WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Hillsdale Interview: John Stonestreet

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

John Stonestreet serves as president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. John is the daily voice of Breakpoint, the nationally syndicated commentary on the culture, founded by the late Chuck Colson. He joined WRFH on 9/9/24.

This is Michaela S. Truth, and with me today is John Stone Street, president of the Colson Center. John Stone Street serves as president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He's a sought-after author and speaker on areas of faith and culture, theology, worldview, education, and apologetics. John is the daily voice of Breakpoint, the nationally syndicated commentary on the culture, founded by the late Chuck Colson. Mr. Stenstreet, thanks for being here. Oh, gosh, he can't call me Mr. Stenstreet. No, we've got to make it way more relaxed than that. Thanks for being here.

Oh, that's much better. There we go. Much better. Yeah. Well, what brings you to Hillsdale? Well, a number of things. The most important thing being a daughter and actually two daughters, one who is a sophomore here at Hillsdale and the other is a senior this year in high school. So looking at Hillsdale is one of the options.

So she's here for an interview. I'm also speaking tonight for the Equip Ministries Group. This would be super great because I'm talking about sexuality with my. my daughters in the audience. So this would be, yeah, not awkward at all. It'll be just great. But yeah, looking forward to speaking to a group of students and folks from the community and that sort of stuff. And so, yeah, yeah, it's always good to be here at this time of year. I try to avoid February, but September, October, money. It's prime time. Yeah, absolutely. Really beautiful. Well, I'm glad you're here. So I was wondering, can you tell us a little bit about the Colson Center?

Yeah. Well, you mentioned Chuck Colson, which is a name that a lot of people in previous generations would have known, but maybe some do, maybe some don't. Folks who know it kind of at the college age is because they read about him in a history book. You know, maybe they saw his cameo appearance in the, there was a mini series on stars about the Nixon administration and Watergate called Gaslit, I think. And who's the guy that plays Spence on King of Queens? Patton Oswald.

You know the actor Patent Oswald? I know that name. Oh, my goodness. He's not that old. But anyway, he plays Chuck Colson. Chuck is known for having three lives. The first life was part of the Nixon administration, famous for being implicated in the Watergate scandal.

There's a whole story there, but he ended up going to prison. But he came to Christ before he went to prison. A lot of people thought it was going to be kind of a jailhouse sort of conversion, you know, a way to get out early and that sort of thing. But it stuck. And that's really the second part of his life is that he spent the next 30, 35, years after going to prison for Watergate related charges, going back to prison and working with prisoners and their families and working in justice reform, using his knowledge of D.C.

and the political system to make real difference in how we think about incarceration, how we think about restoration and things like that. And then also because he was building that prison administrative at a time when there was so much, so much happening in the American context. Think about 70s, 80s, 90s, what you might call kind of the forces of secularization. But on the ground, that looked like an explosion in the prison population. And he realized that that was downstream from a brokenness that was deeper, a brokenness in families, a brokenness in communities, and a brokenness that was leading to a lack of moral formation. And he believed that the church was always better running into the brokenness, not running away from it.

And so he took a really interesting posture at a time when a lot of people were condemning the wider culture from the place of the church and saying, no, Christians need to understand what's happening in the culture and be agents of restoration. And that led him to think and talk about the idea of Christian worldview. In other words, that faith shouldn't be just personal and private. It should apply to every area of life. And he passed away in 2012. And since then, the two aspects of that legacy, the prison ministry and the Christian worldview ministry have become separate organizations, friends, but separate organizations.

And I lead the worldview part of things, which is the Colson Center. Wow. How was that? That was great. It was a little bit longer than an elevator speech. No, I loved it. It's a big story. It's so much to it.

Well, I've known, been familiar with the Colson Center. and I never knew how it went from prison ministry to the school center. I think that's really interesting. Well, it's an odd fit. And that's one of the reasons that after he passed away, the board decided to make them separate organizations, which I think organizationally have to make those decisions. But for Chuck, it was very much connected that what you believe has real consequences. Yeah.

And that there's not this separation between like the spiritual side of life and everything else, but you believe, is there a God? Is there a right and wrong? What does it mean to be human? And what, you know, where is our hope? Can we be forgiven and changed? And, you know, what you believe about that varies differently, whether you're a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a secularist, a new age, or, you know, a critical theorist or whatever.

And so understanding the implications of Christian truth for those areas has real play, obviously, and how you think about law and how you think about criminal justice and sentencing. And, you know, what do you do with prisoners? I mean, you think about it. There's been a lot of regimes about history. You're a criminal. We'll take you out in the woods and shoot you because you're now hopeless, right? So what you think about these things reflect your deeply held beliefs about God, humanity, and the world.

And that's kind of the stuff we deal with. Wow. So how did you first meet Chuck? Oh, man, that's a great story. The funny part is, is I had grown up listening to Chuck on the radio. Wow. The radio, moody radio. So he was one of the on the lineup of people.

My parents had the radio going all the time on the Moody Station. So it was like preacher after preacher after preacher. And then there was Chuck talking about movies or politics or, you know, some historical thing. He was clearly different in a lot of ways in what he was doing. Anyway, fast forward out of college. I was working for an organization called Summit Ministries, which trained high school and college students to know why they believe what they believe before they go to college. and came across a book by somebody who worked with Chuck, and I realized he didn't live that far away from where I did in Tennessee.

So reached out to him. We met at a Cracker Barrel in Sweetwater, Tennessee, out off the interstate. Good news in Tennessee, there's always a Cracker Barrel somewhere off in interstate close by. There you go. And that started a set of meetings and eventually ended up getting to meet Chuck. and that was 2006-ish, seven-ish, something like that. Okay. So you knew him for four or five years before he back?

Yeah, yeah. Actually, started to work on some projects, got invited in to help with some speaking and some different things he was working on, something in 2009 called the Manhattan Declaration, which was a decuminal statement signed by evangelicals and Catholics and Protestants around life, marriage, and religious liberty. I was part of that project, the Centurions Project, which is something that we've carried on since he passed away under a different name. And it was 2010 that he asked me to come work with the Colson Center.

So at that time, Colson Center was still part of Prison Fellowship. We did some traveling and speaking together. He was rolling out a curriculum on ethics that was a part of. And then two years later, you know, he passed away. way, which in and of itself was an incredible story, also one that was kind of inspiring. And, you know, you kind of felt charge. And that's the thing about Chuck. You kind of felt like he was the general. And we used to joke, you know, God loves us and Chuck has a wonderful plan for our lives. Like, that's how we used to talk about. Because he would have more plans.

He was just this kind of unbelievable leader. But if you ever met anyone who knew him, that's what they'll tell you, is that he didn't just kind of, you didn't just kind of know Chuck. You felt commissioned by Chuck. You know, it's like, let's go. And there was a part of that legacy for him. This is Michaela Estruth. And with me today is John Stone Street, president of the Colson Center for Christian World View.

Okay, so now the Colson Center today. Yeah. You're the president. A lot of people might say like you're the voice of the Colson Center. So they're familiar with you as a speaker. What does the Colson Center? What other options? What else do they offer?

Yeah. I mean, look, it's summary, it's really three things. clarity, confidence, courage. That's what we do. So clarity means essentially about culture, because things are moving fast. It's really confusing. You know, Chuck really spent a last part of his life trying to convince people in the church that they needed to think about what was happening outside the church. In other words, that the culture was changing in pretty dramatic, fundamental ways, and it was going to create a very uncomfortable situation for the church. And, you know, A lot of people thought it was, you know, he was probably overstating the case.

When was he saying that? I know. Isn't that amazing? I mean, look, this is, you know, 80s, 90s. Yeah. Wow. Right? And at that point, you know, people were like, well, yeah, I mean, there's stuff happening

out there, but that's not the gospel. Or they would say, yeah, that's happening out there. But, you know, we still have kind of all the freedom we need to be, you know. In fact, one of the first projects I did with them, I mentioned the Manhattan Declaration. And it was a statement of conscience. It was trying to clarify because of Christian belief, this is what we think about life and marriage. And then he added this religious liberty clause to it. He co-authored it with a Roman Catholic scholar, Robbie George, at Princeton, and Timothy, Georgia, a Southern Baptist scholar.

And I remember thinking the religious freedom thing going, well, religious freedom. I mean, why is that up in the air? Everyone's clear on that. Well, not at all. Not anymore. No, no. And so culture now is in a place where it moves so quickly and so dramatically, you know, when you think of the sort of questions we have on a cultural level and how that impacts, you know, our understanding of education or law or how it impacts our art and our leisure time, like social media and things like that, it's really hard to make sense of it. And you can feel like you're either overwhelmed by culture or that you're just playing whack-a-mole.

You know, like, oh, this issue pops up, whack, whack, whack. You know that game, whack, you know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah, I lose back. I have to go back and check all my references. Okay. So what we try to do is on a daily basis through the breakpoint commentaries, which are on radio and podcast and email and online, basically just help Christians think clearly about what's happening outside, out there.

The confidence piece is ongoing kind of in-depth and training, just kind of going deeper on the sort of things that we talk about, about life, about the definition of what it means to be human, about understanding morality. So we do that in a variety of ways. Breakpoint forums or, you know, digital events. We have a series of lectures that we do. In fact, that's the other thing that brings me to town. I leave here and go to Holland, Michigan, not Holland, the nation, but Holland two hours away for a joint event with focus on the family. And we'll be talking with a pastor who's written about how to have good, liturgies for the digital side of life. So digital liturgies is a book, a guy named Samuel James,

who's a pastor. Anyway, so that's kind of the next stage of developing confidence, right? Not only confidence that you understand these issues, but also confidence in a Christian worldview. What is true? And you've got to have solid ground, you know. You have to keep straight the truth of the story of scripture and the chaos of the moment of our cultural moment that we live in. And then, of course, the ultimate example of that is the Colson Fellows program. This is a year-long deep dive lay leadership program that's in 100 churches around the country, 80 communities in a regional format, and then also I think we're up to like 10 or 11 or so international cohort. So, This year we have about 1,800 Colson Fellows, people that are learning in community.

And they're going through a deep dive, 14 books, daily readings, webinars twice a month, culminates with a conference that takes place in a commissioning ceremony. And where we work in local communities and with churches to walk Christians through this clarity, confidence, courage kind of model. And the ultimate goal is that, Christians will, like Chuck did, believe, and like he believed and like he actually lived out, which is don't run away from things that are hard, that are broken in our culture, but run into it. And that's the genius of a gospel that's not just about personal redemption, but about restoration.

And that's the gospel that we've been given in Jesus Christ. So that's the application of what we try to do. Wow. That was perfect setup for my question of what. are the cultural things, the major cultural issues that we're facing that Christian should be aware of. Well, you know, one of the things, and I have a book where we write about some of this for parents, and we talk about culture in terms of waves and undercurrents. So we've all had that experience in the ocean, right? And a lot of people will use water as a motif for culture because it's

like what water is to a fish, right? That's the only environment they know. Right. There's more to the world than that, but that's all they know. And that's really what culture, what water is to a fish, culture is to humans, right? It's the water we, you know, swim in. I don't know if you knew this, but there's a Hillsdale culture. Oh, really? Did you know there's a Hillsdale College culture? And it's from the outside? Weird. Of course. Yeah, I believe it. But, you know, if you've ever traveled to another country, you know, it's like, you're like, wow, it's like being in a different world. I mean, you probably have that experience even going from a school year to a summer. You know, you go back

to your family culture, your church culture. And that's what humans do. And so we can think about culture as if it's normal, but culture's changing all the time. Cultures, you know, keeping up with it can be a challenge. So we talk about waves and undercurrents. Like there are those waves. When you get hit by a wave, you know it, right? Because it smacks you in the face, maybe knocked you down. Maybe it made you laugh. Maybe it made you bleed. You know, but you knew it happened. Right. But I don't know if you've ever had the experience of kind of, you know, playing in the ocean and then looking up and you're like, where's my stuff? And nobody moved it.

It's still there, but you've moved and you didn't even know it. And it's not because you swam to a different spot. It's the undercurrents, right? And currents are very powerful. So when you ask me, what are the big things in culture? I mean, obviously we can talk about the waves because we feel those, but we all know what those are. You know, social media, we know and the impact on mental illness,

particularly among teenagers, the ever-growing acronym, LGB-T-Q-Q-I-A, and now it continues to go and even gets changed in different ways. These are basically the onset of new identities, most of them, sexual identities, and then how that influences everything from media to education. You know, we could talk about that. We could certainly talk about the, you know, gosh, it seems like we're always on the verge of a racial conflict of something. some kind, you know, and that always feels kind of very real and present.

Knowing what we should do as Christians can be difficult. But those are the ways. I think those are typically the expressions of deep changes that are happening under the surface. And I would say very, very quickly, there's a handful that are really, really big. Number one is we're in the middle of a shift from industry to information. And we're still feeling that. And you can go back to the Industrial Revolution back, you know, 100 or more years ago, actually more. And you can see how dramatic that shift was from agriculture to industry and how it changed everything.

Changed politics. It changed, you know, local and national realities, certainly the economy, certainly education. Family life was broken apart in new ways. It was just huge. Well, we're in the middle of another one of those. Wow. And it's from industry to information. And we've seen it and everything from the great resignation where a bunch of people quit because they could do other things, the gig economy, but also just, you know, misinformation.

And then you add AI to that mix, right? And so suddenly, what does it mean to find truth? How can we trust anyone? You know, that's just two things. Huge, huge questions that are. gosh, foundational for a civilization that are suddenly up for grabs. So that's one. The second one is the identity crisis. And now this is something that people have been predicting literally for decades with this move away from God as the world becomes more and more secular. The idea was that

then we would become more humanistic, but that's not what it delivered. What happened was is that human identity got detached from anything fixed. So now it's up in the air. And along with that has come a number of things. Number one is a whole bunch of identities, including the ever-growing acronym, but also this expressive individualism, this radical, like, you be you, follow your heart. And it's one thing when you put that in a Disney movie.

I was about to say Disney. Exactly. But it's another thing when it leaves the Disney movie and becomes part of lawmaking. Or it leaves, and it's how you actually think of yourself as employable or non-employable, right? I mean, this implication is, or let's just the most important thing for the well-being of children, according to every data source that we've ever had and nothing else comes close is families.

But if you start with a relational understanding of yourself, look inside, look inside, you know, follow your heart. How does that impact external relationships with spouses and children? Not well. That's the punchline. Yeah, I'll just say that. So those two are absolutely enormous. undercurrents right there. The third one that I'll say,

and we could hit a couple more, but I'll make it super quick, I think that along with the detachment of identity from God, there's also been a crisis of meaning. So we're really, and this is being reflected across the board, from deaths of despair, from addiction and overdoses and suicidality,

to just people going, I don't know what life's all about. And the institutions that used to give you kind of a proxy sense of identity, family, you know, national identity, all those things are up in the air right now because of global forces. So typically these undercurrents are like ideas that are enabled by, you know, technological or other developments, but they end up causing pretty massive shifts. Those are the three that I think are huge.

information, identity, meaning. And we could talk about a couple others, but I'm guessing we're getting close to being out of time. We are getting close to out of time. I want to ask one more question. And given that I do listen to a lot of Colson content, I know that we're not a political organization, right? Yes.

People don't believe that. But thank you. Say that out loud. We are not. I want to just like pre-politic this with that. We're pre-political. Pre-political. Okay, so I think I know the answer to my question already based off of your analysis of culture.

But in my political journalism class, semester we're debating, is culture downstream of politics or is politics downstream of culture? And I wanted to throw that question. The answer is yes. Oh, no. No, no. Now, listen, well, the answer is both. And I know it sounds like a cop out, but it's not a cop out at all.

It actually is both. Most of our kind of political state of things, like the candidates we have, that reflects a lot of realities that are already in the culture. Like I always pray for our nation and election. time, God, please don't give us what we deserve. Because our kind of government, that we get what we deserve. And I don't want what we deserve because what we deserve is bad. But politics also is human expression. That's what culture is made up of.

In other words, how we do politics, the innovation and how we talk about things and the issues that we think are most important or most important, then that gets into the cultural waters. I'd also say this, that a healthy culture has a lot more than just politics. And one of the marks of our culture right now is that so much is political. So it would be impossible really to say that politics is just downstream from culture. I think that's mostly the case, but it's more reciprocal than that. But I will say that one of the things that's very clear right now is when there's no room for non-political relationships, non-political conversations, non-political aspects of commerce,

non-political aspects of entertainment and media. When everything becomes politicized, that means we've shrunk out the middle. And societies are healthy if they have a robust middle. In other words, you have citizens, you have the state. You want a whole lot of stuff between citizens and the state. You want a whole lot of families, a whole lot of businesses, a whole lot of voluntary associations, a whole lot of leisure and activity and entertainment and innovation that takes place

that protects in a sense. It builds a buffer zone. If you can think about this idea of these mediating institutions is the official term for them. But they create this buffer zone and it protects citizens from the state having to do everything.

But when this becomes thinner and thinner and thinner, the middle, then the state has direct access to the individual. And of course, the individuals then become victims of that. And I think we, the sheer,

scope of politics societally right now is a sign that we need a bigger middle. Wow, that's fascinating. I wish I could ask a lot more questions. But we're out of time. There we go. I will ask just this to remind our audience, where can people go to get familiar with the Colson Center and just remind them about your next two speaking opportunities the next couple days.

Oh, okay. Well, when's this going to air? Is this going to go on today? No way. You guys are so great. That's good. That's good. That's tonight, Monday night.

All right. So I'm in Plaster Auditorium tonight with Equip Ministries, looking forward to talk about. We're actually going to talk about what it would take to launch a new sexual revolution. So that's kind of, I think, a really interesting opportunity and an example of a lot of stuff we're talking about. And then tomorrow, we're in Holland. Have you ever been over to Holland, Michigan? No, I haven't. Holland is one of the great towns in America. In fact, I just saw it on a list of some of the great towns in America. Really? Yeah, no, it's a beautiful little town over on the lake on the west coast of Michigan. And we'll be over there talking about digital liturgies.

with Samuel James. So that's where we're at. And if you want to follow the podcast, that's probably the easiest place to get connected. Look, you can go to breakpoint.org or you can just look up the breakpoint podcast wherever you download a podcast. Awesome.

John, thanks so much for coming. My pleasure. That was John Stone Street, president of the Colson Center for Christian World View. And I'm Michaela Estreuth. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.7 FM.