Breakpoint

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.  

A new “manifestation trend” called “The Whisper Method” has gone viral on TikTok. If the word salad in that sentence is new to you, “manifestation” is the practice of focused, intense thinking about what you want until you get it. The practice is grounded in New Age philosophy and seems to re-emerge every few years in some new form. The “Whisper Method” is the latest manifestation of manifestation, and TikTok is where it is all happening.  The “Whisper Method” involves thinking of what you really want and identifying who can give it to you. Then, you are to imagine whispering instructions into that person’s ear, such as, “You’re going to give me that promotion.” Or, “You’re going to fall in love with me.” If you really believe (and whisper), then eventually you shall receive.   We’ve seen this kind of thing before. Years ago, Oprah popularized “The Secret,” a philosophy that if people put “positive thoughts and vibes”’ into the universe, they’d get positive results back. In other words, if we send out energy claiming a bigger bank account, a smaller waist, or a better parking spot during Christmas, we’ll get those things.  From a motivation standpoint, it’s easy to understand how something like The Secret or The Whisper Method gains traction. It involves little work with big rewards. Beneath the irrationality and geographic specificity (these strategies aren’t very popular in war-torn areas or regions inflicted by famine), there is a truth. The human imagination is incredibly powerful.   In a 2006 episode of Oprah, she described “The Secret” this way: “What you focus on gets bigger.” Short of the weird metaphysical claims to be able to “manifest” new objective realities, Oprah was not entirely off base. God created humans with creative ability. We cannot create out of nothing, or ex nihilo, like God did, but humans are unique among creation in our ability to make something out of the world around us. Thus, humans invent and build and improve and innovate. And, in Psalm 37, we are told that if we “delight” ourselves “in the Lord, He will give us the desires of our heart,” though that has more to do with God first giving us rightly ordered desires once He is our ultimate delight.   Various studies have demonstrated that athletes who routinely imagine themselves performing well often develop a measurable competitive edge. However, even the most imaginative and sincere visualization techniques cannot magically bend reality. Thus, researchers believe that visualizing strong athletic performance is a way of practicing the sport. Not to mention, that any athletic improvements served by visualizations are in addition to actually physically practicing the sport.  The Whisper Method isn’t about training for a good performance or searching our hearts and motives to make sure they align with the will of God. The Whisper Method is about the illusion of control. It assumes that internal focus can determine external realities. This desire for control is nothing new, nor has The Whisper Method shifted from changing our own actions in place of manipulating the actions of others. In that way, The Whisper Method reflects the cultural ethos that other people are primarily objects to be used in service to our own ends.  We didn’t make the world, and we’re not in charge of it. God did, and He is. We’re not to worry ourselves over controlling it but instead are to “cast all our anxieties on Him.” If we are going to “whisper,” it should be in prayer to the God who made us and loves us.  In honest prayer, our hearts are taught what they truly desire. In prayer, we place those desires at the feet of our Heavenly Father, ask Him to conform them and us to His will, trusting that everything He does will be for our good. All of which makes prayer the opposite of The Whisper Method, which only pretends that we can control the world and assumes that our strategies for controlling it are fully informed and perfectly wise, as if we have the faintest idea of what’s really best for us. We don’t.  In his book on prayer, Pastor Tim Keller wrote that “God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked if we knew everything He knew.” Thank goodness we don’t live in a world where our wishing, or our “whispering,” makes it so.

A new law in a northern state of India imposes up to 10 years in jail time for so-called “forced,” or “mass” conversions … meaning more than one person at a time. It also casts suspicion on those influenced by Christian social services like health, education, and charity, which often appeal to those trapped in Hindu’s marginalized lower castes.  India’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but laws like this reflect how rapidly the ruling party’s push for Hindu Nationalism has changed things for Christians in that country.  But efforts to restrict the gospel rarely work. As one local bishop put it...   Anybody who converts to Christianity is doing so from a strong unflinching personal following of Jesus Christ and very much as a personal conscious decision of divine attraction to Jesus Christ, God’s love, compassion, forgiveness, justice and truth. His death we celebrate in love, His Resurrection from the dead we profess with living faith, His coming in glory we await with unwavering hope. This personal experience makes them embrace Christianity.   Amen. That’s why faith in Christ has survived so many attempts to stamp it out. 

The Dobbs decision is the most significant Supreme Court decision of our lifetime, and it’s already been cited in another legal case.   Recently, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall requested that a federal district court remove an injunction against a ban on medical intervention for youth seeking a transgender identity. He wrote: “But no one—adult or child—has a right to transitioning treatments that is deeply rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition.”  His words are based on language from Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in the recent Dobbs case. Alito argued that abortion cannot be found in the Constitution, nor has it ever been “deeply rooted” in the history and traditions of the American people.  Roe v. Wade, which was overturned by the Dobbs decision, was part of a series of Supreme Court decisions that “discovered” new constitutional rights based on little more than the whims of the sitting Justices. Commonly, in the use of the “substantive due process doctrine,” earlier Supreme Courts invoked a so-called “right to privacy,” as they did in Roe v. Wade. While there’s little more American than the right to be left alone, the Court misconstrued this reasonable desire for privacy to mean the “right” to kill children in the womb.  “Substantive due process” is supposedly based on the 14th Amendment’s due process clause. Proponents of the doctrine contend that, even if a right isn’t explicitly recognized in the Constitution, the rights that are explicit cast “penumbras”—or shadows—which suggest the existence of other, unenumerated rights that the Supreme Court should protect. If this sounds like a stretch, that’s because it is, not least because the due process clause is about just that—lawful process, not substantive rights.   The notion of “substantive due process” is often a pretext for judges to affirm current social norms with little more than passing reference to the Bill of Rights. So, what was never historically a right could be deemed one simply by finding a way to rationalize it with reference to some other right in the Constitution. Instead of rights finding root in the constitutional text or in who we always are as human beings, they become based on shifting cultural norms, as easily created as denied. As Justice Thomas pointed out in his concurrent opinion in the Dobbs decision, substantive due process is “legal fiction.” Thus, he questioned the Court’s power to “divine new rights.”   While substantive due process has been used to cause harm, it’s also been used to support good decisions, for example the ruling on interracial marriage in the case of Loving v. Virginia. However, the Court also based Loving v. Virginia on another part of the 14th Amendment, the equal protection clause, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, among other things. In other words, the victory for interracial marriage was a recognition of reality, that all human beings, of whatever race or ethnicity, are fundamentally equal and therefore should not be treated differently. The call for a right to gender transition, however, is a rejection of reality, arguing that maleness and femaleness are illusory or ancillary to who and what we are.  In the current application of the “deeply rooted” test in Alabama, parents demanded a right to experimental medical treatments for their children seeking a transgender identity. They argued that “enduring American tradition” makes them, and not the state of Alabama, primarily responsible for “nurturing and caring for their children.” In that sense, they are right. Parents rank higher than the state when it comes to childcare, but what these parents are demanding is the opposite of nurturing and caring. And in too many cases, government officials are usurping parental rights in promoting gender transitions to children, against their parent’s wishes.  American tradition recognizes a right of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children and even to make medical decisions for them, but it has never recognized a right of parents to cause their kids harm by radically altering their bodies in ways that render them permanently sterile and perpetually dependent on medical interventions. This is something radically new, not deeply rooted in American tradition and history, at best social experimentation.   We can expect more cases in which the “deeply rooted” language of Dobbs is cited. Lower courts, taking the Supreme Court’s cue, should be reluctant to strike down democratically enacted laws based on newly minted theories of unenumerated rights. In the meantime, Christians must continue to point to the reality of human nature, including the good of our bodies as male and female, and most of all, to the Source of our actual rights: our Creator. 

In response to a recent op-ed at Christianity Today, Maria and John insist that Christians can and should be involved in the public square, particularly in the schools. One clear reason is the proposed regulations reinterpreting Title IX. These regulations would remove parental rights from parents whose kids are drawn to radical gender ideology, making the schools conduits to transgender treatments. Maria and John then move to a discussion of the “why” behind a new stat showing that women are leaving the Church.

Next month, the Colson Center is offering a short course entitled “The Essential Church: Why Christians (and the World) Still Need the Church.”   It’s a timely message, especially given a recent shift in Church demographics. Christianity Today reported that younger women are, for the first time, less likely to go to church than men...  not because more men are now attending church, but because more women are deconstructing their faith, and more likely to identify as “nones.”  Battered by church controversies and scandals, and shaped by cultural messages, women are increasingly heading for the exit. In doing so, they are rejecting a faith that, in the words of my colleague Glenn Sunshine, has done “more to improve the status of women than any other historical force.” The Church is meant to enable and empower men and women to live as image bearers, according to God’s design.   Simply put, the Church is essential, and that’s the topic of our upcoming short course, hosted by Dr. Tim Padgett and featuring Peter Leithart, Collin Hansen, and Glenn Sunshine. Christians need to know why. Go to colsoncenter.org/August to learn more. 

Frequent readers and listeners of Breakpoint know about Max. The grandson of Chuck Colson and subject of a book called Dancing With Max, authored by Emily Colson (Chuck’s daughter and Colson Center board member), Max is a remarkable young man who has autism. The last few years have been difficult for Emily and Max, especially since the COVID lockdowns disrupted their routines and canceled their helpers. The last few years were particularly hard on full-time caretakers.  And yet, in the middle of the challenges and disruptions of the last few years, God gave Max a ministry of encouraging and blessing others, a ministry now reaching people whose lives have been disrupted by war.   Here’s how Emily Colson described this remarkable story in a recent email:  We didn’t have a plan: We had a prayer. “How can we be a blessing to others?”  More than two years later, God continues to answer that prayer beyond what we could ask or imagine, bringing hope around the world.  Even into a war zone.   It was COVID shutdown 2020 when Max began to hand-paint colorful heart yard signs and deliver them around our community. Max wasn’t an artist: Autism had made fine motor a lifelong challenge. God often uses the most unlikely individuals to accomplish His purposes so that the story is unmistakably His.   Our dining room became a workspace with plastic wrap stretched across the table and paint dripping into places that won’t be found for another decade. Our home began to look as if we’d invited Jackson Pollock to dinner. It was there, in the ache and loss and isolation of shutdown, that Max would paint his joy-filled hearts.    Max has given away more than 250 heart yard signs now, and he is still painting. The hearts have made it onto note cards, 36,000 cards in circulation so far, with all proceeds going to charity. His hearts grace the front of shirts, each one packaged with a message of God’s love and the value of every life. With every shirt purchased a duplicate is given to a life-affirming charity. And a “heart exhibit” is traveling to different gallery locations, telling the story of what only God can do. Of how He can multiply blessings.   As incredible as all of that is, there’s now another chapter to this story, which began when Emily’s friend April sent her a message.  She’d been watching the war break out in Ukraine on live television. She prayed, and God pressed an idea into her heart like a hot wax seal: Send Max’s hearts to Ukraine.   Our church leapt at the idea. Our printer, Spectrum Designs, a company employing the most amazing team of individuals with autism, jumped just as quickly, printing the first 1,000 shirts. A team of highly caffeinated volunteers began folding and packaging each shirt with a message of God’s love and hope—all translated into Ukrainian.   But…where would we send these?  Who would receive and distribute these shirts in Ukraine?  That answer began 50 years ago, in the brokenness of Watergate. My dad, Chuck Colson, served as Special Counsel to President Nixon... When my dad was released from prison he founded Prison Fellowship ministries, which became the largest prison ministry in the world, reaching millions of people in the darkest places around the globe with the hope and love of Jesus Christ.   Even reaching Ukraine.   The ministry he founded 50 years ago through the brokenness of Watergate would carry his grandson’s hearts, born of the brokenness of COVID, to bring hope to those in a war zone on the other side of the world.   James Ackerman, president of Prison Fellowship USA, traveled to Romania... and (with) a team of ministry leaders and volunteers carried the shirts and other supplies deep into Ukraine, delivering them to children of prisoners, and to people in a Ukrainian refugee center.  Emily received a photo of one little boy who was holding Max’s picture, and wearing a shirt printed with Max’s hearts and the words, “Beloved by God.”  Both of his parents were killed in the war. As Emily said,  When I saw this little boy’s face, I cried for days... God cares. He aches for the brokenness of this world. He is close to this little boy, just as He is close to Max. God was even leaning over Max’s shoulder as he began to paint, knowing He would carry these hearts—and His hope—around the world.   You can learn how to join Max and Emily in their mission at www.heartbymax.com.  

According to Ian Lovett in The Wall Street Journal, “Dozens of priests from the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the country’s largest denomination, have been kidnapped or killed since the (Russian) invasion began.”   Some have been tortured, accused of stirring up anti-Russian sentiment. Those allowed to return to their congregations bear scars and missing teeth. Some never return at all.  The Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s split from Russian Orthodoxy in 2019 provides the political motivation for Russia to target its members. The Russian church, under Patriarch Kirill, has supported the war, arguing that it has “metaphysical significance.”   He may be right, though not in the way he believes. By targeting Ukrainian believers, Russia adds to the ranks of those who suffer, not just for Ukraine, but for Christ.   Father Ioann Burdin, a Russian Orthodox priest who has publicly opposed the invasion, wrote in February, “Russian soldiers are killing their brothers and sisters in Christ…. We can’t shamefully cover our eyes and call… evil good.”  

Earlier this summer, the U.S. Department of Education announced new regulations regarding Title IX, which is designed to ensure and protect access for women and girls in education. These new rules are 700 pages long and are being trumpeted by organizations such as the National Education Association as a victory for victims of sexual harassment and clarification of discrimination based on sex. However, what is meant by “sex” will be a disaster for women.  The massive document is infected with the presumptions of transgender ideology, specifically that “sex” includes “gender identity,” ignoring the biological reality of sex. Not only will these rules limit our daughters’ opportunities to participate in sports and lead to dangerous violations of their privacy, but they will erase parental rights and free speech in favor of state-centered authority. There is a limited time to speak into these regulations before they are instituted.  In 1972, Title IX was enacted to provide equal access to education and athletics for girls and women. Recent reinterpretations of sex threaten the good goals of Title IX by turning reality on its head. In a recent meeting of ministry leaders, Vernadette Broyles, general counsel and president of the non-profit law firm, Child & Parental Rights Campaign, explained three major implications of this regulation.   The first concern has to do with the removal of parental rights. Minors who decide to transition at school will be supported by the schools and led into the process of “social transition,” including using preferred pronouns, without requiring the consent of parents. It’s Broyles’ belief that this will “weaponize” government agencies like Child Protective Services and channel these children to “gender-affirming” counselors and clinics, eliminating the influence of parents in the process. This is already happening in some states, such as California.  A second and primary concern is the remarkable damage that will be done to children’s bodies and emotions by encouraging and furthering social experimentation. For example, in July, the FDA announced that puberty blockers, which activists claim are harmless, can cause brain swelling and vision loss. Their long-term cognitive effects are still being studied. We also know that cross-sex hormones cause permanent sterilization. And of course, that doesn’t even get into what happens when things go “right” with the devastating permanent injuries caused by so-called “gender-affirmation” or “sex-reassignment” surgeries.   Finally, Broyles spoke of the scandal intrinsic to girls having no private spaces in locker rooms or on school trips, and the heartbreaking irony of women and girls’ losing place to male athletes, all under the banner of Title IX.   Even if your state has already acted, as some have, to protect parental rights and girls’ opportunities in sports, these rules will challenge state legislation at the federal level.  So, what can be done? Every American has the opportunity to submit comments on these new rules before September 12. Through bureaucracy, the Biden administration has skirted the legislative process and accountability to elected representatives as it did with the mandate from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services regarding insurance supporting “transgender medicine.”    When contacting Congressional Representatives and Senators about legislation, it is acceptable to use a copied script. In this situation, however, comments must be submitted through the Federal Register, the online journal that publishes the federal government’s rules and regulations. Rather than a Senate staffer tallying positions for or against a bill, staffers associated with the Register look for unique comments. If thousands of people flood the Register with the same script, that repeated comment would be counted as only one.  So, please comment, in your own voice, laying out your specific concerns with these regulations. The Child & Parental Rights Campaign has provided multiple prompts—not scripts—to assist you in registering a comment. There are “comment starter letters” for parents, educators, and community religious leaders. In your comment, tell a unique story or specify your concerns for your daughter, son, grandchild, or school. If you have a psychological or medical background, refer to that expertise in explaining your perspective. If you have a law degree, use your legal training to explain the issues with these regulations. Express your concerns, not only for parental rights and potential harm to children, but also implications this will have for freedom of religion and speech, especially for teachers.  Please, flood the Federal Register with unique comments before September 12. Visit the Child & Parental Rights Campaign website for resources, links, and prompts.   The future of our children may depend on it. 

Last month the world got its first look at new photographs of deep space from NASA’s James Webb telescope. The level of detail in the photos was staggering and beautiful, revealing stars, “Cosmic Cliffs,” and ultraviolet radiation from the birth of new stars.   Christians should approach new technologies with care. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. At the same time, this new telescope is an inspiring example of what humans can do because of how God made us. Technology can enable us to know and appreciate God’s world and to better tend the garden of creation. It also enables us to fight God’s design or try to control it as if we were God.   This telescope is a remarkable achievement, involving years of insight, ingenuity, and perseverance, which are God-given virtues. The fruit of this work rightly elicits awe and should drive us to study and admire a vast and mysterious universe. And it points us to the God who made it all.  Technology that leads us to appreciate creation, grow in wonder, and learn more about it is a true gift.