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Albert Mohler
Foreign It's Monday, November 11, 2024. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. One thing becomes clearer as we move away from the election, and that is that it turns out to be an even bigger story than was understood at the time. That's not a complete surprise. When it comes to the election data, you have the big wave of information, and basically the first thing everyone needs to know is who has won the election. It takes some time after that for an awful lot of the data to be assimilated and frankly, for a lot of it even to be counted and analyzed. So here's what we now know. We now know, for example, that Donald Trump didn't win a swing state. He won all seven of them. We now know that Donald Trump did not lose the gender expectation that was built into his campaign. He exceeded it. We now know not only that the former president won in the Electoral College convincingly. We also know that he won the popular vote. And so we really are looking at a changed political landscape. And one of the things you notice right now is as the data is coming in, you have people on both sides asking, what in the world happened? And one of the reasons we're in this situation is because this was an election that defied expectations. This was an expectation breaking event. And just in terms of how human beings think, once we begin to think for days along certain lines, it takes a bit of shock to make us think otherwise. And this is one of the reasons why, if you go back to the election day, you go back to the day after the election, you had people on both sides saying, is this really what it appears to be? Well, the answer is it was what it appeared to be. Actually, it's even more of what it appeared to be. It's what it appeared to be, and just more so. But as more of the data becomes available to us, there are many different, very interesting things that come to mind. Now, for one thing, going into the election, we were told the big issues were what we were told that the big issues were immigration and abortion. Not so turns out that abortion was a fairly highly ranked issue, but it came in, at best, third in terms of the most urgent issue. Voters were more likely to vote on the economy than they were on abortion. And immigration was either the first or second issue in almost every one of these data calls. And so what you had going into the election was that the abortion issue was, to use the statistical and sociological word, it was salient, but it was not nearly as salient as some other issues. And in worldview perspective, a part of what that tells us is that people do often register very strong opinions or beliefs on certain issues, but then they turn around and do something that indicates they really didn't mean that, at least with the intensity that they said it when they were speaking to a pollster. It's one of the reasons why I just want to remind us over and over again, we have to take a lot of the polling data, the survey data, with a very light touch. We have to look at it with some degree of skepticism, because as I often say, when you look at the Obergefell decision legalizing same sex marriage in 2015, 70% of the American public said almost all the polling before that Supreme Court decision was handed down said that they were opposed to same sex marriage. Just about three to four years later, about 70% said that they were for same sex marriage. Now, it's just not possible that the Supreme Court of the United States changed their mind to that degree. It just tells us that when you have a shift in public sentiment, you have a shift also in how the data shows up. And in this case, when you had citizens actually go to vote, they voted their priorities. Regardless of what they said the day before, their priorities would be, their priorities are how they voted. Their vote does indicate their priorities. And when they're casting their vote, if they say, this is why I cast it, well, it's at that moment that all this becomes most interesting. So you have headline news stories the day of the election saying abortion just might be the biggest issue. It turns out it wasn't. Now, as a Christian, I have to say I am very, very disturbed by the direction the abortion issue has taken since the Dobbs decision in 2022. But still, when you look at this, you recognize that even when you had the issue of abortion on the ballot in 10 states, and we lost a majority of those, sadly, but we had big victories, especially in the state of Florida. But you had people who voted for Donald Trump as president. They voted for the Republican ticket when it came to president and vice president. Then they turned around and voted in a way that seems to be incongruous on the abortion question. And again, Christians look at that, and we recognize that one of our goals in life, in our intellectual discipleship to Christ, is to be consistent. But we also understand that that's a struggle. We understand that we have to think clearly, and sometimes as Christians, we have to think together in order to make certain that we are thinking consistently. But you know, most of our neighbors don't work that hard at consistency, and that's not to throw them under the bus. It's just to say that if you do not have an objective truth that establishes a direct line from which you operate, then some degree of inconsistency is just going to be baked into the cake. Now, we also understand in a fallen world where sin shows its effect in every dimension of life, including our thinking, those of us who want to be most consistent and want to think ourselves most determined to and committed to be consistent, we're often less consistent than we want to be. It's also really interesting in worldview analysis to see how people are thinking in the aftermath of the election. The front page of yesterday's edition of the Winston Salem Journal included a headline with a subhead quote, tapping into culture wars. Young men's fears and outrage fueled his victory. That means Donald Trump's victory. So again, they're saying that Donald Trump's victory is traceable to tapping into the culture wars, young men's fears and outrage. They're saying that that's what fueled his victory. Now, is that right or is that wrong? Well, it's not entirely wrong. Donald Trump, from the beginning of his political life, has understood the salience, the importance of worldview issues, of moral issues. But he wouldn't even put it that way, would he? No, he would simply understand they're part of the culture war. And a part of his political skill, quite frankly, has been directing an awful lot of his attention and the attention of his followers and supporters to these culture war issues. And again, I will say very clearly that Donald Trump is not consistent on these issues. His inconsistency on the issue of abortion should be signal enough. On the other hand, he has been less consistent than the Democrats in a way that pleases voters. One of the problems with the Democrats is that they have been very consistently moving to the left in recent election cycles. And so in this sense, it's one thing to be consistent, it's another thing to be consistently wrong. But as you look at this article in the Winston Salem, North Carolina, paper, the paper is trying to explain to its readers that the reason why Americans voted as they voted is because Trump tapped into their culture wars and in their culture war fears. Now, is that right or is that wrong? Well, let's just state the obvious here. When it comes, for example, to the issue of immigration, you have a battle of narratives, you have a battle of policies, you have a battle of different proposals. One, of course, that came with the support of the Biden administration. Former President Trump says that he will have. Now President Elect Trump says that he will have his own proposal. But the fact is they're not just tied to some kind of imaginary culture war. This is where Christians step back and say, no. You look at the definition of marriage, you look at the LGBTQ issue right now, the front line on that is the t transgender. You look at issues related to Hollywood and media. You look at issues related to all kinds of moral explosions all throughout our culture. The culture war is not a political invention. The culture war is not an illusion. The culture war is real. We have polarization in this country on some of those basic moral questions. And even as you have this newspaper saying, hey, this is basically politics, no, it's a lot deeper than politics. The other aspect of this article that turned out to be very interesting is the fact that you have the writer here, Richard Craver, acknowledge the fact that Donald Trump did turn out the young male vote as was hoped by his campaign. The Kamala Harris campaign did not turn out the differential in terms of the women's vote that she was counting on. Now, the vast majority of non white women, that's just a statistical category. They did vote for Kamala Harris. But, you know, when it comes to the total women's vote, it didn't turn out for Harris as the Harris campaign had predicted. And frankly, as it was depending upon. Okay, so that tells us something. It tells us that Donald Trump had a deeper purchase on the support of young male voters. And by the way, that means record vote for the Republican ticket. When you look at young black men and when you look at young Hispanic men, and when you look at the total category of young men, Donald Trump has tapped into something very, very real. But when you look at the other side of the equation, Kamala Harris was supported more than Donald Trump was supported by women's vote in the aggregate. But you break it down into different segments. Number one, she didn't get the numbers she needed. And the differential wasn't close to what she and others were counting on. And so what does that tell us? Does it tell us that somehow men were more consistent in this election or more predictable than women were? Well, certainly on the predictable side, yes, men. And the younger the men in terms of the sample here, the more this is. So they did turn out as expected. They did turn out as an aggregate more clearly than did, say, young women or women broken up by other demographic categories. Now, this also raises another issue I've talked about on the briefing before. When you talk about men. And especially as you talk about young men and this kind of demographic differential, you're primarily talking about young men who are not fathers. Okay, so just keep that thought for a moment. When you talk about the women's vote, well, there are people who will split that down into college educated women, non college educated women, suburban women, more urban, concentrated women. They'll break it down into racial categories and other things. But here's the thing. You know the big difference in the women's vote, it's whether or not they have one child in the home. If a mother, if a woman has one child in the home, she is more likely to vote Republican than Democratic seven out of 10 times. And the flip side is also true. If that woman does not have a child in the home, she is more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate. This was made very, very clear in a series of elections, most famously an election for the office of governor not many years ago in the state of Virginia. So what does that tell us? Well, it tells us that one of the differences between men and women, hold on to this. Is that women have motherhood as a major factor, and obviously men don't. Now, I know we're living in a confused age, but we got a handle on this clearly. Okay? So looking at the women's vote, the fact that the presence of even one child in the home apparently changes just about everything. It also tells us that when you look at this particular differential, well, it makes all the difference if that mother is voting with the view, the welfare, the safety, the future of even one child in view. Now, when you look at the young men's vote, again, it's very different. For one thing, obviously, we're not talking about motherhood. We're the people who understand that very clearly. But it also raises the question long term as to where those young men will go in terms of their political commitments in the future. And one of the things that every civilization has counted on. And you could look at someone like Pitarim Sorokin, you've heard me quote him before. He was the founder of the sociology department at Harvard University. Don't worry, he wasn't a liberal. He was very much a conservative. And he said that the future of a civilization depends upon the transition in that civilization of young men from being merely unattached young men to being husbands and fathers. So Rokin understood very clearly that if that doesn't happen, the civilization is weakened. Eventually that civilization will fall. And so it's interesting right now that the political scientists, the demographers, they're all looking at the women's side of the equation saying, what does this mean? Well, it really means something on the other side as well. The question for the future of this civilization. And of course, this does have ramifications for future political elections. The big question is, where are these young men headed in the future? But speaking of moral clarity, it's really interesting that the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal had on its front page an article with the headline transgender rights took center stage late in race. So here's something that surprised just about everyone. You had the Trump campaign, and you also had groups allied with the Trump campaign that put out major advertising to the tune of something between 30 and 40 million dollars nationwide. Several advertisements were run reminding Americans, for example, that Kamala Harris had supported taxpayers paying for so called sex reassignment surgery when it came to prisoners. And frankly, the unwillingness of Kamala Harris to answer a straightforward question about transgenderism in terms of the law and public policy. Well, that all turned out to be a far more salient, far more powerful issue in the election last Tuesday than anyone had expected. And so you even had Democrats and some Republicans, I'll say some weak kneed Republicans at the time. They began to worry that there'd be a backlash to those advertisements that would make them a negative rather than a positive for the campaign did not turn out that way. And so on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, you have this acknowledgement. Here's the subhead. Trump campaign found that the cultural topic resonated with voters, made it a focus of ads in final weeks. Okay, so looking at the article, it really is fascinating. And I want to focus on what I think voters focused on. It becomes pretty clear from this data that voters were focused on just a couple of issues, and one of them was more powerful than anything else. And this has to do with what's wrong with this picture. And it has to do particularly with athletic teams or athletic competition for girls and women, where you have male bodies in that competition. And so you have people. It's interesting at this point that you have advocates for the LGBTQ movement who are making an argument. And never was the incongruity and ridiculousness of this argument made more clear than in the response to these ad campaigns. So here was the response of many LGBTQ activists to the eruption of the transgender issue in the campaign. Here's what they said. It doesn't happen. And when it does happen, it doesn't matter. I just want to call them out on this logic because it shows up in this article in the Wall Street Journal, it shows up just about everywhere. You have transgender activists who say it just doesn't happen. There's no problem. There is no real problem, no real thing, no real phenomenon when it comes to boys and men playing on girls and women's teams. Except it is very easy to spot. One of the things we're going to be talking about in coming days is how this is playing out in the San Jose State University women's volum volleyball team, where, quite frankly, it's messing up the entire national schedule of an intercollegiate sport because you have teams that are not going to play under that circumstance. And so it is really telling when you listen to the argument, they're saying it doesn't happen. Well, okay, it happened then, but it doesn't happen very often. And even though it doesn't happen, okay, it happens every once in a while. But even when it does happen, it doesn't make that much difference because the presence of a male body under these circumstances doesn't really count. It's a circular argument. It's dishonest, and frankly, it's not working. So one of the interesting things from a Christian worldview perspective, and it wasn't really expected, let's be honest, as a big matter in the 2024 presidential campaign, it comes down to the fact that if you have one party saying, don't believe your eyes, and you have another party saying, look at this, the party that says look at this is going to win the argument, rather than the party that says, don't believe your eyes because, you know, it's just a fact that we're going to believe our eyes when it comes to something as basic as boy and girl and man and woman. And honestly, we need not to apologize for that. But as we're giving attention to the election and no apology for that, this is the big issue now still central in our national conversation. And by the way, the conversation is going to shift to other things, but one of the most important other things it's going to shift to is the composition and formation of a new Trump administration, because that also comes with massive worldview as well as political implications. But before leaving this, I do want to point out that one of the very interesting developments is that we have to wonder if people who said certain things before the election are ever going to be reminded that they said them. And in this case, I'm not even thinking about politicians. I'm thinking in particular about the media class. Now, I've often mentioned that among the media class, there are Some big brands, some big legacy brands, and they have outsize influence, especially on the left and among the cultural elites. One of those legacy brands is the New Yorker. It's published, not coincidentally, in New York. It kind of epitomizes the Manhattan elite's way of looking at the world. So in the lead up to the election, the editors of the New Yorker issued a multi page, multi thousand word endorsement of Kamala Harris. And I just want to go back to it. Not because the election is still before us, but because the election is behind us. Let's just remember, Kamala Harris didn't win. This is how the editors of the New Yorker ended their endorsement article for Kamala Harris, quote, and so the choice is stark. The United States simply cannot endure another four years of Donald Trump, end quote. Well, okay, that was written in the issue dated October 7, 2024. So just about a month before the election. And they just stated as a matter of their editorial authority that, quote, the United States simply cannot endure another four years of Donald Trump, end quote. So you just have to ask the question, are they selling their homes? Are they moving out of the country? Because they just declared a month ago that the nation can't survive another four years of a Trump presidency. Now, I don't even mean at this point to speak politically. I'm not saying that your analysis of that statement should come down to whether you supported one candidate or another in the election. I'm simply saying that if you say that the nation can't endure X and X happens, you're left with the explanation as to whether you meant what you said or if you just habitually use hyperbole and overstatement. Well, I think we should be somewhat thankful that the editors of the New Yorker in this case are almost assuredly more guilty of overstatement and hyperbole than they are of actually believing that the nation and our civilization are about to collapse. But it does point out the need for restrained speech. And that's not something that just applies to the cultural elite. This is something that applies to all of us. This is not just a problem on the left, it's also a problem on the right. We need to make certain that we can live with what we say. And we need to make certain particularly that if we say in moral terms there's a cause and effect, we better take responsibility for our argument of cause and effect. But speaking of arguments, I want to end on an even bigger issue and an even bigger argument, because the New York Times, as we look at the Sunday edition, that's Yesterday's edition ran in the editorial section an article entitled the Gift of the Cosmic Void. You want to talk about something other than the election? Well, let's talk about whether or not there's meaning in the universe in this case. The writer is Paul M. Sutter, identified as a theoretical cosmologist. And here's what the theoretical cosmologist writing for the New York Times wants us to know. And that is, quote, by strict accounting of cosmic abundances, our planet and the life we find here amount to essentially zero, insignificant. A small speck of blue and green suspended in an ocean of night. A tiny bit of rock and water orbiting just another star. He continues, quote, the great forces that shape our universe have grown the voids over billions of years, and their present day monstrousness puts cosmic insignificance into stark relief. Forget planets and stars. At these scales, even mighty galaxies are reduced to mere dots of light. End quote. Once he talking about, he's saying that the entire cosmos is mostly an empty abyss. It is mostly empty space. It is all a giant cosmic accident. Then he comes back and says that the meaning, even on planet Earth, the meaning of life on this planet, is, quote, essentially zero. His next word, insignificant. Now, I just wanted to point to this, and I'm not going to look at detail at his argument. You pretty much have the argument. But if you are merely a theoretical cosmologist and if you are basically committed to a secularist, to a materialist, to a naturalistic worldview, this is where you have to go. You eventually have to arrive at the fact that life here means absolutely nothing, that human life on one planet is absolutely insignificant. Let me just remind you that the Christian worldview begins with the exact opposite logic. It's not just a different logic, it's the exact opposite logic. The entire logic of the scripture is the wonder of the fact. The Creator made this expansive cosmos beyond our imagination. And yet on one planet, he not only created the conditions for life, he said, let there be life. And he not only said let there be life, he created one creature. He made one creature in his own image out of all of the cosmos. If that's all it means, it means to God's glory that the Creator created this cosmos and that includes this galaxy and it includes this universe, it includes this sun, it includes these orbiting planets. And on this pale blue dot of a planet called planet Earth, he said, let there be life. And then he made human beings in his image, male and female created he them. And you know what? As we think about all the cultural conversation about the election and about all the controversial issues of our day. You know, doesn't it tell us something that in the middle of all of this, the nation's most influential newspaper would run an opinion piece saying that human life itself doesn't matter? Well, let me just state that I don't think most people believe that to be true. Because if humanity itself, individual in aggregate, if it means nothing, you don't need to pay the subscription price to the New York Times. Frankly, you don't need to do anything. Nothing matters anyway. If you look at a baby smile with nothing but a cosmic accident, if you go to a funeral, it's nothing more than a cosmic accident. If you are there for the beginning of something great, don't worry, it doesn't mean anything. If you are looking at something horrible, don't worry, it doesn't mean anything. You know, human beings can't live that way. And that's why some of these cosmologists, going far beyond what this theoretical cosmologist has argued. You have some books, and I've given attention to them, where some of these cosmologists come up with the argument, well, we have to act as if life is meaningful. Well, you know, that's a big problem. Human beings are capable of many things, but I don't think we're capable of living for long as if there is meaning in the universe. No. This ought to give us, just at the beginning of this week, another sense of gratitude towards God, another aspect of God's glory demonstrated in the midst of all of this. And at least God's glory is demonstrated in stark relief over against the meaninglessness of a void where the universe means absolutely nothing. Here's a sentence in this article. Quote. Yes, the universe is mostly void, but we have found many wonders in these great expanses. End quote. So they're nothing, but you find wonder in them. I think we all see the limitations of that worldview, and I don't think that's the way an honest human being thinks. Again, looking in the face of a baby, you can't say what a weird but kind of wonderful accident. There's got to be a lot more to it than that. We know it in our hearts. We need to communicate that to our brains. It gives Christians the great opportunity to witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ by doing what the scripture does. And that is even beginning at the moment of creation, when it is the creator God who said, let there be life and made us in his image. That's where the story starts. And as we know, that's the only story we know, and it's the only story that's true. And so it's the story that shapes our entire worldview and animates our entire lives. So we began with controversy about the election and end with questions about meaning in the universe. I'd say it's a good way to start a week. Thanks for listening to the Briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmuller.com you can follow me on Twitter or X by going to twitter.com Albert Mohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'm speaking to you from Winston Salem, North Carolina, and I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.