The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 38 – John Stonestreet

Episode 38: 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, Dr. Jeff interviews John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. The conversation begins by establishing the legacy of Chuck Colson and the work of the Colson Center in applying a Christian worldview to cultural issues. Stonestreet explains that culture is more powerfully shaped by quiet, assumed norms than by loud, outrageous events.

The main focus of the interview is the trend of millennials and Gen Z “deconstructing” their faith. Stonestreet analyzes the reasons for this, including the impact of celebrity deconversions, social contagion, and generational divides. He argues that the term “deconstruction” itself is being misused and glamorized, distinguishing it from the healthy, biblical process of questioning and seeking truth. He concludes by suggesting that this trend is heavily influenced by a cultural shift toward internal, subjective feelings as the basis for truth, and he advises those struggling with doubt to seek wise counsel and external sources of truth.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey gang, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. This show is available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcasts. Please, this week, tell some friends about the show you think will enjoy it because this is the show where I’m interviewing major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show that worldview changes everything.

My guest today is a good friend of mine who’s written extensively on the intersection of faith and culture, and you hear his voice on the radio and podcasts all of the time. John Stonestreet is the president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview and host of the BreakPoint Show. Please welcome John Stonestreet. John Stonestreet, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

John Stonestreet (00:46):
Great to be here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:47):
We have been friends for a long time, but now here we are in the studio together having a chance to talk on the podcast.

John Stonestreet (00:53):
I know, and it’s so rare that we actually see each other in person in the same place.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:58):
I’m thinking back to when we worked together with the Summit Ministries in Tennessee on the campus of Bryan College many, I mean, years ago.

John Stonestreet (01:08):
It was a couple years, couple years.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:11):
And at that time, we had a shared passion for biblical worldview. We had a shared passion for training, a rising generation. I had the opportunity to sit in on some of your classes. I got to be an evaluator for your classes.

John Stonestreet (01:24):
Yeah, no pressure.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:25):
Faculty members have to evaluate one another. But it was fun to watch the level of engagement that you had with young adults. And now you’ve expanded that largely through the work of the Colson Center. But I’m thinking that a lot of the 20 somethings who are watching this or listening to this right now aren’t even familiar with the work of Chuck Colson.

John Stonestreet (01:47):
Oh no, no.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:47):
So kind of weird. I don’t want to start with John Stonestreet. I want to start with Chuck Colson. And then I want to really dig into a topic, however time permits, that you’ve been talking a lot about that’s really huge right now, which is millennials deconstructing their faith. What’s going on and what can we do about it? But first, tell us a little bit about Chuck Colson and kind of build out our understanding of the Colson Center for Christian worldview and some of the work.

John Stonestreet (02:16):
Well, it’s true. I mean, a lot of younger emerging adults don’t know who Chuck Colson is. I mean, I’ve actually been doing an informal poll every time I speak at a Summit Ministries Conference and it’s becoming fewer and fewer and fewer. He was a leader of the last generation, I mean, an amazing leader and one that was prophetic and kind of a C.S. Lewis sort of what he said and what he predicted came true and is kind of more true or more relevant today.

So it’s a fun trajectory to be on. His story is a story of a guy who rose to the heights of political power, was special counsel to President Nixon. So I mean, that’s in his early 30s. To basically achieve the office beside the most powerful man on the planet in your 30s.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:09):
He was in his early 30s at that time?

John Stonestreet (03:10):
Yeah. It’s amazing. No, it’s just stunning. How quickly he rose to influence. Of course, ended up going to prison as part of the Watergate scandal, but came to Christ right before then. Actually, right before he got in trouble, a lot of people thought it was a jailhouse conversion, but it wasn’t. He left prison and said, “I’m going to spend the rest of my life taking Jesus back into the prison.” And he did that for the rest of his life.

But Chuck was a policy guy. He was a thinker. He wanted to know not just what, but why. And so as he was building Bible studies and prisons, as he was working on prisoner reentry into society, as he was helping the family members of those who were incarcerated while they were in prison, he started to notice this trend that was a big part of the American story about this point, 80s and 90s, which was the explosion of the prison population.

(04:02):
I remember him saying, “How is it that California can build and fill a prison faster than I can start a Bible study in one?” Wow. And he realized that what he was seeing in the prisons was the fruit, not the root. To get to the root of the problem, he had to go upstream. And so he went upstream into the breakdown of culture. He also was mentored by some of the great theological minds of the 20th century, Carl Henry, R.C. Sproul, who challenged him to read widely, particularly into people who were writing and thinking about worldview.

And so my introduction to Chuck, of course I knew he had a radio program called Break Point. He had written that book, How Now Shall We Live, which took worldview from being something that most Christians hadn’t heard of to something that most Christians had heard of. And it really popularized that term.

(04:56):
But when I met Chuck Colson, it was because of that passion about, listen, why is culture headed the way that it was? And his goal, I mean, he really believed two things that we carry on at the Colson Center. We don’t do the prison side of things. Prison Fellowship still does that, but at the Colson Center, we believe that anything that’s happening in the prisons or happening in politics or happening in law is downstream from culture. You’ve got to go upstream to see what the brokenness is.

And then secondly, that the church is always at its best when it’s running towards the brokenness, not away from it. And that’s what we’re called to do as Christians is not only love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, which we are, but to love him in this particular cultural moment. Our cultural moment is a calling and that we may wish we were born in the good old days.

(05:54):
I wish my kids would have been born in the, I don’t know when they were, but I read about them. They sound awesome. But no, God’s called us to this time in this place. And so that’s the mutual shared passion there.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:06):
Yeah. So Chuck went from the position of being at the White House, being a counselor attorney for the president, went to prison through the whole Watergate scandal, came out, started prison fellowship, which became international in scope.

John Stonestreet (06:23):
Oh yeah. Largest prison ministry in the world is an umbrella organization for so many tremendous things.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:28):
And people even who don’t know about prison fellowship would know about Angel Tree. Angel Tree Project. So Angel Tree, yes, that would be one of the projects that was started through that. So many different things that he started. But when he started the BreakPoint broadcast, which was two minutes every day, and I remember being in Washington DC and talked to several people in the beltway and they said, “It comes on when I am stuck in traffic on the way to my job and it gives me confidence that a biblical worldview is a plausible way of looking at the world.”

John Stonestreet (06:59):
Yeah, that’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:59):
So you’re carrying on that work and you do that, so you do it on radio stations?

John Stonestreet (07:04):
Yeah. We call it a commentary, not a radio program because it is on the radio, but it’s also on podcasts, on YouTube, on Facebook, social media. We send it out as an article to emails, other websites, carry it, even some newspapers, if you remember what those are, those paper things that somebody would throw at your house. Yeah. There’s a handful of newspapers that carry those things. It really existed, believe me. But it’s really a cool thing.

And our goal is just to say, look, Christianity is not only true, but it is a uniquely true way of seeing anything that exists. So we get to talk about everything from art to politics to culture to education, whatever, and show that Christianity gives you the right framework to make sense of it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:55):
Well, what I love and appreciate about it, and I hope that everybody who’s watching, if you don’t already get it, you can get it by email.

John Stonestreet (08:00):
Email.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:02):
It comes to you. You can also download the podcast and other resources.

John Stonestreet (08:05):
Yeah, look up the BreakPoint podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:10):
Yeah, this should be, just like I always say, you need to be reading World Magazine. It comes out every two weeks. You need to be listening to the BreakPoint at least every other day because you don’t shy away from anything. If there’s something happening in the culture, you address it and talk about what a biblical worldview of this might look like.

John Stonestreet (08:30):
Yeah. We’re not a breaking news organization. We’re not going to tell you, “Hey, this is what happened.” But 24 hours after everyone’s panicked, freaked out, lost their minds, or you heard this spin on it from major media outlets, we come in and say, “Look, here’s why this matters.”

And honestly, one of the hardest things for us is making that determination. This story is loud, but it’s not really important. And that’s one of the confusing things I think for Christians is that we think that culture is made up of what’s loud. Culture is far more powerful, not in where it’s noisiest, culture’s far more powerful where it just assumes. So oftentimes where it’s quiet is, because a particular bent, a particular set of values, a particular set of definitions are just assumed and taken for granted. Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:17):
So I think I agree with that, but can you give an example of how you saw that in one of the projects you’ve worked on?

John Stonestreet (09:23):
Yeah. I mean, this is going to go back a couple years, but I remember at the MTV Video Music Awards years ago, which if you don’t know anything about that show, it basically has made its name by being more outrageous, somebody being more outrageous. So it started with Madonna rolling around in a white wedding dressing like a virgin and went through kind of a weird satanic exorcism with Nikki Minaj and then Miley Cyrus got a turn. What could go wrong?

So Miley Cyrus and this artist named Robin Thick, this was, I don’t know, seven, eight years ago, essentially it was a very sketchy song. Their performance simulated having sex on stage and the culture talked about it nonstop for two or three weeks. I mean, even Joan Rivers, who was alive at the time, and of course never America’s conscience thought it crossed the line.

(10:13):
A few months later at the Grammys, this was after the prop eight had passed the will of the people in California saying, “Marriage is only between a man and a woman.” A judge had overturned it and the Grammys were held in California. Queen Latifah had been ordained on the internet and she, during the program, which was nationally televised, presided over a mass wedding, which included both same sex and opposite sex couples. So essentially you had the first televised gay wedding in history.

And I remember going on a podcast, I do a weekly culture wrap up with World Magazine on their podcast and the host offline was like, “It was so weird.” I tried to find even some details about exactly how this whole thing went down, but I mean, you talked about it and Al Moeller talked about it, but nobody else talked about it.

(11:07):
And what tells you more about where culture is at? An act or a performance like Miley Cyrus’, which was so over the line that everybody says no to it or something like this mass gay wedding, which came and went like a thing expected. It didn’t surprise anybody like, “Of course you’re going to do that. It’s Tuesday.” That’s the normality aspect of culture.

And look, I mean, you can talk about how much kids are influenced in leisure time where the most normal thing to do is not to talk to another person, but to stare at a glowing rectangle. I mean, you can talk about all kinds of things like that. The normalization of the various letters of the ever-increasing acronym, LGBTQIA, it’s not even those shows that portrayed the salaciousness of particular sexual behavior. It was those in which it was just a normal part of life that really moved the needle in the cultural imagination.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:16):
Right. Yeah. People begin to take for granted that truth is about me and how I see things.

John Stonestreet (12:22):
Oh, that’s widely said.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:24):
I create my own identity. I’m not searching for truth. I’m searching for myself.

John Stonestreet (12:28):
Right. And think about what is the most outrageous thing today is suggesting that there are moral norms that apply to everyone. I mean, when you do that, it’s like, what? You can’t do that. And so that used to be the norm and kind of an expected shared sense of what’s right and wrong. And now that’s considered so far over the line. The norm is, well yeah, whatever’s right for you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:53):
Yeah. Let’s talk about that in relation to the millennial generation. So the students we’re training at summit ministries now are Gen Z. They’re older siblings and the people who were in high school when they were in grade school, the millennials, their experience in church has been different. They did learn some apologetics. They did learn a little bit of worldview, maybe just enough to be dangerous. Now they’re in their 20s and a lot of them, people who you would think would know better are saying, “I’m deconstructing my faith now. I’m deconverting.”

(13:39):
So the testimonies that are on the internet are not about God’s faithfulness during a difficult time. They’re about how I grew up in the church and now I’m doing the right thing and turning my back to the church. You’ve talked about this on your program some, and I think I was just meeting with a group of parents and grandparents in California and the number of them, virtually all of them, have prodigals as children or grandchildren.

They’re saying, “I don’t know what I did. I did the best I knew how. I took them to church. They went to youth camp. They were involved in the campus group at their school that was Christian.” Now you wouldn’t even recognize them from a spiritual standpoint. So I want to process through that. I don’t even know what question to ask to start that.

John Stonestreet (14:30):
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of different angles to this, right? I mean, I think first of all, there is the reality that it is happening. It does seem to be happening at a higher level for that generation, but probably not as epidemic as it seems because so many of these stories are celebrity stories, whereas that didn’t used to be kind of cutting edge news, now it is.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:55):
So if somebody has a platform, okay, so if they have a large Twitter following and they say, “I’m deconverted.” And we’ve had a bunch of those seem like it’s a bigger deal, but there’s also a social contagion aspect to it. That’s exactly right. What a celebrity experiences, then I begin to think, “Well, maybe I’m experiencing that too. Maybe their experience helps me understand mine.”

John Stonestreet (15:17):
We just did a story a week ago where researchers are concerned about an epidemic of physical ticks of young girls and it’s kind of like Tourette’s. And the reason was that there was this TikTok channel of people with Tourette’s or conditions like Tourette’s that have legitimate physically caused conditions and they kind of display it proudly and it became a very, very popular TikTok channel for young girls.

And so now all these young girls have displayed these same symptoms and the research. No, the researchers say they’re not faking it, but it’s that social contagion aspect. And you read about the Salem witch trials in some of these times in history and you hear about these social contagions. Abigail Schreier certainly has talked about this in her book on the gender issue. I think the social contagion aspect is something that is probably understated. Why is it that, particularly on the sexual issues, we see this complete uptick in terms of identification?

(16:34):
Where does that come from? I think that’s one of those things. And yeah, I do think deconversions and deconstructions, that seems to be, we’re describing something that is actually happening. Is there always a good reason for it? I think that’s a very interesting question. I also think that another angle on this that is worth talking about is the dominant cultural and media narrative on this is that it’s Trump’s fault, right? In other words.

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:06):
Of course. Of course it is.

John Stonestreet (17:07):
Well, of course. But you think about it and it’s, there are all these beliefs now that divide the generations. I usually sum it up as sex, technology and Trump. I would probably have to add race in that mix as well, that those are the four areas in which there’s a divide between the generations. There’s always been divides between the generations. One of the features today is that a disagreement allows somebody to be considered toxic.

And so suddenly this disagreement is not going to make me stronger. It’s not going to sharpen me in my belief. It’s not something worth really, well, I disagree, but it’s not worth losing a relationship over. The speed at which a millennial generation goes from disagreeing to calling someone toxic and walking away, I think that’s at an all time high and that’s something to be dealt with.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:02):
Okay. Okay. So there’s a lot there to process. What you’ve got is a generation that thinks that it knows a lot because it can open a Google search and find the first document and be an expert, right? And then a generation that is deeply influenced by other people in the generation who have a platform to the point where they begin to even embody without subconsciously the things, the behaviors that they see other people embody.

And then they’re willing to throw relationships under the bus that if they were to stick, if they were to work through it and have iron sharpened iron, they could get stronger as long as they’re committed to growing, that’s out the window now. What you’re describing is a generation that’s kind of a drift from the influences that could have helped them grow and become stronger. So they’re unraveling at the very time they should be more tightly knit than ever.

John Stonestreet (19:09):
I mean, I think so. And I think that’s the contagion part of it. I don’t want to say all of that as if there’s not real examples of bad behavior that has been uncovered, that has left people disillusioned. I mean, for years working at a Christian college with conservative, evangelical students who were pretty solid in their own commitment to their faith and were growing in their understanding of it. I know what watching a mom or a dad fall or watching a youth pastor or a respected leader fall, I know what that did. It shook their confidence, right?

And so there has been plenty of high profile bad behavior, but there’s also this whole list of things that are included in the list of bad behavior, right? That now we’re subjecting these younger Christians to. Here’s an example. It’s one thing if an institution or a church has covered up abuse and that has happened, it’s devastating, it’s disillusioning for kids and rightly so, but that oftentimes is described in the same category as believing in complementarianism.

(20:23):
That suddenly if you think that men and women are created with different gifts and different places in the kingdom of God to work together, to fully image him, then that’s the same as suppressing women because it’s complementary. You see what I mean? There’s this really strange list of connections now that’s often made and suddenly then, I mean, look, an institution that allows a whole series of harm, that’s devastating, but then lumping all kinds of things in. Here’s an example. One of the high profile de-conversioners is Joshua Harris. Joshua Harris wrote a book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye back in the 90s.

(21:09):
There were examples of youth pastors and youth groups that out of, I think oftentimes passionate, not wanting kids to make these mistakes and feel the effects of sex that’s thrown around and abused or whatever, said things that were foolish, said things that were over the line, said things that were maybe even treated people differently.

Suddenly, anyone that taught sex outside of marriage is a bad thing for young adults, is now thrown into this category of purity culture. Purity cultures. Yeah. And so purity culture becomes this toxicity. In other words, I think this exit, this mass exodus, to what degree the mass exodus is happening, some of this is created in house.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:53):
Okay. Well, I’m not really a conspiracy kind of guy, but I can see how there are certain agendas that would benefit from the overthrow of specific aspects of biblical morality and biblical teaching that can point to say, well, a lot of people have been watching and listening to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.

John Stonestreet (22:18):
Mars Hill, yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:19):
Right. So this pastor, Mark Driscoll in Seattle became very prominent and he had a very strong personality. His leadership style was very dominant and created all of these issues. But a lot of the people who are being interviewed on that podcast, they aren’t trying to throw Mark Driscoll under the bus. They’re trying to use his downfall as an opportunity to bring down the things he was talking about. The truth of scripture, the relationship between men and women, the call of men.

John Stonestreet (22:54):
The call of men to be men, yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:56):
To be leaders in the home, all of those kinds of things. And I mean, they’re blatant on the show, right?

John Stonestreet (23:02):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:03):
Talking about what their real agenda is. So it’s not like this should be a surprise.

John Stonestreet (23:06):
Right. And I’m with you. I’m not conspiratorial. I don’t know if there’s this grandiose plan or anything like that, but I do think there is a lack of wisdom in this approach. And I think you see it, and I think it is contributing to this deconversion narrative, is that in the mainstream evangelical institutions right now, the tendency is to punch hard to the right and coddle to the left.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:32):
Wow. Wow.

John Stonestreet (23:33):
And that is an example of it. I mean, Driscoll caused all kinds of issues as a leader. And there’s character things that should have been obvious and weren’t. And this is what happens in powerful organizations with powerful people. You can see it across the board. It shouldn’t be dismissed. It should be addressed. He hurt a lot of people. But you listen to the series as well as it’s produced and as captivating as the whole thing is.

And you think, well, okay, so what was the problem here? Was it his complementarianism? Was it that he was part of the young reformed restless? Was it that he didn’t stick with the emerging church guys he started with? Was it because it was a megachurch? Was it because he wrote a book? In other words, there’s kind of all these things that end up kind of like, ah, guilt by association, and then it becomes this thing where anything to the right is a real problem.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:21):
Some of the episodes do that on purpose where, Mike, he does a great job with it.

John Stonestreet (24:26):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:27):
It’s very captivating, but Mike Cosper from Christianity Today starts with the issue like complementarianism and then drags it back to Driscoll. We’re going to take the issue of complementarianism and we’re going to tie it around Mark Driscoll’s body with the concrete already set on his feet and drag the whole thing down.

John Stonestreet (24:48):
Yeah. I think it is. And I think that this is a real issue. I’ll give you another example that I see emerging right now in terms of this tendency to punch right and coddle left. When you talk about Joshua Harris or, you have to forgive me, I don’t know a lot of the names, but there’s been a series of high profile names out of Christian music. Christian music, yeah. To say that they deconstructed is probably an accurate term, right? They had a faith and then they slowly tore it down.

What I have been concerned about, in fact, just a few weeks ago, I put this out on a social media channel just to see what the response would be. I mean, I had some thoughts about it, but I wanted to see, I’m hearing more and more evangelical voices. And when I mean evangelical voices, I mean those that would still advocate for faith in Christ and so on, but advocate and talk about deconstruction, not reformation, not repentance, not questioning or doubting in kind of the seeking truth in the proverb sense, but actually the concept of deconstruction itself, which has a loaded philosophical and worldview context- From the postmodern world.

(26:03):
And we should get into that because I think it’s really interesting. What if right now, one of the things that’s being created is this narrative where deconstruction is a good and necessary thing that everybody has to go through. My fear is, A, not only kind of the etymological and philosophical history of the concept of deconstruction, but I don’t know anyone that has gone through the deconstruction process that ended up with a reformed faith.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:32):
Oh, right. Okay.

John Stonestreet (26:34):
Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And people are going to listen to this and go, “It’s just language.” I think language really matters. Chesterton said, “If words aren’t worth fighting for, what on earth would be?” Deconstruction itself is loaded. And I’m hearing prominent voices and prominent articles, many main kinds of center evangelical voices that are commenting on some of these high profile deconversions and talking about deconstruction as if it’s a good thing.

And I honestly wonder, are we actually, are there voices on Christian college campuses in particular? Are there voices in some of these kinds of center evangelical publications that are increasingly giving the impression that deconstruction, not reform, not renewal, not repentance, but deconstruction is now a good part of life. I think that’s increasingly a feature of being a Gen Z evangelical believer. You hear this word deconstruction, you hear it glamorized, you hear it talked about, and I think there could be a problem there.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:40):
So people, they’re questioning things and the questioning process can be good.

John Stonestreet (27:49):
Right. Necessary.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:49):
Face an issue like how could a good God allow evil? Well, I need to examine that. I need to study that historically. I need to see what the Bible says. I need to see what the church fathers have said. I need to look at what Aquinas said five times to figure it out. But I need to examine. I need to talk to wise counselors. I need to be praying about this.

John Stonestreet (28:15):
But is it deconstruction?

Dr. Jeff Myers (28:16):
Deconstruction is not any of that.

John Stonestreet (28:17):
That’s not the right word for that at all. Yeah. Right. One way I’ve been thinking about it, and I ask forgiveness to our audience, because this is a thought and process, absolutely. And it’s just kind of this nagging little thing going off in my spidey sense like, look, deconstruction is the right descriptive term to use for all of these stories that we see in the news, but it’s not the right prescriptive word to use for the process of asking hard questions, going through a season of doubt, going through a dark night of the soul or whatever.

But it’s kind of this new word that’s being hoisted upon all of these things that have been a common expression of faith for a really long time. And I think it’s a problem. And one of the, I think one of the things that has formed my spidey sense in this area is an old friend from a little Mennonite school in the middle of Ohio, and we have a long history that goes back.

(29:20):
And I was speaking at a school once and he talked to me about a distinction he makes for his young men. So we were talking about the problem of young men and he said, “There’s a difference between a seeker and a mocker.” And it’s biblical language that just cuts right to the heart of what we’re after. A seeker is one asking hard questions as if the answer is actually out there. The mocker is one asking the hard questions to make fun of the idea that the answer’s out there.

(29:48):
And that is a dramatic difference. Huge. Someone who’s seeking finds, someone who mocks doesn’t find because they’ve foreclosed on the finding upfront. The idea of deconstruction historically, philosophically. And I think contemporarily describing so many of these stories is itself a process of mocking, not of seeking. And what concerns me is that we’re talking, we’re using that word to normalize a process. It’s not the right word. The word itself carries on all kinds of intellectual and spiritual baggage that we’re now hoisting onto this process that really isn’t a new process.

Maybe the questions change from one moment to the next, but it’s not a new process. It’s what people have been doing and what scripture invites us to do, to seek and you will find, to ask the hard questions. And it’s what you see in Job. God doesn’t condemn Job for his questions. He just says, “You get to question me. I get to question you.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:49):
Yeah. And that’s huge. And all through scripture, you see questions being invited. There’s no other religious book like this in the world where we’re asking probing questions of God. God, where are you at this time? Why do the wicked prosper? Why do the righteous suffer? Those kinds of questions are in there. I’m wondering if the kind of questioning that we see, and I think this is maybe true for every believer. I hope it is that we come up against questions and we have to grow. We grow through that difficult process.

I mean, you’ve been through a lot of higher education. I’ve been through a lot of higher education. A lot of the learning takes place on the cusp of despair. When you’re just about to throw yourself down the stairs because you can’t get it and then you’re on your sixth cup of coffee and it’s four o’clock in the morning, you’re like, “Oh, okay. I finally get it.” If you can’t push yourself to that place of difficulty, then you can’t ever really get the breakthrough.

John Stonestreet (31:52):
Well, and I wonder if even this introduction of the term or how we talk about it, it’s almost like we’re talking increasingly, and I say we as kind of in the evangelical space, not only this deconstruction thing, the deconstruction way of defining questioning is necessary, but that the process itself is good regardless of the intent, regardless of the outcome. And I wonder if we’re actually preempting in the whole process. We’re preempting the process itself and what it could actually achieve.

Think about some of the high profile deconversions that end up making it in the Huffington Post or whatever else. I mean, look, it’s an easy way to get an article published in a progressive publication is to say, “I was an evangelical or I went to this evangelical institution.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:47):
That explains every Christian voice in Time Magazine ever.

John Stonestreet (32:51):
It honestly explains a couple bestselling books right now, but I’ll let that go. But sometimes, I’m trying to think of, there were two in particular that were published from Christian musicians. And again, my staff knew this and they were like, “That’s who this is.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s good.” I’m Anglican. We listen to either really old stuff or ’80s rock. Those are the two options for us. But in the article, the person who had lost their faith was saying the Bible can’t be trusted or the problem of evil or whatever, as if no one had ever thought of that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:33):
No one had ever grappled with that.

John Stonestreet (33:34):
And I wonder if part of that reason is that he was encouraged in the process itself, but not as if there was actually a goal to the process. And I’m not saying people don’t legitimately wrestle hard with the questions and then come up with a place where, I’m sorry, I just can’t believe that, but it certainly wasn’t the case in any of these high profile cases because the reasons that they were giving for walking away are reasons that had been thoroughly dealt with for years.

I often tell our audience, look, this is the golden age of answers. If you have a hard question for Christianity, either the truthfulness of a Christian belief or how Christianity applies to a particular call, it has been thought through.

(34:18):
And it has been written. It may not have been translated and you may have never heard about it, but if the goal of this kind of thing is the question and not the answer, if the goal is the process, you have to go through this to have a strong faith, but there’s no guide, there’s no aim, there’s no purpose, there’s no direction.

Then you end up with students, and you and I have both met these students, and we see it in these high profile cases that are walking away from their faith because they think an answer doesn’t exist. And you and I know that it does. It’s not only there, it’s way better than anything that comes out of a postmodern worldview or a post postmodern worldview or a secularism or whatever else.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:02):
And that’s a key to this. It’s why we teach about other counterfeit worldviews at Summit Ministries, because Christians do need to answer the problem of, why is there evil in the world?

John Stonestreet (35:12):
That’s right. And so does everybody else.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:14):
Need to answer it. Marxists need to answer it, postmodernists need to answer it. And when you look at their answers, they’re emotionally and rationally not satisfactory.

John Stonestreet (35:24):
Yeah. Many worldviews can’t even explain why evil’s a bad thing or why what we call evil is actually evil or why we should be opposed to it as opposed to. Most of them can’t explain the existence of the concept of something bad in the world.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:41):
So this makes me wonder about something, and I know I want to draw this toward what are some things that we could do, but I had a professor when I studied communication who said, “People basically don’t ever have reasons for what they do. They just do it, and then they come up with the reasons later.” And I’m wondering if these articles are like that. If somebody deconverts, and then when they write an article, why did you deconvert? They come up with reasons that aren’t really the real reasons. Do you sense that at all or do you sense that they’re really throwing these questions out as if there are no answers to this and so I’m done?

John Stonestreet (36:20):
Well, I mean, I think some of them have kind of gone on a journey and haven’t found the answers they’re looking for, which again, I think is sad because the answers are almost always there. But no, I mean, Romans one describes what you’re describing, right? And that is not that we reject God and then start sinning. It’s that we start sinning and reject God to justify ourselves.

But think about how hard it is to recognize that in yourself if you live in a culture where there’s no such thing as sin, there’s no such thing as moral norms. And in a church where the increasing voice is not this is wrong, but the process of questioning itself is what faith is all about. Yeah. Does that make sense? Okay. Yeah. I mean, there’s so much about plausibility here. Osgenis in one of his early books, it’s kind of a screwtape-like book called, it now goes under the name The Last Christian on Earth.

(37:14):
He talks about this aversive plot for modern culture. And I think the voice of one of the demons there, he says there are three things that Christians have neglected in understanding, really faith. And one is the history of ideas. In other words, where do these ideas come from? Another is the sociology of knowledge. In other words, how we know changes from one context to the next.

And the other is plausibility. Why is it that in some context, certain things are completely plausible and yesterday they weren’t. This is the profound start to Carl Truman’s book on the self that just came, which if you haven’t read, it’s a beast, but read it or wait till next year when the easier version of that book comes out. But Truman begins with the right question, which is, how do we get to the point where I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body?

(38:07):
Let me go back. He says, the question is not, how do we get to the point where somebody could say, “I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body.” But how do we get to a point where when a man says that, everyone embraces it as if it’s completely normal and no one blinks. 20 years ago, you say that, the doctor immediately says, “You’re sick in your mind and we need to do something to align your mind with your body.” Now it’s you’re sick in your body, we need to change your body to align with your mind. I mean, that is a plausibility flip on the head.

(38:45):
And I think that there’s a lot in this conversation about, why is it that certain doubts, for example, that God would ever expect me to live by certain sexual norms? That in and of itself is an implausible belief for many, that my body is not an actual expression of God’s created goodness. That’s not a plausible belief for many.

So I think that there’s a lot of those questions that go back to what has shifted dramatically in our culture and it means different questions. I mean, when you’re not first, well, not when you started doing this. When I started doing this with you, which you’re older than me, let the record show, even though, probably can’t tell by your cool glasses and haircut, but problem of evil was the number one question. Yeah. And of course, very soon after that was 9/11. It brought the problem of evil right to the center.

(39:45):
The problem of evil is not the number one question. Sexuality and sexual ethics are the number one question. And it’s not, how can God let this happen? It’s, how could God possibly say this is right and wrong? That’s a plausibility shift.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:58):
Yeah. I see that with, I’m often asking young adults, all right, if you believe that the Bible is true, you believe there is a God, that there’s evidence for design, that God can answer the problem of evil, better than any other worldview can. What would stop you personally from living a life that’s fully committed to Christ? And you’re right. It always comes back to, they say things like, “I can’t stop looking at porn.” Or, “I live with my girlfriend and I don’t… It’s the only relationship I’ve ever had where I felt loved and I don’t want to leave it.” It always ends up being that kind of a thing.

We pulled a lot of threads in this conversation and if we can kind of tie it together a little bit, let’s just take this one question. For a young adult who’s thinking, “I’m not sure I can maintain my faith,” or, “I think when these people describe the deconverting, I relate to that. I may even be a little scared of how much I relate to it, but I relate to it.” What are some of the steps that a young person, a young adult, say, a 20 something, 30 something should take?

John Stonestreet (41:15):
Oh, man. I think one of the first ones is to seek wise counsel and seek others, seek people who actually care about your wellbeing and to go forward. Not someone who seeks for you to agree with their agenda. That is one of the, I think the damnedable things about social media is that it sounds like you’re hearing the voices of the world, but you’re hearing the voice of a very small group of people and avail yourself to people who actually care. I think that’s the first one. And that of course is a call to older generations to care.

(41:57):
I think the other thing is a question, and that is, are you willing to look outside of yourself for what’s true, not just inside of yourself? This whole process, I know many young people will come to that point and they’re just like, “I just can’t believe. I’ve looked, I’ve looked. It doesn’t make any sense to me.” And then you kind of investigate, how hard have you looked? And looking means I’ve thought about it a lot in my own heart. Are you willing to go to external authorities?

And that is one of the big plausibility shifts. That’s one of the ways that culture has dramatically shifted is that it’s moved the whole center of truth from the outside to the inside, from a fixed reference point outside of you so that you can orient to the internal as if your own emotions and feelings are the sum total of truth.

(42:46):
And I think we’ve got to actually call students out at times and say, “Who outside of yourself have you looked at? What have you read? What have you studied? What have you looked at? Are you willing to actually spend some time getting to know who God is, not just who you think God is?” I think that’s a bigger thing than we actually kind of give it credit for. The hard part is, that’s scary. That’s because if you’re talking about somebody outside of you, the risk there is that they might not approve. They might not agree and are you willing to take that chance? But man, the external referential versus the internal referential, so much rests on that in my mind.

Dr. Jeff Myers (43:31):
So external versus internal, seeking wise counsel, looking for sources, when you kind of have to let go of the idea that truth is up to the individual and that you’re deciding it for yourself and your heart, and acknowledge the possibility that lots of other people have gone through what you’re going through. I read scripture, I think I’ve shared with you, I read three chapters a day. I have no complicated plan. I read three chapters a day.

Every single year, and I’ve done this for 16 years now, I’m stunned at how often scripture allows people to speak who are being dead level honest about what they are feeling in their heart, but they’re bringing it out and they’re talking about it and they’re relying on God to guide them in this process and relying on wise counselors and prayer and so forth. But the questioning is not the problem.

John Stonestreet (44:27):
No.

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:27):
It’s the questioning when you believe that no answers can be found or that the only answers that can be found are the ones that are in your own emotional case.

John Stonestreet (44:38):
Yeah. I think that’s so important. And I hope nobody hears this and thinks that because I’m critiquing how questioning is happening sometimes in our culture, that I’m critiquing the idea of questioning. It is one of the brilliant parts. I mean, listen, if you think it’s not okay to yell at God, you have to remove the book of Psalms from the Bible. Pretty much. I mean, a lot of that stuff, that’s what it’s about, but that’s exactly my point is when everything is self-referential, then you’re not really questioning. You’re not asking anyone else. So it just undermines the process itself, at least the goal of the process.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:16):
Yeah. Yeah. Man, John, every time we have a conversation, it goes deep, it goes fast. I never know exactly where it’s going to end up, but this is fascinating. And I think everybody who’s watching, probably this is a good time to stop and rewind. Do we even rewind things anymore? Go back to the beginning and watch it again or listen to it again because a lot of the things that you’ve shared are really, really significant. Thank you for everything you do for Summit Ministries. Thanks for what you do for the Colson Center. Thanks for what you do for the Christian community.

John Stonestreet (45:50):
Well, there’s nobody. I mean, and I mean this, I mean, and just even under your leadership, you’ve adjusted Summit to directly address some of these ways that deconversions are happening in questioning. The questions look a little bit different from one cultural moment to the next. The context of the question, how students ask those questions and Summit has always adjusted to really scratch the itch right where it is for young people. And that’s why it has such an incredible success rate.

Dr. Jeff Myers (46:23):
Yeah. Thanks for being on the show today. A special thank you to my guest today, John Stonestreet from the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. You can follow him on Twitter @jbstonestreet and also visit breakpoint.org for John’s books, resources, and be sure to sign up so that you can hear the BreakPoint program every day. Thanks for joining this week. I’ll see you next week.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.

For nearly 60 years, Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more. If you want to live out a biblical worldview in today’s world and you desire to instill a lifelong faith in the rising generation, visit summit.org/thedrjeffshow for more information.

(47:40):
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