Breakpoint

After the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the work to protect preborn lives continues at the ground level, in every community, every city, every church. Here are some resources to fulfill that calling. Continuum of Care is a project of the Human Coalition that networks mothers to financial services, job training, maternity housing, and other resources in six major cities. To equip churches to minister to pregnant and parenting moms, another pregnancy and life-assistance network, Her Plan, offers a guide you can find online. The Abortion Pill Reversal Network educates on the reversal of chemical abortions and connects women who have started a chemical abortion with a provider within 72 hours, the window in which a baby can be saved. And, the Support After Abortion website provides classes, virtual groups, and a help number for those suffering after an abortion. These are just some of the organizations and resources available. Let's make abortion unthinkable.

A mortal affliction affects much of America's heartland. Known as "deaths of despair," both the Rust Belt and Appalachia have seen incredible spikes in rates of addiction, overdoses, violence, and suicide. In addition to the thousands who die each year by various forms of self-harm, thousands more live Gollum-like, trapped by their chemical chains and in loneliness. It is a complex situation. While we must not diminish anyone's moral agency, the downward paths we are on are paved, lined, and greased by a number of contributing factors. For example, Beth Macy, the author of the book Dope Sick, has documented the lethal partnership of doctors and drug companies, not to mention the co-option of government oversight agencies, which inflicted a plague of highly addictive opioids on some of America's poorest areas of the country. A new recent study, however, points to an additional complexity, an oft-ignored element of this cultural disease: the decline of religion. According to the study's authors, there is some correlation between the end of so-called "Blue Laws" and the opioid epidemic. In certain parts of the country, Blue Laws have long limited the range of activities allowed on Sundays. Certain businesses were not allowed to be open, and certain things (especially alcohol) could not be sold. Though these laws continue in certain areas, particularly in Europe, they began to disappear in parts of the United States as the 20th century wore on, to the point that now they are few and far between. Of course, a significant, culture-wide phenomenon like the opioid crisis cannot be reduced to something as simplistic as whether or not people can shop on Sunday. To do that would be to mistake correlation for causation, kind of like saying murders go up with ice cream sales. And this is something the study's authors readily admit. Rather than claiming that the end of Blue Laws created the opioid crisis, they use the end of Blue Laws as a marker to track the decline in American religiosity. The diminishing connections to faith in communities across the country, especially in those areas where they were once so strong, are among the factors that contributed to our nation's chemical plague. In other words, Blue Laws are a kind of canary in the coal mine, marking when we've crossed a dangerous line. In light of these diminishing religious commitments, reinstating Blue Laws likely will not lead to a reversal in rates of addictions or other deaths of despair. Even if they were an important part of our cultural life of faith at one time, too much has changed for such an easy fix. However, what these laws represented and what has been lost as they disappear points to the underlying causes, not only of the opioid crisis but of many of our parallel pains as well. What we need to ask is, in a mix of Friedrich Nietzsche and REM, what is the cost of losing our religion? As much as we prize our individualism, particularly here in America, human beings aren't just dust motes of consciousness, floating on the air currents of life. We're connected, not just to one another, but to a host of other elements through relationships that give us meaning, identity, direction, and hope. To be healthy, as individuals and as communities, these relationships (upward, inward, outward, and downward) must be strong. Human beings need a connection to something beyond ourselves, something higher and transcendent in order to find ourselves, to know who and what we are, to be sure of our identity. We need connections with one another, especially the links of family and friendship, in order to be accountable, supported, and complete. And, we need proper connection to the physical world around us, so to be tethered to reality through things like meaningful labor, a place to call home, and some part of the world to call "mine." Marx got it wrong. Religion isn't the opiate of the masses, but instead a part of life most needed, irreplaceable by technological convenience or scientific mastery. The loss of religion has been a bad idea wherever it has been tried, and those suffering across Appalachia and the Rust Belt are some of its most obvious victims. By abandoning religion, specifically the Christianity which once provided meaning to these now missing relationships, the essential connection between individuals and communities and a higher purpose has been lost. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said all the way back in 1983, "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Blue Laws didn't hold off the effects of substance abuse, but the religious impulse that such laws represented were part of a way of seeing life and the world, one in which we weren't just reduced to being cogs or animals or sexual expressions. The Christianity that the world has rejected offers the hope that the world so desperately needs.

According to Christianity Today, Belarus is cracking down on religious dissent. The new policies come from an earlier case when a Pentecostal group wasn't allowed to meet together without registering with the government but also wasn't allowed to register since there were only 13 people. When the group appealed the decision, they received unexpected support from the United Nations. Eager to avoid further embarrassment, Belarus is now taking steps to prevent minority faiths from getting outside aid. Of course, dictatorships are never keen on those who refuse to march to the state's drum, especially religious dissenters. As Francis Schaeffer once argued, no state that claims total authority can tolerate those who recognize a power higher than itself. Thus, conflict between religion and dictatorship is inevitable. Which is why religious liberty should never be reduced to a special pleading by quirky groups to practice their hobbies. It makes possible the essential freedom to dissent from those who hold the strings of power.

Though it's not always clear when a movement is over, there are many indicators that suggest this is the case of the "New Atheism," a cultural wave that rose in the 2000s and aggressively attacked religion in the guise of scientific rationalism. Despite the name, the New Atheism wasn't really new, at least not in the sense of presenting new arguments. Instead, leveraging the global shock of 9/11, New Atheists pushed an anti-religious mood along with a vision of a society free from the cobwebs of religion, defined by scientific inquiry, free speech, and a morality not built on God or religious traditions. In 1996, prominent New Atheist Richard Dawkins articulated this mood in his acceptance speech for the "Humanist of the Year" Award: "I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils," he said, "comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate." There was a commercial aspect to the New Atheism, with bumper stickers and T-shirts carrying well-worn slogans, such as one coined by Victor Stenger: "Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings." Though, at the time, it grew into somewhat of a cultural force and platformed a group of minor celebrities, the New Atheism now seems to have run out of steam. Divided by progressive politics and haunted by the obnoxious tone of many of its own founders, the movement is being devoured by other ideologies. Concepts like freedom of expression, scientific realism, and morality without God have all met their antitheses, often in clashes featuring the New Atheists themselves. One watershed moment was a conflict over the role of science. Just last year, the American Humanist Association revoked Richard Dawkins' "Humanist of the Year" award for his long history of offensive tweets. For example, Dawkins told women who experience sexual harassment to "stop whining" and parents of babies with Down syndrome to "abort it and try again." These tweets were among the cringeworthy, but the one that completed Dawkins' long transformation from champion of free thought to persona non grata, at least for the American Humanist Association, questioned gender ideology: "In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss." The New Atheist commitment to seeking truth via the objectivity of science has collided with a new ideology that deifies the subjective sense of self. Ironically, this is the kind of religious dogmatism Dawkins and other New Atheists always accused organized religions of promoting, only less scientific. New Atheism has been further undermined by a cultural shift in censorship and tolerance for freedom of expression. Organized religion, New Atheists claimed, suppressed dissent. Only by enthroning secularism could we remove the fear of speaking or hearing the truth, even when truth is shocking and offensive. As it turned out, religion's retreat only left a secular progressivism to censor and suppress at will. In 2017, for example, The End of Faith author Sam Harris ignited a firestorm when he interviewed political scientist Charles Murray. Just a month earlier, a violent mob had shouted Murray down at Middlebury College, injuring moderator Dr. Allison Stanger as the two tried to reach the exit. Harris defended Murray, arguing his research was unfairly maligned as racist and he should be allowed to speak. In retaliation, Ezra Klein published a piece in Vox that landed Harris on the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Hatewatch Headlines," while in Salon Émile P. Torres accused Harris and the New Atheists of "merging with the far right." That same year, Richard Dawkins was barred from speaking at UC Berkeley for his comments about radical Islam, not by Christians or Muslims but by progressives. Turns out that freedom of expression wasn't faring as predicted in a post-religious world. In addition to their own jarring polemics and personal misfires, the New Atheists failed to realize that religion, especially Christianity, was the proverbial branch upon which they were sitting. For example, the freedom of expression depends on a number of assumptions, that there is objective truth, that it can be discovered, that it is accessible to people regardless of race or class, that belief should be free instead of coerced, that people have innate value, and that because of this value they should not be silenced. Every one of these ideas assumes the kind of world described in the Bible and mediated across centuries of Christian thought. Not one of these assumptions can be grounded in a purposeless world that is the product of only natural causes and processes. Maybe that's what led Dawkins, just a few years ago, to warn against celebrating the decline of Christianity across the world. Turns out that all of the efforts that he and the other New Atheists extended to root out organized religion have left him with "a fear of finding something worse." Today's Breakpoint was coauthored by Kasey Leander. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to colsoncenter.org.

Last month the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal responded to the claim that the average American family spends an estimated $300,000 to raise a child. Of course kids are expensive, they conceded, but "that isn't the way to look at it." Seeing children only in terms of cost is a mistake. "Whatever children cost to raise," the editors concluded, "they are a priceless vote of confidence in the future." They're right. It's not that kids don't take massive investments of time and energy. They do. But kids are investments. And the returns are incredible, though rarely easy. Parents should be thoughtful about how and when to embark on the journey, but children are a gift, not a burden. They are image bearers, not luxury goods. To think about kids only in terms of how they impact our happiness or our wallets is to completely miss the point. The most important relationships don't always make life easier, but they do make it better.

Grocery store remarks can reveal a lot about a culture. Just ask any mother or father of more than 1.7 children about the comments that strangers somehow feel free to make about their unfashionably large broods. "You know what causes that, right?" "Are you done?" "What are you—Catholic?" Comedian Jim Gaffigan, who has five children, jokes that people who see him in public with his family sometimes remark, "Well, that's one way to live your life!" These comments reveal what more and more data are also showing. A lower percentage of Westerners, including Americans, are embarking on parenthood than ever before. However, these comments also betray how we think about children: as burdens, impositions on freedom, or so very, very expensive that only the wealthy can afford them. It doesn't help how often media outlets stoke fears that children will eat you out of house and home. For example, a recent Wall Street Journal article grimly reported: "It Now Costs $300,000 to Raise a Child." I wonder how many parents read the headline and panicked or at least scratched their head at this summary of a Brookings Institution study. The cost of raising kids varies widely, depending on variables such as where you live, what you drive, how you educate your children, and how much you spend on household extras and vacations. Still, given that the median U.S. household income is about $68,000, any middle-class family of five not living under a bridge should be proof enough that something is askew with the numbers reported in the Wall Street Journal. For starters, the numbers are not itemized, and the article initially gestures toward inflation, rising food costs, the pandemic, and supply chain hiccups, as if those are the main things driving up the cost of parenting. To put it mildly, this was misleading. Another breakdown by Josh Zumbrun, also in the Wall Street Journal, revealed that "housing and child care" are the actual main expenses. For the average family (an elusive statistical entity with 1.7 kids), housing and childcare are supposed to account for over half the annual cost of children under age six. But, anyone who grew up sleeping in bunkbeds and wearing hand-me-downs knows that housing expenses are highly negotiable. Jim Gaffigan's family of seven famously lived in a two-bedroom apartment in New York City! The other cost, childcare, is something not all families employ. As Zumbrun writes, many families simply do not incur this expense, "because a parent, extended family or some combination provides the care." Historically, this arrangement was the norm. Of course, many married couples simply cannot afford to live on a single income. It can be necessary for both parents to work, but it is worth considering how often it is taken for granted that childcare is an expense. Back in 2018, The New York Times asked millennials why they're having so few children: 61% of those who've had fewer kids than they would like cited the cost of childcare. There are other factors as well. For example, "gender equality" also emerged as a major theme in the 2018 study, meaning that, all things being equal, women are often choosing careers ahead of children. As the authors wrote: "Women have more agency over their lives and many feel that motherhood has become more of a choice." While we can rejoice that women have more options in life, it should give us pause when parents see the decision to have kids as a lifestyle choice. Among respondents who said they didn't want kids, the number one reason was a desire for "more leisure time." One young woman may have spoken for many when she said she planned to forego children in order to travel, focus on her job, get a master's degree, and play with her cats. None of this directly makes children more expensive for those who choose to have them, but it does raise the perceived opportunity cost, which makes inflated numbers like those in the Wall Street Journal seem more believable. When fewer people on average are starting families and more people than ever are choosing self-expression as a life goal, it creates a kind of cultural feedback loop that makes having children seem not only less affordable, but less normal. That context helps explain where the grocery store remarks come from. Making family a central goal in life, one worthy of personal sacrifice, is certainly counter cultural, but it's just not as expensive as it's made out to be. And even if were, it's an investment with incredible returns. Today's Breakpoint was coauthored by Shane Morris. To learn more about the Colson Center, go to colsoncenter.org.

Earlier this year, two professors at Tufts University rediscovered a book buried deep in their library. It was called Maladie de Famine or The Disease of Starvation. The story behind this scientific research is stunning. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, hundreds of thousands of Jews were detained in the Warsaw Ghetto, deprived of food and subject to mass executions. Jewish doctors disobeyed their Nazi captors and recorded the effects of starvation on their own bodies as a testimony against the atrocities. Their work eventually shaped the Geneva Conventions of 1949, when the starving of civilians became a war crime. Why did these doctors do this? One answer is that they believed there was meaning to life and death, and therefore to their work. Former Harvard chaplain D. Elton Trueblood said, "A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit."

As mid-term elections loom, both pro-abortion candidates and the Democratic party — not always for the same reason — have been working to advance abortion "rights" and access as a central issue in November. Increasingly, three common myths are touted by abortion advocates and pro-abortion media sources: (1) that abortion is healthcare, (2) that ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages will be treated as abortion in a post-Roe society, and (3) that the abortion pill is safe. To counter these myths (as well as a few others), the American Association for Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) has launched a campaign to put fact sheets into the hands of medical professionals. This information is vital not only to prevent patients from being misled but also as a public statement of solidarity for pro-life doctors and nurses. A few days before the campaign's launch, the pro-abortion American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology threatened to revoke the certification of pro-life OB-GYNs, for disseminating what they called misinformation about "reproductive health care, contraception, abortion, and OB-GYN practices." In essence, the board is saying that any OB-GYN that disagrees with their stance on elective abortion could lose their license to practice. As Alexandra DeSanctis, co-author of Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing, wrote recently in National Review, the vagueness of the board's claims regarding its version of "misinformation" is nothing other than "veiled intimidation." This is why the work of AAPLOG and all pro-lifers in correcting the oft-repeating myths of healthcare is so vital. In stark contrast to AAPLOG's fact sheet, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has its own, and it directly states, "Abortion is essential health care." Sometimes all it takes to misrepresent truth is an adjective or, as in this case, a missing adjective. While in rare and tragic situations, a sick preborn child can put the mother's life at risk, that kind of essential healthcare does not justify the vast majority of abortions that are "elective." OB-GYNs are trained to recognize when life-giving medical intervention is necessary for a pregnant mother. In these heartbreaking cases, medical professionals work to save the mother. In elective abortions, medical professionals work to kill the child. Adding the word "elective" to "abortion" tells the truth about the completely different situation in which a decision is made to end the life of a preborn child who is not endangering the mother's physical health. That is not healthcare. And, according to AAPLOG, 93% of OB/GYNs do not provide elective abortions. Most enter the field to help women care for preborn babies — not take their lives — and they are able to tell the difference. A second myth addressed by the AAPLOG fact sheet is that "women with ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages will not receive the care they need." Each of these situations is categorically different from elective abortion. An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus. In these cases, the baby will not survive no matter what the doctors do. In fact, up until July, Planned Parenthood's website explicitly stated that treatment for ectopic pregnancy was not equivalent to an abortion. That statement was removed when it became a convenient talking point. As DeSanctis has written, none of the legislation in any of the 50 states eliminates care for ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages. Doctors who would refuse care for an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage are misinterpreting their state's laws, and to claim otherwise is patently false. A third myth that the AAPLOG fact sheet repudiates is that "chemical abortions are a safe and convenient option for women." Last December, the Food and Drug Administration extended their pandemic policy that mail-order chemical abortions be made available without requiring a patient to meet with a medical professional in person. And recently, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stated that it plans to find ways to protect access to chemical abortions. Even if there were not the ethical problem of taking a human life, abortion medication is meant to be used before 10 weeks of pregnancy. If a woman is not required to see a medical professional, there is no way to confirm how far long the pregnancy is. Everyone who cares about building a culture of life should be clear on the facts about abortion and women's health. AAPLOG's website includes counters to six other abortion myths. And, Alexandra DeSanctis will be speaking at the next Lighthouse Voices series on her book, "Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Our Culture and Disadvantages Women." Join us at 7 p.m. (Central time) on October 4th either live (if you live near Holland, Michigan) or on livestream. You can register for free by visiting focusonthefamily.org/lighthouse-voices.

Anytime that doctor-assisted death is legalized, what begins as a so-called "right" to die soon devolves into a duty to die. For example, defenders of Canada's expansive policy of Medical Aid in Dying frequently claim that its supposed safeguards will prevent a simple cost-benefit analysis when it comes to deciding who should live and who should die. However, the truth has slipped out a few times now. Back in 2017, the publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cited a report that Medical Aid in Dying could result in "substantial savings across Canada's health-care system" to the tune of $136.8 million a year. Those "savings" happen when high-cost patients are put to death. Aaron Trachtenberg, author of the report, said it frankly: "In a resource-limited health care system, anytime we roll out a large intervention …. cost has to be a part of that discussion. It's just the reality of working in a system of finite resources." And that's why decisions about life and death should never be put into "systems of finite resources." Putting a price tag on what is priceless cheapens it. And human lives are priceless.

In November 2016, a student at Oberlin College in Ohio attempted to steal two bottles of wine from Gibson Bakery. The owner confronted and then chased the student down the street. He was arrested and later pleaded guilty to shoplifting. Recently, nearly six years after the incident, a judge ordered Oberlin College to pay more than $35 million in damages to the bakery. How did just two bottles of wine become so expensive? The student who shoplifted is black. The shop owners are white. That was enough to start an uproar on the Oberlin College campus. The story is an example of a culture that is in a critical theory mood. The day after the incident, Oberlin students started to protest the treatment of the accused outside of Gibson's Bakery. Soon after that, the Oberlin student senate passed a resolution that called for Oberlin College to "officially condemn Gibson's Bakery" as a racist institution. Professors got involved, passing out fliers and encouraging students to join the protest. The college then severed longstanding catering contracts with the bakery. Neither the protestors nor the school ever claimed the student had not shoplifted but, in their public statements, the fact that he did was conveniently ignored. This allowed them to turn the shoplifter, the store owner, and even the bakery into symbols that served a narrative they were telling. In a recorded audio, one student protester yells, "Shoplifting, the stuff on the surface, does not matter. This runs so much deeper." It is not uncommon for any discussion of critical theory, in any of its forms, to be dismissed. After all, critical theory, we are told, is an academic theory that few people have studied. That, of course, is true. Few people have studied the original source materials for this formalized theory. This dismissal not only ignores that many of those who dismiss concerns about critical theory are those mostly actively advocating its core ideas, it misunderstands the way that ideas work within a culture. If you happen to be listening to this commentary on radio, you have two people to thank: German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, who discovered radio waves in the 1880s and Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian engineer who invented wireless radio communication in the 1890s. However, whether you knew these names before now and regardless of how well you understand how radio waves work, it is still quite possible to conceptualize radio and to hear my voice. Worldviews often work like this. A person does not have to fully understand an idea before being shaped by it. When Oberlin College faculty and administration determined, in the face of the evidence, that the white bakery owners were guilty and the student was not, they were applying a critical theory lens to the situation and interpreting the facts accordingly. When the Oberlin College student said that the shoplifting did not matter because of deeper issues at play, the student was parroting a critical theory way of thinking about the world, in which every interaction must be understood and explained by the demographic groupings of the people involved. Moral status is awarded based on these groupings, not on actions. Certain groups are oppressed, and others are oppressors. End of story. Far from being "too complicated" of a theory to infect culture, critical theory offers a simplistic substitute for the actual complexities of life and people. We cannot determine a person's character by tallying their list of demographic features or applying assumptions of privilege. Individuals are not stereotypes, but critical theory reduces them to such. No one need be able to pronounce multisyllabic academic jargon used by critical theorists to be infected by this mood. We simply are infected by it. A few months ago, a friend told me of something that points to the level of cultural infection. She had asked a friend of hers, a junior high teacher, how many students in that class identified as LGBTQ. The answer, offered immediately in a sort of "don't you know this" tone, was, "Oh, all of them do." "All of them?" my friend replied. "Are they sexually active?" "Not at all," the teacher replied. "But none of them want to be straight or cis." Ideas that have infected college students, academics, and junior highers should not be so easily dismissed. The first way to counter infectious cultural moods is not to share that mood. Intentionally, and especially with our own kids, we must talk about and treat every human being as essentially valuable as image bearers of God, and as equally fallible because of their common descent from Adam and Eve. These are essential truths about the world and people and are far better ideas than the ones assumed by the critical theory mood. Ideas are especially dangerous when assumed, as C.S. Lewis once put it, so we must also not allow the bad ideas to go unchallenged, lest they become normalized. Finally, within a critical theory framework, in both its academic theory and cultural mood forms, there is no possibility of forgiveness or redemption. In a Christian vision of God and people, there is. In Christ, there is solid ground for forgiveness (He first forgave us) and for finding redemption (He has taken the punishment for our guilt). So, in Christ, we not only counter bad ideas, we point to a better way.