Breakpoint

Recently, Stanford Center on Longevity announced a project called the "New Map of Life." "In the United States," the authors write, "as many as half of today's 5-year-olds can expect to live to the age of 100, and this once unattainable milestone may become the norm for newborns by 2050." The problem, the authors admit, is that we don't know what to do with an extra 30 years: The "narrative of an 'aging society' seems to convey only a crisis." Reaching this 100-years-of-life milestone is, as one researcher put it, a "[breathtaking] package of human potential the world has never seen, unprecedented numbers of people with unprecedented capabilities, and significant desire to give back and leave the world better." Scripture agrees, calling old age "a crown of glory." But that's not because of how long it lasts or what is accomplished. It's because there's a "why" behind it all. As Stanford looks for technological and sociological benefits to longer lives, Christians can point to the Source of meaning for all of life, who faced and defeated death. The more time we have to do that, the better.

Recently, we held a public event on the evening before our annual Wilberforce Weekend to talk about how we can prepare to live in a post-Roe world. A very important aspect of that event was learning how we can respond to the common slogans, the common lines that people often throw around in support of abortion. We asked Stephanie Gray Connors, one of the great apologists for the sanctity of life in our present moment to address some of these slogans. One of those slogans was "embryos aren't really people." Here's Stephanie Gray Connors responding. Embryos aren't people. And when we want to respond to that, the first thing we want to do is ask the question, "What our embryos? And what are people?" Let's seek definitions of those two terms. If you look at the word embryo—you actually look it up in the dictionary—it says an animal in the early stages of growth. And I would like to point out as a pro-lifer, I do not believe in protecting all embryos. Dogs have embryos. Cats have embryos. Other species have embryos because the embryo is the animal in the early stage of development. The embryos that I'm interested in protecting are the human embryos that happened to be at the earliest stage of their development. The question is "Are pre-born children human embryos at the very beginning of pregnancy?" And to answer that we have to ask, "Is the pregnant woman human?" Yes. "Is her partner human?" Yes. Then, that means the embryo in the pregnant woman's body must be of the same species. The next question we want to put forward in such a conversation is "Is that embryo that we know is human because the parents are human—is the embryo alive?" And to answer that we ask ourselves, "Is the embryo growing?" And scientifically we know that one cell grows into 2, 4, 8, doubling every time. And so by virtue of the embryo's growth, the embryo must be alive. By virtue of having human parents, the embryo must be human. "What are people?" Well, if you ask an abortion supporter that, they'll say a person is someone who's rational, conscious, and self-aware, and an embryo at the beginning of pregnancy might be human but isn't those things. I have a nine-month-old baby. Yes, she interacts with me to a degree, but let me tell you she does not act rational, conscious, or self-aware very often. I even have to get boogers out of her nose for her. She is entirely incapable of doing many things. "Is she a person?" Yes, because she's human, because she's a member of the human family, and she has the inherent capacity to be rational, conscious, and self-aware like all of us. But due to her age, she can't yet act on that capacity. In the same way if someone is having surgery under anesthetic, in that moment they're not rational, conscious, and self-aware. If you have a conversation or try to with someone under anesthetic, they will not respond back. If you say, "May I kill you?" They will not object. It doesn't mean it's okay to kill them because they have the inherent capacity to be rational, conscious, and self-aware. But due to the circumstances of surgery, they can't act on it. In the same way with a born baby, like a nine-month-old, they have the inherent capacity for this higher brain function. But due to their age, they can't act on it. And the same is true for human embryos. They have the inherent capacities as all of us have. But due to their age, they can't yet act on those capacities. The question then is this: "Our human rights grounded in how old we are, how developed we are, or who we are as members of the human family?" Throughout history, humans have been denied personhood status based on features that don't matter. Women were denied personhood status at one point because of sex, blacks because of skin color, Jews because of ethnicity. And we reject the denial of personhood status of those humans. We reject the denial of personhood status when it comes to pre-born humans because the only difference between them and you and me is their age. And human rights are grounded in being a member of the human family, not how we currently function, how developed we are, or how old we are. Thank you. That was Stephanie Gray Connors, answering a common pro-abortion statement, "embryos aren't people." And at last week's pre-Wilberforce event, preparing for a post-Roe future, Stephanie answered three more slogans, just like that one. To receive access to the entire evening event, Preparing for a Post-Roe World, come to breakpoint.org.

John and Maria consider the ethics surrounding protests, looking specifically at the public outcry over the leaked draft opinion of the Supreme Court. The pair also considers how the war in Ukraine is sparking the consequences of the overpopulation myth many have believed. And then to close, John unpacks the reason the Colson Center has selected The Life Redeemed as the theme of this year's Wilberforce Weekend.

A month or so ago, Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define "woman." She responded, "I'm not a biologist." That was just a week after a biological male won the NCAA women's swimming championship. Gender scholars were quick to support Jackson, pointing to biological anomalies such as people who are born "intersex." But intersex and other "disorders of sexual development" are exceptions. They don't erase the basic biological category of a woman. Ironically, many who remained silent on what a woman is during the NCAA championship have not been silent regarding the potential loss of the so-called "right" to abortion. For example, Vice President Kamala Harris proclaimed in a speech, "How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms," assuming that we should all know perfectly well what a woman is, that the definition has to do with certain biological functions, and that you don't need to be a biologist to know that. Once again, God's design is revealed to be reality.

Today launches our annual Wilberforce Weekend. Ten years ago, Chuck Colson gave what would be his final message, at a Wilberforce Weekend event. His message that day was that the world needed the Church to be the Church. His call that day remains the central purpose of the Wilberforce Weekend. This weekend, we will be looking at salvation and redemption from every possible angle we can, in order to better live a life that is redeemed. Chuck's life was a wonderful redemption story. Today on Breakpoint, I wanted you to hear Chuck Colson, in his own voice and his own words, tell his own redemption story. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and when I got through there, it was time for me to go into the military because the Korean War was raging. So, I became a lieutenant in the Marines and rose very rapidly and won honors in school. I think everything I ever did in my life I was successful. I went to law school nights while I was working as an assistant to a United States senator. At one point, Newsweek wrote about me as the youngest administrative assistant to a United States senator. I think I was 28—ran campaigns, loved it, started a law firm—great success. I got to know Richard Nixon in 1968 when he was elected president and went into his administration as his special counsel. I arrived in his office when I was 38 years old, and my office was immediately next door to his. And you know, you go to the eight o'clock senior staff meetings. There would be 12 of us sitting around the table, and the 12 senior aides would come in with their big portfolios under their arms. Henry Kissinger would always be the last one to arrive. And he would sit down at the end of the table and say, "Mr. President, the decision we are going to make today is going to change the whole future course of human history." I mean every day of the week for five days. That gets pretty exhausting. And we thought we really were doing things that were of great significance. And in many respects, I suppose, looking back, they were. When the campaign was over—and I pretty well ran the campaign for President Nixon in 1972—I decided to go back to my law firm. But I was feeling—instead of jubilant over what was at that point the largest landslide victory in American politics—instead of being jubilant over it, I was feeling kind of down. At 41 years old, I'd been there, I'd done that. There wasn't much else left to do. And I kept thinking to myself, "My grandfather who was an immigrant to this country from Sweden would be so proud to see his grandson in a place like this, but what am I really doing here?" Took a couple of trips abroad, but I came back, and I still had that emptiness. And one day I was back in my law firm, and I went to visit a client whom I had not seen in the four years I'd been in the White House because I refused to see anyone I'd ever practiced law as their lawyer. I was so worried about a conflict of interest. Can you imagine that? But I went back to see one of these men, Tom Phillips, who was the president of the largest corporation in New England. I had been his general counsel. I walked in his office one day, still feeling kind of empty, and I looked at him, and he was a completely different guy. He's a guy like myself who had worked his way up the hard way, self-made man, the CEO of this corporation when he was barely 40 years old. And he was at peace, and he started asking me about my family, and finally, I said to him, "Tom, you've changed since I saw you four years ago." He said, "Yes, I have, Chuck," and then he looked up at the clock, and he didn't look me straight in the eye, but he said, "I have accepted Jesus Christ and committed my life to Him." He looked away as I later found out because he'd never done this with anyone before. I thought about that for the next three months, and I couldn't get it out of my mind. So, I went back to him one evening in August of 1973, and I said, "Tom, you've got to explain this to me," and he said, "Before I do, I want to read you a chapter from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity entitled the great vice, 'The Great Sin.'" I listened to this chapter, and I realized he's writing about me. And I sat there that night in pain listening to that chapter, and I was really moved. He wanted to pray with me, and I said, "No. I have never prayed except in the church." So, he prayed. I left his home that night, and here I was a former Marine captain. And yeah, I was known as the White House hatchet man, the tough guy. And I got into the automobile, and I tried to drive away, but I could not because the tough guy was crying too hard. I couldn't see the road in front of me. I pulled over and sat there. I have no idea for how long, thinking about my life, thinking about "Could there be a God, and if there were, could I know Him?" But that night for the first time in my life, I was sure there was a God, and I was sure He was hearing me. I woke up the next morning figuring I was going to be embarrassed, and instead I couldn't wait to get my hands on Mere Christianity and read it from cover to cover. Away from Watergate and before I was considered a target of the investigation, I simply quietly surrendered my life to Christ and asked Him to come into my life. I will tell you that's 35 years ago this past summer. Nothing about my life has been the same since. Nothing about my life can be the same again. I am convinced Christ is who He says. I'm more convinced as Malcolm Muggeridge once said of the reality of Jesus Christ than I am of my own reality. That was Chuck Colson describing the moment God got ahold of his life and changed it forever. Chuck's redemption story is a feature of this year's Wilberforce Weekend, this weekend in Orlando, Florida. To find out how you can gain access to all of the recordings and videos from this weekend's event, visit breakpoint.org.

For years, sociologist Arthur Brooks has been trying to understand the secret to human happiness. Recently in The Atlantic, Brooks argued that at least part of the answer is wanting less, something taught by teachers as ideologically diverse as the Buddha and Thomas Aquinas. "As we age, we shouldn't accumulate more to represent ourselves," writes Brooks, "but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find happiness and peace." This is good practical wisdom, but there's more to understand here. While the views of Aquinas and Buddha are superficially similar on this topic, they depart radically on what people are, and what people are for. The Buddha taught us to stop desiring, but Jesus said to "seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." In other words, it's not about not desiring, but about desiring the right things. The difference between Buddhist asceticism and Aquinas' idea of soul-building is knowing the One who created us with a capacity for happiness in the first place.

A friend of mine has, for decades now, suffered severe back pain. Finally, surgeons took a remarkable step, implanting a device that sends electrical signals to his spinal cord in order to disrupt pain signals traveling to his brain. For the most part, his pain has been dramatically lessened. This was an incredible help for my friend. After all, pain tells us that something is wrong. His condition was never going to change, so the pain served no purpose. The more our knowledge of the human brain increases, the more breakthrough treatments like this, for an increasing variety of mental and physical problems, are possible. Some, such as treating addiction with brain surgery, are more controversial than others. As WORLD News recently reported, a new study at West Virginia University's Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute is utilizing deep brain stimulation in an attempt to counteract addictive cravings. Surgeons insert a tiny, thin wire into the brain's tissue. This allows them to read the parts of the brain that light up when the patient craves a high. It also stimulates other parts of the brain in an attempt to affect, over a time, a "dopamine reset." Combined with additional medication, counseling and lifestyle changes, the treatment seems to have been successful in early trials. More trials are needed before widespread adoption. Even so, as with all technological innovations, any optimism should come with a healthy side dose of caution. Unlike back pain, addiction involves more than just a person's neurology. It involves relationships, lifestyle choices, sense of self-worth, spirituality, and identity. To be clear, addiction is not about less than our brain chemistry, but it is about more. That's one reason certain addictions, such as opioids, are so difficult to fight or overcome. The chemical forces at work can easily outmatch the human brain. Synthetically produced opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil, for example, pack roughly 100 to 10,000 times the potency of morphine. This partially explains why drug overdoses have skyrocketed in recent years, and why, according to some estimates, more than 90% of those addicted to opioids will relapse. Illegal opiates kill, on average, over 100 thousand Americans per year. The societal and personal damage is incalculable. Finally, certain players in the pharmaceutical industry are facing a cultural reckoning, both on screen and in court, for the damage they caused. Given the powerful chemical forces stacked in favor of addiction, it makes sense to enlist science on the side of the human brain. After all, if we can zap our brains out of addictive behavior, why wouldn't we? The answer is that any theory of treatment that treats the physical and medical side of a person, at the expense of the moral, interpersonal, or spiritual side misunderstands the human person. Of course, an increasingly dominant form of materialism does exactly that. Faced with complicated problems of human nature, such as poverty, crime, or addiction, it is tempting to grasp for explanations that rob people of moral agency. Poverty, in this view, is the result of generational difficulties, class discrimination, or racial inequities, but never the choices of the people involved. Crime is caused by poverty, or the lack of access to basic social institutions like education. Addiction is genetic, a result of chemical dependence in the brain, and nothing more. To be clear, empathy, compassion, and care for those in poverty, prison, or addiction are not optional. Christians should know themselves well enough to say, "there but for the grace of God ..." Also, the biblical description of people and sin includes room for both personal and structural factors, both physical and spiritual sides, of each of these issues. What we cannot do is reduce people down, as a naturalistic worldview tends to do, to only their brains. When we treat them as if they aren't moral creatures, with the freedom to act, we don't merely dehumanize them ... we fail to adequately help them. The problem with poverty, especially in the first world, is rarely just a lack of money. This is why a significant percentage of lottery winners end up filing bankruptcy after winning fortunes. People are not reducible to their material selves: their brains, their traits, even their circumstances. Real treatment requires moral commitment and a strong network of spiritual and relational support. Gerod Buckhalter, an early recipient of deep brain stimulation to overcome addiction, understands this better than most. After his surgery over two years ago, Buckhalter committed to counseling, accountability, and other support systems. He told reporters back in February, "When it comes to staying sober, it's just as important as the surgery." If neurostimulation does prove helpful, and I hope it does, it cannot replace a worldview change so that people see themselves as image bearers and moral agents. Neither people nor their addictions are reducible to just one thing.

John and Shane devote this episode of the Breakpoint podcast to the challenges society will face if Roe v. Wade and a federal protection on abortion is overturned and removed.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been immensely expensive, and not only because of global sanctions and lost military equipment. In fact, the highest price Russia is paying in this war has to do with an increasingly scarce resource: lives. Estimates of Russian casualties in just the first week of the war ranged from 2,000 to 6,000, with thousands more lost since then. Every life lost is tragic, but as British journalist Ed West points out, this is a loss modern Russia simply cannot afford. Russians, like in so many other European nations, simply aren't having enough babies. The country's population is shrinking by more than a hundred thousand people a year, with no clear end in sight. Some parts of the country are simply becoming devoid of people. According to West, about 20,000 Russian villages have been abandoned in recent years, with tens of thousands closely following. This is a factor that could ultimately affect the outcome of the war, West thinks: If Russians turn out to have no stomach for this fight, it will probably be for the simple fact that the country does not have enough men to spare. The majority of those poor young men killed for Russia's honor will be their mother's only son, in many cases their only child…. As it turns out, Russia's problem is not unique. This country, so rich in land but poor in young people, is just one of dozens of nations across an "infertile crescent" from Spain to Singapore, consisting of populations aging so rapidly that their long-term existence is in doubt. West cites a few examples that bring the stats into perspective: "In 2000 Thailand had 7 workers for every retiree; by 2050 that figure will be just 1.7. In Greece, 1,700 schools closed between 2009–2014." In Stoke-on-Trent in England, "40% of bars and clubs have shut in the past twenty years, as the ratio of infants to retirees has gone from 4:1 to 1:2 in a century." And in Paris, "15 schools merged or closed between 2015–2018." According to the United Nations map of world fertility, every continent except Africa is below or nearing the replacement birth rate. This widespread population crash is so steep that West compares it with P.D. James' novel, The Children of Men, a tale about a world devoid of babies. One reason it is difficult to imagine a world threatened by aging and depopulation is that, for decades now, we've been fed a steady diet of alarm about overpopulation. Ever since Paul Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb in 1968, the idea that the Earth is too crowded has been the zombie myth that just won't die. "The battle to feed humanity is over," Ehrich famously declared. "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." He was wrong, of course, largely because human beings aren't mere eating machines. We have the capacity to innovate and improve methods of food production and living, and that's exactly what happened. To the extent that famines do still occur, they are usually the result of political corruption and war. In fact, we now grow enough food to feed three billion more people than actually exist! So why does the idea of overpopulation and the solution that we must have fewer children persist? How can this belief still hold sway over millions of people in the developed world despite the growing evidence to the contrary? The partial answer is that people in places of influence in governments, academia, and the press have committed themselves to an anti-natal mindset, and struggle to admit that the real problem is too few new humans. The myth of an overpopulated planet sticks despite all evidence because it was long ago accepted as dogma, and almost no one has bothered to challenge it since. The demographic trends at work in Russia and around the world—including in the United States—aren't going to be easy to reverse. One author compared increasing a nation's fertility with pushing water uphill. And in many ways, the gray, shrinking world of our not-so-distant future is an experiment never before tried. The most important strategies to address it—beyond building cultures where children and families are valued again—have probably not been thought of yet. What we can say at this point is that Russia's dwindling supply of young men is just another example of how far popular wisdom can be from the facts. On overpopulation, those facts are in. We're seeing the results before our eyes. And the long-feared future where there are too many mouths to feed has not materialized. Instead, we have a banquet set for billions. But some countries may not be joining us.

The status of modern friendship isn't good. "It's precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much," Jennifer Senior recently wrote in The Atlantic. "We are recruiting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow Rotarians." Friendships, however, are in short supply. According to one survey, nearly half of Americans have three or fewer close friends: 12% say they have none. Senior writes, "One could argue that modern life conspires against friendship, even as it requires the bonds of friendship all the more." Complicating this problem is that friendship was never meant to be our only social relationship. People need churches, families, and neighbors, all relationships in steep decline in a culture that prioritizes autonomy over responsibility. The unique beauty of friendship is, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, that it's about something bigger than itself. In fact, all human relationships are. And, Christians who know that have much to offer a world that doesn't.