Culture Friday: Discipleship, abortion, and student loan cancellation

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It's the 2nd day of September, 2022.

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!

Let’s bring in John Stonestreet. He’s the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning!

BROWN: With the November elections just two months away, I thought this might be relevant: It’s an article that got quite a few shares on social media, and maybe you saw it.

The title was “Don’t Run For School Board.” The writer asks, What if the culture war is the wrong approach to the problems we find in public education? What if those problems fall outside the scope of the culture war?

She then concludes, the real and more realistic remedy is discipleship of our kids.

I know you wouldn’t argue with the importance of discipleship, but do you think it’s necessarily at odds with engaging in the public square and trying to right wrongs?

STONESTREET: Well, I did see the article and I did see the source and I was just mystified that this would be published. Maybe the silliest article and most unhelpful piece that I've seen written dealing with these topics, and it really falls into the category of folks putting anything controversial, any sort of Christian activism that is any at any level, controversial or disliked by the larger world into a category called culture war, and therefore, you know, dismissing it a couple weeks ago, I was on the stage with a mom whose daughter was led into a gender transition social transition against her will, she was then put into a group home under the power of child and protective services, and basically only allow and her mom was only allowed an hour a week supervised visit wasn't allowed to talk about anything having to do with their child's you know, gender dysphoria, or her Christian faith, because it wasn't in support of what the school had decided the parent should should teach. She was told that she was the problem, she was told that if she did not fully support her daughter, her daughter would kill herself. She was basically, basically the state drove a wedge between the child and the daughter. And after all of that care, after being ostracized from her family, the daughter did kill herself. I wonder if standing up for that daughter, and standing against stayed in position, if that would be an act of culture war, and therefore we shouldn't do it? What do you do when the state doesn't let you disciple your own kids? Should the rest of the church maybe come around that? You know, what was so mystifying was at stake and this particular story wasn't even whether someone from that church or that community or some Christian maybe shouldn't have tried to get on the school board and stand up for this poor mom, who by the way, was an immigrant, and had a hard time really navigating the system because of that, but that when this poor woman asked her own youth pastor and pastor to go visit her daughter, in fact, the daughter asked, they never did. They never showed up. So this poor mom walked through this alone isn't a culture war to go visit a girl that's in that thing, you have to see that I'm a little upset about this. This is the most silly argument. You know, I wonder if someone actually thought, for example, that day in and day out in a particular school, there would be physical violence inflicted on children? Would it be culture war, then to show up and run for the school board to maybe try to put a stop to it? Well, mental violence is being done, emotional violence is being done, children are being taught to hate their bodies, especially young girls. Is it a cultural war to actually want to do something about this? Why on earth would loving our neighbors by protecting them or at least trying to protect them from bad ideas? Why would that be in conflict with discipling my own kids? By the way, I hope my kids grow up and care enough about their neighbors to stand up whenever they have the capacity and the ability to stand up. And I hope they won't be at a church that will accuse them of culture warring if they do.

EICHER: John, this seems like a big deal—although I guess we have to see what happens on appeal. But the big ballot initiative in Michigan to approve a pro-abortion amendment to the state constitution apparently won’t be on the ballot this fall. The board that decides what’s on and what’s not decided, really on technical grounds, to keep the proposal off the ballot.

Again, there’s legal wrangling still to come here and the board may be overruled, and this seems like a significant development.

But isn’t it better as a cultural matter just to go ahead and have it out? What do you think?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, I think that Christians should just care about discipling their own kids and not getting involved in such culture where it matters, of course. I mean, this is an example. I mean, what's too much? Is it too much to vote on a ballot initiative? And by the way, the folks that are really concerned about this particular ballot initiative, there's some real concern about just what all this ushers in and seems to usurp any sort of parental rights, seems also in the name of so called reproductive freedom to take away any sort of real consequences for things like statutory rape. In other words, the free for all of children to determine their own sexual behavior and their sexual identity, and therefore have universal access to abortion and everything kind of thrown in this is a real challenge. I don't think voters understand just how big of a gap that this phrasing of reproductive freedom would create. How much of a moving target ever expanding category it would create. So no, I don't think when you, you don't have clear language, and you don't have a clear understanding, and you don't have a press dedicated to helping that then I think, yeah, trying to stop this on a technicality is, stop it any way you can is my take, because there's not really a way for this to be clear on what abortion law is. I mean, it's so weird. When you do any sort of polling on abortion, you get what you're looking for. And basically, you have committed advocates and committed opponents, and then most people in the middle, don't think about it, or at least don't think about it clearly. Until it, you know, confronts them in their own personal lives. And at that point, it's too late to you know, really get a strong, strongly communicated, you know, argument about what abortion really is.

EICHER: I want to get your take on the student loan cancellation debate, John. We had David Bahnsen on Monday talking about the economic particulars. We had a college president on Wednesday giving his view. But I want to ask you to evaluate some of the pro-debt cancellation arguments that borrow biblical themes.

Author John Pavlovitz for example. He said on social media: “If you’re a Christian and you’re big mad about the possibility of student loan debt being cancelled. Let me remind you that the entirety of your faith is built upon a debt you couldn’t pay that someone stepped in and paid for you.”

He also draws a parallel to ancient Israel’s Year of Jubilee, in which God required his people to absolve all debts, free prisoners, and release slaves.

What’s your sense of it?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, it's funny, I just saw on Twitter that our mutual friend Andrew Walker, who often appears in this segment, and I had a similar thought about this, and he, I just saw that he had beat me to it on Twitter, and then I had a commentary come out on it. And I liked the way he phrased it. So I'll quote him, you know, where he said, Twitter, where the Bible is ambiguous about such matters as sexual ethics and the sanctity of life, but exceptionally clear on student loan forgiveness. But by the way, the key difference is Jesus freely laid down his life and paid our debt. No one's freely paying this debt. This is the government basically making someone else pay for it. And that's just stealing and to assume that the state should do something that God Himself does, man is a really warped and problematic definition of the state. So this isn't even anywhere close and you start seeing these increasingly bizarre takes biblically to justify things like this or, you know, for example, Georgia politician Stacey Abrams, her line about what the Bible says and doesn't say. I guess at the end of the day, if this actually convinces anyone, it says a lot less about John Pavlovich and a lot more about the American church that needs to know its Bible better.

BROWN: Well, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thank you, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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