Breakpoint

Earlier this year, Kelsey Ichikawa of Nautilus magazine raised an important question: Is virtual reality harming the cognitive development of children? As they grow, kids rely on years of practice to develop basic levels of coordination. The process of "sensory integration," where sight, balance, orientation, and touch are integrated into a seamless neurological experience is a "long and elaborate process of development," writes Ichikawa, "that begins before birth and extends into early adulthood." One of the reasons young kids perform terribly in the virtual world is that they have yet to master those basic skills in the real world. This has led some experts to question if hours spent playing as an avatar could shortchange the process, leading to developmental issues later in life. So far, the jury is still out. "When you enter the virtual world, the rules of sensory experience change, which could impact kids' development," says Swiss neuroscientist Jenifer Miehlbradt; "Maybe it's totally safe, or maybe it's not. Either way we need to know a lot more about what happens to them when they slip into avatar." Researchers won't have to wait long for data. According to Bloomberg, more than two-thirds of all U.S. kids between the ages of 9 and 12 play "Roblox," a massive, multiplayer online game that lends itself to VR. Immediately after going public, the game was valued at $41 billion, making it an overnight competitor with juggernauts like Nintendo and Electronic Arts. While you don't have to use VR to play Roblox, millions do. Their experience could give researchers a baseline to test their theories, but with a painfully obvious catch. Any harm will have already been done. As it develops at a breakneck pace, VR is already creating other ethical dilemmas. For example, despite developers' best efforts, games like Roblox can fall victim to lewd or predatory content, as the BBC covered in February. As users upload content, a "small subset" find creative ways around built-in parental safety controls. It's a problem as common as the internet, but with dramatically higher stakes. VR is a powerful technology. University of Texas at Austin researcher Jakki Bailey found that immersive virtual reality far outpaces other digital media like TV or standard computers when it comes to creating a sense of "presence." That's exactly the purpose it was designed for. "It's why even most adults have trouble stepping off a gangplank in immersive VR despite knowing that in reality, an office carpet lies just below," writes Kelsey Ichikawa. But like any technology, that immersive power should raise questions. Some are Class 1 questions or questions that come up when technology doesn't work perfectly. What happens, for example, if VR safety protocols can't filter out disturbing content? But the more powerful dilemmas are Class 2 questions or "What happens if this technology does work perfectly?" What if we create such a seamless virtual experience that it's indistinguishable from real life? What if we spend more time there than in real life? What if kids can instantly connect with anyone on the internet in a way that to them seems completely real? For questions like these, simple answers aren't enough. Christians need to think critically here because, like all technology, VR needs to be carefully stewarded. On one hand, it has the potential for great good: medical applications, seamless business meetings, and just the fun of trying new things in virtual space. As God's image bearers, we were designed to build, innovate, create, and explore. As we've said before on BreakPoint, "God is no Luddite." But we should also exercise caution. Our bodies aren't an accidental part of who we are. In an age that increasingly downplays physical aspects of reality, elevating our quasi-spiritual projects of self-creation, God's view of our bodies is critical. We live in the most interconnected age in human history, yet people are lonely. We've forgotten that sharing simple things such as food, hugs, eye contact, fellowship, and physical proximity are essential aspects of living life together as humans made in God's image. This especially matters for children, who are at risk of losing the normal interactions of life. Some have never experienced them in the first place. As early adopters, they may gain the most from our new technologies, but they also have the most to lose.

Is the invasion of Ukraine a sign of the end times? What are the end times and how are Christians called to respond? John and Maria unpack the Ukraine crisis and how both Christians and the secular world are interpreting the events as an omen of the end of the age. Maria then asks John for clarity on the new Florida bill that protects young children from being exposed to sexual ideology in grade school. John explains the landscape of the culture and how and why many are responding the way they are. To close, John and Maria discuss a pair of recent commentaries and how Christians are called to this cultural moment.

Is your worldview big enough? Everything at the Colson Center, from the Point and BreakPoint commentaries to podcasts to Wilberforce Weekend brings clarity on culture from a Christian worldview. But the goal isn't just to think clearly. It's also to live in an intentionally redemptive way. And nothing gets in the way of that more than a truncated view of the Gospel. You might call it a "two-chapter" worldview, one focused only on sin and salvation but doesn't take seriously the biblical realities of creation and restoration. Creation helps us see God's intent; restoration puts our personal salvation in larger context of Christ's work in history. A two-chapter Gospel simply isn't big enough for this cultural moment. What if you could spend nine months building the worldview "muscles" needed to make sense of the culture and, working and studying with others, develop a plan to live a life of Christian influence grounded in the story of Scripture? The Colson Fellows program is a regionally based (or online) deep dive into a robust Christian worldview. There are cohorts in over 60 cities and online. Colson Fellows can be found in state legislatures, board rooms, schools, medical research, prisons, pulpits, dinner tables, racial reconciliation efforts...in other words, in every area of life. And that's the vision: everyday Christian leaders, all across culture, with a clear vision for how God can use them in this cultural moment. Learn more at colsonfellows.org.

Babies aren't popular, right now. In fact, on average, Americans have never had fewer children as we did in 2020. Of course, that was also the year the pandemic began, something that historically, like war and recession, tends to empty maternity wards. The decline in our nation's birth rate, however, didn't begin with COVID-19, and there's little reason to believe it has turned around in the last year and a half. The current decline goes back a while now, and didn't reverse when the economy boomed in the second half of the 2010s. In fact, the dwindling U.S. birth rate seems strangely indifferent to what's happening in the stock market or the headlines. It's almost as if, no matter our financial or political situation, Americans are simply choosing to have fewer and fewer children year by year. And, it's not because they can't afford them. It's because they don't want them. That's the conclusion of a new study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which found that economic factors such as rising cost of living or student debt, factors which historically played outsized roles in fertility rates, are not when it comes to declining birth rates today. To isolate what is causing today's decline, the authors estimated the impact of policy and economic shifts—things such as Medicaid coverage, abortion access, childcare cost, and sex education. "Perhaps the key explanation for the post-2007 sustained decline in US birth rates," the authors conclude, "is not…some changing policy or cost factor, but rather shifting priorities across cohorts of young adults." Or as Patrick Brown at the Institute for Family Studies summarized: "It's not the economy, stupid, but the culture." In fact, American incomes have reached record highs, and standards of living are better than they were in decades past. Americans, on average, have the resources to bear and raise more children than they are, something like 5.8 million more, according to the Institute for Family Studies' Lyman Stone One factor that did stand out as firmly predicting fertility was marriage rates. Birth rates among married women haven't changed much since the mid-1990s. What has changed is the percentage of women getting married. That number has fallen by nearly half since 1990. According to Brown, "It doesn't seem to be the case that women who might have had multiple children are stopping at one, but rather delayed marriage and childbirth are preventing more women from having any children at all." The authors of the study cite cultural preferences about adult life as the cause of both falling marriage and fertility. This shouldn't really surprise us. As a 2018 poll publicized by The New York Times found, the most frequently cited reason for young adults' decision not to have children was a desire for more leisure time. Patrick Brown at the Institute for Family Studies is appropriately cautious about what we can learn from this research. For example, it doesn't mean policies designed to make parenting easier for young couples aren't important or that we don't need to address the student debt crisis. What it does mean is that it's time to rethink the conventional wisdom about why people decide to have children. We are not purely economic creatures. Cultural attitudes, norms, and preferences about what makes for a meaningful life have a far bigger impact on fertility than previously thought. Young adults today are having fewer children than ever before, not because they can't keep food on the family table, but because for so many there is no family table. Christians should have different priorities. Throughout Scripture, God prioritizes marriage and children. In the creation account, in the history of Israel, in the Wisdom literature, and in the New Testament Epistles, family is seen as a blessing, the cradle of faith, the place where culture begins, a center of worship. and the setting for some of the greatest joys human beings can experience. That doesn't mean that single life is any less of a calling, or that every young person should focus all their energy on finding a life partner. Just that it wouldn't hurt for more churches and Christian families to play matchmaker, helping young adults reimagine what life should be. We ought not imitate a society that, in its zeal to get the most out of life, is forgetting to pass it on.

There's a religious element to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In 2019 the Orthodox Church of Ukraine officially split from the Russian Orthodox Church. Obviously, the political and religious history of this part of the world goes back far beyond that, but it should be noted that one of the ways Vladimir Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine is by claiming that he was fighting for "the religious soul of Ukraine." And prior to the invasion, one strong indicator of his ultimate intentions is that Jews, Muslims, and Protestants were reporting religious oppression in the parts of Ukraine under Moscow's control. In other words, restrictions on religious freedom came first. Unprovoked invasions, genocide, and totalitarian tendencies are often the things that draw the world's attention that something is wrong in some part of the world. A better "canary in the coal mine" of geo-political conflict is religious persecution. That's because religious freedom is the first freedom. When it falls, so do the others.

When the University of Northampton added a trigger warning to George Orwell's 1984 last year, a fresh round of conversations about speech and censorship followed. What do people in a free society owe each other when it comes to our words? What is the nature and purpose of education? Is it possible to have accountability if there's no real debate? Many educational institutions are taking extreme measures to eradicate language they think is problematic. Students at Brandeis University, for example, compiled a suggested word list to help students and faculty avoid terms with any conceivable sexist, racist, or ableist undertones. Phrases like "killing it," for example, made the list because of their supposedly violent connotations. Others, like "rule of thumb," "you guys," or "that's crazy" were included for even less convincing rationale. In one of the strangest ironies, Brandeis students placed the term "trigger warning" on the list. The students put it this way: Their reason, and I quote, was that "'Warning' can signify that something is imminent or guaranteed to happen, which may cause additional stress about the content to be covered." Ah, but there's a plot twist here: Recent studies are now questioning the effectiveness of trigger warnings for this exact reason. It turns out, the students were on to something. For example, a study published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry found that, on average, trigger warnings increased peoples' perceived emotional vulnerability to trauma. For example, reading written material identified as harmful led to an increase in anxiety. Crucially, these findings only held if the reader actually "believed that words can cause harm" in the first place. In other words, teach a generation that reading certain words can cause irreparable harm, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The same logic applies to other "trigger warnings," like the Brandeis word list: They may create the exact anxiety they're intended to prevent. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt write in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, "A culture that allows the concept of 'safety' to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy." This is not to say any limits or changes in language amount to censorship. Derogatory terms for people of a different race or with a disability such as Down Syndrome once passed as normal in even "respectable" parts of society. Ridding our language of those terms was an improvement. And, on a personal level, we all need to filter the content we take in daily. That's the idea behind the rating system on movies, which has proven to be more than a bit problematic. Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom initially received a PG rating despite a cultic ritual where a man's still-beating heart is pulled out of his chest. The outroar by parents is what led to the PG-13 rating. On the other hand, Facing the Giants, the Christian movie, received a PG rating instead of G because critics feared it was too religious and would offend viewers. The whole thing is a mess. Even so, we should be able to see that there's a world of difference between old-fashioned parental guidance—really, what we would call wisdom—and immediately removing anything controversial under the guise of it being "triggering." The former acknowledges the moral agency that needs cultivation and shaping. The latter treats us as passive victims in need of coddling. And to be clear, there is always a moral framework behind anything that is labeled as "triggering" speech. Even when it's not clear who is making the rules, they reflect some worldview. And once they are set in stone, violating them is anathema … the equivalent of a physical act of violence. That's an impossible system to uphold and leads to a culture void of real moral discourse and the possibility of forgiveness This is our context, and it is quite a challenge for Christian parents. The answer is not to create our own version of intellectual isolation, hiding from any and all offensive content, shying away from tough topics like sexuality or CRT, or arguing as if our own feelings of being offended are legitimate moral reasoning. In the words of Lukianoff and Haidt, "Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child." All Christians, but especially students, will have to be able to think critically and articulate why things like free speech matter. The best antidote for fragility is the confidence that comes from real preparation. It's the only way to avoid resorting to outrage as a strategy and how we can follow the example of Jesus, Who is truth and love together. Intellectual fragility, on the other hand, is neither.

Listeners write in asking for a framework to teach young people to view the world with a Christian perspective. John talks about credibility, plausibility, and discernment. Then, Shane asks John for a Biblical grounding for Lent and how Christians should approach the season. Another listener writes in to ask for clarity on how BreakPoint recently explained Jesus' humanity and if his body was fallen or perfect. To close, John helps a listener think well on where we find our identity and how to think well of cultures and race in the spheres of society.

America has a real trust problem. We've lost trust in our institutions and each other, and the ramifications for society are immense. Recently a senior partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers wrote in the Harvard Business Review about how businesses should focus on building trust with their customers. A recent survey showed that Americans are wary of trusting companies on issues such as cyber security, employee relations, and transparency. A crutch for many businesses, the author wrote, is not having a dedicated employee or department charged with building trust. Much of his advice was helpful, but the piece could have been distilled into a much more effective message: Anyone who wants to be trusted must be trustworthy. This goes for individuals, businesses, and the state. Because all are comprised of fallen people, there's always the temptation to hide missteps and protect our image. This goes back to the Garden of Eden. It shouldn't take a dedicated employee in the C-suite or a checklist from the Harvard Business Review to act virtuously, but in the end, that's the only true "secret sauce" to building real trust.

Richard John Neuhaus, founder of the journal on religion and public life First Things, once wrote, "When I meet God, I expect to meet him as an American." The line got him in a good bit of trouble back then, but today he'd almost certainly be accused of being a "Christian nationalist." Nationalism of any stripe has gotten a bad name recently, but especially so-called Christian nationalism. How should Christians think about nations and national loyalty? The first use of the Hebrew word for nation comes appears in Genesis 10, in a listing of nations that descended from Noah's sons. It's notable that this comes before the Tower of Babel, recorded in Genesis 11, where God created more nations by confusing the languages and scattering people across the Earth. Nations, it seems, were part of God's plan for humanity before the rebellion at Babel. And, even in that story, the dividing into tongues and scattering of the people is described more as an act of mercy than of judgment, to prevent humans from doing all that was possible as one people. Then in Genesis 12, God tells Abram that his descendants would become a great nation, and that, through them, all the nations of the world would be blessed. The Old Testament frequently refers to the Jewish people as a nation, while also using the same word to describe the other kingdoms and empires around them. In the New Testament ethne, the Greek word for "nation" most famously appears in Jesus' instructions to make disciples "of all nations," which is a fulfillment of God's original promise to Abraham. Also interesting is that in the New Testament, language about nations seems to exclude "empire." Though ethne can be translated either as "people group" or "nation," the two are related. Historically, the word "nation" referred to a relatively homogenous group, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically. The kingdoms of the ancient world mostly consisted of people of a single nation. Thus, ethne can refer to a people group within an empire, but not to empires themselves because they contain multiple nations. Nations also seem to be present after the Second Coming of Christ, according to biblical descriptions. For example, Micah 4:2 says: "Many nations shall come, and say: 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.' For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem." And in Revelation 21:24, we are told that "by the light [of God and of the Lamb] will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it [the New Jerusalem]." So, it seems that something of the nations will survive into eternity. Of course, because human beings are fallen, everything humans build are susceptible to sin, including nations. Just as sins characterize our lives as individuals, so also can certain sins dominate nations, corrupting their cultures. And, just as we must be cleansed of sin to enter the Kingdom, so must nations be cleansed from sins if they have any place in the New Heavens and New Earth. A fascinating illustration of this is found in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Their high views of ancient northern European culture show up in their stories of Narnia and Middle Earth. However, though they believed virtue could be found, they also recognized the evils of Norse paganism. Thus, they argued for a recovery of "northernness," cleansed of its paganism and Christianized by the Gospel. Exactly what the cleansing of nations entails isn't clear, but the result is beautifully described in Revelation 7, where "a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages" will join together in worshipping the Lamb. This passage confirms that, at least to some degree, our nationality will accompany us into eternity. Rather than homogenizing us, God's Kingdom will be a glorious mosaic of people of different races, ethnicities, and nations. This makes sense given that God delighted in the diversity of His creation. In other words, according to these texts, when Father Neuhaus died in 2009, he did, in fact, meet God as an American. Of course, all good loves, including love of spouse, child, family, community, or culture, can be disordered and even idolatrous. Nationalism becomes idolatry whenever love of nation devolves into an excessive or uncritical devotion, is confused with the Kingdom of God, justifies evil, or engages in a partiality that treats citizens of other nations as less worthy of love or justice or charity. However, the idea that nations should be defined, self-governing, and the immediate object of Christian stewardship is not idolatry. Another way to say this is that Christians are called to be good stewards of the nations they are in. Our nations are, after all, the most obvious aspect of the time and place in which God has placed us. At the same time, great harm is done whenever Christians attempt to build empires. The reason is simple: Jesus is the only one who rules over all nations, and no one on earth has the right to usurp His authority.

In 2020, America reached a grim milestone. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, 2020 was the first year that more than half of all abortions performed in the U.S.—54%—were done with drugs instead of instruments. That's up from 39% in 2017. Abortion pills are only approved for use before a baby reaches 10 weeks' gestation. Due to COVID-19, prescriptions became available via "telehealth." But how can a doctor verify gestational age without seeing a woman in person? In fact, how is a doctor supposed to monitor women for life-threatening complications after they take the drugs—which do happen—if they never even come into the office? Privatizing abortion for hurting women will increase profits for drug companies and doctors, who can collect their dues without seeing patients, let alone treating them. However, sending abortion home also increases the danger, shame, and isolation of women in need of care. And, of course, adding this bad idea to an already bad idea makes more babies the victims. A grim milestone, indeed.