What counts as Christian

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Friday the 12th of June. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

A week ago this might’ve sounded like an obscure Pentagon paperwork dispute.

The Defense Department, or the War Department, consolidated more than 200 religious designations and whittled it down to 31. In the process, it listed 21 groups under a Christian heading, but it left out the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the LDS, the Mormons.

And that triggered a protest from Utah Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis, direct appeals to the White House and Defense Secretary/War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and by Monday the Pentagon had revised the list again.

Well, joining us now is John Stonestreet. John is president of the Colson Center and host of The Breakpoint Podcast.

John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, the Pentagon decided it was not qualified to answer this question, but Christians still have to. John, why do you think it has become so controversial to say Mormonism and Biblical Christianity are two different things?

STONESTREET: Look, the problem they were trying to solve is an obvious one, which is, in the military, people claim all kinds of religion in order to get the religious exemption. I have it on good authority, having some chaplains within my congregation, that there is a large contingent of people who worship the god Thor in the U.S. military, but it’s only because they want to have facial hair.

I mean, look, this was a reduction of significant proportions of the number of recognized religious groups. 

Interestingly enough, of all the groups that were identified as Christian, the Church of Latter-day Saints was not, and that was the source of the consternation from Senator Lee and by others.

Interestingly enough, there were groups that were included as Christian groups, including for example, Christian Scientists, which, of course, is nothing like a Christian religion, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who themselves don’t like to hold on to that term, kind of like the Mormon Church, when it was founded. It was seen as a correction of Christendom from the great apostasy.

So it is interesting that in the application of this within the Latter-day Saints, they used to not want the term Christian, and now they do. They used to like the term Mormon, and now they don’t. It’s really hard to keep up with it, but that’s what the Latter-day Saints have been doing.

Senator Lee immediately posted on X, "Can anyone tell me why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was not included with the designation 'Christian'?"

And the answer to that question was quick and robust. A lot of people could answer why, and a lot of people did answer why. And you could sum it all up with: Mormonism is not a Christian religion. It is a different religion altogether.

It has a different understanding of Jesus. Even though both Christians and Mormons claim Jesus, they’re talking about different guys from any objective measurement.

In a Christian understanding of Jesus, Jesus is the second person of the Trinity. Mormons deny the Trinity. Mormons believe that Jesus was created. Christians understand, as was clarified throughout several Church councils, that Jesus is not created. Jesus is the second person of the Godhead, eternally existent, who is "begotten, not made," as the phrase goes.

Mormons disagree with Christians about the Bible, about God, about the character and nature of God, about Jesus, about the nature of sin, about the nature of salvation, and about what constitutes holy scripture.

So it was correct not to identify the Mormon Church as being a Christian denomination, because it is not.

The way that the Pentagon fixed this is instructive as well, because, as the Department of War quickly posted out, it’s not our job to distinguish between these things. That I agree with. It’s not the Pentagon’s job to do this, and when they tried to do it, they dropped the ball.

So what they ended up doing is remove the Christian designation from all groups, and that served the purposes of identifying who could be recognized as a chaplain and who could not. 

And that served the purposes, it made everyone happy, and moving on.

MAST: Well John, I want to talk about another set of terms that got reclassified recently. Both chambers of the New York legislature have approved a bill that would replace words like 'mother' and 'father' in parts of state law with terms like “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.”

So with Father’s Day coming up, I’m trying to imagine my kids handing their dad a card that says, “Happy Non-Gestating Parent Day.”

John, this is what happens downstream of Obergefell, isn’t it?

STONESTREET: It happens downstream of the sexual revolution, and the Obergefell decision was an example of one of the fundamental ideas of the sexual revolution, and that is that men and women are interchangeable.

Now, that’s always been a part of the feminist movement initially, that men and women should be interchangeable in rights, which, of course, is true, since both bear the image of God and both should be recognized as such and basic human rights belong as much to women as they do to men.

But when the sexual revolution got a hold of second-wave feminism, then this evolved a bit to men and women being interchangeable not just in rights, but in roles. And when you’re talking about roles, you’re talking about the cultural application of these biological distinctives.

And there are biological distinctives. And in the working out of second-wave feminism, those distinctives got muddied. 

And then that has kind of brought into this brave new world the third chapter, which is that men and women are interchangeable in reality.

Now, to your point, how is this connected with Obergefell? Well, look, if men and women are interchangeable in marriage, then men and women are interchangeable in parenting. And that’s why we have various forms of this in cultural speak, right? We say things like, "Kids just need a loving family," and "Love makes a family," as if just the act of love makes a family.

All of that is nonsense, because homosexual love is non-procreative, even if it’s sincere and committed and faithful and monogamous. Heterosexual love can make a family if it’s none of those things. We’re just talking about objectively different things here.

So please do not send me, do not send me a happy non-gestating parent day card.

MAST: Well John, maybe this is just a different way of asking the same question, but I keep thinking about something my grandfather used to say. He told my mom that the most beautiful word in the English language was “mother,” because he'd lost his when he was very young.

And it strikes me that words like mother and father aren't just labels—they’re these deeply human words.

So when a culture starts replacing them with terms like “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent,” very clinical, is that more than a vocabulary change? Does it eventually change how we understand those relationships?

STONESTREET: Well, words absolutely make a difference.

And not just in the fact that how you define words matters and that words are the fabric of the universe, but when words are used to intentionally obscure clarity—that’s what’s happening here, right? And it has to be done, you have to make up these words in order to bolster these claims that are counter to what is observably real and true and so on. 

So I think it does matter.

Mother and father are perfectly good words, and they reflect the reality that is. 

EICHER: Well John, I know you saw this story. It involved a social media influencer and his wife announcing online that they were expecting a baby. Later, they ended the pregnancy after receiving a Down syndrome diagnosis, they had an abortion. 

But what struck me about the story was not the decision itself, because by most estimates, that is what happens in roughly three-quarters of these cases in the United States. I mean, we’re no Iceland, which is almost 100% of Down Syndrome cases, but 75% in the U.S., still pretty shameful.

What struck me John, was the reaction. People who would normally insist that abortion is a private choice seemed all the sudden willing to call this choice wrong. And they did say so, the guy got clobbered online. 

What do you make of all that?

STONESTREET: Well, I think it reveals again, the worldview ground in which all this stuff happens.

First of all, we have talked about these incredibly significant moral choices, including the choice to actually end a human life, as if it’s personal and private and should not be public.

Second, it was interesting to hear how many people just responded with like, “You know, have some sensitivity. They just lost their baby.”

You know, as if they didn’t actually just kill their baby.

Again, it has to do with words and the use of language as a way to obscure what has actually taken place.

But in a sense it’s interesting, too, to your point: 75 percent of couples make that decision a year, and that’s a low number compared to the rest of the Western world.

We can condemn the Ridgways, and we should, they deserve every bit of condemnation that they’re receiving right now, even if they don’t understand it and other people don’t understand it because they’re so morally blind from what is obviously true.

But we should also reserve some condemnation for the doctors. 

Because think of the number of reports we have from couples who find out some sort of diagnosis like this prenatally, and they are pressured by the doctor.

So theoretically, whether the Ridgways were predisposed to that sort of decision or not, even if they weren’t, they would have received an enormous amount of pressure most likely from the medical community around them. Like, the expectation is to abort.

Really, the thing we should be icked out about on top of all that, is the fact that they chose to post this on social media as some attention grab.

MAST: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of The Breakpoint Podcast.

John, thanks. We’ll see you next time.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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