Hi, this is John Stone Street, President of the Coulson Center, and thank you for joining us for this very special bonus episode of the Breakpoint podcast. Recently, at a private event, I was able to sit down with some remarkable leaders. The topic of our conversation was wide-ranging. It was deep and it was rich. It had to do with what can we learn by looking back over the last several decades of the church's involvement in culture, which was such a unique time in American history, where we were debating such incredibly important topics having to do with what it means to be human, what it means to embrace and lose our public morality, and what is the role of the church in dealing with issues that are often deemed too political to touch.
My conversation partners were Gabe Lyons. Gabe's the founder and the president of Think, formerly known as Q Ideas, an organization also dedicated to helping Christians think and engage the culture. Andrew Walker, a professor of theology and ethics at the Southern Baptist Seminary, and Ryan Anderson. Ryan's the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Though each of the panelists come from different corners of the Christian world in America, we all share a vision that the gospel is true.
That Christ is the Lord. And that Christians are called to engage the cultural moment with courage and with truth.
So, I hope you enjoy this special conversation here on a bonus episode of the Breakpoint Podcast. We have a lot of ground to cover. We're going to keep this as free-flowing as possible. But I'm going to start here. We all come from different understandings of the Christian faith within the bounds of Orthodoxy.
By the way, this is the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed. We all subscribe to that.
Okay, we can be friends? Um But let's start with what are the unique Theological or denominational contributions from your religious tradition that you think shape. How we should think about culture, particularly at a contestuous time like this. And, Gabe, I'm going to let you start. Yeah, I mean, I'm labeled non-denominational, partly because today a lot of our work and ministry tends to hit 70% of our audience, our leaders in non-denominational churches.
My personal background, I grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. Jerry Falwell was my pastor. Never heard of him. Yep. And so I grew up in an environment where the church was told: I mean, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, you need to be involved in the culture.
And a lot of that energy went towards a political frame, not all of it, but I was. I was hit with that every single day. And I just remember growing up in that environment, feeling this was just part of the calling of the Christian to engage that. Then Chuck Coulson became a mentor early in my 20s and 30s. And the idea of non-denominational churches today engaging the culture is one that we have to talk a little bit more about.
We have found over 20 years. We are constantly trying to urge Trying to educate, inform, and motivate these leaders to speak to some of these harder issues. I think we're dealing with a much bigger moment culturally where this type of church has formed in an environment where consumerism has been one of the main themes, where a lot of church leaders have grown up in an environment that they've created churches kind of built off of how do we get the most people in the room and how do we offend the least amount of people for the sake of some of them coming to know Jesus and that kind of mentality. Has worked its way so deeply into the life of the Western and the American church that it's made it difficult on some of these very obvious issues now to look back and see a lot of non-denominational pastors being willing to confront some of these issues. And so I think we have to look back and we have to take account of that and we have to say, look, we need to repent for that for the areas where we've been silent, we've been quiet, we've maybe believed convictionally some of the same things, but weren't willing to speak them.
And now in 2025, recognize we're in a new cultural moment. The consumer, so to speak, is longing for their pastors to speak to these issues. In fact, the research is showing 80% of parishioners want their pastors and think it's part of their job to speak to cultural issues. And yet, 80% of pastors. Feel afraid to speak to cultural issues for fear of offending or losing people in their church.
And so we're at that moment that's gonna require great leadership for the church in this next season to step up and step forward because people are demanding it. Christian leaders need more help, and that's where environments like this, the work that I know each of you are doing as well, is meant to encourage and put courage into these leaders so they start to speak to these issues in an informed way, but in an impassioned way. Andrew, why don't you go next? Yeah, so there's, I think, a historical uniqueness and then kind of a general principle that I think we look at from the Baptist tradition. But the historical principle is: you know, Baptists were pivotal at the nation's founding and with establishing kind of an aura, an ethos of religious liberty.
That's something we have carried with us to present day, and we still cherish and value that as Baptists. But then, thinking about what it means to be Baptist in particular with our Kind of our soteriology, our ecclesiology is this idea of what we would call conversionism. The idea that if you're going to engage the culture, you can't just engage the culture at abstract levels. You need to engage the culture from a level of the heart. And that to become a Christian is not to merely commit to some vague, abstract ideas, it's to have your heart literally converted and changed and transformed.
And in the Baptist tradition, You know, we put a high priority and emphasis on scripture and the word of God, and particularly through the act of proclamation. And as we think about cultural transformation, As a Baptist, I think about that culture transformation is predominantly conscience transformation. And so, as individuals are week in, week out in their Baptist churches, or really any faithful preaching church for that matter, as they're week in, week out in those churches, They're having their conscience shaped. By the word of God. Because their heart has been converted and transformed.
And necessarily, those converted hearts and those transformed consciences are going to want to work themselves out externally in the culture. In terms of Christian, I don't know if there's something distinctively Catholic. I actually think what I want to share is something that would be common to all four of us, which is simply to say that the Christian vocation in the public square is not just to ask for religious liberty. Like everything Andrew just said is accurate. And thank God that Baptists helped.
Even from a Catholic perspective, we were somewhat late to embracing religious liberty as a universal human right. Dignitatus Humani comes out in 1965, right? But if you think about Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from the Birmingham Jail, He cites two Catholic saints. He cites Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. And what he does there is he cites Augustine to say an unjust law is no law at all.
And then he cites Aquinas to say: how do we know the difference? A just law is a man-made law that's in harmony with the natural law and the eternal law. I think Augustine and Aquinas are common saints for everyone in this room. Yeah, we would all claim them. We would, right?
And we should, because I think our calling here is not just to ask for exemptions from unjust laws, right? And I think there were too many people during the Obama era that thought everything's going to hell in the hambasket. The best we can hope for is just to exempt ourselves from bad laws. My understanding of the political theology, the public theology that I'm engaged in is to make sure that every one of our man-made laws is in harmony with the natural and the eternal law. And that doesn't mean to turn the state into the church.
I believe in the separation of church and state, but it's to say that there are some areas that have dual jurisdictions. The topic of marriage, the church regulates and practices. Celebrates marriages as a sacrament or as a covenant or as a religious institution, the state also recognizes marriage. It doesn't create marriage, but it recognizes it, right? Because marriage is a creational ordinance, right?
And so, well, I think the biggest thing I could contribute is just to say that we need to bring to bear the fullness of the truth about the human person, what we know philosophically and theologically, where it intersects with questions of public justice and the common good, to make sure that our laws actually reflect the truth about the human person. And unfortunately, I think we've seen some people kind of back away from that. They think that means, oh, well, I'm a pastor. I don't do politics. It's going, no, no, that's not politics, right?
I mean, properly understood, this is you are defending the truth of the human person as a pastor. And then we're the church as well, right? I mean, so I think lay people have the vocation to then take the truth of the human person and vindicate it. in law and in policy. I mean, for me, it's hard to distinguish between, you know, what's influenced me the most clearly is Chuck Colson.
And Colson loved to quote Abraham Kuyper, and I'm a Neo-Kuiperian. You always put the Neo in front of it, so then you can make it whatever you want it to be. But. But you know, Kuiper has that famous line that there's not a single square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who's sovereign over all, does not cry out mine. And Chuck used to add to that.
And so the Christian's job, the church's job, is to go to every square inch and cry out his. And that to me also, I think, speaks a bit, though, to I think what Anglicanism historically can contribute.
Now, obviously, what's tempting is to say, yeah, we're the ones that screwed it all up because we were the first Christian denomination to say the pill was okay in contraception. And boy, that created a whole, you know, canopy. It really did. And that was a real problem. But, Gabe, to your point, in terms of the evangelical ethos in the last 10, 20 years, to be so missional and so experience-driven and to separate theology out from that in some really structural ways, for Anglicanism, theology is worship.
You want to know what Anglicans believe, you go to the liturgy. You want to know what the liturgy is, that's what Anglicans believe.
Now, it doesn't always play itself out like that, but that priority of the church to be oriented around truth and not around mission. Not that you're not ordered around mission, but mission serves truth, not the other way around. That to me takes us into the second area that I want to talk about, which are the blind spots. What are the blind spots within? our own traditions Or within the church at large?
And I know we're not representative of the whole church. We need a Methodist up here. What are the blind spots? That's about the theological blind spots, either from our traditions or that have manifested in the last few years. Yeah, I can start.
What I love about Baptists and Protestants is that we're Bible people, right? Whenever we go to the public square, We want to cite our Bibles. And absolutely, we should never back down. from citing our Bible verses. But there's a way in which we can go to the Bible.
that actually makes our moral claims as Christians Seem sectarian and disconnected from reality around us. A few years ago, I was giving a series of talks at this very large. church actually here in Florida and I had written a book on transgender issues. And on the second night of my talks, this lovely sweet. Christian teacher comes up to me.
Before I'm about to give my second talk, and she says, Hey, thank you so much for your talks at this conference. I never knew. that we had good reasons. to believe what we believe about God making us male and female.
Now if you think about that and unpack it. You had this mature Christian woman with a correct view on the Bible's inspiration and the Bible's authority, and a correct understanding of what the Bible teaches as far as God makes us in Genesis chapter 1 male and female in His image. But she had thought that that's just kind of a pious claim that you tuck inside the inner recesses of your heart. And if I bring that out in the public square, I'm going to be immediately kind of banished and ridiculed and told to you can't, you know, you can't legislate your morality or the separation of church and state. And so she began to think, actually, no, like...
When when God creates He's not creating secular morality over here and creating a Christian morality over here. When God creates, He creates universally through that sovereign decree. Through his eternal law, that eternal law is made manifest in divine law, we call scripture. It's also made manifest in what Ryan is talking about with the natural law. And so that Christian morality is morality as such.
And so, one of my core emphases in my teaching ministry and my writing ministry is for Christians to not cite our Bible any less, by no means. But to understand that when we cite Scripture, we are citing it in a panoramic and robust way, and understanding that God's Word is actually more sufficient. Than we sometimes give it credit for because it's talking about morality for everyone, not just for Christians. I mean, it's interesting, today in the cultural moment, you have both the right and the left quoting Bible verses. Right.
Well, the left just quotes Matthew 25 and incorrectly, but you know, go ahead. I mean, but that's interesting. I mean, speaking of anniversaries, this is the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial, where in that debate, there was a big banner that was hung across the street with a finger that said, Read your Bible, right? It's kind of this story. But let me, can we kick this around for just a second?
Because, you know, in your story, you have both the. Failure to realize that the Bible actually describes reality, that what the Bible claims corresponds with what's created, but then also that the Bible's real knowledge. Right? That what the Bible says is actually okay.
So what's the balance here? Chuck used to debate this back and forth between citing the Bible, Christians in the public square, versus appealing to natural law or things that are observable with evidence. Sure, I mean, I think partly this depends on who your audience is. I used to do a lot of FedSOC debates at law schools. I don't get to do that as much now because of the new job.
But if I was going to Harvard law school and I was debating gay marriage, or I was debating religious liberty in the aftermath of gay marriage, or the early days of transgender stuff, it would not help me persuade the students that I had to persuade if I gave a theology of the body. Argument, or if I gave a bunch of scriptural reflections. But if I went in there and I actually showed that the best of American constitutionalism, the best of originalism, and the best of philosophy all supported the truth that marriage is man and a woman, husband and wife, mother and father, I would have the same feedback. I would get the same feedback that Andrew got.
Some of the Christian students would be like, wow, I never knew there was something beyond the Bible. That actually reinforced what I believed. But also, like, I would have liberal students say, Well, I know you're wrong, I just don't know why you're wrong. I mean, they had their own form of a faith. They knew that marriage had to be, um, it had to include same-sex couples, but this was the first time they had ever encountered a purely rational, nothing super rational.
And I think revelation is super rational. It's not irrational, it goes beyond what reason can know. But here, I was just saying, this is what we can know as rational animals, creatures with intellects. We can know the truth about what marriage is. And it doesn't violate due process.
It doesn't violate equal protection, right? You have no constitutional argument to redefine what marriage is. And for a lot of those, you know, Harvard law school, Yale law, various elite law schools, it was the first and possibly only time they ever heard that argument. The media refused to cover it. They made it seem like that debate was between bigots and reasonable, enlightened, justice people.
And so, when we see secularists and progressives and feminists actually come around on the trans issue in particular, you know what the Christian response is? Is Yeah, we told you so. Because we believe that these are truths that are observable by nature, and they're observable by reason. And those truths that are observable by nature and by reason are also truths that are also said sufficiently and authoritatively in scripture as well. Gabe, you w got any blind spots?
Yeah, I think relevance being a key pursuit of a lot of churches and the conversations even that church leaders have has been a blind spot. You know, when you try to stay relevant, when you try to keep up with the culture, undoubtedly you're leaving your post behind, and there's going to be a moment where the culture reverts back. To asking the questions that you probably had great answers to before you left the post and tried to keep up with the culture. And so, helping the church become more countercultural and embrace this idea that you're going to believe things, say things, live things, and embody things that run counter to the way this world operates. That's going to provoke questions, gonna provoke people to be skeptical of you, to make fun of you, and to not understand you.
And to get comfortable in that position, I would say as we look at the last decade, we've seen more and more churches grow more comfortable that they're going to be countercultural. And I think the last few years. They're realizing that even the next generation's responding even more. You know, a generation that historically the church always goes, I don't know how to reach the next generation. They're leaving the church.
We're in a moment where they're coming back to the church. Gen Z is looking to the church and Christianity, and they're taking a second look at a faith that their parents never told them about. They just assumed as parents, like, we'll let our kids figure it out. We're not going to push religion on them. And now that they're getting to engage some robust intellectual discourse, as Ryan was mentioning, whether it's through people like Jordan Peterson or Theo Vaughn, you know, a big podcaster, you know, who's asking these tough questions, willing to talk about spirituality, willing to talk about faith.
And what role does Jesus really have in the current modern discourse where the answers that secularism have been giving us are dead ends?
So is that the math here that the answers of secularism have proven to be dead ends? Yes. And the willingness to have these kind of long, hard, three-hour podcast conversations are more attractive than the relevant strategy. Yes, and this generation is more curious than ever. There's nothing off limits.
They're responding to environments that we can create. And if we can do this in the church, this is the opportunity. If we can in the church start to create space to say these conversations, all the ones we've been having the last three days, should be the Whether it's on a Sunday morning, whether it's in Bible studies, discipleship courses, Thursday evening QAs where we bring the congregation together to learn, to be educated, to have these conversations. When this generation starts to see the church isn't afraid of these topics, they actually have a confidence that what we believe about it is better for the world and better for human flourishing. This starts to re-energize the church for a moment where we haven't in our lifetime seen a moment, I believe, where revival is right there.
We're right on the edge of it because the curiosity is so high. If we can step into that moment with courage and confidence, I think the harvest is going to be plentiful. And new energy is a, I think, the right. Way to describe it. It feels, I mean, we've talked about vibe shifts now for the last three days, but there is a new energy here within the church.
All right, let me go here before we spend too much time on the new energy. We've been through like the last couple decades of some pretty significant moments in time, right? I mean, when you add up everything that's happened in the last, you know, really since the 80s, it, you know, Just specifically, are there specific moments in time that the church went through that we need to learn from? What are they? What are the lessons?
Sure, so I think we should start at Lambeth. You were correct to point us there. No one got that joke. Thank you. Um I think of a couple, and especially for the church.
About a decade ago, there were some Christian leaders who proposed what was known as the Utah Compromise. And then at the federal level, it was called fairness for all. And what this did, thankfully it was never enacted into law at the federal level, but it would have made SOGI, sexual orientation and gender identity, a protected class in all of our federal civil rights laws. And then it would have exempted select religious institutions. And so the religious groups that were pushing this were pushing this because it was a way to protect their schools, their universities, and their charities, while they more or less imposed terrible public policy on the rest of the nation.
And they thought, honestly, this is what they thought, this was the best they could hope for. Because a decade ago, they thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. Everything that had gone bad during the Obama years was going to be supercharged under a Clinton administration.
So we just have to make a deal. Think about how silly that now looks. That approach would have made a civil right for a 13-year-old girl to have a double mastectomy.
So Scrimetty wouldn't None of the states could have done what they are now doing with the help not harm law because there would have been a federal civil rights law saying that you have a. Civil right. To transition. Any boy who identified as a girl would have had a federal civil right to play on the girls' sports team, to be in the girls' bathroom. And then we would have, so we would have imposed this on the entire nation and then exempted select religious institutions.
And again, at the time, they were honestly thinking this was the best approach. I was at Heritage at the time, and it was ADF and Heritage. We were the two loudest groups saying this is imprudent, it's insane, it's unjust, it's certainly not fair for all. And then we were attacked saying, you're just doing this to raise money. Right, and at the time I had never asked any.
I now have to raise money in my new job. But back then, I did not have to raise money. At no point was there any conversation about how will this position us best for fundraising. If anything, I would say that there are a lot of things that I do that are detrimental to my fundraising efforts. And so it was particularly annoying that they weren't seeing this as a good faith, honest disagreement.
They assumed we were just doing this to be extremists, to do direct mail, to then scare grandma to raise money. A decade from now, we can see that the people who stood for truth back when it was unpopular on the trans issue, this is now an 80-20 issue our way. And thank God we didn't make that deal. Second thought about pivotal moments: all of the earliest voices that spoke out against trans were believers. And Kristen mentioned in her opening remarks on Tuesday morning, you know, one of them was Alan Josephson.
Christian professor of childhood psychiatry. That was early, early on. I know, I'm the one that got him fired.
So I had been working with, he was not yet an ADF client, he was an ADF expert witness. And I wanted to host a public event at Heritage in DC to get lawmakers to hear from medical experts. What's the truth about this? He spoke at heritage. And then it was a few months later that he got his demotion, and a year later that he got fired.
He was already in his late 60s, if I get the timeline right. They were doing this not just to punish him, but to make an example of him. To silence his students, so no one else would be willing to speak out. And thank God ADF sued. He just got a nice settlement, so his retirement is now, he's good.
But he had the courage when it was unclear that we were going to win, right? There were people willing to speak out. Because the vibe then was, we just got our teeth kicked in on gay marriage. If you stick your head up on trans, it's going to get cut off. It was hard to find expert witnesses, and the last thing I'll say is.
Um The the Christians who uh worked on this were not uh purists. We were willing to make partnerships with the most unlikely allies.
So, you know, I think it was 2017 that Alan spoke at Heritage. In 2018, I had the first lesbian who ever, who was reinstated to the military after Don't Ask, Don't Tell, speak at Heritage against gender ideology. And you see, we have all of these lefty women, people like J.K. Rowling, we have lesbians against transing the kids. And that was because we weren't going to say, oh, we disagree about gay marriage, we can't partner with you.
And I think that's a lesson for the church. We don't have a majority just of us.
So we have to be willing to form partnerships with people who may disagree with us about abortion and about gay marriage, but agree with us about children and trans. And that's a healthy posture for the church to be in. Ryan wanted me to say: in order to give to EPPC, you can text right now. Yeah.
So I don't know if it was one particular moment that I would pinpoint. I would go to a particular phrase. And the phrase of the last 15 years. that was shouted at the face of conservative Christians in this room was, you're on the wrong side of history. And I think that that was an incredibly rhetorically powerful Statement.
and rhetorically powerful strategy. to shut Christians up. But underneath that is a false understanding of how history moves. Mm. And it demonstrated to me that there's a tension in how Christians think about history and culture.
That we'll tell ourselves in the pulpit and read in the Bible that time belongs to the Lord, that He is the sovereign of history.
So we'll tell ourselves that, but then we'll actually condition ourselves to where we'll actually believe that it's the cultural influencers or the politicians or the cultural moods that determine the arc of history. And I think that there was this inevitability thesis. Baked into the culture over the last 10 to 15 years that said you're always going to be wrong.
So calibrate the strategy in order for you to accept the terms of your surrender, which is why you get that negotiated, sue for peace type approach. Just leave me alone, let me go off in the corner and practice my sectarian, irrational truths. If you just let me be, right? I think that's a false view of how history operates. History doesn't do this.
History doesn't do this. History is up and down, up and down. And you know what you're called to do through history, regardless of the context or circumstances, you're called to bear witness to the same truths. It doesn't change. Truth does not change.
It's immutable. And what we're called to do is to hang on to that and to testify to it because if truth is what it is by nature. Then I think it speaks to what social conservatism is and how it speaks in this culture. And my understanding of social conservatism is: at first, it's mocked and ridiculed. And then it end up getting it end up getting vindicated.
And that's what we're seeing happen right now. This vibe shift that we're seeing play out. I'm fine for it to be called a vibe shift. I actually think this is the revenge of nature. It's the revenge of common sense coming back.
And as Ryan was talking about, Who were the people talking about these eternal truths over the last 15 years who didn't budge? It was you all. Clinging to our Bibles and our religion. And that's a good thing. We have to hold on to that.
Yeah, I think the You know, the lesson looking back now is those who remained principled versus pragmatic. Win the day. And sometimes that doesn't happen in five years or 10 years.
Sometimes it's 30 or 50 years when you look at the arc of history. I think we've been fortunate to see the pendulum start to shift so quickly. But I also think one of the ways, one of the blind spots was 2020, COVID. I mean It's not a comfortable thing for people to talk about, but the church reorienting what its role was in relationship to the state and how much churches were willing to basically take guidance from the state, or in some cases, Christian institutions, being willing to be the voice. for the NIH.
and to advance vaccine policy and to tell people their theology demanded that they get this vaccine. And I think looking back, that's been a huge mistake. A lot of churches, a lot of leaders have lost trust because during a moment where the pressure was on from the state, there was a sense of capitulation. Instead of boldness and courage. And then I think what we've witnessed now in the last few years is those who remained pretty bold and convicted about their principles during that season, we saw their churches begin to grow.
We saw more and more people listening to those voices because they said, I think we can trust these leaders because the pressure was on and I didn't see capitulation. And I believe that was just the beginning of, as we look at the coming decade. There's going to be more and more questions, more and more pressure, more and more cultural narratives, whether it's technology, AI, as I mentioned yesterday, there'll be a lot more coming at the church than just COVID policies. Is the church going to be strong enough? Are the leaders going to be bold enough?
Are they going to be informed enough? Are they going to know how to respond to these issues? And that's why the work that's happening these few days, and I know will come out from this, becomes so crucial to help these leaders have the confidence to stand in truth and to know that when they do, that those principles will play out and in the end will be vindicated. Look, I think that word there about, hey, we're still in the middle of it too, right? I mean, I don't want to, you know, don a jacket and hop on an Air Force carrier and, you know, declare victory too early because, you know, I'm in Colorado.
Yesterday during the communicators track, I introduced Kaylee, the counselor, as an ADF client suing Colorado. And then I thought, oh, we're going to have to specify because there's an awful lot of ADF clients suing Colorado, including a brand new one just yesterday. But my moment in time, and I don't want to rein on the happy parade here, but I do think this is a really important lesson. My moment in time is specifically in Colorado.
So I moved to Colorado in 2007. In 2005, When was it? 2000, maybe 11. I can't remember which exact year, but on the ballot, was doctor-assisted suicide. There was a group of us, the Family Policy Alliance, focused on the family.
There was a local pastor who had just lost his wife to a horrific bout with brain cancer. She was a very popular blogger at the time, Kara Tippetts. There was a ministry outreach organization that gave us free mailings. We had videos made, we had sermon outlines made, we had bulletin inserts made, and we had. We had the ability to mail them to the entire church in Colorado twice.
And We lost that issue 70-30. Uh in the middle of that I found myself in line at Starbucks behind a guy that I knew who was a pastor of a church. In town, and I said, Hey, this is what we're doing. This is the doctor-assisted suicide bill. This is what it's gonna do, here's what we've put together.
Are you willing to let your congregation know about this at any level? And he looked at me and he said, that's too political.
Now, fast forward, here we are, however many years later, a little bit over a decade later. And, you know, I don't know if you guys heard, but we had a crazy bit of legislation go through Colorado to the point that the state was going to take kids away from their parents if they misgendered them. They neutered that back. But that was such a crazy bill that the neutered version of that bill is still the most radical bill on this in the country, I think, or one of them, pretty close. California might be worse, but yeah.
We fight one or the other. California, yeah. Where's Jonathan Keller at? We're worse than you, Jonathan. Um But I think about That conversation, and I cannot imagine that pastor at that moment.
You know, whenever that first issue came come up, I was saying. About this later bill, about parents and children, and gender, and child mutilation. Oh, that's too political. I won't speak to that. You know what?
An awful lot of pastors. Did say that this time around. Less, more pastors stepped out. But when you say this is too political, this is too political, this is too political, year after year after year after year, when things get worse and worse and worse within a state, you continue to say, um, Things are too political. And to me, that was a moment where I realized we had completely lost the plot.
We had completely lost the narrative of what counts as political and what counts as moral, and being able to tell the difference between the two. Can I can I s yeah, one of the things we have to constantly be Alert about is to ask the question: Is this political or is this actually politics, or is this theology disguised as politics? We can have reasonable debates about minimum wage laws. That's a political issue, okay? Public policies about whether or not your child can be confiscated from your home may present at the top level as policy.
and political, but it's actually deeply theological. And we need to be able to discern the difference in those types of moments. And the thing that strikes me and concerns me as a leader within the church is that when a pastor says, well, that's just political, okay? I wouldn't want my pastor preaching on the minimum wage law. I do want him preaching on the fact that parental rights is a God-given reality that stems from Genesis chapter 1.
Right? But then there's a question beneath this. There's an authority. Um question there's a permission. Structure question.
Why is that pastor afraid? Who is he trying to appease? Why are you constantly trying to appease the left? And you're not looking to your right flank. And I think that's something that has been kind of endemic to evangelicalism and maybe Catholicism for the last two or 15 years: is that we have lived under what one of my friends refers to as the progressive gaze, G-A-Z-E.
that we've kind of calibrated our strategy. To rhetorically placate and appease the left because we think that the left's opinion ultimately matters about us. It doesn't matter. One of the things that you should do, and one of the things that's most freeing, is to simply detach yourself from the authority structure of progressivism. And give yourself the authority and structure of the Lord and of his work, okay?
That's good. Um I do want to say You know, as we've worked at Think with a lot of pastors who are trying to engage cultural issues, the common themes that come up from pastors, because they're really easy to pick on, they're not doing enough, they're not saying enough. Their lives in this current structure of at least a non-denominational church has become so corporate that so much of their life is spent managing a corporate structure. They're focused on that Sunday sermon. In their best motivations, they say, look, I don't feel educated on the gender issue.
I don't know how to speak to that. I don't have time to read the books. I'm not sure I'm going to say it right. I'm afraid I'm going to do something wrong.
So I'm just going to back away from it. And so the need as we move into this future for more resources, which I know each of our organizations and institutions are creating, but more and more resources that help these pastors and leaders quickly get their handle around the theological basis for why this policy is needing to be confronted, how to communicate it to their people in a way that helps them start to build their own empowerment to engage with their neighbors, because we know the people want it. They're having to have these conversations with their kids on social media, at work. And so there's a hunger for it. And so I think we're in a moment where we're going to meet that need.
And I do see pastors more and more longing for that and saying, please give me more. I know I need to be doing better. I want to do more, but I just need help. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, it is easy to pick on pastors, and there's things to complain about.
I mean, pastors. I don't know of any other job where someone is hired for one thing and fired for something else, like pastors. I mean, it just, the misalignment there is great.
So I think that's an important encouragement. Can I add maybe an encouraging note to this? Um I'm actually encouraged about the trajectory of the evangelical church on these types of questions. I think the last five years has awakened the Protestant church and probably the Catholic Church to these public theology issues. When I was in seminary, I started in 2008, all of the hot button issues the seminarians were talking about was like complementarianism, inerrancy, and reformed theology.
All three wonderful things, right? Fast forward to 2020, when I go and teach at the seminary as a faculty member, what are students talking about now? They're talking about the relationship between church and state. They're talking about the application of Christian morality into the public square. There is, I think, a healthy maturing going on in evangelicalism, and we should be encouraging that trajectory.
Well, and we got to do it in a way, though, that doesn't abandon the theological issues as well. Because I think we've seen that, you know, if you think about Obergefell or you think about some of these other moments in time, and we need to move on, we'll have time to kind of hit all of them. But you did see, at least in some aspects of the church, churches that already gave up on inerrancy are the churches most quickly to give up on marriage. Churches that had already watered down to some degree the exclusivity of Christ, embraced some form of pluralism, were the least likely to have any kind of moral statement out there or become advocates altogether. But I do think this is a good transition here.
Um and I use that word carefully into this um Into the next topic, which is a topic of catechism, right? I mean, if we are to say then, as the church, we need to be really clear on catechism. What are the priorities of discipleship of the people in the pew. From the church that need to take precedent right now, what would they be? We're finding a lot of interest in what we have described as cultural discernment discipleship.
A lot of the data, especially for again, Gen Z, is that when they're in a church environment where discipleship is given to them around cultural topics and issues that they're having conversations with their friends with, when they get into their 20s, 30s, they stick with faith. That's the group that doesn't walk away because they realize their faith has something to offer to the real conversations of the day.
So we even use our think brand, T-H-I-M-Q, as a rubric. To teach worldview now. The T stands for theology, the H for history, the I for inquiry, the N for nuance, and the Q for questions. We believe as a Christian, when you think through that lens, starting with theology first, you will ask a better question in the conversation than the world's asking about that topic. And so, creating those kind of environments, whether it's in youth groups, college groups are doing it now, church small groups are doing it, to start to invigorate the answers to the questions that they are.
We're seeing great opportunity with that.
So, I have a couple of thoughts. One is simply by the basic Christian narrative of creation, fall, redemption. You know that's a reformed framework. I'm trying to be ecumenical up here. You notice I haven't mentioned a bishop or a pope yet.
Yeah.
And I think- I love it. I love it. It's fantastic. I just wanted to point that out. Um I think a lot of the woke stuff was a, was, it, was, a, um.
A rejection of that narrative, where our own creators And yet we recognize something has gone wrong. but we have no way of being redeemed. And that middle part of that is the accurate part of what they were getting at. The world is not the way that it ought to be. I think a lot of the woke agitation that we saw, a lot of what you see in high school and college-age students that just kind of like, Unsettlement, dissettlement, the lack of happiness, satisfaction, like that is touching something real.
The woke answers Are not real. And so I think the role of the church is to say, like, yes, you are a creature. There is a creator. You are not the creator. That means you have a certain nature.
That means you have a certain trajectory, teleology of what's good for you. But yes, you're experiencing. Fallen nature, and there is a pathway for redemption.
So that would be one, just like preach the basic. Overarching narrative.
So that's the frame that people have. Two, I think the story of the 20th century and now the 21st century is the story of faulty anthropology. And I don't mean like Margaret Mead going to investigate the Samoya people. I mean like philosophical, theological. How do we understand what it means to be human?
And the way that I've kind of categorize this is that there are four truths right on the first page of the Bible. That we're made in the image and likeness of God, that we're created male and female, that men and women are created for each other in marriage, and all of us are created for a friendship with God. Those are the four truths that get your books canceled on Amazon, right? But those are the four truths that are most needed at this moment because they directly respond to the most aggressive woke forces. And last thing I'll say.
I don't currently, because they made me take it out of my pocket to come out here so it wouldn't have interference. But normally, we all have these devices in our pockets. That I think are habituating us in ways that make it less likely for us to have serious engagement with scripture and serious prayer lives. And this isn't true just for our kids. You know, a lot of the discussion so far has been technology and kids.
We should think about what our smartphones are doing for our spiritual lives. Can I have a half hour of sustained devotion time? Or am I so distracted by the thing in my pocket? When you ask about the catechesis that we need, it's not just head knowledge. It's going to be how do we habituate ourselves to have silence?
To sit in silence with the Lord, to be able to read scripture, meditate on scripture. And I am finding this is harder and harder for me. And that means it's going to be harder and harder for my kids.
So, one of my very first bosses, you can applaud for that if you want. Yeah.
One of my very first bosses in my career, who's in this audience actually, at the Heritage Foundation, Jennifer Marshall Patterson, she would always talk to Ryan and I in the context of the marriage debate, and she would use the phrase: silence never wins. And so that's a phrase now that's like stuck with me now for going on 12, 13 years. Silence never Whence? Which means Truth has to be actively contended for. Bill Buckley, one of my heroes from National Review, always said that when we look at the course of history, We don't just see that truth naturally surfaces to the top.
And that in light of Genesis chapter 3, In Romans chapter 8, there is constant assault and bombardment on the truth. Which means that there have to be individuals who will actively contend for the truth, and so that we cannot be silent. And so as we're thinking about something like catechesis. It means that we need to have Pastors and preachers who are actively addressing these issues where they can in scripture. It doesn't mean that pastors need to be talking politics every week from the pulpit, not at all.
But where you can apply scripture to the public square, you absolutely should do so. You should also do what you can, where you can. In relationship to where the Lord has placed you. And so, from my own life, I'm a faculty member at Southern Seminary, so I'm able to communicate these truths to future pastors. And one of the reasons I wanted to teach is because every single one of my students.
Who then goes out into a church is going to begin teaching their flock. And so there's a force multiplier effect that I get to have as a faculty member talking to these students about things like anthropology and human nature, human purpose, and human freedom. But then, actually, just this past summer, I was asked to be the committee chairperson, or I guess chairman, we can say chairman here. I'd be gender neutral on this question. Why are you looking at me?
I'm good with it, yeah. Chairman, right?
Okay. I was asked to be the chairman of this year's Resolutions Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. And I had the opportunity to author a resolution, resolution number five, if you want to go look this one up. It was called On Restoring Moral Clarity Through God's Design for Gender. marriage and sexuality.
And all we did was to restate these simple biblical truths. Um in it, we also called for the repealing or overturning of Obergefell, which made a lot of headlines and a lot of fun emails in my inbox, okay? But I would get asked by reporters Why would you all 10 years later after Obergafell talk? Talk about Gay marriage and calling for the overturning of Obergefell. This is just gay marriage is as American as baseball and apple pie at this point, right?
And my response to that was, is because Scripture doesn't change its teaching on these issues. Nature doesn't change its teaching on these issues. And we're called to bear witness to these things regardless of the context, regardless of the circumstances that we find ourselves in, because you never know. where you're going to find yourself. 10 years from now.
Those same-sex marriage enjoys wide Public support in America. Do you know? that there is declining support for same-sex marriage nationally. Do you know that Gen Z is actually Less in favor of same-sex marriage. Did you know that there are wonderful Movements like the children's rights movement that individuals like Katie Faust are starting that are beginning to really rhetorically push back on the overreach of the sexual revolution and gay marriage.
But fundamentally, this all stems from a commitment to not being silent. Always speaking up, always contending for the truth. You know, I think one of the lessons that we need to learn also plays into this kind of catechetical question, which is it's going to be tempting when we feel the momentum swing more in our direction and the wind more in our back to jump into activism and jump ahead of catechism. And what I'm seeing, and I'm encouraged like Abe is, that there is an incredible amount of interest by Christians in the pews to go deeper in their understanding of theology and how it applies to culture, right? They don't want easy answers.
They actually want to go deeper. And I think part of it probably has to do with the fact that, you know, you kind of get your worldview tested now in so many different ways and you find out pretty quickly whether it's big enough or not. And a lot of parents, you know, had kids come home and say, Hey, you know, so-and-so now has decided to be so-and-so, and they felt completely unprepared. And then many more pastors that I am seeing is also welcoming instead of kind of the short, you know, quick, you know, 20-minute Sunday school devotional kind of Sunday school class to go deep, to go deep in discipleship and formation. I mean, we've seen that for us, and an absolute explosion of interest in churches to adopt what we call the Colson Fellows Program, which is something that Chuck Colson developed around worldview and culture.
It's been amazing to see how many more people want to go deeper and deeper and deeper. I'm also struck, too, by something that Rodrigo said in our communicators track the other day, and I've heard him say this before, but I think it's really important, where he talks about the need for courage and the willingness to suffer. And I think we would be deeply, deeply mistaken to think. that courage and the willingness to suffer just comes along naturally. That it doesn't need to be discipled, that it doesn't need to be catechized.
I tell you, the incident. That makes me think about this. is post-dobs. Um We had a lot of celebration post-obs, as we should have. No question about it.
Ah, but then came the hard cold truth about where the American people really were. And we underestimated just how deeply relativist. America was. Including American Christians that went to the polls and said, Well, I don't really like abortion, but I'm not really willing to make a moral stand. That requires a catechism in truth and a catechism in courage.
And so I think right now is a moment. I hope one of the things that everyone's hearing is we have this incredible opportunity to go deeper, to push each other harder, to hold each other accountable, to call one another to good works. And those good works include courage.
So our catechetical framework out of the Colson Center, we boiled it down into four things, four biblical foundations that have cultural applications across the board. The first is hope, that we think about this cultural moment, not in light of what you said, that we're on the wrong side of history and believing the inevitability narrative, but that what we know to be true is that Christ is risen from the dead. Amen? And because Christ is risen from the dead. Yeah.
Peter says that we have hope. The second being truth with a capital T. I think Christians talk a lot about truths. I really appreciate my Catholic brother using that reform framework of the true story of the world, right? I'd add a fourth chapter: creation, fall, redemption.
Restoration, but when we can see our moment in light of that big story. It's like having that you are here. Right in a map, and like, oh, I know. Not only do I know redemptive how redemptive history turns out, but I know where I'm at in redemptive history, and it's really helpful. Look.
The anthropology question. You know, what it means to be human. Theological oversight of the last 50 years within the church by far. I think we go. church to church to church and say Hey, everyone, fill in the blank.
Humans are made in the, and we'd all say. But then you say, what does that mean? What is the image of God? What difference has it made in history? What difference does it make in the biblical narrative?
How does it shape our understanding of? Sinfulness in the fall, and then you hear a lot less certainty and clarity about this. to the extent that people then turned around and believed Maybe we are born in the wrong body or something like that. And so a clear Catechism on identity.
So, hope, truth, identity. And I think you mentioned this. I think it's huge. One of the results of the identity crisis has been this. This crisis of meaning.
When you see the number of young people in particular, and that's why I think they're turning to three-hour podcasts, right? They're like, You know, first of all, they all quit their jobs and then they started listening to three-hour podcast. I mean, what's going on? What's going on is a crisis of meaning, and the biblical answer to meaninglessness is call. I love Oz Guinness's book, The Call.
He talks about calling, that our lives have purpose within. that hope That we're in the middle of redemptive history, and we can find where we're at in redemptive history. And God's made us in His image, and all that leads to calling.
So, hope, truth, identity, calling, I think are the catechetical emphasis priorities. It sounds like you know, something we kind of all look at. All right, we got five minutes left, and we got a big topic. Uh, uh, uh, I think it was uh Yogi Bera that said predictions are dangerous, especially predictions about the future. Um But let's talk about that.
Let's go away from catechism issues. What issues Are out ahead of us. that we don't want to be behind on like some of the ones we've already talked about. Sure. I think what you shared about Colorado and the ballot initiative that legalized assistance suicide, the rest of the country hasn't realized that this is going to be replicated everywhere.
You look at what's happening in some of the Post-Christian European countries, look at what's happening in Canada right now. It's either the fourth or the fifth leading cause of death. Is assisted suicide in Canada. This is coming to the states in a way that I think the church is not prepared for. I don't think policymakers are prepared for it, and I know the church isn't prepared for it.
And what we're going to see is that, you know, look, people have been getting old and dying all throughout human history, but we now have a very geographically mobile society.
So frequently, adult children don't live near their elderly parents. We have a baby booer generation that is retiring, having frequently divorced.
So they're estranged from spouse. They didn't have many kids, and frequently they're now estranged from their adult children. And so we're going to see a giant push to pressure our grandparents to kill themselves. And There's that famous line from Stanley Howard Rouse where he says: If 100 years from now, the church is known as the people that don't kill our babies and don't kill our grandparents will have done well. I think we need to think about.
Institutionalizing that. We have crisis pregnancy centers to help the beginning of life. We have all these new classical Christian schools to help educate kids. What are we gonna do? To help navigate as this generation approaches the end of life.
And particularly to support those people who are trying to honor their mother and father at the end. I mean, historically, the church has helped people die well. Yes. And there's no one else helping people. I mean, there's a lot of people helping people die that just not die well.
So, as a Catholic, I'll say the little sisters of the poor, when they're not suing the federal government, this is what they do. But we can't scale them. Right? Because we have a vocation crisis when it comes to nuns. We don't have that many little sisters.
And so we have to think: you know, when I say the church, I don't just mean like the pastors, the priests, the bishops, I mean everyone in this room. What can we do? We created crisis pregnancy centers, we created class schools, Christian schools. What does it look like to do at the end of life? I would say we're going to have to think robustly about what does it mean to build these parallel structures inside the life of the church.
This was a great example. How does the church start to facilitate what end of life looks like? I think we're seeing that movement amongst classical Christian schools, the homeschool movement. I think we're going to have to build that into medical. I think we're going to have to think about food.
I think, you know, our church in Franklin, Tennessee, we grow 100,000 pounds of vegetables every year on our acreage that we're giving away to the poor, but we're creating a new food system. I think churches are going to have to think more about localism and what does it mean to have local, reliable, trusted community networks to create flourishing life so that as more and more control, totalitarian type identities move in through our digital technology, we actually have alternatives that people can opt into because the church is practicing a countercultural way of life. This may sound really boring, but I'm really concerned about the state of marriage and family. And I don't just mean this in the context of same-sex marriage. I mean this in the context of the overall kind of aggregate picture of the state of marriage and family in America.
All of us in this room come from very, probably socially conservative, biblically informed backgrounds where marriage and family is very normal. It's the assumption, right? Did you know in our culture today? Marriage and family are increasingly not the default assumption of how you're going to order your life. The marriage rate is incredibly low.
I think the Wall Street Journal had a report a couple years ago saying it's as low as marriage rates have ever been since they've been recorded.
So we're marrying later in life. We're having fewer children, or we're not having children at all.
So we're at a place as a society. where we are going to have to begin actually Incentivizing and catechizing the need for why you should get married in the first place. The Atlantic had an article late last year by an author called Caitlin Flanagan. I think it was called Sex Without Women. And it was one of the most horrifying articles I've ever read.
And it talked about the horrible ubiquity of pornography in such a way that it's causing men. to no longer even try to trying to actively court or date a woman. Because it's It's more cost-effective. It's more you're not spending as much time. If you have pornography, you can just receive sexual gratification without spending money or costing time elsewhere.
And that we're seeing an increase in the number of individuals reporting sexual addictions to psychologists. Just sexual brokenness is rampant, and we're going to have to just retrain and keep reteaching these basic truths that male and female were made for one another in the context of marriage. I mean, listen, I can't tell you how important that is. I was going to say the demographic winter that we're not having enough babies at any country really in the Western developed world, but then also is because they're not getting married. And I think the answer to that is the church needs to be a hookup place.
I I literally, I think we I mean, where are people going to meet each other? How do we actually help encourage marriage?
So invite singles over to your house. Sit them beside each other. Make it awkward. You know how it happens? Push forward.
We now have five kids ages six and under.
So we're fighting the demographic clip. And Kristen wanted me to tell you that is a money-back guarantee right there. We'll do it for you as well. No, listen, obviously, AI is one of the things that needs to be talked about. That's a more specific category within, I think, relevant to the things you were talking about.
I'll just say one more thing, which is that we have an opportunity, and I fear that we're in the middle of maybe missing the opportunity. Every Christian K-12 school that I know of right now is full and overflowing. And it's not because necessarily, although many of them are doing wonderful things, it's not because of them. Whenever I speak to headmasters of Christian schools, I say, you know, you guys should all write a thank you note to the Loudoun County School Board for their good marketing of your program. And it's really true.
I think there's an educational moment, is the punchline here, where the state-run system is fragile and it's vulnerable. And right now, do we have the alternatives required to take advantage? Of this moment. And one of the things that's making it difficult at the K-12 level is hiring teachers that have been fully trained in a Christian way of educating from local colleges, even Christian colleges.
So there's a math problem happening here, and it's a shame because it's happening at such an incredible opportunity to offer one of these alternative parallel structures and to do it well. Big fan of the classical movement as well that's been a part of that. We are out of time. Would you guys please join me in thanking our panel? Thanks for joining us for this very special bonus episode of the Breakpoint Podcast.
If Breakpoint is a helpful part of your worldview diet, please leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And you can always find more resources like this one by visiting us at breakpoint.org. I'm going to use a bottle of the same piece of the bottom of the column.
