John Stonestreet – Page 10

A Little Courage Goes A Long Way: Guest Column

Dec 31, 2024John StonestreetCurrent EventsCommunism, Truth

Often, even the smallest acts of courage can change the world. Kamila Bendova and her late husband Václav, both Christians and mathematicians, raised their family in Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia while engaged in the anti-totalitarian efforts of the Charter 77 resistance group. Kamila shared their story of courage during the Colson Center National Conference in May.

The Bendova’s courage began with a small act of resistance. In an old video clip from the BBC, which Kamila showed during the conference, she and her husband are debating whether to acquiesce to the government’s demand that citizens display little flags celebrating the communist takeover:

You see, they wanted us to show the world that the Czech Republic was a democracy on the outside. But on the inside, it didn’t work like that. Yes, we had elections, but there was only one party you could vote for.

Powerfully, the video concluded with the two agreeing, simply and decisively, but also courageously, “No little flags. No little flags.”

Eventually, their resistance would cost them greatly. In 1979, Václav was arrested for his involvement with Charter 77 and imprisoned for four years. Despite this hardship, Kamila continued to open her home to dissidents, many of whom would stop by to seek advice and encouragement before being investigated by the secret police. She relayed secret communications and hid resistance documents in her apartment. All the while, she and her family prayed, studied, and stayed together. The Bendova’s taught their children to love truth and reject lies, especially by reading to them every night. The story that most shaped the moral imagination of the children was Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which was illegal at the time.

When asked “Why Tolkien?” Kamila responded:

Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story … was our story too. Tolkien’s dragons are more realistic than a lot of things we have in this world.

Like the hobbits and their friends, Kamila’s family also faced an oppressive regime. And like Tolkien’s heroes, the Bendova’s faithfulness and small acts of courage were not in vain.

Author Rod Dreher has told the Bendova story in two of his books. At the conference, he noted that courage is costly but comes with great gain:

What has [a person] gained by being willing to make this stand? For one thing, he’s gained his self-respect. He knows that he won’t live by lies even if he has to pay a price for it. Beyond that, though, he has made a statement to the wider community that it is possible not to live by lies. It is possible to defy this unjust authority if you are willing to suffer.

Over time, enough people may be inspired by seeing the small but meaningful acts of courage that they will bring down the entire system, which is built on lies. That’s why it’s important to take the flag down or to take the sign down in your shop, or not to sign a petition that you don’t believe in.

It may be that Kamila’s example of courage, even in the smallest aspects of raising children and exposing lies, can inspire Christians today who face what Dreher calls “soft totalitarianism.” America may not have secret police or gulags, but we do have woke universities and social media influencers, and powerful DEI departments and state civil rights commissions. They threaten to cancel and to penalize and to fire. We’ve seen how small acts of courage from bakers and professors and pundits and X accounts can push back on the darkness we face.

Likely, the new administration will bring a reprieve from the most aggressive corners of the left. Even so, this was made possible by small acts of courage in various corners of our culture and, in the days ahead, the courage in our houses will be more important than what comes from the White House. Kamila and the Bendova family are reminders that little acts of courage go a long way.

Ready to Change the World? Eat Dinner With Your Family: Guest Column

Dec 16, 2024John StonestreetChristianityChristianity, Family Time

If the Christian’s civic duty is only to vote, then it is now safe to return to life as normal, at least until the next election cycle starts in a few months. However, much more is involved in the fight for the soul of any nation, including this one. Our civic duty extends beyond the ballot box.

The historic shifts in the platforms of both parties during this past election are not just due to changes in popular opinion. Rather, they point to how dramatically our collective cultural imagination has shifted, a shift that reflects our institutions. Public schools, universities, media outlets, digital platforms, publishing houses, Hollywood, corporate America, and even churches have become more progressive. Critical theory and gender ideology not only dominate the required reading lists of many schools but are also embedded in the community guidelines of countless digital platforms, the HR policies of many businesses and healthcare systems, not to mention the personnel of various government agencies.

But this collective cultural drift so evident in our politics has not simply resulted from bad ideas or personnel. The conservative Jewish political scholar Yoram Hazony once argued, “It is not disbelief that plagues us but dishonor.” Specifically, he meant the dishonor of the most essential institutions and the traditions kept by them. The breakdown of the family, the compromise and collapse of our religious consensus, and the loss of civil society has contributed greatly to an uncritical acceptance of bad ideas and destructive patterns of behavior.

As Hazony reported, even those who claim to be committed to and excited about conservatism have little intention of actually engaging in those practices worth conserving. Keeping the sabbath, reading Scripture, attending religious services, and hosting regular family dinners are more than just nostalgic traditions. And yet, as Hazony explained, these essential habits of a healthy and flourishing society are losing out weekend after weekend to heading to “the mountains or the beach, or staying home ‘to finish something for work.’”

Civic duty and political change cannot be reduced to how one votes. It’s how one lives, especially with those to whom we are (or should be) the closest, that matters more. For example, studies have long shown that regular family dinners bring enormous benefit, especially to children. According to the Director of the Family Dinner Project Dr. Anne Fishel, regularly gathering around the dinner table results in better nutrition, less obesity, and better mental health:

Regular family dinners are associated with lower rates of depression, and anxiety, and substance abuse, and eating disorders, and tobacco use, and early teenage pregnancy, and higher rates of resilience and higher self-esteem.

Even more, regular family dinners are also a predictor of long-term success. For school-aged kids, frequent family mealtime is “an even more powerful predictor of high achievement scores than time spent in school, doing homework, playing sports, or doing art.”

Yet, for all these benefits, only 54% of American families sit down to a daily mealtime, and for many who do, family dinnertime is constantly besieged by digital distraction. Even before the advent of smartphones and tablets, Neil Postman warned that “(a) family that does not or cannot control the information environment of its children is barely a family at all.”

It may sound too simple to be true, but it’s not. One way that Christians can make a lasting, significant difference in politics is by protecting and cultivating the dinner table. The future of our nation may indeed depend on whether Christians make family mealtimes, as one non-Christian sociologist has described, a “sacred space.”

It matters greatly who is in the White House, but it matters so much more who we are in our houses, in our houses of worship, and around our dinner tables.

Bioethics and Big Sheep: Guest Column

Nov 19, 2024John StonestreetBioethicsBioethics, Human Cloning

If cloning farm animals is illegal, should society clone children?

Don’t let anyone pull the wool over your eyes, sheep are big business. So big, in fact, they landed one 81-year-old Montana man in jail.

The Washington Post reported recently that Arthur Schubarth was sentenced to six months in federal prison for illegally cloning a giant species of sheep and using it to produce even bigger hybrids for lucrative canned hunts. In 2013, Schubarth acquired tissue from a Marco Polo argali, a rare and protected species of bighorn sheep from Kyrgyzstan. He then contracted with a cloning facility to create embryos of what he called “Montana Mountain King,” a 300-pound hybrid breed with the curling horns sought after by high-dollar hunters.

Schubarth then bred the Mountain King to North American bighorn sheep, resulting in an even larger hybrid species, which he began selling to captive hunting preserves for up to $10,000 a head. He also sold dozens of DNA samples to breeders around the country. So, it’s difficult to know just how many of these Jurassic Park hybrids there are.

Schubarth’s business venture violated numerous conservation and commerce laws. As one assistant director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put it, he risked “introducing diseases and compromising the genetic integrity of our wild [bighorn] sheep populations.”

The bizarre story raises an important question: Why are we so good at recognizing and enforcing ethical limits when it comes to medical or genetic experimentation on animals, but not humans?

These two discussions were, at one point, connected. Remember Dolly the Sheep? It was 30 years ago that the cloned sheep made headlines. Hailed as the first “successful” experiment in cloning, Dolly sparked debate about the promises and limits of this technology, especially about if and how it should be used with humans. Buried in the press coverage was just how unsuccessful this success story was. Dolly only lived about half as long as a normal sheep and was the sole survivor among hundreds of attempts, many of which were deformed.

The implications for humans were among the main reasons that, several years later, then-President George W. Bush banned the cloning of human embryos. At the time, he was widely criticized for standing in the way of science and dashing the hopes of the disabled.

However, the years have vindicated Bush’s policy. The promised cures of human embryonic stem cells never materialized, even after the Obama Administration lifted the ban in 2009. By contrast, non-embryo-destructive methods of stem cell research have yielded hundreds of treatments.

Bush, in fact, approached the issue in a fundamentally different way than his critics and successor. His policy emerged after he convened a remarkable panel of experts. The President’s Council on Bioethics included not only scientists with the knowledge of how to clone and experiment on embryos, but philosophers, ethicists, legal scholars, and even theologians who asked whether we should do this; and if so, when and how. Their work, collected in a volume called Human Dignity and Bioethics, demonstrates the breadth of source material about human personhood and value that was consulted. In addition to loosening restrictions, President Obama replaced the theologians, philosophers, and ethicists from the President’s Council on Bioethics with more scientists and researchers.

The problem with that approach is even more obvious today, when technology has come so far. If an old guy in Montana can pull off a do-it-yourself sheepzilla, imagine what’s happening with human cloning in China. For that matter, compare the concern with Schubarth’s scientific meddling to the widespread indifference of human manufacturing in the United States. IVF, surrogacy, and gamete “donation” have made it possible to create children to-order, often for same-sex couples or those who’d simply rather outsource the work of pregnancy and birth. We buy, produce, and distribute children to couples, throuples, and other relational mix-and-match arrangements without an ethical care in the world. And who knows what technology will make possible tomorrow?

Whatever it will be, we’re not ready. The consistent trend in science is to plow ahead and save concerns about right and wrong for later. By the time someone turns up doing with humans what Arthur Schubarth did with sheep, it will be too late to hit the brakes.

In the presidential debate awhile back, Kamala Harris said we should “trust the experts.” What she didn’t clarify is “which experts?” It’s one thing to master a technique like cloning or IVF. It’s another to know whether to ever use that mastery, evaluate if and how it helps people flourish, and to know who is qualified to decide.

For those questions, we need those who make a habit of asking not only what’s possible or profitable, but what’s right, and what honors the value of every human made in God’s image. Dolly, the sheep nature never intended, got us asking these questions decades ago. Maybe that can happen again.