Breakpoint

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.

Last week's leak of a draft opinion in the Dobbs case reignited comparisons of abortion restrictions with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. This isn't new, of course, but it is silly and misguided. Atwood's dystopian novel is about a fictional theocratic successor to the United States, the "Republic of Gilead." In Gilead, select women are forced to become concubines for the sole purpose of breeding. Of course, not killing a child is not the same thing as forcing a woman to bear a child, especially in a culture like ours bent on rejecting sexual morality. In fact, the closest thing to Gilead in our world is commercial surrogacy, particularly those nations where women are kept in surrogacy "farms" and barely paid to remain pregnant in order to bear children for wealthy Westerners, especially same-sex couples. Advocates of so-called "universal parentage" laws are bringing that to America, not pro-lifers. Despite the promises, abortion doesn't bring freedom to women, only a false promise. As Frederica Mathewes-Green and others have observed, abortion untethers men from their responsibilities, and women are on the receiving end of that bad deal. Abortion promises women freedom, but instead delivers abandonment. Let's pray abortion becomes as unthinkable today as those handmade outfits are.

In 2015, Canada's Supreme Court struck down a 22-year ban on assisted suicide. The next year, its parliament passed legislation allowing "MAID," or Medical Assistance in Dying for those who suffer from terminal illness and whose death was "reasonably foreseeable." Five years later, the "reasonably foreseeable" language was dropped, as was the requirement of terminal illness. Today, ending one's life with "medical assistance" simply requires a physician and a witness to agree that physical or mental suffering is such as "cannot be relieved under conditions that you (the patient) consider acceptable." Next year, that will expand to include anyone with a mental illness, like PTSD or depression. There's also talk about expanding the practice to include minors. Soon, under Canadian law, someone accused of a crime "must possess the capacity to understand that his or her behaviour was wrong in order to be found guilty." However, someone will not need the mental capacity to understand the implications of "medical assistance in dying" in order to choose death. None of which, we are told, should alarm us. Proponents of assisted death always point to "safeguards," such as physician approval, the uncoerced consent of the patient, or humane conditions. Certain stories are elevated, such as Betty Sanguin, an ALS patient who chose to end her life in a Manitoba church, surrounded by friends, family, and clergy, who secured permission for a MAID team to kill her in their sanctuary. Other stories are ignored. Even in the so-called "safe" cases, a grave evil has been done. Life is sacred, a gift of God, and should never be thrown away. To intentionally end life in a church is not a blessing. It's a distortion and a blasphemy. For the most part, the realities of doctor-assisted death look nothing like the beatific best-case scenarios described in the sales pitch. In particular, there are culture-wide implications for human dignity and value, something that euthanasia advocates seem unable or unwilling to predict. Many begin to believe that their lives are unworthy of life, their volition stolen, their dignity degraded. Last month in The Spectator, Yuan Yi Zhu described some of these stories in an article provocatively titled, "Why is Canada Euthanising the Poor?" In it, he described the real human cost of euthanasia laws and how the practice blurs the limits of consent: Now, as long as someone is suffering from an illness or disability which 'cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable', they can take advantage of what is now known euphemistically as 'medical assistance in dying' (MAID for short) for free. ... Soon enough, Canadians from across the country discovered that although they would otherwise prefer to live, they were too poor to improve their conditions to a degree which was acceptable. His examples included an Ontario woman, who opted for assisted death because her disability benefits weren't enough to cover smoke and chemical-free housing, and she was forced to live with crippling allergies. In Vancouver, another woman sought "medical aid in dying" when her debt kept her from affording the medication that would have alleviated chronic pain. The family of another 35-year-old disabled man discovered how appalling his living conditions were, only after he decided to end his own life. Tragically, by the time the government investigated the care facility and revoked its license, it was too late. As Zhu put it, "One may wonder how much autonomy a disabled man lying in his own filth had in weighing death over life." Individuals are supposedly "free" to choose, but it is unclear just how often this decision is impacted by financial concerns. "Healthcare, particular for those suffering from chronic conditions, is expensive," wrote Zhu, "but assisted suicide only costs the taxpayer $2,327 per 'case'." He concluded: Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will even pay for their deaths. What it will not do is spend money to allow them to live instead of killing themselves. For at least some of Canada's poorest citizens, coercion in death is not some distant fear, promoted by scared conspiracy groups. The pressure is a daily reality. Euthanasia in any form is a misguided answer to a real, human problem. Some, face a life of unimaginable pain. The only acceptable and loving response is to provide the best compassion, care, and pain management possible. Anytime a country, such as Canada, embraces "death with dignity" or "medical aid in dying" or some other euphemistically disguised lack of compassion, a price tag is placed on people. And, whenever a price tag is placed on something that is inherently priceless, it is cheapened. In Canada's case, the money is going to the so-called "autonomy" of vulnerable people, instead of fighting for their lives.

Today we revisit a speech by Chuck Colson on his renowned work The Faith. Chuck's main idea is that the church is at its best when we propose rather than impose the message of the Gospel. To order a copy of The Faith, visit www.colsoncenter.org

Responding to the leaked draft of Justice Alito's opinion in the Dobbs case, President Biden said, "The idea that we're gonna make a judgment that is going to say that no one can make the judgment to choose to abort a child ... goes way overboard." His statement is hard to follow but here's the point: The president said abortion kills a child—not a clump of cells, not a fetus, not a potential human. A child. This is more than a Biden gaffe. He is acknowledging what even honest pro-abortion folks have been forced to admit: The preborn is a human being and a child. Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has long held this position while not only arguing for abortion rights but also for infanticide. Most others don't go that far, but still argue that the good of the mother outweighs the child's right to life. And yet, many still claim a preborn child is only a clump of cells. We can show them differently. Babies in the womb develop fingerprints, suck their thumbs, have food preferences, recognize their mom's voice, and feel pain. The fact that abortion kills a child is something we can no longer not know. Heck, just quote the president.

Something long considered reliable evidence for Darwinian evolution, the chemical similarity of living things, is now in question. In 1973, leading Neo-Darwinist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that "nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution." He specifically pointed to "biochemical universals," or shared features in the chemistry of life, as evidence that all creatures "arose from inanimate matter only once" and that everything alive today descended from an universal common ancestor. Today, however, discoveries in molecular biology have complicated that conclusion. In fact, a new paper poses one of the strongest challenges yet to the idea that all life shares common chemistry. Though the title, "Scaling Laws in Enzyme Function Reveal a New Kind of Biochemical Universality," may be one that could excite only a scientist, what the authors describe should make everyone sit up and take notice. In fact, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, in a piece at Evolution News, called the paper "the most interesting biology paper of 2022 so far." Its findings are precisely the opposite of what we'd expect if life evolved from a common ancestor. The authors, including theoretician Sara Walker and Dylan Gagler from Arizona State University, looked at enzyme functions across all the major groupings of life. They tallied the different functions, then plotted these against the total number of classified enzymes. They found that "as the enzyme space grows … so do the number of functions." In other words, there are very few "specific molecules and reactions" common to all living things. If your head just exploded, Nelson offers a helpful analogy borrowed from one of the paper's coauthors, Chris Kempes. The English language contains many words, or synonyms, that can mean approximately the same thing. If the sky is darkened, we could just say it was "darkened." Or, we could say that it became "murky," "shaded," "shadowed," dimmed," or "obscured." All these words mean, more or less, the same thing but with very different spellings and histories. According to Nelson, "a strikingly similar pattern" occurs among the chemicals that make life possible. The authors of the paper agree, writing that "[biochemical] universality cannot simply be explained due to phylogenetic relatedness." Or, stated more simply, living things don't look like they evolved from a common ancestor using the same basic components on a molecular level. Instead, many different enzymes are used to accomplish similar purposes. This is precisely the opposite of what Darwinism predicts. An editor of this paper, Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, has long argued that life lacks the "universal genetic core" that Darwinian evolution predicts. Instead, he says, living things show a pervasive pattern of what scientists have termed "non-orthologous gene displacement." That's a technical way of saying that the functions necessary to sustain life are carried out by different molecules coded by different genes in different species. Or, as original paper's coauthor Chris Kempes puts it, "there are a lot of 'synonyms'" at work in biology. This is just the latest instance of scientific evidence complicating the Darwinian picture, which has long been portrayed as tidy, straightforward, and conclusive. In fact, this is an instance where evolutionary assumptions hinder rather than help us understand how life works and where it came from. Nelson simply points out the obvious conclusion: Functional requirements fulfilled by a different molecular tool doesn't appear to be the product of a universal common ancestry. Instead, it looks more like what we see in computers, cars, language, etc. Function and purpose seem to take priority over hardware in the world of biochemistry. And if there is a mind behind life, we can conclude from these findings that He took great care to equip every living thing with exactly what it needed to thrive, instead of giving them all identical tools. Theodore Dobzhansky may have truly believed that nothing in biology makes sense without evolution, but it's not clear how he would have dealt with these findings. The more and more we learn in biology, the less and less it makes sense when thinking from evolutionary assumptions. The more we follow the evidence, the more it leads elsewhere.

John and Maria explore the incredible emotion in the nation following a leak of a draft opinion from the Supreme Court. Then, Maria asks John about the ethics and the way Christians should respond to moves by the government to eliminate student student. They plan to do this by forgiving student loans, but is this a concept Christians should get behind? John and Maria explain the trapings of student debt forgiveness and why the move challenges society. To close, Maria asks John to go deeper into some of the ideas he presented this week in a number of commentaries. Notably, John explains society's problem with forgiveness, touching on a question from Maria on whether forgiveness is a sign of strength of weakness. Then, Maria asks John for some further commentary on the state of books for children, noting that many challenge children's developmental stages and interest in social movements around politics, race, and gender.

Pro-lifers aren't the only ones strategizing for a post-Roe America. By 2020, chemical abortions—abortions accomplished with oral medications—became the most common form of abortion in America. With the FDA recently permitting doctors to prescribe this poison without even an in-person visit, chemical abortions are only going to become more common. This is why it's critical to know that medical abortions can be reversible. The process starts with one drug that starves the baby. A few days later, the mother takes a second drug to induce labor. But women who take the first pill and do not take the second can and have gone on to have healthy pregnancies. Medical abortions will become more common in a post-Roe world for the same reason that they are so dangerous: It pushes a violent, dangerous act behind closed doors. As Christians we know that in God's light, we see light—pray for the light to shine in these dark places.

Many say they want a world without Christianity, but many secular thinkers are discovering they should be careful what they wish for. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of a public high school football coach who was fired for praying on the field after games. Though the firing should never have happened, this now years-long controversy has provided a window into how many in our culture feel about Christian prayer. Hint: they're not positive feelings. Still, one specific prayer, known as the Serenity Prayer, remains a part of our shared cultural language and a staple of addiction recovery meetings: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Of course, Alcoholics Anonymous' official position is that the "God" of the Serenity Prayer can be any sort of Higher Power you wish, but it is profound that most addiction recovery programs continue to stubbornly insist that faith is critical for addiction recovery. That insistence is backed by a constantly growing mountain of data, which has become un-ignorable. Even the government quietly admits that faith-based recovery programs are the most effective. A re-discovery of Christianity's practical benefits isn't just happening in addiction recovery. The more that various aspects of our culture struggle under the weight of bad ideas and their consequences, the more and more people are discovering "new" solutions in the old Scriptures. Canadian clinical psychologist and self-described nonbeliever Jordan Peterson has become famous in part for his bold claims that Christianity has a unique positive impact on individuals and culture. Contemporary historian Tom Holland, a self-described atheist, literally wrote the book on the responsibility Christianity bears for just about every good thing about modern culture. According to Holland: [Christianity] is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us… still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. And just last week, in former New York Times' reporter Bari Weiss's new independent Substack, non-believing author Tim DeRoche put forth what he called "The Secular Case for Christianity": The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the most successful meme in the history of the world. And the spread of that meme over the last 2,000 years has largely been correlated with decreasing levels of slavery, war, crime, poverty, and general suffering. Modern culture, the same modern culture so scandalized by football field prayers and so put off by Christian sexual ethics, must reckon with what Christianity has given the world, DeRoche argued. We should, of course, welcome this kind of cultural self-discovery, though it is a bit like the angsty teenager who rejects the ways of his parents in order to find a more "enlightened" way to do life. But, after all his experimentation, that teen is forced to admit his open-mindedness only led to suffering and maybe his parents were right after all. Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck wrote that "an independent creature is a contradiction in terms." In other words, whether we acknowledge He's there or not, all creatures were made and are sustained by God. He knows best, and He knows us best. That He chose to reveal Himself to us in the creation, the Bible and ultimately in Christ is a tremendous mercy. A Christian life isn't without suffering, of course, but it is the only life in which suffering has meaning, can be redeemed, and will ultimately be defeated. Christians who claim that publicly promoting Christian ethics is somehow intrusive or unloving miss this point, as well as the related point that sharing the best way to live is a way of loving our neighbors. Years ago, comedian Penn Jillette of the comedy duo Penn and Teller famously said that he did not respect Christians who did not proselytize. "How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?" he asked. How much do you have to hate somebody to not tell them the best way to live life? To be clear, neither Christian faith nor Christian public witness is utilitarian. Christianity isn't true because it "works," but it does work because it's true. If God did not take the form of a man, if He had not died and then resurrected, if He were not on the throne of the universe, then Christianity's cultural "benefits" would not matter all that much. But He did, so they do. The Church's great opportunity is not to say, "I told you so," but rather "come and see." The world is better because Christianity is true. Now, come and meet the One behind it all.

I don't love BuzzFeed's clickbaity and crowdsourced approach to content, but a recent article caught my eye: Reddit users revealing what their childhood was like after their parents divorced. "When we were little, mom worked full-time and dad stayed home with us," wrote one user. "When I was six, they separated, and we only saw him once, maybe twice a year. I have never recovered from this sudden and unexplained abandonment." Others described having to become the unintentional middle man between their parents, or trying to keep up with both of them as adults. "Little things like that that take a really big toll on you," wrote one: "I always got physically ill before having to switch houses because of the stress." These anecdotes line up with the research. Divorce is awful, even if tragically necessary. And, more often than not, our culture trips all over itself to obscure its real impact. In order to protect adult feelings, we tell ourselves "the kids will be fine." They aren't. In fact, they deserve better. Sometimes, even BuzzFeed gets it right. I hope people pay attention.