A ballot, not Armageddon

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It from WORLD Radio celebrating 15 years. Today is October 30th. Thank you for making us part of your morning routine. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday. John Stonestreet is here. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Good morning, John.

STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: You have made a distinction over the years between choosing the lesser of two evils and voting to lessen evil, and we’re just days from the midterms. And some Christians are finding those choices increasingly difficult. How does that distinction, John, help us make a responsible decision when we find serious moral objections to the candidates before us?

STONESTREET: I think it does at least in a couple ways, and one is to help us actually make a distinction morally. One is to help us to remember what a moral objection should be. In other words, many people have an objection to a particular candidate’s character that’s been reflected in bad behavior, but bad character can also be reflected in really bad ideas, particularly when those ideas are going to have consequences for more people as they’re enacted in policy.

Look, if you believe that sexual autonomy should trump the rights of preborn children to live, or if you think the state owns children and not parents, these are not just bad ideas; they’re also personal character flaws. And how do you measure that? Well, I think voting to lessen evil can help put some of that into framing.

I think it also helps us remember that a lot of voting isn’t between candidates at all. Increasingly, it has to do with things like ballot initiatives, and of course, I say that as a citizen of Colorado having to vote on a ridiculously and may I just say stupid long list of ballot initiatives. Some of them over completely bizarre things. Now that says a lot about any culture, right? That tells you that our state’s getting really close to mob rule by majority, which is why our founders wanted a constitutional republic and not a democracy.

But at the same time, I need to be engaged and put a stop to a ballot initiative, if I have the ability to do so, especially when so much is at stake, as is the case on a couple ballot initiatives, certainly in my state, and I know in Missouri and other places around the country.

And then finally, I think it helps us remember the scope of politics. We put way too much weight on it. We think that everything is ultimate. Chuck Colson used to say that salvation will never come in Air Force One, and I always add a postscript on that that I think is appropriate for our moment, which is, and neither will the apocalypse. When we start thinking that way, that it all rests on this election, then we are putting way too many eggs in that basket, and the political basket just can’t handle that much weight, as we’ve seen.

So I think this is a way to keep our own perspectives straight. It helps us distinguish character on a deeper level, and I think it actually helps us stay involved and fulfill our civic duty as Christians to vote, which I do believe we all have.

EICHER: And it does keep us from slouching toward the ballot box. I really like that idea of voting to lessen evil. That’s incredibly practical.

John, I’ve got a story in The Wall Street Journal. We’ve talked a lot about delayed marriage and delayed childbearing. There’s a piece in The Wall Street Journal that talks about a different kind of outworking of that phenomenon, and that has to do with the grandparents. The median age of becoming a grandmother has gone up from 44 to about 57 since the year 1960, and what that means, just doing the math, is that the healthy years with grandchildren fall from about 28 to about 15 by that measure. Now, have we underestimated how far these consequences of delayed family formation have really extended here, John?

STONESTREET: Yeah, we certainly have. Obviously, they would, I think, extend beyond just one generation to multiple generations, and that’s the reality here. Of course, we have to remember that in 1960, the average life expectancy was below 70, and today it’s basically 80. So you’re talking about an extension of 10 years there, and it pretty much closes much of the gap.

And you’re also talking about incredible improvements in our healthcare, and people are healthier longer, both because they’re eating better, and that fitness craze, and so on. But I don’t want to underestimate here how ideology affects this, and it’s the delayed birth rates. And the delayed birth rates is just one expression of what you might call an anti-natal or an anti-family worldview. One of them affects grandparents directly.

I’m a big, big fan of a ministry called the Legacy Coalition, which reaches out to grandparents and helps them be intentional as Christian grandparents, caring for the next generation. It’s really appropriate today when some people in the boomer generation are being canceled by their kids for not going along with transgender ideology or voting for Trump or something like that.

But it’s also appropriate because of a lie that grandparents believe, which is, in America, what do you do? You move to Florida, and then your responsibility to your grandchildren is to send money and leave an inheritance, and that’s pretty much it. And I think the loss of that extended family, not just the immediate mom and dad, but if you think about the experience that so many had in a family-centered culture with aunts and uncles, and grandma and grandfather, and how important that is.

I think about how important my son’s grandparents are to him, and also my daughters—for all my children—and I’m so grateful for that. But a lot of people don’t have that experience. I remember, man, if you wanted to get Chuck Colson mad, you should tell him that you were going to move to Florida and play golf for the rest of your life. But a lot of people have bought.

EICHER: I can only imagine.

STONESTREET: He just didn’t think retirement was in the Bible, and not just retirement from work and certainly ministry, but retirement from your responsibility as leading a family, and so I think there’s a lot of factors here, and we’ve lost something really, really significant in the experience for childhood.

EICHER: Now this may touch a little bit on politics, but I think you’ll find this one interesting, John. Of course, you know about the unrest that France has been experiencing lately. But Bill McGurn was writing in The Wall Street Journal about one particular problem in France. There is a French word for it, which I will attempt: laïcité, the commitment of France to laïcité, the idea that religion belongs outside public life. His argument is that the French rejected religion without finding much of anything to replace it. Now, that’s a totally separate conversation. But can a society really hold together without some shared understanding of truth that is pre-political, that goes beyond politics?

STONESTREET: No, it cannot. And of course, for the kind of society we’re talking about, what matters the most is the kind of truth around which it’s orienting itself. But listen, I thought McGurn’s piece was exactly right. I think what we’re seeing there—to try to explain it like, “Oh, there’s some school kids who want to read more books”—it just didn’t make sense from the beginning.

We certainly have the opportunism of the far left and radical Islamic protesters that are joining forces. They don’t agree on very much, but they do agree that the West needs to be torn down. And of course, that in and of itself is an expression of something deeper, and it’s the consequence of pushing religion further and further out of the center of life and reorienting life around something else. Which, of course, in the case of modernism, is the promise of progress, either through economics or science or technology.

That’s not the same thing as giving someone meaning, and the crisis of meaning has been deep, and the angst that comes with that, and the anger that comes with that, I think is being reflected here. And at the risk of being self-serving, I just want to say, our good friend Oz Guinness did a darn good job of explaining all this in the first half of the Truth Rising documentary. I was watching some of these videos and looking at some of these protests and thinking, boy, his analysis of this really has aged well.

And so I would point people to that as a way of understanding this, because look, civilizations take a long time to decline, and when they’re detached from their roots, as he put it, it doesn’t happen overnight. When we’re thinking about that, we’re typically thinking about a civilization that long ago died. And other than those brackets that might tell us that it took decades or centuries, it seems to us that this is what happened here, as if it were immediate. But it was a really, really long time of decline, and yet throughout that, you can point to flare-ups, really significant crises that reflect the fact that a civilization has lost its way.

That’s the question when it comes to what we’re seeing in France. That’s the question for what we saw, I think, in the 2020s in the United States. I think we’re seeing, in other places, “Is this a flare-up that is caused by the same forces that are leading to this widespread decline?” And my take is the answer is yes.

BROWN: John, before we let you go, let’s talk about Halloween. I was taking my little granddaughter for a walk. By the way, thinking about Nick’s question, I was 59 when she was born. But let me tell you, I see that little one practically every day. I make sure of that.

I was taking her on a walk, and we came across some pretty disturbing Halloween decorations. Enormous skeletons and demonic-looking figures in front of people’s yards, and retailers keep coming up with bigger, more grotesque displays. So I’m wondering, John, is this just harmless seasonal fun, or should Christians be troubled by how casually we’re turning images of death and evil into neighborhood entertainment?

STONESTREET: So, at the risk of being doubly self-serving in this one episode, I’m tempted to just point people to, I think, the Breakpoint commentary that had the greatest title in all of history, which is “To Boo or Not to Boo.”

EICHER: That is the question—

STONESTREET: —and which we wrestle with some of these things. Look, how a culture thinks about evil is really, really important, and that’s going to be reflected in the cultural artifacts, both the big ones, the significant ones, and also the silly ones that we put in our front yards.

And I think, as I was having the same conversation with my son just last night, as we were talking about this and thinking it through together, that there’s two possibilities where we can get this wrong. Number one is to actually not distinguish between good and evil, and there is a difference between those stories, those movies, those tales that talk about evil as if it’s evil and portray evil as if it’s evil, and those that do not, that just treat it as something to revel in, something to titillate your senses and to get spooky about, and that sort of stuff. And I think in that case you’re underestimating the seriousness of evil.

The Bible talks about the seriousness of evil as a force. It talks about the seriousness of evil in terms of the evil figure, the fallen angel Satan, and it talks really seriously about the danger of the evil that’s in every human heart and that needs redemption.

But I think the other mistake that Christians can make is to give evil too much credit. If you go back to the early church fathers, there’s times they mock evil. They mock Satan. That was a part of it. If you think about the age of the witch hunts and trying to find the demonic everywhere, which of course those stories have been overblown. But there were cases here and there that they worried that we were giving evil too much due because what the Bible does now, in light of the death and resurrection and enthronement of Jesus Christ after the ascension, is talk about evil as if it’s defeated.

Doesn’t mean it’s not real. Doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. But it does not have the last say. We’re not waiting with bated breath to see who wins this fight. Christ has won. Satan has lost. Good has conquered evil, and we actually have access to that. And so, I never want to give evil more due than it should have.

And I think those things at least give us the theological grounding for talking about something like Halloween, and of course you always have the option of Christianizing it, right? Which is nailing 95 Reese’s cups instead of 95 theses on the door, or remembering that it’s Reformation Day, so that’s your other option.

EICHER: Oh my goodness, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, great to talk with you. We will see you next week after the election.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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