There is a phenomenon known as Stockholm syndrome, which describes situations where a captive forms a positive bond with their captor. Some have drawn the connection to the Church, as Christian leaders have become increasingly captivated by secular worldviews.
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Dr. John West, Vice President of the Discovery Institute, to discuss his new book Stockholm Syndrome Christianity and how the Church is being held captive by secular culture.
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Family Policy Matters
Stockholm Syndrome in the Church (with Dr. John West)
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Conservatives are often found bemoaning the state of our culture and how far we’ve strayed from biblical values. But our guest today says the church and Christian leaders may have been complicit in the fall Dr John West is vice president of Discovery Institute, and he’s just written a new book entitled Stockholm Syndrome Christianity: Why Christian Leaders are Failing, and What We Can Do About It. Well, what is Stockholm Syndrome? Well, the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines it as quote, the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with his or her captor. Is it possible that influential Christian leaders are unwittingly siding with anti-Christians on everything from biblical authority and science to sex, race, and religious liberty? And if so, what are we to do? Dr John West, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
JOHN WEST: Traci, thanks for having me.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: First of all, let’s just talk about why you define anti-Christian influencers in our culture as captors.
JOHN WEST: If you look at the elite, whether it be in government or arts and entertainment, certainly in the news media and in academia, these people drive our culture, and a lot of them are really hostile to a Christian worldview. So, if you are a Christian who is especially going into one of those culture forming areas of our culture, like politics or law or entertainment or news media, you spend a lot of your time training under people who really, they may be personally nice people, but who really are hostile to a Christian worldview. If you go to graduate school, you may be training under people who fundamentally have views contrary to the Bible or a biblical worldview. And so, I think that a lot of Christians spend a lot of time, in essence, captive to either surrounding people who they work with, or, like I said, in college and grad school. And then for some Christians, that rubs off, and you end up adopting the assumptions of those people that you’re studying under your fellow workers and your bosses, and you sometimes don’t even know it, but you end up basically adopting their worldview.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: You mentioned in your book crusading secularists. Is that what you’re talking about here, and are they actually on a crusade?
JOHN WEST: I think you could look around whether it be, say, in science, someone like Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, who argued in a lot of popular books that Darwinian biology means we should support atheism. So that’s an example of a crusading secularist. In our own United States, we have a biology professor Jerry Coyne at University of Chicago who makes the same arguments. You have groups like Planned Parenthood who are certainly pushing abortion and also, really sex without any sort of moral restrictions. You have groups like the ACLU who are promoting similar things. So, I think there are a lot of crusading secularists.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So why so hostile, do you think? Why can’t we just co-exist, as I see on bumper stickers?
JOHN WEST: Again, I think in some of these cases, we’re not talking about personal hostility. They may be nice to you personally, but if your worldview is that there is no God or the product of blind, purposeless processes, and that say the time honored morals that you find in the Bible and actually in many other cultures, are just like fairy tales, then when the rubber meets the road, when you’re trying to actually form a society or raise your kids, or, you know, set standards that’s going to come into conflict. And so, I think, you know, a lot of people have this idea that they don’t like God or traditional standards because that hems them in, and they want absolute freedom to do whatever, even to their own destruction, or their kids own destruction. And we’re seeing this now, say, in the gender ideology area, where, you know, if you don’t like your biology, you simply can remake it. Well, of course, you can’t. And of course, when this is put on kids, you’re actually engaging in child abuse, really horrific behavior. You know, the Bible talks about, you know, out of our heart is where we speak. And so, our fundamental first principles really do impact how we act and what we think is good.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, let’s talk about these Christian leaders. First of all, why do you suppose that they have succumbed to this secularism? Are they just trying to get along? What’s the reasoning here?
JOHN WEST: I think it is multifaceted. Part of it is they want to get along. Part of it is, like I said, if they’ve spent their life studying under or surrounded by people who don’t share their Christian worldview, it could end up rubbing off. And so, they actually think that it’s true. And so, they begin to doubt some of their fundamental beliefs, or think that, say, a biblical view of sexuality, they feel embarrassed by it, and they start to adopt some of the point of view of the people around them that well, this is just intolerant, or this doesn’t really fit our biology, or, again, they’re listening too much to the people around them. So, part of it wants to be getting accepted, but part of it is they actually end up adopting that worldview. And we can talk about some specifics.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, well, let’s do that. What are some specific ways that you’ve seen Christian leaders are embracing some of the secularism?
JOHN WEST: Well, let’s talk about probably the leading evangelical Christian Scientist in America, Francis Collins, who was actually the most powerful scientist in America for more than a decade. He led something called the NIH, the National Institutes of Health. And I have no doubt that Francis Collins is a personally devout he believes in Jesus, but if you actually looked at how he ran his government agency, I think people ought to be troubled. So, for example, he spent millions of our tax dollars to harvest baby parts from aborted babies, from six weeks to 42 weeks to create a nationwide tissue bank for research using aborted baby parts. And again to 42 weeks, you’re talking about at term. That’s just infanticide. And yet this was our leading evangelical Christian Scientist who actually embraced this. He also pledged that he was an ally and advocate, hose were his terms, of the LGBTQIA movement, and spent millions of more of our tax dollars to fund doctors and hospitals that were engaged in gender reassignment surgery, kids filled with puberty blockers. And again, this wasn’t done by a secularist or an atheist. It was done by a committed Christian. And so, I think that’s an example of what I’m talking about, of you know, a personally devout Christian who is, in fact, championing secular beliefs that are actually quite destructive.
But he’s not the only one. I mean, mega church pastors like Andy Stanley from Georgia, one of the leading pastors in the nation, who trains thousands of other pastors. He wrote a book basically trashing the Old Testament, saying that it was, in his words, the obsolete testament, and that we shouldn’t really follow it. And you know, it’s pretty clear he’s embarrassed by it. Well, when you have your leading pastors actually embarrassed by the Bible. Houston, we have a problem. It’s not just with the secularists and atheists out there. It’s in the Christian community. If we don’t get our own act together, how can we expect the culture to be any better than we are ourselves?
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, so talk a little bit about that. How do we get our act together? How do we address some of these Christian leaders that we’re seeing failing as you have put it, and how do we move forward from here?
JOHN WEST: First of all, we need to make sure we know what’s true, and then we can build on that. But you know, I think it depends on where you are. If you’re a parent, if you’re a member of a church, you first should be looking to do a how are you exercising your gifts and your responsibilities? For example, if you’re a parent who is really raising your kids? I know most Christians would say, Well, of course, I’m raising my kids. But is that really the case, or are you farming out the raising of your children to public schools, to social media, to Hollywood, you name it. You know who really is raising your kids? And I think a lot of parents basically allow their culture to raise their kids and then they don’t understand why they wake up and their kids are in middle school, let alone high school, and they don’t recognize them. So, I think first of all, you need to take control of the upbringing of your kids, and that includes their education. That includes either homeschooling or private education, or if you’re going to send your kids to public schools, you need to supplement and help them wisely go through public schools so that they can know what to question and have what one of my friends used to call a baloney detector to detect the sort of the things that they’re getting wrong there.
The other thing is, more generally, whether you are a parent or not, how are you stewarding your own resources? Are you going to a biblical church, or I’ve known people who have good views, but say their pastor goes off the deep end and embraces gay marriage, and they don’t agree with that, but they stay at the church. They continue to donate to the church because of social reasons. Well, what are you partnering with? Make sure that, for example, where are you giving your money? I’ve known there are many good Christian schools and good Christian universities, but there are many that have fallen away, and I’ve known people who continue to donate, say, to a Christian university where they graduated from the past when it was good. They know it’s fallen away, but they continue to write a check each year to promote it, even though it’s really not a solid Christian institution anymore. So, you know, I think people need to evaluate what am I doing? It’s not that God is asking you to do everything, but in the areas in which he’s given you responsibilities, with your friends, with your children, with your nieces and nephews, with your fellow congregation members, are you being a good example? Are you really grounded in the truth, or are you facilitating really the Stockholm Syndrome Christianity?
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. Boy, I really appreciate that comment in particular there at the end about how we can’t do everything. North Carolina Family Policy Council, of course, is a public policy advocacy organization, and we rely on people out there to just do that small thing that they see in front of their face. And so, thank you very much for making that point so well. So, talk about what it means to our culture if the church continues down this road towards secularization.
JOHN WEST: The great story of Western civilization with the rise of Christianity was just how influential a truly biblical church is. And I don’t think people really quite understand that. In the ancient world, for example, just in the area of treating the old and elderly and others really, in the Greco Roman world, if you were getting sick, you’re probably going to be dead. And they wanted you to be dead. The rise of hospitals and things like that came out of a Christian worldview. The rise of universities came out of a Christian worldview. The rise of modern science came out of a Christian worldview. So the Biblical Christianity has offered so much human rights, human dignity, things we take for granted today as if they could flourish anywhere. Well, they can’t, and so let’s turn to the other side. If the church is abandoning a truly biblical worldview and those things, then that light that the church has provided for human rights, for human dignity, for caring for people who are in hard situations, for mercy and compassion, that goes down the drain too. And I think that if you look around in our culture, what’s happening in our cities. I work in the Seattle area, and just the tremendous number of broken lives that we’re experiencing, the explosion of homelessness, which largely is related to substance abuse and mental illness, and it’s just tragic. And so, I think that Christians need to understand that this is like non-negotiable. If you want a healthy culture, you need a healthy church that stands for the truth, because if it just becomes like the world, you’re just rubber stamping the going into the sewer. And so, the great news is that if we’re faithful, God is definitely faithful to us beyond we can ever hope or imagine that that provides a light and that we can have a positive, constructive culture. But if we abandon what we know to be true and sort of hide our light under the bushel, as it talks about in the Bible, then how can we expect the culture to be better than what we’re willing to do ourselves?
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: What would you like the result to be for readers who read your book, and then why do you recommend that they follow up with Francis Schaeffer’s book, The Mark of the Christian?
JOHN WEST: My goal in writing the book was not just to indict the problem, it was to actually show forth some solutions. And so, in one of the chapters, I actually give like 21 things people can do, whether they’re parents or pastors, church board members, school board members, teachers, just ordinary people. What can you do? So, I hope that they’ll read that and come up with something that they can do in their own lives. Again, things that they’re already called to do, but to be light in our culture. One reason why I suggest that people follow up with Francis Schaeffer’s book, The Mark of a Christian, is it can be hard in the face of evil to stay loving and to really follow Christ. And so, it’s easy to become bitter. It’s easy to become angry in a very ungodly way. And I think Francis Schaeffer, in my own life, was really a voice in his own lifetime for truth. Yet he really emphasized the need to treat other people with love and compassionately. And so, I think it, for me personally, and for when I was a college professor, I would assign this to my students too, that book, The Mark of a Christian, was always a great anchor in as we’re going out and standing for truth and trying to do good things that we don’t demonize other people, that we try to do it in love. And so, it’s sort of a great anchor to remind me of things. And so, I just thought that I would recommend it to others.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right. Well, we’re about out of time before we go, John West, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your good work? And of course, find your new book, Stockholm Syndrome Christianity: Why Christian Leaders are Failing, and What We Can Do About It?
JOHN WEST: The easiest place is StockholmSyndromeChristianity.com that’s StockholmSyndromeChristianity.com. At that website, there are lots of free resources, like, if you’re considering a Christian college and don’t know, well, how do I get a good one? I have 10 questions you can ask as a parent, when trying to consider a Christian college that are really practical questions you can ask that will help you give you guidance.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right. Well, Dr John West, Vice President of Discovery Institute, thank you so much for being with us on Family Policy Matters.
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