Culture Friday: Speaking boldly

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, July 11th. 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 and joining us now is John Stonestreet. He is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning to you.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good Morning.

EICHER: John, there’s been a policy change out of Washington this week that could ease a long-standing tension between church and state. Daniel Suhr has a good column at WORLD Opinions on the subject.

As you well know, many pastors and churches have tiptoed around political issues—especially when election day draws near. The concern being that saying too much from the pulpit might get them in trouble with the IRS.

That fear goes back to the mid-1950s, the so-called Johnson Amendment. It restricted political speech by tax-exempt nonprofits, including churches.

But now the IRS has announced a change: If a pastor is preaching to his own congregation, during a worship service, about issues—even electoral ones—from a Biblical perspective, that no longer counts as political campaigning under the tax code.

John, you’ve often been critical of churches avoiding “political” engagement out of fear. So in your view, was that fear really about the IRS? And do you think this new policy opens the door for pastors to speak more boldly?

STONESTREET: Yeah. Well, I hope it does, and I think probably some of it was fear of the IRS. But of course, that reveals a much deeper problem in worldview. So for example, if you think it is the state's job to put the line on what counts as something that churches should care about, what is within the proper purview of faith and what is outside the purview of faith, where you're looking to the wrong authority to begin with, this is getting the admonition from Jesus rendered to Caesar what belongs to Caesar exactly wrong to begin with. I'm not critical of churches avoiding political content, because I think most political content does need to be avoided in church.

My problem is that we take all of the moral issues that have to do with the definition of what it means to be human and whether or not we're obeying the 10 Commandments and common sense morality that have political expression, and avoiding all of those as if avoiding these moral issues is the same as avoiding political issues. And I think that that's fundamentally misunderstanding the world, and I think it has to do with the fact that we have over politicized everything.

It says something about our world, and it says something about our worldview when everything gets labeled political, as if that explains what it is. It just doesn't. The most important issues are moral issues. They have political ramifications, and the church has to have the ability to stand up and say things about these things and include the ramifications of being a citizen, and our faith should make us better citizens.

I tell you another thing, Nick. I've been really interested to see the reactions, and there's been a lot of reactions that say things like, “Well, yeah, the Johnson Amendment needed to go because, you know, it wasn't legitimate.” No one really cared about it. It wasn't ever enforced, and no one on the left was ever criticized for being too political, even though they clearly were. But of course, Christians should never endorse political candidates. I think that's exactly wrong too. Why shouldn't Christians endorse political candidates? I think at the very least we should be willing to say never, ever, ever vote for that guy, or never, ever, ever offer power to a party that thinks that children belong to the state and not to parents. Christian political engagement in a falling context is almost always the task not of voting between the lesser of two evils, but voting, whether on issues or on candidates, to lessen evil, and that fundamentally is a moral task, not a political one.

BROWN: Speaking of speaking boldly, John, there’s bold and then there’s “Billboard Chris” … He’s the Canadian dad who travels the world with provocative sandwich boards critical of gender ideology. I’m sure you’ve seen him online.

He has a knack for sparking street conversations … or just getting yelled at … and then making the encounters go viral. And this week, he won a major free-speech victory in Australia.

Let me give you the background: The government there had ordered the social-media platform X to take down one of his posts. The reason was because he’d criticized the World Health Organization for appointing a transgender activist to its global gender policy team.

X refused at first but then geo-blocked the post in Australia. So Billboard Chris fought back—and he got help from ADF International—and this week a court ruled in his favor, saying the government got it wrong and that peaceful speech like his is not so-called “cyber-abuse.”

John, how big a deal is this? Is it a one-off? Or does this case tell us anything about the current battle over speech and truth in the public square?

STONESTREET: Well, it's impossible to think about this as a one off, because it is another chapter or another account and what's becoming a long story of people backpedaling on this issue where it seemed as if just a few years ago that trans ideology was going to run roughshod over every aspect of our culture. And think about that however you'd like, whether you're talking about different specific examples or the seven spheres of culture, from medicine to government to education to the arts to religion to whatever else, it's hard to imagine any of those spheres that did not seem completely vulnerable to this ideology, and suddenly it's not. I think it's also interesting to think about it country by country.

I mean, you know, look, Europe started backing off before the United States. This year, we've seen the United States back off of some of this. Australia was a late adopter. And also, I don't know, I mean, Australia, to me, is such a fascinating place. Love the country. Been there a lot. COVID did something right where there's this place that was kind of conservative, like the United States just 10, 12, 15, years ago, compared to the rest. Then becomes, in many ways, during COVID, locked down, and that includes locking down on dissent in any sort of way, and suddenly it went from any dissent on government policy of COVID to any dissent on transgender stuff, and that's what we saw in Australia. So the fact that this decision reversed there, to me, is really interesting as just someone who has been interested in Australia and watched it throughout this whole time. So that's encouraging, and it's part of the larger story.

But billboard Chris is one of those guys that we will look back on when we're on the other side of this madness and say, “You know, there were some people who were willing to say it out loud.” His provocative sandwich boards critical of gender ideology, as you put it, aren't saying anything all that revolutionary, but he has the willingness to put it on the sandwich board and stand out and take shots. And he has taken shots, obviously verbal, but also physical, and this is just the latest case of legal shot that he has taken. So a lot going on here. It's an interesting new development in this ongoing story.

EICHER: John, I want to end here, because I feel like if we started here, there’d be no graceful way to get into other stuff. But we were reminded just a few moments ago about the news that’s rightly consumed us this week: the heartbreaking news out of Texas—the destructive flooding, the unspeakable loss of life. It’s the kind of tragedy that just leaves us stunned.

Obviously, natural disasters come with every season—hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires—but this one feels different. Children at summer camp.

Two basic questions come to mind. First: How do you think believers should respond when the grief is this raw and the loss so great? And second: Yes, there are lessons to be learned and undoubtedly accountability to be had—but, honestly, day one, some of the coverage had turned to finger-pointing. Does that seem to you at this early stage disrespectful?

STONESTREET: You know, I'll answer the second question first, and the answer is yes. The first question, to me, is the far more interesting one for us right now, and the most important one, which is, how do believers respond in a time of great loss. And I think the most important place to get our answer from is from Scripture.

And so I'll point to two places. Number one is at the center of the whole Biblical story, from the start to the finish, is a God who took on flesh and dwelt among us, Emmanuel, God with us. The real answer to the evil and the suffering that God's image bearers have to endure as part of this fallen world is God Himself. He comes in human flesh. He suffers His death, His resurrection.

And you know, one of the things that makes this particular tragedy so difficult is that whenever you talk about children, you're talking about people that are innocent and deserve this. They didn't do anything to bring this onto themselves. They're innocent. And what God gives us at this time is is Christ, who was the most innocent of all sufferers.

The second place is Job, which is, of course, all about dealing with suffering and why bad things happen and and so on. And that's a book that, I don't know about you, but tends to leave more questions than answers. And I think that that is what evil should do. Evil should leave us with more questions than answers. Job’s friends do a great job of responding to his tragedy until they start talking, until they start pontificating. That doesn't mean we don't have anything to say. I think we do have something really important to say, because the suffering, although it makes us question, “Where was God in this? Why didn't God do something to stop this?” We also have to ask, “Why is the world this way?” Unless in the sense that this stuff does happen, but we sense it as evil.

You know, if the world's just a gigantic accident, the product of natural causes and processes, what happened to those beautiful little girls in Texas wasn't evil. It was bad luck. But we sense it as evil. And that says something about us. That says something about the world, and the fact that we have that moral framing gives us the grounding to look to God and ask for help. And that help has been seen. It's been seen already in this event, it's been seen in the helpers. Mr. Rogers used to say that at a time of great tragedy, look for the helpers. Why do we not only then know intuitively that the evil that took place and the suffering that happened to these girls was, in fact, evil, and that the help is good? Where does that framework even come from? That says a lot about who we are, and the ultimate helper is God Himself. And even the girls, as they're driving away, having been rescued, singing praises to God and still saying, we want to sing about God and that being part of that camp and that culture and their lives is something that points us, I think, also in the right direction.

So I think at some level, in the face of tragedy like this, Christians get in trouble by saying too much, and we get in trouble by not saying enough. And to me, again, it goes back to what God reveals about himself, that he ultimately is not only the God who exists, but the God who communicates. And the most clear way that he's ever communicated is in the person of Jesus Christ. And what Jesus Christ reveals in his own suffering and his defeat of death and his witness with us is actually something that we have to offer those who are suffering. So I hope we figure out ways to do that. Clearly, already, there have been people doing that for this community and for these victims, but you're right. I couldn't agree with you more. This one feels different. And whenever you're dealing with the innocence of children and the innocence of suffering, that's when you know this is not the way it's supposed to be.

BROWN: John Stonestreet, president of the Colson center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, thanks again, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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