Voices and verses

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday the 24th of April. 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! 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, I should say you are in Washington, D.C., because that’s where you are right now, and it’s important to say that, because that is how we’re starting our discussion, talking about this event in D.C. at the Museum of the Bible. 

It’s “America Reads the Bible,” and hundreds of people, including you, John, have been taking turns reading through every verse in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, even President Trump got involved. The goal of this event is that a hunger is released over our country, and that people realize that God speaks through His Word. 

So John, in a culture that is consumed with binge watching, you know, the organizers of America Reads the Bible certainly had the right idea. The question is, will it stick? And what did you read?

STONESTREET: That’s a good question. I got a great passage to read, Jezebel getting killed, thrown from the tower, and eaten by dogs. Jehu driving like a bat out of hell, is my translation there of the King James that we read.

I mean, listen, of all the passages, that was one of the ones that I remembered from that, remember those old picture Bibles for kids? I mean the old ones that didn’t edit any out, it had every story, including those stories that we might call PG-13 today. That was mine.

The President, for his part, read from two Chronicles. I mean, second Chronicles, and which was, which was, which...

EICHER: [laughter] Oh, come on. Couldn’t resist, huh?

STONESTREET: [laughs] I couldn’t resist, sorry, that's low hanging fruit, you just had to go there.

It is the right idea. I mean, one of the things we have to ask is what is it that we believe about the Word of God?

There were people in this lineup, there were partners that came together on this that wouldn’t come together on other projects. They would have divides over maybe particular issues or the engagement level that Christians should have in politics, or anything like that.

And for our part at the Colson Center, we’re just like, look, the Word of God is sharp. It’s sharper than any two-edged sword, it gets right to the heart of the matter. It lays us open in front of God, and there’s power in and of itself that it accomplishes what the Lord wants to accomplish from it. 

And it can’t be a bad thing. It’s always a good thing too to be able to go and visit the Museum of the Bible. Two of my kids got to run around there and see some of the incredible exhibits about the impact that the Word of God has had in in human history, about the impact that the Word of God has in this city of D.C.

If you just go from building to building to building, that the number of references that are biblical, that point to things that are good and true, having to do with being a good citizen, being a good government, being a moral people. I mean, these are all biblical truths that are literally stamped onto our nation and often, of course, things that we reject and forget. And a lot of us who read are those who have forgotten, and we need to be reminded of these things.

So, I was a fan of the event. It seemed like it got some good attention, which was fun. And people, at least for a little bit, the Bible was a top trending thing on Twitter, which you know, compared to what’s often trending on "formally known as Twitter," that’s a good thing.

EICHER: Yeah, there you go. 

Well John, another D.C.-based question for you. The Supreme Court this week agreed to hear a case next term—so we’re not going to get a decision for at least a year from now. 

So this comes from your home state of Colorado, which you know, has this habit of getting dragged to the Supreme Court to be admonished for one reason or another. 

And this one involves the state’s universal pre-K program. Colorado says it’s open to everyone—so long as providers follow strict non-discrimination rules … which of course are written in such a way that confessional schools tend to bump up against the rules.

But a group of Catholic and Protestant schools is pushing back on this. They point out the state already allows a fair amount of selectivity in the service of the LGBT agenda and other reasons. Providers can prioritize low-income families, they can target certain demographic groups, even exclude some families in order to meet state-defined social goals.

So here's the question: if the state can be selective for reasons like those, why is it a legal deal-breaker for a school to remain confessional—to hire and operate according to its statement of faith?

So how do you see this one? Is this genuinely a case of anti-religious bias—or is it simply the state saying, you know, "he who pays the piper calls the tune?"

STONESTREET: Well I mean, listen, the question is, you know, what is it going to be to the Supreme Court? And the Supreme Court has spoken on these kinds of issues over and over and over and over again. 

Now, as you mentioned, the state of Colorado doesn’t seem to care one whit what the Supreme Court has said, or the fact that they will once again have to go and get a verbal lashing, or at least a written verbal lashing at the hands of these justices.

But the Supreme Court’s been really clear. If you have a state program, you can think of the Trinity Lutheran recycled tire case for playgrounds, you know there’s many others. You have a state program, all people are welcome to participate. All groups are welcome to participate, except for one.

And over and over, the Supreme Court has said you cannot rule a group out simply because they’re Christian, simply because they’re religious, simply because they’re holding to their statement of faith, unless there’s compelling interest.

Now, I’ll tell you right now, the state of Colorado believes that their social agenda is compelling interest for everything else. 

There’s only one issue here that the state of Colorado cares about for Christian schools and it is this one: it has to do with advancing this sexual ideology. And our state’s committed to it. 

It’s probably because our governor is a homosexual in a homosexual marriage, having bypassed a mother in order to acquire children. It probably has to do with the priorities stated and lived out of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which has violated the civil rights of many of its citizens, over and over, but believes it has this justified position because of this one issue, and because of their desire to make the entire state conform to this ideology.

And that’s why Colorado is an outlier on these and they just will not let it go, and they will find more and more and more ways to penalize people of faith in order to advance this agenda.

EICHER: Well John, I'd like to turn to something a little more positive, something you may have heard from Justice Clarence Thomas this week—he gave a speech looking ahead to America’s 250th anniversary. We played some excerpts from that speech on the program a couple of days ago. 

One of the central points Justice Thomas made was this: the principles of the Declaration—human equality, rights, dignity—these are not abstract theories. He said they were lived realities, even for people like him growing up under segregation, because the rights didn’t come from government, they came instead from God.

And Justice Thomas was warning that modern thinking—especially progressivism—tends to flip that around, treating rights as something government gives and therefore can redefine.

Just a terrific speech—Justice Thomas, I think, is a national treasure. Did you happen to catch those remarks?

STONESTREET: Yeah, it was a tremendous speech. 

And what we’re seeing is a justice who was pretty well known for the first more than a decade, couple decades into his career as a Supreme Court justice, for being quiet, for listening and for then articulating very clearly the nuances of the law and how it applied to the case that he was writing on. 

But in more recent years, really, I think, trying to establish a conservative jurisprudence legacy, you know, as the heir of Antonin Scalia in many ways.

You know, Thomas is just straightforward. I think the more that he is willing to be outspoken like this, it’s going to do all of us, including the future of the Supreme Court, really an, an incredible favor.

I’m old enough to remember where the number one thing we all worried about was the Supreme Court being in such a progressive direction, not basing anything on natural law or even the Constitution, but really seeing, famously, the Constitution as a living document and so on.

So basically, the job here is not just to rule differently with a different majority, it’s to rebuild a jurisprudence that was, I think, greatly threatened in previous decades, prior to the way this particular court has been put together.

BROWN: Well, John, you did a Breakpoint recently on taking a life to save an organ. And I’m a bit surprised that you went there, that you touched this issue, because it’s really sticky.

Becoming an organ donor is as easy as getting your license renewed, and people feel very deeply about this issue because thousands of lives have been saved through organ transplantation and donation. 

So here’s my question, how do we understand this from a biblical worldview, when the Bible is silent on organ donation?

STONESTREET: It is a very difficult one.

I mean, listen, we’re living on the tail end of a century where the definition of death has changed over a dozen times and we’re still not always clear.

And we also have these reports, and that’s the other troubling part, because this has been accepted as such a unmitigated good—organ donation—of the tendency of hospitals to rush certain people to death in order to harvest organs.

And of course, we also have academic journals coming out of the medical community which basically precede policy in which there are really encouragements to do as much, particularly with individuals perhaps who have are facing permanent disability.

And a lot of times, if you read it, it’s the same kind of justification as for doctor-assisted suicide.

There’s this mood that starts death is inevitable, so therefore. But then it quickly becomes not just that death is inevitable, but the prognosis is “hopeless.” 

And that is a big, big word that can carry weight in an awful lot of directions.

What do we mean by hopeless? Something that will kill us? Something that we’ll never recover from? Something that we’ll have to live with for the rest of our lives, and so on. It just is a muddy thing.

And think about how this, as you said, and rightfully so, thousands of lives have been saved.

So here you have this incredible life-saving alternative that’s been introduced to the medical community just recently, and what we have now are new headlines. The headlines are no longer heralding how wonderful this is. The headlines now herald that there is a dramatic shortage in organs to be donated.

Now it doesn’t take, you know, really a lot to read between the lines and say, Well, what they’re saying is more people need to die so that more people could live.

And that becomes a trade off that has to be carefully thought through. It’s got to be carefully governed by some hard fixed line. And that’s my whole point, is we don’t have a hard fixed line, especially when it comes to particular members of the human community whose value is already deeply questioned anyway.

Now this is something that’s been in place for a long time, but for a long time, the science has run way ahead of the ethics. And when that happens, there’s usually the vulnerable that end up becoming targets of our "compassion and charity."

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

Thanks, John, we'll see you next week!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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