And that's really what this whole project has been about from the beginning. Will the church be the church? Will we live into this calling to this moment? right now. And we've got to do it personally.
We've got to do it individually. We've got to do it in our own marriages, to your point, certainly in our own families with our kids, but also in our communities. and then that will have a civilizational impact.
Well, that's John Stone Street encouraging us with the uncommon hope that believers have amidst the chaos of the culture. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller, and thanks for joining us. John, man, I want to jump right in and say we know we're living in a broken culture, and it's just all around us.
Something's different. It's like a can of something got opened up, whether it's social media or just discontent, but there's a lot of the enemy's personality sweeping over this world. And that caused us at Focus on the Family to kind of kick back and say, okay, what do we need right now? And we started to think about a documentary that could highlight this. And we were hearing different people like Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk, people that aren't given to the Christian faith.
They might be thinking about it. And many other voices in the culture who were saying things that were right. You know, like we need children. Children are a blessing. They may not say it that way, but they're saying something like that.
Or the idea of gender with Jordan Peterson that, you know, we're male and female. There's a purpose in that. And we have distinct characteristics that allow us to do things differently. And the differences are actually good things, not bad things. And let's not make men into women and women into men.
Just those things. And you see it all over the culture. And I remember thinking, we need a follow-up to the Truth Project that hits this moment. And I believe we've hit it thanks to the Lord's intervention and good friendships, like with John Stone Street from the Coulson Center. Right.
And of course, the Truth Project was, boy, that was 20 years ago. Del Tackett, Dr. Del Tackett. Very successful. I think it was something like 20 million people saw that over time.
And I think Truth Rising is going to be maybe even bigger.
Well, certainly more dimensional. There are a lot more pieces to Truth Rising. But we're happy to talk today. With John Stone Street about what the film is in particular, and then explore all the collateral resources that go along with it. John is really a great guest.
He's been here a number of times, and as you said, Jim, a very deep thinker. He's the president of the Coulson Center for Christian World View and is such a student of the culture and a good guide for us to understand what's going on. We'll have details about John and this film, Truth Rising, in the show notes. John, welcome back to Focus on the Family. Hey, thanks so much.
It's great to be with you. It's been great to work on this project together. Yeah, you know, it's funny because the Coulson Center, you're leasing space here at Focus, so you actually just walk down the hall. I did, which is fun. Long journey.
But it's awesome. It's great to have you here on the campus and the great work you're doing. You know, Chuck Coulson, who was your predecessor, terrific human being, of course, worked in the Nixon administration, goes to jail for Watergate. finds Christ in that process, comes out, starts, you know, prison fellowship, an incredible ministry to help prisoners be truly set free spiritually and physically. And you've taken over from him.
You've done a wonderful job. And I so appreciate Chuck. I can remember he came by during the transition. I had lunch with him and just prayed over me, just the two of us sitting in my office. And it was so kind of him to take that time on several occasions to call me.
How you doing? But that was him, right? It was well, it was. And he really invested in leaders. And he also really cared about what was upstream from the work that he was doing in the prison.
What's it like to take over from such a famous guy? We should have a kind of a club here, I think. It's so fun, though. But yeah, he just was so, so good. Yeah, and he foresaw a lot, right?
I mean, he was a student of church history. He was a student of theology. And if you think about Francis Schaefer, the quirky guy. Guy walking around in his knickers talking about what was happening in Western culture and how ideas were creeping in that were going to have consequences. Chuck jumped in to that story and said, Yeah, here's what's happening in the culture.
And he wanted the church to care about what was happening in the culture because he thought it really mattered. And of course, now here we are. 20 years after that, we don't have to convince ourselves that what's happening in culture matters because we feel like we're victims a lot of times of these cultural forces that overwhelm us, especially as parents and leaders and Christians. It seems to be on full display now, this conflict. Of course, Chuck Coulson wrote Kingdoms in Conflict, which is so apropos now.
And again, these people that had a foretaste, a foreshadowing of what was going to come. In fact, Francis Schaefer, he was the quirky Christian philosopher who ran his ministry there in Switzerland and said things like in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, this will lead to euthanasia, it'll lead to a death culture. He was already there, and slowly but surely, his pronouncements all those years ago, decades ago, have come to pass. Where we now accept culturally the killing of elderly people.
Canada is suffering from that. But, you know, With this idea that there's linkage to these things. When you legalize abortion, you are denigrating human beings and people become desensitized to death. Yeah. I mean, listen, we live in a profoundly dehumanizing cultural moment.
And I think we see that in terms of policies like the embrace of death, both at the beginning of life and at the end of life, but also the crisis of meaning, the crisis of identity formation, particularly for young people, kind of chasing identities and thinking that identities are these fluid things and that they're going to eventually find happiness through quote unquote being themselves. But what we're seeing now is that they're not. And so, listen. This is kind of the proof of what a lot of these guys said: ideas have consequences. Bad ideas upstream in the culture lead to the consequences that we see downstream.
And they're not just disembodied consequences, they're consequences for real people. We often say at the Coulson Center: ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. And I think we're in a unique cultural moment. Our friend Oz Guinness calls it a civilizational moment where a lot of these things are coming to a head. And then the question is: you know, to follow up on both Francis Schaefer and Chuck Coulson, how should we live?
What's our call to this moment? And that's really the crux of this project. How can the church be the church in this time, in this place?
Well, and there's so much stuff flying. I mean, now it's like everybody's got their own truth. You know, your truth isn't my truth.
Well, the reality is, like gravity, it. Truth is truth. There is. one set that we would call truth. And we as Christians squarely believe the Bible is full of God's truth for the universe, its creation, how human beings operate, et cetera.
And the world just is in this weird place. Describe that idea of Christian worldview, its formation, what it is we believe. Man, we could just spin off of that and talk about the offense it is to people. But why do we need to help our children? have that formulation of a Christian worldview.
A lot of people say, oh, Christian worldview, that's so ancient. But speak to the wisdom of ancient truth. Truth.
Well, it is mainly because it gives us a map. It gives us a fixed reference point. Think about the importance of the magnetic North Pole to the compass. You know, if we dropped you off in the wilderness of Colorado here and gave you a compass to find your way out, it really matters that that compass works. Imagine like if you were kind of in the middle of nowhere and you started to realize, oh, the compass is always pointing at me.
No matter where you turn, you're the center of reality.
Well, in the context of a wilderness, you're going to be lost and there's going to be huge consequences. A compass gives us that fixed reference point. A biblical worldview or a Christian worldview is just basically orienting our life to truth. That is that fixed reference point. It doesn't mean we have all the answers to all the questions.
It doesn't mean that the Bible prescribes exactly what we ought to do in each and every situation. What it does is it orients our hearts and our minds, our families, our communities, our cultures to something fixed and unchanging. no matter how rocky the cultural moment is. And that's why it's essential. Think about then how damaging this lie is that we told a whole generation of young people, look inside, look inside, look inside, look inside.
What they need to look is up. What they need to look is out. They need a fixed reference point. But by removing truth, we've removed that from them. And then we wonder why there's so much evidence of how lost they are.
You share the baton in this documentary collaboration between Focus on the Family of the Coulson Center with Oz Guinness. Oz is a great friend of both of ours, and he is in his 80s. He has been around. He has an incredible life being born in China, going through Mao's takeover of China and almost starving to death. His two brothers died in that situation, and he was able to live off goat's milk.
And he and his mom and dad were able to get out of China. And it's an impression. Incredible story, and that's in the documentary where Oz shares that. But Oz talks about civilizational moments, and he says, you know, you either see it in museums, you see it as part of history, or you see a revitalization. His hope, and I think all of our hope as Christians, is for the West particularly to rediscover its core.
Now, in the U.S., like in places in Europe and Canada, I mean, those things aren't really taught anymore. The foundations of our country, at least, and the idea that people are created equal and that we're created in the image of God and to create an environment of opportunity for people to lift everyone's boat, which I think, again, this United States has been phenomenal at raising the boat for everybody, right? But people are. Just I don't know. There's just such a lack of gratefulness for what God has given us.
What's happening there? And how do we reorient people to say the good things of culture can be restored and we can find our hope again? How do we do that?
Well, listen, I think Oz is as close as we have right now to a Gandalf for the church. You know, kind of the wise guru. And there's two things in particular that I think I've learned from Oz that are extremely important right now. The first is what you just mentioned, that we're living in a civilizational moment. We think about civilizations in history books and museums because that's where most civilizations are.
What that means is, is that civilizations don't last forever. You know, once dominant civilizations are now reduced to ruins because civilizations rise and fall. And there are actual rules to civilizations that will determine whether they have a future, whether they're growing and building and expanding or whether they're. they're dying. Oz thinks that the West, which has been the dominant civilization on the planet, For hundreds of years.
Because of its Christian roots. Because of its roots, its strong roots that led the flourishing, roots like a fixed understanding of truth, the Judeo-Christian notion of God, and certainly of the image of God, which grounded things like human dignity and value and so on, that we're at it now a moment of decline. He calls it being a cut flower civilization.
So think about cutting a flower from its roots. You can put it in the water, and for a while, it'll still be beautiful. It'll still have shine. It'll still have its petals. But eventually, if it's cut off from the thing that gave it life, it will wither and die.
And civilizations do the same thing.
So historically, what we know is that when a civilization is cut off from the source that gave it vitality and life and flourishing, that it either has to be reattached to that source, attached to a different source, which may be better or worse, or it's going to wither and die. And we're in that moment. It's hard to. Know what it's like to be in that moment. I mean, museums and history books can tell us that civilizations die.
Sociologists can even tell us why civilizations die, and we can see some of the parallels today. But what's it like to be in this moment? What's our responsibility and calling as Christians? And that brings up the second thing, really, that Oz has helped me understand is the understanding of time that comes from Holy Scripture. The Bible describes God as being Precise.
In Galatians 4, just the right time, just the right place, he sends the Messiah. We think about our calling as Christians as being called to maybe the mission field or called to the pulpit or maybe being called to our particular job, our work. But the Bible also talks about us being called to an hour, called to a moment. And when you put those two things together, that we're in this critical moment in the history of our civilization and that we're not here by accident, that God's called us here, man, that is the ultimate way of creating that, well, how then shall I live crisis that I think the church is in? What is God calling us to be and to do in this time and in this place?
And that, to me, is where Christian worldview meets the road. Not just what we believe, which is super important, but how should we live and how do we connect those two things? John, this idea of living what it is we believe is so critical. You know, we just released a marriage study and it showed something so critical in this area that convictional Christian, in the way that most sociologists would define that as somebody who goes to church regularly, prays regularly. That group of people have better marriages than anybody else.
They have. Less chaos and crisis in their marriages, and their divorce rate is the lowest.
Now, we in the Christian community would say, of course, but people that live a more nominal Christian life, meaning you know, they go to church occasionally, they pray occasionally, some of the highest divorce rates rest there.
So, it's this idea that actually the proof in the pudding is when you put your faith into action. And we're talking at a cultural level here, but it's true at the level of marriage. You want the happiest, most fulfilling marriage you can have. Commit your life to the Lord and then live the faith. Be kind to one another, love one another.
And what happens is you have less chaos and more love in your family. I mean, again, this is what we can do with the culture as well. Yeah, that's right. And I think this gets us to the job description, really, of what the church is to be in this moment, is to be the kind of place that helps people understand what is true and attach their lives to it in profound and meaningful ways. A time of civilizational crisis, like we're in, is a time of reflection for individual Christians.
Because if it's true that God put us in this time and place, and it's true that our actions really have meaning and purpose, listen, we are not just victims of civilizational forces we can't control. We're not just to be swept along with the tide of history. God uses the faithfulness of his people to accomplish amazing redemptive things. And we know this is true not because of the chaos of the moment, but because of the biblical story. And the story gives meaning to our moment.
What do we know from the story? That God created this world, that this world has fallen, and that in Christ we have the potential for redemption. And the story is headed to the new heavens and new earth.
So, a time of civilizational crisis does not mean a time of biblical crisis. That truth is secure, and that's the fixed reference point that we want to attach our lives to. In other words, I think a lot of Christians tend to use Christian stuff. For benefit. And you know what?
It is beneficial. It does work. But it's not true because it works. It works because it's true. The Bible gives us the actual description of reality as it actually is.
It describes who we are as made in the image of God. And it describes how we can live out this faith even in a moment like this. And that's really what this whole project has been about from the beginning. Will the church be the church? Will we live into this calling to this moment right now?
And we've got to do it personally. We've got to do it individually. We've got to do it in our own marriages, to your point, certainly in our own families with our kids, but also in our communities. And then that will have a civilizational impact. John, I want to come back to something that you mentioned, but I want to drill a little deeper on it.
And that is the disagreement over marriage, the definition of marriage, love, sexuality, and where the culture is tearing itself apart. I think one of the prime ministers from Australia made this point that the engines of democracy still work, but we're putting alternative fuel in that is choking them. I thought, what a beautiful illustration. He said, if we can get back to the Judeo-Christian values of the fuel for the engines of democracy, the engine will purr. And he related that to putting the wrong gasoline in his diesel truck, and it choked and sputtered.
He went to the side of the road, had to empty and drain the gas tank, and then put the right fuel in to get that truck moving again. That does feel like where we're at. All this stuff we're trying and failing at, it's not the way humanity was built or designed to work by God.
So we need the fuel. How do we do that successfully? How do we combat these newer ways of defining marriage and love and identity? How do we say that is not going to be the fuel that's going to lead us to success?
Well, first of all, we have to know the truth, right? I mean, and I think that's a very important thing. And not only knowing the truth, but knowing what truth itself is. I mean, to your point, we embraced a definition of truth that was true for you, but not for me. Or truth changes and evolves.
I mean, these are all things that weren't just kind of said by individuals. These were kind of ideas about truth that were put into the highest levels of our society and civilization. And now we're seeing the fruit of these ideas. I talk about it as if it's the difference between gravity and a speed limit. You know, I mean, speed limits are social constructs, right?
A road is built, group gets together, looks at that road, and then we make a determination of how fast it is safe to go on that particular road. If the social conditions change, Well, then the speed limit can change. The problem is Gravity doesn't work like a speed limit. You can get a group of people together and say, you know, in our enlightened age, we think it would be more beneficial if gravity means going up and not going down. The problem is, as soon as you step off the roof, as Dallas Willard said, you hit the ground, you don't go up.
It doesn't matter if you try to proclaim it. We have treated almost everything. as if it's a social construct. We've treated it as if it's a speed limit. We treated marriage that way.
We talk about male and female. We talk about the state and the role of the government. We talk about worship. We talk about God as if all of these things are speed limits. But what if they're gravity?
So, knowing what is gravity and what's a speed limit, man, that is an incredibly important aspect of this. But it's not just enough to know the truth. We have to love the truth. If you love the truth, you're willing to stand for it and orient yourself to it despite the cultural pressure. You know, John, I'm the parent of 20-somethings.
There's many parents listening that are parents of teens. And, you know, the question is in watching this. How do we absorb that and then share that with our teens or 20-somethings?
Well, I'm the parent of both. I have one 20-something and a handful of teens. And I think this is a very helpful project for that because I think the world seems like a place that's too big to comprehend. It's too hard to understand it. And so then, and of course, there are so many different voices saying so many different things to these young people.
And many of them are saying things like, you know, you be you, just follow your heart. You can be whoever you want to be.
So it's lying to them about who they are as an individual. And this film, I think, accurately describes how that bad idea about what it means to be human has led to so much civilizational chaos. It's not just that it's not true. It's that we've tried it and it's brought disaster. And the various experts that are interviewed in this documentary, as you mentioned earlier, many of them are not Christians.
They're coming at it just looking at the evidence, going, Hey, guys, this isn't working. We need to rethink this. And then it also points back to the ideas that did make Western civilization flourish, especially the idea of the image of God and the existence of truth. And so I think one of the things that this film can do as you talk to your teens and 20s-somethings is help them understand what we mean by the notion of truth and that it's bigger than just do you believe it or not believe it, but look at what corresponds to reality. And we have to orient our lives to that, even if there are voices saying different things.
Yeah. And again, hitting that identity issue and then their confidence in that identity. Yeah, I think it can build confidence and that the truth is actually true. The end is not up for grabs. Chuck Colson used to put it this way: despair is a sin.
because Christ is risen from the dead. When you stand confidently, On quote-unquote the right side of history, like that, then you're not threatened. In the same way as if you think it all depends on you, it all rests on your shoulders and your ability to talk somebody else into your point of view. We should share truth as a beggar shares with another beggar that bread is available. We should share truth as if we are communicating the hope about this crazy cultural moment because it's the hope of reality.
That's what the Bible actually gives us. It gives us not just truths about various things, it gives us the truth about everything.
Well, I think you know why I'm excited, John. I mean, this is a taste of what we've done. We've captured this in a documentary. There are, I mean, young people, older people in this documentary expressing their view, agnostics, atheists, Christians who are pointing to similar things that are going on in the culture. And I'm just so grateful that we were able to work with you, John, at the Coulson Center and with Oz Guinness.
And, you know, our partner in this, Jim Fitzgerald at Coldwater Media, who actually filmed for us the Truth Project, did such a fabulous job. In capturing this, and it communicates a profound message. And I am so hopeful that the church will grab it, that non-believers will poke in and watch it. You know, it'll be fun for them to watch it as well. September 5th, that's the global release, the streaming date that we're going to do this.
John also has a four-part curriculum that comes in behind it. And that's where we want people to go to better understand our design, our identity, where we go, and what we're called to do. And I think it's going to be revolutionary. And John, thanks again for being with us. Let's come back and talk more next time about this.
There's so much more content to cover. But man, I'm proud to stand with you in this project. Thank you.
Well, thank you. And again, September 5th is the premiere date. You can sign up to have free access to that at our website. The link is in the show notes, or you can call 800, the letter A in the word family. You know, John, let me just jump in too.
We need your financial support. This Was not inexpensive. I think we're approaching $2.5 million to do this. And we took a step of faith to do it. And we had some seed investment, but we need to hear from you.
You know, when I look at all the things we're doing, and I know the Colson Center is doing great things too, and you definitely want to check out the Colson Center. Here at Focus, I mean, last year we had 292,000 decisions for Christ. That's one of our strategic pillars to lead people to the Lord because you can have a great family, but if you don't know who the author of the family is, we kind of missed it.
So that's number one. Then to help your marriage, we have Hope Restored, where 80% of those difficult marriages, people that in many cases have already signed divorce papers, can come for a four-day intensive with an 80% post-two-year save rate. It's awesome. I think it's one of the best things happening in the country. Then move to parenting and helping parents.
Then go to ultrasound machines being placed in pregnancy resource centers, the abortion pill reversal, the social. Media that we're doing to bring these clinics together under the My Choice Network for women who are searching for an abortion. We're trying to offer them a different choice, a better choice to give that baby life with foster care, you know, helping a family consider adoption out of foster care, participating in foster care, respite care and foster care, and then engaging the culture, which is right where we're standing here, John.
So, man, that's what you're given to when you support the ministry.
So, let's do this together. Yeah, donate generously. The link is in the show notes or give us a call. eight hundred, the letter A and the word family. And on behalf of the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly.
Join us again as we continue the conversation with John Stone Street and once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Your marriage can be redeemed even if the fights seem constant, even if there's been an affair, even if you haven't felt close in years. No matter how deep the wounds are, you can take a step toward healing them with a hope-restored marriage-intensive. Our biblically based counseling will help you find the root of your problems and face challenges together. We'll talk with you, pray with you, and help you find out which program will work best.
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