How Commentator Allie Beth Stuckey Forms Biblical Perspectives on Hot-Button Topics

Published: August 16, 2023

How Commentator Allie Beth Stuckey Forms Biblical Perspectives on Hot-Button Topics

By Movieguide® Contributor

“Relatable” podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey joined Kirk Cameron on TBN to discuss how Christians can form biblical perspectives on topics the Bible doesn’t specifically address.

“What kind of movies should I watch? What kind of music should I listen to? Who should I vote for when it comes to my school board or my governor’s office or the presidential election? Or what gender expression is really all about when we don’t find those terms in the Scriptures,” said Cameron, positing questions many believers face.

“Well we do find the basic principles of all of those things in Scripture,” Stuckey began. “So of course we’re not going to see the word ‘gender expression’ or ‘gender identity,’ for example, in the Bible.”

“But we do see in the first chapter of the Bible that God made them male and female, and so right there from the beginning, I can look at the creation order, and I can see that that creation order is reiterated throughout Scripture,” she explained.

“It’s repeated by Jesus himself in Matthew 19 when he says, ‘Haven’t you heard that a man shall leave his mother and father and the two shall become one flesh?’” she continued. “Of course, we see in the 10 Commandments that we are to honor our father and mother, and so even though we don’t see terms like ‘gender identity’ or ‘gay marriage’ or ‘transgender’ or things like that, we see what God says.”

Stuckey then explained how instead of looking to the Bible for clarity on these issues, society has taken Scripture out of context and distorted it to support current cultural trends.

“An error I see a lot of people make is that ‘Well Jesus never said this word,’ or ‘the Bible doesn’t say ‘abortion,’ so that means that it’s fine.’ It’s kind of an argument from absence—because the Bible doesn’t use our modern political or cultural terms that means that Jesus was fine with it,” she added.

“But we’re not supposed to read the Bible and say, ‘Well what does the Bible say specifically that we can’t do so we can see what we can get away with,’” Stuckey continued. “Rather, we look at the Bible and say, ‘How do we positively define these things?’”

“God positively defines marriages between a man and a woman, he positively defines gender and sex in really the same categories as male and female. So, I don’t need to look for the modern terminology in an ancient text. The principles are all there,” she concluded.

Stuckey frequently discusses what it looks like to hold a Christian perspective on cultural trends.

“[God] created the heavens and the earth therefore he the authority over all of it. Therefore, he and he alone says what is and what isn’t, what’s right and what’s wrong, when life begins, what’s justice, what’s not, what’s male, what’s female, what a marriage is and what it isn’t,” she said at AmFest in December 2022.

“What the world calls a political battle or a culture war, we simply call being a Christian,” she continued.

Dr. Ted Baehr, founder and publisher of Movieguide®, also uses biblical worldview to define what media is appropriate to consume. He teaches parents how to discern the mind of Christ in movies and television.

“A worldview should square with biblical precepts. If behaviors are exhibited that Our Heavenly Father finds objectionable, for example: trickery, witchcraft, sex outside of a heterosexual life-long commitment, or unnecessary violence, those behaviors should be recognized as a cause for suffering and be viewed with some possibility of redemptive love, to introduce the hope of salvation as much as possible. If simply condoned as normative, the message is clearly deviant from the Word of God,” Baehr says in his book, The Culture-Wise Family.

Baehr continues: “Every mass media product reflects a view or opinion about reality and the laws that govern it. HARRY POTTER posits an unpredictable and frightening world with no sure compass to use for navigation. Other media products, such as Sartre’s famous play NO EXIT, take an existentialist perspective that you cannot find answers, so life is essentially meaningless. Many media products have an evolutionary view, which means that there is no divine plan governing creation, nothing is certain and everything is ultimately pointless. Thus, you need to understand the cosmology of a media product to make discerning entertainment choices.”