalism? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The BriefingPart VI (23:56 - 26:06)Why Is There Talk of a LGBTQ Revolution When Americans View Revolutions Positively? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The BriefingSign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

It's Friday, August 9, 2024. I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. We're going to get pretty quickly to your questions, but I want us to look at a few very interesting cultural indicators that cross our screen and every once in a while come to our attention. But I want to start with something that's a little sad on the one hand, but more heartwarming on the other. and I think particularly may be helpful to American families, Christian families, Christian parents, and others who work with Christian teenagers and even college students. And it comes down to this. It is very interestingly and perhaps conveniently blamed, especially on COVID-19 in the pandemic, but the fact is that most American teenagers and even young adults are reporting that they have a friendship challenge.

They are missing friends. they seem to lack a lot of the friendship structure that has been honestly so crucial to American adolescents for so long, and frankly, not just American adolescence, but looking at adolescence over the span or something like human history. And we understand that at least part of what takes place in adolescence is a necessary, this can go off the rails, of course, but a necessary broadening of the young person's world. And there are other social actors who loom pretty large in that world. Now, when it comes to American teenagers, America's Christian parents have often been more concerned that there would be too much peer attention, there'd be too much peer concern,

that friendships might, in some sense, compete with the family, and peer influence, compete with parental influence. And those are very legitimate concerns, certainly over the span of American adolescence in the 20th century, and maybe even more urgent toward the end of the 20th century. But things do appear to have changed. I'm going to say that I think far more to blame here than the pandemic, which was actually fairly brief in terms of even the lives of American teenagers now. The fact is, I think the rise of social media and the fact that you've had the withdrawal of so many teenagers from structured relationships, I think that has a lot to do with the problem. But I want to point to how you see this kind of problem emerge in a report about something else. In this case,

it's a Wall Street Journal report. The headline was, isolated teens crave friends on the job. So here's something, and I do think this is heartwarming because it tells us something about human nature that is, I think, according to God's design, and it tells us something that Christian parents, and all those who love teenagers and young people should keep in mind. The report in the Wall Street Journal says that rather unexpectedly, an awful lot of teenagers who took summer jobs this year, and you could say young adults as well as teenagers, college students can be included in this, but a particular focus on high school students, it turns out that a lot of them said the best part of the job was the fact they work with other teenagers. They worked with friends. They had

someone to talk with. They looked forward to going to work because they were there with other young people. One of the things that also comes out in this is that employers needed an awful lot of of adolescents, especially during the summer season. There are amusement parks, there are theme parks. There are all kinds of events at the local, county, state level, that need an awful lot of teenage labor during the summer months. You've got pools open. You've got lifeguard positions. You've got waitress and just all kinds of things that come up. Summer camps, you go down the list. And when you look at this, an awful lot of these teenagers said, you know, it was actually the friends that I made at work. which were more important to me than the pay.

One teenage boy, who's looking very responsible in terms of his comments here, said, you know, the pay was really a secondary issue. It was getting to be with these people that I enjoyed as I think about the job. The summer work context actually informed a lot of these teenagers about the lack they had been experiencing but perhaps didn't know how to articulate. Terrell Wright is the reporter on the story. The story begins, quote, when 18-year-old Helena Floric was ready to find a summer job, she had plenty of choices. Employees were eager for temporary help during the peak vacation season, and the money was good. But after years of school over Zoom, a canceled field trip to Washington, D.C. and an axed eighth grade formal, she had something other than that, other than just a paycheck on her mind. Friends, quote, I wanted to work somewhere where there's a community, she said. She ended up working at a restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire, that employs four 18 teenagers. Now just imagine that. And the teenager said she's made new friends and she's also made money.

She is also learned a lot through constant interaction with customers while working as a cashier, quote, which she said has improved her problem solving skills and patience, end quote. The co-owner of the Golden Rod restaurant there in New Hampshire said that he had to hire the teenagers pretty quickly. If he didn't call them back, quote, they've gotten a job at the local grocery store at Hanford, Cushing carts, cleaning out the aisles, making sure everything stocked correctly. End quote. In other words, if you wanted to hire teenagers this summer, you had to be pretty fast. One poignant comment was made by a 17-year-old boy who, after playing, quote, hundreds of hours of video games during the pandemic, and during that time and afterwards, growing farther apart from his friends, quote, he applied to work at Typhoon, Texas Water Park in Austin after turning 15.

Today, he says, he's more confident and talking to people. He said, quote, it was a bit rough. You go from talking to hundreds of people every day to basically nobody within the span of two weeks. Another teenage young man was reported in this story to sometimes go to the workplace on days he's not scheduled to work just to say hello to people. He now calls his friends. I want to say that from a Christian biblical worldview, there's just so much here to celebrate, for one thing. It's just the fact that God made us social creatures. and adolescence is one of those periods of life when a lot of that sociology really comes to the forefront.

But it also tells us there's something healthy about teenagers wanting to have friends. It also tells us something that isn't emphasized in this report. And that is that work is a really good place because work is a really good moral context for teenagers as well as the rest of us to make friends. It's quite natural that when we give ourselves to work, because God made us to work, when we work in the right sense and for the right cause and in the right place for the right reasons, doing everything the right way. We actually learn a great deal. We mature a lot and we do so in a social context in which we are together. I think you could simply say, by the way, you could look at a lot of adults who've been working remotely and you look at the fact

that there's so many offices empty because people are working just at home. And you recognize that the crisis of loneliness, which was considered an epidemic in American society in the middle of the last century, you can imagine how that epidemic has become a true relational pandemic when it comes to friendships, not just with teenagers, but also among many adults. And the work context, I think, is something that Christians need to see. It really has a biblical resonance. Oh, and by the way, I've got skin in this game. I started working at a local grocery store the day I turned 14. It was legal then. Had to get a work permit. But the work permit at the county office was simply given to me when I asked for it, and there was a quick

approved stamp on it, which meant that day, the day I turned 14, I could go get a job. And I can affirm just about every good thing that is either mentioned or even hinted at in this article about that experience. I'll also say that early on, when I started working in a grocery store at age 14, I'm not sure I contributed a great deal, but you know, I learned how to do so and I learned how to do it fast. There's also something about the romance of a first job. Honestly, I grew up in the grocery business given the fact that my father was in the grocery business and I still find a thrill going into a grocery store. Well, all right, just a couple of other cultural indicator matters that I think come with some worldview significance, but they also

come with a bit of fun thinking about the economy and the society around us. You know, honestly, we can be absolutely inundated with economic indicators. You can look at a business channel on cable news, streaming news, and there'll be a ticker tape at the bottom, and there's some people who evidently are watching that minute by minute, if not second by second. You understand how the stock markets work. Well, then again, you look at the larger economy.

Most people are probably most influenced by just looking at a graph. Is it going up or is it going down? Too much data is simply a matter of overload for an awful lot of Americans. But it also turns out that there are economic indicators. You don't have to have a PhD in economics or an MBA degree to understand. And here are a couple that came up in recent news reports in which the point wasn't that this is an unusual indicator. The point was, well, the indicator's telling us something. Indicator number one, the sales of Cheetos. So here's how it works. PepsiCo and Fritoly,

just part of a giant conglomerate that has an international reach, it includes the brand Cheetos. And Cheetos is a big brand. A lot of folks like Cheetos. They like him a lot. So what's the indicator? When sales flag on Cheetos, something is endangered in the economy. Things may be going badly for the economy because if people are giving up Cheetos, they're giving up something they want.

If they are switching from Cheetos to a local store brand, well, you just might have an economic problem on your hands. Or at least that is an indicator of what could be. trouble. Now, clearly, if you're free to lay, the numbers ought to be going up, not down. And if they are going down, the big question is, is this telling us something about the larger economy? But then the second indicator, it might be a little more direct. It turns out, and I'll credit the Wall Street Journal again with this report, it turns out that economists, at least some of them, are looking at another indicator to see when the economy might be entering a downturn and when consumers really are changing their behavior. And in this case, it's not about snack food. It's about toilet paper.

Headline, cheap toilet paper triggers alarm bells among investors. So there are investors who look to the brand sales of toilet paper and when the more expensive brands are giving way to the less expensive brands, when people are voting with their toilet paper purchases, their confidence in the economy, well, it turns out that the toilet paper could be a pretty, important indicator. If people are buying cheap toilet paper, there just might be an economic problem. But this report in the Wall Street Journal also tells us that there's something of a bifurcation in our economy. There are some people in our economy who are economically protected. They're economically secure. They can afford whichever brand of toilet paper they want. They're largely immune,

at least at this point, from some of these trends. But there would also be an increasing number of Americans who are toilet paper conscious when it comes to making consumer decisions. And those decisions can tell at least some investors and economists more than you might think about the economy. And that points to a bifurcation in the economy between those who are consumer price point sensitive when it comes to toilet paper and those who, according to this article, reflect the alternate reality of premiumization, a word I hadn't seen. in economic terms before, which means they can afford an even more expensive premium product. And when it comes to toilet paper, they are gung-ho for premiumization.

One final thought about all of this as we turn to questions. Yes, they are watching us all the time, and they know exactly what is in our cart, and they're watching us because they are looking at big trends in the economy. So if your card includes both Cheetos and Charmin, some people are getting pretty excited about it. Well, now let's turn to questions from listeners, and I appreciate all the questions. An overwhelming number of questions send in every single week, and you can send your question to mail at Albertmuller.com. You can go to the website and just leave a question there. But I'm humbled by so many people who send so many good questions, so many from the heart,

so many that require some really good biblical thinking. And I'm often surprised by the fact that there turns out to be a pattern to questions. Now, obviously there's a pattern with events. Sometimes there's a pattern like at the beginning of school or, you know, other events such as Christmas, things like that, where certain issues come up. But I am more surprised by questions that come in with a pattern in which, for instance, on romantic relationships dating young people, and that includes young Christian people, evidently are asking a lot of similar questions. All right. A young man wrote in to ask.

He says, in a romantic relationship, hoping to lead to marriage, what are signs that the relationship should end, and what would be signs that it's a good relationship that God intends for marriage? Now, let me just say that a part of this is just the common wisdom of whether you enjoy each other. And, you know, that joy should be growing in a relationship in which a young man and a young woman are drawn together. So let's put it in an explicitly Christian context. That means that you have a believer dating a fellow believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so your relationship, which is flowering, perhaps here romantically, is between two persons who are biblically qualified to be married. And, you know, this is where a key Christian question is, is this relationship making me a more faithful Christian, or is it distracting me from my Christian commitments? And the fact is that when a young Christian man and a young Christian woman get together and marriage is right or it's right that marriage is on the horizon and the romantic relationship is deepening, obviously deep spiritual realities, deep spiritual questions, testimonies, hopes, dreams, desires, commitments, convictions, they're all going to be shared.

And I think a part of what draws a Christian man and a Christian woman together, even in the context of marriage, is a shared love for Christ, a shared love for Christ, a share. love for the gospel, a shared love for preaching, a shared love for the church, a shared desire to have a family and raise children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And, but, you know, the question is concrete. What are signs that the relationship should end and what would be signs that it is a good relationship that God intends for marriage? I would say, and I, it's a young Christian man asking me the question. I will simply say, you know, if you're thinking about marriage as a young Christian man, a Christian young man, I think that's a wonderful thing. And if you are thinking more and more about marriage as your relationship develops with a specific Christian

young lady, I would say that's a very good sign. And I would say that that's in itself something that is very positive. And if you want to see her more and more, not less and less, if you can see her as the mother of your children, and you can see her as the wife of your old age, that's a really, really sweet thing. And if the Lord is putting on her heart the same kind of love, the same kind of commitment, the same kind of vision. It's a very powerful thing. I would also say, especially to Christian young people, you know, I think the context of the local church is so important, and I think other believers seeing you together and seeing the effect of your developing relationship on each other, I think that's a really powerful thing. And this is where, in a rightly ordered gospel church,

I think a part of what you would have is some married couples able to observe a young couple, even just contemplating marriage and say, you know, this looks like a very good thing or to speak honestly otherwise. But next, I'm going to turn to another question, and I'm simply going to acknowledge that in the dating process, things can get complicated. Okay, so here's a complication. A Christian young woman writes in identifying as a lifelong Southern Baptist, quote, I'm currently dating a young man who grew up in a Roman Catholic church in school. We've talked about theology and are in agreement about Corbelis, and currently he goes to my Southern Baptist Church. However, I'm sure the opportunity will come up when visiting his family to go to Catholic Mass.

So my question is this. Is there any reason I should not participate in Catholic Mass as a Protestant? Okay, she asked more in explaining the question, but let me just say, I can answer the question right there. No. An evangelical Christian should not participate in the Roman Catholic Mass. So let me just be really clear. This is not brand loyalty. this is not anti-Catholic prejudice. I have so many wonderful Catholic friends.

It is simply the objective acknowledgement that the Roman Catholic Mass is a form of a repetition of the substitutionary atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. The doctrine of transubstantiation means that, according to the official theology of the Roman Catholic Mass, the elements of the bread and the wine are actually transformed into the body and the blood of Christ. And in effect, as Martin Luther said, Christ is crucified again. Now, the doctrine or transubstantiation and the entire context of the Catholic Mass is far more doctrinally detailed than that. But in this context, I just have to answer in the economy of time and say, no, I do not believe that a gospel Christian, I don't believe that a confessing Protestant can participate in the Roman Catholic Mass.

Now, I don't think it means you can't be present when Roman Catholics are worshipping in terms of a certain context. For instance, you've got families, you've got others. But participating in the mass is a very different thing. That is clearly where I would think you'd need to draw a very understandable and very clear line. I simply had to come back and say, I think inconsistency with the great reformers or the Protestant Reformation and inconsistency with evangelical principles, I could not participate in a mass, period. I could not take the elements of the mass, period. I could not affirm the declarations that are made by the priests, period. Now, honestly, there is no way I can go much further in answering this question and

assuming that I know anything about this young man and his actual convictions. I'm very encouraged to know he is with you at a Southern Baptist Church. I think that's very encouraging. I hope he's moving towards a full affirmation that would even lead to the full confession of Christ and believers baptism. And in terms of the family complexities, me just say that going all the way back to some of the questions faced by the earliest Christians, and certainly specifically, since the Reformation in the 16th century, you'll hardly be the first

couple to try to wrestle with some of those complications. Okay, how's this for a big question? I hear a great deal about globalism in the media today, says this listener, for and against. How are we to understand it, and what is the biblical position on it? Well, I appreciate the fact that this man sent in the question. He's 75 years old. and he's in the United Kingdom, he's in Great Britain. And this is a question that honestly is faced by evangelical Christians just about everywhere. And in one sense, this is a very new question. And so as a listener asks, what is globalism?

Well, it is basically the argument that we should shift our worldview into a context of a single global reality. And we should make moral and political, economic, social adjustments in that global context. Now, there's a sense in which this, of course, is something that's only possible in hypermodern times. I mean, we can look at a globe, but we remember that even the vision of planet Earth was only possible since the manned space expeditions allowed even photography looking back at Earth. The reality is that globalism, first of all, just doesn't work. It doesn't work because even though there is some weird sense in which you could call something a global community, it's really a fiction. the United Nations is proof positive of that. There is no global community.

And you can argue why this is, but I'll simply go back to the biblical worldview, that begins with the most important relationships, not being global, but being local, so local that this gets to the Christian principle of subsidiarity, that it begins with marriage and family, parents, and children, and then local community, local church. You can just imagine, the larger the abstraction, the less efficient and economic the social unit is. So let's just say that in our understanding, looking at planet earth, globalism would be the least efficient system of trying to meet human needs and actually

conceive of a human community. But if you are abandoning a biblical worldview, and honestly, if what you want to bring about is some kind of social transformation, then doing it in the name of some kind of mandate of globalism would be a pretty smart way to try to bring it about. And that's why so many conservative Christians raise so many concerns about globalism because that ambition will basically run counter to almost everything that I've just argued that is implied or explicit in the Christian worldview. It's not to say that we don't have any responsibility to people on the other side of the earth. Clearly, we do. But the point is we have a primary responsibility of those who are much closer to us, which is to say our own children and our

own home that need to be fed. Our neighbor right down the street who needs to needs our help. You can imagine what we're talking about here. The rest becomes something of an abstraction. It's not to say that with national emergencies, we don't send relief efforts and all the rest, but it is to say it is very difficult to imagine the abstraction of the administrative state of the federal government of the United States of America. And I think the last thing that any American citizen would say is that it's efficient. And my assumption is that the listener in Great Britain would have an at-home analogy. to what I'm talking about here.

So if indeed our national governments are not hyper-efficient, why would we think that extending that to a global reality would be? I think ideologically, the other thing I want to point out is that even though Christians, of course, affirm that every single human being is made in God's image, and so we start from that, there is a human community in that sense. The reality is that most who are pressing the ideas of globalism are doing so because of specific power.

and political ambitions. They want to do things in the name of the people. And I think it's also honestly, very important we recognize there are some people who no doubt mean this sincerely. But just because they're sincere doesn't mean they're right. And so we owe something to people virtually everywhere in the world. It's hard sometimes to know exactly what that something is. The larger imperative is helping someone who, well, might be just a few feet from us or a few yards from us, a few miles from us, you can just understand how this works. And you can also understand why, if you want to bring out a vast reordering or reconstruction of society, doing so in the name of globalism and the world, would be a pretty powerful argument for those, at least,

for whom that's a pretty powerful argument. Okay, finally, a very interesting question, an intelligent question coming from a listener in California who asks, why do folks talk, and that would include me, on the briefing, why do you talk about an LGBTQ revolution? Quote, my point is that we Americans seem to think revolutions are positive. Who's against a good revolution? Maybe a less complimentary label would be more accurate, end quote. Well, you know, that's a smart question, but I simply say it's a limitation of language. But it is also because those of us who refer to the LGBTQ revolution are trying to point

to the fact that it is indeed that. It is a revolt. It is a revolution. And so what's interesting, coming from the, listener is the assumption that a revolution is a good thing. And, you know, he says in a smart way, he said, you know, for Americans, revolutions are a good thing. Well, you know what? That's an interesting point. And the point is also, I think, to be made that there's not a good word as a substitute for revolution. And that's what it is. And I think in the course of human history, Christians are

not to say, revolutions have to be justified, and few of them turn out to be justified. Now, I'll just cut to the quick and tell you. I think the American Revolution was justified, but that requires an argument we don't have time to make today on the briefing. But I'll also say that deep in the Christian conscience is the understanding that few revolutions in all likelihood are morally justified. And that takes us all the way back to the first revolution, which wasn't called a revolution, which is in Genesis 3. I'm thankful for such good questions coming from insightful listeners. send in your question to mail at Albertmohar.com. And as always, thanks for listening to the briefing.

For more information, go to my website at Albertmoller.com. You can follow me on Twitter or X by going to Twitter.com forward slash Albert Moller. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spTS.edu for information on voice college. Just go to voicecollege.com. I'll meet you again on Monday for the briefing.