Pastor Eric Brown offered another angle on the Virtue in the Wasteland matter that I found useful. It is reproduced below.
The issue I have is this: I don’t know if ViW is designed to be an educational podcast so much as an informative one, and this is a distinction I think is important.
When Thomas and I podcast, we are intending to teach. We are diving into the Scriptures saying, “here is how it is.” That is an educational endeavor – we are teaching (or at least trying to). ViW seems much more informative, in the sense that they will present a bunch of random “things” out there in the modern day wasteland.
Or to think of it this way – they seem more along the lines of reporters doing interviews to present what the interviewed thinks, where as we tend to give our opinion like a editorial would (if you’d rather think of this in outdated print journalism terms).
Now, even if this is a valid distinction, that doesn’t mean one can’t raise the issue of whether or not a certain guest is a worthy or proper guest… but the emphasis on being a Doctor of the Church might be slightly misplaced when they are acting more as journalistic interviewers.
My response:
I think that’s a fair angle to take, for sure, and by far the most persuasive case I’ve seen for the position that my concerns might be misplaced.
Now, the journalistic approach does open the issue of the removal of a listener’s concerns a bit wider. Even if the idea is to curate opinions, then there still seems to be a line past which the expression of an opinion is prohibited. In which case the question becomes: what is the standard in play that allows the publication of an anti-church agenda but prohibits concerns surrounding the individual with said agenda from being aired in that same space.
I don’t see how we can have it both ways, but I’m open to exploring a paradigm where this is possible.
Pastor’s final word:
I don’t know enough about the show, but I always had the idea that they were… poking around the fringes. That it wasn’t to be safe (boring) topics and interviews, but things that were a bit… stranger.
Without question, this take has merit — and it does somewhat blunt my criticism. I’ll continue to assert the principle of responsibly caveating material like this that goes out, especially under the circumstances, but I’ve laid all that out for consideration already. Pastor Brown’s argument also deserves a hearing.
I think in the end this is something where a difference of opinion is unavoidable. I’m okay with that, and my readers can and will fall to either side of the dividing line. If we are all earnestly seeking to glorify God in the content we provide, we can certainly go wrong (being yet sinners), but not too far wrong, at least in theory.
Lastly, I want to thank Pastor Brown for holding me accountable for my views when he differs, just as I have done for Virtue in the Wasteland. One of the most wonderful gifts of the Gospel is that we can have our disagreements, but as long as we remain united around one Word and one Faith, then we’re never too far apart from one another to be reconciled.
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