Breakpoint

Since the pandemic, American adults are behaving badly. "Bad behavior of all kinds—everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence—has increased," Olga Khazan recently wrote at The Atlantic. "Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of 'unruly passenger' incidents ever, according to the FAA." Plenty of viral videos, especially but not exclusively of passengers on airplanes and in airports, affirm Khazan's description. Her question is a good one: Why are people acting so weird? An obvious answer is that the social isolation of the last few years has taken a real toll on our mental health and well-being. Studies do show that prolonged isolation often does lead to anti-social behavior. "When we become untethered," one Harvard sociologist told Khazan, "we tend to prioritize our own private interests over those of others or the public." It's also not a secret that, to deal with the increased stress and isolation, more Americans have turned to destructive coping mechanisms. Per capita, we're drinking more. Drug overdoses, despite a two-year decline pre-pandemic, have spiked by nearly 30% since 2019. Even crime—including break-ins, robberies and homicides—has increased, as the pandemic has eased. In the article, Khazan quoted a University of Missouri criminologist who thinks that we've developed "a generalized sense that the rules simply don't apply." Everything about the pandemic, of course, increased individual and collective anxiety, isolation, and economic uncertainty. However, the coarsening of the American public was already in place. You might call it a "pre-existing condition," made worse by COVID-19. In his book A Free People's Suicide, Os Guinness argues that America has become a "cut-flower" society. Though we still have the trappings of liberty and morality, he argues, we are cut off from its root. Just as with flowers, there's a lag time between when a civilization is cut from its roots and when it dies. Even so, by cutting ourselves off from a shared Judeo-Christian framework, we are starving ourselves. The pandemic didn't cause this, but it has worsened and exposed it. G.K. Chesterton described something similar in The Everlasting Man. Sometimes, he argued, it's the solutions we invent that unmake us, not the crises we are attempting to endure. Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. The widespread cultural breakdown we see around us cannot by explained by a mere loosening of morals, or the wrong political party being in power, a pandemic, or our response to it. What we are seeing is the catastrophic emptiness when life is built on the wrong foundation. While our distractions keep us busy—Americans streamed a mind-blowing 15 million years' worth of digital content in 2021, according to analytics company Nielsen—but are failing to satisfy. The American dream has been written and re-written and altered completely but remains out of reach. It's not clear what can hold us together anymore. A critical question for Christians is whether there is anything we can do about it. A critical answer to that question is to remember that we aren't the first to find ourselves in a society unmoored from morality and meaning. If public behavior today is "weird," public behavior at the start of the 18th century was downright shocking. In London, it was not unusual to come across bear fighting and heads on pikes. Crime and prostitution were endemic, as was poverty, and churches sat empty. According to a Christianity Today article about that time period, "only five or six members of Parliament even went to church," and those churches often peddled nothing more than state-sponsored religiosity. Yet, unknown to most, God was moving. The revivals led by John and Charles Wesley and their friend George Whitefield proved to be a match in a powder keg, sparking a massive return to Christian faithfulness and care in their own time. That revitalized Church set the table for William Wilberforce's "reformation of manners and morals," a movement for human rights that would change England and the world forever. The secret, according to John Wesley, was realizing what really is at the center of human flourishing. "How a sinner may be justified before God, the Lord and Judge of all, is a question of no common importance to every child of man," John Wesley argued. "It contains the foundations of all our hope, inasmuch as while we are at enmity with God, there can be no true peace, no solid joy, either in time or in eternity." Those words are no less true in our times. When public morality is unhinged, Christians ought not lose hope. Who knows whether God is poised to bring another Christian revival as during the time of the Wesleys and Whitefield? Either way, our part is to reject the spirit of the age, embrace what is good and true, treat everyone as if they are made in the image of God, and speak boldly when we can. Of course, that will make many think we are being weird. So be it. That's the kind of "weird" the world needs.

Why are pro-abortion activists so committed? Because of lies built upon centuries of bad ideas... If we wondered just how committed some Americans are to abortion, the last couple of weeks have been a helpful demonstration. After a leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court on the Dobbs cased suggested the court might overturn Roe v. Wade, pro-abortion activists erupted. Protests were organized outside the private homes of six Supreme Court justices, vile demonstrations were held on the steps of Catholic churches, and the offices of pro-life organizations in Oregon and Wisconsin were vandalized, threatened, and even set on fire. People are angry, and they're not faking it. Especially for Christians praying for an end to legal abortion in the United States, it should matter to us that people feel this strongly on the other side of the issue. If we want, ultimately, to make abortion not just illegal but unthinkable, we will have to reach the very people who are so dedicated to it that they'd debase themselves and threaten others just to protect it. But we will not be able to challenge the misconceptions they believe and spread if we don't understand what they are. In his 2020 book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Dr. Carl Trueman traced the philosophy behind abortion back several centuries, though these bad ideas date even earlier. When Charles Darwin suggested, in the mid-19th century, that human life resulted from mindless and purposeless processes, he wasn't just making a biological claim. He was making an ontological claim. Human life, if accidental, has no ultimate purpose. Instead, purpose had to be invented. Enter Sigmund Freud, who suggested that what we really live for is sex, even if we don't realize it. After Freud came the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who agreed that sex is everything. He also believed that power was a global currency. To Marcuse, so-called "sexual morals" or norms aren't based in any objective reality but are merely inventions used by people to exert power. Radical feminist Simone de Beauvoir built on this theory in her famous work The Second Sex. She argued that if sex is a tool of oppression, then women can only truly be free and fully human by making themselves "eunuchs." A free woman must, she wrote, be "freed from nature" and "win control of her body." Abortion is a tool of this fantasy. The patron saint of every single one of these bad ideas lived centuries earlier. Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested that human beings are inherently good in their inner nature but are corrupted by our outer interactions with other people. The solution to that corruption was to look inward. In other words, to be human is primarily a psychological, not a physical, reality. The ideas and lives of these people, long dead, have fundamentally shaped our world. The reason that abortion is so important to its supporters is the same reason it's so abhorrent to Christians. Nothing else reveals more about what we believe it means to be human that what we believe about abortion. To abortion supporters, the prerogative of women to violently hinder the gender-specific ability of their bodies to bear children is central to their humanity. If we believe the biological realities of our bodies oppress or even limit our feelings and desires, we must force our bodies to comply in order to be fully human. Anyone who wants to stop us may as well be killing us. Christians believe that to allow the killing of a vulnerable image bearer is to proclaim, among other things, that our bodies have nothing to do with being human, that God doesn't image himself in our bodies, that God didn't make us for a purpose, and consequently, that He is not good—which means He is not God. Even so, we should also remember that abortion is a real evil. Sociologist Philip Reiff believed cultures without a moral center produce what he called "deathworks," or cultural artifacts that don't build but only to tear down. Abortion is a deathwork of a culture captive to bad ideas. It is death for death; and if we don't put an end to it, it will kill not only babies but the women and men who embrace it. Our job as Christians is to build a culture that promotes life. When we do, we promote life not just for each individual child but for an entire culture that sits now on the brink.

Recently, The Economist wrote among those intrigued with "the idea of living forever" are "a motley crew of fringe scientists, cultish groups and tech billionaires." The article is a review of The Price of Immortality, a book by journalist Peter Ward. In it, he highlights a quirky, quasi-religious group called "The Church of Perpetual Life," based out of Pompano Beach, Florida. Its adherents mainly talk food supplements and cryonics, while espousing the hope that science will one day grant eternal life. The quest for immortality will always be, to some degree, religious. Even for people with limitless resources, like billionaire tech moguls like Jeff Bezos, the lines between science, science fiction, and an existential crisis can be blurry. Part of the longing is that no matter how many toys we have, there's something more than our materialistic age can offer. As C.S. Lewis said, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world." This is part of what Ecclesiastes calls the eternity put in our hearts by God.

A couple weeks ago, a Title IX investigation was opened for three middle school boys from Wisconsin who used the pronoun she for a biologically female student who wished to go by they. Under the Biden administration, refusing to use misaligned pronouns is considered sex discrimination. Even style guides today encourage the use of they if it is the chosen pronoun of an individual. One rationale given is that someone really is, whatever gender they claim, and to not recognize that with pronouns is to contribute to that person's psychological distress. This is the case even if, as Abigail Shrier describes as being increasingly common, a person's gender dysphoria is socially conditioned. So, according to our own government, we are now in a zero-sum game: Either use individuals' chosen pronouns or be blamed for their suicides. Thankfully, many are beginning to recognize that even using the pronoun they for an individual is deeply problematic, much less fully imbibing all that the new transgender orthodoxy commands. Recently, the Manhattan Institute's Leor Sapir wrote an editorial entitled "Don't Say 'They.'" In it, Sapir argues that using they and them to refer to an individual is far from harmless, and amounts to buying into an ideology that "gender is an oppressive social system." In other words, using nonbinary plural pronouns and also opposite-sex pronouns says something that is not true about God's design, the created reality of men and women. So, what are we to do? Shall we use words that align with reality or shall we refuse to risk the psychological distress of a transgender person? Two guiding principles can help us here. First, as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn advised, we must "live not by lies." Second, as Paul advised, "so far as it depends on (us), live peaceably with all." Living like Christians today requires both, together. Words matter. Not only do our words reflect reality, and thus misusing words can distort reality, but Scripture is plain that God's words make up reality. To use words incorrectly is to not only embrace something not true, it is to mislead others away from God. This is not true, nor is it loving. Thus, God says that He hates a "lying tongue." Honoring the second principle, to do our best to "live peaceably with all," is particularly difficult when the choice is to tell a lie or to be responsible for psychological distress. Philosophy professor Nick Meriwether had a creative response when he found himself between this rock and hard place. When a male student requested that Dr. Merriweather refer to him as a female, using feminine titles and pronouns, he offered to only "refer to this student by a first or last name." In response, Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, charged Dr. Merriweather with creating "a hostile environment," placed a warning in his employee file, and threatened future punitive action if he refused to comply. So, Dr. Meriwether filed suit, claiming his free speech had been violated. He won. Shawnee State was forced to award him $400,000 and remove the disciplinary statement. Dr. Merriweather's story demonstrates that people of conscience ought not prematurely surrender their convictions, or believe that cultural defeat in inevitable. Even more, it offers a way forward when it comes to pronouns, telling and truth and living at peace. In English, names do not indicate gender. Pronouns do. Offering to call an individual by their chosen names is a way of respecting a person without saying something that is not true about them. In a conversation with the individual, the pronoun you is acceptable, since in English it refers to both plural and singular, and to both male and female. In no way, does "you" deny that biological sex is binary. On the other hand, speaking in the third person—he, she, or they—when speaking about others is trickier. Some people point out that we use the word they all the time to refer to individuals. However, whenever we say something like, "Somebody left their book" when we don't know who it is. It's different if we do know who it is. For example, it would be inaccurate (and strange) to say, "Abigail left their book." In other words, there are ways to not say something that is not true. We can avoid using nonbinary or opposite-sex pronouns, and instead use names. And, we can use plural pronouns to talk about a group rather than an individual. Still, as Dr. Merriweather's situation illustrates, these alternatives will not satisfy everyone. And, when there is no choice but to use third person pronouns, the only way to tell the truth is to use the pronouns that align with biology, not ideology. To be clear, there is one situation where using someone's chosen name violates the first principle of telling the truth: If you've known a person all of their life, and if their name was given for specifical purposes. So, for example, to ask a mom to use a chosen name over a given name for the child they've raised and loved, is just cruel. Some argue that because language changes over time, accepting pronoun changes is just changing with language. This argument assumes that language doesn't actually refer to reality, but only to other words. But there is a real world, and sexual distinction is part of that real world. To change the language of pronouns severs a link to reality, denies that reality, and disconnects people from what is actually true about their created bodies. Pronouns may not seem like a fight worth having, but as Chesterton said, "The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about."

John and Maria reflect on recent claims that Judaism supports a pro-abortion agenda. The pair reflect on a Breakpoint commentary with Glenn Sunshine that dispels this myth, and explains why the falsehood has picked up steam in culture. Then Maria asks John to explain more of the culture breakdown as we are seeing a rise in gun violence across the country. John helps explain that gun violence is one of many examples of how our culture is in a crisis of meaning. He explains how we've gotten here and what many philosophers are saying about this issue. Maria then asks John to comment on what is being celebrated as Pride Month during the month of June. John explores areas the church can engage this, referencing a piece written by Carl Trueman on social justice and pride month. To close, Maria asks John to comment on a recent Tweet showing public posters in support of reducing the stigma around drug addiction, encouraging recreational use of addictive narcotics. -- Recommendations -- See Life Event>> -- Show References -- Segment 1: Judaism and Abortion While Conservative and Reform Jews do support legal access to abortion, they have only done so recently and despite their moral and religious views, not because of them Breakpoint>> Segment 2: Iain McGilchrist And Uvalde "If you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get aways with it, but have a right to it — and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; and reject the idea of a transcendent set of values." It seems to me that she is making a point complementary to Dr. McGilchrist's: that we have created a culture and indeed a civilization that produces unhappy, unstable people, and provides them with the means to stay hidden from the rest of us, and to inflict mass murder. The American Conservative>> Segment 3: Social justice demands our opposition to its celebration and symbols The Christian cause of this month should be opposing Pride Month and its flag in as public and strident a way as many have opposed racism and its symbols. Let us have many blog posts and tweets on the topic. And may we even have pointed op-eds and major articles slamming Pride by those Christians privileged enough to have access to the pages of The Atlantic and The New York Times. Social justice surely demands it. And I, for one, am looking forward to reading them all. WNG>> Religious Liberty Is Good for Everyone for Many Reasons Often, the term religious liberty is cynically thrown around in cultural discourse by those critical of the legal or social arguments for religious liberty. Religious people are accused of being ignorant or selfish, of only caring about their own rights, or of "clinging to their guns and religion." At the same time, some Christians wrongly talk about religious liberty as if it's only for Christians, or as if religion should be kept personal, private, and out of the public square. Breakpoint>> Most People Don't Agree With Trans Ideology Most Americans do understand the categories of biological sex and feel uncomfortable foisting harmful ideology on children. Breakpoint>> Segment 4: Drug Addiction and Harm Reduction This normalizes injecting deadly life-changing drugs "avoid using alone" 🤔 "Start w small doses" 👀 "Using safely" 😳 This is twisted Twitter>>

The latest Dr. Strange movie is making waves, partly because of its dark, violent, and even occultist overtones. Heroes are brutally murdered, seances are had, and undead souls go shrieking in and out of books of demonic curses. As one critic put it, I worry that younger kids who are excited to see the typical Marvel movie may get frightened by the very, very dark tone …. but hey, everyone needs that movie from their childhood that gave them nightmares, right? Mine was Poltergeist; maybe for some kids it will be The Multiverse of Madness. They don't need this one. The Marvel Cinematic Universe usually has plenty to appreciate: heroism, redemption, and a striving for that which is good. Even if it mostly paints with broad brushes to reach bigger audiences, that's why the movies have been a kind of cultural unifier. But Multiverse of Madness mixes the script, to the detriment of the audience. Christians don't have to agree with everything to engage with a movie—but we should never take off our glasses of discernment even for a series we once had reason to like.

During the "Preparing for a Post-Roe World" event at the annual Wilberforce Weekend conference, Stephanie Gray Connors responded to various slogans that are used in our cultural moment to promote abortion. Here's her response to the slogan, "Abortion is healthcare." Abortion is healthcare. Instead of using five minutes to reply, it's really tempting to just use five words. "What? That is ridiculous." To respond to that, what we want to do is ask a question, two in particular. We want to ask, "What is abortion, and what is healthcare?" In terms of answering the question, "What is abortion?" I'm reminded of something my dad would tell me growing up. My dad is originally from Scotland. He didn't immigrate to Canada, where I'm originally from, until he was in his thirties, which means my dad's got a fantastic Scottish accent, right? He's right from Glasgow, Barrhead. Anyway, so my dad would always say to me growing up, "Right, Stephanie, your old Scottish grandfather used to say use their own words against them." So, when it comes to answering the question, "What is abortion?" Don't quote a pro-lifer. Use the abortion supporter's words against them. Go to their textbooks. What do they say? And, so, I went to the National Abortion Federation's textbook on abortion. It's called the Clinician's Guide to Medical and Surgical Abortion. And in chapter 10, they specifically refer to feticidal techniques, feticidal techniques. So, the question we want to ask is this: "What is the meaning of the root word cide?" Feticidal, cide. That means to kill. So, there's an admission there by using the term feticidal, that it's a technique that involves killing. Or take one of their chapters on D&E abortions after 12 weeks. That chapter in this textbook refers to the pregnancy elements by calling them "spinal cord" and "calvarium." Well, we want to ask, "The spinal cord and calvarium of who?" That textbook is not referring to the spinal cord of the pregnant woman, but rather of the preborn child. So, there's this admission that it's killing and that it involves parts not of the woman but of the baby and dismembering those particular parts. Then, there's Planned Parenthood itself. We just heard the reference to Margaret Sanger, their founder. And yet, would you know that back in 1952, long before Roe v. Wade, they had a brochure not on abortion but on birth control. And in answering questions about birth control, they answered the question, "Is birth control abortion?" And they said, quote, "Definitely not. An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun." End quote. Planned Parenthood, 1952. So, if we're asking the question, "What is abortion?" We get the answer from abortion supporters that abortion is killing. So, then we have to ask ourselves if we're trying to figure out whether killing is healthcare, "What is health care?" And we know healthcare involves the treatment and prevention of disease or maintaining and restoring health. So, the question is "What disease are we responding to when someone's pregnant?" And the answer is pregnancy isn't a disease. It's a sign the body is working right. If you have cancer of the eye, you might have to remove the eye. It could cause you to be blind, but you never take a healthy eye and maim it. So, with abortion, we actually have a healthy body, a healthy state—a pregnancy—which should occur because the body is fertile at that time. And then abortion is maiming that. It's like destroying an eye that's functioning well. It doesn't make sense. And it's certainly not healthcare. You know, some abortion supporters might say, "Well, abortion is healthcare because physicians do it." So, we want to ask a question: "Just because the doctor does something, does his action suddenly become morally acceptable by his involvement?" And then to answer that, we can use a little parable. Imagine you have someone working in the black-market underground organ-harvesting industry where they kidnap people or take political prisoners and have their organs removed—maybe their kidneys, maybe their liver, maybe their heart—and transplant them into someone who's paid good money to get access to those organs. We all agree that's unethical. But in order to remove the organs from one person and successfully implant them in another, you can't have just a random person on the street doing that, right? You need a physician to do it. Would we ever say because it's a surgeon working in the black underground human organ trafficking market—would we ever say that that type of organ harvesting is ethical and healthcare because a doctor does it? And obviously, we would say it is not ethical, and it's not healthcare because what a physician is doing in that case is destructive to a human person. And, so, since we know the preborn child is a human person, albeit younger, and because we know abortion kills that human person, and because we know healthcare is about maintaining health and restoring a sick body to a healthy state, and abortion does the opposite of that, an abortion is not healthcare. That was Stephanie Gray Connors, answering a common pro-abortion slogan that abortion is healthcare. Throughout our preparing-for-a-post-Roe-future event, Stephanie responded to a few more slogans just like that one. To receive access to her presentation as well as the other speakers at this very special event, go to wilberforceweekend.org.

John answers what Christians can do in the wake of a series of mass shootings that reveal we're not right as a culture. Before answering that question, John responds to a listener who asks if incrementalism is the best strategy for prolifers to honor God.

Technology is a gift, but there are real problems with certain forms of prenatal screening. When used to help parents prepare to care for an infant with anticipated genetic conditions, it's an amazing asset. Instead, it is too often used to decide whether or not a child should live. Recently Daniel Navon, in an article written for Scientific American, raised his own concerns. "Prenatal screening is big business," he writes. "The annual market for [noninvasive prenatal screening technology] is already around $4 billion dollars and is growing rapidly." The problem is that "including a condition on a prenatal genetic test implies that it may be incompatible with a 'life worth living.'" One result, he warns, could be that religious communities, and staunchly pro-life states, will see increasing populations of those with genetic disorders. So be it. That wouldn't be a crisis. We must always resist the temptation to build a perfect world, especially when it comes "not by eliminating defects, but eliminating people." If Navon's predictions prove true, it would be a badge of honor.

A year ago, Biden administration officials standardized a radically new interpretation of the word gender. In a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services, officials mandated all employers must cover the cost of so-called "transgender medicine" in their health insurance plans. In response, the Christian Employers Alliance sued HHS on behalf of a coalition of Christian-owned businesses. A few weeks ago, a federal district court ruled for CEA and halted the Biden mandate. Many media outlets, in their coverage of this story, referred to the CEA as a "religious liberty group," identifying them not by what they do but by their legal argument. To be sure, forcing an employer to pay for harmful hormones and violent surgeries on healthy bodies, against their deeply held beliefs, is to violate their religious freedom. All citizens of the United States have an unambiguous right, thanks to the First Amendment, to not just worship inside a church or synagogue or mosque but to order their lives outside of those buildings according to their deeply held beliefs. Whether the belief comes from religion, conscience, or some mix of the two, the ideas that men and women are real and distinct things and that their bodies shouldn't be experimented upon is widely held across cultures, religions, scientific disciplines, and human history. Legally speaking, then, it was perfectly sound for the Christian Employers Alliance to argue that forcing employers to subsidize those experiments violates their religious freedom. And, by doing so, the CEA wasn't arguing to protect their own rights, only. They are fighting for the common good. Often, the term religious liberty is cynically thrown around in cultural discourse by those critical of the legal or social arguments for religious liberty. Religious people are accused of being ignorant or selfish, of only caring about their own rights, or of "clinging to their guns and religion." At the same time, some Christians wrongly talk about religious liberty as if it's only for Christians, or as if religion should be kept personal, private, and out of the public square. These views are somewhere between incomplete and flat-out wrong, misunderstanding what religious liberty is and why it matters. The lawsuit filed by the Christian Employers Alliance against the federal government offers helpful clarity. Christians care about the religious freedom of others, not only in the sense that protecting our religious freedom helps others maintain theirs, which in itself is a moral good. Christians care about religious freedom because we believe Christian claims about life and the world are true, true for everyone, and the world is better off when we are not denying those truths. If men and women are real things, made by God for a purpose and with a good design, to deny that goodness or mutilate that design is harmful, whether or not the person doing it believes in Jesus. Though being a Christian might determine whether or not someone accepts the truth, it doesn't make the truth more or less true. And, if loving our neighbors includes keeping them from harm whenever we can, we'll want to keep the freedom for truth to remain in the public square. The cultural tidal wave of "trans medicine" can rightly be characterized as medical malpractice, even abuse. Medical institutions are prescribing puberty-blocking hormones and, increasingly, sterilizing surgeries to adults and children at skyrocketing rates. Refusing to be co-opted in this kind of abuse is not some sort of "don't tread on me" self-defense. Recently, writing in WORLD Opinions, author Abigail Dodds pushed back against the caricature of the self-interested Christians taking some kind of perverse pleasure in "fighting the culture wars": It is surely true that the kingdom of God advances not through resentment but rather by those who bear witness to Jesus in sincerity and truth. Yet, I wonder where and to whom some think we are to bear witness? What is all this Good News for anyway? Do we not believe we are against the world for the world? Do we deny that God's ways are truly good for all? Christianity has been a unique force for good in the world, for both its adherents and non-believers. It is a great horror to lie about and/or to mutilate our bodies. Hopefully more Christians will, like the Christian Employers Alliance, refuse to live by lies. A world where living out Christian faith is suppressed or illegal is a worse world, more corrupt, more exploitative, and more dangerous for everyone. Fighting for religious liberty isn't selfish. It's a way to love God, and our neighbors.