Culture – Family Council

The Perils of Prosperity: Guest Column

Oct 6, 2026John StonestreetCultureCulture, Socialism

A few weeks ago, the New York Post reported that, Gustavo Gordillo, a prominent official in the Democratic Socialists of America lived in a $1.5 million home owned by his parents who, in turn, live in a 5,000 square foot home in Boca Raton that’s listed for $3.1 million. Even accounting for NYC’s high housing prices, this seems pretty lush for someone speaking up for the oppressed of the country.

Recently, Ohio chocolate heiress Grace Ryan, who campaigned for one of the most radical DSA politicians, posted about the need for socialism from her boat while “summering” at the lake. And the new self-described socialist mayor of Seattle recently came under scrutiny when it was discovered that, at 43, her professor-parents pay for her child’s childcare, at $2,200 a month.

History is full of stories about the children of wealthy elites who adopt radical socio-political causes, coming out as enemies of “the system” that gave them their lives. Dubbed “Lulu Lenins,” and “Neiman Marxists,” these are modern incarnations of “champagne socialists” who have the financial luxury of never having to live out of their own bad ideas.

Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong also did not grow up poor but were comfortably middle class before embracing murderous ideologies. Ayaan Hirsi-Ali just reminded the world that Mohammed Atta, one of the leaders of the 9/11 attacks, was not born into an impoverished situation, but studied architecture and urban planning before turning radical. And, Osama bin Laden was the son of a billionaire.

As it turns out, there’s often a strong correlation between adopting extremist ideology and privilege. In more recent days, the new supporters of Islamism and neo-Communism tend to be college students from relatively well-to-do families.

Such is the danger of undisciplined prosperity. George Orwell once quipped that “some ideas (are) so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” And some are so unrealistic that only those insulated by comfort could entertain them, while never facing the consequences of worldviews and ideologies that get reality and the human condition so wrong.

This is, in addition to an incredible intellectual curiosity, what makes Ayaan Hirsi-Ali’s voice so credible. Not only has she experience life lived in both a family and in nations under the control of Islamism, but she also walked through the personal desert of trying to find meaning without God. When she reminds us of the true nature of Islamic radicalism and the struggle of secular elites to take seriously true belief, we should listen. As she so aptly put it:

Twenty-five years later, the more uncomfortable truth is that the West has become much better at finding, capturing, or killing men like Atta, but still hesitates to confront the milieu he emerged from: the institutions, networks, doctrines, funding streams, and civilizational ambitions that shape him long before he appears on a watchlist.

An obvious lesson is for parents who live with financial blessing. We must teach our kids to appreciate having what we did not earn without forgetting where it came from and how vulnerable it all can be. We need to teach them what is true, as well as how to recognize what is not true, especially when it comes in the form of oppression narratives and false compassion.

Teaching truth will sometimes look like letting them fail and, if so, what it means to be resilient and to try again. When done rightly, sports can be one of the most effective means to teach endurance, self-sacrifice, and the hard truth that success never comes easy. When done poorly, it can affect how they think about every other part of life.

And, of course, teaching history is essential. A generation that doesn’t know that socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried or that communist governments murdered millions in the twentieth century—or even that Osama Bin Laden was the bad guy of 9/11—will be easily deceived by simplistic and even silly ideas about people and how best to help them.

This would be doubly tragic since, as Ayaan Hirsi-Ali put it, we will need the next generation on the essential project of restoration. As she wrote:

Civilizational resilience is not a vague confidence that democracies always muddle through. It is the hard capacity of a people to see its vulnerabilities clearly, repair them in time, and deny its enemies the use of its virtues as weapons.

I’m pleased to announce that Ayaan Hirsi-Ali will be joining us for the 2027 Colson Center National Conference June 4-6, in Charlotte, NC. Register now at colsonconference.org!

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.