Culture – Family Council

The Power of Naming: Guest Column

Sep 21, 2026John StonestreetCultureCulture

Words shape how we understand reality, but they cannot redefine it. Scripture explains both the remarkable power and important limits of naming.

President Trump’s recent executive order not only renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America, it changed how millions of Americans remember what the Great Lakes are. HAMES just doesn’t have the same ring to it as HOMES. So far, President Trump has also renamed mountains and military bases, and he even floated renaming the Strait of Hormuz as the “Trump Strait.”

Political renaming is not new, of course, not for either side of the political aisle. As Bill Maher joked in his opening monologue to Real Time, “The liberals… say you can’t just go around changing things to fit your political agenda. . .. Just ask any Latinx birthing person.”

Things are renamed all the time, sometimes to reflect the ideological shifts of a culture and other times to reflect the growing ego of a leader. In recent years, mountains have been renamed and then renamed again, as have streets and holidays and food products and sports teams. More drastic and consequential has been renaming babies as fetuses, men as women, mothers as “birthing persons,” and the vast majority of everyone who has ever lived as “cisgender.”

That’s because there is real power in naming things. The more important the thing named, the more consequential naming is. A name, in other words, is more than a random label. Names frame how things are seen and understood.

This is an arena of thought, where a postmodern analysis comes close but ultimately misses. The influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger had a profound impact on how latter postmodern philosophers would understand language and reality. He proposed that humans could not really access reality outside of our language. Quite memorably, in an essay title “Language,” Heidegger wrote:

“In the naming, the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide and so are the abiding ones.”

The postmodernists he influenced took this notion further; that our language does not merely describe reality, it creates reality. Jacques Derrida famously said that “there is nothing beyond the text.” Reality is what we describe.

And, of course, our words are incredibly powerful. What we call things or people or pets tends to stick. Think of how powerful it is to name the day to ourselvesas “hard” or “blessed.” What we name our children or nickname our spouse becomes more than a mere identifier for them. It becomes, in a sense, who they are. Perhaps the best example is how a name invented by an oldest grandchild, even an otherwise random sound like “Babo,” becomes what a grandparent is called for the rest of their lives.

What the postmodernists missed is that there is a reality beyond our words. Yes, our words have creative power, but that’s because we are made in the image of God Whose words brought reality into existence. The power of our words reflects, in fact, the order of reality. We name our pets. Our pets do not name us. We name the forests and the lakes and the oceans where animals live, not the other way around.

Naming is prominent throughout Scripture. From the second chapter of Genesis to the second chapter of Revelation, and everywhere in between, namingprovides key markers of a person’s journey through life and with God. And there is a profound distinction between what God names and what God tasks His image bearers with naming. Adam was to name the animals, in part as a way of realizing the truth of what God had said about him, that he was alone and that was not good.

Because names matter, we should always take the God-given task of naming seriously. At the same time, we should not think that we can rename reality into something else. We might play our language games, demanding pronouns, calling good “evil” and evil “good,” or denying that there is a real world beyond our words. In the end, it is God’s words that ultimately determine what is, what is good, and what is true.

The Population Zombie Strikes Again: Guest Column

Sep 16, 2026John StonestreetCultureCulture, Family

Overpopulation fears keep returning, despite failed predictions and devastating consequences.

A group of scientists are, once again, predicting imminent disaster because of overpopulation. “It might sound like the evil plan of a nefarious villain,” a recent Daily Mail, article read, “but scientists now say that we need to halve Earth’s population to save the planet.” The researchers have even offered “non-coercive measures” to lower the global population to four billion by the year 2200. Of course, that includes “providing women in low–income countries with family planning services.” Their plan, according to The Daily Mail, is similar to that of Marvel villain Thanos, who thought he could eliminate suffering by eliminating half the human race.

Rather than seeing people as incredible resources of creativity and ingenuity, Thanos and these scientists assume that more people means less food and less wealth. Like a zombie that keeps coming back no matter how many times it’s killed, this thinking is a rehash of the flawed work of Paul Erlich. His 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which predicted global starvation and utter economic collapse if the population at that time didn’t stop growing, is perhaps the best example in recent memory that “ideas have consequences” and that bad ideas have victims.  

In fact, as an obituary to Ehrlich admitted, his ideas “encouraged mass sterilization program[s] in India and the one-child policy in China and influenced how children everywhere were viewed and valued.” His predictions were, as Chuck Colson noted in 2001, spectacularly wrong.

[A]lmost none of the dire predictions associated with what Ehrlich called “The Population Bomb” came to pass. That’s because the doomsayers didn’t understand what it really means to be human. Ehrlich’s was only the most dramatic expression of a worldview that saw reducing birth rates as the key to not only humanity’s, but the entire planet’s fate. In this view, people were akin to parasites. They consumed resources and gave little, if anything, back. Population had to be contained both for our sake and for the sake of the earth. 

In fact, since Ehrlich’s ideas became mainstream, the world population has more than doubled, from 3.8 billion people in 1972 to an estimated 8.3 billion today. Yet, instead of mass starvations and increased conflicts over resources, crop yields have increased dramatically and global rates of undernourishment and starvation has been reduced by more than half.  

Humans are simply not the virus that Ehrlich, Thanos, and these scientist claim. Yes, we do create a mess of problems, but we are also innovators of additional resources and new solutions. That, of course, makes sense if the Biblical story of reality is true and the naturalistic one is not. If we really were made co-creators by the One who created all things, humans are not just consumers but producers who are tasked with cultivating the creation. 

In contrast, population scare warnings have very real victims—tens of millions, in fact. In just the last 50 years, over 60 million Americans have been killed through abortion, and among what has driven the practice is the fear of bringing a child into a dying world. In China, where the myth of the population bomb led to the horrific one-child policy, some 300 million babies were slaughtered, many against the will of their mothers.

Instead of saving the planet, vain ideas of population control have left the nations of the world with a birth dearth. Russia, China, and Japan are notably struggling to maintain their numbers even as their older population phases out of the workforce. The same is happening in the U.S.

Zombie ideas of overpopulation and human pestilence gets humanity tragically wrong and misunderstands the created world. Had Ehrlich’s claims remained in his books, the damage would have been minimal. But his ideas, as they tend to do, grew feet and walked into the real world of image bearers. They wreaked havoc. It’s long past time for this zombie to stay dead.

Courageous Culture Building in a World of Desecration

Sep 10, 2026Erin HoganCultureCultural Commentaries, LGBT, Worldview

Walking the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland I saw a long line of historic buildings and cobblestone streets that millions traverse every year. As my group walked along the historic alleyways and the famous Royal Mile, rainbow flags came into view. They were being displayed for the pride parade taking place downtown. I even saw a “pride” banner on the grounds of the Tolbooth Kirk which was originally designed to be a meeting hall for the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In the same field of view, a Scotsman, dressed in full kilt, played Amazing Grace on the bagpipes. I saw an older gentleman bravely standing amidst the pro-LGBTQ crowd with a sign that told people Jesus loved them, calling them to repent.

I had no idea there would be a pride parade that day with hundreds of people crowding the streets, including drag queens. The city center became incredibly crowded with an influx of people, some celebrating, others taken aback at what they saw, and some simply trying to eat their lunch.

I recall thinking of the dramatic contrast between the noise of the bagpipe blaring out Amazing Grace and the boisterous clamoring of people celebrating pride, all in a beautiful country that has a rich history of Christian reformers.

Back in the U.S, things are hardly different. One day I saw a bumper sticker that read, “ I love my gay dog.” And here I thought Aristotle said that the thing which separates the human animal from all other animals was man’s ability to reason. Now humans are confusing the poor animals with their “reasoning.” Just like the scene in Edinburgh, these sorts of odd statements are a downstream effect of humanity’s denial of God and His statutes. It is an all too unfortunate result of individuals and families who push away the abundant blessings that God offers.

Vice President JD Vance’s new book Communion talks of this denial of God’s truth. In the book, the Vice President explains his own return to faith, but he also explains the societal disease that has inflicted society as a whole—Secularism. Individuals, societies, politics, marriages, and the dynamics of world leadership are infected by the destruction of Secularism. As a result, life spans are shorter, people are having fewer kids or none at all, gay marriage has risen, and hopelessness is rampant.

Thankfully, truth can be found in God’s word and His gospel. Every human being is made in the image of God and because of this, our value system should stem from that understanding. As Christians, we should always be making the case for a return to faith in God as the foundation for flourishing families and fulfilling lives. This is culture building. When humanity gets the truth distorted, it needs the light of the gospel. If Christians do not stand up and fight secularism and the distortions it inflicts, humanity will fall into the depravity that calls dogs gay and more tragically, desecrate themselves in the process.

Erin Hogan has worked with Family Council since January of 2019, where she serves as Director of Government Relations.