Breakpoint

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. 

Three days before the first day of school in Columbus, Ohio, the teachers’ union went on strike, leaving 47,000 students with nowhere to go. School board officials promised that schooling would move forward “online,” but on what was supposed to be the first day, the website suffered hours-long outages. It was chaos.  Even as this teachers’ strike was brewing, a new school, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Columbus, was preparing to open its doors for the first time. Westside Christian School will serve kindergarteners through second graders this year, using Sunday school classrooms and the gym inside a local Baptist church. Thanks to funding from donors and Ohio’s school voucher program, which allows kids who live in failing school districts to use their tax dollars for private schooling, students can attend Westside Christian School without paying tuition.   This is just one example of the kind of creativity that has animated Christians all over the country for decades now, with the goal of offering different and better educational options for families. While some consider the idea that Christians are involved in education, especially public education, controversial, it didn’t use to be. In a filmed conversation a few years ago, I asked Dr. Vishal Mangalwadi, a philosopher who has studied the historic impact of Christianity on the world, why Christians should engage in educational work, especially in a pluralist society like ours. His answer was that Christianity is education.   The Christian account of reality, from creation in Genesis to the New Creation in Revelation, is the true story of the world. The biblical mandate to tell that story to everyone, rich or poor or clergy or not, is the foundation of the entire Western world’s concept of universal schooling.   For example, a chief complaint of the Reformers was that Rome kept a tight rein on education and learning, most notably in limiting Bible translations to Latin. The Reformers’ view that everyone should hear God’s Word led to Bibles in a common language and widespread education for those previously left out. The ability for everyone to read God’s Word for him- or herself led to the dramatic expansion of literacy and learning, not to mention commerce.   Of course, the Roman Catholic Church was also a great champion of education, founding universities and parochial schools everywhere the Church expanded. That’s because of the fundamental view that all Christians share: that God has revealed Himself and wants to be known. Therefore, learning is a high calling of being human.  A few hundred years after the Reformation, the American founders established public education as the right and duty of every citizen. Thomas Jefferson even suggested that an uneducated citizenry would neither flourish nor long be able to self-govern. Unfortunately, public education was isolated from religious faith long ago and therefore untethered from its moral foundation. Today, most people, including Christians, think of education as a secular arena. Religion, we’re told, should be kept personal, private, and above all, outside the classroom.  This bad idea has had real consequences. Far from neutral on issues of religion and morality, public schools instead push dangerous religious and political ideologies, like critical race theory, and harmful, irrational ideas about sex and gender. Administrative costs have ballooned while teachers strike over salary demands.   Many American schools aren’t even succeeding in the basics. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education found that almost 20% of American high school graduates could not read. In many communities, that number is far higher. Lockdowns and Zoom classrooms made parents more aware of these things, and so now in many communities, public school enrollment is in a free fall. In contrast, private, Christian school enrollment has gone up, and a record number of households are homeschooling.  This is a moment for Christians to love our neighbors through education, like our forebears did. We do this by pressing public schools to do better and by providing as many other options as possible, and by making those options financially and otherwise feasible. We should also advocate for new school choice policies, like the one just implemented in Arizona which allows parents to use their own tax money for the schooling that’s best for their kids.  There’s a lot that we can do, and when we do it, we give good gifts to the world. While grown-ups stalk picket lines, there are real kids who need a real education right now. The Church has always been more than up to the task. 

Recently, in a speech at a Georgia church, rising progressive star Stacey Abrams, after noting that her parents had been pastors, declared, “I was trained to read and understand the Bible, and I will tell you this, there is nothing about the decision to eliminate access to abortion care that is grounded in anything other than cruelty and meanness.”  However, the way the Bible speaks of preborn children eliminates abortion as a moral option. In Psalm 139, the psalmist declares, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” The Prophet Jeremiah was told by God, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” And in one of the most beautiful moments in Holy Scripture, John the Baptist, still in Elizabeth’s womb, leapt when in the presence of Jesus, still in Mary’s womb.  Test everything, the Scripture says. Especially those who claim to speak for God. 

Recently, at The Celebration of America’s Promise to Parents event, hosted by the Alliance Defending Freedom, Abigail Martinez, a grieving mother, shared a story that every single parent, pastor, and lawmaker in America needs to hear. Abigail’s daughter Yaeli began to struggle with depression when she was in the 8th grade. Without communication with her mother, Yaeli was quickly funneled by personnel at her school towards the LGBTQ group, and then to an outside psychologist. Soon, Yaeli was being led by these adults towards a “social transition,” going by the name “Andrew” and increasingly presenting as a boy. All the while, she was urged to keep the details hidden from her family.  Once she caught wind, Abigail protested both the secrecy and the strategy of this counseling, urging the counselors to instead look into underlying issues of Yaeli’s mental health. Instead, she was told that by refusing to call her daughter by her new name and pronouns, she was the problem. If anything happened to Yaeli, the school said, it would be Abigail’s fault.  From that moment on, the system boxed her out at every turn. When Yaeli was 16, the school psychologist urged the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services to intervene, arguing that because her mom was “unsupportive” of her social transition, Yaeli would be better off living elsewhere. Yaeli was moved to a group home, where she started taking cross-sex hormones. Abigail was only allowed to see her daughter for one hour each week, supervised, and strictly warned not to bring up anything relating to her daughter’s transition, including their Christian faith. If she did, her visitation rights would be revoked.   “If we keep [Yaeli] out of your home,” Abigail remembered being told, “she [will] have more chance to survive. She’s not going to try to commit suicide.”  Instead, all the while, Yaeli’s mental health continued to decline. The testosterone caused her constant pain, for which a doctor prescribed CBD oil. “She was taking the [cross-sex] hormones; she was not happy,” her mother said. “She changed her name, [but] was not happy, she adopted a dog because that was going to make her happy. None of it, everything that they’ve done, didn’t work.”  At age 19, having moved out of the group home and pursued her new identity for about three years, Yaeli took her own life. As Abigail later told The Daily Signal, “I don’t want any parent to go through this, because this pain never goes away. … You breathe and you can feel the pain.”  It’s hard to imagine a tragedy like this could happen. It’s hard to believe that a parent could lose custody to the state, simply for holding to a child’s biological sex. What’s not hard to imagine is that Yaeli Martinez will not be the last victim of these bad ideas, indoctrinated by state power. Local governments like Los Angeles County aggressively promote the doctrine of “gender-affirming care,” even if it means tearing a family apart. On a state level, one California senator has proposed a bill empowering courts to remove children, not just from California residents, but from anyone who travels to the state and whose children claim their parents do not support them in their gender identity or sexual orientation choices. A similar case recently unfolded in Ohio, where a county prosecutor charged a couple with “abuse and neglect” for seeking counseling instead of transition for their daughter. And in Michigan, it is very likely that a ballot initiative will be taken to the voters this November utilizing the language of “reproductive freedom” to usurp parental rights in similar ways. Through these laws, the state perpetuates grave evil. In the case of Yaeli Martinez, the silence of her church was even more tragic. When at the state-assigned group home, Yaeli repeatedly asked her mother when a pastor or youth leader might come visit. She had felt close to these leaders and was eager to see them. “[They] know I’m here, right?” Abigail remembered her daughter asking.  As Abigail said, “I asked them. I gave them the address.” But they never visited. Not Abigail. Not Yaeli. No public support from the pulpit. No private support either. Abigail Martinez has walked this path all alone.  In this, Abigail was the victim of a church culture designed around making people feel good and dodging difficult issues. Shame on them. Yaeli Martinez will not be the last teenager in crisis. That’s why I’m grateful for churches that, with truth and grace, do show up for parents in need. Nobody wants this culture war over sex and gender, but we didn’t choose this moment. To oppose state-sponsored trans ideology in law and in school is a necessary act of love.   No child should be harmed by state-sponsored lies. No parent should go through what Abigail Martinez went through. And absolutely no parent should go through what Abigail Martinez went through alone.  

Earlier this month, British-Indian author Salman Rushdie was brutally attacked at an event in upstate New York. In 1989, Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses so enraged Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini that he issued a global kill-order, or fatwa, on the author, his editors, and publishers.    Though Khomeini died later that year, fatwas cannot be revoked posthumously. So, Rushdie went into hiding, appearing later only under heavy security. Eventually, many in the West simply forgot about it.  Shia extremists did not.   This tell us something about how differently the secular West and radical Islam sees the world, and how short our cultural memory is compared with theirs. And, at stake is more than a contest of memory. In the Western world, we’ve been secularized to think of religion as a privatized matter of preference. We therefore underestimate the power that religious convictions wield, including the power that our secular religious convictions hold over our own hearts, minds, and culture.   All of which is an opportunity for Christians to show and live a better way, one that sees God, history, people, and the world so differently. 

In 2016, Canada legalized euthanasia through the euphemistically titled Medical Aid in Dying (or MAiD). Since passing, the number of Canadians who either “enthusiastically” or “cautiously” support the practice has risen slightly from 75% to 80%. The response from communities representing those with disabilities, however, has remained consistently opposed. Their fears, that Canada’s end-of-life policies would prove to be only the cliff edge of a moral abyss, have proven to be largely accurate.   As Maria Cheng of the Associated Press has reported, Canada “arguably has the most permissive euthanasia rules [in the world.]” Just last year, over 10,000 lives were legally taken, an increase of a third from the year before. Patients can request aid in dying without informing family members and for any reason, including, beginning in 2023, mental health issues and not just physical suffering. Doctors, as well as nurse practitioners, can raise the topic of euthanasia with any patient and are not required to first exhaust all other treatment options. Though the government keeps track of yearly deaths by euthanasia, it does not have a commission to review troubling cases, a practice used by other permissive nations like Belgium and the Netherlands.   Next year, euthanasia will likely be extended to so-called “mature” minors. At a time when so many efforts are being made toward suicide prevention among teenagers, they will be taught that death is an acceptable way out of mental anguish. Horrific.  The deadly cocktail of adverse incentives, little accountability, and ineffective “safeguards” have led to a context in which, as AP’s Cheng wrote, “Some disabled Canadians have decided to be killed in the face of mounting bills. .… Other disabled people say the easy availability of euthanasia has led to unsettling and sometimes frightening discussions.”   The worst impact of this slope Canada is sliding down could be a perversion of the word “care.” For example, one Canadian armed forces veteran was outraged after a healthcare worker raised the possibility of assisted death as a “treatment” option for his PTSD.  Alan Nichols was a 61-year-old man who was hospitalized in 2019 over fears he might be suicidal. “Within a month,” Cheng described, “Nichols submitted a request to be euthanized and he was killed, despite concerns raised by his family and a nurse practitioner.” The only physical health condition listed on Nichol’s form of consent was hearing loss. According to his brother Gary, “Alan was basically put to death.”  Stories like these are shocking, but we can’t say we were not warned by nearly every disability group in Canada, observers from the UN, and even the American Medical Association. When it comes to euthanasia and doctor-assisted death, abuses and loopholes are not anomalies. They are inevitabilities of a system that operates from a cheapened view of human value and a redefined understanding of healthcare.   The AMA’s official opinion makes clear, “Euthanasia is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” Particularly in a single-payer health care system like Canada’s, the decision of who lives and who dies will inevitably be influenced by crass factors such as money, access to medical resources, and arbitrary decisions about what constitutes “quality of life.”   Against such cultural headwinds, mere “consent” is not enough. In fact, whenever and wherever it is legalized, the so-called “right” to die soon becomes a perceived “duty to die.” Patients consistently report making decisions about not wanting to be “a burden” on friends or family, or because they are convinced, as law and disability professor Theresia Degener described, “a life with disability is automatically less worth living and that in some cases, death is preferable.”   Euthanasia is at odds with any civilized vision of human value. As Alan Nichols’ sister-in-law said, “Somebody needs to take responsibility so that it never happens to another family. I am terrified of my husband or another relative being put in the hospital and somehow getting these (euthanasia) forms in their hand.”  Let’s pray the rest of the world learns from Canada’s terrible example and in nation after nation the lid of this Pandora’s box will be slammed shut.  

Last week President Biden announced a plan to cancel student debt, about $330 billion worth. The cost to taxpayers could be as high as half a trillion dollars.   My friend Dan Darling joked on Twitter that youth pastors just received the gift of a great sermon illustration, but some have actually defended the policy (which even former Obama advisors have criticized) by pointing to Jesus words in the Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors…”  For example, an editorial in TIME argues that when Christ prayed these words in the Garden, He was referring to the Old Testament “Year of Jubilee,” in which debts were canceled every 50 years. So, mass debt forgiveness, conclude the authors, comes from Moses not Marx.   OK, I’m lost. Is it now suddenly OK to impose Old Testament laws on America? Which ones? All of them? It’s so strange after hearing over and over that when it comes to things such as sexual morality, the Bible is not clear; but when it comes to debt policy, it is...  In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus was not talking about economic debts. Both His words and the Year of Jubilee in Israel point to the forgiveness of a debt far greater than college loans: our sin. That debt was paid in full by His blood, not by moving tax dollars around.