March 4, 2021 Show with A. M. Brewster on “Cancel Culture & Your Kids”

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Introduction and Proverbs 27:17

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all happy Thursday on this fourth day of March 2021.

And I'm so thrilled to have back on the program a returning guest. His name is A .M. Brewster, aka Aaron Brewster, and you've probably been hearing the ads that Aaron has been running on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio every day.

He, for over 10 years, has served God and his people in various capacities, including husband, father, homeschooling parent, preacher, biblical counselor, president of a non-profit that serves Christian families, a conference speaker, a camp director, Christian school administrator, director of a boarding home for at-risk teens, podcaster, author, and host of Truth, Love, Parent, will address cancel culture and your kids.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, A .M. Brewster.

I was really looking forward to getting back on this show with you. I'm super excited. Thanks for the invitation.

And let me give our email address right away to our listeners in the event that they have a question on cancel culture. My email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence. If you live outside the USA, please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Truth, Love, Parent and Biblical Counseling for Families

So before we continue with the main theme at hand, cancel culture and your kids, tell us about Truth, Love, Parent.

I'd love to. So Truth, Love, Parent started in 2006 at the Boys Home Victory Academy for Boys in northern Wisconsin. And I was creating a parent in the home with me. And I realized very quickly together from the Bible for those parents had value for more than just those parents.

Long story short, I thought, hey, I've never even listened to a podcast before. How about I make one? Information out there in podcast form, and the Lord blessed its spread. People responded to it. And now, almost five years later now, we are working on getting our 501c3 status and being a full nonprofit ministry where we are doing three things primarily.

Number one, we're creating free parenting resources. But we also started a second podcast called the Celebration of God that is designed specifically for parents and their children, far beyond just parenting.

It's discipleship for all of God's people. And so the Celebration of God podcast was started. And so on and so forth. We also counsel. We're biblical counselors. And so we meet with anyone who works with children and help to equip them to do that better and to help people with their family struggles.

And if anybody wants more information about Truth Love Parent, go to TruthLoveParent .com, TruthLoveParent .com. Well, this is something, this theme that we are addressing today is something that has been coming up a lot lately, every day in the media.

And that is something known as cancel culture. If you could please, for those of our listeners who may be living in a cave somewhere, and they only listen to Iron Trump and Zion Radio, let them know about exactly what cancel culture is.

I'd love to. Not because I think cancel culture is an amazing thing, but because it's very important that we have a unified definition, and that definition to be God's definition. Cancel culture, the phrase itself is a new thing.

But of course, Adam blamed Eve and also God way back. Cain, we could say, canceled Abel by murdering him. So canceling has been going on. This idea of canceling has been going on for quite some time. And also, it's important to acknowledge that cancel culture, you know, are various practices included in the process.

However, there does seem to be some agreement on the root purpose of cancel culture. And if I could sum it up this way, I'd say that cancel culture is the act of punishing people for their beliefs. Punishing people for their beliefs.

Now, that's a general definition, and I think some people might be like, well, I don't know. They might have some questions. And I'm about, admittedly, I'm about to cite Wikipedia. I know it's not a scholarly source, but I've looked up lots of definitions for cancel culture, and I really liked theirs.

Theirs was fantastic. Quote, a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of a social or professional circle. This can be online, on social media, in the real world, or both. Unquote. That was Wikipedia's definition for the cancel culture, and it involves this idea of ostracism.

And yeah, it may involve simply shaming an individual in person or online. It may involve this group ostracism idea. There are a growing number of people losing their jobs over this. And sometimes we're even seeing that violence isn't...

Some people, well, no one's actually being canceled. They're being canceled for their words and their actions, what they've done, not really what they believe. And in those situations, I would just point out to someone who's thinking that the premise, with their understanding of beliefs, is what we do and what we say and what we feel and what we think are all consequences of our beliefs.

So yes, to cancel someone for their behavior, to cancel them for what they've said, is in fact to punish them for their beliefs. Particular definition I've given because of the word punishment that I used.

Punishing somebody else for their beliefs. But Merriam-Webster defines punishment or loss that serves as retribution. So retribution is exactly what cancel culture wants. They want to hurt you or hurt someone else for what you have done.

And then I think the last... One of the last objections a person may have to my basic definition I've given is that, you know, everyone... Every authority figure on the planet is involved in cancel culture, if that's what cancel culture is.

This would include police officers giving a ticket to a speeder, a parent grounding a disobedient child. And it could even be said that punishing people for their beliefs is true of God. Now, I would completely agree with that observation based off of the definition that I've given.

But I want to make my definition a little bit more specific, okay? The real problem with cancel culture is not the act of ostracizing or condemning or firing someone because of what they said or did. This can be in real life or online.

It doesn't matter. That's not the real problem. Cancel culture best refers to people, whether those people are in a position of authority or not. This punishment does not fit the crime in a behavior that they have no right to punish, okay?

So I would say that a really good way to sum up this definition of cancel culture would be to say that it involves illegitimate authority, unrighteous punishment.

Liberalism, Leftism, and the Dr. Seuss Censorship Debate

Where we would distinguish liberalism from leftism would very much involve the subject today, wouldn't it? A historic liberal, the liberals that have existed for centuries and always in some way or another at odds with those who identify ourselves as conservatives.

Although liberals have always been at odds with us, there are some things that we have always shared in common and freedom of speech is one of them and other things. But a true liberal would be very upset and should be those that are liberals today that are true liberals, they should be just as if not more upset as the conservatives are against this leftist totalitarian tactic known as cancel culture, should they not?

I would agree completely with that. I have many friends who are on both sides of the political spectrum, both conservative and liberal, and I'm finding that the ones who would not consider themselves to be leftist do have a problem.

For Dr. Seuss, the thing that I saw on Mulberry Street, they refer to that in that particular book, they make a statement about a man of Asian descent and it seems cliche to these people and say, okay, well, we have to get rid of the books.

We're not burning them necessarily, but we're not selling them anymore either, we're discontinuing them. And I've had some liberal friends who are just astonished that we're going so far as to say, you can't read the Mulberry Street from Dr. Seuss anymore.

Yeah, and Dr. Seuss was actually a liberal and he was a champion for racial equality, not the equity that we are hearing about today, but the equality of all humans, regardless of their ethnicity, their nationality, the color of their skin.

And he actually had at least one of his books specifically on that whole topic. One of his children's books, The Sneetches. I'm not sure if that was the title of the book, but the Sneetches were the main characters in the book.

Yeah, exactly. That book basically said, it didn't matter if you had a star on your belly or not, we are all Sneetches and we're all in this together. And obviously, it's not a true person a certain way simply because of the way that they look.

And that was, I mean, even Yertle the Turtle, oftentimes people will say it was an attack against totalitarian governments and people like Hitler who would treat people in terrible ways based off of their ethnicity.

So yeah, Dr. Seuss was this fantastic guy who wrote fantastic children's literature. And I mean, forget children's literature, I think I still have one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish memorized. And yet, he wrote a line with chopsticks, all of a sudden we're deciding that we must stop.

Universal Studios has a whole, and my family and I, we love going to Universal Florida and they have a whole section dedicated to Dr. Seuss. And one of the sections is, if I ran a zoo, you can play on in that section.

Universal Studios is discussing whether or not they need to tear down that section because If I Ran the Zoo was one of the books that has recently been canceled. And so you have these whole organizations, these multimillion dollar organizations submitting to this idea of cancel culture because a group of individuals have said, this is bad, we must punish it.

And everyone else is running to be in line to give part of the whipping.

And one of the classic Dr. Seuss books that has even been used by the pro-life movement is Horton Hears a Who.

Yeah, definitely.

And a person's a person's no matter how small and you very small persons will not have to die if you make yourself heard. So come on now, try. This has just reached a level of insanity because you have this elite, this group of people who are declaring that they are creating the dictionary or the encyclopedia.

And we must all follow the definitions that they subscribe to certain things. They are the ones who are the arbiters and determiners of what is racism, what is bigotry, what is hate, what is right and what is wrong.

This is, it's mind boggling how insane a lot of this is. This is just, and I'm sure there are a lot more historically liberal people out there that are just terrified or paranoid to open their mouths about this because they recognize that their favorite political party is pushing this nonsense.

And many of their Hollywood elite celebrity heroes are pushing this. And they're folks in the music world that are their idols. So they keep their mouth shut and they don't let their voices heard that they know that this is insanity.

This has really become something that you wouldn't even thought would be realistic maybe three, four or five years ago.

I'm not sure I would have thought it would have been realistic two years ago.

Yeah, you're right.

I mean, the word's not strong enough. I love the word that God uses in Proverbs 12, one. He says, whoever loves discipline, loves knowledge. Okay, they like to learn. They like to grow. But of course, as you said, and truth of apparent, we've been focusing on this now for a couple of fact that God's word has to be the foundation for our family vocabularies.

We have to define terms the way God does, right? But then the second part of this verse says, but he who hates reproof, right? Reproof is basically being told that you're wrong. And of course, you know, we need to tell people that they're right.

Basically it here says that he who hates to be told by God what is right and wrong, this is the Bible's word. And that's not pejorative. That's not me sitting back here, you know, passing judgment on a group of people.

God himself is saying that when we hate to bow to the Lord's definition of what is right and what is wrong, we are literally being stupid. And the Hebrew word being translated here has the idea of being brutish.

That's exactly what we're seeing in the world today. And you're right, people are afraid. Even people who completely disagree with it because they're going out for blood. And if you disagree with cancel culture, you can guarantee that you're gonna be the next one on the list to be canceled.

And who knows, you might lose your job, you might get kicked out of your social circles, have your house set on fire.

Obviously, Christian parents and leaders in the church need to help prepare children, even small ones, because they are indeed targets of the left with cancel culture and everything else that they want to push.

We need to make sure that our children are aware of what's being said out there so that they have an answer for it, that they don't become sponges and just immediately soak up everything they're hearing as truth.

And I think one of the beauties of classical Christian education, I don't know how familiar you are with classical Christian education or how much you are involved in supporting it, but one of the things I love about it is that they don't keep children isolated from everything that has been said and taught and written about and promoted in secular society just because they're a Christian school.

They want the children being educated to hear first, if possible, from Christians what the enemies of Christ and his word are saying so that they can have a biblical and an intelligent response to that.

Am I making sense here?

Definitely. In fact, I just referenced that same concept. I'm in the middle of what I'll call the biggest parenting challenges you will ever face. In fact, this series was actually inspired by our last interview that we had talking about parenting challenges, modern parenting challenges.

And one of the observations that I made was the fact that some people in an attempt to guard their children's definition of morality, they will try to keep them separated from every definition of morality.

We don't want our kids interacting with any books or movies or music or people who disagree with our morality unless our kids come to believe that. And I pointed out on that particular episode that that, A, is not very smart.

And I also pointed out that it doesn't work very well. They, as a country, are trying to do that. We can keep our people ignorant of Western to buy into, but it's not working. It's never worked to just try to isolate everyone from reality.

In fact, we're told in Proverbs 18 that a person who isolates himself is doing so for the wrong reasons. And so you're right. Exposing our children to what's going on, having these conversations so they understand why people are doing what they're doing on both sides and then helping them see how God would have them navigate these issues is the way that biblical Christian parents need to.

One of the ways that this whole cancel culture is a manifestation of totalitarian leftism and not liberalism is because eventually you're going to have the tiny handful of an elite group, elite in their own minds, of course, who even exist after everything else is smoldering in the ashes because it's a very cannibalistic concept.

You more and more hear about even those that were considered a part of the left. We could even consider Dr. Seuss being a part of that, who have been attempted. There have been attempts to annihilate them from public view, public hearing.

And this just keeps progressing. There is a hunger, isn't there? There is a hunger on the part of these proud and arrogant and self-righteous elitists to continue to hunt down and dig up things that they can attempt to remove from society that they don't believe fits their worldview.

Am I right?

Yeah, that's exactly what totalitarianism has to be in control and it has to be this. And of course, I have to clarify one statement you made. Yes, generally everyone, and then they have to knock everyone down when they do things that they don't like.

But the problem is that that's not always the case. Perfect example is Judge Kavanaugh exclusively did at a party when in college. The whole Me Too movement pretty much grew out of that. He was everywhere, who has sexual misconduct accusations coming against him.

And people of the leftist establishment are sitting back going, yeah, but a lot of those things he said, he wasn't on the job when he said them. Hold on, he was a sitting governor. Whether he was on the clock or not, that's completely different than a guy being held responsible for something that he supposedly did when he was in college.

And so they're not even consistent with the behaviors that they want to cancel. It really is about canceling people. And that's why they're so inconsistent in how they apply the cancellation, because they will latch on anything that they can latch on to to say, I don't like you, and so I'm going to use all of these reasons to cancel you.

They find out that those exact same reasons apply to people in their camp. They go, oh, well, that's okay because this person, you know.

Yeah, the feminists have been doing this for decades. But just as with Governor Cuomo, there are more and more exceptions on the left coming out of the woodwork who are trying to be consistent. Because not long ago, a leftist like Governor Cuomo would hear absolutely no opposition from the left.

Now you are at least hearing some. And amazingly, many in the left finally acquiesced and came to admit that Margaret Sanger, for instance, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was indeed a racist. She was indeed a champion of eugenics who desired to wipe out all the non-white races, originally through sterilization and then later through abortion.

But even though what you're saying, I believe, is absolutely correct, and it's infuriating and inconsistent, you are starting to hear more and more opposition from the left, from people who are guilty of the things that go against the ideology of the woke movement.

But in certain circumstances though, however, obviously, even you and I as conservative Christians, we are opposed to women, or anyone else for that matter, being sexually abused, sexually harassed, and on and on we go.

So it's one of those odd things, and even throughout the history of feminism, there's always been some unlikely unions between leftist feminists or liberal feminists and conservative evangelical Christians on things like pornography and so on.

That might not be so much of an issue today, but the feminists used to typically be guaranteed to be opposed to pornography. So not everything's monolithic.

That's very true. Sometimes, praise God, logic wins out.

That's right. We have to go to our first break right now. And as I said before, if anybody wants to join us with a question of your own for AM Brewster on cancel culture and our children, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question is personal and private.

We'll be right back with AM Brewster right after these messages. So don't go away.

Parenting, Consequences, and Teaching Children to Think Biblically

Getting a driver's license, running a cash register, flipping burgers, passing sixth grade. Do you know what they all have in common? They all require training, assessments and certifications. But do you know what requires no training at all?

Becoming a parent. My name is AM Brewster. I'm the president of Truth, Love, Parent and host of its award-winning podcast. I've been a biblical family counselor since the early 2000s. And what I've discovered is that the majority of Christian parents have never been biblically equipped to do the work of the ministry in their homes.

That's why Truth, Love, Parent exists. We serve God by equipping dads and moms to be the ambassador parents God called and created them to be. We produce free parenting resources, trained church leaders, and offer biblical counseling so that the next generation of dads and moms can use the scriptures to parent their children for life and godliness.

Please visit us at TruthLoveParent .com.

I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. My friend, Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I are headed down to Atlanta, Georgia once again for the G3 Conference. This year's G3 will be held Thursday, September 30th through Saturday, October 2nd on the theme, Christ is supreme over all.

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We are discussing cancel culture and your kids. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you are sending in a question or comment.

We have a comment from Tom in West Islip, Long Island, New York. And Tom says, a young man in Geneseo, New York, going to college there, has been suspended from his education program for putting on Instagram that he believed there was only two genders.

Outside of the fact that I find that to be a violation of his First Amendment rights, I am fearful, even voicing my opinion, that what they're doing is wrong, given the ramifications that might occur on my job and also to my daughter, who attends the same college.

We really are in a bad position right now. Not sure how this is going to end, but it really doesn't look like it will be peaceful. And any comments, Aaron?

Definitely, I do have a comment for that. Now, that was Joe, correct?

No, that was Tom in West Islip, New York.

All right, sorry, Tom. All right, so, yeah, that's a, and you're right, it does go against our First Amendment rights and whatnot. But I really, the thing I want to focus in on, Tom, you said, that I think is one of the key things that we need to be watching out for in our kids, in ourselves as well, is this idea of, there, you know, when I look at our children, I see that there are two kids that are going to be, we can definitely talk about those children, but I think that the bigger group are the ones who are going to be afraid of being canceled, or who are going to be the canceled one.

And what's interesting is that they are tempted, this group, the second group, is tempted in all the same ways that the first group is. Additional temptations on top of them, the biggest of which is the completely, completely just paralyzed by the idea of what will I do?

One of the things I think was interesting is that this past election, we saw early on in the coverage, which on Daily Wire, and one of the things that they talked about was when approached by a pollster outside of a polling station, they were afraid of telling this pollster that they had voted for Trump.

And that's one of the reasons they believe that the polling data was so, you know, Biden didn't have the question about who won the election or any idea of us being afraid. That is definitely something that we're going to have to talk with.

Thank you so much, Tom. Keep listening to Iron Trip and Zion Radio and to keep spreading the word about the program in West Islip, Long Island and beyond. Okay, so parents are sitting down with their kids.

How young do we start the conversation on cancel culture with them? And what would be the most delicate version that we start off with very young kids? And how do we progress as they get older in our defining it and warning about it?

Fantastic question. And I think from where they are, that means that we have to keep in constant understanding of what they know, what the reality is that a child who has the ability, who likely has, I want to go back real quick to remind ourselves what I'm talking about when I say cancel culture.

Okay, I said that it involves illegitimate and a good way of summing this up is that cancel culture involves unrighteous people punishing people in unrighteous ways. So let's apply that to a three-year-old who's playing with a toy, has that toy taken from them by is not doing it in any more, you know, not glorifying God the way they did it either.

So children understand these concepts. We don't, they don't have to be taught how to spin. They do, however, have to be taught how to respond. Children are all tempted to believe that they can define right and wrong outside.

They can be the sole source of what it means to be right or wrong. I didn't like that you did that. Therefore, you are wrong. This is why children will throw temper tantrums when they're in a store and they ask if they could have a toy and a parent says no.

The child has decided that you are wrong. You are not allowed to tell me no and I am now going to punish you for doing so. So regardless of the age of the child, I think that definitely first day in and day out, moment by moment to define right and wrong by their own standards.

Speak to that supposed to believe that they have the right to punish people who do and say things that they don't like. If I'm God, if I get to define morality, if I get to define what's right and wrong, then I get to throw lightning bolts at people who are wrong, which is why all those ancient false gods were depicted that way because mankind was just saying, well, if I were God, this is how I would respond.

And that's how exactly how human beings respond. So children are constantly tempted to believe that they have the right. And so we need to help our children with that as well. We need to sit in the moment when they have retaliated against the sibling or they have thrown a temper tantrum with mom and dad.

One of the things that we need to discuss is the fact that they don't give. They don't give. By the way, just as a side note on this particular topic, parents, I would strongly encourage you to stop using the word punish.

I have what you and I tell you what process of an acting harm on an offender for no other reason than they deserve the harm because what they yes, it's sometimes true that the experience of being punished may teach the offender a lesson, quote unquote.

But the action itself is simply designed to penalize the offender. Often the punisher doesn't care if the lesson is learned or not. So, for example, a speeder, you know, being required to pay a hefty fine, like the example that we used earlier of Cain punishing Abel by murdering him.

But but we also have to understand that punishment is also oftentimes a righteous thing. And there's in the lake of fire is going to be the ultimate and final act of punishment for all unbelievers and appropriate, even though it often does not allow for any lesson to be learned.