Truth, under pressure

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Culture Friday!

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And John Stonestreet is here. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. 

Good morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: Well John, you heard our report of what happened to the Christian college student working as a barista. This young lady gets a question from a coworker and was simply saying what she’d learned in church. 

We’re very eager to hear the coffee shop point of view, but they’re not talking right now.

Meantime, John, for the listener who is in a workplace where faith can be a sensitive topic—what wisdom would you offer about when to speak, how to speak, and what to expect?

STONESTREET: I mean, I think first of all, the decision of when to speak and how to speak has more to do with where the Lord is putting you. And I think this is the story from here is that you don’t have to fight every battle, but you’re not allowed to lie. You’re not allowed to say something that’s not true.

We need both, first and foremost, to live out our faith publicly in a way that people ask, but then when people ask, we have to say the things that are true and not back down.

I think it’s completely appropriate to appeal then, to the legal and cultural resources that we have to challenge any decision that’s made, but we also need to be ready to accept the consequences of standing for the Lord, because sometimes He puts us in those positions. 

We’ve called it for a long time "a theology of getting fired." And, you know, we haven’t had to think in those terms...it’s surprising when you hear of somebody in of all places, Louisville, Kentucky, you know, or the middle, you kind of would think, oh, these are the stories that a decade ago were coming from the coast, but here we are. And I think we have wonderful examples too. That’s something that we can be thankful for.

The other thing I’ll say is that this is not just a question for this particular employee, it’s a question for Southern Seminary. It’s a question for the church that’s around her. It’s a question for her family. What’s our responsibility to someone who is a brother and sister in Christ and has been asked to stand up at such a time and place as this?

And I think that’s something that so far, we don’t have a great track record of, but I know that that is the way that folks there at Southern Seminary are thinking, and I know that’s the way, and hopefully that’s the way that the church that she’s a part of is thinking as well, because I think that’s our responsibility. It’s a way that we love our neighbor, pray for everyone, especially of the household of faith, is what Paul says. 

So we need to live that way and figure out what that means.

EICHER: Well John, with the Artemis II set to return tonight I think we’re seeing something really notable—not just the technological achievement, which is enormous, but astronauts openly talking about God, creation, even offering what sounded like a pretty decent Easter message.

John, when you hear that kind of public expression of faith—especially on such a massive stage—what stands out to you?

STONESTREET: Well, it certainly is a joyful thing. The Artemis thing, to me, was especially encouraging. I mean, it brought to mind for example, the Christmas message of the Apollo astronauts. And we had this conversation within our Breakpoint team this past week—I mean, if you think about the human accomplishment that it takes in order to get people to space, the science, the technology, the human knowledge, the math—and yet, when they’re up there, they’re up there giving praise to God.

The commander of the mission was asked about an Easter message, and he said, "I haven’t prepared." And then he went on as if he had prepared—it was a heck of a sermon. And of course, he also, right before they went into the dead zone or the quiet where they couldn’t communicate, basically articulated the first and great commandment and expressed, you know, love for that.

So to me, there’s just something about that, a positioning in the space thing, and we’ve lost that, because we spend so much time talking about whether we have the capability to do it, whether we still have the capability to do it. And at the end of the day, those that are up there, what they want to talk about is God. What they want to talk about is something bigger than them. 

And I think that’s what the sense of awe and wonder do to us as humans. I think that’s why God put it in. I think it’s an expression of what the scripture talks about, eternity in our hearts, and even the creation declaring the glory of God and us having to reckon with it.

I did think it was interesting, though, that the Easter message did involve human exceptionalism. It’s this whole thing and we’re at the center of it; you’re special. Not because you’re special because of anything you’ve done, but you’re special because God built this thing around human beings.

And of course, that’s the—although the Scripture doesn’t speak directly to whether there are other living creatures in other places like C.S. Lewis ruminated about—what you do get is that only humans bear God’s image. Of all the created things, only humans bear the image of God and are therefore on a different level in value and authority than anything else that God created.

As the Psalmist said, we’re a little lower than God and angels look with jealousy. And there was a part of that message that was communicated in that message. 

I just thought it was absolutely spectacular and a wonderful Easter message...and yes, it was in direct contrast with some of the other messages we got on Easter, particularly from this administration.

EICHER: Yeah, yeah, I think I see where you’re headed there John, and I do think it raises a tension that I noticed over the weekend.

You know, you think about the rescue of the weapons service officer, the effort to find him I heard described as something akin to locating a grain of sand in the desert—and yet the mission went forward anyway.

So that “leave no man behind” ethic seems really does seem rooted in the idea that every life has inherent value because we are made in the image of God. But then at the same time, we’re hearing very different rhetoric from the president about what’s in store for our enemies.

So, I mean, how do you make sense of those competing messages?

STONESTREET: Yeah, yeah, you don’t get that sort of "never leave a man behind and spend as many resources as possible that you need to spend in order to rescue a person" before the influence of the Christian idea of the image of God in this area.

And it is a remarkable thing that the expense, the time, the energy, the effort, and I think it’s a noble thing. 

You’re talking a direct contrast here between a nation that would go to such great expense, experience such great loss of equipment and time and energy and focus to rescue this one soldier, compared to in Iran, surrounding targets, military targets with 14 year old kids. You know, this is a completely different worldview.

And then you have what President Trump tweeted in terms of "ending a civilization." It was conflicting, certainly, I think it suffered from a desperate lack of clarity.

At one level, I have a little bit of sympathy with Eric Erickson, you know, who said, "well, if I have to choose between this sort of sloppy language, just language now, not behavior, but this sort of sloppy language and the Trans Day of Invisibility that we got last Easter under the Biden administration, it’s an easy choice." And I think a lot of us feel that way.

You know, this is, unfortunately, the cultural choices that we’re faced with, and yet we can condemn it. 

And it’s a remarkable thing that that language can be condemned in the United States. It has been condemned, it should be condemned, and we’re all not like, you know, hiding under the bed waiting for someone to knock at our door, because we are saying right now that the President’s tweet or the President’s post on Truth Social about ending a civilization is needs to be condemned. It does need to be condemned, and we live in a nation where you’re allowed to condemn it. 

There’s something to be said about that and what that says about the values that uphold this. 

Because you know what? You level that sort of condemnation at a lot of other nations in the world, and you know we’re all going to disappear the next day. 

So there are these things that need to be kept in mind.

And at the same time, if we believe that every single person is made in the image and likeness of God, then our words and our actions need to align with that.

BROWN: Well there’s a new study out of Finland—about 2,000 young people tracked over more than 20 years after undergoing gender transition procedures.

And the findings, John, are the opposite of what’s often claimed. Instead, they found higher rates of mental health struggles—things like depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, even eating disorders.

So John, doesn’t this back up what critics have been saying—that these treatments aren’t actually improving outcomes?

STONESTREET: Well listen, there’s a number of factors to this particular study that make it so incredibly important, not just because it’s the latest. 

Number one, previous studies really cast doubt on, you know, well, maybe these treatments aren’t as effective as we thought they were. This is a statement that actually says the treatments are harmful.

The second thing is that we’re not talking about a dozen kids here, or in the case of many of them, that there were conclusions from middle aged men who were dealing with sexual perversion, and they were settling into their new identity which allowed them to be perverts in public. And instead, they applied that as if it were the same rules to children, even as we saw this incredible spike.

So we’re talking here not just about a handful of middle aged men that are being used to justify this entire field; we’re talking about nearly 2,000 under the age of 23.

So we’re talking about a bigger study. We’re talking about the right demographic. We’re talking also about a comprehensive sample, because everyone had to be a part of this study if you receive this treatment in Finland.

So we’re talking about it’s the right demographic, we’re talking about it’s a larger sample size, we’re talking about it’s a comprehensive versus a self selective sample size, and we’re talking about longevity.

I mean, listen, if you talk about 1996 to 2019, we’re talking about over 20 years. So you’re actually following these young people that underwent this procedure when they were in their adolescent stage, and then what it’s like in their early 20s and even 30s. 

This is an enormous, an enormous development in here.

And what’s crazy is, now we know that we’re reaching the cusp of the science being settled in the other direction, but by any category of what we now can be relatively confident of in terms of these treatments, it is the exact opposite conclusion.

So this is a remarkable development in my mind, and we need to pay close attention to it. It’s the best one that we have that takes into account the real conditions that on the ground on this issue and have been for the last decade or so.

BROWN: All right. John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center and Host of the Breakpoint podcast. 

Thank you, John!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.