Breakpoint

A new California bill would require that youth receive so-called “gender affirming care” … even if it means removing them from the custody of their parents to do so.  If passed, SB 107 would, according to the California Family Council, “empower California courts to take ‘temporary emergency jurisdiction’ of children if they come to California for trans-drugs, surgery, or mental healthcare.”   This would not only apply to parents and children who are California residents, but to children who travel to California from anywhere in the country. As one attorney put it, “SB 107 may be the most brazen assault on fundamental parental rights in the history of this state.”  This bill is the culmination of destructive and backwards ideas: that gender affirmation means rejecting the body, that removing healthy organs is the right way to treat gender dysphoria, that “trans kids” are expressing an innate identity instead of a temporary experience, and that parents who question invasive procedures deserve to have their kids taken away from them.   Ideas have consequences. If this bill becomes law, there will be many victims of these bad ideas.  

What would it be like to live only—and exclusively—in the present?   Clive Wearing, a former musician for the BBC, is now the most famous amnesia patient in the world. In 1985, Clive suffered a severe fever that gave him both anterograde and retrograde amnesia. That means he can neither form new memories, nor recall most of his previous life. Instead, he lives his life thirty seconds at a time.   Clive’s struggle has been well chronicled in two documentaries, the first produced in 1986 and the second in 2005. Clive retains some knowledge—he can play piano expertly, for example, and remembers that he is married—he doesn’t remember the wedding, his children, or his wife’s name. The dominant experience of Clive’s life, repeated hundreds of times a day, is of waking up from a coma for the very first time, without knowledge of who or where he is.   “You are the first people I’ve spoken to in thirty years,” he repeatedly tells his interviewers.   Clive’s story has inspired multiple publications of medical and psychological research, not to mention haunting existential questions. Who are we without our memories? What is life worth with no knowledge of the past and no ability to form new experiences from the present? Where is the hope for the future in this?   While much has been written about Clive, the most powerful story lies with his wife, Deborah. The two had been married only a year when catastrophe struck. In the midst of her shock and grief, Deborah campaigned relentlessly to get Clive the care he needed. However, after seven years, she reached an impasse. A future with Clive seemed unbearable after years of the same questions, the same confusion, the same anguish.   Deborah decided to leave and start a new life in America. She moved to New York, intent on resuming a career in the arts. She even tried new relationships. However, none of it worked.   “I wanted to be with someone else and have kids and a regular life. Yet how can you love somebody when you already love somebody? I loved Clive,” she wrote later in her book Forever Today.    It was only after she returned to England, torn by what felt like the impossibility of life, that she found a future. It came from an unexpected source.   “I’d reached the end of my tether, and I rang a friend and I asked her to pray for me,”  Deborah described years later.   "She was the only Christian I knew, and as she was whispering away to God, I just felt this extraordinary power coming into me. And I knew that God was in my room. I just had this incredible sense that I was really, really loved … and that emptiness that I had been trying to fill all those years with relationships, with food, with alcohol, I was filled. " That moment changed everything for Deborah. She discovered peace. Though God did not erase her suffering or Clive’s, suddenly their lives were imbued with purpose.   In a scene from the 2005 documentary, standing in a London church, Deborah tells Clive about one of the last concerts he performed before the illness stole his memory: “It was so moving that everyone was in tears. That’s how good of a musical director you were.”   At this, Clive is filled with emotion. Though he cannot remember the scene, or even the name of the woman describing it to him, he sensed her compassion.  “I’m amazed that you would say that,” he said. “I can’t think that.”   “You were marvelous. You still are marvelous,” she replied and kissed him on the cheek.   Where, in the entire modern arsenal of materialist evolution, self-help, and expressive individualism is love like that to be found? Much less explained. Each of these dominant theories that claim to explain so much only turns the search for love and purpose inward. In the end, as Augustine described, these eternal values become incurvatus in se, destructively turned in on themselves—no help in the face of serious struggle.   True love, like what Deborah offers Clive, dignifies the other. It’s turned outward. Though he doesn’t recall her visits, when asked what he wants to do after Deborah leaves, Clive answers: “A gin and tonic I think, and a cigarette. Waiting for time to elude and disappear. And her arrival.”  

According to new research, the link between depression and “chemical imbalances” in the brain could be less settled than previously thought.   A leading theory as psychiatrists Mark Horowitz and Joanna Moncrieff write, “Our study shows that this view is not supported by scientific evidence.”   Related studies show, for example, that when people believe their depression is the result of mere brain chemistry, their self-confidence and ability to change plummet. Ironically, they also tend to feel more stigma, not less.   Christians, of course, have nothing to fear from the insights of science. Findings like these matter. It confirms what a Christian worldview confirms: People are not merely their brains, nor are they at mercy of chemical forces. Thinking that everything about us is located in the brain is the inevitable conclusion of materialism, and an idea that has real consequences.   Our brains are a big part of what we are, but they aren’t all of who we are. A worldview limited only to material components is too small for reality. That’s a conclusion that the science is beginning to support.  

Particularly “in the L.G.B.T.Q. community, it’s not uncommon to find a substitute family, colloquially known as a chosen family,” Dani Blum recently wrote in an article in The New York Times. According to Blum, a “chosen family” refers to the “intense, intimate relationships … people form apart from their biological relatives; it is the kinship you create outside of a traditional family structure.”   Chosen families are not a new phenomenon, nor are they exclusive to LGBTQ people. But in an age quick to write essential relationships off as “toxic,” they are increasingly common and consequential.  Relationships were designed by God to be a gift of His common grace. Certain relationships, like the intimacy between a husband and wife or the bond between parents and children are distinct in purpose and unique in function, irreplaceable in their roles as building blocks of society. Friendship, from our deepest commitments to common neighborliness, is to be treasured. All of these relational arrangements are increasingly rare and disordered in a techno-driven culture, captive to utilitarian concern.   And it is important to remember that Jesus taught of a tie that binds the redeemed beyond blood relation, secured by His blood. He asked in Matthew’s Gospel: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Then, pointing to his disciples, he answered: “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”  The Church then is a family in an even deeper sense of the word. It is the family that is chosen by God. It has the capacity to fill needs keenly felt by those whose home life has been broken, characterized by absence, abuse, or hostility. In fact, family is the only relationship employed in Scripture as an analogy for the Church, both in the sense of Christ’s relationship with us and our relationships with one another.  The troubling thing about so-called “chosen families,” at least in our modern context, is what they are intended to replace. Rather than simply “expanding” the scope of family or letting friends step into a gap, we employ these relationships to shove away and replace our biological families.   The harms of this are most evident to children, as decades of studies have shown with stunning clarity. Biological fathers and mothers each contribute things irreplaceable by any other relationship. Even in the case of adoption, the most redemptive of all arrangements, deep emotional wounds often remain that children must process. Adoption is a beautiful choice, made because something has gone wrong. Thus, adoption is among the family relationships employed by Scripture to describe how God loves and redeems us.  In its glee over creating “family” out of any assorted collection of people, society has forgotten that the biological family is baked into the world by God’s intent. Family is no accident of history, no social construct that can be replaced. It is so woven into the fabric of biology that no society that has rejected it has survived.  In fact, “chosen families” are already failing to meet people’s basic relational needs. As Joshua Coleman wrote in The Atlantic, “Studies on parental estrangement have grown rapidly in the past decade, perhaps reflecting the increasing number of families who are affected.” In one survey of mothers aged 65 to 75, one in 10 reported being estranged from an adult child. Some 62% reported contact less than once a month.  Part of the beauty of biological families is that they are not chosen. In essence, they are built around obligation, a duty to the other, not merely as a means of self-fulfillment. By contrast, if we can opt into a group of friends, we can just as easily opt out.   There are certainly cases in which family members are abusive, controlling, or in the true sense of an exhausted word, “toxic.” Still, the spirit of the age is one that teaches us to prefer the company of those who ask less of us. Will these “chosen” replacements endure the demands of life, illness, and aging?   In such an age, the Church’s calling to be a family for those who have none matters all the more. Like the family, the Church is no social construct, but a reality baked into the world by the One who created it. He is the same One who included man and woman, husband and wife, mother and father in the design specs of humanity. Any society that tries to write these relational realities out of the story of the world will not fare well. 

In the face of record crime, Starbucks has announced the closure of 16 stores in five cities: Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.   The reason, according to CEO Howard Schultz, is these cities have “abdicated their responsibility in fighting crime and addressing mental health,” leading retail partners to repeated concerns over “their own personal safety.”   “Starbucks is a window into America,” he continued. “And we are facing things which the stores were not built for.”  Given Starbucks’ outspoken support for progressive candidates who lead these cities, it’s easy to think the coffee giant should sleep in the bed it helped to make. As the National Review reports, Starbucks “pledged over $100 million in social-justice grants” over the last few years, and individual stores are hubs for left-wing causes from trans rights to climate change.   Basic law enforcement is about the reality of the human condition. When Proverbs says that “whoever sows injustice will reap calamity,” it goes for individuals and entire cities.  Social justice is trendy, but at the end of the day, pushing hip causes is only possible where there’s actual justice.  

This year, the familiar back-to-school windup includes a growing sense of trepidation for many parents. A host of faddish ideologies, and the ham-fisted ways of imposing them, adds to their worries (or at least should). Revised historicism, sex and gender ideologies, even the seemingly harmless Social and Emotional Learning are all expressions of Critical Theory in some form or fashion.  Of course, many ideas out of accord with Christian teaching have been taught by schools, but these reject core realities of what it means to be human. Critical Theory in any form, whether established academic theory or mere cultural mood, categorizes people as members of particular groups and either awards or reduces social and moral merit based on those groups. This is something Christians must never do. As philosopher Douglas Groothuis writes in his analysis of the influence of Critical Theory in the U.S., “One’s fundamental identity is being made in the Divine Image; it is not found in race or gender or social class.” Many parents have begun to see that whenever that primary identity is dismissed, all manner of confusion sets in.  Even so, this sort of thinking plays an outsized role in the rules and guidelines of our kids’ schools. Recently, a colleague of mine, while enrolling her daughters at a new school, was assured by the principal that the curriculum and policies were “ideologically neutral” with respect to transgenderism. Wisely, my colleague pressed further, and asked a clarifying question. “What would happen if one of my daughter’s classmates identified as trans? Would she be compelled to use their preferred pronoun?”   The principal replied, “We’d want to make sure we respect the viewpoints of everybody, and so, yes, we’d ask your daughter to use the correct pronouns.”   “What if she didn’t?” my colleague clarified.   “In that case,” the principal conceded, “it would probably be grounds for a disciplinary conversation.” In other words, gender ideology wasn’t taught, it was enforced, and in such a way as to assume that the matter was already settled.  That’s only one of a half dozen or more stories I have heard so far this year. Parents must research schools, both policies and personnel. Unfortunately, some administrators simply don’t have a grasp of how they will handle these issues. Even more find their hands tied by laws like Colorado’s Gender Identity Expression Anti-Discrimination Act. By asking specific, sometimes uncomfortable questions, parents not only protect their own kids, they provide an opportunity for transparency, maybe even change. That protects everybody’s kids from bad ideas that threaten to overtake every element of their lives.  A tremendous tool for parents is the Promise to America’s Parents, a project of the Alliance Defending Freedom, in partnership with other organizations such as the Family Policy Alliance and the Heritage Foundation. In addition to legal assistance for those facing discrimination based on their religious convictions, this project gives a roadmap and a toolkit for parents when it comes to education and healthcare.   For example, did you know that “parents can regularly and proactively request in writing to… review the entirety of their child’s education records, including any files involving counseling on gender identity issues”? Also, according to a guide on transgender ideology in schools from the Minnesota Family Council, parents have the right to request the policies for locker and restrooms to know if students identifying as transgender are allowed to use the opposite sex’s changing rooms and toilet stalls. In addition, parents can review curriculum before it is delivered by teachers to their students.   Explicit rights afforded to parents differ state by state. For example, only 25 states and D.C. require schools to inform parents whenever sexuality is being taught. And, 36 states and D.C. openly allow opt-out options for sexual education. ADF has a sample opt-out letter for parents and other letters to request notification for any issue or ideology with which they are concerned.   And, of course, all of these concerns point back to a key premise too often forgotten. Parents are in charge of educating and protecting their children, not the state. More than ever, it is vital that parents take this right seriously. The Promise to America’s Parents is one way to do that. In fact, on Friday August 19, I will join ADF, the Heritage Foundation, and others for a Celebration of the Promise to America’s Parents. It will be livestreamed and absolutely free. Just visit adflegal.org/celebratethepromise to register.  Truth doesn’t become falsehood because it’s unpopular. The hard thing to do is also the loving thing to do, and both kids and educators need to know the difference. 

According to the BBC, the U.K.’s “only dedicated gender identity clinic” for youth has been ordered to shut down. The reason is not a lack of demand. In fact, referrals for “treatment” are 20 times higher than 10 years ago.   Rather, the clinic has received wide criticism from an independent report of their practices. Former patient Kiera Bell, now 25, was prescribed puberty blockers at age 16. She underwent a double mastectomy at age 20. She has now changed her mind about the procedures and says that doctors “should have challenged” her thinking, especially at such a young age.   A former consultant psychiatrist to the center agrees: “Some children have got the double problem of living with the wrong treatment, and the original problems weren’t addressed—with complex problems like trauma, depression, large instances of autism.”  While countries like the U.K. are questioning these wrongly named “gender affirmation” treatments, clinics, academics, and the executive branch of the government in the U.S. have only doubled down. We should stop now. The rising tide of those who are expressing regret is quickly becoming an ocean.  

Throughout Church history, church attendance and overall religiosity have been higher among women than among men. That seems to be changing, especially for younger generations. According to new data, the long-existent church gender gap, which shows up in both religious affiliation and church attendance, has now flipped.   However, the headline is not that more men are connecting with the Church. The story is that more women are disconnecting from the Church.  A number of factors have contributed to this demographic shift, not least of which are recent scandals of sexual impropriety and abusive leadership among prominent pastors and Christian leaders. Also, education and ethnicity seem to play a significant role in the religious identification of millennial women. “Among white respondents,” a recent Christianity Today article summarized, “women are 9 percentage points more likely to say that they have no religious affiliation compared to white men,” but “there’s no real difference in the share of male and female nones among Black, Asian, and other racial groups.”  Another factor, Dr. Abigail Favale argues in a new book The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, is the rising influence of feminist thought, what she calls “the gender paradigm” in evangelical circles. Or as a colleague recently put it, describing the deconstruction process of a few of her friends, “It’s all about ‘resisting the patriarchy.” That kind of language points to the paradigm which Dr. Favale once herself subscribed. She now believes it to be incompatible with a Christian understanding of male and female, sex, and gender.   Even so, the feminist paradigm has quite successfully framed Christianity and the Church as misogynist, patriarchal, and harmful for women. The same paradigm idealistically reframes pagan religions and cultures as being pro-woman, at least until Christianity gained prominence. This narrative, however, doesn’t match the historical realities.  First, in contrast to ancient paganism, monotheism provided women with more freedom than polytheistic religions with goddesses did. In cultures dominated by the latter, women were limited to roles performed by the goddesses, and not always all of them. In fact, the “role” designated for many women by pagan religion was temple prostitute, a tool of men’s worship.   In ancient Rome, women were permitted to engage in business, but their primary role was in the household. Men had public roles, but women engaged in domestic work were subservient to their father or husband. As in other historical periods, elite women had more options. However, the vast majority of women were seen as not much better than slaves.  Twelve was the legal age for girls to marry in Rome. If not married by 20, women were generally marginalized. Though divorce was available to both men and women, husbands caused most divorces since women rarely had other financial means. Ex-wives and widows were often left destitute.   In contrast, Christianity saw women as the spiritual and moral equal of men. Women and men shared the same created dignity, the same problem (sin), and the same solution, Jesus. As result, women in the Christian community had a higher status and more freedom than women in the broader Roman world.  The Christian rejection of divorce and sexual double standards, and its insistence on strict monogamy reflected this. Further, women were given more choice about whom and whether to marry and tended to marry later than their Roman counterparts. While widows were encouraged to remarry, the Church provided aid for those who did not or could not.  The Church also rejected abortion and infanticide as murder, meaning that women were not subjected to dangerous surgical procedures, and girls were not “discarded.” Thus, there were proportionately more women in the Christian community than in Roman society as a whole.  Because of Christian attitudes and behavior toward women, more women converted to Christianity than men, and many men who converted did so under the influence of their wives. Eventually, Christianity transformed the status of women in the Roman world. Unfortunately, as Greek ideas were adopted within the Church, elements of pagan misogyny were as well. For example, some Church fathers placed blame for the Fall entirely on Eve and ignored the Apostle Paul’s putting the blame on Adam.   Nonetheless, Christianity did more to improve the status of women than any other historical force. Even today, as the Gospel spreads around the Global South, the status and freedoms enjoyed by women are being raised. The treatment of women is just one example of how the Church has been an essential force for good in the world.   There are others, even in an age that often labels the Church “non-essential.” Don’t buy it. This month, for a gift of any amount, the Colson Center’s theologian-in-residence, Dr. Timothy Padgett is hosting a course entitled “The Essential Church.” Be equipped theologically, biblically, socially, and culturally in the critical role of the Church, both in the past and today. Go to colsoncenter.org/August to sign up. 

Recently, two separate crisis pregnancy centers in Worcester, Massachusetts, were vandalized on the same night. Next to broken glass and spilled paint were the words “Jane’s Revenge,” the name of a group behind a number of similar attacks in recent months.   Earlier that same week, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey warned the public of a group using “deceptive and coercive tactics,” but she wasn’t referring to the pro-abortion extremists threatening violence. She was warning of the crisis pregnancy centers themselves. Though her office has since condemned the violence, the bulk of its attention is still in all the wrong places: not the vandals, but the clinics offering help to women in crisis.   Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that “violence cannot conceal itself behind anything except lies, and lies have nothing to maintain them save violence.”  In this case, the attorney general’s lie about pregnancy resource centers covers up the violence of abortion… and those using violence are allowing the attorney general to maintain the lie.   Let’s pray that, by some miracle, Attorney General Healey focuses her office’s attention where it needs to be. 

Back in May, 20 Nigerian Christians were brutally martyred by the Islamic militant group ISIS. In June, 40 more Christians died in Owo, Nigeria, in a terrorist attack against a church. Though it is not clear who is responsible for that attack, what is clear is that Christians continue to be severely persecuted in this West African nation. The persecution, which has been ongoing for years, is part of a long history of conflict with Islam.  In 1953, Christians made up only 21.4% of the population in Nigeria. Today, about half of the country’s population, about 96 million people, are Christians. To put that number in perspective, Germany, the largest country in Europe, has a total population of less than 84 million. Much of the Christian growth in Nigeria has resulted from education efforts by Western missionaries, though the country has long had a Christian presence.   Nigeria’s Christians live primarily in the southern, farming part of the country. They are mostly under attack by Islamists and the Muslim Fulani, who live mostly in the northern herding areas. They also face the threat of Boko Haram, a ruthless Islamist terrorist organization whose name literally means Western learning (boko) is prohibited (haram).  Boko Haram was founded in 2002 to overthrow Nigeria’s government and impose strict sharia on the country. The group was relatively quiet until 2009, after which conflicts with police escalated. By December 2010, Boko Haram began a campaign of suicide bombings and attacks on churches and government buildings. In 2014, they began to attack schools. In one attack, 59 school boys were burned alive or shot. In another, 276 school girls were kidnapped. In both cases, the victims were Christians. Boko Haram has also conducted massacres in mosques that do not support their radical ideology.  Also in 2014, Boko Haram pledged loyalty to ISIL. That loyalty ended in 2016, when ISIL ordered Boko Haram to stop attacking Muslims. Currently, there are three Islamist terrorist groups that originated with Boko Haram: Boko Haram proper, the Islamic State West African Province, and Ansaru, an al-Qaeda affiliate. All are engaged in terrorism, not only in Nigeria but also in surrounding countries, with much of it aimed at Christians.  As dangerous as these explicitly Islamist groups are, the Fulani herdsmen are worse. Because the Fulani territory in north Nigeria is suffering from a long-term drought, the Fulani are moving south to access water. In the process, the herdsmen have been raiding and burning villages, slaughtering villagers, destroying crops, and engaging in a host of other atrocities in order to take the land for themselves and drive out Christians.   President Muhammadu Buhari is a Fulani. Though he has attempted to address some of the economic issues that drive Fulani militancy, he has denied that religion plays any role in the conflict. He points out, for example, that Muslim villages have also been raided. Still, the vast majority of attacks have come against Christians, and the Fulani’s history of Islamic militancy dates back to the late 17th century.   Though contemporary Fulani militancy reveals a struggle between nomadic herders and farmers going on for millennia, denying the religious dimensions of these attacks is pure propaganda. Christian villages are deliberately targeted, Christian houses and churches are burned, and Christians driven off or slaughtered.   Although up-to-date numbers are hard to come by, between the Fulani and Boko Haram and its offshoots an average of 13 Christians per day were killed in Nigeria last year. That’s 372 per month or over 4,450 alone. In the last 12 years, 43,000 Christians have been killed by Islamic radicals in Nigeria. And these numbers do not include those injured, beaten, or driven from their homes.   What has happened to Nigerian Christians meets the established international standards for genocide.  Christians must not forget the spiritual aspects at the root of this conflict. God is moving and the Church is expanding across Africa. In 1900, there were just 9.64 million Christians on the continent; today there are over 692 million. It is not surprising to see Satan counterattacking by inspiring persecution.   For our Nigerian brothers and sisters, we can fight on two fronts. First, we must continue to lobby our government on behalf of suffering Christians, asking our officials to put pressure on Nigeria to take more decisive action against Boko Haram and the Fulani herdsmen. Second, we must lobby Heaven, for both our persecuted brothers and sisters and their persecutors, praying that God’s kingdom would advance and win even the jihadis to Jesus.