The fidelity alternative

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday May 22nd. 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 joining us now is John Stonestreet. He’s president of the Colson Center, he’s host of the Breakpoint podcast, and he’s here now. 

Good morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: Well John, we’re coming up on June, which for decades in American public life has been dominated by so-called "Pride Month" celebrations.

But there’s now a counter-observance gaining traction among religious conservatives…it’s been around a few years, it’s called “Fidelity Month.” It’s the idea that June ought to honor fidelity to God, to family, to country, instead of celebrating sexual identity politics.

The effort is associated with Princeton professor Robert George and it’s drawn support from Christian conservatives across denominational lines.

It’s a great idea and I know it’ll be active again this year. But is there any danger, John, that conservatives simply become reactive? So in other words, are we too busy building parallel observances instead of articulating a positive vision of the good life? What do you say?

STONESTREET: Well, one of the reasons I've loved Fidelity Month since the idea first came across my attention is exactly that, is that this is an articulation of a positive vision of the good life in the sense of what the good life historically has meant. What is good? How do we actually flourish as human beings?

And we don't flourish with an inward turn, we flourish with an outward turn. We flourish by being faithful—faithful in our trust to God, faithful to those to whom we have responsibility, especially our families, and then faithful ultimately to country.

Now, if you ask Professor George, though, he does not describe this as an alternative. I know it is, because you can't celebrate both. You can't celebrate one of the seven deadly sins on one hand, and then faithfulness to God and to others on the other hand. So they are polar opposites. So I think that competition is probably built into the system.

Listen, whatever happens with Pride Month, I love the idea of Fidelity Month because it's true and it's good, and it wasn't invented just as a way to get back at those who are celebrating something else. It is something worth honoring and remembering.

And I think it's especially true right now in light of the 250th anniversary of America. 

But you can choose to participate in it by putting something on your social media feed, by just changing your profile picture. All of it is available at FidelityMonth.com. I'm a big fan of it. 

In fact, this year, to connect with the 250th anniversary of America, there's a high school essay contest with cash prizes. So you can show your fidelity to God and others and maybe get some cash. I don't know if there's a contradiction in terms there, but it's something people should know about, and it's a lot of fun.

I love the idea. It is gaining traction. Pride is losing traction, so why not lean in this year?

EICHER: Well John, as you can tell from the backdrop of the screen, we’re in a different location today. A lot of our team is up in northwest Iowa, Myrna is here with me, we’re involved in the 2026 World Journalism Institute Collegiate course. It is an honor to get to do it every year.  

And as we have done the last several years when we’re here at Dordt University, we ask students whether they have questions, and they do again this year, so we have time for just a few:

SNOWDEN: Hi, my name is Kelsey Snowden. I am a student at Southwest Baptist University. My question is: Are we seeing a devaluing of the humanities in higher education? If so, how will that impact the workforce going forward?

STONESTREET: Oh, we we're not seeing it, we have seen it. 

Devaluing things like great literature, great works, those things that make you think. Prioritizing pragmatism, getting a grade, getting a result, getting a job, as if education itself is primarily a transactional endeavor as opposed to a transformational endeavor as opposed to a transformational endeavor; all of these things have been pretty much in the water for quite some time. 

I do think it's gotten worse. I do think the amount of debt that students go into, oftentimes to study a field that isn't actually a field and get a degree that means nothing and makes one less employable than they were maybe going in—I mean, these are the realities of higher education right now.

So I do think perhaps more than at any other time that I can think of in my lifetime, the opportunity for Christians to show a better way—what education really is, the pursuit of wisdom. To become an educated person is to be someone who's curious, to be always learning, and to be exploring and living, not just for self-expressive individualism.

And that requires, as a student, that you're humble, that you're not sucked into the chronological snobbery that is at the heart, as C.S. Lewis called it, of so much of this devaluing of the past, the devaluing of the great ideas, and the elevation of the individual over and above the humility that is required to actually be a student.

EICHER: You know John, speaking of the humanities and higher education, did you see this one?

The Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education—this was reported this week in The Wall Street Journal—it found a 30 percent relative surge in A grades in college courses that were heavily exposed to AI since the launch of ChatGPT.

Did you see that one?

STONESTREET: That’s really amazing. Yeah, what a coincidence!

EICHER: Right. I mean, 30% is not a small rise, though I will admit I half expected an even bigger bump than that. We actually had several student questions on the subject of AI, John, and here’s the one we decided to go with:

KEARNEY: Hi, John. My name is Katie Kearney, and I'm a student at Emmaus University in Iowa. My question is about AI. With the amount of AI content flooding the internet right now and with how realistic it's been getting, how do you think this will affect the way people use the internet long term?

STONESTREET: Well, I think it's affected the way people use the internet already in dramatic ways. I mean, the most obvious way is we're all kind of in on how much better AI search is than actually, you know, relying on Google.

But of course, all of that in and of itself was a replacement of something of what it meant when I was a kid and I had a question and my mom said, “Look it up.” What she meant was 'go to a book.' And to go to a book for the answers for our questions is a fundamentally different exercise than going online.

Whether you start at page one and get to page 70, or you start at page one and only get to page seven, it's a linear way of approaching life and the world. It orders your brain in a cause-and-effect sort of way. What happens on page one takes you to page two, and so on.

And already in kind of life online, or life on the internet, we lost a lot of linear capability in our thought. We've lost the capability to think about life in terms of cause and effect. There was always workarounds. Life was seen in the network, and there's benefits to that, but there's also liabilities.

Now fundamentally, I think the challenge—and we'll see it in a million different ways—but I think fundamentally the challenge is that our technology should be tools that we use in order to enhance our humanity. The real tragedy happens when it's used to replace our humanity.

And those are tough lines always to figure out because we certainly do appreciate the ability to get around disability with some of our technology or to increase our capability because of our technology. But when it replaces what it means to be human, that's when we're in really dangerous territory.

So for example, in the search world, the idea that we could access an incredible amount of information at any point of our day—the access to knowledge became a really bad substitute for the acquisition of wisdom. Those aren't the same things, but in an information age it's easy to take those two things and confuse them.

And now, when it comes to an AI generation with even more effective access to even more information, even more conveniently, then we'll miss the things that make us human, the ability to cultivate wisdom, the hard, inefficient ways that are required of us if we're actually going to think well.

And if we shortcut those things, then we're going to be impoverished. It's going to make us poor in pretty profound ways.

FOSTER: Hi, John. My name is Micah Foster, and I'm a senior at Reformation Bible College from Sanford, Florida. My question is about a growth in liturgical church interest among young men. I've noticed a lot of my male friends in their teens and in college are becoming interested in Catholic or Orthodox churches. Why do you think we're seeing this trend?

STONESTREET: I think this is a part of a larger trend, because if you actually look at the overall numbers, the actual numbers of those who are converting to either Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy, there's actually not as big of a trend line as many people have the impression that there is. And it's probably not all that greater than those from Catholic and Orthodox backgrounds converting to Protestant and evangelical ones.

So, I do think, though, we're seeing something specific among young men, which, of course, was your question. But it's an important distinction.

What we're seeing is that young men do seem to be trending more conservative in many areas, including religious affiliation, and young women are actually trending the other direction. In some reports this is not really an increase of those who are converting, it's a decrease in the ones that we're losing out of religion and religious identification altogether, and so it seems like a growth.

But I will make at least one suggestion, and that is that we are coming out of, in many ways, and thankfully so, a seeker-friendly model within the evangelical church in which basically pastors and church leaders and worship pastors and so on had to make up something new every week and essentially had to outperform and outdo themselves week in and week out.

And what we wanted was something that didn't need to be made up each and every week, I think. 

And there's something in a postmodern ethos where we're told everything is a social construct and history is bunk, to actually go back and see, “Oh no, there's a historical trend here. We're not making stuff up. There's something solid here to stand on.”

I don't think that that is necessarily fully a reality, as if there's no problem in the history of liturgics or older hierarchical churches, of course, there's all kinds of issues. But I do think there's a bit of pushing back against the inventiveness that really defined the last several decades, and you're seeing kind of a pendulum swing the other way.

There was a promise, there was a promise that if we didn't get into the rote, the rhythm, the habit of saying the same thing over and over and over, then it would be more authentic. And I just think that didn't come true. I think that was probably a false dynamic, and things have changed.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. 

John, thanks!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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