Increasingly, news culture pushes stories that advance their agenda from writers sitting behind a desk. Gone are the days when reporters would get onto the street to reveal the facts about what is happening at the heart of an issue. Dr. Marvin Olasky calls us back to this foundation, reminding us of the importance of hearing from diverse viewpoints and going beyond austere sermonizing to tell stories that are not only useful and true, but interesting. Olasky is quick to point out the profound impact that Christianity had on culture as he recounts the mistreatment of people in other times and parts of the world. Join us and consider the news you are hearing and sharing with others.
Increasingly, news culture pushes stories that advance their agenda from writers sitting behind a desk. Gone are the days when reporters would get onto the street to reveal the facts about what is happening at the heart of an issue. Dr. Marvin Olasky calls us back to this foundation, reminding us of the importance of hearing from diverse viewpoints and going beyond austere sermonizing to tell stories that are not only useful and true, but interesting. Olasky is quick to point out the profound impact that Christianity had on culture as he recounts the mistreatment of people in other times and parts of the world. Join us and consider the news you are hearing and sharing with others.
Welcome again, everybody, to another episode of Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. My name is Scott Allen and I'm the president of the DNA, and we're really excited to have you joining us again today. I'm here with team members Darryl Miller and Luke Allen, and we are thrilled to have again as our special guest Dr Marvin Olaski. Marvin, it's great to have you back on the podcast.
Marvin Olasky:Oh, very glad to be with you.
Scott Allen:I think if you are a regular listener to our podcast, you know who Dr Olaski is, and even if you're not, you probably know him because he's so well known and respected within the evangelical Christian community, particularly for his time at World Magazine as the editor-in-chief there. But for those of you who are new to the podcast or don't know anything about Dr Olaski, he's a brilliant guy and so we're thrilled to know him. He's a graduate of Yale in 1971 and then went on and got his doctorate in American culture from the University of Michigan That'll become more relevant here in a second as we get into our conversation and has been a professor, university professor at University of Texas, austin, and has done a lot with Christian universities as well, including the King's College Patrick Henry. But for most of his career Marvin has been working as a writer and a journalist and again, he really left his mark at World Magazine, working from 1992 to 2001.
Scott Allen:Of late, marvin has been a busy beaver on books, and that's what we're here to talk about today because, marvin, you've got two books coming out within a month, which I am just I don't know. I'm floored by that that you. You know, in two months, two new books, two different publishers, so we want to talk to you about that, but congratulations, that's fantastic and I just want to congratulate you on that. Let me just go ahead and give the titles of the books as we get started here. The first one is called Moral Vision and the subtitle is Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden. And you're looking at moral leadership in the United States in particular, and that book is releasing tomorrow. Is that right? Yeah, right, that's awesome.
Marvin Olasky:That's correct.
Scott Allen:Congratulations on that. And then the next book is called Pivot Points. I love the subtitle of this book Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment. And this is really as I understand it. Marvin, this is kind of a memoir, a bit of your own personal story.
Marvin Olasky:Well, that's right, and there should be one correction that I'll offer, probably because, whatever I sent you a biographic information, I probably had a typo in it. I was actually editing World from 1992, not just to 2001, but to 2021.
Scott Allen:Yes. And that's probably my typo, but anyway the relevance of that is that I stopped editing in 2020. Sorry about that. Thanks for correcting the record there. I stopped editing in 2021.
Marvin Olasky:I stopped editing in 2021. And that's why I'm able to come out with these two books.
Scott Allen:I don't think I'd be able to do it if I were still editing.
Scott Allen:And you know too I'll just mention to our listeners, you know, because you guys are fans of the ministry of the DNA, you know Marvin has been hugely helpful, you know, in terms of getting our messages out on biblical worldview and the power of truth to transform especially very broken and impoverished cultures around the world. He's been an endorser and a promoter of our books and, marvin, I just am deeply grateful for that. I just continue to be grateful for your friendship and your belief in our ministry. It just means the world, means the world to us.
Marvin Olasky:Well, I'm grateful for DNA. I'm grateful for DNA and I've actually seen DNA in action in places like Ghana, so far, far flung spots around the world. I'm seeing the difference that a DNA understanding makes.
Scott Allen:Well, it's not DNA, it's the power of God's word when it's applied, you know, broadly and holistically in all areas, and people begin to live that out, and so it does bring change. It just brings a transformation, and so that's, that's really. That's what our what's, what we're called to do, and we just thank you for your friendship and partnership and just using your quite large platform and megaphone to help us get our message out. We're so grateful, marvin. Let's transition to the books. I, you know, boy, I would and I'm going to open it up here to Darrow and Luke too but I just I'd like you to just tell us about both of the books a little bit. Just give us an overview, whichever one you want to start with, and just tell us a little bit about what, what, what the books are about, what kind of prompted you to write them at this time.
Marvin Olasky:Well, start with moral vision.
Marvin Olasky:Yeah comes out. First, I've always been interested at least since since college and presidents of the United States and why they do what they do and and what affect their beliefs have on their actions. And back in 1998, I was writing a book about presidents and this was right in the middle of the Bill Clinton Monica Lewinsky scandal and I was very agitated about that and world. Actually, we had a cover saying that Bill Clinton was unfit to be president and I was writing about presidents at that time, so I included some stuff about Bill Clinton. I think it was probably an overheated book in some ways because I was angry about about Bill Clinton's actions. And so, looking back at that 25 years later and seeing that some of the some of my rhetoric was was overheated, and then also seeing that I had left some things out.
Marvin Olasky:I don't think I paid enough attention to race relations and the effect the presidents had. And then I wanted to write about some people I had skipped before, like Harry Truman, and then, of course, updating it to Donald Trump and and our current president. So that's that's why I started writing this again and as we as we had world had thought that Bill Clinton was unfit for office in 2016,. We had a very controversial cover and a story I wrote saying that that Donald Trump we thought was unfit to be president, and that is that created a lot of consternation in various places.
Marvin Olasky:But with all that agitation about it, I wanted to get back to this question of how much do beliefs of presidents affect their actions? What makes a president fit or unfit to be president? So it deals with those questions and those questions really are moral vision, which then get expressed in action. So that's that book, and then the other one is really a memoir and just dealing with the various pivots in my life over the years and the way that seems to me that we shouldn't be afraid of the changes. All of this is under God's authority and God's sovereignty and we should, in each situation, be trying to discern what God is teaching us and not running from it, but actually understanding and trying to be faithful to God.
Scott Allen:Well, and just on the latter book, marvin, for our listeners who aren't aware, your life has been just so fascinating. You know and I think you know you mentioned this in in the promotional piece for the book how you began, as you know, kind of coming out of a Jewish family, a Jewish background, moving into communism, atheism, traveling to the Soviet Union and then becoming a Christian, and I mean so those pivot points have been really significant for you and I, just you know your life is, just is a fascinating life and journey, and so I, you know both books. I'm looking forward to reading that one in particular, just because I'm just fascinated by your life story. I just on that I was curious, you called it a adventures on the road to Christian contentment. Tell me a little bit about that, that subtitle, and especially the word contentment. What are you trying to say there?
Marvin Olasky:Well, the biggest pivot in my life was from 1973 to 1976 when I moved from atheism to a belief in Christ. So that's the most significant, but that it's a testimony. But sometimes people in writing memoirs their story culminates in a particular testimony. That's the kind of genre it tends to be. And actually that was the beginning of a whole series of adventures.
Marvin Olasky:And I've had big aspirations trying to in a way reform Christian journalism, trying in a way to change our way of poverty fighting in the country so that we actually act biblically with Christian compassion. So I've had a lot of these big goals and none has been entirely fulfilled. Big professional goals, but big goals. Small disappointments, sometimes bigger disappointments, but always through God's kindness and mercy, being able to move on to something else. That I hope has glorified him. Now, the one thing that hasn't been a disappointment I've been married now for 47 and a half years and that's just been glorious and getting better and better. So in that most important aspect it's been wonderful. In some of the professional things, again, big, huge aspirations, sometimes disappointments, but learning and being content with what God gives rather than wishing for more.
Scott Allen:That's fantastic. What a great lesson for all of us, and I also want to applaud you, Marvin, for dreaming big dreams and how do we reform journalism as a big dream and not being afraid or shying away from those things, as God has opened the doors. I think that's a lesson to us all.
Darrow Miller:I know, marvin, for previous conversations. You know that how impactful your book the Tragedy of American Compassion has been on our thinking and the formation of the ideas in the DNA and the importance of a biblical worldview for addressing issues of poverty. And that book was seminal in Scots and my own thinking and shaping what we've been involved in for all these years. And I think the way I would summarize it, you looked at issues of poverty and compassion from a biblical worldview and contrasted that with a modern, atheistic worldview, and what I'd like to do is ask you to do a similar thing in terms of journalism. You made a comment a few minutes ago about your life as a journalist. How did you have that calling into journalism and how does the biblical worldview shape your desire to reform journalism? And I would imagine it's not just within an evangelical Christian context but what is the framework for being a good journalist?
Marvin Olasky:Yeah, very good questions. The framework, I think, is understanding at least what we at world would call biblical objectivity. In other words, people sometimes talk about objectivity but interpreting facts depends very much on the worldview that you have. In a sense, when cameras came in photography came in in the late 19th century the original understanding of journalists was that well, what the camera shows is what is objectively real. But then, increasingly, people figured out that in fact you have to decide where to set up the camera and that's going to make a big difference. And then, as there were different types of film and different types of this and different types of different lenses, all that is going to vary and so there are decisions that have to be made. There isn't a universal objectivity that, anywhere you set the camera, it's going to tell what's going on, because you may position the camera, so it's just shooting a bare wall. That's not going to help you a whole lot.
Marvin Olasky:On the other hand, in recent years, or the past 50 years or so, journalists have moved away from an idea of objectivity to an idea of utter subjectivity. Namely, it's all a matter of opinion and we're just going to tell our opinions. We're not actually going to do good reporting and getting out on at street level. We're just going to sit in our offices at sweet level and suck our thumbs and give our opinions and that's all you can do, because everything is complete subjectivity. Well, neither of those positions is really accurate and biblical. See, of course that's like saying you make up your own existence, you make up your own facts, you make up your own view of everything well-known. There is right and wrong, there is good and evil. We learn from the Bible what these are. We always see through a glass darkly. We are not capable of understanding God's thoughts. He is obviously much wiser than ourselves, but we can try as best we can, in our limited and fallen way, to apply what the Bible teaches to the events that go on around us. We can try to do it in a way that takes account of the facts, that's based on good reporting and not just slinging our opinions. That's what biblical objectivity is. You go out and do a good job, you build from the facts. You build in a sense, from the bottom up, inductively, and then you have some understanding. When you apply the Bible to the facts you see around you, you have some understanding of the reality that actually exists. That's what we tried to do at world. Biblical objectivity is different from journalistic subjectivity, which is the ruling doctrine now, or this attempted objectivity. That just is fallacious, because objectivity differs according to the worldview and you have to take into account how you're looking at things, with what view you're looking at things, with what understanding you're looking at things. That's the basic challenge we have in journalism.
Marvin Olasky:We briefly hear American journalism up until the 1840s was Christian journalism. There was a sense that there is God, that the Bible is true, that you can apply the Bible and interpreting what goes on around you. Then, starting in the 1840s, in a sense Christian journalism collapsed, intended to become more sermonic, not really based on looking at the world around us, but just almost always dealing within what's within the four walls of the church. Christian journalists stopped doing a good job of reporting and secular journalists took over. And it's been that way pretty much for 150 years, up until 1980s, 1990s, that world.
Marvin Olasky:We tried to reassert this understanding of biblical objectivity and try in a way to bring back journalism to the earlier understanding, but also to just do a better job of reporting and going out and viewing the world, not just sitting on our studios, not just in our offices, but actually, if we're reporting border controversies, go to the border.
Marvin Olasky:If we're reporting poverty, go and actually learn about it. If I'm working a lot now on homelessness and going and living in various homeless shelters and actually seeing what it's like, anyway, that's what we tried to do with world and it was a very exciting proposition. I think there are journalists now who are still trying to do it and we just want to be able to honor them and help them. Very briefly, I'll just mention we have a little foundation called Zenger House, after an early Christian journalist named John Peter Zenger, and we give out awards every year. We've done this. This will be our third year doing it. We give out awards to journalists both at Christian publications and secular publications who are trying to be biblically objective as best they can. That's an exciting proposition too.
Luke Allen:Yeah, marvin, I'm really excited to look into both these books once they come out. Especially Pivot Points Also caught my attention. I've noticed as a young guy I'm right on the edge of a millennial slash Gen Z, I'm right in that gap and I'm a young guy starting a young family and I've found it recently. I really like reading memoirs and biographies, especially as someone who's in the Gen Z generation. The last couple years have been a little tumultuous, kind of my entire adult life, starting out with 2016 until now. I've just been a little crazy and when I look at the world, I'm like, is it always this bad or am I just paying attention at the wrong time? And when you look back at biographies and memoirs, you see that there's this constant theme of the world's coming to an end, but then God's faithful, and then crazy things happen, but God's still faithful and it's cool to see that through the lives of Christians especially. And I looked into your in Pivot Points already and it looks really interesting.
Luke Allen:But yeah, what you were just talking about with journalism caught my attention, especially today. There's just this real seemingly lack in good journalism. I have a really hard time figuring out what's actually going on out there in the world. I you know journalism is supposed to be all about objective truth, like you were saying facts, informing the people, helping them make decisions, helping them walk through the decisions making process accurately, fairly non-biased opinions, all of that. But I just have such a hard time finding that out there today, especially in the world of digital media and where it's all about clicks. So you can just anything that'll essentially make it as far as possible people will put out there, even if it's completely unmoored from the truth.
Luke Allen:And now we're getting to the age of AI and deep fakes and you know faking people's voices and you know putting up fake speeches and whatever. It's just getting crazy. And finding journalists you can trust is getting harder. So I'm excited to learn more about your thought process throughout that book. And when it comes to that biblical objective journalism, is that what you called it, biblical objectivity? That'll be fascinating. Back to Darrow's question For journalists who aren't believers and don't have a biblical worldview, what should I be looking in? What characteristics should I look for in a journalist like that who still cares about the truth enough to report on it and maybe doesn't have the biblical objectivity but is sticking to the facts as they are what do you look for when you're looking for a journalist like that?
Marvin Olasky:Yeah, there's a lot of hysteria out there now and a lot of people saying the sky is falling, things are worse now than they've ever been before, and so forth. Yeah, luke, I would not trade trying to approach this with biblical objectivity. I would not trade our current situation, difficult as it is, for, let's say, the situation in 1861, as the United States is actually embarking on a disunited state of civil war and four years of just 700,000 deaths which, if you translated that into our current population, would be 7 million plus deaths. I would not trade our situation for that. I would not trade our situation for, say, 941, where you have Nazi Germany triumphant. You have the United States enters the war in December with the disaster at Pearl Harbor. I wouldn't trade our situation for that either.
Marvin Olasky:Objectively, what's different is that you have a lot of journalists and politicians and others just saying the sky is falling, the sky is falling, things are terrible, there's nothing you can do, it's all. There's disaster coming and so forth. So, objectively, our situation is better than it was, let's say, during those previous times of crisis. Subjectively, in terms of what we're reading and what we're hearing, in terms of a breakdown of communication, in terms of people unable often to tell what's true from what's made up now, especially with AI coming in. It's a mess. But it's a mess if we think the sky is falling, god has deserted us, there's nothing we can do, we're helpless, hopeless, helpless. It becomes a bigger mess if we think it is because, objectively, things are not as bad as they have been at other times and we survived those times and if God is kind to us, we can survive these times too.
Luke Allen:Yeah, I agree that objectively there has been darker moments in our past. But one thing I see as a similarity between your two books moral vision and pivot points is that things are changing, and the biggest thing that's changed is this we're drifting from truth, from morality, from virtue as a whole as a society in the United States and as the West more broadly, and with this comes the breakdown of journalism and with this becomes a breakdown and leadership at a political level that we can trust and we can look to and really wholeheartedly endorse, and I think that's true for a lot of other countries. But this shift of straying from truth I see as kind of a similarity between your two books.
Luke Allen:Marvin, we have a global audience here on the podcast, so more than 25% of our audience is in all over the world essentially. So I would love to hear more about moral vision. But the main thing I would like to get at today is that question of what makes a president or a leader of any type in other countries fit or unfit to be a president. So what should we be looking for as Christians in our elected leaders? We all want to be active citizens, but how do we do that in a world where sometimes the options seem very limited.
Marvin Olasky:Yeah, what are we really for, I think, is a question to ask. In other words, let's talk about three different types of things that can be what's preeminent in our thinking about how to act. In particular ways, I mean number one you could say is well, what's in it for me? So there are some individuals who just seem very selfish, egotistical, and that's not a good situation for a president. One of the things we can learn from the Bible is that the best leaders are servants and people who think of themselves as servants and serving others rather than just egotistically thinking about themselves. So that's one type of leader who's just in it for himself. Another type of leader is in it, in a sense, for his organization and in some ways, that's certainly better than just being in it for yourself, because you're thinking about other people as well as yourself.
Marvin Olasky:That's the second thing, and there are a lot of presidents who are like that. They're not so much just focused on themselves, but they're focused on, in a sense, their tribe, their administration, their party. And then a third way is to think of well, what should we do? That, thinking beyond ourselves and beyond our tribe, what can we do? What's our vision of what's right and truthful? And as Christians, what should we be doing to glorify God and enjoy him forever, beginning right now?
Marvin Olasky:So you have some presidents who are animated by number one, that is, I am number one, what's in it for me? You have some who are animated by what's in it for their tribe or administration or party. And you have some with actually a moral vision of something more important, and so they're willing sometimes to sacrifice some of their own power and popularity, not just for themselves, not even for their parties or tribes, but because there's some sense, we hope, informed by the Bible, about what's true and what's right. And I think we should try to find leaders who have that type of sensibility, not just for in it for themselves, not just in it for their administration, but in it because they think the country and the world and God's glory will be better off.
Darrow Miller:How would you say Marvin? How does the church cultivate that kind of leadership in a culture?
Marvin Olasky:Yeah, yeah, good question. I'd say, first of all, by taking the Bible seriously and not just reading into the Bible what we would like to be there, but reading out of the Bible what God has put there. For example, and the way I got involved in writing this book that you referred to, the Tragedy of American Compassion was really, for a dozen years after I became a Christian, trying to read the Bible faithfully and just seeing how much the Bible says about poverty and helping the poor, the poor in spirit, the poor materially helping widows, orphans, the strangers within our gates, prisoners. How can we help those people? There's so much about that, and if you approach public policy issues with that in mind, what can we do on a certain question, not just to help ourselves and benefit our particular party or class, but what can we do to help the least and the lost, Then that changes the way you think about policy. So I'd say it starts with we hope reading the Bible.
Marvin Olasky:Now there can be good leaders who aren't Christians. What can they do? Well, they can still, at least in a country that has some biblical residue, they can think about loving our neighbor as ourselves. They're not going to be impelled to it by the reading of the Bible. But if they're in a culture that's been influenced by the Bible, they're going to be thinking more in these terms than if they're in a culture that just says, as, for example, ancient Greece and Rome, the strong should do whatever they want to do and women should be exploited. Children, if you don't want them, should be exposed, left out to die. I should enslave people If I can get away with it. That's what I should do. If you're in a culture like that that emphasizes power rather than compassion, you're going to act in a very different way than if you were in a culture either because people are still reading the Bible or, nevertheless, they've been formed in some ways by the Bible Makes a huge difference.
Darrow Miller:So you're saying churches need to be taking the scriptures more seriously and more seriously in all areas of life, like in the area of poverty, the issue of the dignity of women, telling the truth if your journalist yes.
Marvin Olasky:The Bible teaches very clearly that you don't do what they did in ancient Rome, that is, if you want to dump a wife, just dump her. If you want to have sexual activities with any people outside of marriage, that's wrong. If you you know, in Hindu cultures traditionally there was the idea that when the man died, you burn the widow. A lot of cultures had that, where men are more physically powerful and they just dominate women and children are the property. Women are the property of men. Children are the property of men. Do what you want. You have you put people in slavery. If you can do it, do it. That's what most cultures from much of the world have done, and a Bible oriented culture is very, very different.
Scott Allen:Marvin, I'd like to pick up on Daryl's question and maybe ask it a little bit of a different way, because it seems like there is a thread between the tragedy of American compassion, what we've been talking about with journalism, and also leadership in terms of virtue, and that is this is just my observation that all of those things journalism in terms of objective truth seeking and conveying objective truth, poverty in terms of doing what actually leads to help for the poor, and then virtuous leadership there was a time in our country when all of those areas were shaped heavily by Christianity and it seems to me like what you've noticed is that there was a time when Christians kind of backed out, like you were mentioning, in journalism back in the 1800s.
Scott Allen:There was this kind of reversal and then there was, you know, christians stopped, either changed the way they were doing journalism or stopped doing kind of objective journalism. You mentioned the same thing with the tragedy of American compassion, where there was a lot of Christian involvement in helping the poor, you know, the addicted and whatnot, to rise out of poverty. And then it shifted again late 1800s, early 1900s, and a lot of the work became quite secularized and you know it was just kind of dominated by secular thinking. Just give the poor enough to eat and they'll be. You know, they won't be poor anymore. Christians kind of got out of the work, and you could say the same thing with leadership, right, you know, there was a time when kind of Christian virtues shaped people, and now we're in a situation where it's hard to find a leader in the United States that really exhibits, you know, those kind of Christian virtues.
Scott Allen:So I guess my question is Marvin, what happened, you know, with the church in terms of shaping the culture, where we got out of it in many ways, in many different areas, and other people kind of picked it up and ran with it. Because it seems like where we're at today is we're in a situation where, you know, 80, 100 years beyond that, we haven't been having a lot of influence in these areas, and so they've taken, they've been shaped by these other non-Christian worldviews and you have all sorts of negative consequences as a result. We have leaders that don't, you know, reflect virtue. We have journalists that are just. You know, their philosophy of journalism is propaganda, because that's what subjective journalism is essentially. So, I guess, what happened then? How do we turn it around now? I guess is maybe a way of asking that question.
Marvin Olasky:Yeah, what happened is that other understandings came in and cultural leaders, academic leaders, absorb those understandings and then translated them into terms that people who were not academically or culturally trained could understand. So you had the development of, coming from the top, people who would teach and communicate values that were very much opposed to biblical values, and others would then pick up on that. And you can look at particular influences. You can look at the influence of Karl Marx, certainly, in which, instead of thinking that people who have providentially gained some means should use those means to help the poor, you would say instead there was the assumption that they were just going to exploit the poor, and the more in fact there was that assumption, the more, in a sense, there was permission for people who were wealthy sometimes to exploit the poor because there was an understanding.
Marvin Olasky:Yes, everything proceeds on a class background, certainly Charles Darwin and his theories from origin of the species in 1859 up to the present. If you basically think that people are just mammals, just animals, and there's a struggle for survival and you basically going to have the survival of fittest, then you try to gain power and use that power not to help others but to exploit others. Lions and tigers and bears don't really think through how they're going to help sheep and lambs and others. They're just out there to eat them. And basically, if we start thinking of ourselves in those terms, then we're back to the period of ancient Rome and ancient India and other places where the powerful were just gonna use their power to get more power.
Marvin Olasky:So, whether you do that, whether you look at the way Sigmund Freud influenced psychology, you can go field by field and you see that, instead of seeing that we are created in God's image and we are called to be gardeners of God's world and called to help people who, for whatever reason, haven't been providentially graced as we have, if, instead of thinking in those terms, you just think in terms of power, then you're going to get a very bad situation, which is where we are right now. So, in a way, it's not surprising. Once you no longer take the Bible as your compass, it's not surprising that you're not going to know what's North, what's South, what's East, both West. It's just gonna be. Make it up as you go along. In whatever way advantages you.
Scott Allen:And so Marvin back the folks that you mentioned Freud and Marx and Darwin these guys were active, very powerful, very influential sets of ideas in the late 1800s kind of quickly became mainstream through academia and whatnot.
Scott Allen:Why didn't the church?
Scott Allen:It seemed to me and this is just looking back at that it didn't have a very good response to that.
Scott Allen:It kind of almost said, hey, we're just gonna give the culture over to these new powerful ideas that are taking over academia and that are gonna filter down into poverty and journalism and every other area, these atheistic ideas, and we're just gonna focus on kind of what we do in the church and prayer and evangelism and we're just gonna let all those other areas just be taken over essentially.
Scott Allen:And now when you have Christians say, hey, we need to kind of make some inroads back into those areas that we used to have a lot of influence in 100 years ago but we don't anymore, then we're dangerous Christian nationalists trying to take over the country. But anyways, I still comments on that because it seems to me like their response when those powerful ideas came in and I think that's what we're struggling with now is that they've now kind of embedded themselves in journalism and in every other area in leadership, just civic leadership, we're trying to kind of dig ourselves out of a ditch that we ourselves the church, the Christians we're kind of partly responsible for, and so yeah, I mean I could give a generally answer to that, but let me talk for a minute about what I know and have actually researched myself, namely journalism history.
Marvin Olasky:Good journalism is based on street level reporting, not sweet level opinionating. The tendency now opinions get more clicks and so if someone shouts loudly then the response of a lot of Christians is to shout louder. We're gonna out shout them, whereas what happened in earlier times is that Christians did a good job of reporting With human interest, specific detail, colorful stories. You start to see a difference. News in itself is interesting and exciting and you wanna find out what's going on.
Marvin Olasky:If the story is well told and I've gone back and actually read publications from the 1700s, the early 1800s in America and there was a certain sense of excitement you start to see a turn around the middle of the 19th century where people instead of saying, oh, I am reading this newspaper, I'm opening it up, I wanna read an interesting story, I wanna enjoy this. There's gonna be drama and human interest in action. Instead you see people saying, oh, here's a copy, a copy of the Sabbath Observer that's just shown up. Oh, I guess I have to read it now. It's my duty to read it because the church is presenting it and I must grit my teeth and read it. Once you stopped emphasizing or editors stopped emphasizing good writing, lively writing, specific detail, human interest, humor, all those good things, bad writing drove out good writing and a lot of Christian publications became boring.
Scott Allen:Yeah, were they writing specifically for themselves too, kind of like you say I'm a Baptist writing for other Baptists at that point instead of for broader audience. I'm a Baptist, I'm from the.
Marvin Olasky:Baptist and I am a very serious person and I'm going to write about very serious things. I am going to give you a sermon and you are going to sit and listen to it, whether you like it or not, and then, more recently, there started to be a sense of well, a person I don't like is shouting. I'm going to shout louder. That's not the way really to make reading and listening enjoyable, rather than an errand that you have to do. You're forced to do it.
Scott Allen:I'd like to continue. Yeah, go ahead, Marvin, no go ahead.
Marvin Olasky:No, I was just going to make a bad joke, so you please go ahead and save me from that.
Scott Allen:Well, yeah, I'd like to just pick up on this. Continue on the thread of journalism, marvin, because that's your area and it's just to me. We are in such crisis right now in journalism because so you have this split that you're talking about. That happened in the late 1800s or early 1900s, where journalism began to be taken over by non-Christians operating from maybe atheistic worldviews. And now, if you fast forward to the present, we're in a fully post-truth, post-truth, post-modern moment.
Scott Allen:And it seems to me that 10 years ago there used to be a discussion about bias in journalism. It's biased. It's biased to the left. It seems like we've left that behind and now you've got probably the most influential journalistic outfits are just openly exposing that what we are all about is promoting a particular point of view or a narrative, and they've just completely given up on objective truth. It seems to me and I find that just kind of still jaw-dropping and that's a crisis. I mean, we need journalism right. We need to know what actually is happening and not just, whatever the narrative is that the powerful want me to know what's happening right.
Scott Allen:And, as Luke said, it seems to me that we it's just so hard now to even know what's happening and layer on top of that AI or censorship. We're in a real crisis of just trying to even know what the heck's going on, because journalists have shifted into, they've abandoned truth, and just what are the facts? Let's get the facts out to the American people so they can make their best judgment, and things like that. So, given that crisis and you know you're right, I mean we've faced crises in the past and I don't mean to overblow the current crisis in any way, but it seems to me that this is quite a serious crisis.
Scott Allen:How do we as Christians recover? You know, and go back and you know, and where do you see some hope and see that beginning to happen? Do you see a movement to shift back on the part of Christians on the church to say, oh, let's just not yell at these people that are promoting post-truth narratives. But how do we kind of redo really good Christian journalism again? And I know that's something you get in a lot of your life too- yeah, there are two problems really.
Marvin Olasky:There's a problem in local journalism and there's a problem in national journalism, and there are different problems. The problem in local journalism is that increasingly, in city after city, town after town, because of the economics of journalism which get a little bit complicated, but basically lots of newspapers are just getting out, going out of business. Yes, lots of local newspapers. They're laid off just about all of their staff they are just when they still exist. They're basically just relaying national news and so people don't know what's going on in their own city councils, in their own towns and so forth. That's a huge problem.
Marvin Olasky:We're trying to do a little bit about that with our Zenger House Foundation, for example, in the Sharpstown area, southwest Houston, where we're backing a local newspaper. It's not a small area. There are about 100,000 people in that area and there hasn't been information for them available of what's really going on in the area. There are a couple of large Houston newspapers, but they just cover the big metropolis, but in Sharpstown itself people don't know what's going on. So we have a publication called the Sharpstown Sharperner. We trained the editor and we're backing that editor, and that's just one thing. But I'd like to see things like that going on in lots of places around the country.
Scott Allen:Yeah, I love that. The neighborhood, town, city journalism yeah right, just what's happening?
Marvin Olasky:Yeah, so that's what's happening on the local level the sounds of silence very often. On the national level, the big problem is that people are not doing detailed, hard, investigative reporting, they're just shouting. And I used to think and again, a long, long time ago, before Christ saved me, I was on the left and starting from the 1970s up until recent years, I was thinking the big problem was on the left and conservatives and people on the right can fight against that. Well, I am now seeing the big problem on the left is still there, but there's also a big problem on the right, where people on the right are not doing reporting, are not actually looking hard at things, but are just shouting and shouting louder and propagandizing.
Marvin Olasky:So this tribalism is very difficult and Christians are not supposed to be tribal.
Marvin Olasky:Jesus taught about how there's neither Jew nor Greek, how we're supposed to love our neighbors ourselves, and gave us an example the good Samaritan helping a person from a different ethnic group, and actually the Samaritan is despised by the Jews.
Marvin Olasky:The Samaritan is the real hero there. So the New Testament is not tribalistic at all. It's very much thinking of seeing our neighbors as people of every tribe, every class, every group we're supposed to be thinking about, not just our own faction and nationally, the problem is we're very factionalized, we're very tribalized and we have publications on the right that are becoming just as bad as publications on the left, just issuing propaganda rather than actually doing reporting. So you just hear this beat all over the place the sky is falling, the sky is falling and people keep saying that and rather than just understanding that we pray to God and God and His mercy can, and we pray and we pray we'll hold up the sky, you just have this feeling of despair and the people on the left are saying propagandistic things, so we have to respond with our own propaganda rather than actually going and doing a good job of street-level reporting. That's the problem nationally opinionating louder and louder and louder and screaming at each other.
Luke Allen:Yeah, I feel like, in the wake of the lack of good journalism, we've seen the new phase of all the social media quote, unquote, journalists, the people picking up their iPhone, shooting a video, adding some commentary and posting it and getting more views on their little video than the New York Times does. Social media is definitely putting a lot of newspapers out of business, for good or bad. What are your thoughts about this new phenomenon? I know for my generation. I saw recently more people get the news from TikTok and YouTube than any other news source. Is this good, is this bad? Is this something I should stay away from?
Marvin Olasky:It's definitely popular, well yeah, I mean, tiktok is a special problem insofar as it's under the thumb of the dictators in China. And hey, if you were President Xi in China and you wanted to do something that was utterly brilliant, you would have TikTok and you'd have American teenagers and folks your age Luke just living off TikTok and I think that's a huge disaster. But then you go to other social media and the problem is there's a tendency they have algorithms that you get more of what you like and people tend to like what already agrees with. I mean and I say people, I'm not just saying others, I mean, I am a sinner also we tend to like what we already agree with and unless we make a real effort to read things that we don't agree with, we're just going to get more and more and more of what we already agree with and we're going to think more and more and more that our tribe is the righteous tribe and all the others are terrible. So that's a big problem.
Marvin Olasky:I would hope that listeners would deliberately go out and try to listen to and read things with which they don't agree and educate. We need to educate ourselves in that way. We agree that we agree with. We should try to read something we disagree with, and then we're. I'm speaking here particularly politically and socially. That would be very helpful, there's, by the way. Well, I'll just stop there.
Scott Allen:Marvin, what are your thoughts on? We need to be wrapping up here and, dara, I want to make sure you get any final questions as well, but what are your thoughts on groups like the Free Press? Barry Weiss, it seems like there's a group that's really trying hard to kind of recover some objectivity at the national level not necessarily Christians, these are often people that, like in her case, worked in the New York Times, but it just it became so propagandistic that she eventually got pushed out. Any thoughts on some of these new outlets that are coming up and other ways that you get the news or you find it very helpful? You mentioned trying to read broadly, but no.
Marvin Olasky:I taught for 25 years. I was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and certainly the education at least as long as I was there and intimately knew what was going on. The education kids were getting was often a propagandistic education and so far as the Free Press, barry Weiss and others are trying to be really for freedom of speech and emphasize that it's good to hear from different viewpoints politically. That I think is very useful and I'm glad they are there.
Scott Allen:Well, the books and I'm just going to mention it again that are coming out our moral vision and pivot points. Moral vision is being released tomorrow and the subtitle is Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden, and I just want to encourage all of our listeners to go and check those out on Amazon. If you can, you know, purchase books when they're first released. It's a huge help, darryl. I'd like to just any final questions for Marvin, as we wrap up our thoughts on your side in terms of this discussion that we've been having.
Darrow Miller:No, I'm fine, I think this is the place to to wrap it up is to just go back to Marvin's two new books. You will be encouraged and blessed by things that Marvin writes and I can testify I think Scott can as well that, marvin, things you have written have been life changing for each of us and for the work that God has called us into. So let me just encourage those who are listening to the podcast Be sure to pick up one of these two new books by Marvin.
Marvin Olasky:Well, thank you.
Scott Allen:Darryl, yeah, and Marvin, thanks for your work, thanks for your scholarship, just for you know the incredible perspective, especially historical perspective, that you bring on so many of these issues and we look forward to reviewing and reading these books and also the one that's upcoming on homelessness, which is such a crisis here in our cities, especially on the West Coast, so I'm looking forward to seeing that as well. Thanks for your thanks for your work and thanks for being with us today, Marvin, and for our listeners. Thank you again for tuning into another episode of. Ideas have consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance.