John Stonestreet – Page 5

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.

Lessons from the Rise and Faltering of Transgenderism: Guest Column

Jul 9, 2025John StonestreetTransgenderLGBT, Transgender

Many “inevitable” social movements turned out not to be so inevitable. The most notable recent example is transgenderism. In the latest development of this fast-moving story, earlier this month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibited so-called “transgender care” for minors, including hormone therapy and sex-reassignment procedures.

Predictably, the American Psychological Association threw a fit about the ruling, scolding the court for disregarding “decades of psychological research and clinical consensus,” and jeopardizing “the health and wellbeing of transgender youth.” Aside from further eroding their public credibility, the APA statement ignores the obvious fact that any consensus around transgender “care” and identity is collapsing. It’s not 2016 anymore. First, there was the Cass Report, which questioned key claims of transgender medicalization. Then there was the closing of Britain’s only gender clinic. Also in recent days, L.A. Children’s Hospital announced it would close its center for transgender youth, one of the largest and oldest clinics of its kind and a hub for “gender reassignment” surgeries on children for years.

Public opinion has shifted as well. Earlier this year, Pew Research reported that about two-thirds of adults now support policies requiring trans athletes to compete on teams that match their biology. Most adults also support outlawing gender identity curriculum in elementary schools. Compared to just three years ago, more Americans now support laws that require people to use the bathroom corresponding to their sex and favor banning transgender surgery on minors. And just last week, the University of Pennsylvania signed an agreement with the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education about men competing in women’s sports. Penn will now strip Lia (born William) Thomas of his swimming wins against women, reinstate the integrity of women’s athletic teams and spaces, and apologize to the women whose rightful athletic “records, titles, or similar recognitions” were stolen by a male athlete.

Now somewhat on the other side of this cultural confusion, there are two crucial lessons to be learned about how culture changes, and how to fight future battles. First is how unpredictable and fragile supposedly “inevitable” cultural progress is. A few short years ago, corporations, government, higher education, entertainment, science, and medical establishments were being aligned in support of the idea that boys can become girls, and vice versa. But then a few courageous athletes, artists, filmmakers, de-transitioners, and a handful of public figures like J.K Rowling and Jordan Peterson spoke out. Unfortunately, many Christians and high-profile pastors were unwilling to do the same.

And yet, remarkably, it was enough to start the resistance. The momentum of the trans movement has now slowed and faltered. Though Irreversible Damage was inflicted on too many individuals, especially children, the mutilation of bodies and poisoning of minds turned out to be not inevitable, culturally. This should embolden us all to be willing to break the “spiral of silence” sooner and to stand courageously against false ideas in the future. After all, the worst ideas flourish when people are convinced that resistance is futile.

The second lesson to learn is how quickly social contagions spread. How an observably absurd and unscientific idea like transgenderism took over the West should humble us all and highlight the danger of losing a high and shared view of the human person. Until we can agree broadly on what it means to be human, what sex is for, what male and female mean, what marriage is, and why there are givens to our embodied nature, we remain susceptible to other absurd and dangerous notions.

And so, we should ask, even as this particularly bad idea is in retreat, what “inevitable” bad idea might take its place? How can we as Christians be better prepared and willing to respond?

As neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, a likely (but tentative) guess is that we will encounter new and dangerous forms of transhumanism. Just as transgenderism began with the belief that the body is merely a vehicle for the “authentic self,” so will visions of biological enhancement, AI relationships, new forms of “designer baby” eugenics, and attempts at immortality. And anyone who believes that there are created givens to the human person and moral boundaries that limit the expression of our “true selves” will be castigated and accused of hate, bigotry, and anti-science. Christians who understand that humans are made in the image of God must speak early and often, and especially clearly, no matter the cost.

Thank God that trans ideology, though far from defeated, is faltering. However, short of a cultural revolution in which our createdness is embraced and the myth of self-creation rejected, the West will continue to be vulnerable to the next bad idea that claims to be inevitable.

Free Only to Agree: The Limits of Freedom

Jul 2, 2025John StonestreetFree SpeechFree Speech, LGBT, Religious Freedom, Transgender

Many western countries are putting the right of conscience and speech to the test.

In March, Chris Elston, known as “Billboard Chris,” was detained in Australia for protesting the harm done to children in service of radical gender ideology. He was detained again in Belgium in June, this time along with Lois McLatchie Miller, a senior legal communications officer for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International. The two were simply standing in a public space, offering to talk to anyone interested about the realities of transgender treatment, wearing billboards that stated, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers” and “Children are never born in the wrong body.” Though they called the cops to ask for protection from harassment, they were told to remove the signs or face arrest. After being detained and strip searched, they were released without charge.

Thought and speech has not always been treated this way. Because the West was deeply influenced by Christian consensus, citizens enjoyed the liberty, to various degrees, to challenge dominant paradigms and ideologies. That liberty is, based on what we’ve seen in Belgium and Britain and other nations, on shaky ground, from both state and institutional pressures. In some places, praying to yourself is considered unruly protest.

Just recently, Lila Rose of LiveAction shared the story of Naomi Best, a therapy student at Santa Clara University, an ostensibly Roman Catholic school in California. As part of the coursework, the university insisted that therapy students view extreme pornography and share their own sexual history. When she asked for the same exemption regularly given to Muslim students, they refused. When she described what happened in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Best was kicked out of the program. As she pointed out,

If we don’t have a set of therapists with diverse worldviews, and with tolerance for people with diverse worldviews, we will alienate people who need psychological care, and we will cause more harm than good.

Totalitarian states such as East Germany and Soviet Russia guaranteed citizens the freedom of worship but would levy fierce and often violent penalties for spreading religion outside church walls. In those countries, freedom of conscience was only the freedom to believe in one’s heart and head and maybe, one’s house of worship. Worldview diversity was never something allowed to enter the public square.

The First Amendment guaranteed more. In just 45 words, it protects conscience rights that are public. Thus, nonsensical campus chants that “speech is violence” or “silence is violence” are, in law, separated from actual violence. The founders wanted a country in which citizens could think and worship as they believed but could also assemble together and take those beliefs out into the world. Both Belgium and Britain, which is currently debating whether saying things that offend Islam should be illegal, could use something like that, written down into law, about now.

Of course, all freedoms have limits. In the United States, that limit is not one’s own head or heart but real harm done to another. Certainly, that must be constantly clarified and adjudicated, but it’s a far better arrangement than a limit based on how someone else might feel.

The First Amendment is a bulwark against speech police and one of the Founding Fathers’ greatest legacies. It’s a structured freedom that is part of the inheritance of the Christian view of humanity, recognized as both sacred and sinful. It’s a legacy that will not last if people are not willing to express their deeply held beliefs and defend the right to do so.