John Stonestreet

Last week, democratic Senator Tim Kaine made this bold statement during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing:

“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.” 

It’s one thing when a progressive media figure says something like this. For example, back in 2024, Politico’s Heidi Przybyla warned that believing human rights “don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God,” makes one a Christian nationalist! Even so, it’s another thing altogether when a sitting U.S. Senator and former vice-presidential candidate claims that this fundamental Christian belief is indistinguishable from Islamic fundamentalists.  

Kaine’s comments were quickly condemned by fellow Senators and religious commentators for, among other things, rejecting the words of the Declaration of Independence. The Senator also failed to realize that his own belief, that rights come from government, is what every communist, fascist, and totalitarian regime in history believed. Still, the first part of the Senator’s claim is not fully wrong.  

The Mullahs in Iran, like all committed Muslims, believe that human rights come from God. So do Christians. But that is where the similarities end. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has lived in cultures rooted in both Islamic and Christian notions of human rights, “You don’t have to imagine how life would be under Islam. … All you have to do is go to any of these places that Western Civilization has barely touched, and the education you’ll get is much better than Harvard.” 

In fact, though Muslims and Christians agree that our rights come from God, they hold widely diverging views about what those rights are, how those rights should be understood, and how the government should recognize and enforce human rights. That’s because Muslims and Christians hold fundamentally different and conflicting ideas about who God is and who humans are. 

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali also says the God of Islam reveals only his will and demands our submission to it. The true God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ and offers freedom. The Christian God created humans in His own image. He “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, [so] that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” Not only does God want to be known, He made humans in such a way as to know Him. Islam refers to God as love but then reveals him to be vindictive and cruel.  

According to Islam, humans have not fallen. According to Christianity, humans are sinful, having inherited a fallen nature from our first parents. If humans are inherently ordered toward sin and evil, then a government run by humans will be prone to abuse its citizens. Thus, it must be ordered toward preserving those rights which God has ordained. In an Islamic society, humans are not seen as bearing God’s image and need only be forced into submission by the state, which is inseparable from the religion.

And so, in practice, Islam looks far more like the totalitarian governments that think of human rights like Senator Kaine does. If humans do not have intrinsic dignity as individuals, individuals must be, at times, sacrificed on the altar of the state or the collective. In just the 20th century alone, Joseph Stalin oversaw the executions of 800,000 perceived political opponents in the Soviet Union, and many put the overall death toll of his policies at 20 million. In China under Mao Zedong, 15 to 45 million people were slaughtered. Cambodia under Pol Pot and Germany must also be put on this same list. Whenever and wherever human rights are attributed to the government, they are trampled. As Chuck Colson often said, “If government thinks they can grant rights, then they can also take them away.”  

The very idea that humans have rights that transcend class and sex, tribe and nation, to the very individual, has had a singular source in history. In his book, A Brief History of Thought, the atheist French philosopher Luc Ferry identified that source:  

“Christianity was to introduce the notion that humans were equal in dignity, an unprecedented idea at the time and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”

In recent months, at two synods for different diocese of the Anglican Church of North America, I encountered a significant number of impressive young men, mostly in their twenties. In one case, they humbly served the clergy and leadership throughout the multi-day proceedings. In the other, they attended a local parish but chose to join and stay for the entirety of an exceptionally long ordination service. I see something similar at my church, where there is often a row of single, young men, faithful, spiritually hungry, and interested in cultivating a deep, personal faith. I should note, that there is no corresponding row of young women, nor did I see similar numbers of young women at either of the aforementioned synods. 

Though these stories are anecdotal, there is growing evidence of a “quiet revival” of Christian belief among Gen Z men. The New York Times reported last fall that, for the first time in American history, men now outnumber women in churches. The trend is especially pronounced among twenty-somethings. Last year, a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 39% of Gen Z women identify as religiously unaffiliated, compared with just 31% of men. Among white evangelicals, young men had begun showing significantly more religiosity than women.

Newer data from the U.K. shows a surprising reawakening across the pond, where church attendance overall has long been much lower than in the U.S. In April, the Bible Society reported that church decline in England and Wales “has not only stopped, but the Church is growing, as Gen Z leads an exciting turnaround in church attendance.”  

This turnaround happened in a short time. In 2018, only 4% of 18– to 24-year-olds in the U.K. attended church regularly. By last year, that number had quadrupled. Among 25– to 34-year-olds, attendance more than tripled, raising the overall rate from 8% to 12% of the population. Though still a low number, it represents a historic reversal of the country’s century-long de-churching. Like in the U.S., young men in the U.K. are leading the return to church. Among the 18 to 24 age group in the Bible Society survey, 21% of men attended at least once a month, compared with just 12% of women the same age. 

As statistician Ryan Burge wrote on X, “It seems very clear now that men are more likely to be regular church attenders than women. And those gaps are the largest among the youngest adults.” He also pointed out that these numbers are not due primarily to immigration, as the white-only sample showed the same trends. 

Why are young men returning to church? And why aren’t young women joining them? The Times pointed to a shift in cultural and political attitudes among men that seems to correspond with their search for traditional faith. As young women have skewed increasingly progressive, young men are now much more likely to call themselves politically conservative. In fact, the partisan gap between men and women has doubled in the past 25 years. Surprisingly, young men are also more likely than young women to say they want to have children someday.  

One pastor told The Times that young men “are looking for leadership, they’re looking for clarity, they’re looking for meaning.” Another college minister at the University of California-Irvine suggested that religion is perceived as traditional, and Christianity in particular as the “one institution that isn’t formally skeptical of [young men] as a class.”  

This trend also corresponds to what Justin Brierly has called the “Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God” among high-profile secular thinkers. It’s a reminder that we can’t predict where the Spirit will blow, that narratives of inevitable religious decline are far from certain, and that we still live in the same world where the Great Awakenings occurred, the Wesley brothers, Whitefield and Spurgeon preached, and where St. Peter saw 3,000 converted in a day. It’s also a reminder that the same God they all served is at work in the world. 

Still, the growing disparity between men and women poses significant challenges. The reversal in the historic tendency of church to be mostly female is proof of how our culture has lied to young women. And it won’t help the decline of marriage or birth dearth much either. 

It’s also possible that some young men are returning to church for the wrong reasons. They still need to hear Christianity taught accurately and in its entirety. Church should not be sold to them as a “based” social club, but as a place that belongs to the God of the universe, and the faith as a way of seeing all of life and reality in surrender to Christ’s loving lordship.   

Even as we praise God for this “quiet revival,” we should ask how we can fan the flames of belief in Gen Z and make disciples rather than just cultural converts. God is up to something. We should be eager to play our part in His providential movement in young hearts.

Recently, Time magazine announced that the biotechnology company Colossal has resurrected the dire wolf, a species that went extinct thousands of years ago. “This is Remus,” read the caption over a photo of a robust-looking white wolf. “He’s a dire wolf. The first to exist in over 10,000 years.” According to Colossal, this is a first step to resurrecting other long-extinct animals, like the woolly mammoth. 

As it turns out, the headline is an exaggeration. Remus, his brother Romulus, and their sister Khaleesi contain no DNA from the dire wolf. Rather, they are modern gray wolves with genes tweaked by the company to mirror the DNA of the dire wolf. And they were more than likely engineered to look like the fictional giant wolves from HBO’s Game of Thrones.

The most common comment on the Time story was some variation of the sentiment, “I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well.” Most people likely had in mind Jurassic Park, in which a company uses genetic technology to bring back dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t end well. In fact, the seventh installment of the franchise will release this summer, each containing the same message as the 1993 original: Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. 

Dozens of movies reflect the dangers of genetic tinkering, human reengineering, and other forms of scientific hubris. From The Island of Dr. Moreau to Gattaca to Planet of the Apes to The Island, not to mention about half of all zombie movies ever made, we’ve been thoroughly warned about the illusion of human control over nature.  

Maybe this is just the story of directors sprucing up a plot, or perhaps a surprising amount of wisdom in the arts has been overlooked or ignored by scientists and tech pioneers. A popular meme from Twitter quotes an imaginary science fiction author saying, “In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale,” immediately followed by a tech company exec announcing: “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.” Even more, there is a strange disconnect between pop culture’s ability to anticipate the negative consequences of our scientific advances and our overall willingness to volunteer as guinea pigs.  

This is as true for Artificial Intelligence as for medical technology. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to A.I. to Terminator to I, Robot, to Avengers: Age of Ultron, we’ve been warned about AI. Wall-E warned how we’d lose our humanity if we relied on technology to solve all our problems. Ready Player One warned against getting lost in virtual reality. Children of Men depicted what would happen if society stopped having enough babies. Minority Report questioned the justice of a surveillance state.  

What all these movies have in common is that their warning has been ignored in the real world. People will jokingly say, “I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well,” but we continue to adopt every new technology that promises comfort, convenience, and control without a serious discussion about purpose or boundaries.  

Even when the warnings aren’t exactly accurate or even realistic, these films often raise questions worth asking. And yet, our curiosity wanes once the credits roll. As in the Terminator movies, artificial intelligence continues to gobble up vast areas of life and human creativity without much protest. And despite all the Jurassic Park references, Colossal’s wolves will likely be the first of many bioengineering projects that prioritize profit and publicity over the welfare of animals or humans.  

You won’t hear me say this often, but it’s time to pay closer attention to Hollywood. Despite the garbage that comes from the entertainment industry, there’s a willingness to question “progress” that is lacking at MIT, medical labs, and Silicon Valley. 

C.S. Lewis wrote that reason is the organ of understanding, and imagination is the organ of meaning. We need both, which is why we should listen when someone asks, even in film, “What could go wrong?” Asking whether we should do something is a skill that should not be extinct.