Breakpoint

If we never speak up, we'll never find out what could happen... After nearly 10 years of hosting its annual "Wilberforce week," an Oxford college abruptly disinvited British group Christian Concern this March. Apparently, a handful of students accused the group of "hateful and invalidating" language. In response, Christian Concern approached Worcester College and asked them to substantiate those accusations. The college was unable to do so and was instead reminded of a prior statement issued by its provost, that "the free expression and exchange of different views … goes straight to the heart of our democracy and is a vital part of higher education." In the end, the college walked back the cancellation of Christian Concern and issued an apology. Thank God for small victories like this, and for Christians willing to live out Peter's command to respond with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak against us "may be put to shame." But this also requires Christians who, like the Apostle Peter, are willing to speak truth in the first place ... which takes courage, but who knows what God will do?

One of the more helpful analogies to explain the personal and cultural damage wrought by the sexual revolution is that sex is like fire. When a fire is in the fireplace, it brings light, warmth, and ambience. It can even preserve life. When, however, a fire jumps out of the fireplace onto the curtains, it brings destruction, even death. A similar analogy compares sex to water. Our bodies need water to live, but we need water in the right place. When water gets in the lungs, it can be deadly. One point of these analogies is that, like fire and water, sex is good. It has a design and purpose. The sexual revolution wanted sex to be "good," but forfeited the "design and purpose" part. In fact, proponents of the sexual revolution argued that sex is only good if it is set "free" from all restraint, responsibility, and consequences. This kind of fundamental error, like all bad ideas, is bound to have victims. With each day that passes, we meet more of them. Consider a piece published several months ago at Vice that announced a hip new way to find sexual satisfaction: "radical monogamy." Don't call it marriage (that's for dinosaurs), but man, there's something really fulfilling and safe (apparently) about sexual fidelity between two committed people. Or consider the recent book by Washington Post columnist Christine Emba. In Rethinking Sex, Emba argues that using the often vague ideal of consent as our only moral guidepost governing sexual activity has left a lot of people hurt, lonely, and frustrated. All of this is pointing to an opportunity for the Church to offer something better. However, to do that, we must be careful and clear. If sex is designed, it is under the authority of the One who designed it. If it is, indeed, under God's authority, and God is good, then rightly ordered sex is a good gift. In other words, the full antidote to the toxic sexuality of the sexual revolution isn't just to return it to the safety of the fireplace. The sexual morality we rightly talk about from Scripture isn't the whole story of this beautiful gift. Keeping sex within the confines of a lifelong marriage between one man and one woman is a moral good, but just as loving our neighbors is much more than not actively hating them, respecting God's design for sex is much more than not transgressing certain boundaries. In His kindness, God has called us to the lifelong cultivation of being properly sexual. This is the virtue of chastity, something often mistaken by Christians and non-Christians alike for prudishness. Instead, the call to be properly sexual with one another is a calling for all of us, married and single, to pursue all our lives, before, during, and after marriage. The Scriptures describe this well. Husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the Church. Christ laid down his life for His Church. And so, we give our bodies generously to our spouses, but not with degradation or violence. Sex within marriage can still demean, degrade, and victimize. When sex is seen as nothing more than an act of mere pleasure seeking, or when sex is demanded or withheld out of anger or contempt, or when sex is pursued in body or in mind with someone who is not given to us in marriage, chastity is abdicated, and we are sinning against God, our spouse, and ourselves. Wedding rings are not some "license to practice" in any and every way that comes into our minds. That's reductionistic. Sex is allowed in marriage, but it is also still designed. Often we think of biblical exhortations like the call to "love our neighbor" or to "seek the good of the other" as applying only to our actual neighbors, friends, or coworkers. But these verses also apply to our sexual relationships with our spouses. Practicing the virtue of chastity means to approach sex as an act of generosity. It's not something to treat lightly or selfishly, even in marriage. The sexual revolution sent the fire screaming out of the fireplace and then poured gasoline on the whole disaster. As more and more people are burned in its wake, the Church has a wonderful gift to offer, a gift that goes beyond the rules of the fireplace. When ordered rightly, the whole world will be blessed by its warmth, its light, and its life.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed what is known as the Respect for Marriage Act. Despite its traditional-sounding name, this bill is anything but. It's an attempt to make legislatively secure what was decreed by the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that redefined marriage for the entire nation. It's not surprising the bill passed the progressive-controlled House, but 47 Republicans joined all the Democrats in the vote. And it seems at least possible that Dems could find 10 Republicans in the Senate, which would make the deceptively named act a law. There's nothing conservative about the state redefining marriage and forcing it on a nation as Obergefell did. If so-called conservative lawmakers don't get that, it seems there is little left for conservatism to conserve. Too many political conservatives are philosophically rootless. Their ideas are built on sentiment or nebulous "values" instead of the solid rocks of Scripture and common sense. If society is ever to re-embrace creational norms about marriage and family, our so-called conservatives must reject "the Hallmark-ization" of ethics. They must stop prioritizing sentiment over conviction.

In 2016, psychologist Dr. Peter Langman compiled biographical data on 56 American school shooters. He found that 82% had grown up in dysfunctional family situations, usually without two biological parents at home. The trend has sadly continued. The shooter in Uvalde, Texas, hadn't lived with his father in years. The Sandy Hook shooter hadn't seen his father in the two years leading up to that massacre. Last month, new research from the Institute for Family Studies demonstrated, once again, how important fathers are, especially for boys. For example, boys growing up without their dads are only half as likely to graduate from college as their peers who live with dad at home. Strikingly, those numbers remain steady even after controlling for other factors such as race, income, and general IQ. Boys without a dad at home are also almost twice as likely to be "idle" in their late twenties, defined as neither working nor in school, and are significantly more likely to have been arrested or incarcerated by the time they turn 35. These are only a few of the data points which demonstrate that fatherlessness is one of the most pressing crises our culture is facing. Why doesn't our culture talk more about this? One reason is that this crisis intersects other "third rails." Our culture got to this point via the sexual revolution, which encouraged promiscuity by redefining freedom and prioritizing autonomy over responsibility. When sex outside of marriage becomes normal, it is mostly women who are left on their own to raise the resulting children. There are other contributing factors as well, many of which were made possible by legislation. Divorce has been largely destigmatized, not in small part by making it legally easier. The legal demand for same-sex "marriage" brought with it the demand for same-sex parenting, which by definition asserts that kids do not need both a mother and a father. Certain forms of assisted reproduction likewise assert that children are less the fruit of a committed marriage than they are a commercial process. And now here we are, with 32% of American boys growing up in homes without their biological dads. If there's anything that we should learn from the grim outcomes of this social experiment, it is that dads aren't replaceable. This was true from creation, but even more so in a fallen world with each of us born with a fallen human nature. We only learn to grow from socially, emotionally, and spiritually immature children into adults so that we can live together in a healthy way by seeing healthy behavior modeled and by having unhealthy behavior corrected. Scripture passages affirm that mentoring in righteousness requires demonstration, as much or more than just explanation. Christ repeatedly told his followers to "do as He did." When He washed His disciples' feet, He offered it as an object lesson: "I give you an example, that you also should do as I did to you." Paul told believers in Corinth and Ephesus to be "imitators" of him, just as he was an "imitator of Christ." In other places, Scripture even points to modelling and mimicry in sex-specific ways. In his letter to Titus, Paul instructed men to be "dignified" and "self-controlled" and to "urge the younger men to be self-controlled." He also told the older women to "teach what is good" and to "train the younger women" to be "self-controlled," "pure" and "kind." That, of course, is another cultural third rail. We are so desperate to pretend sexual difference isn't built into our biological reality, we simply cannot abide the suggestion that our genders are critically important in parenting. But the numbers don't lie. As Dr. Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, puts it, "[T]here is no such thing as 'parenting.' There is mothering, and there is fathering—children do best with both." Christians can challenge the growing public safety crisis that is fatherlessness, and we must start in the Church. We must affirm, in word and in action, that there are men and there are women and that both matter in parenting. We have to de-normalize absent dads, challenge men to take responsibility for their sexual choices and for their children, and fill in the gaps whenever and however necessary. No matter if our technologies and cultural dogmas pretend otherwise, every child has a father. These new statistics show, again, that every child needs their father. We have no right to deprive them of

According to a recent article in The Guardian, the theory of evolution may be in trouble. For the first time in a long time, scientists are bucking the so-called "Neo-Darwinian synthesis," which has dominated the sciences since the early 20th century. This doesn't mean "evolution" is finished as a theory, but it could mean the end of thinking of it as the only theory. There's a lesson here for Christians. Every new fad, whether in science, the arts, government, or social issues, comes with the temptation to capitulate or avoid being on "the wrong side of history." In the past, proponents of the death of religion, the looming "population bomb," utopian Marxism, and all kinds of other theories have made this claim, only to be proven completely false as time went on. As a theory of everything, neo-Darwinism has failed. As a theory of the origins of biological diversity, it is clearly failing. Christians have no cause to abandon what Scripture reveals just because an idea, lifestyle, or theory becomes popular.

Nineties kids (and their parents) may remember the Tamagotchi craze, a tiny egg-shaped video game that dominated toy markets for a time. Kids would raise a virtual pet that could hang from their backpack like a keychain. I've been told it was a great toy—the trauma of forgetting it somewhere and then finding it had passed on to greener digital pastures notwithstanding. Now, in the age of the Metaverse, something else is here … and it is even creepier. "Augmented reality babies" offer users the virtual experience of "parenting" an algorithm designed to behave like a real baby. Using virtual-reality goggles, or even potentially wearable gloves which can simulate physical touch, users can interact with a digital baby as it grows … or, optionally (and even more creepily), as it stays exactly the same. Some gurus are heralding AR babies as a new age of parenting. "Make no mistake that this development, should it indeed take place, is a technological game-changer which… could help us solve some of today's most pressing issues, including overpopulation," says Catriona Campbell, a former technology advisor to the British government, and author of the book AI by Design: A Plan for Living with Artificial Intelligence. Some argue this new development could also ease loneliness for those who want children but are unable to have them, or for those who feel they can't afford to have children. While the average kid costs about $230,000 by the time they reach age 17, reports the New York Post, "a digital kid … could have all its needs met for less than $25 per month." And as a bonus, no changing diapers! In light of these possibilities, Campbell offered a somewhat unsettling prediction: "I think it would be reasonable to expect as many as 20% of people choosing to have an AR baby over a real one." On one hand, it's hard not to be cynical of Campbell's bright-eyed tech optimism, especially given the current dubious state of Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse. No matter how good it gets, augmented reality simply cannot replace many of life's best experiences. Playing a video game in the Metaverse, for example, is fun. Eating a slice of cake... not so much. By misunderstanding why people become parents in the first place, many proponents of augmented reality misunderstand the essentials of what it means to be human. Logging off from an AR "baby" might be easier, but all the labor spent on an actual child is something that simply cannot be simulated or replaced by a simulation. And of course, the entire idea of global overpopulation continues to fall apart as its predictions continue to prove false. Should it actually work, this technology will almost certainly be adopted in countries where the most acute problem is underpopulation, not to mention increasingly devastating rates of loneliness. It's a common trend in the modern world—much like prescribing marijuana to combat anxiety—that our "cures" only further aggravate the problem. Spending over seven hours every day staring at screens for work, leisure, and connection has led many people to think technology can replace real relationships. But the opposite is true. Technology can do wonders, but putting a virtual baby in the hands of a lonely person is akin to giving a glass of salt water to someone dying of dehydration. Likewise, it is simply not true that a life free of responsibility is the one which will produce the most happiness. As any parent knows, real kids are noisy, expensive, and inconvenient. There are days when they seem to constantly take our reserves of energy, and sometimes the last strands of patience. But, they're worth it. Jesus' words that "it is more blessed to give than to receive," aren't just a pious aphorism. They're describing a core piece of what it means to be human. The surprising source of real life, joy, and vitality is from serving others, not just ourselves. No matter how sophisticated they may someday be, virtual babies will always be just a piece of code, a vain attempt to meet the felt needs of lonely adults while never providing for their true needs. If that's what people want, it would be best to avoid any pretense of "parenting" and buy them a Tamagotchi instead.

Post-Roe rhetoric continues to reach new levels of rumor, scare tactics, and red herrings. Take a recent headline from Scientific American, "Abortion Restrictions Could Cause an Ob-Gyn Brain Drain." The implication is most doctors want to offer abortion so badly, they'll leave medicine if they can't. The truth, however, seems to be the opposite. The LA Times reported, from a 2019 survey of American OB-GYNs, that "while nearly 3 out of 4 had a patient who wanted to end a pregnancy in the past year, fewer than 1 in 4 were willing and able to perform one themselves." For some, the reasons were pragmatic. Many others cited pro-life convictions. As Dr. Donna Harrison of the Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists put it, "We have two patients: both the unborn child and the mother. As physicians, we've taken the Hippocratic oath… we don't kill our patients." That's the actual heart of the issue. Doctors are there to heal, not kill. It's not hard to tell the difference.

Today, July 19, marks a dark day in Christian history. On this date in A.D. 64, the Great Fire of Rome left two-thirds of the Eternal City in ashes. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, the fire was sparked in a part of town concentrated with flammable goods, quickly spread by high winds, and burned over the course of the next week and a half. This was the stuff of nightmares. According to Tacitus: "The blaze in its fury ran first through the level portions of the city, then rising to the hills, while it again devastated every place below them; it outstripped all preventive measures, so rapid was the mischief and so completely at its mercy the city, with those narrow winding passages and irregular streets which characterized old Rome." He went on to describe screaming women, helpless children, and panicked crowds, trampling everything before them. The end of the blaze was not the end of the terror. On the throne at the time was Emperor Nero, a man notorious for his immorality and hatred of Christians. Suspicious by the way Nero refashioned the charred city into his own image, as well as by rumors that he "fiddled while Rome burned," many Romans began to wonder if he had started the fire himself. To forestall the whispers, Nero blamed the Christians. And why not? Christians were weird. They talked about eating flesh and drinking blood. They called their husbands "brother" and their wives "sister." They denied the gods, like atheists. They thought a dead man had come back to life and was going to return one day in glory and, most pertinently, in vengeance. Up to this point, believers had mostly been left alone by Roman authorities, but Nero found they were easy to pick on. In the days that followed, the Apostles Peter and Paul met their fates, along with an unknown but great number of other Christians. If this was the first time Christians took heat for a public disaster, it certainly would not be the last. Christians have found themselves an unpopular minority in many cultural settings and have been consistently blamed for various disasters in various societies. A century and a half after Nero's attacks, Tertullian, a North African Christian writer, morbidly quipped, "If the Tiber rises too high, or the Nile too low, the remedy is always feeding Christians to the lions." In 410, pagan writers suggested that the sacking of Rome by German tribes would not have happened had Rome not abandoned her gods for a supposedly immoral Christianity. That accusation led Augustine of Hippo to respond with his magnum opus, The City of God. One of the most important works in the history of Western civilization, The City of God is still read, centuries later, by pastors, philosophers, and historians alike. In it, Augustine provided a thoroughgoing defense to a shallow trope leveled against Christians. He offered a litany of natural and military disasters and gross moral failings from Rome's supposedly purer and pagan past. With these examples, he undid the critique that Christians had somehow made life worse. If anything, in fact, the influence of biblical ideals had made things better. Christians today face analogous accusations. We aren't being cast to the lions (at least not here in the West, anyway), but there's a clear and growing undercurrent of hostility toward Christians that often resembles the tropes used in ancient days. Christians have been blamed for the prevalence of poverty, natural disasters due to climate change, the degradation of science and technology, and all kinds of social and political oppression. Our reply can be much the same as Augustine's. Oppression, poverty, military, and natural disasters are the common lot of humanity. They are common in times and places where the Gospel has never gone. However, in those places where Christianity has gone there are hospitals, universities, technological innovation, freedom, and an unusual insistence on human dignity. Recently, the good that Christianity brought to the world has been described in books like Dominion by the (as yet!) non-Christian historian, Tom Holland, and the newer The Air We Breathe, by Anglican evangelist Glen Scrivener. These works remind us how bad the world was before Christ came, and how much of what we think of as good and valuable has come, not despite Christianity, but because of it. Any Christian who faces an unfair accusation today should read these books and be encouraged. Christianity is just as true and good today, as it was then.

The day that Roe v. Wade died, reactions were mixed. Those who long supported Roe's legal death work mourned the victory for life. For many, it provoked fear, sadness, outrage, and hyperbole. "I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid's Tale," Canadian author Margaret Atwood wrote. "The Supreme Court is making it real." On the other hand, many pro-lifers celebrated. "For nearly fifty years, America has enforced an unjust law that has permitted some to decide whether others can live or die. We thank God today that the Court has now overturned this decision," said Archbishop José Gómez, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The only truly surprising reaction came from a third group. While technically pro-life, this group viewed the overturning of Roe as a sort of problem, a cause for caution and even sorrow. Some even condemned the celebrations they saw from the rest of us. Apologist Mike Winger referred to this group as "the sideways people," ... because it's like they are taking a sudden turn from the issue at hand and going sideways onto other things they care about more. Or perhaps it's because they are "looking sideways" at this whole thing in the sense of being bothered by it, even if not repudiating it. He's right. After achieving a goal that united Christians for nearly 50 years, it was strange to see a tone of fear and concern from some corners of the Church. If the caution came from a fear that the Dobbs decision was wrongly understood to have ended abortion or to have settled the issue, that's valid. Overturning Roe did neither. As many have said, this is not the end of this battle on behalf of pre-born life. It's not even the beginning of the end. At best, it's the "end of the beginning." The pro-life movement must continue, and its future has to be not only pro-child but also pro-mother, treating people, especially women caught in unexpected pregnancies with compassion and support while unraveling the lies our culture tells them about their child's life. All of this is true. But that's not really where these critiques were coming from. These were coming from Christians who declared that real compassion precluded celebration and that we must "lament" with women who no longer have a presumed right to end the life of their child. It was as if the real problem was that this particularly heinous choice was being taken away from them. Abortion is an act of violence to both mothers and children. Only a society that's been deeply poisoned by a culture of death pretends otherwise. Should celebrations of the Emancipation Proclamation have been muted as well? The real issue is that too many Christians crumple under the weight of mere public opinion. Whenever empathy becomes the chief virtue of a Christian, their moral waters are muddied. "Winsomeness" somehow looks like "silence." Cultural elites, from business to entertainment, have made it perfectly clear: To speak out against abortion carries with it the crushing stigma of somehow hating women, of being merely "pro-birth," of needlessly offending our neighbors with divisive rhetoric. The tragic irony is anyone who favors the killing of unborn children can publicly say so without a hint of moral disapproval from some of these Christians. This imbalance is, of course, not new for pro-life advocates. We've come to expect it from those who are deceived by the worst ideas of our age. But we don't expect it from those who claim to be pro-life. Princeton Professor Robert P. George often tells of a question he asks his students. If you had been born before the Civil War, would you have accepted slavery, or opposed it? Nearly every student quickly answers that they would have opposed slavery and would have worked tirelessly to dismantle it. "Of course, this is nonsense." George writes: "Only the tiniest fraction of them, or any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves." If he's going to believe those students who claim the moral high ground, George demands that they show evidence of how they have stood, today in some context, for an unpopular victim of injustice, knowing that, as a result of their moral witness, they would lose standing with their peers, be loathed and ridiculed by powerful people and institutions, abandoned by some of their friends, called nasty names, and denied valuable professional opportunities. Because that is the cost of moral clarity. If we will not even risk being liked, the end of Roe v. Wade feels more like a problem than the win it really is. Of course, from here, if we're going to show true love, it's far more difficult than simply speaking pro-life opinions. It will cost us to support crisis pregnancy centers at the level they need to be supported, to protect at-risk mothers, to show compassion to all children, and to live lives that are in line with God's plan for human flourishing. In short, there's plenty of work to do. But we can do that work and still celebrate the end of a legal obstacle to life that has poisoned so much of our culture for so long.

A gay couple is suing a fertility business in California because they had a daughter instead of a son. The lawsuit is full of loaded terms we shouldn't miss. Gay couples "must" pay surrogate mothers if they want to have kids, the suit says. The men paid the clinic to create "their" embryos and to implant only male embryos into "their" gestational carrier. Must two men, who've chosen a biologically sterile union, demand children at will? Who exactly owns a young embryo or a gestational carrier—which is another word for mother? At the end of the day, this distasteful story isn't a bug of assisted reproduction: It's a feature. Treating women and children as objects is the enterprise. If we are uncomfortable when someone is more upfront about that—like a couple who files a lawsuit because they didn't receive what they had ordered and paid for—maybe we should reconsider turning procreation into a manufacturing business.