Culture and Christianity meet in the press

Two recent articles in major American newspapers brought issues at the intersection of culture and Christianity back to the spotlight. On Christmas Day, The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed piece by Eric Metaxas entitled “Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God.” The article went viral, getting some 350,000 likes on Facebook.

Then on Jan. 2, The New York Times quoted John Stonestreet in an article about The Marriage Pledge, a proposal that asks Christian ministers to stop signing civil marriage documents in protest against the growing availability of marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

About the Metaxas article on science, Stonestreet said the outcry from scientific naturalists against it reveals a double standard: People such as renowned atheist Richard Dawkins comment on metaphysics all the time but don’t think theologians have a right to comment on science. But Stonestreet said, Christians are the ones who have home-field advantage in the debate: “We live in a world charged with God’s grandeur, and the deeper we go into discovering truth about the world, the more that’s going to be revealed.”

Stonestreet’s opposition to The Marriage Pledge was noted in the Times article, and he gave me a deeper explanation of his position.

“I do think the day’s going to come in which the church is going to be forced out of the public marriage business,” Stonestreet said. “But I think that’s precisely when it should come, when we’re forced.” He said the definition of marriage comes from neither the state nor the church, but from God, and the church should stay in the conversation to proclaim that truth.

“It’s not for the church to decide what marriage is anymore than it’s for the state to decide what marriage is,” he said. “Marriage is pre-church and pre-state, so it’s both of our jobs to recognize it.”

Stonestreet and I also talked about Planned Parenthood’s recent annual report that reveals the systemic evils in that organization. Listen to our full conversation on The World and Everything in It: