The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Tuesday, March 24, 2026

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.On today’s edition of The Briefing, Dr. Mohler discusses the death of Leonid Radvinsky, the dark turn in Cesar Chavez’s story, how history discloses the truth, and the defense of biology by Girl Guides and its lack of controversy.Part I (00:14 – 12:30)Part II (12:30 – 14:44)6 Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into Cesar Chavez by The New York Times (Sarah Hurtes and Manny Fernandez)Part III (14:44 – 20:21)Part IV (20:21 – 25:59)Sign 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 Tuesday, March 24th, 2006. I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. There's so many big news stories around us, so many happenings in the culture, so many issues thrown at us that Christians need to think through and need to understand in terms of a Christian worldview. Some of them are easier to talk about than others. And in its own category came the news yesterday that Leo Radvinsky, the owner of the vast website known as OnlyFans, had died at age 43 of cancer. Now, the death of Leo Radvinsky is a story into itself. The emergence of only fans as one of the most significant purveyors of pornography in all of human history, that's very much due to Leo Radvinsky's plan. Radvinsky himself was born in what is now the former Soviet Union and what is now present-day

Ukraine. His family came to the United States, lived in Chicago. he graduated from Northwestern University. He obviously was way ahead of his time in terms of digital technology and interest about how to commercialize the web and how to commercialize web traffic. He went into several different ventures

before eventually centering in on only fans which he purchased and basically ran and through his leadership and during his leadership, that particular pornography site exploded to 377 million users, bringing in more than 7.7 million users, bringing in more than $7.2 billion in revenue in a single year. So again, the numbers, 377 million users.

That's larger than the population of the United States of America. $7.2 billion. We're talking about a massive amount of money. Now, on the one hand, what this just underlines is the power of a distorted morality, a distortion of human sexuality, a distortion of creation. order that is represented by the entire world of pornography. But we're also looking at the fact that this is a story that could only happen at this point in human history. So let's just review a certain, say, historical survey of this issue. Pornography has been a problem ever since

there were drawings made on caves. In other words, it's just so much a part of the fallen human imagination that such things can be drawn and people can see them thousands of years later and go, okay, I know what that is. All right. It is a distortion and a manipulation of God's good gift of making us male and female and establishing marriage and the sexual union and the command be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, which was given to the first couple to Adam and Eve. and what is intended to be a unitive gift to a man and a woman within the covenant of marriage for multiple goods, including the gift of children. The distortion of a sinful world leads to the fact that 3.77 million users are officially registered, and that means at least some kind of formal registry, often involving financial information, with this one platform.

a platform that has done at least $7.2 billion a year. Leo Radvinsky saw the opportunity to commercialize pornography in such a way that, I'll just say, a provider of pornography, and in most cases this means one way or another, a sex worker, is actually able to use the platform to sell pornographic materials and to sell it in such a way that persons can go on and, well, you can do the math. They can find what they're looking for. They can pay for it. It doesn't surprise us, I think, that the distortion of human sexuality in the fall

and the fact that even as Romans chapter 1 tells us that people, sinners, can give themselves over to sin. When you talk about this kind of industry at this kind of scale, you're talking about the mass industrial production of pornography. And we're also talking about it being consumer-driven to such an extent that 370, that 370, 77 million people are involved in this as registered users. And of course, there are thousands upon thousands of those who are also providing. Now, there's so many dimensions to this. And maybe we just need to go over for a moment the fact that in every situation, pornography is

wrong. Because pornography is based upon the Greek word pornea, which is wrongful desire. Okay, so that really, in terms of scriptural truth, just cuts through to the heart of the matter. Pornaya is a corruption of and a distortion of something good. It is wrongful sexual desire. That means that there can be rightful sexual desire within the context of marriage. That makes it holy. But when you talk about what this particular platform was commercializing, the only fans platform, it was not a celebration of creation order biblical sexuality.

it was the commercialization and mass production of its corruption and distortion. Well, all right, let's talk about another Christian aspect of this, Christian biblical worldview aspect of this. What does it tell us that this is actually a mass industry? It tells us this is a massive problem. It tells us that what Paul describes in Romans chapter 1 is actually endemic in our society. As a society increasingly, we're just given over to this kind of corruption. and this kind of pornography.

And evidence of that comes in the fact that OnlyFans is of interest to some people, not because of pornography at all, but because of its financial success. There are people who look at it and say, look, this is an interesting financial model. There were capital investment companies looking at purchasing OnlyFans, simply because it is such a viable commercial product. If there are $7.2 billion on the table this year, well, there are venture capitalists and investors who could say it could be eventually $40 billion.

The sky is the limit. The other issue for Christians is just to remind ourselves of what is essentially wrong with this. What is the evil at the heart of this? And that's where we come to understand that what the secular world wants to say about Christians is often that we're just anti-body and anti-sex. And that's just profoundly not true. Being just profoundly anti-body and anti-sex would be anti-biblical, anti-creation order. You can't possibly buy into that kind of denial.

And then at the same time, celebrate God's holy institution of marriage. You can't celebrate a young man and a young woman entering into the holy covenant of marriage. You can't celebrate nor fulfill that divine mandate to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. No, we have to see here that there's big money, big, big money. and the corruption of something good. And that's just a basic Christian worldview issue. This is helpful. If we can just see it,

most of the horrible things in the world are intentional subversions and corruptions of something that is good. It is something good turned into something evil by the fact that it's wrenched out of its biblical context. It is corrupted from its creation order context and is made to be something else. here's another big lesson.

Something else sells. The Christian worldview has to explain why this kind of material is so very popular. How is it the human beings have found their way on a cave wall or on a massive digital platform to find or to sell or to consume this kind of material? Well, it is because we just see here the power of sin and the power of human depravity matched with human ingenuity, that just leads to an ever-expanding problem. And when we talk about an ever-expanding problem, let's just state the obvious, you had to look at a cave wall to see it. You had to be there to see it. When you're talking about even, and many of us who are alive now, you know,

going back to the time when I was a teenager, a young man, you really didn't have to worry about this issue in the same way. There was no internet. There was no widespread, you know, access even to this material. And, you know, thanks be to God for most people in my generation, it wasn't much of a problem, particularly for Christian young men, because frankly, it was not something to which there was a great deal of access. How the world has changed, where you can have a teenager or a college student, you can have a young man who can have access to virtually anything. And I started to say imaginable, but I think that's a false limit. I think it's virtually anything imaginable by anyone anywhere. So let's just be really, really clear.

The biblical worldview says no. The Bible says no to pornea, says no to wrongful sexual expression, wrongful sexual interest. There are those in the secular world who would say, look, that's just some form of denialism and people who hate the idea of sex and hate the idea of all the rest. And the fact is, we don't hate anything that God has given us as a good, but we also can't hate all the rest, which means the entire context and even the explicit commands that go with it. But we do understand, however, that if there is a human drive that is susceptible to this kind of subversion and corruption, sex would be it. And in particular, it's not equilateral. That is to say, that in patterns of sin, this is far more a male pattern than a female pattern of sin. Now, I'm not saying

exclusively because that's not so. In the digital age, the virus is spreading. But I will simply say that in the main, it is a male-centered problem. But that also leads to other considerations. And so there are those who are women on these platforms. And I'm just going to speak explicitly to that. And they are basically selling themselves. And this is a commercial platform that says, you do it. We'll allow someone to pay you to do it. We'll create the platform for it. When you think about a diabolical plan, I mean, this is a, this is just a deeply diabolical plan and strategy. And obviously it works. And at the time that Leo Ravinsky died, the report came just yesterday. There were firms trying to buy Onlyfans. And they're not

buying it because they want to shut it down. They're buying it because if anything, they want to expand it, to make it produce even more revenue, to attract even more users. And of course, that also means to widen all the expressions of depravity. I'm going to end it with that today. I think this is just an incredible wake-up call for all of us. We know that sins big business. And we know that some of the most explicitly sinful sins revealed as such in Scripture are those that are the most tenacious.

and obviously they're tenacious even in showing up as a consumer product. But as Christians, we have to understand that not only is this a direct rejection of creation order, a direct rejection of God's plan, a direct disobedience to God's word. It is a sin which is graphic in both what it represents by action and also by inaction. It is a sin both of omission and a sin of commission. and it also is a dehumanizing of human beings, and it is the exploitation of human beings. I guarantee you, behind all of this is not only sin and depravity and lust, there is also manipulation and oppression and basically a form of at least financial enslavement when it

comes to these patterns. So it's a sad day, Leo Radvinsky died. He died of cancer, we are told at age 43, a very young death. and this is catapulted the story into the headlines. And at least we as Christians need to understand, there's a lot more to this headline than the secular media would ever understand. But next, speaking about the impact and the legacy of sin,

we have to look at how sins rewrite stories. And so in particular, I want to point to Cesar Chavez. And, of course, so many headlines, just the recent days, pioneering reporting work done by the New York Times, analysis by the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and just pretty much all across the media landscape. A lot of attention to Cesar Chavez, particularly from his co-worker, Dolores Huerta, accusing Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993, of rampant sexual manipulation and even sexual assault. And sexual assault not only against Dolores Huerta, who has come forward with this story.

And by the way, there's a lot of corroborating evidence. So there's a lot of evidence that what she's saying is true. And also that Cesar Chavez, who with Werta had founded the United Farm Workers back in the period of the 1960s and the 70s, we are talking about a rewriting of history now, a necessary rewriting of history. And Cesar Chavez has been a hero to so many people, especially on the political left, and in particular the Democratic Party. has held up Cesar Chavez. And let me just state that as a Christian,

there is no doubt that he was responding to a legitimate claim of oppression in many cases. So again, the Bible is very clear against oppressing people. At the same time, it was also clear that there was a leftist impulse behind this that also became a part of the movement as well. And so, you know, as Christians,

we can understand that there are mixed motivations in any number of situations. Cesar Chavez was so celebrated that his name was put on many schools, including public schools. And by some estimates, you're talking about several hundred identifiable public buildings throughout the, especially the West and the Southwest of the United States that have been named for Cesar Chavez, a cultural hero. The Democratic Party has been closely identified with support for the movement of Cesar Chavez

and support from the United Farm Workers. Gerardo El Cadava, writing at the Atlantic, an article entitled The Dthrowning of Cesar Chavez, he says this, one of the most revered figures of not only Latino history, but of all of 20th century United States history can no longer be thought of as heroic, but the movement he led still can be, end quote. Okay, let me just mention that as Christians, we need to understand how some of these stories work. And this is predictable, and this isn't even a complaint. This is just a fact of how news gets out and how people deal with it. You have an initial report, and the first question, when there's a story of this kind of moral

importance, the first question that comes on the part of many is, is it true? And then there's a second wave of documentation that comes, and the public has to make a decision. And by the way, in this case, the evidence is evidently so overwhelming. No one seems to be arguing at all that this didn't happen. then there is yet another wave. And in this, you have the article that I decided from the Atlantic, the dethroning of Cesar Chavez.

This man's coming back to say, you know, we really do need to understand that Cesar Chavez was an evil man. And we need to take whatever actions are morally necessary to remove his name, to create distance, to revise history, etc. But he goes on to say, and that's the reason I read that sentence, that, quote, one of those revered figures, not only of Latino history, but also 20th century United States history can no longer be thought of as heroic, but the next words are important, but the movement he led still can be. So now you have another wave of response to something

like this saying, okay, but let's be careful to say that this is the argument that's being made, is that Caesar Chavez may no longer be celebrated, but the movement he started can be. That's the argument that this article represents. I just want to remind us as Christians that this is the kind of thing that can still shock us, but it can't fundamentally surprise us. Any reader of scripture has read enough to know of human sinfulness in such a way that we're just not shocked in this kind of context to find out that sexual manipulation, sexual oppression, sexual violence, sexual opportunism took place. And of course, all of this is just a complex of sexual sin. And I'll just point out that the secular society has a hard to

knowing how to unpack all of this. When in our secular society, the only moral principle many people hold to is consent, then the only way that someone like this can be seen as guilty of sexual misbehavior is if there was no consent. And actually, that's what Dolores Huerta's claiming. She's claiming that this was assault against her will, against her consent. So even the secular world can say, well, that's wrong. The secular world wants to say that there are no fundamental rules when it comes to sexuality so long as they're consenting adults. But, you know, an article like this does imply there's more to it. The moral verdict behind this does imply that there's more to it. By the way, there's another aspect of this.

And that is that even on the left, there is the belief that children can't give consent in this situation. So sexual activity against children, well, that turns out to be a sex crime. And that's involved in this story, too. I just want to remind Christians that we actually do share the moral outrage you see in these articles. We should. We should absolutely be an agreement that Cesar Chavez, if he did these things, should not be celebrated by anyone. And it's discredited himself and his movement to you just go down the list. And I can tell you, they're going to be an awful lot of renamed schools in coming days or months. However long it takes, this is just the way it works. It also tells you that human beings do have a very strong moral impact.

So let's just not even think of left, right. Let's just think of moral impulse here. It's a very strong moral impulse. And so it is interesting that a lot of the people who would have demanded that Cesar Chavez, that there be a national holiday in his honor, they're now wanting to take his name off of schools and all the rest. And it's for moral wrongdoing. So even in a society that wants to reduce the ground in which there's recognized moral wrongdoing,

you know, at least on this, there is the agreement. yep, this was profoundly evil. All right. One final thought on this. We as Christians understand that human beings are all sinners, and Christians are those who are sinners saved by grace. And, you know, the New Testament does include heroes of the faith. Just think of what you find in the book of Hebrews.

Men and women who courageously and faithfully serve the cause of Christ. And even before Christ in the Old Testament, you had Old Testament figures. You know, Abraham most extensively treated there in Hebrews as an exemplar. This doesn't mean they were without sin, but it does mean that the final verdict on their lives was one of faithfulness by God's grace and to God's glory. It was by God's work. But we look at this and we recognize, you know, history does have a way of unfolding things. It has a way of unfolding things that leads to historical judgment. And just a matter of, say, a year ago, there would be people who would be wanting to put Cesar Chavez's name on institutions. Now they want to take them off. And you know,

as Christians, we need to be the people who say, you know, there's really something to this. However, we also need to tell you, there's a lot more to this than you think. All right, finally, I want to look at a controversy there in the United Kingdom. It's coming to us from Britain. The Telegraph reports, quote, girl guides at war over transband. Okay, the girl guides are the equivalent to the girl scouts here. And they come out of a common movement. And of course, they began both in Britain and in the United States with those identified as boy scouts back in that golden era when everyone knew what a boy was or who a boy was. And now we're talking about a very different thing. You had girls organizations that were also formed, a girl guide,

at least roughly analogous to the Girl Scouts in the United States. Now, let's just remind ourselves, the Girl Scouts have been confused for a long time. The Girl Scouts have been largely serving a very liberal revisionist morality. To the left of the Boy Scouts, but then again, the Boy Scouts more or less just joined them. And in fact, now it's just like Scouting USA. In other words, the boy and girl just removed,

at least from the Boy Scout side of the equation. And that's a very sad thing, because I think these organizations had done a great, deal of good, but it is telling that now you have in the telegraph a headline that the girl guides are at war over trans band. Okay, so here's the deal. The girl guides, again, just think of them as the Girl Scouts in the United Kingdom. They had decided years ago to have basically a pro-trans policy. And so that meant that within the Girl Guides, there would be those who were, let's just state the obvious, physiologically, boys. And it just turns out that didn't work.

well. Who would have thought it? That just didn't work so well. And so now they're adopting a new policy, and this is the trans ban in the headline. We are told that there's now an organization called Guiders Against Trans Exclusion. That's G-A-T-E. You know, how clever. We're told, quote, the group encourages guide leaders to oppose the policy through activism, including writing to politicians and attending protests. Okay, I just want to say to Christian parents, There is one absolutely, I just think, important paragraph in this article coming from a telegraph in London. I'm just going to read it to you. Quote, one Brownie leader, so you hear Brownie again, you recognize that same verbiage in the United States.

One Brownie leader who has to remain anonymous said, quote, it's an increasingly hostile environment. Communications from girl guiding headquarters seem to assume everyone is devastated by the rule change. I haven't had a single parent ask me about it, end quote. Okay. you know, sometimes civilization just comes into focus in an unexpected way through just a sentence like that. And so we're told that the headquarters at this organization, they assume that parents and scouts are going to hear this and see it as, here it is bad news.

But the article just goes on to say, quite honestly, quote, I haven't had a single parent ask me about it, end quote. So let's just state the obvious, the vast, and I mean the vast majority. of parents would expect that this so-called new policy should and should always have been the policy. It tells you something about the distance between the group and elites in power. So it turns out that the elites in power who are lamenting that they had to make this decision, they're in a very different moral position than, say, local scouting units, including the parents and the girls. They seem to understand this clearly and see it clearly and believe that it is clearly the right thing. By the way, one of the big issues behind this was a judgment by the Supreme Court

there in the United Kingdom in Britain last April that made very clear that there really are two sexes, male and female, and sort of like what you have in the Trump administration's very helpful clarification of the fact there are two sexes, two genders, male and female, the female with the large reproductive cell and the male with the small reproductive cell just in case someone out there is unable to connect the dots. It does tell you that these kinds of decisions, these kinds of rulings come with consequences. So the organization, once again, the girl guides there, they've really had to come into compliance with this ruling. I'll just point out that as Christians look at it, it's also compliance with.

God's law, yes, yes. It's also compliance with, oh, I don't know, biology. Let me also point out that this decision by the Girl Guides was not generated from within the organization, basically forced on them by this judicial decision. And as in the United States, we have organizations, schools, and others who are having to comply with the executive orders coming from the Trump administration. It's a reminder to Americans that all of this correction, all this clarification, all this sanity will only last so long as those policies last. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website at Albertmoler.com.

You can follow me on X or Twitter by going to X.com forward slash Albert Moller. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbtsketeen. For information on Boyce College, just go to Boisett College.com. I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.