Breakpoint

John and Shane, standing in for Maria, examine the Biden’s administration executive order that Medicaid patients can travel across state lines for abortion. They also explain how the killing of an Al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan reminds us of not just the danger of extremist Islam in other nations such as Nigeria but also the threat of secularist states toward religious freedom. Musing on two recent commentaries, they discuss the cracks in Neo-Darwinism and the Gnostic basis of the topic of cannibalism in popular media.

Recently, police in Hampshire, England, arrested a man for an unusual crime. Not vandalism, theft, or murder but, according to the arresting officer because “someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post.”  Setting aside the dubious and dangerous logic of involving the state in social media spats, appealing to emotion as a matter of justice is astonishing. So, I no longer have to prove wrong has been done, only that I feel a wrong has been done?  All that’s left once a culture has rejected the idea of right and wrong is to grope for some moral foundation in nebulous ideas like “anxiety” and “offense.” Everyone’s inner voice becomes an unassailable authority, and the loudest outer voice must win.  Common sense tells us that this is a disaster in the making, but without the common sense that there is common truth, there won’t be common justice. 

As America adjusts to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, including by enacting more laws in some states to protect unborn children, a higher number of women will likely bring their babies safely to birth. This is good news, including for those in unexpected and crisis pregnancies. Not only will more at-risk babies be saved, more women will be spared the violence and false promises of abortion.  This will also mean that the efforts of pregnancy centers, adoption services, foster agencies, and other providers who generally care for struggling families must continue. In fact, by the grace of God, their work must increase. I have nothing but confidence that the Church is up to this task.  And yet, as a pro-life leader recently put it, these could be the hardest days for the pro-life movement to date. The oft-repeated charge that Christians must “redouble our efforts” to care for women in crisis pregnancies in the wake of the Dobbs decision presumes that women who feel unprepared, ill-equipped, scared, and abandoned to deal with crisis pregnancies on their own is a given part of life in America in 2022. That should not be a given. It should be unacceptable to us.  In other words, the emergency before us isn’t only that women are facing crisis pregnancies, and often facing them alone, but our culture’s warped views of sex, marriage, children, and commitment. These bad ideas have set the stage for a world brimming with crisis pregnancies in the first place.  This is another subtle way legalized abortion has poisoned our cultural imagination. As Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis demonstrate in their profound new book, Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing, legalizing abortion—which then normalized and destigmatized abortion culturally—rewired American thought so deeply that we don’t even realize anymore when we’re accepting demands that we could—and should—refuse.  Our work is not just to make abortion unthinkable. It is to make abandoning pregnant women unthinkable, to make derelict dads unthinkable, to make the fable of “sex without commitment” unthinkable. It is to re-catechize the world, and ourselves, about the true, un-severable relationship between sex, marriage, and babies.  Legalized abortion has blinded us to that core truth. In her book Rethinking Sex, Washington Post columnist Christine Emba describes how legalized abortion and even normalized contraception were sold to women as indispensable tools of their liberation. In fact, they made possible the widespread cultural acceptance of a lie: that sex and babies have nothing to do with one another.   “As contraception has become more mainstream and the risks of sex more diffuse,” Emba writes, “saying no can feel like less of an option for women: after all, what’s your excuse?” In other words, once abortion was legally on the table, it gave us leave to deconstruct sex to nothing more than a play for individual pleasure. That fundamental lie changed our worldview and thus our behavior.   However, rather than “liberate” women, it put more pressure on women to have sex without commitment and less pressure on men to commit. It allowed us to view and treat any children who result from our sexual activity as unexpected and unwanted consequences, rather than human beings with rightful claims on our protection and commitments.  To be clear, none of this was ever true. We never actually separated sex from babies. We never changed the fact that kids and mothers need committed dads and husbands in order to thrive. Lies never have the power to change God’s design. They only teach us to pretend we can change reality. Crisis pregnancies and chronic absentee fatherhood are the fruit of these fictions, and women and children pay the price for these cultural fantasies.   This is the house abortion built. It led us to see children as things—even burdens—instead of as image bearers. It put pressure on us that we were never meant to bear by pretending family building is fully in our own hands, not God’s. Legalized abortion normalized promiscuity, promoted fatherlessness, and secured a view of children so bereft of humanity that we won’t even call them children anymore. We employ euphemisms like “fetus” or “tissue,” but euphemisms don’t change reality, or the hard consequences of ignoring it.  Yes, Christians must continue and even re-double our “pro-life” efforts inside crisis pregnancy centers. And we must continue and re-triple our pro-life efforts outside as well, advocating for healthy sexuality, biblical marriage, and a Christian vision of moms, dads, and children. This is how we finally suck the venom of legalized abortion out of our cultural imagination.     

Last week, more than 80 organizations—including the Colson Center, Alliance Defending Freedom, and Focus on the Family—sent a letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The purpose was “to denounce . . . the so-called ‘Respect for Marriage Act, ‘in the strongest possible terms.”   The letter outlined three problems with this legislation.  First, the act would require recognition of any state definition of marriage, making possible options such as polygamous or open marriages. This would sacrifice the well-being of children for adult happiness.   Second, the act sets up religious organizations and businesses to be sued for upholding that marriage is between a man and a woman. So, religious foster agencies, social service organizations, and other organizations and businesses contracted with the government could expect to be targeted.   Third, this legislation could threaten the tax-exempt status of non-profits that believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.   The so-called “Respect for Marriage Act” would establish and expand the wrongly decided Obergefell ruling. If you care about religious liberty and children, please contact your senator today.  Resources:  Call Your Senators About the Respect for Marriage Act>>    Possible Script to Say to Senator’s Office About Marriage Act>>  Letter From Coalition to Senate Minority Leader>> 

One of the iron laws of popcorn cinema, especially to score the coveted (but ever-more elusive) summer blockbuster status is that there must be sufficient shock value. And one of the iron laws of shock value is that it must always increase. Each new film must outdo the last one.  Take the Jurassic Park series. In the first movie back in 1993, a mere five people were eaten by dinosaurs, all of whom were confined to a tiny island. Fast-forward a few inferior sequels, and a score or more people are gobbled by a host of mutant CGI dinos prowling the entire planet along with giant killer grasshoppers. The lesson is clear: Audiences had already been shocked by dinosaurs coming back to life, and they wanted more. The old thrill would no longer do.   The more this iron law holds across pop culture, the more desensitized we become. Enter another rising entertainment genre more gruesome than dinosaurs eating people. People eating people.   Writing recently in The New York Times, Alex Beggs documented a growing fascination with cannibalism. In the article, Beggs offered a long list of movies, TV shows, and novels in which characters eating one another is a central plot device. The novel A Certain Hunger is “about a restaurant critic with a taste for (male) human flesh.” The Showtime series Yellowjackets is “about a high school women’s soccer team stranded in the woods for a few months too many.” A new show on Hulu called Fresh is about “an underground human meat trade.” Raw is a film about “a vegetarian veterinary student whose taste for meat escalates,” and Bones and All is a movie about “a young love that becomes a lust for human consumption.”   “Turns out,” wrote Beggs, “cannibalism has a time and a place,” and “that time is now.”  What on earth is fueling a sudden fixation with perhaps the oldest and most unsettling of taboos? The writer of one show told the Times: “I feel like the unthinkable has become the thinkable, and cannibalism is very much squarely in the category of the unthinkable.” Another seemed to find the concept potentially appetizing, asking, “what portion of our revulsion to these things is a fear of the ecstasy of them?”  When I first saw the headline for this New York Times story appear in my newsfeed, I thought it was a prank. Apparently, all of these books, movies, and TV shows about cannibalism point to a very real partially popular trend. Why?   Perhaps, in a culture that has made virtues of deconstructing all moral boundaries and celebrating all desires, it is increasingly difficult to shock anyone. Shock value, after all, depends on some sense of what is right and wrong, and even more, what is normal. With sexual and gender identities multiplying daily and more and more people treating the human body as moldable clay without any underlying design or purpose, is it any wonder some are reimagining it as food?  And why shouldn’t they, if human beings are only, as Christian author Glen Scrivener puts it, “mischievous apes?” Chimpanzees routinely kill and eat one another. If we are only advanced animals, it’s difficult to imagine why we humans should have a strong aversion to dining on each other, too. If our bodies are in no way sacred or made for a higher purpose, then not just every sexual appetite, but every appetite must be permissible.  To be clear, I am not suggesting that we are on the cusp of a cannibal rights movement. I certainly hope we are not. The social aversion is extremely strong, as it should be, and has only been broken in a few times and places throughout history. Still, the current flirtations with people-eating in entertainment is a tell-tale sign of a culture that is losing all good aversions.   Like those sub-par Jurassic Park sequels resorting to ever hungrier and bigger dinosaurs, our movies and stories reveal a lost creativity, leaving a culture that must constantly push boundaries. In particular, our gnostic age tends to push the boundaries of how characters think of and use their bodies, and the bodies of others. When it comes to sex, titles like Fifty Shades of Grey and Cuties have already put sadomasochism and the sexual exploitation of children on the menu. In such a culture, a side dish of cannibalism isn’t surprising.   Those who find a worldview in which bodies have no purpose or boundaries a bit nauseating should wonder why. Christians can tell them, and offer the alternative: a worldview in which bodies are sacred, not only because they are part of what it means to be created in God’s image, but because God, Himself assumed a body and gave it for us. Interestingly, Christianity’s early critics alleged that the Lord’s Supper was a form of cannibalism. In fact, it was and is the ultimate reason that the human body is worthy of respect and honor, in the bedroom, at the movies, and even at the table.  

Philosopher Blaise Pascal was best known for his so-called “wager” that believing in God is the smartest decision, even if you’re not sure God exists. What many don’t know is that Pascal was a pioneer in the psychology of persuasion.  Heated disagreements are common in social media, writes Olivia Goldhill at Quartz. But Pascal suggested centuries ago that if you want to convince someone of your position, you don’t begin by telling them they’re wrong. You understand where they’re coming from, admit ways they’re right, but suggest they maybe haven’t seen the whole picture.  “No one is offended at not seeing everything,’ wrote Pascal. “But [they don’t] like to be mistaken.”  Another tip? Lead people to the answer, but let them discover it on their own. “People are generally better persuaded by reasons they have themselves discovered than by those from the minds of others.”  These are great tips, especially for Christians, who are entrusted with the most important truths there are, and who are to speak those truths in love.   

In 1973, evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.” Almost 50 years later, an increasing number of scientists are asking whether evolution makes any sense in light of what we now know from biology.  A recent long-form essay in The Guardian signals just how urgent the problem has become for the most dominant theory in the history of the sciences. In it, author Stephen Buranyi, gives voice to a growing number of scientists who think it’s time for a “new theory of evolution.”   For a long time, descent with slight modifications and natural selection have been “the basic” (and I’d add, unchallengeable) “story of evolution.” Organisms change, and those that survive pass on traits. Though massaged a bit to incorporate the discovery of DNA, the theory of evolution by natural selection has dominated for 150 years, especially in biology. The “drive to survive” is credited as the creative force behind all the artistry and engineering we see in nature.   “The problem,” writes Buranyi, is that “according to a growing number of scientists,” this basic story is “absurdly crude and misleading.” For one thing, Darwinian evolution assumes much of what it needs to explain. For instance, consider the origin of light-sensitive cells that rearranged to become the first eye, or the blood vessels that became the first placenta. How did these things originate? According to one University of Indiana biologist, “we still do not have a good answer. The classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time,” he says, “has so far fallen flat.”  This scientific doubt about Darwin has been simmering for a while. In 2014, an article in the journal Nature, jointly authored by eight scientists from diverse fields, argued that evolutionary theory was in need of a serious rethink. They called their proposed rethink the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” and a year later, the Royal Society in London held a conference to discuss it.   Along with Darwinian blind spots like the origin of the eye, the Extended Synthesis seeks to deal with the discovery of epigenetics, an emerging field that studies the inherited traits not mediated by DNA. Then there are the rapid mutations that evade natural selection, a fossil record that appears to move in “short concentrated bursts” (or “explosions”), and something called “plasticity,” which is the ability we now know living things have to adapt physically to their environments in a single generation without genetically evolving.  All of these discoveries—some recent, others long ignored by mainstream biology—challenge natural selection as the “grand theory” of life. All of them hint that living things are greater marvels and mysteries than we ever imagined. And, unsurprisingly, all of these discoveries have been controversial.  The Guardian article described how Royal Society scientists and Nobel laureates alike boycotted the conference, attacking the extended synthesis as “irritating” and “disgraceful,” and its proponents as “revolutionaries.”  As Gerd Müller, head of the department of theoretical biology at the University of Vienna helpfully explained, “Parts of the modern synthesis are deeply ingrained in the whole scientific community, in funding networks, positions, professorships. It’s a whole industry.”  Such resistance isn’t too surprising for anyone who’s been paying attention. Any challenges to the established theory of life’s origins, whether from Bible-believing scientists or intelligent design theorists, have long been dismissed as religion in a lab coat.  The habit of fixing upon a dogma and calling it “settled science” is just bad science that stunts our understanding of the world. It is a kind of idolatry that places “science” in the seat of God, appoints certain scientists as priests capable of giving answers no fallible human can offer, and feigns certainty where real questions remain. The great irony is that this image of scientist-as-infallible-priest makes them seem like the caricature of medieval monks charging their hero Galileo with heresy for his dissent from the consensus.  As challenges to Darwin mount, we should be able to articulate why “settled science” makes such a poor god. And we should encourage the science and the scientists challenging this old theory-turned-dogma, and holding it to its own standards. After all, if Darwinian evolution is as unfit as it now seems, it shouldn’t survive.  

In a recent article at The Gospel Coalition, writer Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra tells the story of a Christian family with a teen who once identified as transgender.   “I started to associate womanhood with being sexualized,” says Grace, now age 16. Peers, teachers, counselors, and—above all—social media circles guided Grace towards a strong case of rapid onset gender dysphoria. She stopped wearing feminine clothing and asked her parents to refer to her as “they/them.”   This is the moment that many parents fear. These parents prayed hard, stayed true, and remembered the long game. “They built their relationships with her,” writes Zylstra. “They drew boundaries around how she could express herself. They took her to counseling and to church.”  Eventually, Grace began to feel comfortable as a girl again.   In a culture where nearly 1 in 5 of Gen Z calls themselves “LGBT,” the story of Grace and her family is worth reading. At a time when so many are tempted to despair, it does not offer a quick fix. But it does offer truth, love, and hope. 

In early March 2021, the U.S. Senate’s Caucus on International Narcotics Control released a report on the increasing potency of marijuana products available on the market. At the time, America was just a year into the pandemic and related lockdowns, so marijuana policy was not front and center on everyone’s mind. It should have been. In fact, the findings contained in the report can be described as shocking. A more creative, but just as accurate, title for this 58-page report would be “This Isn’t Your Grandpa’s Weed.”  Included in the findings, the THC levels in marijuana products are soaring. THC is the psychoactive chemical that gives pot users a high, and reportedly provides relief from pain and nausea. In recent years, high-potency products have become more common. In 1990, the average concentration of THC in a marijuana plant was 4%. By 2012, it had tripled to 12%. Today, some products on the market have THC levels as high as 90%.   These increasing levels come even though a 2020 NIH study found that pain relief benefits of marijuana require THC levels no higher than 5% and that marijuana with higher THC levels might even be less effective in fighting pain. Setting aside the consistent political reality that legalizing medical marijuana is always intended to lead to the legalizing of recreational marijuana—even if legitimate pain patients need medical marijuana, they do not need THC levels of 90%.  And yet, marijuana policies are clearly headed in a direction that does not align with what we now know. Most U.S. states allow marijuana use in some capacity. The only two states in the country with a cap on THC levels and high-potency products are Vermont and California, where the cap is 60%. Right now, Ohio’s legislature is considering a bill to cap THC levels at 90%. At that level, what is the point?  While the political posturing continues, a dystopian reality born of the marijuana revolution is unfolding outside statehouses. Doctors and emergency rooms across the country have sounded the alarm on the spike in psychosis, suicidal ideation, actual suicide, schizophrenia, and addiction-like behavior they have seen among young people using high-potency marijuana.  In June, The New York Times reported the story of a teenage girl who could not stop fainting and throwing up after becoming functionally addicted to vaping high-potency pot. A doctor at the Adolescent Substance Use and Addiction Program at Boston Children’s hospital has reported an explosion in the number of young cannabis users experiencing “hallucinations and trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality.” And increased marijuana use also poses secondary dangers such as more deadly traffic accidents, more poisonings of young people who mistake edibles for candy, and a worsening opioid crisis, which many doctors believe is directly correlated with marijuana legalization.   Lawmakers in Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational marijuana 10 years ago, are now trying to apply brakes to this runaway train. Last year, the state legislature passed a bill mandating that coroners test THC levels when someone under 25 suffers a “non-natural death.” According to one state senator, “Since legalization in Colorado, the regulatory framework has failed to keep up with the evolution of the new products….  The industry has changed, and we need to catch up with those changes.” Unfortunately, “catching up with changes” is not generally a “strength” of government.  The Church, however, can play a redemptive role. American Christians have a responsibility to advocate for policies that benefit our neighbors’ welfare and against policies that hurt them. Marijuana should be no different. The 30-billion dollar marijuana industry has been incredibly deft in crafting messaging that makes anyone opposed to legalizing weed seem “uncool” or “behind the times.”   So, it is essential to understand that today’s weed is far ahead of the times. We are far removed from the Cheech and Chong days. This stuff is dangerous, particularly for young people. Christians should be highly motivated to not let this cat out of the bag wherever it has not yet been loosed and to minister to people where it has, including in addiction recovery centers and other healthcare settings.   Christians have a legacy of running into the plague when everyone else is running away. Marijuana legalization has reached plague status. It is time to head in.  

Earlier in July, an Ohio Democratic state senator thought she was taking a courageous stand against the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade. She introduced a bill that would allow pregnant women to file civil lawsuits against the men who got them pregnant. Those men could then be on the hook for up to $5,000 in damages.  The senator, an outspoken abortion supporter, said she wrote the bill to counteract Ohio’s “draconian” abortion restrictions. However, instead of making a statement for abortion, the bill is more of a solution for abortion and an endorsement of marriage. After all, the idea that men should take responsibility for the babies they make isn’t revolutionary... or at least it shouldn’t be. In a Christian vision, sex and babies go together and shouldn’t be separated. So, God established a way to hold them together: Cultures around the world call this arrangement “marriage.”   In fact, $5,000 is a pretty sad settlement. It won’t pay for a baby, much less a wedding budget. But hey, if lawmakers want to dis-incentivize men abandoning their children, I’m all for it.