The Case for Truth
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John Stonestreet:
This is a job that, if you’re somebody who wants to be a detective, you got to start off the hard way. I was raised in a law enforcement family. My dad was a cop. He was also at Torrance. He hired on in ’61. I was born in his academy. My son, Jimmy, was born in my academy. So it’s multi-generational.
When I was in high school, I thought I would actually do this for a living, but I got distracted for a number of years, spent some time studying the arts. I have a bachelor’s degree in design. I have a master’s degree in architecture from UCLA. And I graduated from UCLA on a Sunday. I was in the police academy the very next day. And I have been there ever since. I just knew that when I was in grad school, that although we use a lot of art in what we do in jury trials, and you’re going to see the presentations that we do today are driven by media.
But for the most part, I knew I couldn’t do that for a living. I was already married. I was with my wife and I thought, “That’s not a job for us.” So I went back to law enforcement. Now, in law enforcement, you got to pay your dues. I spent time in patrol, a lot of years in patrol. And then I came out and did two years in gangs.
This is my son, Jimmy, here. This blonde haired kid. David’s a med student at USC. So we’re divided. Okay. Our house is divided. We have two of us that went to UCLA. Jimmy went to UCLA also, but David’s at SC. So he’s the trader in the family. Now, after just a couple of years working gangs, I actually spent four years working under cover. We were doing big, dope deals, big Colombian dope deals, which are a major kilo. Oh, I did three years in SWAT too. I have to mention that. Three years in SWAT. That’s fun by the way, very fun.
But we did these big dope deals where we were getting a bunch of kilos. And I didn’t cut my hair for four years. Why cut your hair if you don’t have to? Right. Because you have to have this stupid haircut your entire career, except for those four years. And after that, I when right to investigations and I was working in a robbery homicide.
Most of that time, I was not a Christian. And I was the kind of atheist that was really pretty obstinate. And I think I was a pretty well-educated atheist. I mean, I had a reasons why I rejected God’s existence. If you’re going to come up against atheist objections, I’m pretty sure I held them in one fashion or another when I was an atheist.
And I was pretty thoughtful about my atheism. I know I wasn’t raised in a Christian family, I don’t have Christians in my family. My dad’s still an atheist, but I raised my family. I got saved when my kids were pretty young. So they don’t remember a time when I wasn’t a Christian. So that was good for them.
We do these cases that are high profile cases because they’re cold cases. They’re only murders. There are no cold cases that are anything other than murder. Murder has no statute of limitations. You can do a murder and I come after you years later. You do a robbery, after a certain number of years, I can’t come after you. There’s a limitation on how long I can prosecute a robbery. But a murder, I can go after those forever.
As a matter of fact, right now, I’m in trial. We’re three weeks in. We started three weeks ago. I’m on the stand on Monday. I had to get back, tomorrow I fly back to Los Angeles county. And that’s a case that from 1979. And these are all cases that have been covered by the media. We’ve been on Dateline three times. This case we’re doing right now is also a Dateline case. They’re in there filming every day.
If you do well, you get to do well on national TV. If you lose, you get to lose on national TV. I don’t want to do the interview as the loser. Okay. Trust me. So I’m hoping that we’re going to do well on this case as well. But now we’re going to take some of those techniques that we learned doing cold cases, and we’re going to apply them to the Christian worldview.
There are some skillsets that you can actually employ as a Christian to determine whether or not this is even true. And that’s what we’re going to do today. Make sense? I’m going to give you some skills to work with, and then we’re going to make the case. Today, I still work our agency. I’m the chaplain now. Now, I get to put gold crosses on my lapel and nobody can say anything about it. I get to wear those all the time.
This is my son, Jim. He is now a police officer. We’re like the George Foreman of law enforcement. Do you know who George Foreman is? He’s got six kids. Do you okay and what his six boys’ names are? George Foreman. That’s right George 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and six. We’re the same way. Three guys named Jim Wallace. We’ve all done the same job. For the last 53 years, if you call the Torrance Police Department and ask for Detective Jim Wallace, someone’s been there to answer the phone. And for the next 30 years, this knucklehead here will be there. He’s also on our color guard. So we get to hang out a lot.
Now, I think that we have all been doing this job the exact same way. We’ve carried the same weapons. We’ve done the same kinds of interviews. We’ve employed the same kinds of techniques. All three of us, going back 53 years. And I think we can turn a corner now and apply these techniques to the Christian worldview. So I’m going to try to give you basically three generations of information.
I want to start off by showing you the problem we’re facing with young people in the years they attend college. Christians who attend college leave Christianity in large numbers. It’s pretty ugly. I used to everybody stand up and I stood up and I’m going to draw something on the wall for you. There’s a reason why the numbers are as bad as they are. And they are bad. Disgustingly bad.
Most young Christians, most young Christians will step away from the church in their college years. Some will come back, but most will step away. And I don’t care who’s doing the survey, the numbers look bad. They look anywhere from say it’s 55 to 80% of Christians who claim to be Christians in their freshman year in college, will no longer claim to be Christians by their senior year in college.
And I don’t care if it’s Baptists, if it’s Lutherans, if it’s Assembly of God, I don’t care who is doing the survey. If it’s Gallup or Barna, if it’s the secularists who were doing the surveys, it all looks the same. It’s bad. Why is it happening? That’s the problem, really. And I want to talk about that a little bit.
I think there’s a simple math to the problem we’re seeing on college campuses and I’ll draw it on this whiteboard for you. Okay. Here’s the first part of the equation. We’re going to add three things. The first thing we’re going to add is that students who we send to university, Christian students we send, are really poorly prepared. So we have poorly prepared students.
In other words, if I was to ask you, why are you a Christian? Now this is an unusual group because you’ve already decided to spend two weeks at Summit and you’re at the end of your first week. I get it. You guys are probably not in this group. I hope not. But if I ask them, I go all over the country, speaking at churches and conferences and at university campuses. I’m in Holler State next month.
And I can tell you, if you ask Christians, why are you a Christian? You know what you hear? And it’s the same every time. I can tell you right now what you’re going to hear? “Well, I was raised in the church. I’ve always been a Christian. Well, I pray to God and God answers my prayers. I have a sense that God is with me. I have a deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I know that Jesus has changed my life. I had a transformational experience.”
Those are all good answers. My dad remarried. He’s an atheist still. But his second wife, who has been with him for about 45 years, she’s a Mormon. And I have six brothers and sisters all raised LDS. I spent a lot of time in wards growing up. Probably why I was an atheist for as long as I was. But do you know, my Mormon friends and family, those are their answers. They give me the exact same answers. The same answers that most Christians give.
Now, none of us as Christians believe that Mormonism is true. So shouldn’t our answer to that question be different, a little different? Can it really be, “I was raised in the church. I have a sense that it’s true. I’ve experienced God.” They all say that. How about, I know it’s evidentially true, because they can’t say that. We have to be ready to be able to answer this question. We have to be better prepared. And right now, students are not well-prepared. That’s the first thing.
Second thing. Aggressive antagonistic campuses. Let’s face it. Most college campuses are not in favor of Christianity anymore. They’re not. If you’re unprepared and then you’ve got college professors and college groups now that are ready to kick your butt, be ready to have your butt kicked. That’s what’s going to happen. You’re not prepared. You don’t go into a fight without training, but you’re willing to go to college without training. That’s just called stupid.
There’s a third thing though, that most of us leave out. And my friend Brett Kunkle, who teaches here also. I don’t think he’s in your session this session. You guys know who Brett Kunkle is though, right? He’s always teasing me about my age. This isn’t even my natural hair color. This is a weave I put in to make me look older. You know that, right? Stupid guy.
Oh, look at that. Doesn’t even work. There’s a third thing that you can’t see. And you’re never going to know because I can’t teach it to you because I don’t have a pen. I’ll have to do it in black. There’s a third thing. This is the thing that really is the problem because all of us have it. You have basically innately fallen humans as students. This is the thing no one wants to talk about, but it’s huge. You have, we’re unprepared. Right. Stepping into hostile territory. And we have a predisposition as fallen humans to chase our desires anyway.
Trust me. If you can give me a worldview that explains how we got here. And it has its own creation story, but it allows me to sleep with my girlfriend without feeling bad about it, I’m gone. I’m in that worldview. So if you’re willing to give a student an antagonistic environment, an alternate worldview that allows them to chase their passions, most of us end up over here. And most Christians end up over there. This is what the statistics show.
Let’s face it. We’re all of us, we’re innately fallen to begin with. We all want to chase our passions and our desires, but this is where we get an excuse to do that. And what do you think is going to happen when those things come together? Honestly, what do you expect to happen? That’s what happens. See the problem?
Now, it’s not just students that have a problem in the church in this regard. Because when I ask this question of why you’re a Christian, adults are just as bad. So while students are at least bold enough to leave, adults don’t leave. Adults just sit there, empathetically. We’re not willing to engage it really because we’re not really all that convinced. It’s true for me, but it’s not really true. And if that’s the case, why should I get all excited about this?
Do you see the problem? The problem is true for both of us. Students are leaving. Adults are staying with apathy. We have to move the church in a new direction. That’s why we have something like Summit to begin with. You are the church. You’re the most important demographic in the church. You’re the future. I’m a was. You’re an is. That’s the difference.
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