John Stonestreet – Page 4

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.

Beyond Crispr: Recreating Man with Genetic Editing

Jul 29, 2026John StonestreetBioethicsBioethics, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

The “man-moulders of the new age” vs. Imago Dei.

Recently, the New York Times reported that scientists at Columbia University have used a new technology called “base editing” to alter the DNA of early human embryos with unprecedented accuracy.

As the Times noted,

On the one hand, the technology might one day enable parents to safely repair disease-causing mutations in embryos. But it might also be used to select desired traits—a practice that some ethicists have argued is nothing short of eugenics.

These recent approaches differ from earlier gene-editing methods like CRISPR, which remove defective genes rather than improve them. So, what the Times has reported is not just a difference in degree, but in kind, though with the same moral questions still unanswered. As Andrew Walker said at WORLD, “We should recognize that this technology occupies a morally gray zone . . . Therapeutic intervention differs from genetic enhancement . . . Base editing enables both.”

Neither base editing nor CRISPR will be the last foray into this kind of eugenics. In fact, some of us predicted that the imprisonment by the CCP of a Chinese scientist who used CRISPR to modify human embryos was more of a distraction than a punishment. If so, it worked. The public has moved on. The outrage at Dr. He has died down. His work continues, even as Columbia researchers add a degree of academic respectability to the efforts to edit human beings.

And it always goes like this. As one of the geneticists from Columbia put it, we need a public “discussion” about gene editing. Do we? Before or after we do it? No, these scientists behave as if the moral questions are settled, or at least a matter of personal interest, and all that’s left is to discuss how best to use this technology.

Both history and the Bible warn what happens when our technologies outrun our ethics. Many have now forgotten the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell (1927). Caught up in the euphoria of the Progressive Era’s zeal for scientific improvement, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for an 8-1 majority and upheld a compulsory sterilization law of the mentally disabled. The aim of the law was, as the Court said, to “prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” According to Holmes, in the case of Carrie Buck being sterilized, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Lawyers representing the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials after World War II cited Holmes’ opinion in Buck v. Bell to justify their own eugenics efforts in the Nazi regime.

New developments in gene editing are still plagued by essential questions regarding human nature. First, is human nature permanently flawed or are we constantly progressing toward perfection? And, second what will stop us from using this technology not just to repair, but to pursue perfection, or—dare I say—a master race?

These aren’t far-fetched questions. One scientist quoted by the Times raised exactly that concern when he said, “In regular I.V.F., embryos are screened for genetic abnormalities,” but base line editing “is providing the ‘baby improvers’ with a how-to manual for forays beyond the ethical pale.”

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis foresaw these dangers:

Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men…But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the power of an omnicompetent state and irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.

Yet, what governs these “conditioners”? A “public discussion?” No. Without moral standards, we are left to the impulses of those in charge.

Recently, Christian ethicist Scott Rae argued that those things resulting from the Fall are within the domain of medical treatment (such as disease), while those not resulting from the Fall are the “givens” of life and not in the realm of enhancement (such as your biological sex, eye color, etc.). This distinction is helpful, despite the real challenge of drawing such an ethical line in a Fallen world, much less expecting others to comply.

Scripture is plain. Every person is made in God’s image and is endowed with eternal dignity, worth, and beauty. Any potential value to be found in this new base-editing technology will be outweighed by the consequences of not recognizing what is true of the human condition, both our value and our potential for evil. In this case as well, the potential consequences far outweigh the potential benefits.