John Stonestreet – Page 2

Guest Column: Where Do Human Rights Come from, Senator?

Sep 10, 2025John StonestreetCurrent EventsLiberty

Last week, democratic Senator Tim Kaine made this bold statement during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing:

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

It’s one thing when a progressive media figure says something like this. For example, back in 2024, Politico’s Heidi Przybyla warned that believing human rights “don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God,” makes one a Christian nationalist! Even so, it’s another thing altogether when a sitting U.S. Senator and former vice-presidential candidate claims that this fundamental Christian belief is indistinguishable from Islamic fundamentalists.

Kaine’s comments were quickly condemned by fellow Senators and religious commentators for, among other things, rejecting the words of the Declaration of Independence. The Senator also failed to realize that his own belief, that rights come from government, is what every communist, fascist, and totalitarian regime in history believed. Still, the first part of the Senator’s claim is not fully wrong.

The Mullahs in Iran, like all committed Muslims, believe that human rights come from God. So do Christians. But that is where the similarities end. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has lived in cultures rooted in both Islamic and Christian notions of human rights, says in the new film Truth Rising, “You don’t have to imagine how life would be under Islam. … All you have to do is go to any of these places that Western Civilization has barely touched, and the education you’ll get is much better than Harvard.”

In fact, though Muslims and Christians agree that our rights come from God, they hold widely diverging views about what those rights are, how those rights should be understood, and how the government should recognize and enforce human rights. That’s because Muslims and Christians hold fundamentally different and conflicting ideas about who God is and who humans are.

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali also points out in Truth Rising, the God of Islam reveals only his will and demands our submission to it. The true God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ and offers freedom. The Christian God created humans in His own image. He “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, [so] that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” Not only does God want to be known, He made humans in such a way as to know Him. Islam refers to God as love but then reveals him to be vindictive and cruel.

According to Islam, humans have not fallen. According to Christianity, humans are sinful, having inherited a fallen nature from our first parents. If humans are inherently ordered toward sin and evil, then a government run by humans will be prone to abuse its citizens. Thus, it must be ordered toward preserving those rights which God has ordained. In an Islamic society, humans are not seen as bearing God’s image and need only be forced into submission by the state, which is inseparable from the religion.

And so, in practice, Islam looks far more like the totalitarian governments that think of human rights like Senator Kaine does. If humans do not have intrinsic dignity as individuals, individuals must be, at times, sacrificed on the altar of the state or the collective. In just the twentieth century alone, Josef Stalin oversaw the executions of 800,000 perceived political opponents in the Soviet Union, and many put the overall death toll of his policies at 20 million. In China under Mao Zedong, 15 to 45 million people were slaughtered. Cambodia under Pol Pot and Germany must also be put on this same list. Whenever and wherever human rights are attributed to the government, they are trampled. As Chuck Colson often said, “If government thinks they can grant rights, then they can also take them away.”

The very idea that humans have rights that transcend class and sex, tribe and nation, to the very individual, has had a singular source in history. In his book, A Brief History of Thought, the atheist French philosopher Luc Ferry identified that source:

“Christianity was to introduce the notion that humans were equal in dignity, an unprecedented idea at the time and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”

The Demand for Death in Canada Grows: Guest Column

Sep 5, 2025John StonestreetEuthanasia and Assisted SuicideAssisted Suicide, Euthanasia, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

According to a recent article in The Atlantic, assisted suicide is now so popular in Canada that doctors cannot keep up with the demand. Appropriately titled Canada is Killing Itself, the article described how Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAiD), passed just 10 years ago, now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada. That number is more than the total number of combined deaths from Alzheimer’s and diabetes, and it surpasses many countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer. The shortage of “care” is not due to a lack of interest from medical professionals. Doctors are in fact flocking to join what the Atlantic article called “the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime.”

For example, Dr. Stefanie Green, a founder of the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers, traded in her decades-long practice as a maternity doctor to end lives. Both kinds of medicine, she told The Atlantic, are “deliveries.” Some doctors have reported euthanizing hundreds of patients and yet, the demand exceeds the supply.

Canada’s Parliament legalized MAiD in 2016, promising increased autonomy and decreased suffering. Instead, the practice has corrupted medicine, threatened conscience rights, pressured the vulnerable, and expanded the culture of death. As the American Medical Association’s official opinion articulates, “Euthanasia is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” That’s especially true in single-payer health care systems like Canada has. Eventually, the decision of who should live and who should die will be determined by financial realities, justified by arbitrary ideas about “quality of life.”

In fact, whenever and wherever it is legalized, the so-called “right” to die soon becomes a perceived “duty to die.” Though patients are promised “death with dignity” and an end to unnecessary suffering, patients consistently report not wanting to be “a burden” on friends or family. Many are convinced, as law and disability professor Theresia Degener described, “a life with disability is automatically less worth living and that in some cases, death is preferable.” 

Despite what Canadian officials have claimed, there are no effective “safeguards.” A report last year in the New Atlantis noted hundreds of serious violations of regulations in just the Ontario province, and none have been reported to law enforcement. Although Ontario Chief Coroner Dirk Huyer boasted, “Every case is reported. Everybody has scrutiny on all these cases,” physician whistleblowers identified over 400 “issues with compliance.” These range from patients killed who were not capable of consent to communication breakdowns with pharmacists providing the deadly prescriptions. For example, only 61% of physicians notify pharmacists about the purpose of the euthanasia medications prior to dispensation, as required.

Even more troubling are reported cases of providers expediting euthanizing drugs to patients sooner than the legally required 10-day waiting period. In one case, euthanasia provider Dr. Eugenie Tjan administered the wrong drugs. When the patient did not die, the doctor had to administer different drugs to complete the assisted suicide. Huyer failed to report this, eventually admitting this was a “blatant” case of violating Canadian laws: “The family and the deceased person suffered tremendously.”

Also, according to the report, about one quarter of all euthanasia providers in Ontario were notified by the coroner’s office of a compliance issue in 2023 alone. National law states that all reports should lead to criminal investigations, but Huyer failed to report even one. Instead, he determined that all issues in question required only an “informal conversation” with the practitioner. Dr. Tjan, for example, received an email of warning and remains licensed.

To call this a “slippery slope” is an understatement. MAiD began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients at the end of life. The law has already expanded to include people suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. MAiD will soon be available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

Assisted suicide is not a medical practice. Rather, it is a practice that corrupts medicine, risks abuse, and erodes public trust. The best-case scenario at this point is that Canada becomes a deterrent for the rest of the world, and that Christians there demonstrate courage in how they live and how they die.

Guest Column: That Bible Verse Is Not About Immigration (and Other Ways How Not to Read the Bible)

Aug 7, 2025John StonestreetChristianityBible, Christianity, Religious Freedom, Religious Liberty

Recently on X, the Department of Homeland Security posted a video that featured immigration enforcement officers riding in Black Hawk helicopters and toting rifles to a cover of Johnny Cash’s song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” A narrator quoted Isaiah 6:8: “Here am I, send me.”

Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries utilized a similar hermeneutic a few days later. Quoting from the Gospel of Matthew during a record-breaking speech to delay the passing of President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” he said,

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

According to Jeffries, this passage applies to government assistance programs. “It’s not just in [U.S.] law, it’s right here in Matthew,” he said.

As Christian statistician Ryan Burge pointed out in a post on X, “there’s been empirical work” demonstrating how both the Right and the Left “emphasize Bible verses that [reinforce] their own political perspectives,” while conveniently ignoring the context of those verses.

Selective proof-texting points to how widespread and deep biblical illiteracy is. In addition to an ignorance of the actual content of the Bible, there is ignorance about what the Bible even is, and how Christians throughout the ages have used it. It’s bad when this ignorance shows up in politics. It’s sad when it shows up in our churches and Christian subcultures.

Who hasn’t seen a “verse of the day” calendar that overlays a singular motivational Bible quote on a field of flowers or a sunset? Before the DHS misused Isaiah 6:8, thousands of church conferences and short-term mission trips have, with “Here am I, send me” printed on banners and t-shirts. Often missing is Isaiah’s near-death experience and repentance beforehand, not to mention what God actually sent Isaiah to do (basically, fail as a prophet until he was eventually sawn in half).

Christian publishing, much of Christian music, and maybe the majority of Bible studies are afflicted with this same bad habit. Christian bookstores are full of “Bible promise” titles filled with de-contextualized verses meant to directly apply to the reader. But how many books of Bible curses are there, though the Bible includes those, too? How many Americans, in the habit of “verse plucking,” gladly claim Deuteronomy 28’s national blessings, but don’t read on about the national curses for disobedience that directly follow? How many Bible studies ask the question, “What does this verse mean to you” before truly wrestling with, “What does this verse mean?”

For years, I led a session for Christian school leaders entitled “How (Not) to Read the Bible.” But of course, the point isn’t to take the Bible out of anyone’s hands. Rather, it is to help us know and understand this essential way that God has made Himself known. Rather than treat Scripture as a fortune cookie, we have what Peter called, “the prophetic word more fully confirmed.” More confirmed than what? Astonishingly, Peter wrote that the Word of God is more sure than his own experience with Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration.

A simple, effective way to understand Scripture is to ask where the verse in question fits, within the chapter, the book, the testament, and redemptive history as a whole. Who was speaking, and why? For example, best not to quote an observation about God or life out of the middle of Job, when his friends give “darken[ing] counsel by words without knowledge.” Answering these questions always requires reading more than a single verse.

Also, we should always ask where a passage fits within the four-act drama of the whole Story of Scripture. Seeing the Bible’s larger movements from Creation to Fall to Redemption to Restoration de-centers ourselves and our stories from the text and re-centers God and His story. This will also require reading the Bible not in isolation from other Christians or from Christian history. God’s Word, like the Christian faith it reveals, is personal, but as Peter goes on to say, it is not private. The Bible tells the story of God and His creation, so we must ask, “Where do I fit into it?” rather than “Where does it fit into my life?”

None of this means the Bible ought not be personally applied or, for that matter, brought into policy discussions. Rightly understood, the Bible speaks to all of life. We must be careful to bring the Word of God to our discussions, rather than our opinions masqueraded as a Bible verse. After all, unlike our political class and inspirational calendars, God has not revealed Himself in soundbites.