Culture Friday: The Christian church and sexuality

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s the 6th day of October 2023. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: In the current issue, WORLD reports:

“Nearly a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, church leaders face intensifying pressure to adopt current cultural language and messages about sexuality and gender. More pastors are capitulating, nudging evangelicalism down the same road that has gutted mainline Protestantism.”

Mary Jackson reports on this trend among so-called non denominational churches … and of course a major thread in her reporting is a controversial conference at North Point Community Church in Atlanta. It’s the “Unconditional” conference that caused such a stir.

It’s such a well-reported and important piece … Mary has done strong work on this … as she did on the Revoice movement that has roiled the Presbyterian Church in America. I could read the entire piece and it’d consume all our time … we talked about this on the program yesterday … and if the listener hasn’t read the piece yet, I’ll once again place a link to it in our program transcript.

I just want to mention a couple of points from the piece we didn’t discuss yesterday.

Evangelical support of same-sex marriage is on the rise. Among white evangelical Protestants, it rose from 11 percent in 2004 to 29 percent in 2019, according to a Pew survey. It also found that 4 in 10 of those who attend religious services once a week now favor same-sex marriage.

The story quotes church historian Thomas Kidd … who says: “Now, the realm of the possible changes within the broad and very poorly defined evangelical sphere. It suggests the traditional Biblical view of marriage and sexuality is no longer a defining principle of the evangelical movement.”

John, are you concerned evangelicalism is going the way of mainline Protestantism?

STONESTREET: I don't know if evangelicalism is going the way of mainline Protestantism. If it is, this is just another chapter in that drift, not the start of it. I think specifically, what Andy Stanley has done is very similar to a historic mistake of mainline Protestantism, which is at some level arguing—and he's made this in other places before—that you can separate theology from pastoral practice and pastoral care. And I think that's the fundamental mistake.

But first, our theology has to be grounded in that which does not change. And our practice has to be grounded as well as possible into a sound theological approach to all of these issues. I think North Point and Stanley have weighed in on an area that most churches haven't, which is how do you actually help parents who are in this situation? What does it actually look like to keep relationships with your kids? And I think there was an attempt to kind of thread that needle and offer a third space or a quiet space or a third way (I forget exactly how the description said). And I think that in and of itself is going to be really influential.

Now look, I think there have been a lot of headlines about evangelical pastors from otherwise conservative denominations or churches who have become affirming. Almost all of those stories were overblown by media looking for that sort of devolution. This is a big deal. I mean, Andy Stanley founded and pastors what is one of the largest churches in America. The voices that he chose were universally affirming voices, maybe with an exception or two. My friend, Alan Schliemann from the organization Stand to Reason attended the North Point conference, and asked a lot of questions. And he recorded an interview about what he saw with Sean McDowell. And he said something really interesting. He said, if I were planning an event to try to kind of smuggle in and shift the church's allegiances on these matters, this is the kind of conference that I would do.

But this has been a historically repeated mistake going all the way back to Friedrich Schleiermacher who attempted to separate the good of Christianity from the truthfulness of Christian claims about Jesus and about the miraculous and about the supernatural. This is theological liberalism in the 20th century—trying to separate the fact that while Jesus really wasn't the Son of God, he really didn't die for our sins, substitutionary atonement really isn't a thing, he's really just a good example. And so it's how we practice that really matters.That was the fumble of theological liberalism in the 20th century, until it became—as J. Gresham Machen famously put it—a different faith, a different worldview. That this wasn't just another form of Christianity, it was another religion altogether. So this is a repeated mistake.

And that is, I think blatantly what Andy Stanley said he was trying to do is separate theology from practice. And for this conference, it was pastoral practice, but he said this in different ways at different times. And I just don't think those two things can be unhitched and stay Christian for very long.

BROWN: John, this week Pope Francis is meeting behind closed doors in the Vatican City. The topics under discussion: the elevation of women in ministry, priest celibacy and marriage and more support for LGBT Catholics.

Conservative Catholics have warned the outcome of the three-week gathering could trigger a split. What do you think and are you expecting immediate changes?

STONESTREET: Well, there have been numerous times when people have predicted a split in the Roman Catholic Church and have almost always been wrong. Not always been wrong—there's been a handful of times—but they've been so few and far between. This is the thing about a historic, hierarchical church body like this. These are like ocean liners turning around.

You know, I thought the best take on this was from a Roman Catholic thinker—someone who's more known for his political takes but serious about his faith—Roger Severino. He used to work for the Heritage Foundation and also health and human services under President Trump. And here's how he described it. He says, as is typical with Pope Francis (this is on Twitter/X), he acknowledges objective morality, and doesn't change any church teaching, but uses ambiguous language about wholly unspecified hypotheticals that people who clearly want to change Church teaching will seize upon to confuse multitudes. And I thought, you know, that's exactly right. Because if you look at the overall quote, in context, Francis actually endorsed, here's what the Church teaches. And here's what the Church has always taught. And it wasn't, you know, in a sense, unlike pastor Andy Stanley on Sunday morning, kind of saying, here are the three fundamentals of Christian morality with sexuality. And then there's all this lack of clarity around it, when clarity is possible.

And there is just something to that. What's the line? “When it's misty in the pulpit, it's foggy in the pew.” And somebody else said, “and it's stormy in the culture.” And I think that that's probably right. I think that there is a cultural responsibility that church leaders of all stripes have…when things are muddy, clarity is a wonderful gift. And it's the sort of clarity I think that the Bible gives and that church teaching and historically has done. Otherwise it does become something that can be seized upon to confuse multitudes—as Roger Severino put it. That to me was the most helpful take on what happened with Pope Francis.

BROWN: John as you know, attacks on Alliance Defending Freedom is nothing new, especially with its work on the overturning of Roe. But a recent article, published by the liberal news media source, The New Yorker, paints a particularly unflattering picture. And I’m quoting here, “ADF resembles a cultural war personal injury firm.”

The article also cites leaked recordings of ADF meetings and pages of internal documents.

You often talk about Christians having a theology of getting fired. How would you characterize something like this?

STONESTREET: I think something that Kristin Wagner—the CEO of ADF—has said a number of times, and I'm kind of paraphrasing her here, but it resembles a cultural war, a personal injury firm. That's because there's a lot of personal injury happening.

The second thing that came to mind is I've read The New Yorker piece. In fact, it was sent to me by two or three people who said, you know, this isn't that bad. And I actually kind of agreed, I mean, it was unflattering—if you accepted all of the assumptions of The New Yorker—that to even be involved in this would be bad, right?

If you start with the assumption that this should never exist, then yeah, it was unflattering. Other than that, I don't think ADF has anything to be ashamed of. There was nothing there that should have surprised anyone that's been following along for any lengthy period of time.

To your point about how this fits into the theology of getting fired…I think it's quite simple: we are moving into a new age, and we have moved in in many ways. We're not dealing with eye rolls anymore. We're dealing with intentional misrepresentations and attacks. And that's just a different place. I think parents who send their kids to college need to know that it's one thing to believe that God created the world when everybody else agrees. It's another thing when you go to college, and nobody else agrees, it's a completely different thing to go to college. And if you say marriage is between a man and a woman, you're considered to be a fascist Nazi pig who hates women, even though we can't define women. Which is why anytime somebody who's supposed to be on the wrong side of these issues, says, you know, I saw the light now, I'm affirming of whatever, in any sort of way, whether it's clearly stating that or ambiguously stating that, like Pope Francis, then it's such a big news story, because it's kind of an apology on behalf of all Christianity for being Christian.

So this is the sort of thing we can expect in the days ahead. And I actually wrote to a good friend who's in leadership at ADF, and I said ”congratulations” when the piece came out, I was like, “You've earned this.” That actually says something. Or as my high school basketball coach used to say, “dogs don't bark at cars that ain't moving,” which I always thought was super profound. And every time I say it out loud, people are like, what does that mean? Basically, ADF is moving and the dogs are barking. That says something about their effectiveness.

EICHER: Alright, John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks John!

STONESTREET: You bet. Thanks a lot.

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