Breakpoint

Last year, the FDA lifted an important restriction on the "abortion pill," a drug that induces abortion in early pregnancy by starving the preborn child. Prior to the pandemic, doctors were required to meet face-to-face with patients before prescribing the drug, but that requirement was lifted during the pandemic. Last week, the FDA made the policy change permanent. This comes just as our culture, from psychological literature to the arts, has begun to understand miscarriage as real trauma, even if it is a loss not readily seen. Part of the trauma is how hidden a miscarriage can feel. The abortion pill causes this trauma on purpose. Not only do many women report physical trauma after so-called "medical" abortion, but without a face-to-face visit, the mother is isolated from one less source of support and accountability. This is not healthcare. This is, however, the reality of what it will mean to advocate for the preborn in the days ahead. Hidden evil is allowed to flourish, we must work to change hearts and minds, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.

More than a few folks, from theologian John Calvin to philosopher William James to French theologian and historian Louis Auguste Sabatier, have noted that humans are "incurably religious" creatures. In other words, religion is native to the human heart. In the history of the world, the wholesale rejections of the supernatural is a quirk of Western secularism. At the same time, it will not ultimately survive the human longing for transcendence and communion with the supernatural, no matter how far technology advances. Evidence for this analysis is currently on display in Dortmund, Germany. An art exhibition, entitled "Technoshamanism," was recently highlighted in the New York Times article "Space Pagans and Smart Phone Witches: Where Tech Meets Mysticism." Josie Thaddeus-Jones describes the exhibition, which features the work of twelve artists and collectives, as an exploration of the "connections between technology and esoteric, ancestral belief systems." Visitors are welcomed by quotations from French artist Lucile Olympe Haut's "Cyberwitches Manifesto," which urges readers to, among other things, "use smartphones and tarot cards to connect to spirits" and "manufacture D.I.Y. devices to listen to invisible worlds." According to the Times, the exhibition is an example of the rising interest in pagan and occult practices among "spiritual but not religious" Westerners. The new development, reports Thaddeus-Jones, is how frequently these practices are being combined with technology: "Spirituality is all over our feeds: The self-help guru Deepak Chopra has co-founded his own [Non-Fungible Token] platform, witches are reading tarot on TikTok, and the A.I.-driven astrology app Co-Star has been downloaded more than 20 million times." One Brazilian artist at the Technoshamanism exhibition organizes festivals where participants use robots to "connect with ancestral belief systems and the natural world." Other artists imagine a pagan future for humanity in space, where "rituals and visions play as much of a role as solar power and artificial intelligence." For others, animistic customs and psychedelic drugs meet virtual reality and black lights for an experience that looks part séance and part science fiction. So, why are digital technologies and social media bringing about a resurgence of pagan spirituality? The Times cites an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, who says that because of the Internet, "people have access to belief traditions that were not easily accessible to them before." This allows them to "discover, select and combine the spiritual traditions that most [appeal] to them." Still, availability is only part of the story. Materialists of all stripes have long predicted that the human thirst for superstition would soon vanish with the rise of science and more enlightened societies. Karl Marx famously prophesied that communism would bring the end of religion. Yet, this renaissance of paganism continues to happen precisely in countries where science and technology have most influenced life. If the Times is right, smart devices and the Internet have only fueled the spread of pagan spirituality. What this reveals is not only that the draw of the numinous is more enduring than 19th-century atheists ever imagined, but also that secularism isn't satisfying as a worldview. As it turns out, it's not so easy to disenchant the world or the human heart. We are incurably religious creatures. At the same time, celebrations of "technoshamanism" should remind us that pagan mysticism also fails to fill the "God-shaped vacuum" in every human heart. With VR headsets and tarot apps, would-be witches may try to reimagine what pre-Christian beliefs were like, but real paganism died out in Europe over a thousand years ago. The reason was the advance of Christianity, something historian Rodney Stark has called "The Victory of Reason." Christianity's triumph led to expanded human rights and freedom, capitalism, and the science that made the "tech" in technoshamanism possible in the first place. Fundamentally, Christ supplanted paganism because His gospel was better news, and the worldview centered on His rule and reign brings rest to the restless human heart. The more secular forces and ideologies in the modern West attempt to replace Christ with belief in nothing, the more paganism rushes back to fill the vacuum. But it has already been tried and found wanting before, and it will fail again. True hope, joy, and dignity come only from Christ, no matter how tech-savvy the world becomes.

Historian and long-time friend of the Colson Center, Dr. Glenn Sunshine joined Shane Morris to discuss if Christmas is a pagan holiday. During his conversation with Shane, Dr. Sunshine answered some of the core questions about Christmas. For instance, Sunshine argued that December 25th was not chosen as the date for Christmas in order to co-opt a pagan solstice festival. More likely, it was based on an ancient Jewish belief that people are conceived on the date of their deaths. Since Christ died on or around March 25th, some Church Fathers believed that Christ must have been conceived on that day and born nine months later… December 25th. For more on this topic, visit www.whatwouldyousay.org to find a special video to help guide conversation with your family.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, believes social media platforms should be held accountable for the damage they cause teenage girls. He offers many reasons why. In one study, young women were told to use Instagram, Facebook, or play a simple video game. After just seven minutes of scrolling, the Instagram users, in particular, showed decreased body satisfaction and a negative emotional state. This isn't because of the amount of time on the site, but because of its design. Focusing on body image creates a trap that young people can't escape. "Instagram," he writes, "can loom in a girl's mind even when the app is not open, driving hours of obsessive thought, worry, and shame." What's worse, Haidt argues, big tech executives have known about this effect for years but have done little to stop it. They should be held accountable, but that accountability starts with parents. We shouldn't just look to the state to do what God has tasked parents with first, to fight for the hearts and minds of our kids.

A few years ago, my friend and former Breakpoint co-host Eric Metaxas wrote a book called Seven Women. While researching for the book, Metaxas made a strategic decision: he would not write about women who were merely the first women to do something men had already done — even though these were the sorts of women people kept recommending he write about. Instead, Metaxas wrote about women who improved the world because they were women, not in spite of that fact. Since Seven Women was published in 2016, the rise of the transgender movement has further degraded our culture's respect for femaleness. A few weeks ago, Twitter users began sharing stories of notable women in history and claiming, under the hashtag "TransAwarenessWeek2021," that these women weren't women at all. "Queen Kristina of Sweden was born female, but wore male clothing," one user wrote. "She did not marry and inherited the Swedish crown." Thus, we are to believe, Kristina of Sweden was transgender. The contrast between Metaxas' celebration of women as women and the transgender movement's aggressive decree that any woman who does something stereotypically male must therefore be a man is profound. Until yesterday, culturally speaking, it was our bodies, not our minds or feelings — let alone what kind of clothes we wear — that determined a person's sex. This should especially hold true for Christians, who know that God created His world good, and His image-bearers, very good. Transgender ideology tells lies, not only about the human body, but about the inherent goodness of sexual difference itself. That's what was happening with this Twitter trend, too. In the name of inclusivity, transgender ideology says there is a box inside which exists all the potential actions, attitudes, and appearances of a woman. Any woman, whether centuries ago or today, who does not fit neatly inside that box must be a man. This isn't inclusivity. This is, in fact, the most exclusive possible vision of gender and sex. Even more, this backward view isn't unlike the unrealistic standards of female beauty often propagated by advertisers or the entertainment industry. For years, movies, advertisements, and fashion designers featured tall, incredibly thin, and often photoshopped women in their productions. These unrealistic depictions of femininity are harmful to women, especially young women. So, over the past two decades, the "body positivity" movement has pushed back, for a more accurate representation of women in mass media; including women of many shapes and sizes. That's a good thing not just because it could mitigate actual harm; it's a good thing because it better portrays reality. Transgender ideology promotes the same damaging error of improbable beauty standards, but further. Now, we're told, there's not just one right way to look like a woman. There's only one narrowly-defined way to be a woman. A Christian worldview, in contrast, offers a much more expansive, inclusive view of women (and men, for that matter). Asking the question, "Is this something a woman would do" about something a woman just did, is perfectly redundant. Would a woman really ride a horse or assume the Swedish crown? Well, a woman did…so, yes! This is the beautifully diverse way God created humans in His image. Of course, just because a man or a woman can do something without risking his or her identity doesn't mean he or she should do that thing. As Christians, we should always wrestle with how best to live out our God-given design as men and women, by asking questions like: "is this an honorable thing to do? Does this respect the body God gave me, or fight against it? Does it glorify God and His design?" Christians find answers for these questions in Scripture, common sense, observable realities, and history with guidance from the Holy Spirit, wise counsel from other believers, and in the (ironically) most ignored source of all, the general revelation of our own bodies. We will not find those answers in a culture like ours, one that increasingly and obstinately refuses to see the inherent goodness in our sexual differences. A few years ago comedian Tina Fey produced a charmingly strange comedy show for Netflix called "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." The script was characterized by somewhat stupid jokes that often followed a format of a premise with a predictable punchline, but then the joke would swerve. In one scene, a woman put on a pair of high heels and complained about how much they hurt her feet. "You know how I know men invented high heels?" She began. "Because women never invented anything." Her joke is not just an analogy or a metaphor for what's done to women when we look at their clothes, their bravery, or their intelligence and then claim, by virtue of those things, they must be men. It's the exact same thing. And it's wrong.

John and Maria discuss the destruction from a series of Tornados that swept the Midwest this week. The explore the worldview significance of the devastation in light of our culture's loss of the inherent value and dignity of life. To close, Maria asks John to expound on how society is experiencing a rise in acts of desperation, through crime and violence, and the avoidance of the deaths from despair. References: God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas Deitrich Bonhoeffer | Westminster John Knox Press | 2012 Every Moment Holy Douglas McKelvey | Rabbit Room | 2017 -- References -- Segment 1: Rare tornadoes strike America's heartland, destroying homes and knocking out power At least 21 tornadoes were reported across three U.S. states -- Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota -- between Wednesday and Thursday this week. This happened five days after tornados tore through Kentucky that have killed 74 as of Tuesday morning.ABC News>>Fox News on Kentucky>> Opioid Deaths Pass A Grim Milestone So how can the church help in this opioid crisis? Before we talk about how, we need to discuss why we must. It's not clear that any other institution, particularly those that lost so much public trust in the last 25 years, has anything much to offer. They are largely exhausted as social resources. The Gospel is never exhausted. It offers a clear sense of who we are, a source for meaning and purpose that goes beyond our age's radical individualism, and a potential source of the kind of social support everyone, especially men, desperately need. It also offers a clear call: to run into the brokenness, not away from it. To go where people are, into broken communities and families, often to those beyond our comfort zones, and be part of the solution. The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost; can we, who claim Him as Lord, do less in the face of this challenge?BreakPoint>> Kids Are Dying. How Are These Sites Still Allowed A few years ago, a website about suicide appeared. On it, not only do people talk about wanting to die, but they share, at great length, how they are going to do it. Through public forums, live chats and private messaging, users can get advice as they make their plans. Times reporters were able to identify 45 people who killed themselves after spending time on the site, several of whom were minors. The true number is likely to be higher.NY Times>> Assisted suicide pod approved for use in Switzerland "The person will get into the capsule and lie down. It's very comfortable. They will be asked a number of questions and when they have answered, they may press the button inside the capsule activating the mechanism in their own time."The Hill>> Segment 2: Our Nation's Crime Spike and the Need for Shalom Communities must develop around virtuous citizens and mutual responsibility. The more shalom is cultivated within a community, the less "the stick" of coercion is needed. An essential ingredient is what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons" of society, the flourishing of non-governmental, local networks and institutions, an often intangible infrastructure of education, creativity, care, and problem-solving. BreakPoint>> Chicago Mayor Invests $400 million in social plan to curb violence "We may not call all of these (aspects in the "Our City, Our Safey" plan that highlights violence prevention, street outreach, affordable housing, job training, health and wellness, and community development) things part of the tools of public safety, but they absolutely fundamentally are. Because when people are healthy, when communities are vibrant, when folks feel like they have ownership of the geography under their feet, communities thrive." ~Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on $400 million safety plan targeting 15 communities in Chicago Chicago Sun Times>>

Every generation, it seems, complains about the next generation's music, sometimes for moral reasons and other times from taste. When Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring debuted in Paris, it sparked outrage from conservative opera-goers, leading to a full-scale riot. While musical styles often differ, the emerging consensus of researches suggests that music leaves its mark, especially when it delivers lewd or violent content. Multiple studies published in the American Association of Pediatrics, for example, have found a strong correlation between listening to sexualized lyrics and risky sexual behavior in teens. "Let me write the songs of a nation," says a quote sometimes attributed to Homer and sometimes to Scottish statesman Andrew Fletcher, "and I care not who writes its laws." Music is a powerful medium, shaping how we think and what we love. Recently Emily Ratajkowski publicly regretted her role in Robin Thicke's 2013 song Blurred Lines. Far from empowering, she now mourns the ways it commodified her body - and taught younger girls to do the same. When Solomon wrote, "Above all else, guard your heart," that includes music… "for everything you do flows from it."

In his article "A Photo History of Male Affection," Brett McKay catalogs the dramatic ways male friendship has changed over time. One hundred years ago, men were far more comfortable showing each other everyday physical affection: draping arms over shoulders, sitting close to each other, even holding hands. To modern eyes, McKay's examples look, well, odd. It seems impossible for us not to see some kind of homosexual subtext to these photos. But challenging that assumption is precisely why McKay wrote this article in the first place. "[You] cannot view these photographs through the prism of our modern culture and current conception of homosexuality," he writes. "What you see in the photographs was common, not rare; the photos are not about sexuality, but intimacy." In other words, as crazy as it sounds, we're the weird ones. The typical ways men have shown each other affection for all of human history are so foreign to us that, when we see them, we don't recognize them. That's the exact phenomenon C.S. Lewis wrote about in The Four Loves, when he said that "those who cannot conceive friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a friend." [emphasis added] Lewis was right in more ways than he knew. Americans are lonely. According to research from Harvard Graduate School of Education, 36% of Americans report feeling "serious loneliness," as do an incredible 61% of young adults. According to a Cigna health survey, nearly 54% of American adults agree with the statement, "nobody knows me well." Isolated and glued to our screens, it's a crisis that's only getting worse. The most significant decline in friendship is among men. According to a May 2021 poll, the percentage of men who say they have "no close friends" has quintupled since 1990, affecting nearly one out of every six American males. There are obvious reasons why ours is a lonely culture, and most of them predate the global pandemic: a high rate of geographical mobility, time spent traveling for work, and time on screens all play significant roles. And yet, behind those factors is one few people are willing to talk about: the power of ideas, namely ideas about sex. We've created a culture so obsessed with disordered erotic love that we've all but thrown away the concept of friendship as a vital component of life. This is especially true for men. There's evidence that the over-sexualized experience of American men is dramatically harming their ability to foster their other relationships. A good example is the effects of pornography. Porn addiction fuels cycles of loneliness, draining motivation and hijacking the brain's reward centers. Men addicted to pornography have less capacity to form life-giving relationships with real people. And increasingly, pornography is contributing to the sexualization of men, in a widening trend across culture. As the visual matrix of our collective brains are trained to see both men and women as sexual objects, what will the impact on male friendship be? Like McKay observes, the increase in - and corresponding fears of - homosexuality are exactly what led to the cooling effect in male friendship in the first place. One NYU researcher put it this way: "Children have remarkable social and emotional skills — to listen to each other, to read each other's emotions, empathy, all sorts of lovely things." But when they hit adolescence, "[You get the] 'No homo' [response], as if I've been asking a question about their sexuality rather than about their friendships." The tragic irony is that, these days, we are asking, or more accurately forcing questions about their sexuality. We tell girls who like to climb trees that they're actually boys. We tell boys who share emotions with their friends that they might be gay. Caught between what they are told is sexual behavior toward other men, and the type of cold, isolated masculinity demonstrated for them everywhere else, it's no wonder so many boys grow into lonely men. In the 1993 film Tombstone, Doc Holliday is asked why he's going to such lengths to bring a band of outlaws to justice. "Because Wyatt Earp is my friend," he says, referring to the legendary gunslinger. "I got lots of friends," comes the reply. Doc pauses for a second, then says simply, "I don't." Male friendship has always been a precious thing. It's worth fighting for. The first and best way to do this is to teach young boys what it means to be a friend. Sharing emotions and normal physical affection are not inherently sexual acts. But on a societal level, restoring friendship to its proper palace means keeping sexuality in its proper place. If we don't, it will keep ruining the relationships men - and all people - need the most.

According to Lifeway Research, over 90 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, but only 22 percent feel confident they could retell the story of the Jesus' birth from memory. 17 percent said they couldn't remember any of it! It's tempting to cry out with Charlie Brown, "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?!?!" Maybe it's time to whip out the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, and watch Charlie go through the motions of the holiday season without knowing why. Right when he is at his wit's end, Linus steps into the spotlight, literally, and recites the Nativity story from Luke's Gospel. The more our world detaches from the Bible, the more it detaches from truth. What the world needs are more Linus-es. Only the Church has the words of life, the message that explains, not only the reason for the season, but the real story of the world, why it is the way it is, and how God took on flesh to make all things new

Yesterday on BreakPoint, we talked about the rise in addictions and overdose deaths due to our nation's opioid crisis. Through a constellation of unemployment rates, cultural darkness, and opioid availability, thousands in America's "Rust Belt" are falling to what are being called "deaths of despair." All of which was worsened by the greed and deception of pharmaceutical companies and the FDA. And now, thanks to a new report, we know that the largely rural pain of opioid deaths is being matched by a predominantly urban crime scourge. In the last year, there's been an increase in crimes of all kinds, from shoplifting flash mobs to property crimes to outright murder. Just as with the opioid crisis, a network of causes is behind the uptick in lawlessness, and the consequences are particularly devastating for the poor living in many of our nation's urban centers. Though violent crime per capita isn't as bad as it was in the early 90s, at least twelve major U.S. cities broke annual homicide records this year, before the first week of December. This includes Portland, Oregon, Tuscon, Arizona, and St. Paul, Minnesota. Philadelphia, a city of nearly 1.5 million people, had more homicides this year than New York and Los Angeles, a 13% rise from 2020 and breaking the homicide record set in 1990. Overall, major American cities have seen a 33% rise in homicides since the "new normal" of Covid began. 63 of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one violent crime category in 2020, those being homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. An obvious factor is that, in many cities, deterrents to crime have been removed. Facing accusations of police brutality, activists and municipal leaders called for defunding the police, diminishing the presence of law enforcement, and scaling back arrests and prosecution for certain crimes. The results have not been good. Target, Walgreens, and CVS have largely pulled out of the Bay Area after stores were targeted for "smash and grab" looting. Criminals were slapped with only misdemeanors if they lifted less than $950 worth of merchandise. Cities like Chicago have seen crime waves that began downtown nut now have hit the suburbs as well. Many cities which advocated for defunding the police last year are now looking to beef up police departments as crime continues to rise. But for too many, this is too late. As one study put it, "marginalized communities endure endemically high levels of violence. The events of 2020 exacerbated disparities in several forms of violence." Communities already suffering from economic hardship and crime are now stripped of the legal and police protection their more affluent neighbors take for granted. Many corporations and shop-owners who experience not only a rise in crime, but a corresponding drop in profits conclude it's best to take their business elsewhere. This can leave already doubly-afflicted communities without food stores and jobs. Still, it would be mistake to place all the blame for this crime surge only on fewer police officers and reduced law enforcement. After all, in 19th century Victorian London, the police force shrank without precipitating more crime. The difference is, in that case, they were no longer needed. A people able to govern themselves by the conscience is not in need of the constables. In our moment, those pushing to reduce law enforcement got the math exactly backward. As our culture is showing an inability to govern itself, evidenced by dual epidemics of "deaths from despair" and what could be called "acts of desperation," is not the time to lose the constable. A word used often in Scripture is Shalom, often translated peace. So much more than the mere absence of conflict, shalom means wholeness, rightness, the state of being when things are ordered as they ought to be. It is right to insist that those who "protect and serve" do just that. Security is a non-negotiable prerequisite to shalom in civic life. Without it, outside investors will stay away from poverty-stricken areas and residents seek a better life elsewhere, taking their talent and resources with them. Even so, security is only a first step. Communities must develop around virtuous citizens and mutual responsibility. The more shalom is cultivated within a community, the less "the stick" of coercion is needed. An essential ingredient is what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons" of society, the flourishing of non-governmental, local networks and institutions, an often intangible infrastructure of education, creativity, care, and problem-solving. Without it, communities only experience a peace born of force. This, of course, is precisely where the Church can thrive, doing what it's always done, caring for those in need through things like charity and education and care, as well as by proactively encouraging the other spheres of society to live out their roles as God intended.