John Stonestreet – Gender Ideology & a Biblical Worldview

Episode 109: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show podcast, host Dr. Jeff welcomes John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview and the daily voice of Breakpoint Radio broadcast. As longtime friends spanning decades, they engage in a deep conversation about navigating today’s challenging cultural landscape from a biblical perspective. Stonestreet discusses how the Colson Center helps Christians develop a “usable worldview” to make sense of rapid cultural shifts where “things that were unthinkable yesterday are unquestionable today.”

The conversation emphasizes the importance of parents communicating truth to their children in a world where someone is always providing a perspective. The episode concludes with three key takeaways: encouraging young adults (16-22) to attend Summit Ministries’ summer program, inviting adults to explore the Colson Fellows program for biblical worldview training, and recommending Stonestreet’s daily commentary available at breakpoint.org. Dr. Jeff closes with a reminder from Romans 8 that nothing can separate believers from God’s love, framing this as a call to courageous action rather than passive comfort.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. This show’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Liftable, Edifi, and a whole bunch of other channels that I don’t remember off the top of my head. But wherever you found this podcast, would you please go back to that channel and leave a positive review that helps the podcast come to the attention of more people? And this is the show where I interview major thought leaders to demonstrate that worldview changes everything, so we want more and more people to be able to get the truth.

So today’s podcast episode is with John Stonestreet, who is the president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He’s the daily voice of the Breakpoint Radio broadcast, which is on hundreds and hundreds of channels all across the United States and actually around the world every day, giving a biblical perspective on cultural issues.

(00:56):
I’ve known John Stonestreet for a long time, a couple decades, and every time we talk, the conversation goes deeper than I ever thought it could and often to a place that I did not think it could go. I hope that as you listen in, that you will be struck by the reality of the challenges of these times, the terrifying challenges of our time. It seemed almost unsolvable and at the same time struck by the realization that there has never been a better time to stand for truth with courage. Please welcome John Stonestreet to the show. John Stonestreet, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast.

John Stonestreet (1:42):
Jeff, how are you?

Dr. Jeff Myers (1:44):
I’m good. It’s fun to have this conversation with you again. I always love talking about issues. Last time we met, we were in a temporary studio. You came over to the studio, we had a chance to talk about a lot of things. Give us a quick update on what’s going on at Colson Center. We love you guys and what you’re doing.

John Stonestreet (02:01):
Well, listen, the Colson Center, God has been really, really good to us and it’s really exciting to be able to help people just make sense of the cultural moment. And that’s really kind of our thing on worldview. It’s, we want Christians to have a usable worldview, especially Christian parents, Christian teachers, Christian educators, Christian adults and their calling that basically this is a lens through which to understand what’s happening in the culture right now, there’s a way to do worldview philosophically, and there’s a way to do it apologetically, and those are really, really important.

A lot of us, though, are just dizzy. I mean, man, things that were unthinkable yesterday are unquestionable today. If you were the bad guy yesterday, you’re the good guy today, and it is happening so fast and it’s so out of control that it can just really be disorienting for a lot of us.

(02:59):
So that kind of acute pain point, pain points, I guess, is a plural there, that culture brings, that’s what’s happening. So yeah, just really excited for the opportunity to do all this. One of the things we’re super excited about, Jeff, is just the Colson Fellows program, which of course is a one year deep dive in Christian worldview that Chuck Colson started.

I mean, the demand for this, the desire to get more training, and I think it’s because of those acute pain points, has just exploded. So we’ve got 1300 Colson fellows in 60 cities and 46 churches that are going through a deep dive on how to think about the world through a Christian worldview. The fact that that many people want to is super encouraging to me. The fact that they’re actually spending the time and the money and just the energy to invest in it is all the more encouraging.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:57):
And just for those who haven’t been familiar with the Colson Fellows program yet, when you hear someone is a Colson fellow, that means that they have read, studied, dialogued, written, developed curriculum around applying a biblical worldview to some particular area.

It’s sort of like a postdoctoral fellowship in Christian worldview for those who are already in the, and not necessarily academics or theologians, but just people who are in the workforce, somebody who runs a business, but who feels like, I really have never thought through what a biblical worldview of business is, or someone who’s a teacher in a school who thinks I’ve been teaching physics for all these years and never really thought about other than just a half hour segment on intelligent design, how a biblical worldview relates to this.

John Stonestreet (04:47):
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And what kind of really drives it are Christians who just want to go deeper. They just kind of sense there’s another level to which my faith applies, and that is kind of direct engagement with the world around me and the place where God’s placed me.

And I tell you, a new innovation in this program has been the church affiliate. We have programs in 60 different cities, and then this past year we launched programs that actually allowed churches to host this inside their own walls. And of course, the whole thing we need to see with churches is for them to go inside out.

In other words, not just be kind of a come and see, come and look what’s happening here sort of place, but here we equip and now we’ll send you out. And like I said, I think it’s about 46 churches right now, some of them multi-campus churches that have just said, we’re going to lock in on this and this is going to be a leadership development program for us. And I look at those opportunities and I’m just really blown away. We want to partner with the church as much as possible.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:56):
Yeah, yeah. I love it. I’m so grateful for that. And what’s the best website for somebody who’s watching this and says, I think I’d like to check that out.

John Stonestreet (06:06):
Just colsonfellows.org for that program. And then just to find the rest of our content, breakpoint.org is the best website. Yep.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:14):
Yeah. Okay. I’ll give that again, everybody, when we get to the end of the show, and I do the wrap, but John and I today are going to chat through something that we’ve been talking about on this show occasionally. It is an issue that is sort of in the minds and the hearts of a lot of people. Right now, Colson Center has been leading the way and telling actual stories of people wrestling with this issue. And that is the issue of gender ideology.

We use the term transgender, which is, it’s an ideology laden term because by using the term, we assume that gender is somehow different than sexuality and that it’s actually possible to change from being a man to a woman or what have you. So this is an issue that a lot of people are talking about, but John, I think if there are a lot of people who say, look, this is just a boogeyman of the right. People are just making stuff up and making it worse than it really is just because you want to keep everybody upset. I’m curious.

John Stonestreet (07:34):
I think it was Rod Dreier who said something, he coined this phrase like the law of narrative possibility, like it’ll never happen. And when it does, it’ll be your fault. You big it. And this is kind of what’s happening in this, and I’ll give you two vignettes that I think are front and center on why this is not just a fabricated thing. One’s a personal one and one’s a cultural one.

So I just wrapped up at the end of 2022 coaching my son’s five-year-old basketball team. I don’t want to brag, but I did win Coach of the year for that. And there were only two of us, but I won it. Okay, so who voted, the five-year-olds? I don’t know. They just walked up with a trophy and it’d been a while. So I said, thanks. But dude.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:20):
When you’re five, everybody gets a trophy.

John Stonestreet (08:22):
Yeah. Now look. Yeah, even the coaches, that’s great. So this is five-year-old, so it’s just peewee league, it’s a co-ed league. So there’s boys and there’s girls, and there was one little boy who was the smallest boy on the team, and he showed up late on the last day of practice, really liked this kid. I met his moms, plural, on the first day of practice and just prayed that at the start of the season, they wouldn’t Google me because that would make the whole coach-player relationship awkward. They didn’t, very nice people last day, their son shows up late and jumps in the layup line.

And my daughter’s with me who’s 15, and she tells me this later, that one of the other players, one of the other kids says, oh, this boy thinks he’s a girl. And another kid says, oh no, he’s a boy. And the boy himself says, a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy, and looks at my 15-year-old daughter who’s helping me out and says, isn’t that right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:38):
Wow.

John Stonestreet (09:39):
To which my daughter replies, of course, no, that’s not true. And then realizes the layup line in a gym on a Saturday morning with ten five year olds is not the place to have this conversation. So she successfully deflected.

But my point is, as I heard the whole thing earlier and how she described it to me, this was not a new conversation for any of them. The one being called a girl completely embraced that it could be a possibility and responded with talking points and was clearly not the first time he had had this conversation at age five. And it was the conversant part that really threw me, you know what I mean?

(10:22):
Now look back in 2009, I had the privilege to be a part of a project that Chuck Colson and Robbie George and Timothy George, Robbie George of Princeton and Timothy George at the time of Beast and Divinity School put together, it was a statement on life, marriage and religious liberty called the Manhattan Declaration basically saying, look, these are the cultural lines that Christians need to be clear on. Here’s where we need to stand.

And the topic of gender at that time came up and it was universally decided upon that. Although that confusion on this was really important to counter, it was such an obscure issue. It was such, it would distract from what really mattered at the time because the gender conversation just wasn’t important. And that was in 2009, Jeff, that was yesterday.

(11:12):
And now we go from, it is basically rejected out of hand by everyone in 2009 to a five-year-old is conversant today. That happened in a decade. So when you say it’s not happening, then walk me through public schools with the pride flag. Walk me through Pride Parades, but I don’t really want to go to a pride parade. But if you did, what you would see is the T hijacking all the other letters of the acronym to such a degree that there’s a lot of discomfort from the other members of the other letters in the acronym.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:52):
So people who claim gay or lesbians same-sex attracted identity are now being told there’s no such thing as being gay. You’re transgender.

John Stonestreet (12:01):
Yeah, it’s a real problem. Yeah. I mean, think about the whole lesbian narrative, for example, which really was connected with second wave feminism, this idea that men were the problem with the world and that men were trying to superimpose themselves on women’s experiences. And now you have men basically appropriating women’s experiences fully and identities, and the lesbians are going, wait, this isn’t what we signed up for. And the Ts are kind of hijacking it.

And not only that, but there’s not a social justice movement in America right now that the transgender activist, and not everyone who struggles with gender dysphoria certainly is an activist, but many are. This happened after the Dobbs decision this past year, and this is the cultural example, Jeff. This happened in Massachusetts where the state of Massachusetts, the like is happening in other progressive states that want to basically enshrine abortion rights and to state level constitutions and to say, this is basically part of a central reproductive healthcare, are passing these bills.

(13:13):
So in Massachusetts for example, they passed a bill that said, if you are someone out of state and you come to Massachusetts and have an abortion, then that act can’t be criminalized in another state. If you’re a doctor who performs that, you can’t be charged out of state and so on.

And then you turn around and the final product of the bill says, oh, and that also includes transgender surgeries and people who perform what’s so-called gender reassignment surgery, which is really, that’s another language game, right? About reassignment or gender affirmation surgeries. But those who perform it can’t be prosecuted out of state either. And you think, well, wait a minute, this have to do with the abortion issue.

(13:54):
And the ability and the power of this movement to hijack so many of these social justice conversations. Black Lives Matter has to become Black Trans Lives Matter, abortion reproductive rights become something that has nothing to do with reproduction whatsoever. Not that abortion does either, by the way, it’s the exact opposite, but this is not even the same category of behavior. So it’s just something to see in culture that if it isn’t such a big issue, why is it being talked about all the time and being pushed through as if it’s right.

And by the way, obviously the thing that’s often called the boogeyman of the right, the drag queen story hours at local libraries or things like this, drag queen shows, drag shows, if you’ve noticed in the last two years, the narrative has changed from it’s not happening to Why do you think this is such a big deal?

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:04):
Right? Yeah.

John Stonestreet (15:05):
And we have seen that even in the response to the performance at the Grammys, which was recently in which Sam Smith, and I’m blanking on the other man’s name, but the other man presents and identifies as a woman. They have a song called Unholy, and they did a performance after winning a Grammy for the Duo of the Year.

Look, there’s a long line of crazy performances at these shows, the MT Video Music Awards, it started with, you remember the quaint old days when Madonna rolled around in a white running dress and sang like a virgin, and now that looks chaste. And then we went to even lesbian kisses and all kinds of things. What they did on the stage of the Grammys the other night was just flat out something that you may have seen at an Ozzy Osborne show back in the 1980s, the Shock and all. Satanism.

(16:12):
But this is not obscure heavy metal music. This is mainstream from a song that was topping the charts, two different global billboard charts and was directly connected with the transgender issue. And people were alarmed. And the headline of Variety, the headline of Huffington Post, the headline of Buzzfeed and others are, All these right wingers are all upset about this. What a conspiracy theory. I would love to stop being a conspiracy theory, Jeff.

It just seems like, it just feels like I’m being pushed that way in so many ways. I mean, CBS literally tweeted before that performance we’re ready to worship. And then this performance happens at the Grammys directly connected with the transgender ideology that’s advanced both in the song and by the artists themselves. Yeah, yeah. It’s a right wing conspiracy. Are you kidding?

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:11):
Right. Yeah. There were little elements of The Exorcist gender bending, menacing, evil. I mean, it was hellish. I don’t watch a lot of stuff, so I saw the video for it, unfortunately. I saw it at bedtime.

John Stonestreet (17:34):
I’m sorry. No, and I have to talk about it because I don’t think it’s just a random occurrence. A lot of these really shock and all sorts of performances are a lot of noise and not a lot of importance. When Lady Gaga wore a meat dress, who cares?

(17:51):
This was a cultural marker. This wasn’t an exploration behind a dark corner of the mind or somebody’s creepy imagination like Ozzy Osborne. This was a marker. Here’s who we were. And when they accepted the award prior to the performance, literally claimed that. So this was a You are here moment for the culture, not so much, oh, look down this dark passageway where a lot of these sorts of things have, and it is hell. It is a hell on earth that’s been created by these ideas.

So I guess at some level, we should thank these performers for making such a direct link between satanism and transgender ideology. And I’ll say that out loud and I don’t want to say anything for you, but satanism is not just when Satan jumps out and scares you and goes boo and is super creepy, that’s what that performance was. But it points to a deeper satanic origin of this idea that God is not good and that his creation is not fixed.

And that’s where Lewis goes in the Screwtape Letters, this doubting of God, this twisting of God’s goodness. And of course, the serpent’s first temptation was God, really say that Maybe what he meant was, and I know he created the world this way, and that’s the sort of twisting that now is at the heart of this great deception.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:16):
Say that again because I really like the way you say that the lie of satanism is that God is not good and his creation is not fixed. Is that the way you?

John Stonestreet (19:29):
Yeah, that’s right. That we are actually the creator. This is a really important fundamental of the Christian worldview. We often talk about the creation chapter of the biblical story and deal specifically with Darwinian naturalism, which we need to, this assumption of how the world happened. But the creation chapter of the story is also what kind of world do we live in? Do we live in a world with fixed givens or do we live in a world that is constructed?

And of course, this is at the root of postmodern philosophy that moral realities are constructed, but even our understanding of basic fundamental realities like crime and right and wrong and up and down and male and female, that all of these things are up for grabs and see, that’s really what’s at the heart of transgender ideology. It’s a denial of creation. In other words, is male and female like gravity or is male and female like a speed limit?

(20:32):
In other words, are these just categories that we use that were helpful in one cultural context and now we’ve evolved beyond that and we can actually cast off these restraints and notice the restraints? I mean, gosh, remember the good old days when the restraints we were trying to cast off were just the ones about right and wrong.

Now, the restraints we’re trying to cast off is about reality itself, that the world actually isn’t that way. I think the denial of created givens in our culture is assumed, and it’s so assumed that if you don’t intentionally teach a younger generation, not only that God created the world, but the givens with which he created the world and that those givens were good, then kids don’t have a chance because there’s so much that’s lost in their hearts and minds at that level of the battle.

And that’s just kind of at the very, very beginning that the world is a particular way that seems pretty basic, doesn’t it? But it is not something that’s assumed. It’s something that kids are actively taught against. And that’s part of Christian catechism, I think, is to go back, not just that creation is true. Evolution is not, but this is the way the world is. And it’s good.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:48):
Yes. Okay. I appreciate that explanation because I’m thinking of a lot of the students, the generation we work with at Summit Ministries, super high levels of mental health issues of various kinds, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and a rule of thumb in the mental health field is you cannot get well unless you grapple with reality as it actually is.

As long as you create your own false reality, you can’t be well, someone who God forbid, is anorexic. They say, well, I think I’m a little overweight. And you’re looking at them thinking, I think you’re about to starve to death. No one would look at them and say, yeah, you could lose a couple pounds and be okay. I mean, that would be the height of cruelty to do that person rather than submit to their perception as reality. You’ve got to challenge that perception somehow lovingly, compassionately, but you’ve got to challenge it or else they won’t make it.

But the same thing that’s true with personal mental health is also true in psychological understanding of relationships that two people cannot relate to one another. Psychologists call it attunement. You can’t relate to another person unless you have some shared reality. But what you’re saying is the same thing that is true for mental health for a person, and it’s true for relationships between individuals is also true for society.

(23:30):
That if we can’t grapple with reality as it actually is, the givens is the term you used, what are the givens then? We have no basis for, well, for a while. I mean, what do we stand to lose?

John Stonestreet (23:47):
Yeah. Well, I think we’re seeing that, right? You point to the mental health epidemic among young people. Look, I think it was about 13 years ago in the British Daily Telegraph that a survey of young people in Britain and just ask them a basic question, does life have meaning? They didn’t say, does life have this meaning or does life have a fixed meaning or do you find life meaningful? It was just, anything counts. 9 out of 10 said yes, 10 years after that, they did the same study. 1 out of 10 said, yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:19):
Wow.

John Stonestreet (24:20):
That’s crazy. I remember seeing that number going, that can’t possibly be true. During COVID, six, eight months into the COVID lockdowns and fearing, given what we knew about depression and isolation and the suicide rate among young people, you see the rates of the CDC said that 25% of young people during those lockdowns had contemplated suicide. 25%, one out of four. You look at these numbers and you’re like, that can’t possibly be true.

Well, I think you’ve pointed to it, which is you, how do I want to say it? When you don’t have any fixed reference point, you don’t have anything solid to tether your life on any solid ground on which to stand, then it’s like living perpetually in mid-air. That’s fun for a second. If you go to one of those skydiving places and it blows you up into the air, that’s kind of fun for a second. You wouldn’t want to stay there longer than 20 minutes or however long those things last. Can you imagine living all of life psychologically in that sort of a state who predicted this was Frederick.

(25:37):
And the parable of the madman? He has this crazy man go into the middle of these Western intellectuals and they sneer at him for asking about God because no one believes in God anymore. And then the madman goes on this long rant of You don’t have any idea what this means. This means this is unchaining the earth from the sun. This is wiping away the horizon. This means there’s no longer up or down. There’s no longer left.

And then he has this line, and this is the one that keeps coming back to me, Jeff, in light of what you said about meaning and mental health issues and so on, are we not now straying us through an infinite nothing? And of course, the madman finishes this rant and his onlookers, his listeners are kind of staring at him like, what’s wrong with you? And the madman goes, I’ve come too soon. This is on its way because deeds, when they’re done, take time to be seen and heard. This will be seen and heard, but it’s still too distant from them. He says, that was a hundred years ago.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:40):
Wow.

John Stonestreet (26:40):
I have this suspicion, Jeff, that we’re now in the age that Nietzsche warned us about, where the consequences of losing that solid ground of an absolute losing, that fixed reference point of God, we’re now feeling the effect, and I think it’s in two categories. One has already been coined the deaths from despair. You mentioned that the depression, the suicide rates, the opioid addictions, those sorts of deaths from despair that have been trending, by the way, well before COVID.

(27:16):
2019 was the third year in a row. The year before COVID was the third year in a row where the average life expectancy of the American male declined. So this is before COVID three years in a row. The last time that had happened was during World War I and the Spanish flu. Wow.

And of course, since 1919 or whenever it was, how much better we are dealing with immunizations and dealing with viruses and ambulatory services, access to medical care. So something went wrong and it wasn’t like we ran out of money for band-aids. Something else was factoring in what’s called the death despair.

I would also add to that then what we might call acts of desperation. So what makes sense of these acts of mass violence? They’re all male. They tend to be young. They tend to be lost either radicalized on the internet, almost all of them have a bad relationship or no relationship with dad. They’re untethered.

Now, how they act out is going to be different than how young women act out because men and women are different. But that’s an act of desperation, I think cutting off perfectly healthy body parts and a never ending search for identity, literally wounding yourself forever, which is absolutely the case when it comes to a man trying to be a woman. That’s an act of desperation of ever, ever heard one.

Dr. Jeff Myers (28:53):
Yeah, that’s right.

John Stonestreet (28:54):
That’s why transgender ideology or gender dysphoria was considered a mental illness. The whole history of the world until yesterday. I mean to then all of a sudden, this isn’t just societies that have Christian history. I mean, there’s always been kind of playing around with gender bending and that sort of stuff by edgy artists and stuff like that. But there’s not been a society that said, oh yeah, that’s normal, that’s healthy, until us, trying to say it. We’ve untethered ourselves from those givens. I think that’s ideologically where all this has come from.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:43):
Well, one of the guests we’ve had on this show talked about the relationship between childhood trauma and gender dysphoria, what’s commonly thought of as gender dysphoria. And there’s sort of a worksheet that you can go through. Do you have this or that? And if you get a certain number of them, then your diagnosis is gender dysphoria. But I don’t recall a time when it was the medical prescription.

(30:14):
That we take that despair and desire for self-destruction and we medicalize it and institutionalize it. Now, maybe there were others. I mean, obviously there were times where people did horrible things medically. Obviously, Adolf Hitler did horrible medical experiments on people, his medical doctors did.

There’s a whole book called The Nazi Doctors where they reflect after the war, even decades after on what they had done. Obviously the eugenics issue, which had been promoted in the United States by major foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and others, until Adolf Hitler got involved and they thought, we don’t want to be associated with that guy. So we’re going to step back. What else?

I mean, lobotomizing really at a loss to think of a time where we as a society would think that because of this despair and because of the childhood trauma, we are going to promote the disfigurement and the mutilation of children, but we’ll do it in a controlled environment like a clinic or a hospital. And that makes it okay. I can’t remember a time when the whole medical establishment turned against kids in this way.

John Stonestreet (31:37):
I can’t either. I think you can go to cultures where government forces did. If you look at those that were hijacked by paganism and advanced child sacrifice or child prostitution as kind of a state policy, obviously we’re talking about pagan societies. Even in a case, for example, of a lobotomy, you’re trying to, even though it was a horrific process and terrible and ended up being just kind of an act of violence and abuse, you were still trying to bring someone who was out of touch with reality back in touch with reality. You weren’t basically normalizing the pathology. Like what happens here? And that’s one of the features of the transgender moment that we’re in, is that this one thing is allowed to play by such radically different rules. There’s not another dysphoria that we know of, and there’s a lot of body dysphorias where the mind and body are disconnected.

(32:38):
There’s only in which we actually align the body with the mind, every other one. You align the mind with the body because the body is presenting physical facts that cannot be denied, right? Every other one. The idea is you want people to realize and access reality. That’s where health is. That’s mental health. That’s stability. Here. It is only in this that we’re making this change and we flip everything upside down, not least of which are our words.

I mean, think about how directly misleading all the language is. So if someone, a counselor, a parent, a pastor, tries to help a young person who is struggling with gender dysphoria come to grips with who they are as their bodies and to re-embrace their sex. That’s called conversion therapy. If a doctor, then that actually affirms someone in a dysphoria or a delusion, that’s called affirmation. In other words, you’re pushing them to actually physically transition. That’s affirmation.

(33:55):
There’s just no other area where we just have work where up means down and left means right, and health means sickness and dysphoria means stability. I mean, we treat this by its own set of rules, and I think that’s why it’s really uncomfortable. Now, I do think there’s something uniquely American about this too. There at least seems to be a push in the treatment of children to back off almost in almost every other nation in the world.

I mean, the classic story is the Tavistock clinic in Britain, which really led the way. And they’ve really kind of backpedaled, closed that thing down, rethinking the use of puberty blockers and all of these sorts of things. But in America, it just kind of goes and pushes straight ahead. And so I think that still has to be explored. What is happening uniquely in America? And I tell you, I don’t know how you can get around the fact that ultimately, we are a country now that is allowing the abuse of children in order to satisfy adult demands.

(35:15):
Does that make sense? Yeah. There’s not a medical reason. The medical questioning by these highly secular and many ways progressive states across much of the rest of the world, it’s because it’s like, oh, wait, this didn’t work. People want to desist and they’re not happy.

And the stories particularly of young women who in a social contagion sort of way, all in this one junior high, 70%, 80%, 90%, that clearly can’t be right. In other words, looking at the data and backpedaling, there’s never been medical confirmation of any of these sorts of things.

I mean, we’ve just kind of announced, oh, the kids will be fined so that we can kind of pursue what we wanted as adults. There’s something uniquely American about the persistence of this in attacking and going after children. And I’m not sure that’s been explored fully yet.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:14):
No, I don’t think it has either. I think there’s a free flow of ideas, but if we’ve lost capital T truth, we have no capacity to think about the ideas, then yes, it becomes a contagion very easily.

John Stonestreet (36:38):
I think there’s something else driving that. Sorry, I think there’s something else driving that. Jeff, can I jump in real quick on this point? I think this is something that parents have underestimated and not by any fault of their own, even those that are seeing all these stories and really what’s driving this, you remember back in the nineties when we were trying to teach postmodernism at Summit and help kids not become postmodernist, and sometimes people would push back on how we talked about and said, well, it’s not really postmodernism, especially the emergent church folks.

They would say, it’s not really postmodernism because that’s Derrida and Foucault and those folks. No one’s ever really read them anyway. That’s an academic theory. It’s a literary criticism, and it’s not really, and they were right. No one had read and those folks because it, it’s kind of impossible, anyway, if you tried, they’re unreadable. But beyond that, we didn’t need to.

(37:34):
And the reason is because we had Britney Spears, Kurt Cobain, and Eminem in the Matrix movies. In other words, postmodernism was very effective as a cultural mood. We’re hearing the same thing right now about critical theory, particularly critical race theory, because that’s the one that’s at the top of everybody’s mind because of the events in America the last several years. And so it’s not really teaching critical theory because that’s an academic theory and you don’t really understand it anyway.

And you, right, most people haven’t read the academic sources for this, but I do think we are very much moving into a time where a critical theory mood has replaced the postmodern mood. Postmodern mood was much more, there’s no truth tolerance. Whatever the critical theory mood takes, those same kinds of cultural groupings that postmodernism advance, but then places a moral status on them.

Not only are you the way you are because you’re a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, or you’re a heterosexual female, or you’re part of this race or class or gender or socioeconomic status or whatever. It’s that you’re good or bad based on that. And this is one of the things now that’s driving the transgender push the contagion as we say it, particularly among young people.

Back last summer, I was speaking to a friend of mine who’s an academic up in New England, and one of her friends is a public school teacher, I think junior high age in a big city in New England. And she asked this teacher, Hey, how many of your kids identify as LGBTQ? Now, Alfred Kinzie told us it’s 10%, and that was high back then, those who identify as gay and lesbian or those who are gay and lesbian. But now we’re talking about the full acronym, and now we’re talking about 40, 50, 60 years later. Do you know what the answer was, Jeff?

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:43):
No. I’m afraid.

John Stonestreet (39:44):
All of them do.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:44):
All of them.

John Stonestreet (39:46):
And she answered the question as if my friend should have known. And my friend was like, well, wait a minute. Are they having sex? And she’s like, oh, no, they’re junior hires. No, they’re just identifying on social media. It’s like, well, why are they identifying if they’re not actually acting out in this way? And here’s the answer. She said, because oh, no one wants to be cis.

(40:10):
Does that make sense? Now, of course, cisgender is a completely made up word that refers to 90% of people who’s ever lived in the history of the world, which more than that, who I continue to identify with the sex that they were born with. But in other words, it’s not just I might have this attraction or this dysphoria, and that might be who I really am in the language of 20 years ago. It’s that to be cis is to be bad, to be trans is to be morally superior.

(40:41):
And that adds a level of social pressure, particularly among junior hires and high schoolers and young adults that drives identification. And you can even see it among parents. Who was it? Bill Maher, I think on his show, talked about how, hey, if it’s only supposed to be, and I think at the time he used this example, the national average was 30 or 40% and L-G-B-T-Q, he goes, why is it that my California friends, all of their kids are trans? Right? In other words, it’s good and bad for your social status.

Even some parents have bought into this. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think this critical theory mood has hijacked this or has kind of merged in kind of a superstorm with this ideological confusion that’s untethered from any of fixed reality. And parents need to know enough to deal with both of those because that adds a level of social pressure. That’s pretty big.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:42):
Yeah, I see that. I think it is a perfect storm between the emergence of a radical academic theory, which when I was in my doctoral program, we read articles doing gender, things like that, but gender is a social construction. That was 30 years ago, and now you have the what, 25 years ago? But you have the same kind of thing coming to the surface combined with the social contagion and reinforced by peer pressure.

(42:19):
But I wonder, John, I mean I’ve seen this happen before. So you and I talked about rum. So the guy who founded the sociology department at Harvard University, he studied the sociology of civilizations, and he said, in the absence of moral absolutes, in the absence of God, the only binding power is physical force. That’s all that you have left. And it’s not always.

So if you go back to something like Ukrainian famine, it wasn’t just that Stalin was killing Ukrainians. He got Ukrainians to kill themselves to fight against one another. Gosh, I mean, not to be real super nerdy about it, but I mean, when you read Josephus and he’s talking about the Roman attack on Jerusalem in AD 70, which Jesus prophesied, nobody believed that Jerusalem could fall. There was no better fortified city.

Nobody could destroy the temple. I mean, the rocks on which the temple is built are so massive. Nobody could move them. Nobody could destroy it, but they divided into three factions inside the city and attacked one another until they were so weak that the Romans could not prevail.

And I just see some of that same kind of thing happening. It’s like if you really want to tear down the morals of a society, you don’t succeed by attacking the morals directly. You succeed by getting people to attack within themselves to fall apart with their own moral understanding, to lose moral clarity and to attack people who they think might have it.

(44:03):
Now, that sounds conspiratorial, but if you look back at the example of history, what we’re seeing happen in the junior high where if you’re a cis kid now, the abnormal is exactly what you would see happening with kids reporting their own parents for being secret Christians in the Soviet Union.

John Stonestreet (44:24):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, gosh, it’d be bleak if it didn’t actually describe what it is that I think we’re seeing. It is a dark moment. I’m not sure. Because there are times when the evil ones overplay their hand. And I love what Paul says. The devils basically didn’t know who Jesus really was because if they would, they never would’ve the forces of darkness. They never would’ve crucified him. They did themselves in by this.

But I do think that there is a clear biblical precedent for God’s judgment. And by the way, I think normatively God’s judgment is not to send a calamity, but to simply take his hands off. It’s like it’s either my way or your way. And when you start having the consequences of the behavior that you’ve chosen and the ideas that you’ve chosen, that’s punishment enough. And so we’ll see if there’s a backlash to this.

(45:37):
There certainly is a level of discomfort with it by people that you wouldn’t expect. I did not agree with Bill Maher most Friday nights on my Bingo card for 2022. And I’m not recommending by the way that people see him. He still says things in way too colorful ways, but there is a sense Andrew Sullivan gay guy, absolutely for gay marriage, but turns around and looks at this issue of the gender thing and says, this is just out of touch with reality. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

The problem, or one problem is that Christians also lack that Christian worldview and that sense of given and how important it is for the givens to be acknowledged. And so we’re still having this conversation about being nice as if that’s the whole of the gospel as opposed to fidelity to God’s revealed truth.

(46:37):
And we’re choosing one over the other. I think that we’ve got so much to do to get our own house in order on this. And then I also think too, there’s a lot of parents who really want to do what’s right and especially do what’s right by their kids, but we really do need to have a strong reckoning with, kind of, what sort of pressure that our kids are under. And I guess maybe for me, I’m just kind of repeating myself here because of that wake up call I got with my son’s five-year-old basketball team.

I mean, I knew that there were some kindergarten teachers or pre-K teachers that were introducing these kinds of bad books that Ron DeSantis is trying to protect Florida kids from. I did not expect the five-year-old to be so conversant in this conversation with definitive views that no five-year-old would ever think yesterday. That was a moment for me.

And I think we have underestimated the amount of social pressure on kids. We’re looking at this pointing at Sam Smith’s performance at the Grammys going, look how bad that is. And I do think we have a generation that doesn’t think that’s anything abnormal at all, and culture’s really powerful in what it normalizes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (48:10):
I started this conversation hopeful that we could see the tide turn on this issue. We can, and I think we need that sort of courage. We’ve got to talk about that. So we’ve got to have moral courage. We obviously need training like what we’re providing in the Summit Ministries, two week programs to get young people into a place where they can converse with, ask all of their questions, dialogue with, learn from people who can reorient them to the truth. But I mean what?

John Stonestreet (48:44):
Well, don’t downplay that. I mean, look, I’ll just tell you my experience now teaching at Summit for a lot longer than I would care to admit. I still think of myself as young, but I think I’m pushing 20 years now doing this. And to one degree or another, probably the last 10 years talking about marriage, 10 years ago, I was talking about marriage to a group of kids who largely agreed most Summit sessions, and these are great kids, they’re smart kids, they care, they love, they love the Lord, they want to be clear on this.

But the best ones haven’t really thought this through about marriage and how it relates to God’s created realities. And there’s always concessions. People who disagree, either they’ve been influenced by progressive Christianity or they are at the summit as cynics and skeptics themselves, and there’s not very many places like Summit where, and I know I’ve committed to this, I don’t ridicule anyone. I don’t make any snide jokes. I don’t cover anything up and I don’t pull punches. It is a direct straight conversation on, this is marriage.

(49:56):
And it is something that most of them, even the most well catechized kids, some of them, it’s just never been part of that. And I get it. I mean, you go back to all the historic creeds that were founded in the history of the church. None of them deal with anthropology and the image of God. It’s almost like that stuff was just kind of taken for granted. Nobody was really questioning the existence, much less the reality of the human body as male and female.

So there’s a level to this catechism that has to happen, this process of catechizing the next generation that has to involve all this stuff and some, it does it better than anybody as a partner with parents. And I do think though as well, that the key thing is when adults are just going to stand up in that same sort of matter of fact, straightforward way and tell kids the truth, I think too many parents are scared of what to say.

(51:03):
They’re scared they’re going to say something wrong, and so they don’t say anything at all. I get that fear. I have that fear as a parent, but if you’re not saying anything, here’s what you need to understand the culture, and I don’t care how homeschooled, how protected, how Christian schooled, how sheltered they are everywhere they look.

They are given the impression that male and female is really nothing is really not a thing. I’m talking about the subtle messages, the commercials, even if you don’t, the billboards, the bumpers, I mean the memes, social media. By the way, we need parents to have that straight direct conversation from the very beginning about our sex bodies, about male and female.

I told a story, actually, I aired a story that was originally part of the Daily Wire podcast of a mom whose daughter was struggling with gender dysphoria and was in a school where the school was just basically feeding it, calling the mom the bad guy, and so on and so on. And what this mom basically said is, I was not going to lose this one. And she pulled her kid out of that school, took away all the influences and the phones, and she goes, you know what my kid told me she hated me for a long time. Now she tells me she loves me every day.

Dr. Jeff Myers (52:25):
Wow.

John Stonestreet (52:32):
What came across to me from that woman’s story is that Jesus said that if your right hand offends, you cut it off. This woman was willing to do that. She was going to go all out. Most parents aren’t even willing to turn off the social media on their kids’ phones. Social media is an evil in this. Social media is the direct source of sewage spilling into our kids’ hearts and minds. It is reaching the point where future generations will look back at us and say, you were insane by giving them one of those things.

Dr. Jeff Myers (53:08):
Yeah. Yeah.

John Stonestreet (53:09):
I think that’s right. Access to this. So I think there is hope, but you have to be able to do the brave thing. You have to be able to do the courageous thing. You have to have this straight conversation. You can’t assume that knowledge is innate. It should be. It is. In most cultural settings, it probably is from birth, but every cultural force really is against you and there is hope. I think if you just stand up and just say the truth over and over and over and over again, it’s powerful.

Dr. Jeff Myers (53:41):
Yeah. Well, that’s a great place to end the show. That’s a call to a bracing kind of life, but there is no plan B. The parents have to learn to communicate the truth. And I would say the point that you made is so powerful. Someone is out there giving your children a perspective, and if they’re not getting the truth, then they’ll be victimized by the lies.

(54:17):
It’ll be possible. Paul, we’re talking earlier about hano up and no down. It came to my mind is Romans chapter eight, where Paul said, I’m persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, we’ll be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. That’s our hope, and in that hope we can have the kind of boldness that we need to have to raise up this next generation and pass the baton to them.

John Stonestreet (54:53):
Amen.

Dr. Jeff Myers (54:55):
Thank you to my guest, John Stonestreet, for coming on the show today. There were a couple of different takeaways that you probably heard in the show. The first one is young adults ages 16 to 22, really, really need to come to two weeks at Summit Ministries this coming summer. You go to summit.org, you can sign up. Those seats will fill up, so please do not delay in making this decision. It’ll be the best couple of thousand dollars that you’ve ever spent to prepare your child for the battles they will face.

If you say, I can’t do it financially, would you reach out to us please? Because we want to make sure that your child has this opportunity. The second thing is the Colson Fellows program. There are a lot of people who are adults thinking, I wish I knew more about Biblical worldview and could do something about it.

(55:43):
So you want to go to colsonfellows.org. And then the third thing is any other resources from John Stonestreet including a way to sign up for its daily commentary, which is excellent. I read it. I don’t usually listen to it every day, but I usually get the email and read the transcript of it for me. That’s a better way, but they’ll send it to you both ways, and there’s no charge for this. You just go to breakpoint.org and you can sign up to get that information.

When we finish the show, I shared Romans chapter eight just briefly, and I want to do the same thing right now because the Apostle Paul said, I am persuaded that nothing, not heightened or depth, not life nor death, things present things to come, can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. We need to keep that in mind, but we miss the point if we think that we believe that and therefore have nothing we need to do that, in fact, is a call to action. Wow. Do we ever need that right now?

Thanks for joining the show today. Listeners, I want you to know that our podcast is on Edifi, which is a truly powerful app that brings together thousands of the best Christian podcasts in one place, your listening enjoyment. You can download it at Edifi, E-D-I-F-I, edifi.app. Be sure to share the show if you have enjoyed listening to it and leave a review if you would, on the site where you download the show that helps more people know about the Dr. Jeff Show, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.