Culture Friday: Christians in the newsroom

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday the eighth of March, 2024.

Thanks for joining us for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for culture Friday. Joining us is John Stonestreet, the President of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, John, I am among this year's World Journalism Institute Mid-Career class in Asheville, North Carolina this week. We are in the classroom, several students submitted questions, and I've invited them to step right up and ask. So let's jump in. And we will begin with Herschel Forester of Garland, Texas.

HERSCHEL FORESTER: John, how would you answer someone who says “If you have Biblical worldview, then you're biased, you can't be objective”? WORLD produces sound journalism grounded in facts and biblical truth. How would you contrast that approach with other news sources that produce sound journalism, grounded in facts, but stop short of grounding their journalism in the Bible as the source for ultimate truth?

STONESTREET: Well, I think the easy answer is that everyone’s grounding their writing, their journalism in something. In other words, no one’s coming at this from neutral ground. No one’s coming at this without a worldview. I think it was Francis Schaeffer, who said, “To be human has to have a worldview.” It doesn't mean that everyone’s aware of their worldview, right? Doesn’t mean that if you walk up to someone on the street and said, “Hey, what's your worldview?” They’d probably think you’re weird and run away from you, unless you were in Asheville. Asheville is kind of weird, so they kind of liked that kind of stuff. But in the rest of the world, not so much.

But if you stop people in the street, and you said, “Hey, you know what's right and wrong, and how do we know? What's the real problem with the world? Who are the good guys? Who were the bad guys? Or where did everything come from? What do you think it's all about, what's worth loving, what do you love more than anything?” You ask those kinds of ultimate questions, everyone's going to have an answer. And everyone's going to have a set of assumptions. And these are beliefs that you don't normally think about, but they're beliefs you always think with. And that is really at the heart what a worldview is. It's the beliefs you think with not necessarily the beliefs that you think about. Sometimes we realize what those beliefs are. But for a lot of us, it's like contact lenses. They're in, they're shaping how we see stuff, but we're not looking at them, we're looking through them. And we can forget we even put them in that morning.

So, I think the best way forward there is to point out that no one's neutral. Everyone's coming from some sort of bias. Everyone's coming from a set of assumptions about life in the world. Now those assumptions might be true, they might be false, they may negatively impact how you tell the story. They may positively impact how you tell the story the same way that glasses do if we are all wearing prescription glasses. That prescription might help us see the world war clearly. It might keep us from seeing the world clearly. And so that's why we have to go back and examine them.

EICHER: All right, John, Ladisa Onyilioogwu of Loganville, Georgia is next, and she has a question for you.

LADISA ONYILIOOGWU: In our journalism discussions here, we have talked about the influence of the Associated Press. And one of our conversations was around AP's annual style book and usage guide. And it's right there where I see a lot of bad cultural influences begin to take root—so much of the transgender language as a most recent example. I just think of Ephesians chapter 4:14, and human cunning craftiness in deceitful schemes. John, I’d love your advice for Christian journalists on how to deal with this craftiness in the newsroom and remain faithful to Christ.

STONESTREET: Yeah, I love the question, and I can't tell you how much I agree. And this is where our postmodern friends get it right: the power of language to really create reality. Where they get it wrong, is saying that all of reality is a social construct of human language. Humans have that creative ability because we are made in the image and likeness of God, but ultimate reality comes from the language of God. So you read in Genesis chapter one, that language is at the root of reality, but it ain't ours, it's God's language that is. And we do have kind of creative power as well. And that can be creative power to lead people towards truth or away from truth, to lead towards a proper understanding of who they are or away from it. And so when it comes to some fields, journalism being one of them,

I think Christians have to be fierce defenders of true language and fierce opponents of false language. And so don't compromise on language, don't give in there. This is the Alexander Solzhenitsyn "live not by lies" call that he gave his fellow Russian citizens before he was exiled from that nation. You don't have to show up to every rally. You don't have to rant and rave and get angry about everything. But just don't say things that aren't true. That's just going to be a, you know, kind of the first commitment of a Christian.

I think the other thing is not just don't say what's not true, but encourage people to define the terms that they use, so that you can help them point to the ideas that are being smuggled in, maybe that they don't even know. You know, I think that question, “What do you mean by that?” is probably the most powerful question that you can have in your back pocket. And highlighting where definitions are being smuggled into stories, particularly when those in power do it. I think that's all stuff that's worthy of being highlighted, whether true or false. You know, I think that's going to be a task of truth-tellers, like, like journalists are, or should be.

The other thing I would say in all this is that bad ideas can be really sticky. And they oftentimes are really sticky, because they're reinforced by power, not by truth. And so you're gonna have to pay a price for fighting for words. That's going to be inevitable. You know, you might call it the theology of getting canceled, the theology of getting fired, or whatever. But you're going to have to be willing, I think, at some time to take the shot that is going to come if you are a truth teller in an age like ours. So yeah, those are, those are the two things that come to mind there. Good question.

EICHER: Yeah. Yeah, agreed. All right, John, the last question we have time for: this is Angela Harris. And she is from Raleigh, North Carolina.

ANGELA HARRIS: You've talked a lot about IVF in recent weeks, and I've heard you talk about how unpopular pro life positions are. My question is, how can a Christian be salt and light when discussing IVF with our neighbors?

STONESTREET: Yeah, that's a great question. And a shout out to Raleigh, particularly my friends at Prime Barbecue. Have you had Prime Barbecue yet, there outside of Raleigh?

HARRIS: I have not. It's on my list of places to go. But haven't tried it yet. I hear they run out if you don't get there in time.

STONESTREET: They run out. Yeah, no, it is. I know there's some Texans in the room there that probably rolling their eyes. But you just I'm telling you, this is as good as anything you'll get in Texas.

EICHER: Hey, John, actually, there is another student from Raleigh, who attests to what you're saying.

STONESTREET: There we go. Good, good, that's true. So I just want to give a shout out. And Nick, you need to make sure that makes the edit into the final cut there.

Hey, listen, IVF is a really difficult thing, because the cat is so far out of the bag. And I think that when it comes to these sorts of confusing moral issues, we need to be salt and light inside our own homes, inside our own churches, having a catechism that actually is big enough to address the moral implications of Christian truth.

The other thing that we're never going to be able to do without it is that we've somehow got to teach the doctrine of the image of God in its fullness. And I think right now, if you went from church, to church, to church, and you just said, “Hey, everybody, fill in the blank. Humans are made___” And everyone would say together "image of God." And then we'd say, “Well, what does that mean?” And then you'd hear a lot of crickets. Because I think it's become really a matter of Christian trivia. It's something we like to trot out when it has something to do with something we believe in. But really wrestling with the full implications of what it means to be made in the image of God, what it means to be made in the image of God, male and female, what it means to be made in the image of God, male and female that become one flesh in the sanctity of marriage, and the kind of the sacred implications that that has for human relationships. And our catechisms are not keeping up, our catechizing is not keeping up with the ethical dilemmas. In fact, our ethics aren't keeping up with the ethical dilemmas, the church is not anywhere close on this.

It's going to have to start inside our own house, I guess, I would say, before, we're going to actually be able to say the hard thing out loud. That doesn't mean we don't say the hard thing out loud right now. It's just going to be a lot harder. We're gonna, people are gonna look at us, like, we're crazy. But I'm used to that. I mean, when you talk about the sacredness of human sexuality, you know, basically trying to unravel to some level, the implications for marriage and sexuality in our public lives, of this idea that humans are made in the image of God, Christians look at you like you're crazy, you know?

I think we can see this, for example, in recent conversations about should Christians attend a same-sex marriage? That was a big controversy over the last couple weeks. And I think what's interesting is what that whole thing revealed is that there's still an awful lot of Christians who believe that a wedding is a party. So why wouldn’t you go to a party and celebrate somebody's happiness? But what if a wedding is something else? What if a wedding is a reflection of some of these implications of being made in the image of God, male and female? Now, now we're talking about something other than a party. And the ethical analysis has to be a whole lot more robust. That's what I think is missing in the process.

EICHER: Good discussion. John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center. He’s host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, thank you.

STONESTREET: You bet, thanks a lot.

EICHER: And let's all say thanks to John.

AUDIO: [Class clapping and saying thanks]

STONESTREET: Thanks, everybody.

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