John Stonestreet – Family Council

Existential Crisis and the Antidote: Guest Column

Aug 19, 2026John StonestreetChristianityChristianity

A 2026 study found that one-third of Americans are currently experiencing an existential crisis of meaning, including 39% of Millennials and an alarming 52% of Gen Z.

Today on Breakpoint, author and professor Dr. Thaddeus Williams has some thoughts on what’s causing the catastrophic loss of meaning today and how the person of Jesus Christ provides what the world needs most.

If we want to speak meaning into our cultural moment, with its epidemic levels of felt meaninglessness, let us run a short thought experiment.

Paul tells us in Colossians 1:16 that all things were created both by Jesus and for Jesus. In Romans 11:36 we see that from Christ and through Christ and to Christ are all things, to whom all glory is due. Theologian Colin Gunton notes that “It is not therefore something which holds things together, but someone,” and that Someone is Jesus.

In our thought experiment let us assume for a moment that the resurrected Person of Jesus is not the ultimate focal point of meaning, what then?

Dr. Loyal Rue, an avowed atheist, helps us run the experiment. In a famous lecture called “The Noble Lie” delivered to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Rue offers us three possibilities for finding meaning. First, each individual can become the centerpoint of meaning for his own universe of personal fulfillment. Rue calls this “the madhouse option,” which abandons all hope for social cohesion. Second, the State can make itself the centerpoint of meaning in an otherwise meaningless cosmos. Rue calls this “the totalitarian option” where all individuality and freedom are lost. Third, we can say that the universe has meaning even though it doesn’t. Rue calls this “the Noble Lie,” which “deceives us, tricks us, compels us beyond self-interest.” In Rue’s bleak trilemma, either the Me destroys the We, the We destroys the Me, or the Lie saves them both, but only by destroying the Truth. (Rue himself defends option three, since “without such lies we cannot live.”) Atheist Alex Rosenberg offers a fourth possibility in the concluding line of his book, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: “Take Prozac or your favorite serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and keep taking them till they kick in.”

So take your pick: Would you rather live in Rosenberg’s Pharmacy of chemically-induced meaning, Rue’s Church of the Noble Lie, the totalitarian’s Prison of State-imposed meaning, or the relativist’s Madhouse of self-made meaning?

Thankfully, the thought experiment fails. Those are not our only options. Jesus is, in fact, the Telos, the Goal, the focal point where all lines converge and find enduring purpose.

In the era before the seventeenth century, before Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, a fixation on meaning questions often left our understanding of the material world dragging woefully behind. In the era following the Scientific Revolution, we have come to understand the mechanics of the universe far greater than ever before. Yet it appears more meaningless to us than ever. We know more and more about matter but less and less about why matter matters.

Such close-minded materialism has ushered us into a kind of teleological Dark Ages. We have become just as naïve about the meaning of the universe as the medieval alchemist was about the mechanics of the universe. But the meaning void left swirling at the center of a materialist’s cosmos will be filled with something. The human heart, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

To our family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers who are experiencing that existential crisis, we must show them a Grand Telos beyond Dr. Loyal Rue’s madhouse, totalitarian nightmares, and noble lies, a meaning infinitely more meaningful than Alex Rosenberg’s pharmaceutical illusions. We must point them not to an impersonal Something but to the Personal Someone by whom, through whom, and for whom they exist. Bold and clear evangelism—pointing to the resurrected Jesus as the only one big enough to save us from sin and satisfy our deepest existential longings—is precisely what our increasingly nihilistic age needs. Tell someone about Him today.

For more on how the Person of Christ speaks to the meaning crisis of this cultural moment, see the latest book by Dr. Thaddeus Williams, Reflecting the Son: How to Mirror Jesus.

Sports Gambling Is Still a Bad Bet: Guest Column

Aug 12, 2026John StonestreetGamblingGambling, Sports Betting

Where betting is legalized, lives are being destroyed.

A recently released report shows a clear correlation between legalized gambling and gambling addiction. While this should surprise absolutely no one, there is further evidence that the explosion of legalized sports gambling was a bad idea.

In 2018, a Supreme Court decision cleared the way for states to legalize sports betting. Since then, according to the study shared by Epic Research, gambling disorders have risen by 61% in states that allow it but is down 29% in states that have not.

That’s a big spread, pun intended. The time frame is also significant. Only Nevada allowed sports gambling prior to 2018. Today, it is legal in 39 states and DC, though app-based gambling has made it ubiquitous. The results of this experience speak for themselves:

Of the overall population, adults aged 30 to 49 had the highest overall quarterly rate of diagnosed gambling disorder throughout the study period. . .. The largest proportional increase was among adults aged 18 to 29, whose rate more than doubled. Rates rose in both sexes and in every age group, but the male-to-female gap was substantially larger in adults under 50.

The math speaks for itself. For example, sports betting companies make enough to pay out a fortune in constant commercials while still raking in incredible profits. As of last year, gambling businesses have taken in around $300 billion, which is as much as China spends on its military each year.

The cost to consumers, however, is not only in the bet. According to a 2025 article by Charles Fain Lehman in The Atlantic, for every dollar spent on betting, household investing fell by an average of two dollars. The years since 2018 have been marked by large increases in over-drafted bank accounts and maxed-out credit cards. Legalized sports gambling has increased “the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent” and has caused debt delinquency to surge.  

The financial strain, in turn, worsens social pathologies. According to research cited by Lehman, an upset loss for an NFL home team correlates to a 10% spike in male domestic abuse. Overall, states with legalized sports gambling have seen an estimated 9% increase in “intimate-partner violence.”

As it turns out, it is possible to legislate morality, or, in this case, to legislate an increase in immorality. The legalization of sports gambling, and the general betting industrial complex, is a scourge on society, as if a highly contagious illness had a multi-billion-dollar PR campaign behind it. This is a cause for both the Left and the Right to get behind. Progressives would be hard pressed to find a better example of the rich getting richer on the backs of the poor. Conservatives have a horribly perfect example of the effects of moral decay and the corruption of domestic life.

Moral decline isn’t inevitable. Too many are convinced that things always go from bad to worse, so why try to turn the tide? Fighting the new normal, especially one with so much money and political power behind it, is an uphill battle. But Christians are commanded to love our neighbors. Sometimes that means giving to a local charity. Sometimes that means pressing leaders to ban what is destroying lives.

Business and the Christian Life: Guest Column

Aug 6, 2026John StonestreetEconomicsBusiness, Christianity, Church Ambassador Network, Economics, Ethics

President Calvin Coolidge once said that “the business of America is business.” Too many Christians think of business as either inherently bad, immoral, or perhaps amoral, something set apart from their faith. At best, it pays the bills and support the missionaries, but many fail to see it as also under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Recently, Colson Center COO Pete Marra challenged a group of business leaders to rethink business according to a Christian worldview, especially in light of emerging cultural challenges:

I believe there’s one thing that changes the world, and that’s the Church. There is no plan B. There’s no alternative to that. It’s the Church. But I also believe that there’s something that is equally under it, so not exactly equal, but equal and under, and I would say that is enterprise. Enterprise being business.

What we have at our disposal through business, the ability to organize, to solve problems, to create value, to deploy capital, to steward the things that God has given us, is something that’s very unique to enterprise itself. … So, with that kind of framework, I want to talk a little bit about calling and think about place.

There’s a reason that we use the idea, “You are here.” This can’t be missed on us in this cultural moment, particularly as business leaders—leaders of enterprises—that you were brought to a time and place that God has called you to and God has brought you to. And it’s now.

[I]t’s not an accident. I believe not only has God brought you to this place and called you to this space, but he’s equipped you for it. [T]here’s something that’s happening inside the world that we’re speaking to in theological spaces, and philosophers and some politicians and business leaders are talking about it, and that’s the age of AI. 

But AI is just a new tool for a bigger problem. The bigger problem that we’re facing—and one that I think is going to impact business and enterprise in a way that we have never seen, at least in my short lifetime—is the fundamental question of, “What does it mean to be human?”

I know that sounds a little bit heavy or like I’m trying to make a bold statement, but I just want you to think about something like your corporate culture. I want you to think about how you use enterprise when you have an opportunity to become more efficient, make more money, which generates more profit, which gives you more to steward, which is the reason we get into business.

Let’s not be confused. I’ll stand here and tell you, I love profit. I am never confused about for-profit. In fact, I’ve often joked, I sometimes prefer for-profit businesses over nonprofit, because no one’s confused about what we’re doing.

But here’s the challenge we’re facing: What happens when that idea of profit and the deployment of capital face a maybe once-in-a-generational upheaval to where we no longer need a workforce? What if the ways we used to think about automating production factory lines, we can now automate everybody?

Now, is that going to happen next year? No. But these are questions I think business leaders have to start wrestling with now so that they can do that. We need a framework to be able to think through that. That framework is something you’ve seen inside the Truth Rising: The Study, which is that idea of hope, truth, identity, and calling.

[W]e must remember through these things that that idea of hope is what drives us. Our hope is in Christ, and Christ alone. Never be confused. If that is where we find our hope, then the truth of the world, the truth of God’s story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration is the thing that gives us not only meaning, but it helps us anchor the why we do business.

The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper famously said that “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” This is as true about business as about anything else.