Ideas Have Consequences

The Consequences of Killing God with John Stonestreet

• Disciple Nations Alliance • Season 2 • Episode 25

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The foundation of our society has shifted beneath our feet. Where there was once a firm base rooted in the Bible, we now find our culture in a moral freefall. Special guest John Stonestreet from the Colson Center reveals how subtle shifts have radically eroded people’s ability to find truth, identity, justice, and meaning. Believers have a responsibility to shape society in such a way that people know truth and can find meaning and justice. Today, prominent voices like Richard Dawkins are waking up to recognize the role of Christianity in creating a society that supports human dignity and freedom. It’s time that believers learn the same and take action.

John Stonestreet:

Yeah, if love is winning and truth is losing, we're playing the wrong game, right? This is not the game. This is not the Christian game. We're playing somebody else's game.

Luke Allen:

Hi friends, welcome to Ideas have Consequences. The podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. Here on this show, we examine how our mission as Christians is to not only spread the gospel. Welcome to Ideas have Consequences. The podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. Here on this show, we examine how our mission as Christians is to not only spread the gospel around the world to all the nations, but our mission also includes to be the hands and feet of God, to transform the nations to increasingly reflect the truth, goodness and beauty of God's kingdom. Tragically, the church has largely neglected this second part of her mission and today most Christians have little influence on their surrounding cultures. Join us on this podcast as we rediscover what it means for each of us to disciple the nations and to create Christ-honoring cultures that reflect the character of the living God.

Scott Allen:

Well, welcome again to another episode of Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. I'm Scott Allen, I'm the president of the DNA and I'm joined today by my friends and co-workers, darrell Miller, luke Allen, and we have a really special guest, a longtime friend and somebody that we respect deeply, joining us today. John Stonestreet is the president of the Colson Center and I'm sure is somebody that many of you listeners are familiar with from his really powerful daily podcasts, breakpoint and his work with World Magazine and just many other things that he's doing around the culture. John, it's great to have you with us today. Thanks for taking time.

John Stonestreet:

Oh, you bet, it's always great to talk to you guys and it's been a while, so it's nice to reconnect here.

Scott Allen:

It is. It is John. Yeah, john, I thought just to get the ball rolling today. I was looking at your website this morning and I came across your byline, which I thought was terrific. It has to do with bringing the church clarity in this chaotic cultural moment and I thought, well, the question would just you know, there's many big issues on which Christians today, I think, need some clarity in this chaotic cultural moment. What do you see as some of the big ones that rise above the rest, one or two, what are those big issues or that are on your heart in particular, john? And what's the confusion and what kind of clarity do we need to be speaking into that confusion?

John Stonestreet:

Well, that's a big question and I think it kind of underscores what a lot of us feel like, which is kind of we're playing this game of cultural whack-a-mole. You know, we can't keep up with how many of these things are popping up that need to be smacked on the head, and a lot of them are noisier than others, and I think one of the difficult things is sometimes we can think like the noisy things are the most important things.

John Stonestreet:

But you know, I kind of think about and a lot of people think about, culture, like the water. You know what water is to a fish and you know it's just what is all around us and so in that sense, like the ocean, we have the cultural waves, which right now it's a really, you know, rocky culture Turbulence. Right, there's a lot of turbulence. Know, rocky culture Turbulence right.

John Stonestreet:

There's a lot of turbulence, that's right. I mean, we're getting hit by waves, sometimes we see them coming, but a lot of times we don't. But you know, a big factor in what creates those waves and also in our experience in the culture of these undercurrents, like in the ocean I don't know if you've ever had that experience.

John Stonestreet:

You take your kids to the beach and you see them run into the water and you put your towel down and look up and there they are. And then you look down again and you look up and they're not there and it's like they were just there what happened?

Scott Allen:

And you're carried along by it and you don't realize it. It's such a really good analogy, john.

John Stonestreet:

Well, and culture is that way.

John Stonestreet:

We've had some significant shifts in our culture and I think you know I sometimes think about it in light of the four relationships that humans are in our upward relationship with God, the inward relationship and how we understand ourselves, the outward relationship with how we relate with others, and the downward relationship, how we relate with the other, the rest of creation. And I think, if you kind of can see this culture as a culture really fully experimenting in life without God. So think about the parable of the madman from Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the two places that Nietzsche wrote about the death of God, and in this one it's not like Zarathustra. In Zarathustra he's really writing about kind of making a case for let's build this world without God, let's be courageous, let's be. Superman. Yeah, the Superman that's right In the madman.

John Stonestreet:

he's really going after the atheist intellectuals who think it's going to be all smooth sailing and you know talks about the earth being unloosed from its sun, so we don't know what up and down is anymore.

John Stonestreet:

It's darker, it's colder and I think you can kind of sum it up in light of those four relationships, seeing that disconnect from God which you know, worldview advocates like us have been talking about for a long time. In a more theoretical sense, it really feels like we've moved to see the existential consequences. Remember Schaeffer? Francis Schaeffer talked about living on Christian capital and what if that capital was almost run out.

John Stonestreet:

Well, we're going to existentially sense, I think, a catastrophic loss of truth, a catastrophic loss of identity, a catastrophic loss of trust or love and a catastrophic loss of meaning and purpose. So, upward, inward, outward, downward truth. Upward, inward, outward, downward.

John Stonestreet:

Truth, identity, love and trust and meaning. You know what we're really here for, where we fit in the cosmos. Wow, without those things, I think you know, without those things, we kind of take those things for granted. But those are God ideas. Those are things that only exist truth, identity, trust or love, and love and meaning in a God-infused world.

Darrow Miller:

God's not there. That's absolutely true.

John Stonestreet:

We're going to start feeling this more and more and more, and I think a lot of those issues that are hitting us as we're floating, bobbing around in the ocean of culture and getting smacked from the right and the left from these waves, I think you can probably trace them to those undercurrents.

Scott Allen:

I'm so thankful you started in that kind of broader way, john, rather than, you know, narrowing in on any one or two issues.

Scott Allen:

Just this broader moment that we're in and I often think of it.

Scott Allen:

You know, darrow, when he teaches on worldview he has a kind of very powerful way of describing how worldviews kind of penetrate into a culture and it takes often many generations and often starts with really powerful ideas. And you mentioned Friedrich Nietzsche and you know, I mean, we're going back to the 1800s now Philosophers like Nietzsche and Marx, and you know, of course, charles Darwin and many others, you know that were active in that time. But those ideas, you know, at the time they seem, you know, they're cutting edge and they're just kind of locked up in really small little academic places maybe. But then they begin to penetrate culture through the arts and then those you know things become institutionalized in curricula and policies and you know whatnot, and then eventually all of us are shaped by those ideas that you know, the way Darrow describes it is, you know, the common man, right, and that's the way—I agree with you. I think where we're at right now is those ideas now are hitting the common man. Everyone's now shaped by these ideas, right.

John Stonestreet:

I mean Dara has been doing this. Dara worldview advocates never address like international aid and humanitarianism and benevolence and community development. But we think about kind of the great intellectuals of the last 100, 150 years the Marx and the Darwin. I mean Darwin's trying to offer an account of the world without God. Marx is very utopianistic, right. He basically thinks that this is going to bring about a perfect world. The thing that keeps taking me back to Nietzsche lately is that he was in the parable of the madman, describing the existential experience of being without light, without heat, without a sense of up and down. And if you remember the parable and if you haven't, everyone should go read it because it's free, it's on the internet, it's so accessible. So he has this madman. He's speaking to a group of atheists right who had this kind of smugness about the world they're going to build without God.

John Stonestreet:

And they make fun of him and the madman just goes on this street. If you remember, what happens at the end is everyone's just standing there in astonishment and the madman says I've come too early, like this is coming the deeds been done yeah, but deeds when they're done, take time yeah to be seen and heard yeah, and what if? We're seeing and hearing. I mean, we warned about this all the, all the apologetic worldview stuff that was done in the middle to latter part of the 20th century, 1970s, 80s.

John Stonestreet:

We are talking about the Francis Schaeffers and the David Nobles and the Norm Geislers writing about this really on a theoretical level, like oh hey, listen, if there is no God, we don't have a source of right and wrong, and hey, if there is no God, we don't have a source for meaning. And if there is no God, we really don't know who we are. Well now, like think about, the dominant idea on college campuses, and now even below, is that there is no such thing as human identity, that it's a social construct to the very level of our bodies, or that it's not just that there's not a real source of meaning, but people are living lives in which they report to be meaningless. So in the Western world, in America, we have a declining life expectancy At this time in history it's crazy, especially among the American male because of deaths of meaninglessness or what's called deaths of despair.

John Stonestreet:

This is a remarkable moment, to be kind of moving from this theoretical that we've all been writing and speaking and talking about for a long time and you know, darrell, to your great credit, I mean, you've been writing on the existential. Having seen it, you know, around the world for so long. Like you know, this is what happens when you try to build a community or build a culture or build a country without God. It just you're tethering these ideas to things that can't hold the weight. But it's almost like you know, we had those carabiners, you know, tapped into the rock, but now they've come loose and we're free falling.

Luke Allen:

Hi friends, I wanted to tell you real quick about the Kingdomizer Training Program, which is the DNA's most popular biblical worldview online training course. It is available in seven languages, it's completely free and it's one of those courses that won't take you months to complete. Most people actually finish the entire Kingdomizer 101 in about seven hours. These courses were created to help Christians live out their mandate. These courses were created to help Christians live out their mandate to disciple the nations, starting with themselves and working out from there. I would recommend this course to any Christian who wants to stop living in a sacred secular divide that limits their faith to only some areas of their life. To sign up today, head to quorumdalecom and begin to have an impact for Christ on your culture that, if it's anything like mine, is in desperate need for truth and direction right now, Again, to sign up head to quorumdalecom, or you can learn more on the episode page, which you'll see linked in the show notes.

Scott Allen:

I've always appreciated Nietzsche's just. You know, honesty in that parable right. You know he's a nihilist but he's honest about what nihilism means and just how dark and unlivable it is. You know, and I'm like you know, because I feel like there's so many atheists that haven't. You know they don't kind of grasp. You know what they're advocating, you know what it means. You know. But he did, and you know, to his credit, you know he didn't sugarcoat it.

Darrow Miller:

But you just said the carabiners. We're pulling the carabiners out. Yeah, they're attached to something solid and now we're pulling them out to free fall from the solid. Yeah, people are recognizing that now.

John Stonestreet:

That's exactly right and it's probably another if we, I don't know, we might be killing this illustration by beating it too much, but the fall is euphoric much. But you know, the fall is euphoric. And think about the, the 90s and the 2000s, uh, up until you know, really 9-11, but really you know the 80s and 90s, this kind of euphoric feeling that we could kind of have this life of freedom and that's the promise, right, and I I think there might be a little bit more of hitting the ground now than there was.

John Stonestreet:

The free fall, the free fall. Yeah, it's just like we're trying to build a culture, but so many of these ideas of nihilism were destructive. By the way, one example that might endorse our thesis here that we're wrestling with now together is something I'm interested in. I want to hear your take on it as well. I just heard, for example, richard Dawkins, one of our atheists, our great enemies of atheism 15 years ago, turn around and say, hey, I like Christmas carols and maybe Christianity wasn't that bad.

John Stonestreet:

And then the epic story of the last year has been Ayaan Hirsh Ali coming out of radical Islam, making fun of Christianity, going into a radical atheism. And now I was actually at the event in London where she called herself a Judeo-Christian and I heard a thousand people gasp. And because it was like, first of all, what's that mean? And second, you know what's happened? Because clearly something and her evolution you know to steal that word back towards God has been really remarkable to watch. But her reasoning has been I didn't find the meaning and the purpose in atheism that I thought I would find there, and I'm wondering if some of these high-profile either atheists or agnostics trying to hold on to truth even a Bill Maher who continues to mock truth in so many ways but then looks at the kind of the far left and calls them out the Jordan Petersons of the world. I just wonder if there's—we're seeing people realize this existentially and rethinking their own worldview.

Scott Allen:

I don't think there's any question about it, john, it's so—it's kind of—. We've talked a lot about this and we've observed the same thing To us. There's an excitement to it and an incredible irony, and maybe I can touch on those, and, Daryl, I'd love your thoughts and Luke's too. The excitement is that I think, going back to what we were talking about previously, we're at this moment where the vestiges of Christianity, you know, have kind of evaporated. You know the cut flower, right. You know it's no longer being sustained by that soil, and you've got new things emerging that are dark, and you know they can't sustain freedom, they can't sustain human dignity or meaning or purpose, just as you well said, in the culture. And you've got people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, jordan Peterson, who's the author of Dominion, tom Holland.

Scott Allen:

You know many of these people. They're really thoughtful. Most of them are not Christians, but they're really thoughtful people that care about the culture, and they're rediscovering the Bible, going wow, all of these things that I love so much and believe in—you know even Richard Dawkins, right. You know they're under threat either from this kind of you know woke Marxism or Islam. You know like, literally, we could lose these things, and now they're rediscovering their foundations in the Bible and they're saying things like gosh, I'm far more Christian than I ever thought.

Scott Allen:

That's the excitement to me, like there almost seems to be an awakening right now or a revival of some sort. And the irony is that while they're discovering it within the Church, you've got this kind of—you know, I feel like the Church has kind of lost—the evangelical Church, anyways, doesn't know. You know the roots of—the biblical roots of these things. We've kind of got this truncated understanding of what it means to be a Christian is personally pious and try to get people saved and into the church building, and you know, but in terms of what from the Bible creates a Christian kind of culture, it's hard for Christians to understand that or think they don't think in those terms. You've got non-Christians now thinking in those terms, and you know, you've got this whole debate on Christian nationalism, like if we even talk about bringing biblical ideas into the culture, then that's a really wicked thing to do. And so, darrell, what's your take on this whole thing that John's bringing up?

Darrow Miller:

Well, I wrote a word down, a phrase. This is a pragmatic realization that's happening. These people who are what I would call the old liberals, who have a sense that there's truth and now we're seeing the free fall of Western civilization and they're saying we need to go back to the things that made Western civilization.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, they're literally rediscovering the Bible, right.

Darrow Miller:

And you know the way I describe it, at least with Peterson and maybe others, is they're on their way to the cross because, as they understand what has made the West and that you know, peterson saying the Bible is merely true, it's the foundation for truth and people are realizing it's the foundation for our being made significant in the image of God. Where does that come from? Well, it doesn't just fall out of the sky, it's come from somewhere. So you have these people who are looking for truth and who are realizing where we're going, because we have cut ourselves off from the voyage of looking for truth and now they're saying we can't do this. And there's a pragmatic realization that we need to go back to the things that made the West the West.

Darrow Miller:

Pragmatic realization that we need to go back to the things that made the West the West and hopefully this will lead them to the cross and realizing, while it is a set of ideas coming from the Judeo-Christian worldview, there's also a person there who they need to bow their knee before. That person and I just think it's exciting to see this going on and hopefully that will be like a slap. What do you call it? Hitting the church over the head with a two-by-four to say, hey, what are these people recognizing? You've had this all along, but you don't recognize it.

Luke Allen:

John, I want to get back to you, but just to see if I'm keeping up with you guys, just to see if I can put this in my own words. So when Nietzsche went back and proposed that God was dead, that became a very popular idea, because if God's dead, then I don't have that spirit in the sky telling me what to do, right, so I'll have perfect freedom, right. But what I don't think many people realized which I think Nietzsche did, which is interesting, what a lot of people who you know followed his train of thought there, they didn't realize is that when you lose God, you also lose purpose. You lose goodness, you lose that. When you lose God, you also lose purpose. You lose goodness, you lose truth, you lose beauty, you lose love, you lose mercy, you lose reason for forgiveness, you lose almost everything the heart desires, you lose joy. And what's ironic is Nietzsche a lot of times when he was writing, he would actually attack the people that liked his idea of God is dead, but they didn't actually fully live it out.

Luke Allen:

They still wanted to live in like a Christian world, like Richard Dawkins, likes the Christian culture they lived in, and he was pointing at these guys like you're being inconsistent with this train of thought here, you're being kind of syncretist between this idea that God is dead and you still want to live in this Christian culture where you have all these structures put in place that acknowledge that God is alive. And yet now today we've kind of lived out Nietzsche's plan and we realize that you can't live in a world where God is dead. It falls apart, it starts eating itself. Where God is dead, it falls apart, it starts eating itself, and I think that at this point now, all these people are realizing oh, we do again need God.

Luke Allen:

and that's what all these people are starting to recognize All the good things that are like in life actually did come from God. So, nietzsche, you're wrong.

John Stonestreet:

Well, I think the central metaphor of that you know. Again, he says God is dead in two places, and one he's making the case for it and the other he's kind of warning against. This is going to be worse than you thought. It's not going to be. All you know, unicorns and rainbows here going forward.

John Stonestreet:

And you know the central analogy is he actually says it in the opening lines of the screed that the madman goes into in front of all these enlightened atheists. He says how were we able to unchain this earth from its sun? Now of course there's five references happening right now because he was so brilliant, but he's referring to the central discovery of science, which was supposed to be the thing that allowed us to stand on our own two feet, without reliance on religion or tradition or any sort of divine authority, which is science.

John Stonestreet:

But and that, of course, is that the earth revolves around the sun. But what if the sun disappears? And what he's basically saying is we built a world that revolved around God, and without that sun it's dark, it's cold. One of his great lines is doesn't that mean we're all straying through an infinite nothingness? I mean, there's just this existential reality that he's warning is coming Now. He thinks we can beat it down. He thinks the ubermatch, this mentality of the strong man, can give us something else to revolve around to. He's not landing in this kind of democratic humanism where we're just going to collectively sing Kumbaya and feel better about ourselves. He realizes that you're going to need a—in fact, here's what he says won't we ourselves have to become God simply to appear worthy? Of it.

John Stonestreet:

So I mean, there's such powerful lines here, but what he's talking about is an existential reality when that capital, when that Christian capital, divine capital, runs out.

Scott Allen:

Well, there's a direct connection to his. You know we need to become gods, these supermen to create.

Scott Allen:

You know we need to have the moral courage to create the world in our own image. You know there's a direct connection between that and Adolf Hitler, right, because that's what he tried to do. And I think, john, you know the vacuum created by the loss of God is the sun that holds things together, especially in the West, because the West did build a civilization around the worship of the one true God in the Bible. You know we can't live, right, with something's going to replace, right? You know you can't have a vacuum there, right, and I feel like this is kind of also describing where we're at right now is we're kind of casting around for something that can replace the loss and give meaning.

John Stonestreet:

Oh listen, we're out of options. Right, we're out of options, scott. I mean we tried science. Then we tried the strong man, the power. Right Right. We tried science. Then we tried the strong man, the power. We tried democracy. We tried just happiness and pleasure. Now Carl Truman's right. Since this is the podcast where we're trying to use the most analogies in history, let me give you one more. This is the one.

John Stonestreet:

I really like this one, you know, which is imagine being lost in the woods and pulling out your compass to find your way out of the woods and the wilderness, and everywhere you turn the compass points at you. See, this is the look inside you be you. This is Carl Truman's expressive individualism.

John Stonestreet:

Now for a while. That's going to be euphoric Again. It's the euphoric of the free fall, until you start realizing that you're falling. When you are looking at yourself and feeling good about yourself, that's great. Until you look around, it starts getting dark and you hear wolves howling in the background. Now you're like well, how do I find my way out? And you have nowhere to go. There's a sense of such existential loss. Who can I trust?

Scott Allen:

John, I'd like your thoughts on this, because my take has been that the whole kind of drumbeat of social justice has been really an attempt to replace a lot of that loss with meaning and purpose for people, that they feel that sense of purposelessness and some way of working towards a better world.

Scott Allen:

Right, you know, I've got to have something that gives meaning and purpose to my life. And I remember, you know, many years ago, john, you came to me and you said, scott, you know you guys are working with poverty and development and justice issues. What's this new drumbeat of social justice? This was way before, you know, black Lives Matter and all of this stuff kind of burst onto the scene and we wrestled with that, you know because. But even at that time I thought well, you know, this whole social justice has been always kind of associated with Marxism, I thought, but it's been that thing's kind of fading, I think. Since then, what I've realized is I was really wrong. Like that thing did not really fade away. That thing is flowering. In some ways it's really.

Scott Allen:

It is the kind of the dominant, you know, religion, if you will, or belief system that's taken over our institutions. You know, I mean just this week here and Luke was reminding me at the Oregon State Track Meet I'm in Oregon right now, you know it was a transgendered male that won several of the key events, right, you know. So, anyways, I'd love to hear your thoughts, john. Just what do you see? Because I think it's unlivable. It's a horrible worldview, this social justice worldview, because it divides people. It's highly divisive. There's no basis for love. I mean, the critical aspect of it is just, you know, doubt everything. There's nothing good. If it seems to be good, that's just some cover for some power play to. You know, somebody's trying to get your gore dominate you. You know I'm like this can't work, this worldview, but people are really trying, it seems, right now, to kind of make this the dominant, workable worldview. What's your take on all of this, john?

Scott Allen:

Catch me up on how your thinking has evolved on this since those early conversations we've had.

John Stonestreet:

You know. So it's interesting. You know, a lot of these things have roots in kind of a neo-Marxist, a social Marxist, postmodernism and what I've seen lately is kind of the stepchild of postmodernism. Critical theory kind of ascend and become this dominant theory of everything. And what I mean by a theory of everything is not a worldview. I think there's a difference between a theory of everything, idea of worldview and how I understand worldview to be. The theory of everything becomes ideology. It becomes everything has to fit in this box and nothing can fit outside of this box. And that becomes really problematic when it is a very limited worldview, if you think about a worldview not only being lenses but creating blinders and blockades.

John Stonestreet:

The critical theory impulse I think has been underplayed by people who say well, this is an academic theory. We heard this during the critical race theory conversation a couple years ago. This is an academic theory conversation a couple years ago. This is an academic theory. No one's actually teaching this in elementary school because it's at the college level. And have you ever read the academic? And I remember hearing that and thinking that sounds exactly like the pushback I got from the emerging church people when we talked about postmodernism back in the 90s which was you haven't really read postmodernism.

Scott Allen:

You don't understand it. It's too complicated.

John Stonestreet:

And to some degree they were right, because who has actually read Derrida and understood it anyway? But there was something we were seeing, which is whether or not people had read the academic source material for postmodernism. The culture had entered a postmodern mood.

John Stonestreet:

It was a mood right and I would tell people like, okay, we haven't read Derrida Foucault and Lyotard, but we have Britney Spears, kurt Cobain, the Matrix movies and Eminem. In other words, there was this cultural mood that was taking place. The same thing's happening with critical theory, where there's a mood where critical theory now has overtaken so much of the debate, including, for example, on economic justice. Now, what does critical theory add to the conversation? I think it adds two things. Number one is that we are oppressors or the oppressed not by what we've done, but by who we are, which means it's fatalist, and along with that is there's no way out, there's no forgiveness, which is why this poor chief's kicker right goes to this Catholic college last week, gives this pretty Catholic speech as a Catholic to a Catholic audience, and the answer is he has to be run out of society in the name of justice.

John Stonestreet:

So you have these ultimate categories, even in a way, when you and I talked, scott, and I remember that conversation about social justice and then Dara, we had those conversations and at the time it was more of a if you have too much stuff, if somebody else doesn't have enough stuff, it's because you have too much stuff. So it was more the Marxist category of that fixed pie that wasn't divided correctly and you can say you're sorry and give up your stuff, and that way we can all be happy. Yes, that kind of what's the word for it? That kind of making things right is no longer part of the equation, and I'm seeing that critical theory framework being applied to everything.

John Stonestreet:

I'll give you two examples. Obviously, it's being applied to sexuality. So I was with a wonderful theologian about a year ago In fact, it was a year ago, right about now, maybe two years ago now actually and she was describing a conversation she had with a friend of hers who teaches at a junior high, sixth grade, and so she had asked her friend hey, how many sixth graders in your class identify as LGBTQ? And this was the first time it came across my radar, because I knew, for example, back in the 80s and 90s, when we were talking about those who identify as gay or lesbian, the numbers were highly inflated. And I also knew that in that time since that, those numbers were actually going up, not so much in the gay marriage conversation, but more after that when it came to queer and gender.

John Stonestreet:

So when you say the LGBTQ numbers have exploded, it's not the L, it's not the G, it's somewhat the B, but mostly the T and the Q. And I was expecting the answer that she'd asked her friend who taught in sixth grade to be 50% or 40%, something inflated because you have kids who don't know who they are and that sort of thing. You know what her answer was and she replied as if everyone should know. She goes oh, all of them do. I was like what do you mean? All of them do? She said all of them do. She said well, are they having sex? No, well, if they're not having sex, how are they identifying as LGBTQ? You know what the answer was and see if you can sniff out the critical theory mood here. The answer was the reason they all identify as LGBTQ is nobody wants to be cis and straight anymore.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, because they're oppressors. They're the bad guys, yeah, they're the bad guys.

John Stonestreet:

So we went from the T being an alternative category to normalize something that wasn't normal to now. The abnormal is the cis.

Scott Allen:

I remember when Andy Ngo was writing about the Antifa riots in Portland, he saw that phenomena and he said so many of these rioters are young white men, but they now are identifying as transgendered and it kind of broke my heart, because to be a young white man now is to be evil and they can't bear that. And so it's a way for them to change the category.

Scott Allen:

You know, and now they can be on the side of the oppressed just you know just by claiming you know to be a sexual minority, if you will, or whatever you know on that spectrum of LGBTQ, you know.

Speaker 4:

And I thought, wow, that's just, and it's why you see these crazy bedfellows.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, just put yourself into their shoes. And there's so many people like that, john, now I do agree, that's what's driving it, I think.

John Stonestreet:

But that also explains why we see queers for Palestine. Yeah, that's right.

John Stonestreet:

Or the individuals in these recent university protests and you know who have no identity or identification. You know, obviously we have a very diverse community at these elite universities, so there are a lot of people of Arab descent and they're going to have, you know socioeconomic and ethnic and you know nationalistic reasons for supporting Palestine against Israel or whatever, depending on how they do it. But when you look at all the rest of the people that are there, these are people that you know. If you hold up a Queers for Palestine sign, you clearly don't know what a Queers in Palestine reality is.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, it's kind of an oil and water thing, isn't it?

John Stonestreet:

Oh, I mean, it's just not even close. And if anybody's been to Tel Aviv, you know that there's one place, one solitary place in all of the Middle East where someone who identifies that way would be accepted and by accepted I mean not actually put in jail or killed or worse. You know, the other example I've seen of the critical theory mood is in the abortion debate. We're all old enough on this call. I'm guessing, luke, I don't know your age. You look so young. But I remember the safe, legal and rare days of President.

John Stonestreet:

Clinton, yeah, but I remember the safe legal and rare days of President Clinton and President Biden's a Catholic, Roman Catholic, and particularly Kamala Harris's lines. The vice president out of this administration has come. Not just women need a right to choose, which is the language for so long, but that pro-lifers are oppressive In the state of Colorado that's now been weaponized by the state, where the state has been weaponized against pro-life. I mean, have you ever? We've all been to pro-life centers, pregnancy centers, right? Who is in that building building the nicest ladies on the planet? And the state of Colorado says they're deceptive, they're harming women, they're intentionally misleading. So you see, they're bad guys, these nice women who show up every day just to hug on other women who find themselves in crisis pregnancies.

Scott Allen:

They're now evil according to our administration and according to various states. John, you're kind of making my point, though, that I think this oppressor-oppressed the critical theory, the Marxist framework didn't go away. It incubated here in the United States in our universities. Now it's taken over our institutions. I think it's making a real play to be a functioning you know, the functioning dominant worldview of the society. I just don't think it's workable at all, you know because, it's just.

Scott Allen:

You know it's well. There's so many inconsistencies in it, and when you lack any basis for unity and love and forgiveness and mercy, you know you can't have any kind of relationships or community, much less a functioning culture or nation. So I think I don't think it's going to work. But it seems to me that that's kind of what's. I see it in that way, like going back to Nietzsche again. Yeah, there is a vacuum now, like all of these things that we received from Christianity and the Bible have been cut off and you've got a whole generation of young people that don't even know that and they're looking for something to replace it. And this is it, and we're making—you know there's an attempt being made to make it workable, you know, right now.

Luke Allen:

Darrell, I'll get to you, but yeah, it's just unlivable. It's such a fragile worldview, or what was the term you used, john, the frame of life or meaning.

John Stonestreet:

Limited. Yeah, very, very limited. It's locked in.

Luke Allen:

Exactly, and you're just going to keep going down the list of who's the top of the oppressor, canceling them all the way down until you get to that one dude, or probably lady, who's the most oppressed person in the world Because, compared to them, everyone else is an oppressor.

John Stonestreet:

Well, that's the irony. You're just going to start at the top. It's not the lady anymore, it's the man who wants to be a lady. That is the most depressed. True, yeah, it's the lady of the year who's a man, but it gets absolutely unmanageable. And you know, and Scott, my point earlier on this social justice is the social justice conversation, even when we started having it, didn't have this much critical theory in it.

Scott Allen:

No, you know, I just feel like it's been poisoned a little bit more, and I didn't see it at that time, john, either. It's been poisoned a little bit more, and I didn't see it at that time, john, either. I had to go on a bit of a learning curve, but it just keeps going.

John Stonestreet:

Yeah, Right, but you know, Luke, to your point. Some of us are old enough also to remember the kind of the fundamentalist evangelical controversies of the late 20th century where some of the real fundamentalist Christian schools had to start keeping lists of who's allowed, who's not allowed, who you can talk to, Dara. You know what I'm talking about, right? I mean, this is the legalism that people reacted against. One of the things that happened in that was that it just became too hard to keep track, Like, oh, you worked with this person, who worked with this person who worked with Billy Graham, and now I can't because he is working with that person and that person, and it just got really hard to keep track of. I think you're seeing at least some of that on the woke left is that the people that are supposed to be on that side, like JK Rowling.

John Stonestreet:

Yes. Martina Navratilova, the first publicly accepted lesbian in American sports history is a TERF. I think that's what we're going to see. That's the reality on the ground. It's going to be impossible to keep track of, which also is and this is really important. All this presents a good opportunity for Christians. We have a wonderful opportunity here. Truth is going to be revolutionary. It's going to be like we've never heard this before. This is fantastic, and I think this is the experience that the early church had in many cases.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, you're going right where I want to go, Because you're working with Christians every day. You've run excellent training programs. You're in churches, speaking to churches. Where do you see the evangelical church, the Bible-believing church at today in relationship? Do they see this opportunity? Are you up positive in terms of what you're seeing? What's your take?

John Stonestreet:

Yeah, you know so, I think many do. And, dara, I'd love to hear your take on this as well. You know, because your perspective is far more international than mine and also I don't want to say older in a bad way, but more experienced, let's put it that way I've been encouraged by a handful of things. Number one kind of inheriting this organization and this work from Chuck Colson.

John Stonestreet:

I just know Chuck spent a lot of the last 20 years of his life trying to convince Christians to pay attention to the church or to the culture, and that what was happening outside the church was going to affect what was happening to the church or to the culture, and that what was happening outside the church was going to affect what was happening inside the church, and we don't have to convince people of that anymore Now. It's basically helping them understand those undercurrents and certainly that solid ground of a Christian worldview. At the same time, I do think there's a deep theological trend and maybe it was an accident, but it was last year in the same week. We heard it from a prominent evangelical pastor and the Pope at the same week which was this call for Christians to divorce theology from pastoral practice, which is another way of saying divorce truth from love, and it's a terrible idea. It's exactly what the world doesn't need right now, and so I guess I'm both encouraged and concerned at the same time. Darrell, what do you think?

Darrow Miller:

Well, I think that divorce of truth and love is parallel to the divorce 120 years ago, of separating the sacred from the secular Only. We're 120 years later and instead of dealing with modernism, we're dealing with post-modernism, and now the tension for the church is to separate truth from love, and from what I'm seeing so far, love is winning, which means truth is being set aside, and that concerns me. I think we need to, just as we have, I think you and we at the DNA have been fighting against the sacred-secular divide. We need to fight very hard in our speaking to the church not to separate truth and love. They must be held together.

John Stonestreet:

That's really good, yeah. If love is winning and truth is losing, we're playing the wrong game.

Scott Allen:

This is not the Christian game.

John Stonestreet:

We're playing somebody else's game.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, we are. That's really well said, john. I like that. Yeah, that's right, so, yeah. So, john, you're seeing some things that encourage you, john. You're seeing some things that encourage you also some things that discourage you. Yeah, that's helpful for me. What are some things that you guys are working on at the Colson Center? I know the work that you do daily, you know, just to kind of inform people of what's happening, and you do such a good job at that. By the way, john, I'm so thankful for your voice in the church right now. I really mean that. But what are you guys working on right now? What are some things that you're dreaming about or really hoping to do that'll move the ball forward here in the next few years?

John Stonestreet:

Well, two projects that we have initiated that are accessible, and available to the public is. One is a set of resources aimed at Christian K-12, Christian school leaders and teachers. And the reason is is during COVID, christian schools got the greatest gift that they could possibly get, which was the Loudoun County School Board which basically?

John Stonestreet:

filled all of their schools and about eight months into that whole thing, when most schools around the country were still closed for COVID and Christian schools were filling up because they were willing to get back in for the most part a group of headmasters said the problem is now we can't find teachers and I said well, what do you mean? He said well, if they were trained at secular colleges, how are they going to teach biology from a Christian worldview, or math?

Scott Allen:

And honestly, unfortunately— yeah, they've learned from Paulo Freire. I mean, it's just amazing, right.

John Stonestreet:

And he said unfortunately that's also the case at many Christian colleges. Now I'm just quoting what they told me.

Scott Allen:

It's true, my two daughters, john, are in the world of education. I mean, one's moved on to medicine, but yeah, even in Christian colleges. This is the sacred-secular divide. I mean, when you lose the vision for seeing biblical truth, biblical definitions and principles, shaping something like education, you go along with whatever the other people are doing to shape it, which has been Marxist, frankly, it has been.

John Stonestreet:

Well, we had some investors and we said look, we can't do everything, we don't need to write a curriculum. There's a great curriculum. But this is a real problem that needs to be solved. A great curriculum with a bad teacher is still a bad class. A good teacher can do a whole lot with even a bad curriculum.

John Stonestreet:

So let's invest in the educators, and so we have a new program called Colson Educators, and this has a whole platform of educational resources. These headmasters told me this. You'll appreciate this. They said we now hire teachers planning to have to retrain them. Absolutely, absolutely Think about the cost and the expense. We're like, well, look, we have this content, we can help on this, and so Colson Educators is a platform that's widely available. We've had about 30,000 teachers go through some of our course material there, which we're really excited about.

Darrow Miller:

How do we promote this through this podcast? Well, I appreciate that.

John Stonestreet:

Yeah, if you work with a Christian school and a lot of these classes are, you know it's all available for free. We're not charging at all. You just got to sign up and be a part of it. We're taking it to the next level now, which has to do with we have six regional schools that we've partnered with that become center of training for worldview development for partner schools. So we're seeing these schools work together, which is really exciting, but the website's just educatorscolsoncenterorg.

Scott Allen:

Educatorscolsoncenterorg, if you are involved in Christian schools, christian education. If you're a teacher, you need to go there. Thank you.

Darrow Miller:

John, I appreciate that that's so wonderful If you are a Christian educator working in a public school, a state school, and are feeling squeezed out. Here's a resource for you, that's right.

John Stonestreet:

There's going to be stuff there that's going to be helpful. We had those folks in mind as well. Although we are really aiming, I just feel like we're in this disruptive moment and as much as we can disrupt the state-run system, let's do it. Yeah.

John Stonestreet:

Yeah, but the other thing I want to tell everybody about too. I'll give you two more things, and sorry. I'll pick up the pace here. Pick up the pace here. We work with a handful of other organizations around something called the Identity Project. This is identityprojecttv. Again, a set of resources. You know the number one question, unsurprisingly, we get from our podcast and webinars and the things that we do is having to do with sexuality identity gender.

John Stonestreet:

And about two years ago I started to see this curriculum and training program that was really promoted across social media and when I dug past it a little bit I became really, really concerned. It was basically that approach where we divorce theology from pastoral practice and very, very problematic in my mind. So those two things really drove us to work with a handful of other organizations around the Identity Project. This is a set of videos there's about 100 and some odd videos having to do eight to 10 minutes each. All brand new content with experts from the medical field, from the education field, from the theology world field, from the education field, from the theology world, from educators across the board, political activists and then folks who themselves have a testimony of finding redemption from sexual brokenness.

John Stonestreet:

So these are a wide range of experts on about 40 or so different questions and topics around sexuality. Gender from you know, are you born that way? To? What's my right as a parent for my kid To you know what's the latest research say about gender dysphoria? All of that stuff is there. It's detransitioning possible. So identityprojecttv, that's another set of resources.

John Stonestreet:

You can go there sign up for a free trial and then subscribe, and so we're excited about that. That's just off the ground. We're about, by the way, to announce and launch partner licenses, so that'll be on that website when they're available. Right now you can sign up as an individual, but basically, how do actually other institutions use this content, which we want to share widely? And then the last thing I'll say, of course and you guys know this and you've been supportive of this we've used DNA material in the Colson Fellows Program. This is a leader development program that Chuck Colson started under the name Centurions and since then the name Centurions and since then the program's been renamed. But in a couple weeks we're recording this here in the middle of May, and really just a couple weeks we'll be commissioning our 2024 class of Colson Fellows about 1,400 of them, wow and from 60, 70 different regional cohorts, 80 church affiliates, some institutional affiliates and even some international affiliates. So this is a leadership development program around Christian worldview and calling that has just been exploding and particularly church by church.

John Stonestreet:

We just launched a church partnership program on this where churches can offer the Colson Fellows program within their church. Still nine months, still 14 books and 10, 12 hours a week of reading and interacting on these important cultural issues. But you can do it together as a church community and we'll have about 100 different churches that are employing that Colson Fellows program. So we'll have about 100 different churches that are employing that Colson Fellows program. So we're excited about that.

John Stonestreet:

It's new but it's growing, and that's colsonfellowsorg. So those are three easy ways to kind of jump in.

Scott Allen:

Wow, those are all so strategic, john, yeah.

Darrow Miller:

You started this part of the session, john, by saying in this season, in this moment, you're trying to be disruptors. And that word yes, it's time for the church to be disruptors. In the context of what's going on today in our world and the dire direction we're heading in, we need the church to create disruptors who will like this football kicker. What he did was disrupt and he's getting pushback from it, but how?

Darrow Miller:

do we create more disruptors and get more people out there willing to stand by truth, for truth, in the midst of a culture that hates truth.

John Stonestreet:

Amen, amen. I love that and it's a shift. You've seen this take place around the world in your work, darrow, but this is new for a lot of American Christians. It's new for me, because we're talking more about what has been slipping away, yeah Right, what we have been losing as a culture, and it was true and it's a loss. But really taking that kind of calling as a disrupt and it was true and it's a loss but really taking that kind of calling as a disruptor seriously, I think is a really interesting framing of calling and mission today and if you're a little bit ornery, it'll be a lot of fun.

Darrow Miller:

Well, this is where I It'd be good to have you on again at some point just to explore together that theme of the disruptor.

John Stonestreet:

That's right. I'd love to do that.

Darrow Miller:

Let's do it.

John Stonestreet:

Anytime you guys, I love DNA, I love everything that you guys are doing. It's been too long since we've had you at our conference. We need to do that again soon and I'm really grateful. Plus, we didn't get to the question about Christian nationalism.

Scott Allen:

No, Okay, and I'm really grateful. Plus, we didn't get to the question about Christian nationalism.

John Stonestreet:

No, okay, well, we've got at least two more podcasts. Yeah, I really wanted to get your thoughts on that, john, and that conversation doesn't get anybody in trouble, so that'll be a super safe one. We'll have to do that again. Not disruptive at all.

Scott Allen:

John, thanks for your faithful leadership and for your vision and these projects. They just really touch my heart because I know God's using them and is going to use them, and I just am so grateful for you and for your work and your friendship. And so, anyways, I encourage all of you who are listening to avail yourselves. There's a lot of great resources that are available through the Colson Center. John just mentioned three of them and, john, thank you, thanks for your time today. We are grateful for it. And to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning in to another episode of Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciples Nations Alliance.

Luke Allen:

Thank you for listening to this episode with John Stonestreet. If you'd like to hear more about how to apply some of the things that we heard during today's discussion, then make sure to tune into the post-show discussion that Darrow Scott and I had after John hopped off, and I'll have that discussion posted here on Ideas have Consequences in a couple of days, as always. To learn more about our guests or find any of the resources that we mentioned during our episode, then make sure to head over to the episode page, which is linked in the show notes, and on this week's page you'll find more information about John Stone Street, the Colson Center, the Breakpoint Podcast, the Identity Project, the Colson Educators Program and so much more.

Luke Allen:

Ideas have Consequences is brought to you by the Disciple Nations Alliance, which is a ministry that has worked around the world for the last 27 years, training over a million people in over 90 nations with a biblical worldview. If you'd like to learn more about our ministry, you can find us on Instagram, facebook and YouTube, or on our website, which is disciplenationsorg. Thanks again for joining us. Please share the show with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening, and we hope you'll be able to tune in again next week here on. Ideas have consequences.

People on this episode

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Scott Allen

Host
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Darrow Miller

Co-host
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Dwight Vogt

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Shawn Carson

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Tim Williams

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Luke Allen

Producer