Culture Friday: More than one issue

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday the 12th of July, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

It’s time for Culture Friday, and joining us now is John Stonestreet. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

MAST: Let’s start with the outcry over politicians changing their views on abortion.

This past weekend, two senators with strong pro-life records seemed to walk them back: those senators were J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio.

Let’s focus on Senator Rubio’s comments. A reporter asked whether he supported changing the official GOP platform to say abortion should be a state issue. That’s former President Trump’s position, one that’s already been accomplished with the Dobbs decision. This is what caused some eyebrows to raise, though… Rubio answered the GOP platform must reflect the nominee and that nominee’s position is one “grounded in reality.”

Now, WORLD’s Andrew Walker wrote about this for WORLD Opinions. He pointed out that it’s one thing to acknowledge political realities, it’s a whole other thing to surrender moral principles.

John, most Americans are moderately pro-abortion. Do you expect there will be an outcry against this position change like Walker calls for?

STONESTREET: I think there will be. I think there will be by people who have been underestimated by the Republican Party just how pro-life we really are. And notice I said "we," because this is, this is a, I mean, doesn't even make sense to me as a politically viable strategy. I mean, the sort of commitment to certain candidates and the party that has been shown has by these folks, has been because of the very clear distinction between the position of the Republicans and the Democrats on the issue of abortion, specifically, and also, this is a group of people who believe that this isn't one of many issues.

This is a foundational issue, a fundamental issue. You don't get life right, you don't get so many other things right. And that's what's so confusing right now about President Trump's position, about the position that was articulated by Senator Rubio, about the position that's now been enshrined in the Republican platform, which is, how can you actually think what we think about abortion and then be okay with access to mifepristone. How can we actually think what we think when it comes to the dignity of preborn lives and then be okay with a completely unregulated, out of control IVF and surrogacy industry? You know, these are all things that the GOP is trying to kind of walk the political wind on. It's a tight wire, and it's where the pragmatism of politics has to break down, and you've got to go back to principle. And that's what I think Andrew Walker is calling for. That's what several of us will be calling for.

Now, at the end of the day, we also believe that there's only so much that politics can accomplish, and so there is this choice, not necessarily, as I said before, between the lesser of two evils when it comes to a particular race or particular candidate, but the best way, as one of my friends and former colleagues puts it, to lessen evil. And that's where this platform shift isn't super clear. If that this is the level of commitment that the Party now has to protecting pre-born lives, then it's not actually clear that this platform, that this party will lessen the evil of abortion anymore than it currently has with the overturning of Roe.

Don't get me wrong, as Ryan Anderson put it at an event that I attended this just this past week, the end of Roe is now two years old. What that means is there are two-year-olds that are walking around right now that wouldn't have been if Roe had not been overturned. That was a real win. But to suggest, as the President has, that somehow that what everyone wanted is just for every state to make their own decision on this. No, that's what we wanted on Roe, because Roe was terrible law.

Roe actually was poorly decided on a legal level, but it was also terrible in the sense that it enabled great evil across the board with no restrictions whatsoever. The goal has to be, still is that abortion gets swept into the dustbin of history, like some of the other historically grave evils, like slavery, like human trafficking, some of these other things that just can't be thinkable anymore as an option for people. So the schizophrenia, essentially, that's being called for by the Republican platform position now on this, by the presidential candidate, by Senator Rubio, is not going to be one that we can embrace and go along with.

REICHARD: My question then becomes what it means in the voting booth, just me and the ballot. There are lots of problems in the U.S. and lots of issues on ballots. Abortion being one. Does this reasoning you lay out mean Republicans should become one-issue voters then?

STONESTREET: No, politics is not a one issue vote, and that's why I like the framework of lessening evil versus the lesser of two evils, like a lot of people talk about, first of all, especially when you're talking about the presidential race, you're giving too much credit to, you know, who sits in the White House. And you know, the American experiment is who sits in all the houses. You know, who sits in the House of Representatives, who sits in Congress, who sits in your local state house, who sits in the wherever your local school board is housed, and most importantly, in the American context, and by the way, I think, in a Biblical framework, is who sits in your own house, and what sort of freedoms do you have to parent your own children. And of course, what we're seeing now is a political party that actually thinks that the state knows better than parents and the raising of children. So there's all kinds of levels of evil that we, that the government right now is enabling, that we can actually, I think, address with our vote. And that's where you know, the calculations have to begin.

But it is notable now that America has lost, you know, the clear choice, at least according to this platform language, to think that being pro-life is to be satisfied with where things currently are, where half of our states or so on, are protecting life, and half of our states are more actively targeting pre-born lives than was the case under Roe. I mean, you know, we have states passing more radical pro-death laws. My state's one of them, Colorado, where now you're not only trying to enable abortion at any stage, but actually going after pro-lifers, going after these sweet little old Catholic ladies that show up every day at pregnancy resource centers, targeting doctors who want to give women the additional choice of abortion pill reversal.

So to take away the stark choice, and then to think that pro-lifers are somehow going to be happy with this, absolutely not. This is never what we signed up for. We didn't sign up for the end of Roe. We signed up for the end of abortion.

MAST: Alright, one more question John: The organization you lead today was founded by the late Chuck Colson. And it was 50 years ago this week that he began serving prison time for his part in the Watergate scandal.

Now his daughter Emily Colson was 15 years old at the time. She wrote a reflection of that day in 1974 for WORLD Opinions about a one-on-one conversation she had with her father in that jail cell.

Had you heard that story before? And what lessons are there for us today as we think about the promise of Jesus to never leave or forsake us - whether it be in a man-made prison or a spiritual one?

STONESTREET: Yeah, I had not heard that story before. I mean, Emily had shared, and of course, she has spoken for us at the Colson Center, and also serves on our board, and she actually did a Breakpoint commentary in the steps of her dad on that same day, talking a little bit more about what it was like for her dad to go to prison. And you know what? We actually believe that this Romans 8:28, thing that we unfortunately oftentimes lob over the wall to people who are who are suffering and hurting in inappropriate ways: “Hey, all things work together for good.” But the truth is really that God is orchestrating these details together.

And of course, Chuck said that in that famous press conference leaving the courtroom, "I could serve God in prison. I can serve God outside of prison." And it proved to be true. But you forget kind of the human cost of a 15, then 15-16 year-old girl, Emily Colson, trying to make sense of this with her dad, you know, believing in her dad and yet having such a public fall like he did, and what does that mean for, you know, their relationship, and you know she needs him. In fact, you know there was a former political enemy of Chuck's that offered to serve his sentence because, as he said, you know, his kids need him. And it's just there's so much that kind of emerges from this story. And looking back you you can see it was, you know, as Emily said in our commentary for Breakpoint, there's a line from Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who said, you know, "Life is understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards."

And so, you know, it was such a beautiful thing to hear her reflect backward on something about what it was like to live that forwards. And of course, we've all had that experience where you go through something, and then years later you can kind of start seeing how God used it. And now it's, it's just such an incredible thing, you know, being with a gathering, even this week, and Chuck's name comes up over and over and over and over again, of course, by me, but also by many others who just kind of point to his leadership, his ability to connect the most significant questions that Christians have to the fundamental truths of the Bible, who we are as human beings, who God is, the potential and possibility of forgiveness. It's just, it's just a wonderful thing to remember.

And you know, there's so much came out of that day. So much came out of not only the fact that Chuck became a Christian, but that he did go to prison, that his first years in following Jesus were going to prison, and of course, famously, we know now he went back to prison over and over and over and never stopped, most famously, on Easter Sundays to preach about the resurrection. And so many things emerged from this that we can trust God's hand in orchestrating the events of our lives, even when it's really, really difficult. And Emily, of course, wrote about that and did so so beautifully.

REICHARD: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. John, thanks so much.

STONESTREET: Thank you, both

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