Culture Friday: Fatherhood and Shiny Happy People

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s the 16th day of June 2023. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. 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, GUEST: Good morning

BUTLER: Shiny Happy People is a new docu-series streaming now, and in a recent WORLD Opinion article, contributor Ericka Andersen writes this, “notions of Biblical submission, pro-life advocacy and Christian homeschooling are portrayed (in this documentary) as intrinsically toxic. Viewers could easily walk away believing that a Biblical worldview inherently leads to misogyny, violence and abuse.”

Well John, you’ve met a lot of homeschool kids and families over the years, and I’m wondering how might we respond to the abuses the series alleges, while not throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

STONESTREET: I think there's a lot of things to say. One could come away from the documentary, putting all of those things together and making it all guilt by association. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of us find really frustrating because there's certainly things that can be done on public schools and the inherent dangers to kids that take place in public schools as well as homeschooling or you know, anywhere else. This way of doing kind of Evangelical bashing is becoming increasingly common, where you put a whole bunch of things in one basket and create this air of guilt by association. I mean, it's actually become the method by which we've gotten some of the more popular center left Evangelical spokespeople like the one that shows up, for example, in this documentary, Kristin Du Mez, her book, Jesus and John Wayne does the same kind of journalism. Even though hers actually goes by the title of history, it's really not, there's just a whole bunch of things thrown together and a guilt by association line drawn through.

That said, Gothard and his ideas were the classic mix of some things that were really good and some things that weren't really good. He and it really was rooted in his inability to make a biblical case for something, which is really, is going to strike some viewers who attended his various seminars as strange, because his seminars are full of Bible verses, and that's my point: they're full of Bible verses, individual verses that are tacked on to points he already wanted to make. That's not how the Bible should be handled. It should not be used as a book of helpful illustrations or proverbs. There is a book of Proverbs that you can use that way. The rest of the Bible is this grand sweeping narrative that describes the human condition. And the community that came out of IBLP and that came out of Gothard's thinking and the community that we see exposed in the story of the Duggar family is a story that misses the big that big narrative of Holy Scripture, particularly a proper understanding of the fall.

There is a wrong perspective that permeates conservative Christian communities, where if we can just build the fences higher here, we can keep evil and sin out there. And that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the fall because the fall teaches that every single human is made in the image of God and that we're also fallen. And when you think that the fall can be kept outside of the walls, and if you just have long enough skirts and short enough hair, then you know, bad things won't happen in here, you just have a fundamental misunderstanding of the human condition, which leads, for the record, to a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel. So the gospel then becomes conformity instead of forgiveness. The gospel then becomes, you know, looking a particular way.

And you know, I have done an awful lot of speaking in various homeschool groups and state level conventions, and I'm a part of the homeschool community as a dad. And I will often talk about the realities that I've seen and the Gothard dominance is one of those, there were other key figures, some came from a more reformed bent than Gothard that really impose the same sort of oppressive vision of humanity, which is you can have perfect kids if you do the right things. What an oppressive thing to put on parents that are just fundamental, and it's a view that just fundamentally misunderstands the gospel top to bottom. And I have actually the last several times that I've been invited to speak, brought that message to this group, because I've seen it, I've seen it up close and personal. And it's just not fair to put that on somebody. And it's just wrong biblically. There's not a formula to great kids. There is a way of understanding the human condition. There's a way of understanding the roles of moms and dads and the essential roles that they play. There's certainly a need that we have to understand the evil forces that are out there that are vying for our kids' hearts and minds. But the formulaic approach never works.

BROWN: The roles of moms and dads, I want to talk about that a little bit, particularly dads, because Sunday is Father's Day. And I know that you're a dad, John, and so is Paul. I think it would be a treat for our listeners to hear a few of your personal Father's Day reflections, so you two get ready! But first, you know, the culture isn't always kind to fathers, especially dads who try to follow God's design for the family. John, how would you encourage them?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, I just had a kid, my oldest graduate from high school. So clearly, I'm an expert on fathering. And I can tell everyone exactly how to do. No, people often ask me, Listen, I just want to—

BROWN: Congratulations!

STONESTREET: Yeah, well, it is something to be excited about but I've got three more, you know, so batting 1000, this early in the game is a good start, but who knows. But I will say this, I had a great dad. And I love my dad, because he took seriously his responsibility. And we've got a culture that has been, where men and women have both been convinced that men are not responsible for the product of their sexual choices. And that is so deeply ingrained because of the abortion issue, because the reality of abortion and contraception and so on, that when you have a dad that does fulfill his commitments, you know it's something to be grateful for, and thankful for. You know, it's stunning how many social goods can be traced back and rooted in the fact that a committed dad was there, and how much social chaos and breakdown is rooted to the fact that a dad wasn't there. Now, that doesn't mean that statistics determine the destiny of every single person just because all the stats say that the single greatest factor in a child's long term success is whether they were in a home with married mom and dad and the single greatest factor in pathologies and you know, everything from learning disabilities, to graduation rates, to criminal activity, to sexual riskiness to everything else is traced back to whether a child is at home with mom and dad. You know, that doesn't mean that having a dad in the home guarantees that you'll be successful. There are a lot of idiots who have squandered a wonderful inheritance that their parents had given them. On the flip side, there are unbelievable single moms who have been helped by wonderful neighbors and friends and church members and grandparents to raise to raise their kids in situations that, you know, really had the world work the way it was designed shouldn't have left them that way. But it just on both of those realities underscore how important moms and dads are.

Dads bring unique things to the lives of their children. Now we know moms bring unique things too but the simple fact is, as our friend Ryan Anderson puts it, moms don't dad and dads don't mom. There are moms and there are dads. And this is the way God and His kindness designed us. And so, you know, this isn't just a made-up holiday to move, you know, more greeting cards and neckties, although it kind of is, it's rooted and points to a reality that that really exists. Moms and dads aren't made up factors. These aren't social constructs that humans came up with to govern our lives together. Moms and dads are built into the fabric of the universe, in the way that it was created by God like gravity. So it is a call that we should issue to dads to take that calling seriously.

BROWN: As I reflect on this Father’s Day, I’m thinking fondly of my dad, who passed at the end of April and is with Jesus now. I’m also celebrating my Heavenly Father who is All-Knowing and through that particular attribute, my husband I relocated to Alabama from Georgia in 2021. That move, by the way, had many people scratching their heads. But my Heavenly Father blessed us with almost two years with my earthly father before he passed. And I’m so grateful. I’d love to hear some of your reflections.

STONESTREET: Can Paul go first?

ALL: [LAUGHING]

BUTLER: Well, thankfully none of my kids got in the habit of buying me ties at Father's Day. So I don't have a huge collection of those to worry about.

But Myrna, I actually want to return to something that John just said—that encouragement for dads to take their calling seriously. Early on, my wife and I decided that we would celebrate our very first Father's Day—which is probably the most memorable Father's Day for me—while we were still expecting our first child.

My wife was five months pregnant at the time and we made that intentional decision that if life begins at conception, and a child is a child from conception, then that means from that moment, I also became a dad, my responsibilities as a father began then. And so that weight of responsibility hit me on that first Father's Day. And I will say now 28 years later, I'm really enjoying reaping some of those blessings and benefits.

BROWN: Wow, John, you should have went first.

STONESTREET: I should have went first, that was really good. But, you know, my great memory, memories on Father's Day, just about my dad, I mean, you kind of are in this work, and you're looking at, you know, the way the world works, and you just become more and more and more and more grateful that a guy, you know, stuck around and showed up and, and the thing that I know about him is he was absolutely committed to say what's true, and to not say what's not true. He was committed to being an honest man. And at times I watched that, you know, he could've, you know, fudged it here and fudged it there and cut a corner and done better. But he just wouldn't. He just absolutely wouldn't. He was committed and he stood by it. And to me that really stood out.

And it's really not so much specifically on Father's Day that everything that Father's Day represents. The amount of time he drove to be at my games and the amount of time he drove to have a job that could you know, support a family that wasn't definitely wasn't doing financially very well at the time. And, and you just see that sort of kind of commitment and you realize that's, that's what masculinity needs to be. And too often the world calls it toxic, and or various aspects of it, but when it actually is lived out, I can testify that it's good.

BROWN: Well, John Stonestreet is the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Thanks John and Happy Father’s Day.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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