The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 21 – Marvin Olasky

Episode 21: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jeff interviews Dr. Marvin Olasky, the editor-in-chief of World Magazine. Dr. Olasky recounts his personal journey, beginning with his time as a member of the Communist Party during his youth. He describes a profound moment of reflection that led him to believe in God, which consequently caused him to leave the party. His path to Christianity was further shaped by reading the New Testament in Russian and studying early American Puritan writers.

The conversation then shifts to Dr. Olasky’s career in journalism, where he contrasts the modern trend of narrative construction with his philosophy of biblical objectivity. He also discusses the World Journalism Institute, a program designed to train young journalists in this philosophy. Finally, Dr. Olasky speaks about his new book, Lament for a Father, detailing the complex and distant relationship he had with his father and the lessons he learned about family, communication, and mercy through his posthumous research into his father’s life.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everybody. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. This is the show where we talk with major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how worldview changes everything.

My guest today used to be a member of the Communist Party in his early adulthood, but he had a huge change of heart, years of teaching as a journalism professor at a major university, and then became editor in chief of the Christian Publication World Magazine, my favorite magazine, position he’s held for many, many years. Please welcome to the show Dr. Marvin Olasky. Dr. Marvin Olasky, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (00:42):
Thank you, Dr. Jeff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:44):
I am really glad to talk with you. Every time we have conversations, I learn something new and I’m so excited to say congratulations on 20 years as editor-in-chief of World Magazine.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (00:58):
Right. Actually, 29 years.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:00):
29?

Dr. Marvin Olasky (01:01):
Right. Right. So one more to go, at which point I will continue writing, but step down from being editor.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:09):
I have loved every minute of it. I think every single person who’s watching this or listening to this, if you don’t already subscribe to World Magazine, you want to go to worldmag.com. Is that right? Worldmag.com. And go ahead and sign up for it. Just trust me, if you don’t have it, you need to get this magazine. It is my favorite magazine and has been during the whole time that I’ve known you. And it’s a remarkable way to take a biblical worldview and apply it to the issues of today and interesting and fascinating insights into people and into current events. So congratulations.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (01:50):
Well, thank you. Yes. I approve this message.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:55):
Now, you wouldn’t have back when you were younger, that you are the editor-in-chief of the number one biblically worldview oriented magazine in the world would have been a big surprise to your younger self, wouldn’t it?

Dr. Marvin Olasky (02:12):
Well, I think so. Particularly 50 years ago when I was a member of the Communist Party, that would have been quite astonishing.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:20):
Tell us a little about that. You were a radical when you were young.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (02:26):
Yeah. And these were the Vietnam War years. So I was involved in lots of demonstrations in Washington and New Haven, other places. And just kept moving to the left. I had become an atheist when I was 14. This is sadly traditional in a lot of American Judaism right now, Bar Mitzvah, 13 atheists of 14. And my atheism led me politically further and further to the left. What I learned at college certainly contributed to that. So by the time I graduated in 1971, I was a Marxist already and bicycled across the country to Oregon, worked on a small newspaper there, and then joined the Communist Party. Go ahead.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:12):
Yeah. I’m curious. We’re hearing that up to 70% of millennials say they would vote for a socialist for president. I think the latest statistic I saw was that more than 50% of Americans say a political revolution may be necessary to redistribute wealth. A lot of people are drawn to that now. What drew you to it then?

Dr. Marvin Olasky (03:36):
Well, along with the politics, probably certain ruthlessness. In other words, people today, millennials and others who say, yeah, socialism, they may be thinking about what passes, what’s called democratic socialism. The idea that peacefully people will get together and decide to pull all their resources and everyone will live communally and happily ever after. It doesn’t work out that way historically.

It never has worked out the way historically because at a certain point, people start becoming resentful about giving up if they’ve worked hard for something and other people haven’t, there’s a certain resentment at just transferring resources. And at that point, the revolutionaries have to decide, well, am I just going to give in to these natural tendencies to emphasize family and work for the benefit of my spouse and children and so forth? Am I going to just give into that or are we going to push harder to build a true egalitarian communalism?

(04:42):
And at that point, usually the hardest, the most ruthless people win out in the interparty struggles. That’s certainly what happened in the Soviet Union and China and so forth. So the toughest guys are the ones who say, “Democracy, forget about it. We’re going to do what we have to do, and that’s going to involve putting people in prison. It’s going to involve killing people.”

But hey, that’s what we need to do in order to have a bright, wonderful revolutionary society. And what does it matter if a few hundred or a thousand or a million people get killed along the way? That’s what happens in revolutions all the time. And folks who today just say, “Oh, I am for democratic socialism. Isn’t this nice?” Don’t realize what they’re getting into.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:25):
So they start with the idea that we can have socialism by the ballot rather than the bullet, but those with the bullets always end up running the show.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (05:35):
Yeah. The most ruthless people win out in revolutionary situations because others want to be nice, they want to play nice. And when some people are nice and other people have guns and are willing to kill folks in the way, it’s the people with guns who win.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:51):
So you got involved in communism because you thought this is the way to peace, this is the way to fight the military industrial complex and things like that. But at some point along the way, you had a revelation that this is not going the direction that you thought it would. Can you tell us a little about that?

Dr. Marvin Olasky (06:13):
Yeah. Well, I remember weirdly writing in a notebook at that time. Yes, this revolutionary stuff we’re talking about is sin, but it’s sin going somewhere. That is life is full of sin, but this is sin that would actually be progress. Wow. So I thought that was useful. But now where did this concept of sin come from? Maybe from my childhood, but I think I’d pretty much left that behind for about 10 years. November 1st, 1973, I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan.

And then for some reason, which I still can’t explain, because I was pretty happy as a communist, I saw lots of things going wrong in the United States, Watergate and all that, which meant lots of things going right for communism. I thought this was the wave of the future, but for some reason that day I was in my room just off the University of Michigan campus and I sat in my chair for eight hours just thinking, “Well, is there really a God?”

(07:15):
“And if so, what does that mean as far as my own personal life? What does that mean as far as politics?” So three o’clock in the afternoon, I sat down, I was a communist. I had been reading a pamphlet by Lenin called Socialism and Religion. It wasn’t anything new to me. He said that atheism is the foundation of communism. I read that, but I started to think, “Well, what if I’m wrong in being an atheist? What if there really is a God?”

And after eight hours, and I wasn’t doing any drugs or anything like that, I was looking over the clock and just surprised. I was still sitting and just thinking these thoughts coming into my head, there really is a God of some sort. Got up, wandered around the University of Michigan campus, cold, dark for a couple of hours. And at one o’clock in the morning, I realized, “Hey, I believe in a God of some sort, therefore I’m no longer a communist, therefore I should leave the communist party.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:05):
Wow. And what did you leave to go to? Did you have any idea at that point?

Dr. Marvin Olasky (08:11):
No. At that point, I left because I just thought this wasn’t right and there was a God of some sort. What kind of God I had no idea. And after three weeks of wondering and starting to read things by people who were no longer communist, hey, I had to get back to writing my term papers and tried to put this stuff out of my mind.

And here’s where God and his mysterious providence intervened. 1974, to get a PhD, I had to have a reading knowledge of a foreign language. The language I had been learning was Russian. I had forgotten my high school, French and all that and just had a book in my bookshelf that I had picked up a couple years before when I was a reporter in Oregon. It had been given to me. I’d held onto it as kind of a weird souvenir of my Oregon life.

(09:03):
It was a copy of the New Testament in Russian that people in a Russian speaking commune in the Willamette Valley had passed on to me and started reading just for reading practice. And I may be the only person reading Matthew who really likes the chapter with all the begats, so- and-so, beget, so- and-so, because I could get through it pretty quickly. I knew the Russian word for having children. But I kept reading, plunging on.

And by the time I got to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters five and six, I thought, wow, this is something really special. It’s not manmade. Because Jesus’ whole concept of turning the other cheek was totally foreign to me as a communist. Basically, if someone hits you on the cheek when you’re a communist, you’re supposed to cut off his head, basically. Someone acts harshly towards you, you want to be doubly harsh to him.

(09:57):
But Jesus speaking about love and compassion and so forth, I thought, “Wow, this is really special.” So that led me part of the way towards becoming a Christian. I had grown up in a Jewish household thinking that Christians are kind of stupid people who worship Christmas trees, but in the fall of 1974, when I was assigned, not volunteered, assigned to teach a course on early American literature, well, what’s early American literature? It’s basically puritan sermons.

So all these dead white males from 300 years ago were preaching to me and I realized these are not stupid people. You can hate the Puritans, you can love the Puritans, but anyone who reads them thinks these are people who work this out very carefully, very rationally, step by step. So I came away from that also heading towards Christianity. There are other twists and turns along the path, but three years after finally deciding, realizing there’s a God of some kind, I was ready to actually say this is Christ, this is God and professed faith in Christ joined the church.

(11:02):
And that was in 1976. So 45 years later, here I am believing more and more in Christ and really reading the Bible and realizing this is actually very, very wise stuff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:17):
Wow. I get chills when I hear your story because it is such a powerful demonstration of God’s spirit working in a person that you were reading the New Testament in Russian as a graduate student and encountered Jesus.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (11:33):
Yeah. And this is God. My own path was towards more sin, sin that I thought was useful, but full of sin personally, politically, but God had other plans. So yeah, I hear lots of people come to Christ in lots of different ways. Sometimes it’s sudden, sometimes it takes longer, but yeah, it also sends chills running up and down my spine because it’s God. It’s a story of what God’s doing. It’s not that we are wise, our natural tendency is towards sin and towards basically being pretty stupid, but at some point, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, we realize God’s a lot smarter than us.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:17):
Wow. When we first met, you were a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. And one of the things, when I was a professor, people would always say to me, “Hey, I’m sorry that you’re a teacher. Those who cannot do teach.” You’ve always done both things. You have always taught journalism to students, but you have been a journalist working and writing and editing all during that time. And I’m curious a little bit about how you got interested in journalism, because I think this is all going to tie together. We’re going to talk about a new book that you have written so timely and so significant, but I’d really love to just talk about journalism for a minute.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (13:02):
Well, worked in my high school newspaper and I discovered the thrills of a press pass, namely when there was a fire in the high school, I showed my press pass and the firefighters let me go behind them and look around at the burn stuff and so forth, which other kids in high school couldn’t do. I thought, “Wow, this is lots of fun.” Then I went to work at college, I became a reporter on the Yale Daily News.

I wrote a column, enjoyed going around New Haven, Connecticut, and going into poor areas of the city, going into places where ordinarily I wouldn’t go. And I thought, “Hey, this is lots of fun to be able to do this and see things I otherwise wouldn’t see.” Worked on a small newspaper in Oregon, enjoyed when the county commission had a new car and it was a little fancier than the average resident of Bend, Oregon had, and they didn’t want me to see it and take photos of it.

(14:06):
I enjoyed being able to get the specifications from the car dealer and take a photo of the garage door and say, “Behind this locked door, there’s this car.” So it was things like that that just seemed lots of fun.

(14:22):
There’s more to the story, but skipping by, it just always seemed interesting to me. When writing my dissertation, and I had become a conservative and was writing things that the very liberal chairman on my dissertation committee didn’t like. So he actually resigned about a month before the dissertation defense. He did what was very unethical in academia and resigned as chairman just because he didn’t like the politics of it.

But happily, there was another fellow, the one Christian in the history department of 38 history professors at the University of Michigan, the one Christian who saw what this fellow, this other professor was doing to me and came on as my chairman. And so I managed to get my PhD, but he wrote a recommendation that wasn’t really going to help me get an academic job, although it turned out I was able to get one, but saying that basically I’m not an academic, I’m more of a journalist and he saw that in me and he was right.

(15:24):
So becoming a professor, I also had the opportunity to write some columns and freelance for magazines and so forth, and then eventually got involved with the world. And through the kindness of Texas taxpayers at that time, I was able to get a full-time salary for teaching six hours a week and able to devote most of my time to World. So thank God for Texas taxpayers who don’t exactly know what’s going on at the university and were actually subsidizing World at that point.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:53):
Well, now they do. And some of them are going to be grateful.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (15:56):
Well, yeah, some of them are. Most of them are probably resentful, but yeah, it was always a lot of fun being a journalist. It turned out that since my lifetime batting average and Little League was about 182 and I wasn’t able to do a lot of other things. I found that I was able, pretty well, to do some writing and then I actually turned out to be a pretty decent editor. And so yeah, 29 years later, editing World, I’ve enjoyed not every moment, but most moments of it. And I still enjoy writing a lot.

And yeah, I would advocate journalism because, and this is what we tell world readers, we’re going to introduce you to people you probably don’t know and would never meet. We’re going to take you to places you probably would never visit. Maybe sometimes we’re going to suggest ideas to you that you probably haven’t had or might not have. So yeah, journalism has always been enormous fun.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:55):
Well, I have loved it. I love the format of the magazine and the way it’s so accessible and the way it does bring up ideas. But you have a different idea of journalism than seems to be common today even from when, even back before you were a Christian, you saw journalism as a way to reveal the truth. Whereas, and I hope I’m not speaking out of turn here, but it seems like a lot of journalism today is designed to construct a truth or construct a narrative and then pick stories that fit that narrative and diminish stories that don’t. Is that too harsh of a thing to say?

Dr. Marvin Olasky (17:37):
No, that’s a fine thing to say, and that’s accurate, that a lot of journalists are, they’re not members of the Communist Party, but their thinking has been powerfully influenced by Marxism. Black Lives Matter, the concept is a very good concept, but the organization itself is essentially a neo-Marxist organization. I mean, neo-Marxist because it puts race and place of class and all that type of stuff, which I’m sure Summit Ministries students learn a lot about, which is really good to know, to know how that works.

So all that stuff is out there, but it’s an ideology. An ideology is something constructed by human beings, and therefore it’s not objective. It’s subjective. It may be some ideologies are truer than other ideologies, but none of them is really objective as far as explaining the world the way it really is because the only one who knows objectively the way the world is, is the person who made it, and that’s God.

(18:38):
And the Bible tells objectively how the world is. And so a world, we have our philosophy of biblical objectivity, which is unusual, I mean, highly unusual in American journalism, which is very subjective, sometimes pretending to be objective in terms of ideology, but it’s subjective or sometimes saying, “There’s no way ever we can know what’s true. And so I’m going to quote from person X and person Y and person Z, I’m going to quote all their subjectivities and that’s going to lead to an objective story.” Well, that’s not the way it works. It’s still not objective.

(19:14):
I’m talking to you from my house in Austin, Texas, and the fellow who built the house used to live next door to us. And so when I had a question about the house, I was able to actually ask the builder and get an objective analysis. He knew the way the house was made because he had built it. When we want to find out the way the world, which is a house built by God, is constructed, we go to the Bible because that’s where the builder tells us how we constructed the house. So that’s basically biblical objectivity. That’s what we learn.That’s where we try to put into practice.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:49):
And if there are students who are watching this or listening to this right now, there is a way for them to study with you and your colleagues to learn the principles of biblical objectivity, learn to be excellent journalists through the World Journalism Institute. Can you just mention something about that? Because even if it’s just five or 10 or 20 students who are interested in this kind of thing, I would want them to know about it.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (20:15):
Well, sure. If they’re in their sophomore year in college, they’ve just finished their sophomore year in college, or more typically just finished their junior year in college, they’re eligible to apply to the World Journalism Institute College Program, which is two weeks. We’ve done it. We did it by Zoom last year. This year, we just did it at Dort University in beautiful Northwest Iowa. Two weeks, really intensive, working from nine in the morning usually to midnight, learning about writing on paper or for the website, but also broadcasting for podcasts.

And now we have a program Worldwatch, which is for students, 10 minutes daily, a TV show, and so also learning how to do that. And we typically have about 26 students a year, second half of May, and we offer, then, internships to some of them, and then others go and work for Christian ministries or secular organizations.

(21:25):
So no, it is, the students tell us regularly it’s the hardest two weeks they’ve ever had in an academic program, but also those who are journalism majors typically say they’ve learned more in two weeks in the program than they learned in their journalism courses being majors in their colleges because it’s just really intense. But the students form really strong bonds with each other.

And we have, I think, a teacher-student ratio this past year of about one to 2.5. So lots of World people involved. It’s really hands-on. And yeah, professors, I can say, really enjoy it. And the students actually working very hard, we get their reports and appraisals and they enjoy it too. And then they often want to get together for alumni relations and they develop lots of friends who sometimes become friends for the next 10 years.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:26):
Well, any of the students who’ve been to a Summit Ministries’ two week program who are interested in journalism could really benefit from that.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (22:36):
And I’ll say, also, that if they are not at that August time in life that is having finished their sophomore year in college, they can still learn a little. Here’s my commercial. I wrote a book that came out a couple years ago called Reforming Journalism, which basically we use as the text at the World Journalism Institute, but it’s something that a high school student can readily read, understand, and maybe even enjoy, because I try to do some storytelling in it. So yeah, I’d recommend that to people who have not reached the age of 20 years old or so, but are smart and interested enough in reforming journalism.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:18):
I would recommend that as well. I thought that was a terrific book. Thanks. I just wanted to follow up with one thought on World Journalist Institute. Your graduates have gone on to do some really extraordinary things. This isn’t just a program that’s an interesting thing for Christians to do. This is helping Christians move into the marketplace of ideas.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (23:44):
Yeah. We have a lot of students working at secular papers, including Washington Post and Gannett papers all over the country and so forth. So big papers, little papers. Yeah, we’re happy to see that because often it’s hard. Often that person may be the only Christian in the newsroom, but one thing I think I found out is if a person is a good writer.

There aren’t a whole lot of good writers to go around in America anymore and people who are good writers do not starve. Maybe hard at times, may have to fight with editors at times if they want to do an honest job, but no, they can survive and really enjoy being God’s servant in a different situation. It’s newsroom evangelism, which is really important.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:37):
Wow. Well, you’ve written a number of books in addition to editing the publication that comes out every other week for 29 years. I don’t know how you find the time to write, but I think you’re in a season of life where you’ve begun to really reflect back on your younger years. And this is a very personal thing that you’re thinking about and writing about now in this new book called Lament for a Father about the complex relationship you had with your dad.

And I was thinking this through when you were talking about coming to believe in God and God is our father. Could you tell a little bit about your story that you’re writing about here? I know that we want to make a difference in the world. We are living in families and a lot of people who are watching or listening right now have difficult relationships in their families and we want to learn.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (25:40):
Yeah. No, I had a difficult relationship in some ways in that my father grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household and was very ambitious and the book goes into the way he worked so hard to get into Harvard from a high school that was not a feeder school for Harvard, but he had to take an extra year of schooling. After graduating from high school, he went to a feeder school with the goal of applying to Harvard again. He was turned down the first time, so very ambitious.

And in college, he basically has to decide, am I going to stick with my father’s religion, that is my grandfather’s religion, which was Orthodox Judaism, which has God creating Adam and Eve and the whole world and everything. Or since I’m majoring in anthropology, am I going to be a success in anthropology by moving to the worldview of these very distinguished anthropology professors, which is basically straight Darwinistic evolutionary materialism.

(26:56):
He had to make that choice or he felt he had to make that choice because he was hoping to go to graduate school and anthropology and become a professor. He made the choice. He chose Harvard over Judaism, and he still retained an affection for Jewish culture, but theologically he looked at the Bible I read, I finally got my hands on his senior thesis that he did at Harvard. And he basically says, “The Bible is just another document from the ancient Near East. There’s nothing God about it. It’s just something people wrote like Babylonian documents,” or this or that.

So that was throwing over what he had learned and that I think looking back now is sad. So he went through a lot of other changes and he had, I think, sad experiences after he threw over his whole belief system to get into the anthropology program at Harvard for several reasons that are complicated.

(28:00):
The program kicked him out after his first year. So he had sacrificed everything to go there and the love was not reciprocated by Harvard at that point. He went into World War II right after the war. He had a fluent knowledge of German. And so as best I can tell with about 95% certainty, because he’d never talk about this, but right after the war, he was dispatched to be a translated interpreter to the concentration camps and refugees. And he saw what the Nazis had done, he saw the dead body stacked up, and that also changed his life.

So he went through a long career, but then when I came to believe in God and then specifically became a Christian, even though he didn’t believe in God, this was joining the enemy because I think he associated, as many Jews do, he associated, well, Christians with antisemitism, and he had seen the results of antisemitism, the dead bodies and concentration camps.

(29:07):
And so why was I going over to the enemy? So this was hard. We’d had a distant relationship already because he was a very introspective person. I was very selfish and self-absorbed, but once I became a Christian, I think things became harder. So he never really answered my questions and I was not persistent as I should have been in asking questions, but never really answered my questions.

So I had to, after his death at age 67 from cancer in 1984, I slowly became more and more interested in what he had gone through and I had to do a lot of detective work. I had to interview 10 of my cousins to find out what memories they had of him and of my grandparents. I was able to talk with my mother for many more years until she died in 2008, but I found out once I started doing research Once the Harvard people, after I pushed hard, gave me some of his records, once I talked with others, I found out that she actually did not understand a lot of things either about him.

(30:10):
I think he had kept some of these things from him from her. And I was able, I think, to find out what actually went on and to develop a certain gratitude to him for not telling me all these things. I don’t know if some of the listeners here have seen detective shows, police shows. One of the common things is the police officers, the detectives don’t go home and tell their wives and kids what they’ve seen on their job. And that’s actually a merciful thing for them to do. It’s very hard on them keeping all this within themselves.

And that’s what my father did. He kept within himself some things he had seen, but I think this was a very altruistic thing on his part. He did it for the benefit of his wife and children. In my case, if he had told me all the concentration camp stories and identified that with antisemitism and said, Christians are antisemitic, I would’ve become older believing that.

(31:11):
And that probably would’ve inhibited me as I moved towards Christianity. So I’m very grateful, in fact, that he didn’t tell me that, which wasn’t true. The real Christians, the true Christians in Germany fought against Hitler. And true Christianity is the best friend, kissing cousin to true Judaism. But I would not have believed that. So I’m grateful to my father, in that way, for keeping a lot of this within himself. I wish he had talked more, but I can understand now why he did it and I can honor that and love him for doing that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:50):
That is a powerful thing, Marvin. I know as a dad, and I’ve had a lot of difficult family struggles, I’ve talked about this publicly a lot, wrote about it in a book called The Secret Battle of Ideas About God. But as a dad, I constantly struggle with how to help my children prepare for life in a difficult world, but also that mercy that you’re describing of doing that and keeping in mind their capacity to grasp things and what it means when I just lay things on them.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (32:31):
My father’s favorite saying was, “Expect the worst so you won’t be disappointed.” And that’s really after a certain point after Harvard kicked him out, after he saw what the Nazis had done after he had an unhappy marriage that nevertheless he stuck with. And I think I’m much better off because he did than if they’d gotten a divorce. After all these blows to his self-esteem and to his sense of things, I think he really internalized that. He did expect the worst, so he wouldn’t be disappointed, but you don’t want to have a child grow up that way.

I don’t think, for whatever reason, I tend to be more of an optimist than a pessimist. So I’m glad I am. I want my children to be optimistic. I think as Christians, we can be optimistic because we know there’s a big, hard struggle along the way, but eventually there’s a happy ending, both individually for us and then for the whole world.

(33:35):
So yeah, we don’t want our kids to expect the worst. We want to instill a sense of optimism in them. And yeah, that means sometimes we withhold from them some of the realities of things until they’re old enough to understand it themselves and realize that, yeah, bad things happen, but that’s not the end of the story.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:58):
I think I’m seeing biblical objectivity as you described it in a new light based on what you just said. Because when I read World Magazine, as opposed to other magazines that I read, there’s only one other news magazine that I regularly read. There is a current of hope that runs through everything. Because God is there, because God is a creator and a loving Father, we have hope even in the midst of difficult things.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (34:30):
Yeah, I think that’s true. And we ask our reporters, number one, go out and report. We try to do things that write stories at street level, not sweet level, as we say. It’s a lot easier these days, by the way, just to throw out your opinions, but to actually do reporting is hard, which is why a lot of people don’t do it. But we emphasize that and this means reporting bad news very often, but we always ask and reporters are conscious of this, is there a redemptive thread?

And very often there is. Sometimes it just looks bleak and we just report that. But other times, yeah, there’s bad news we report. But nevertheless, you see people, particularly Christians, but others as well, soldiering on, bringing heart into a situation that may just seem cold and ruthless and showing the way that Christ changes lives as he changed our lives.

(35:30):
So no, that’s very rewarding to, I think our reporters are realists, but they’re also, to a certain extent, romantic realist and the romance is true because Christ loves the church and we can report what God does in the world through common grace, through special grace, to begin restoring things and bring people to himself.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:54):
And yet they also have to be able to discern the narratives that are out there, the stories that are being told that are untrue. It’s almost like there needs to be a streak of doubt in the mind of a reporter to somehow hear what’s going on behind the story that they’re being fed in order to get to the real story. How do you balance that with hope?

Dr. Marvin Olasky (36:21):
Well, and I think your students learn that critical thinking at colleges is often a euphemism for Marxist or neo-Marxist thinking. But I taught for a couple of years, a big lecture class at the University of Texas called Critical Thinking for Journalists. And I actually meant critical in the way the word is defined in the dictionary. Namely, you think hard about stuff, you don’t go in just thinking that everything is nice, you ask hard questions, you criticize authorities, which people on the left like when it’s criticizing conservative authorities, but not progressive authorities.

But yeah, everyone, everyone is to some extent, and this includes Christians. Everyone is telling a story of some kind, some more true than others, and you want to probe that and ask, how do you know this is true? In fact, there’s a fellow who told me the four hard questions at some point, and I passed that on to our students and you want to ask those questions.

(37:42):
So you can ask those questions and be critical, but again, we have the basic understanding that there is reality in the world, there’s objective reality in the world, and that reality is God and the world God has created and that in some ways we here on this earth are in the arena and we’re on a stage that’s broken in some ways and there are people who are watching. There are fans in the stands and that’s important.

In Texas, there’s a song, The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You, which has, I think, a certain theological significance. I’m not sure that’s the way it’s often sung, especially when people have had a couple of beers, but the eyes of God are upon us and the angels are in the stands and we learn the Bible that they’re watching. And that’s pretty exciting that we are athletes out there, as Paul said, and we run the race.

(38:46):
So it’s exciting to be in that. It’s also hard, exhausting at times, but there’s excitement in running the race. So that’s partly the redemptive thread and also knowing that God is in charge. Another one of our little sayings, I mean, that I try to have our reporters and our readers understand is that the sky isn’t falling because God is holding up the sky. So we can have that faith that even when things look bad, there’s a plot here, there’s a story, there’s a script that God has written, and at the end, there’s a happy ending.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:22):
Yeah. That we can be curious without having to be cynical.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (39:26):
Yeah. We are very curious because we don’t know from moment to moment what’s happening. I mean, God knows this is all part of God’s plan, but we are learning all the time and watching sometimes with jubilation, sometimes with frustration. But yeah, it’s all part of a story and we are little hobbits in a great big world, but we have our task and it’s pretty exciting.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:51):
Marvin, as we draw our conversation to a close, I’m thinking about my relationship with my father, which was strained when I was in college and we reconciled and it’s been great since, but I’m wondering if you would just give us a little bit of insight of what you learned as you were writing Lament for the Father about those who are watching or listening right now who have a difficult relationship with the parent. Is there any wisdom that you could give to them, any way that we can take the hope that we’ve been talking about and help apply it to their personal situation?

Dr. Marvin Olasky (40:32):
Well, let me start with one thing I learned about myself, that I was already learning over the years, but it came to me more emphatically about how self-centered I was as a teenager in my 20s, even into my 30s. When I was growing up, I basically saw my parents as my servants to a certain extent. I expected them to do stuff for me.

I looked at them in that way, that their task in life, and this is putting it a little crassly and roughly, and I suspect the listeners are better people than I was, but I basically didn’t think of them as human beings with their own joys and frustrations and problems and all that. I basically saw them in relation to me and that in part is being young and so forth, but I look back and I wish I had done better. I wish I had thought of them as human beings with some needs of their own rather than just functioning to meet my needs.

(41:47):
So I think looking back, if I had had that awareness then that I have now, I would’ve been a much better son to them. And that may be something that some of the sons and daughters who are out there listening can apply to themselves.

(42:04):
Secondly, I learned, again, and I think you have to have that self-insight first, but I really came to realize the importance of asking questions. I wish I’d asked more questions. I wish certainly as I was older and they were older still, but still alive, I wish I’d asked them to tell me or at least write down more about their own backgrounds and where they came from and what their parents were like and their grandparents, if they knew anything about them and so forth.

So I wish I’d asked them, “Oh, please write some of this stuff down or tell me about it because at some point later on, I’m going to want to know it and it’s going to be harder to find out at that point.” A third thing is, even if you’re older or if your parents have died or they’re no longer in contact, there’s still a lot of research you can do, especially with the internet now.

(42:59):
I mean, I was able to find out what kind of music they were probably listening to, what the news events were, how things that affected their lives, how this and this and this. So even if you can’t talk with them directly, you can interview other people, but even just going on the internet, finding out how they got from one place to another, if they had to travel to school, how they had to travel, if they had to go a long distance at some point, how they did, you can find out all that stuff now. You can research and it’s really interesting detective work to do.

So that would be a recommendation also to folks. But I think it starts with the self-insight that you have to really be interested in them and thinking of them as real human beings. And then also I think as parents, we realize, hey, as parents, we know what our parents did wrong and we are going to work hard to correct that.

(43:54):
And if there were three things we really wished our parents would’ve done with us, we’re going to do them with our children. But of course, what we won’t be aware of are the three other things that we could do and maybe our children aren’t telling us they’d really like, maybe they are, but we don’t, in other words, we will make whatever flaws we see in our own parents, I think we can be pretty sure that our children will see rightly those flaws in us and we can repair some of those things, we can do better in some ways, but we’ll probably also do worse in some ways.

So I would say, also, from the point of view of parents, try as best you can to have a really good, honest relationship with your kids so that you can be frank with them within the limitations of what they can understand in different ages, and you hope they will be frank with you.

(44:52):
So if you can convey to them, “Don’t worry about hurting my feelings, I would really like to know what you would really want me to do.” And some kids will say that, and that’s very useful. It’s very useful to know. Not that we’ll be able to satisfy in every way, but perhaps we’ll be able to satisfy in some ways that we otherwise would not. But yeah, communication and really pushing that hard and from both ends as much as possible, I think is really important.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:22):
I see that being so helpful personally, but if you extend that as your mission to the world, those same principles apply. Marvin, thank you for sharing your wisdom today. Thank you for sharing your story with us. It’s been a fantastic journey with you in the last little bit, and I’m really grateful that you came on the show today.

Dr. Marvin Olasky (45:44):
Well, thanks, Jeff. And no, congratulations on Summit’s success. And I do pray that you’ll be able to climb even higher mountains.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:54):
Amen. It has been so great to have Dr. Marvin Olasky from World Magazine on this show. Follow him at worldmag.com. Go ahead and subscribe if you don’t have that publication already. You can also follow him on Twitter @MarvinOlasky. There is a lot of fake news out there. There’s a lot of twisted information out there. It is so important to do journalism well or anything that God calls us to do and to do it with integrity. So go forward, be the one to stand, be courageous in Jesus’ name. We’ll see you next week.

Ryan Dobson (46:32):
Hi, everyone. This is Ryan Dobson from Rebel Parenting. When my parents, Jim and Shirley Dobson, chose Summit Ministries Worldview Conference for me when I was 17, who knew how completely transformed my life would be in two short weeks? It changed me so much, I’ve returned every summer for 34 years.

Summit Worldview Conferences challenge students ages 16 to 25 to think deeper about their faith and convictions by engaging with today’s top worldview thinkers and apologists. This summer, your student can attend an in- person conference, that’s right, in person or summit’s amazing virtual experience. They will be equipped to vigorously articulate biblical truth, meaningfully impact culture, and curb the influence of false worldviews. Join Summit this summer and change the trajectory of your students’ life forever. Click the link in the show notes to learn more.