Culture Friday: The right fuel in the tank

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday the 15th of August.

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

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday and John Stonestreet joins us. He’s president of the Colson Center and Host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Good Morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: Hey, listen to this.

MUSIC: [Excerpt from album]

BROWN: We’ve got something in common…I like music, too.

That’s a single from the group, The Velvet Sundown.

You wrote about their music …“with the coffee house vibe and their one million hits on Spotify.”

Turns out the group got all that attention before fans realized the band and the music ... all AI generated.

I will admit, watching the AI generated music videos with the little AI people … kind of creepy. But John, so what, the artists behind the music aren’t real people….do we have to connect with every musician whose music we like?

STONESTREET: No, and I that’s also an illusion, right, that people listen to musicians and they think they know them. I mean, that happens on all kinds of levels. But this is something else. This is not just, not connecting with a musician. This is something that God endowed human beings with the capacity to think musically, even the command to be musical. I mean, there’s, if you read the Psalms, there’s a command to worship the Lord with song. But to outsource that, this is a dehumanizing of music.

Music is something that is unique to humans. You don’t find it in the animal kingdom. I mean, you have songs, I guess, of birds and that sort of stuff, but you don’t have symphonies. It’s actually something that is a reflection of both the imagination, but especially a way of worshiping. And that’s why even music not directly aimed at God or telling us truth about God is still an expression of worship, in my view. And it could be a good expression, or it could be a bad expression. It could be noble or it could be idolatrous, but this is to a whole nother level of expecting somebody else to do the work for us.

So there’s so many of these AI stories that come up, and it makes me think of something that Peter Kreft wrote years ago, the Catholic ethicist. He said, you know, just when our toys went from being sticks and stones to thermonuclear bombs, we all became moral infants. In other words, this has a lot to do with the kind of people we are and whether we’re able to handle this technology. And so far, I’m not convinced.

BROWN: I want to go back to what you said about music being an expression of worship. I agree. But this isn’t Christian music. Does that matter? Do you make a distinction?

STONESTREET: I really don’t. And just like I don’t think that there’s much of a distinction to be made between Christian songs and non Christian songs and secular songs. It’s basically all music is a reflection of how God made us, and it either aligns with what’s true and it points our hearts and minds towards God.

You know, we know from Scripture that you can point your mind and heart towards God, not just by looking at God, but by looking at his world, or looking at the human experience. I mean, this is the Song of Solomon. I mean, there’s, there’s all kinds of ways.

So some of those categories, I think we’ve superimposed on all of human expression, but especially music.

BROWN: So, John, exactly where do you draw the line?

STONESTREET: Yeah, I think the question of where you draw the line is not the right place to begin. I mean, I know you have to get there, and this is going to sound like a cop out, and maybe it is, but, you know, it’s kind of like what is the line of purity? Purity is not a line. It’s a direction.

In other words, are you running into a direction that honors God and where your habits and your heart and your mind and your intention are in that direction to align with how God made us and the sorts of people that we’re supposed to be or if we’re not?

In other words, you know, a tool of any kind, a gun, is really helpful in the hands of a hunter, and it’s really harmful in the hands of a killer. The difference isn’t a line between hunting and killing. It takes that expression, but the real difference there is what kind of person is holding that gun. That’s what I have to think about when it comes to AI.

I mean, we talk here all the time about how Neil Postman got it all right and predicted how we were going to engage with entertainment. He did the same thing with technology. So are we using the technology to advance those things which God created humans to do, or are we using them to replace humans altogether? I think we can draw a number of lines around that framework, and what’s good and what’s bad, what’s useful and what’s not.

EICHER: Well, hey, John, I hope you can stick around for a little bit longer, because I’d like to talk with you about a new project of yours coming out in just a few weeks in September called Truth Rising. Now, your team sent me a screener of the 90-minute documentary, and I’ve got to say to you, John, well done. I watched it over and over. Even scrapped my original column idea for the September WORLD Magazine that went online today and decided to write about this instead. That’s how enthusiastic I am about it.

STONESTREET: Ah, that’s great. Thank you.

EICHER: Yeah, sure. So I guess since Collin Garbarino is away and we were not planning on a movie review, we can add one of our own — a documentary review — here of Truth Rising. And here’s where I’d like to begin with it.

I know that you’re aware of another recent project called The After Party. It drew a lot of attention last year. It was aimed at the 2024 election, sort of trying to reframe a Christian approach to politics. It billed itself as moving Christians beyond “partisan divides.” But the leadership of this project and the funding of this project led, shall we say, more than a few people to see it as shaped by just Never Trumpism and leaning left politically.

But when I watched Truth Rising, it struck me as moving in the opposite direction and providing a hopeful vision for a cultural engagement grounded in Christian conviction. So, John, was Truth Rising meant as a response to that by any chance?

STONESTREET: You know, I can’t speak for everyone that was involved in the Truth Rising project. This is a partnership from the Colson Center and Focus on the Family. And very quickly we realized we wanted to invite Os Guinness to really kind of be the thought leader—the Gandalf, you could say—of the project.

The After Party literally never came to my mind until you just now asked me that question, Nick. I’ve got to be honest, it had nothing to do with it. I think our approach is, listen, we’re in the tradition of some wonderful thought leaders—Francis Schaeffer, Chuck Colson—who wrestled with ideas and the significance of ideas to cultures and even civilizations.

You think about guys like Jacques Barzun or Pitirim Sorokin, who talked about the rise and fall of cultures and civilizations. When we think of civilizations, we think about them as historical artifacts, right? You see them in museums. You see them in history books. And yet we’re in the middle of one. And we’re in the middle, if Os Guinness is right, of a really vulnerable time in Western culture.

I don’t know if we’re in a Bonhoeffer moment, where everything we try will fail, or if we’re in a Wilberforce moment, where everything we try will succeed. But what I want to know is, what kind of people should we be? Isn’t that the question that Francis Schaeffer and Chuck Colson both asked, using up all the available adverbs — “How then shall we live?” or “How now shall we live?”

I’ve said this a number of times here, and I deeply believe it. I learned it from Os Guinness, that God has called us to a particular time and place. We’re not just called to a job, we’re not just called to a ministry, we’re not just called to acts of charity and good works — although all those things are true — but God put us in this moment in history and not in another.

And so if indeed we’re in a civilizational moment, as Os Guinness puts it and describes and so many of the thought leaders argue, what kind of people can we be? And you know, many Christians have bought into a secular worldview — that history proceeds with these mindless forces, and we’re just victims of wherever it takes us, that there’s really not a lot we can do. And that’s exactly opposite of how the Christian worldview describes the significance of followers of Christ being called in place by God in times and places, and how God sometimes uses remarkably small things to make remarkably big changes.

This is a journey. The Truth Rising film is ambitious. It attempts to start with an analysis of Western culture and end by calling Christians to be courageous voices, like the people whose stories we tell. And hopefully Truth Rising can call more and more Christians to that kind of life.

EICHER: You know, John, listening to you describe it, that’s exactly how it played for me. I think in my column, I wrote that watching Truth Rising felt a bit like a 4K compression of the last decade of Culture Friday conversations.

You know those courageous voices that you highlight — that you just mentioned — Chloe Cole, Jack Phillips, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Seth Dillon, Katy Faust, the last two of those have even written for WORLD. It’s that same mix of conviction and clarity we’ve been talking about for years.

But here’s what I’d like to ask next, and I said this in the column too — the film felt to me like a baton pass, like Os was handing the torch to you. Was that intentional?

STONESTREET: Well, I think he’s passing the torch to all of us, and that’s, of course, what I think matters the most. And this was central to Chuck Colson’s message. This was central to what you heard from so many of the thought leaders, including Os — that engaging culture or being a culturally sound and thoughtful Christian isn’t just the job of the professionals.

All of us are in a cultural moment. This cultural moment is super shaky. I mean, we’ve all felt it, right? We’ve all gone from voices that yesterday were telling us religion is poison to today saying that they like Christmas carols, or yesterday saying you’re not allowed to say that there’s such a thing as boys and girls to now being changed a bit. I mean, it’s so dizzying how fast culture changes.

And what I wanted to really see happen is the church called in a powerful way to jump into this moment. And by the way, the film is really a call to action, and then it’s followed by a four-part teaching series that takes small groups through four pillars of courage.

What does it mean to be a courageous Christian? Four things: hope, truth, identity, calling. Be a person of hope, like First Peter says. Be someone grounded in the truth, because that’s the only way forward. Be someone who understands what it means to be made in the image of God as an answer to the crisis of identity of our culture. And then have a keen sense of calling — put some flesh on that: hope, truth, identity, calling. That’s where we want all this to land.

EICHER: Well, hey, listen, we may not have time. I’ve got a million questions for you, John, but the one thing I have to ask you about is the old truck.

STONESTREET: Haha, everybody wants to know about the old truck, yeah.

EICHER: So it’s a ’64 Chevy C10 Fleetside, right?

STONESTREET: Beautiful.

EICHER: So did I get it?

STONESTREET: Yeah, yeah, pretty darn close. I think that’s what it was. Have to go back and remember—it’s not mine. It had a Corvette engine retrofitted with old-looking gauges to go with the real one. And Os Guinness legitimately almost did not get in the truck — like that scene …

EICHER: Yeah, he did not look like he wanted to be there at all.

STONESTREET: … that was not acting. He was like, “You got to be kidding me,” in his British accent, without curse words. I mean, it was like … and honestly, I couldn’t see because we had three cameras across the front windshield that had to be bolted in because the suction cups wouldn’t work on the curved windshield.

EICHER: Amazing.

STONESTREET: True story — and I drove that national treasure, not the truck, I’m talking about Os Guinness — risking all of our lives from the Lincoln Memorial out to rural Virginia.

EICHER: Hey, and my brother, I told you I have watched it over and over, wanting to be a good reporter for the magazine, but I noticed that you ran a red light. We need to talk about that.

Yeah, I have the evidence, but clearly you’re following the camera car, which hurried through a yellow, is what I’m guessing, and almost left you guys stranded at the red. And I’m imagining you going, “We’ve got to get this shot.” So I’ll just chalk it up to one-take documentary driving and let you off here with a warning.

But seriously, John, I could not help thinking that that old pickup was a metaphor for Western civilization — something sturdy, something worth keeping, but also something in need of restoration and care. Was that the idea?

STONESTREET: You know, we worked with Coldwater Media, who are known for telling great stories. Those guys love cars, as you know from Drive Thru History, which is one of their wonderful projects. But one of the best analogies, I thought, that emerged in the film was the former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, who says that civilizations run on fuel, and if you put the wrong fuel in them, they sputter and die. And we all sense that we’ve been putting the wrong fuel in there.

It’s very similar to what Os says elsewhere — that we’re a cut-flower civilization. The ideas that animated the West, again, made it flourish and led it to become a flourishing context for human beings, have been cut off. And that doesn’t mean the flower immediately decays — it loses its shine and petals start to fall off.

And I think that long decay and that long decline comes when you don’t have those ideas tethered. So this is really a call for Christians to tether their lives to the things that are good and true and beautiful. And you can also use that analogy — put the right fuel in the tank, and when you do, like that truck, that baby will hum.

EICHER: That baby will hum. Good thought.

BROWN: With all this talk about it….I’m looking forward to seeing this documentary myself! John Stonestreet, president of the Colson center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, thanks again, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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