Culture Friday: If you can keep it

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: t’s Friday, January 2nd. 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 is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Morning, John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, welcome to 2026, John. We did a bit of year in review last week with you and now I’d like to take a run at a year in preview this year—and I do think it’s significant we’re in the quarter-mil of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And I’ll jump off of a famous saying of Benjamin Franklin, who, you know, famously said we’ve formed a Republic “if you can keep it.”

How do you think we’re doing keeping it?

STONESTREET: Well, I mean, listen, it would be un-Christian spokesperson-like if I found any good news in this, as opposed to just saying, no, it’s all coming apart.

On one hand, people have been saying it’s coming apart for a long time, and people were worried about it. He was worried about it. Then John Adams was worried about it. Then a lot of our founders wrote about being concerned about whether or not we were kind of the moral people that was needed.

I think one of the big differences today is that we’ve lost some of the institutional strength. And I think that exists on two levels.

First is the mediating institutions of civil society—a local sense of responsibility, certainly strong families, prominent churches. Those churches and the church life and the religious ethos of American society stayed longer than the European counterparts did, and I think that made a real difference, because it did frame out a level of virtue.

You weren’t expecting the state to do everything to kind of hold things together. People took some responsibility institutionally to hold things together themselves, and that’s the role that mediating institutions have played.

It would be foolish not to notice that as a big difference now. There are just so many different examples of the loss of the local, the loss of the voluntary, and the loss of these institutions, I think that really matters.

The other thing too—I was thinking about this as my wife and I spent some time watching through the Ken Burns documentary—despite, I think, the things that were rightly critiqued, there was an all-out call that the kind of nation we are needs to be taught, the kind of people we are, the kind of government we have.

It’s just called civic education.

How can you expect to have citizens behave as citizens and carry out this experiment if they don’t know what the experiment is? Much less having an open-border strategy and bringing in a number of people—I would say that in many ways, those that actually go through the process probably have a stronger civic education than a lot of people who grow up here, because there are such low expectations.

Not to mention, we’ve also embraced in the civic education we do kind of a critical theory framing of oppression, with the good guys and bad guys being reversed.

So I do think that those two losses are palpable, and hopefully this is a year, as we do this 250th celebration—what did President Trump call this? What was he calling this celebration this year? He had some crazy word for it.

EICHER: Semiquincentennial.

STONESTREET: A super—a super-centennial, because that’s what Trump went with.

I heard him in an interview, and I think the loss of those two things are palpable. As we hit this 250th celebration, whether you want to use the big, complicated word—which I’m not even going to try to pronounce—or I like Trump’s easy one, super-centennial, we’ll just go with that.

We need to, at some level, take stock of those things. We won’t be able to keep it—to quote Benjamin Franklin—at least in any long-term way, without those two things.

That’s kind of the newer experiment that we’re trying: to try to do this republic without the things that actually can form civic virtue as citizens and as a people together.

BROWN: So with this next question, I feel like I’m a day late and a dollar short. That’s an old phrase that my dad used. I don’t know if you’ve heard it.

The reason I say that is because, well, Christmas and New Year’s are over. But one thing I didn’t get the chance to ask you about over the holiday season, John, is all those really robust Christmas messages coming out of the government.

Did you see these from several different federal agencies actually mentioning Christ as Savior?

One conservative writer posted on social media, “It’s only okay to cite Christian ideals if you’re attacking Republicans and exploiting it for politics,” citing as an example a representative from California reposting stories that liken the federal enforcement of immigration law to shutting the Holy Family out of guest rooms in Bethlehem.

What do you say, John?

STONESTREET: I mean, I think it’s completely a legitimate thing to do.

If we go back through the 250 years of the American experiment, the use of Biblical imagery, Biblical language, quoting Scripture from government officials is pretty common. It’s common on both the left and the right.

It’s probably more common to quote it in a utilitarian way—shoehorning Scripture into a particular political cause—and whether that aligns with the Christian worldview or doesn’t, and in the cases of all these references to the immigration issue and the story of Bethlehem, all that needs to be vetted out.

So it’s really part of the American experiment. It’s part of American history. You can see it from all sides, from people who held to various degrees of serious faith—whether it was kind of a personal, private thing like a Lincoln or Washington, and probably a bit unorthodox.

But I tell you, since you harkened us back to Christmas and New Year’s, I am way less—way, way, way less—on the right or the left concerned about government officials misusing Christmas references than I am what I saw from churches.

I’m just going to say this bluntly: we ought not have too high of expectations of the state, but we should have high expectations of the church handling the Bible and handling the holy holiday like Christmas well.

I don’t know what it is at Christmas and Easter now in our market-driven, consumeristic churches that we feel like we have to doll it all up and add all these things to the plain, life-changing message of the truth of Jesus Christ and the incarnation.

It is enough in and of itself.

If you want to add the things that the church has already contributed—wonderful hymns and liturgies and Scriptures—wonderful. But the way this stuff is exploited muddles the message of Christmas way more than what I saw from any social media platform from a state official.

BROWN: Gen Z lifestyle trend that’s become a talker on social media. It’s called “soft life.” If you Google it, you’ll find articles, videos, more articles … about it.

It’s the antithesis of “hustle culture” and makes even so-called “work/life balance” look like life in the fast lane. Just more slowing down … chilling out … focusing less on work and prioritizing “self-care.” Pretty sure this is not the best way Gen Z should kick off the new year.

STONESTREET:I agree it’s not the best way.

This is why I’m so grateful for the voice of a guy like David Bahnsen right now and his book last year about work and the meaning of work and the articulation of a Christian worldview in the sense of calling.

We have a complicated relationship with work that we’ve passed down, and Gen Z kind of hit it between the eyes. They have a really complicated one.

There are external factors—affordability, the pandemic—but the problem isn’t just diligence or laziness. It’s actually a creation issue.

The creation story presents work as an essential calling of all human beings. We were put on the planet to work. We were created for work.

The Fall complicates work and turns what is supposed to be life-giving and fruitful into toil and frustration.

There’s a reaction here from this generation of not being able to tell the difference between work and toil. There are cultural moments and entire settings where people don’t have the blessings of work and are subjected to toil, and those are dehumanizing societies.

If we look back at the American experience, one of the amazing things has been the life-giving aspect of work—individually, corporately, nationally—a rising tide lifting all kinds of boats.

That’s something we need to teach and demonstrate in our behavior. We may have assumed it would naturally pass on, but what’s been passed on is a really unfortunate, twisted, broken view of work.

So maybe the New Year’s resolution should be: go get David Bahnsen’s book. It’s an antidote to the type of thing you’re talking about here.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Thanks John, see you next week.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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