John Stonestreet – Family Council

Outsourcing Discernment in An Age of Mass Information: Guest Column

Oct 14, 2024John StonestreetCurrent EventsCurrent Events, News

Elon Musk recently found himself fighting the government of Brazil after his X social media platform was briefly banned there. Ironically, the censorship was marketed as a defense of democracy, i.e. the government “graciously” stepping in to save the people and the voting process from harmful disinformation.

Of course, claims of disinformation is a common tactic often employed by the powerful to silence critics. Once limits are placed on what can be written and spoken, many other liberties are at risk. Indeed, there are real dangers of an unchecked flood of information, too. In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman described this tension by comparing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984:

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

In the end, the explosion of information everywhere, all the time, has made us believe everything and nothing at all.

And our reputation precedes us. There’s been understandable concern about Russian interference in the last few U.S. Elections, but their strategy reveals as much about us as it does them. Imagine a group of operatives from Moscow planning and scheming how to dismantle America, and finally one of them announces, “I’ve got it! Memes! We’ll use memes to interfere with their democracy.”

Of course, it’s far more serious and strategic than that. In fact, it’s even more troubling how the interference from our international enemies resembles so closely the behavior of social media giants like Facebook and legacy media outlets. Shutting down conversations they don’t like and highlighting narratives they do is not the free exchange of information.

Over 30 years ago in First Things, C. John Sommerville wrote an article entitled “Why the News Makes Us Dumb.” His answer was that the very idea of “news,” as the name suggests, prioritizes novelty. To stay in business, the media “have to make each day’s report seem important, and you do this primarily by reducing the importance of its context.”

If we read philosophy, history, science, theology—regularly—we would be able to make much better sense of the day’s events. But we don’t. We’re too busy to manage anything but the News.

Sommerville wrote this before the internet was much of a thing and social media even existed. At the time, he was complaining about archaic things called “newspapers,” but his concerns proved prophetic. If people were “too busy to manage” one daily news reading back then, how can we possibly make sense of news firing at us all the time and from every direction now? The answer is, we don’t. In fact, many don’t even try. We prefer our “news” pre-digested and delivered to our feeds. In other words, we have outsourced the hard work of discernment to others.

Two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, especially Facebook. Nearly three-quarters of X users rely on that platform for news. When Americans say they rely on “multiple sources,” they typically mean multiple social media sites, not a combination of traditional media and social media sites, or sources from multiple perspectives.

If Americans weren’t regularly reading “philosophy, history, science, theology” in 1991, it’s even worse today. In 1990, 16% of Americans hadn’t read a single book in the previous year. In 2015, it was 27%. Last year, it was 65%. Most of what was read isn’t helpful anyway. According to USA Today, between 1993 and 2013, the best seller lists were dominated by self-help and young-adult fiction. Today, people are mostly just reading their phones.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman presciently warned of a “vast descent into triviality.” Christians, because they believe that Christ is the truth and the Word, should always prioritize discernment, but especially in the information age. Otherwise, we risk being tools in somebody else’s arsenal.

The Courage of Eva Edl: Guest Column

Oct 7, 2024John StonestreetAbortionAbortion, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

Above: Eva Edl was arrested for criminal trespassing during a protest at a surgical abortion facility in Little Rock in 2021. She has since been charged federally for blocking an abortion facility entrance in Michigan (Photo Credit: via Facebook).

89-year-old death camp survivor faces prison time under DOJ’s criminalization of pro-life advocates.

Last month, seven pro-life protestors were convicted of engaging in “civil rights conspiracy” and violating the Clinton-era Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. The protesters were arrested in August 2020 after standing in front of an abortion clinic in Sterling Heights, Michigan. Combined, the seven face up to 11 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

One of those who were found guilty is Eva Edl, an 89-year-old widow from South Carolina who survived a death camp in her youth. She first came to the U.S. in 1955 at the age of 20 after fleeing a government-led ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. The target was the Danube Swabians, a German-speaking ethnic group to which her family belonged. As she recounted to the the Daily Signal, Eva’s mom decried the injustice, “We haven’t done anything wrong! Who would harm us?”

When Eva was nine, she, her parents, sister, and brother were rounded up by soldiers, loaded on a cattle car, and taken to an extermination camp. The prisoners were forced to share the same living quarters and one outhouse. Adults were forced to work but also kept on the brink of starvation. One day, while working in the fields, Eva’s mother escaped on a wagon under a pile of grain. She would later come back and help rescue her family.

It was in 1968, after moving to America, that Eva was introduced to the atrocity of abortion. During a discussion in English class, a fellow student declared it should be legalized (this was before Roe v. Wade ruled a constitutional right to abortion). “[A]fter that,” Eva said, “I just brought up the subject all the time because it bothered me that people would actually think of killing their own children.”

In the fall of 1988, 400 protesters were arrested outside of abortion clinics after two months of pro-life protests following the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. Eva was shocked by this, but also compelled to do something. Likening abortion clinics to her experience in the death camp, Eva recalled:

When we were rounded up to be killed, we were placed in cattle cars, and our train was headed toward the extermination camp. What if citizens of my country would have overcome their fear, and a number of them stood on those railroad tracks between the gate of the entrance to the death camp and the train? The train would have to stop. And while the guards on those trains would be busy rounding up the ones that were in front of the train, another group could have come in, pried open our cattle car and possibly set us free, but nobody did.

Later that year, Eva joined a peaceful protest in Atlanta and was arrested for the first time. She has now been part of more than 50 “rescues” (what she calls the protests) and has been arrested about as many times.

Having emigrated from the tyranny of post-war, Communist-controlled Yugoslavia, Eva said she never imagined she would be imprisoned for protecting innocent lives here:

America, in my eyes, was this country of justice and opportunity and everything that is good. A beacon for us, over there, that didn’t know what all that meant, because we had nothing but oppression from whoever was ruling us at the time. … [H]uman life is sacred. Government does not have the authority to permit what God forbids. And murder is forbidden by God.

Since Roe was overturned a few years ago, the Department of Justice has indicted 40 pro-life advocates with FACE-related charges. Pray for Eva and protesters across the country who are being persecuted for standing for life.

This Breakpoint  was co-authored by Jared Hayden. If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

Guest Column: Has God Changed His Mind on Homosexuality?

Sep 17, 2024John StonestreetHomosexualityHomosexuality, LGBT

When politicians change their position on some policy matter, it’s called a “flip-flop.” A new book on sexual ethics describes God this way, as a kind of “flip-flopping” politician who said one thing for thousands of years but has, in recent years, altered His moral demands. Oddly enough, His new perspective makes Him more progressive, tolerant, and enlightened. You know, like us.

Thirty-years ago, Richard Hays, professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity, produced the classic work of biblical ethics, The Moral Vision of the New Testament. In that book, he offered a definitive biblical argument against same-sex relationships. “The New Testament,” Hays wrote, “offers no loopholes or exception clauses that might allow for the acceptance of homosexual practices under some circumstances.”

In a new book co-authored with his son, Fuller Seminary Old Testament professor Christopher Hays, he has now reversed this position on same-sex relationships. In The Widening of God’s Mercy, the authors assert:

The biblical narratives throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament trace a trajectory of mercy that leads us to welcome sexual minorities no longer as “strangers and aliens” but as fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

This idea of a moral “trajectory” in the Bible that eventually points beyond itself is nothing new. In other words, same-sex relationships used to be wrong, but now they’re ok. As Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler explained, the authors are suggesting that God has changed His mind on homosexuality and that the Church should “move beyond the Bible” on this issue.

Reversals like this, even when scholars and pastors claim otherwise, are rarely motivated by arguments or theology. The elder Hays acknowledges that his “experience being in a congregation with openly gay and lesbian members” helped change his mind. And, it’s likely the younger Hays played a role as well. As author Christopher Yuan remarked, “I have seen young adult children turn their previously biblical parents toward heresy…including a president of a Bible college.”

Still, the arguments offered in this book are neither good nor new. For example, Hays repeats the claim that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. It’s a silly claim. As Rebecca McLaughlin countered in an article at The Gospel Coalition, Jesus condemned “sexual immorality,” (the Greek word “porneia”) alongside murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and slander.

Porneia (from which we get the word “pornography”) is, as Hays himself admits, “a nonspecific umbrella term for any kind of sexual immorality—presumably including all forms of illicit sexual relations elaborated in Leviticus 18.” That would, of course, include homosexual activity. So, by Hays’ own reasoning, Jesus did speak about same-sex relationships in the Gospels.

Moreover, when asked about divorce, Jesus responded by reasserting God’s original design for marriage described in Genesis. “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh…” Also, his “trajectory” was not to relax rules on sexual immorality. Jesus said that anyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery in his heart. That doesn’t sound like God changing His mind about morality.

The ultimate problem with the argument the Hayses make is that it all amounts to God “learning on the job,” as they unbelievably phrase it. As theology writer Derek Rishmawy responded, a “God” who changed his design for human sexuality would not be a God worth worshiping. Such a change would imply that there is a moral standard higher than God to which He failed to conform in the past. The moral purposes of such a “God” could not be trusted, nor could his supposedly “widening” mercy, since what he calls sin today may tomorrow be something he welcomes and encourages.

Thankfully, the “God” of this book is not the God of Christianity. James 1:17 says that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” Human sexuality, designed for union and procreation within man-woman marriage, is such a gift. Though it has been distorted by our fall into sin, God’s purposes for sexuality, and the prohibitions that flow out of those purposes, have not changed.

This is far better news for sinners, including those who’ve sinned sexually, than a “God” who has changed His mind. His mercy doesn’t need “widening.” It is already vast enough to rescue sinners from futile behaviors and false identities.

Those hoping to widen God’s mercy make His mercy unnecessary and His character untrustworthy. They should know better. In fact, considering the Bible’s warnings to those who call evil good and good evil, and who cause others to sin, they should repent.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.