Breakpoint

Recently the University of Washington published research into whether hormones and puberty blockers improve the mental health of kids with gender dysphoria. According to the PR team for the university, pretty much every media outlet that covered the study, and the study’s authors themselves, the answer was yes.  Except it wasn’t. The numbers actually revealed no difference between kids’ mental health before taking hormones and after a year of the treatment. At both moments in time, kids were suffering from dramatic mental health problems. If anything, the study suggested that kids who did not start taking the medications got a little worse.  The university refused to officially respond when an independent journalist challenged their conclusions—though the study’s authors admitted their findings had been misrepresented. Internal emails showed the university’s communications team wasn’t concerned the story was not accurate. They liked that it was popular.  Among the casualties of the politicizing of scientific research is public trust in our institutions. Still, the most vulnerable casualties are the kids. 

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,” wrote Karl Marx, “…the opium of the people.” Decades of often painful historical experience has proven his observation both right and wrong. Believing in God does ease pain and suffering of faithful followers, but he was wrong in thinking that religion, especially Christianity, leaves them with nowhere else to go from there.   A recent article in The Economist put it this way: “Religious belief really does seem to draw the sting of poverty.” Although there is a correlation between poverty and decreased mental health, the article highlighted German sociologist Dr. Jana Berkessel’s recent findings that religion significantly mitigates this effect.   A variety of similar studies confirm this. Regular attendance at religious services consistently correlates with longer life spans, stronger immune systems, and lower blood pressure, as well as decreased anxiety, depression, and suicide. Kids raised in religious households have a lower incidence of drug addiction, delinquency, and incarceration. They’re more likely to graduate high school. In short, the nearly unanimous scientific consensus is that religious belief is good for you.   Of course, Marx’s point was that these benefits only serve to keep people content in their chains and to keep them distracted so much by the next world that they do nothing to change this one. Many critics today take the critique even further. Religion, especially Christianity, has not only been used to pacify people in their oppression but is the very source of it.  Of course, the charge that Christianity has been co-opted, corrupted, and weaponized to justify all kinds of abuse, conquest, and enslavement, is undeniable. At the same time, it’s also undeniable that Christianity has been a global force for the kinds of goods now so pervasive, it’s hard to even imagine the world without them. Many of the rights and principles we consider to be naturally occurring features of the world only came to be by the influence of Christianity.  In the ancient pagan world, violence, rape, infant exposure, and prostitution were rules, not exceptions. Almost immediately, Christianity began to revolutionize pagan ethics, particularly in its view of the poor and the outcast. Roman Emperor Julian famously wrote that when the “impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”   To a world with no reason to believe in the equality of all people, Christianity taught that “there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.” This belief was grounded in the Christian view of the human person, which had no parallel in the ancient world and which created an explosion of literacy, social mobility, and human rights that we now take for granted in the modern world.   Christianity’s unique contributions in humanizing the modern world are yet another reason to not simply lump all “religious beliefs” into the one blanket category. All religions are simply not the same, not in substance nor impact.   Economist Robin Grier, for example, conducted a cross-national survey of 63 formerly European colonies. She found that, across the board, Protestant Christianity, in particular, was “positively and significantly correlated with real GDP growth,” and that “the level of Protestantism is significantly related to real per capita income levels.” A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper found that only certain religious beliefs—notably beliefs about heaven, hell, and an afterlife—are linked with economic growth. In other words, it’s not just about having a “religion,” but about what your religion teaches.   Consider Africa. A recent paper from NBER analyzed educational outcomes among religious children. Though Africa is becoming increasingly religious across the board, the paper found that in many countries, “primary school completion for Christians was more than double that of Muslims or Africans adhering to local religions.” Christian communities far outpace others when it comes to intergenerational educational growth.   Writing in 1843, Karl Marx couldn’t have anticipated how thoroughly science would analyze his claims about religion. He’d likely have been among the modern theorists surprised that the world is becoming more religious, not less. As one writer with The Brookings Institution put it, “While weak state structures collapse and aid agencies switch priorities, one group of actors persist against all odds: religious institutions.”   Of course, this isn’t why anyone should believe the truth claims of Christianity. They should be believed if they are true. At the same time, the fact that Christian belief has been an educational, social, and economic ladder for millions suggests these beliefs ought to be taken seriously. 

Hope Resource Center, a Christian crisis pregnancy center in Knoxville, Tennessee, offers free pregnancy tests, well-women exams, STD testing, and ultrasounds. If you search for Hope Resource Center on Yelp, a “consumer notice” pops up with a warning: “Crisis Pregnancy Centers typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.”   Last week, Yelp announced that these notices will appear at the top of listings for every crisis pregnancy center—even when they don’t apply.  If Yelp truly were worried about women’s access to “real” medical care during pregnancy, they’d put a consumer notice above every Planned Parenthood listing. A few years ago, Live Action found that fewer than 5% of Planned Parenthood facilities in the country actually offer prenatal care, even though Planned Parenthood openly pretends and advertises otherwise.  It’s these practices by Planned Parenthood that make crisis pregnancy centers so necessary in the first place. Women—especially those in crisis pregnancies—deserve accurate information and actual care, which they can’t find from Planned Parenthood or, for that matter, on Yelp. 

The Institute for Family Studies has published a list of legal and policy recommendations to protect teens from the dangers of social media. Among the recommendations are age-verification laws, parental consent requirements, and shutting down social media platforms at night for teens. Other nations have already attempted to restrict young people’s access to technology. For example, a couple of years ago, France banned cell phone use in schools up to age 15.   Monitoring teens’ engagement with social media should be a no-brainer. Anyone still not convinced that something needs to be done need only consider the teens on TikTok exhibiting Tourette-like tics, not to mention the rapid onset gender dysphoria crisis initiated within social media communities.   However, the fact that government may now be the last line of defense in providing some boundaries for social media means that the other lines have failed. Most notably, families have failed to protect children from that which threatens them the most.  This is a modern-day application of one of the most helpful ideas of Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper, who lived at the turn of the 20th century. Kuyper has jokingly been called the Colson Center’s “patron saint.” Near the end of his life, Chuck Colson described how influential Kuyper’s thought was to his own, specifically in understanding how Christians were called to interact with and influence the culture around them.   Christians could best influence society, according to Kuyper, through the sphere of our family, the basic building block of society. During his lifetime, Kuyper worked across various spheres of culture, not only writing as a theologian but founding a university, leading a newspaper, and eventually becoming prime minister. Throughout his various careers, Kuyper proposed and championed a concept called “sphere sovereignty.”   “Spheres,” as Kuyper understood them, are the social groupings, or domains, that keep society running. He saw them as interlocking “cogs” that work together. In his message at the inauguration of the Free University in the Netherlands, he explained that each sphere—such as science, art, business, government, and family—has “its own law of life” and “its own head” or leadership. Ultimately, Christ is sovereign over all of life. His most famous quote is, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human life of which Christ, Who is Sovereign of all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”  It is Christ who moves “the wheels to turn as they are destined to turn. Not to oppress life nor to bind freedom, but to make possible a free exercise of life for and in each of these spheres, is not this a beckoning ideal for every noble State Sovereign? [or leader].”  His idea, that the duty of the head of a state is to facilitate “free exercise of life,” reveals that, in many ways, Kuyper lived in a time period similar to ours—a time when people were calling for revolution. Kuyper was so uncomfortable with this lawless approach that he called his political party the “Anti-Revolutionary Party.” According to the author Michael Wagenman, Kuyper believed, "Human beings are called to responsible human agency in which 'the course of our historic development may be altered only through gradual change in a lawful way.' But this is accomplished through responsible reforms rather than outright revolution that seeks to usher in a manufactured utopia." If the language of ushering in a “manufactured utopia” doesn’t sound familiar, just search for “antiracist” and “revolution” on Twitter. The crisis in the state, Kuyper believed, revealed a crisis of family.  Kuyper saw family leadership as “responsible for the good order in the family,” rather than the “head of the state.” Government should only step in if parents did not do their job. He insisted that “the central government may only take on and carry out what is not (and for so long as it is not) properly taken care of in the smaller spheres of life.”   If government control of the good order of the family has to occur, it should be only temporary. Thus, the government can incentivize good family order, such as tax deductions for college saving plans, but a secular government controlling family life can get weird fast, such as removing a child seeking a transgender identity from a Christian family’s home. It’s one of the reasons Christians should recognize and champion parental rights.   Coming back to the topic of teens and social media, we can say that restricting their access to social media is a good idea. But this is the job of the family, not the government. When families fare well, society fares well. That’s those cogs of spheres working together well. A society is only as virtuous as its families.  This month, if the Colson Center has helped you understand the sphere of the family better—if it’s helped your thinking to be big enough for this world and for living in your place in it, would you consider giving a gift of any amount? Go to colsoncenter.org/september. 

Recently The New Yorker profiled a nursing home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. The piece described, in admirable terms, the Catholic nuns’ reputation for treating the elderly with dignity and compassion, as well as the Little Sisters’ founder, a French nun known for personally taking in the homeless.  Such behavior is not strange for followers of Jesus. What is strange is The New Yorker’s about-face. Not long ago, the magazine covered the Little Sisters for a very different reason. Writing about the nuns’ lawsuit against the federal government’s Obamacare mandate, which would have forced them to pay for contraception and abortion, The New Yorker called the nuns “irrationally passionate.” There was not a word about the Little Sisters’ love for the elderly or their courageous founder. Instead, reporters suggested they didn’t care about women.   In a secular society, Christ followers will sometimes be loved and sometimes subjected to baseless accusations. That’s OK. We were told this would happen. Our job is to keep loving our neighbors while never compromising our convictions. 

Teen mental health has never been this bad.   As New York Times journalists Michael Barbaro and Matt Richtel discussed last week on The Daily podcast, we’re facing an unprecedented crisis in teen mental health. Mere decades ago, the major threats to the health and well-being of young people in the West were nearly all external, such as illness, car accidents, risky sexual behavior, alcohol, or smoking. Today, the greatest threats to the health and well-being of young people are internal. As Richtel reported, in 2019, 13% of all adolescents reported having a major depressive episode, a 60% increase from 2007. Teen suicide rates, which had been stable for nearly a decade prior to 2007, “leapt nearly 60% by 2018.” In 2019, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced,  “Mental health disorders have surpassed physical conditions as the most common reasons children have impairments and limitations.”   The factors behind this tsunami of depression, anxiety, and self-harm are many, one of which is the internet. In 2017, Dr. Jean Twenge of San Diego State University noted that the spike in adolescent mental health problems reached a crescendo in 2012. That year, the percentage of Americans who owned smartphones surpassed 50%. Exposing developing brains to an overwhelming amount of social information, she argued, was contributing to a massive, unprecedented uptick in mental health issues.   On one hand, social media has brought the near constant experience of social comparison to the developing minds of 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds.  On the other hand, the sheer amount of panicked, hyperbolized, and truly frightening headlines a student must navigate is unprecedented in human history. We might forgive students who are convinced the world is completely out of control.  Richtel and Barbaro also noted other factors in the podcast. For example, the average age for the onset of puberty has become earlier and earlier since the 1980s, especially for girls. Experts are unsure as to exactly why this is the case, but there are plenty of correlations having to do with early exposure to sexually explicit material, fatherlessness, and family breakdown. Whatever the cause, the impact is real.   In the face of this exploding mental health crisis among young people, the demand for care is outpacing the number of trained counselors and psychologists. Pediatricians and emergency rooms have become first responders. As Richtel observed, “Every night, in emergency rooms across the country, there are at least 1,000 young people spending the night waiting in a room to get to the next level of care where they can be helped.”   More and more frequently, medication is seen as the only answer. While an important tool, Ritchie notes why that is far from adequate. “We are prescribing medications in the absence of dealing with… fundamental structural changes that we have not addressed as a society.”  In every generation, followers of Christ have seen protecting and caring for vulnerable children as a crucial part of their calling. Today, children are vulnerable to radically changing social conditions, harmful ideas about their minds and bodies, the loss of institutions crucial to their health and well-being, and a barrage of bad news.    The first step in fulfilling our calling is, in the words of my friend Dr. Matthew Sleeth, to Hope Always. Children need the truth about life and the world, about themselves and God, and we can give it to them. Of course, parents must limit and help guide children in their digital interactions, as nearly all experts recognize. But this is not merely a crisis of media: It’s a crisis of meaninglessness. That’s one reason a Harvard psychologist writing in Scientific American argued that “Psychiatry needs to get right with God.”   To that end, we’ve developed a new Colson Center Educators course taught by Dr. Matthew Sleeth to equip parents, pastors, and educators, with the tools to meet the current crisis.   Also, tonight, is the latest in our Lighthouse Voices series. “Despair, Mental Health, and the Crisis of Meaning: How Christians Can Speak Life to a Lost Culture” is a live event featuring Dr. Ryan Burkhart of Colorado Christian University. To register for the live event in Holland, Michigan, or the livestream, visit Colsoncenter.org.  Christians have an obligation to care. When we see the brokenness of the world around us, we are to imitate the work of Christ. In His name, we can be a force for good in our lifetimes, and, God willing, reverse the tide.  

Fertility is a gift, not a problem.  According to an NPR report, more women are seeking sterilization. For example, at Bozeman Health Deaconess Hospital in Montana, more women in their twenties and thirties are asking not for their tubes to be tied—a reversible procedure—but to be removed, a permanent procedure.   This is another sign that women’s fertility has been largely pathologized, treated as a bug rather than a feature of being a woman. It’s as if a woman’s body is presumed better when more like a man’s—without the ability to bear children... somehow in the name of “women’s rights.”  But studies cited in the article suggest these women may regret their decision. Dr. Kavita Arora, the chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Committee on Ethics, described a patient: “She wanted to have autonomous control over her body, and this was her way of ensuring she was the person who got to make the decisions.”   Rather than practice sexual self-restraint, the patient’s desire for “control” led her to deny the potential of motherhood.  

On this Labor Day, here are some important ideas from Chuck Colson on the importance of work.   Americans are rethinking work, at least in the sense of employment.  While there are many factors behind what has been called “The Great Resignation,” “The Great Quit,” and “The Great Reshuffle,” we shouldn’t underestimate the connection between how people see work and our culture-wide crisis of meaninglessness.   Christian ethicist Oliver O’Donovan has written:   "In work we make a difference to the world, not merely the kind of difference that any event must make … but a purposeful difference. In work we not only affect things; we effect things….  To work well is to bring intelligence and love to bear upon the grain of our worldly material, whether that is inert stuff, living beings or abstract relations of things." In other words, our work, whether physical labor or intellectual pursuits, matters. Here is a recording of Chuck Colson, from many years ago, explaining a Christian vision of human work.  "In American society, most of us spend more of our waking hours at our jobs than in any other activity. While that may or may not be a positive commentary on our culture, it’s a fact that’s got to be considered by churches and ministries seeking to equip Christians to live faithfully. Yet, in our work cultures today, most of us have been trained to separate our faith lives from our work lives. The chasm between the two worlds disturbs us, signaling that something is wrong. And this comes at a time when the single most common demographic among people in the church is work, and at a time when the culture of that workplace is most foreign to our faith.    For years we’ve lived with the belief that the real work of God’s kingdom was done by missionaries and members of the clergy. Others work to make money to support the 'real work.' Yet, Scripture insists that our work is good. The ancient Greeks thought of work as a curse; Christianity gave meaning to work. Work, for the Christian, is a calling. After all, Jesus grew up with the callused hands of a carpenter, and the very fact that He worked gives dignity to our work. The Reformation, as I wrote with Jack Eckerd in Why America Doesn’t Work, 'struck at society’s dualistic view of work. Just as they saw the church comprised of all the people of God, not just the clergy, so the Reformers saw all work—sacred and secular, intellectual and manual—as a way of serving God.'   Work embraced as a calling expresses the glory of God, and it’s part of—very literally—following Jesus. Through our work God provides for us and for our families, contributes to the common good, and also gives us a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. He has given us work as the way to fulfill His mandate to us as humans—to take dominion over the world he has created. As we work, we extend God’s reign and influence as his agents or stewards.   And the way that we take that dominion, confronting the challenges and difficulties that “go with the job,” is, in itself, our witness to the reality of God and our faith in Christ. Excellence in our calling, which the Bible calls for, makes the most powerful witness for us in the workplace. Sure, we could wait for those who are seekers and skeptics to come into our church buildings, but the vast majority never will. We could wait for them to seek out a pastor, but most don’t know any.   Now more than ever the “indigenous believers,” those Christians already in the mission fields of accounting, sales, software, construction, and other honorable vocations, need to be equipped to work with integrity and thus share their faith in actions as well as words." That was Chuck Colson. I hope that this Labor Day can be a sabbath from your work today.  

John and Maria focus in on the factors contributing to the remarkable rise in mental health issues for young people, including the crisis of authority that results from the barrage of information online. Afterwards, they discuss how the Church has always led in innovative education and must continue to do so. They end on a recent win and two losses for religious liberty in the lower courts.

It’s been a year since the U.S. military’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan left allies, colleagues, and up to 1,000 American citizens there to fend for themselves. Though the new Taliban government promised to respect human rights, especially the rights of women, it’s turned out as many expected.   Universities and primary schools are open to women, but girls over age 11 are locked out of secondary schools, women are only permitted to work in education and health, must keep their faces covered, and must be accompanied by a male guardian for long-distance travel. And, swift and cruel punishments for breaking these rules also have returned.  Though the Taliban deny it, a division is growing between a political wing that wants better relations with the outside world (and therefore wants to relax restrictions on women) and clerics in Kandahar who, like the Ayatollahs in Iran, dictate policy on the ground.   We often hear that all worldviews are equal, all religions the same, and we shouldn’t impose our values on anyone else. The truth is that our ideas about the world and human beings have real consequences and real victims.