Culture Friday: Half a gospel won’t do

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 28th of March.

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, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: John, a recent article by Andrew Walker has gotten a lot of traction on our website—he argues that while the culture seems to be shifting politically to the right, especially among younger people, evangelicalism isn’t prepared to meet the moment. It’s a heady article, challenging, and tough to summarize, but I’ll put a link to it in the transcript for the listener who wants to dive in.

But Walker’s argument is we’ve emphasized grace for so long that we’ve forgotten to affirm creational truths—things like moral order, authority, family, even the goodness of being male or female.

So here’s the question for you:

If the culture really is starting to rediscover some of these creational truths, why do you think the church seems so reluctant to affirm them?

STONESTREET: Well, it’s a good question, I think that the idea that the culture is starting to rediscover creational truths might be an optimistic way to say it. I think what we have seen instead is that the system’s not working, so to speak. The alternatives are actually worse.

I think there’s maybe a more pragmatic realization than anything else.

But to your question about why the churches hesitant to speak clearly about them is that, even in the framing from Andrew—which is a good framing about the relationship between nature and grace—these aren’t theological categories that the church even thinks with.

The church really doesn’t think about them by and large—and I’m talking in big generalities here—with that kind of theological precision or that kind of theological aim.

The church is largely pragmatic, and the church is largely gnostic. So there’s not a sense of the church having a Christian worldview, a Christian view of reality that aligns with the revealed truth of scripture.

It has to do with—as Rosaria Butterfield said to my daughter recently in an interview which she was very kind to do for my daughter—the remnants of [Friedrich] Schleiermacher, in which religious experience is what matters and Christian truth doesn’t. Religious experience is what we’re after, and we go after that. Those are the limits of what we can know to be true about Christianity.

Now, of course, many people listening and even many who have bought into that framework wouldn’t know who Schleiermacher is. [Self-aware laughter] But this is the legacy of really bad theological ideas that have taken root in our culture.

I find it somewhere between interesting and bizarre to go back to a conversation we had not too long ago here: when somebody says that what needs to be changed about Christianity is how much they talk about worldview. It’s so ridiculous to me, because the thing that is missing is what we might call “applied theology,” the taking of what is true and thinking about the world through that lens.

Our problem is not that we’re talking about worldview too much. Maybe we’re not talking about it precisely enough. But the bigger challenge is that we don’t even think about faith in those terms. There’s a whole side of muscle memory, theological muscle memory, that just doesn’t exist.

And then we wonder why—to throw out a good March Madness analogy—we keep missing our free throws at the end of the game.

EICHER: All right, John, I’m utterly helpless on March Madness when NHL playoff dreams are so close to coming true for my hockey team, but I’m going to look up that philosopher and in the transcript, we’ll add a link for the listener who wants to explore because I need to do the same, frankly.

But I want to shift to something eles we’ve been tracking here: the Trump administration’s deportation of gang members believed to be part of a violent Venezuelan gang. The administration used a founders’-era wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to justify the removals.

Even this week we had some reporting from our DC bureau … Josh Schumacher telling us some are cheering the move; others are raising concerns about due process and evidence—especially when things like tattoos are being used as proof of gang affiliation.

So here’s what I’d have you wrestle with: Christians need to err on the side of mercy—but is that always the right instinct when dealing with people who reject law and order? How do we pursue justice that protects rights without going too far: slipping into either harshness on the one extreme—or into naïveté on the other?

STONESTREET: They’re not easy questions, when the cat’s already out of the proverbial bag. But I do think that there are some framings that can bring to the table here. The first is, whose job is this? There’s a difference between the church’s job or the individual citizen’s job and the government’s job.

The church’s job is to be a message of mercy. We certainly we want our state to act mercifully we appropriate, but that’s not the primary virtue by which the government is even supposed to or is able to act. Part of that is that the state struggles to be precise. We know that’s true from TSA security—to fulfill a task government rightly has, which is to protect its citizens.

I find here that the just-war way of thinking helps give us a little bit of precision here. So “just war” basically asked the question, is war ever justified? Then, how should war be carried out in order to be just? The same thing can apply here to deportation or enforcement of borders themselves. Is it ever justified? I think the answer on every single level through the history of the world would be yes—and it is helpful when the government does that, it becomes a source of life and, yes, even mercy to its own citizens.

But then how it is done really matters.

That’s where it gets quite difficult and we’re not dealing with the one size fits all with who we’re concerned about being in the country. So for example, the young man who was a Columbia student, the situation with him is different than the situation with these Venezuelan gang members. It’s obvious, right? If you are a human being, you have a various level of rights that should be respected.

Within the purview of government authority, then it’s like, whether you're here legally or illegally extends the amount of rights, the additional rights that you have. If you’re here on a student visa, you have a certain degree of rights. If you’re here in a worker’s permit, you have a different degree of rights or a green card. Then if you’re a citizen, you get them all, right? And that’s a legitimate way to carry this out.

Now, is the government going to make mistakes when you’re dealing with such an incredible, vast problem? The answer is, of course, yes, they’re going to make mistakes, just like even in carrying out a just war when mistakes are made, it’s devastating.

When mistakes are made, people should be held accountable. When mistakes are made, then we should speak up and demand that our government do the right thing and do it in the right way. We shouldn’t expect them to be perfect—and we shouldn’t justify whatever they do as being perfect just because we like what they are doing, right? We have to be able to call those balls and strikes.

I think that that framework can be helpful and looking at something as alarming as violent Venezuelan gangs that clearly do not have the protections of citizenship or legal status—and then are breaking the law—and there has to be a punishment that is just in order to be merciful and compassionate, and just for the citizens the government is tasked to protect.

BROWN: John, earlier you mentioned your daughter’s conversation with Rosaria Butterfield. I love her! She’s someone with deep wisdom and a clear biblical lens. I’m glad your daughter has access to that, and that’s a far cry from what many students are getting in schools today. The Wall Street Journal reports a case in point: a new program being rolled out in nine districts where middle and high school students can turn to an AI chatbot named “Sonny” for mental health support.

It’s pitched as a kind of well-being companion. But behind the scenes, it’s monitored not by trained professionals—but by twenty-somethings hired mainly for their relatability.

What’s your take on this shift toward AI-based therapy in schools—and what does it say about what kids really need and who’s stepping in to care for them?

STONESTREET: Oh, I well, I am and Rosaria was very gracious on that front, yes. We are very grateful that she didn’t have to contact “Sonny” instead.

Look, I do think there is a role, particularly in health care and even in mental health care for kind of triage work using technology. But the question is, what is it able to do, and what is it not able to do, and where do we go from here? I don’t know whether to be more alarmed by a AI chatbot talking to kids or that it’s backed up by 20 somethings without any sort of professional training. I don’t know what’s worse at this point.

You know, the contrast here for me is living in the state of Colorado, which has incredibly high rates of teen depression and teen suicidality—and has for a long time. It hit a peak prior to COVID. So prior before that pandemic, before the school lockdowns, there was an intervention program that was initiated in the schools of Colorado Springs.

It was so successful that it was featured in national mental health care conferences, as a way to address the depression and suicidality rates among young people. It brought in adults who served as kind of first responders. They would walk around the lunchroom. They would be approved volunteers. They would just look to talk to people, look for signs. It was so successful in terms of what it prevented and how it curbed those numbers that it became something that was celebrated by mental health professional associations.

Then, of course, COVID happened. All of the volunteers were sent home and all the kids were sent home to be in front of their screens—and a lot of progress was lost.

But then the question was, where do you get these adults who would be willing to volunteer to go into back to high school? What’s the answer to that question? There’s only one place in American society where you’re going to find a critical mass of adults willing to care for the next generation. It’s what you’ve always found in history where there is a plague, you find the people that are running into the plague, and there’s just one group, and that is Christians.

In other words, the program that was nationally celebrated as curbing this crisis that was happening in Colorado Springs found volunteers from church. They went to church and, yes, suddenly religion was allowed back in public schools because when you hit rock bottom, you look for all the resources that you can find. It was real people, real Christians stepping in the gap in a real way.

So I would love for us to go back to that program. I would love to rely on that and for Christians to be willing to step up and to play that role and not outsource our responsibility to AI chat bots.

BROWN: I meant to mention, I’ll link up that Wall Street Journal article as well as a piece of commentary on the topic on our site. You’ll find all that, and the ones you mentioned, Nick, in today’s transcript.

At the same time, we don’t want to junk up the program by mentioning a bunch of web links, so let us know whether these are useful to you.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, we’ll see you again in a couple weeks, and we’ll be talking with Katie McCoy. Safe travels, John, thanks!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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