Culture Friday: Resettling South African refugees

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 16th of May.

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

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. 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.

REICHARD: John, let’s begin with the debate over the arrival of the first group of white South African refugees, known as Afrikaners, into this country.

This week forty-nine men, women and children arrived in D.C., waving American flags. The Trump administration says these families are fleeing persecution by the South African government. It allowed their farms to be taken without compensation.

The South African government says, prove it. Meanwhile, in this country, some on the left are claiming this is white supremacy at work, calling it a double standard because tens of thousands of refugees from other countries who want to resettle in America are in limbo due to the stalled U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Even some faith-based refugee groups are questioning this.

So John, how should we evaluate claims of a double standard

STONESTREET: Well, it might be. It might be a double standard on behalf of the Trump administration. It might be a double standard on behalf of everyone critiquing the Trump administration. You know, humans are quite capable, and human institutions are quite capable of double standards. I do think that any sort of admissions program like this has to prioritize certain factors, and I think historically, religion and religious conviction has been among the highest factors taken into consideration when accepting refugees. And I think that's the kind of thing that Christians should actually advocate for. That is essential.

And I know people are going to hear that and go, ‘Wait, you’re critiquing this decision, and you’re also trying to protect Christians above everyone else.’ And the answer is, yes, I am. I think that's actually what the Bible tells us to do, is to care about people of faith. And we know that religious persecution, particularly the persecution of Christians, was at its highest in recorded history last year, and the year before that was the second year, and the year before that was the third year, because this is the trend. This has been going in for quite some time, and we’ve got real issues in trying to kind of parse that through.

Now, there are other things, right? There are mechanical parts of this decision in terms of overall numbers and ease of determining the level of need, how big of a strain this will put on our country, things like that. And I think along those lines, this was a pretty straightforward decision. We're not talking about thousands, and we are talking about a situation in South Africa where that history of racial—I say tension, it’s kind of an understatement, isn't it—that the history of racial conflict there in that nation has reversed as the power there has reversed, and there's plenty of evidence of that, I think. So there's some low hanging fruit here, I guess you could say, that I think that's what the government sees. But we're going to have to figure out the refugee piece. And I think the American people have struggled to distinguish between immigration, illegal immigration, coming through the southern border, and what we do with people who actually need help.

And we have a history of taking in refugees. I think the American culture would do well with strong Christian families. Because, you know, I go back to what the apologist, the earliest apologist, said about the first Christians: You don't want to persecute these people, because they're the best citizens you got. Well, I think that, you know, could potentially be the case here as well. So I think we're going to have to figure out this priority, and I don't think we have figured out the right priorities as of yet.

REICHARD: I do want to follow up with that, this is from NPR: “In a striking move that ends a nearly four-decades-old relationship between the federal government and the Episcopal Church, the denomination announced on Monday that it is terminating its partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by President Trump's administration.”

STONESTREET: Yeah, I mean, I don't put a whole lot of weight on the moral proclamations of the Episcopal Church. You know they have confused right and wrong on all kinds of issues, particularly sexuality. And let's just be really clear. If this were a group of sexually deviant white South Afrikaners, the Episcopal Church would be all about resettling them. They're not consistent at all on this. The Episcopal Church has been completely captivated by the wrong criteria, and that criteria is that someone is oppressed by a particular racial, ethnic or sexual category. And that's the entire moral discussion is who somebody belongs to. So I, you know, I'm I would say that both the government and the American people should be grateful that any relationship between the Episcopal Church and our National Government is severed.

BROWN: Well, moving on now: A telling report from Planned Parenthood this week. In the two years after the Supreme Court ruled there is no constitutional right to abortion, the organization received more taxpayer funding than any time in history.

A quick review of the numbers: The report for the year ending in 2024 reveals more than 400-thousand abortions were done and over 790-million dollars in taxpayer funding was received. Essentially, taxpayers became Planned Parenthood’s largest financial contributor.

Republicans in the House have been trying to defund the organization. John, I wonder is this the boost they need to finally get it done?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, I'm hopeful, because there's a whole lot of things that the GOP has claimed to be has claimed as priorities over the last, well, more than a decade, couple decades, including, you know, life and have had really, I think the power to do it at times, and instead, what's happened is nothing, and this is probably the primary example, is the federal funding of Planned Parenthood. And I’ve had this conversation with Republican lawmakers. The justification is, well, we can't not fund the government over this issue. We can't not fund the military over this issue. Like well, maybe.

But why is it more than last year? Why does it continue to be more and more and more and more? The number that I don't have in front of me, and is just how much this funding of Planned Parenthood has grown. And you could say, well, listen, it's clearly not for abortion services, it's for other things. Well, why anything? We know that Planned Parenthood doesn't actually provide holistic health care for women. We know that they only provide one particular kind of “reproductive care,” which isn't reproductive at all. Their primary business model is against their name. They're not a parenthood organization at any level. They're an anti parenthood organization at every level, and the vast majority of their money, and they make a lot of money, by the way, come, you know, come from offering this service. And so basically, everything else is being subsidized by the federal government and states as well. So I, you know, I hope something can be done. Maybe that's misplaced hope. I don't know, but it would be great to see that change.

REICHARD: Alright, John, I want to get your thoughts on this. It’s still career suicide to wear your faith on your sleeve in Silicon Valley—but a new movement called the ACTS 17 Collective is doing just that. From venture-capital pitch rooms to AI start-ups, a handful of bold believers are preaching Christ and pushing back on tech’s moral blind spots. This group says it’s not trying to make the faith “more palatable,” but to spark true conversion. How does that square with Paul’s Areopagus model in Acts 17?

STONESTREET: Well, every culture has a center. And you know, the center of the the culture in Athens, if you read that really intriguing passage at the latter part of acts 17, was this kind of gathering of ideas, so much so that, you know, Luke describes it as the Athenians loving to do nothing more than to sit around and everyone else did all the work. I mean, that's kind of what we know about that particular culture. And so this became the center of it.

In ours, it is technology. And so in this sense, going to where the culture is being kind of formed or created or catechized, is exactly what the gospel, I think, has always done. I also think this is part of a story, and you mentioned earlier about it being career suicide to wear your faith on your sleeve in Silicon Valley. That was certainly the case 10 years ago. I'm not sure it's still the case today. And the reason is, is because some reporting that's come out of Silicon Valley, about all these religious folk. And it's not just coming from Christians, like those of us here at WORLD, but it's, you know, there was an article, I think it was The Atlantic, just a few months ago that that talked about just a remarkable resurgence of faith, and that now it's actually okay to say it out loud. So I think that it's going to be an interesting thing to watch. And by the way, to quote GK Chesterton, ‘There's a lot of ways to fall down … there's only one way to stand up straight.’

This exploration of religion that, if it is indeed happening in Silicon Valley, is going to have some downsides as well, right? Just claiming God is not enough. The question is, which God? But this is exactly where the gospel belongs. There's not a corner of creation or a corner of culture where Christ is not Lord. That's the essence of a Christian worldview, and you can try to kind of push him out and not recognize that He is Lord of heaven and earth, but Christ is Lord of heaven and earth, and he's Lord here. So I laud this movement. It makes me think, not only of … I appreciate the reference to Acts 17. It also makes me think of the Businessman’s Revival at the beginning of the 20th century in New York, right? Here you have the center of American culture, and a group of business leaders just getting together and pray and do Bible study, and it sparked a revival. And I think there's other examples like that throughout history where it's not necessarily coming out of the church building, but it's coming from the church being the church in the wider culture. And two thumbs up for that.

BROWN: Before we let you go John, Christians once supplied the moral backbone of the GOP, but a new story in WORLD by Emma Friere says that backbone is buckling.

From “Barstool conservatives” who cheer bikini calendars to techno-monarchists and Nietzsche-inspired influencers, non-Christian ideas are reshaping the American right. So what does that mean for believers who still care about life, marriage, and a coherent public witness?

The piece quotes Aaron Renn noting that evangelicals sometimes assume any right-wing movement is a friend. How can believers cultivate discernment without sliding into cynicism?

STONESTREET: I mean, I'm tempted to say through the Colson Fellows program, but that would be a shameless piece of self promotion, so I would never do that. But actually that's, that's the vision that Chuck Colson had, which is … to start with the presumption that Jesus Christ is Lord is a different place to start when it comes to cultural engagement than you know, the world’s going to hell. Now, there are many aspects of which the world's going to hell, but Christianity is not just a set of beliefs that tells us what we don't agree with and what we need to oppose.

When we're in a time of feeling culturally beleaguered like we are, then it is tempting to define ourselves by everything that we're not. And we need to be really clear about that, because that's been a failure in various corners of the Christian church —is to not oppose the things that we should oppose in the name of being culturally relevant or something like that. So the clarity of a Christian worldview is the only way forward, the clarity of what it is that we believe. What are those foundations, that if we allow those to be destroyed, there's no way forward, as the psalmist said … What are those things? And I think building our faith and our public witness around four pillars is kind of how I see it, which is hope. Not just hope is a feeling, but hope is a reality based in the resurrection. Truth, not just as a collection of random things that we believe as Christians, but as the true story of the world. Identity, being centered in the image of God. And calling, that Christians have been given a job in this world, not just what we're against, but what we're for. So hope, truth, identity, calling. If we're clear on those four things, I think we have a strong way forward. But the risk that Aaron is talking about here, the reality, isn't it going to be kind of a crazy irony if in 10 years, we look back and you have the religious stuff happening on the left and the atheist stuff happening on the right, you know? I mean, we've seen the two sides flip on all kinds of issues. That would be a real tragedy, and it would be a failure of the church at that point.

REICHARD: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and Host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John See you next time.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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