Breakpoint

As the "Big Quit" happens across America, the Christian vision of work could be more relevant and impactful than ever. Which, as history attests, is saying quite a lot. Physical labor was devalued in the ancient world. The exception, in classical Greece and the early days of the Roman Republic, was farming, which was considered the proper pursuit of citizens. All other labor was viewed as demeaning. In the later days of the Republic, as plantation agriculture replaced small farms, the work of farming was also seen as demeaning and relegated to slaves. By the time of the Roman Empire, all physical labor was only thought proper for slaves and lower classes. Though the foundation of the empire's wealth, the upper classes believed that production was beneath them. Their attention, or so they thought, belonged in the more "refined" areas of life, such as the arts and philosophy. Of course, the biblical view of work is completely different. Scripture frames work as a good thing, an essential part of what it means to be human. Because God created us to work, at least in part, it's inherently connected to our worship and dignity. Put differently, work is not the result of the fall. It was, however, tainted by Adam's sin. God's created purposes for humanity, to fill and form His world through work, would now feature pain and frustration. Aspects of human work were twisted from dignity to drudgery. Human efforts to cultivate the earth, designed by God to be part of the joy of imaging Him, became sources of frustration, pain, sweat, and sorrow. Because of the uniqueness of the Biblical framework, even the early Christians approached work with a very different view than their pagan neighbors did. They thought of work as good but marred by sin. So, for example, in monastic communities, monks were expected to do physical labor, if for no other reason than to grow their food. In his Rule for Monastic Life, St. Benedict of Nursia (480-547) insisted that monks should work both to fulfill the biblical mandate that God gave Adam, and to encourage humility in a world that thought of work as demeaning. Within a full understanding of the Biblical story, from Creation to New Creation, Christians came to understand the Gospel as Christ redeeming us of sin as well as all of its effects. In addition to forgiveness of sin and security of eternity, salvation also included the redemption of anything infected by sin. This included work, which led Christians to attempt to restore work away from "toil" and back to the kind of meaningful labor God intended. So, in the middle ages, many monasteries became centers of technological innovation, focused on making work more significant. A prime example is the waterwheel. Although the Romans knew about waterwheels, they rarely made use of them. After all, why invest in an expensive machine when you have unlimited slave labor? The monks had a different view of human value and the value of work which inspired them to develop ways of using the waterwheel to mechanize production. Initially, waterwheels were likely used for grinding grain. This required converting the vertical rotation of the wheel into horizontal rotation for the millstones, which the monks accomplished through a system of wooden gears and wheels. Later, the waterwheel was adapted for a wide range of other applications including powering bellows in forges, operating trip hammers in smithies, sawing lumber, and fulling cloth. Soon, even secular communities began to invest in building mills. While some might say secular communities adopted water wheels for economic impact, the economy in Rome was very specialized. Therefore, the Romans did not deploy waterwheels. What made communities adopt these and other technologies was likely the influence of the Christian idea of work, as it moved out from the monasteries to penetrate and shape the culture. Many more inventions were developed during the Roman and Middle Ages, stimulating economic activity and making work more efficient and meaningful. These developments were inspired by the idea that Jesus' work in redemption meant restoration was possible in all areas of life, including reversing the curse of the Garden. Though other countries had innovative technologies, some far more advanced than the West, the West's use and employment of technology was unique. According to Indian philosopher Vishal Mangalwadi, the West used technologies to make the work of the common person easier and to aid in production, rather than to cater to the elites. In our current cultural moment, many see work as frustrating, unrewarding, an dnot worth it (that is, as toil). So, in our cultural moment, Christians have an incredible, better vision of work to offer the larger world. We've also got a history to tell, of how a vision of human dignity and innovation became a blessing across economic and class lines. Just as in the past, the Christian view can move our imaginations about work beyond drudgery, to a renewed and redeemed way of thinking and living. This vision shaped the work of men like Johann Gutenberg, whose motive for inventing printing with movable metal type was to produce Bibles that were "no longer written at great expense by hands easily palsied, but multiplied like the wind by an untiring machine." The same vision can find traction today, in a culture that doesn't know what work is for and needs an example of redeemed human labor, production and meaning.

Security guards and local police were at a loss about how to deal with the gang violence that was rampant in a Shreveport school, where detention and even arrests weren't enough to curb the violence. So a group of dads stepped up, committing to being present at the school every day. Now there hasn't been a fight in over a month, andow kids say they love going to school. They call themselves "Dads on Duty," replete with sweatpants, gas station coffee, and dad jokes worth rolling your eyes at. They fist bump students in hallways, providing a fathering gauntlet that is deterring fights and decreasing gang activity. "Not everybody has a father figure at home – or a male, period, in their life," one of the dads told CBS News. Clearly, this crisis in Shreveport required more than good intentions. It required fathers, because God created dads to do just this kind of thing. I love how these dads took stock of the cultural moment and acted on four simple questions: What good can we celebrate, what is missing that we can offer, what is broken that we can fix, and what evil needs to be opposed?

Among the prominent buzzwords in Christian social media are variations of the word "deconstruction." The word has been used to describe the deconversions of Kevin Max (from DC Talk) and Joshua Harris (of I Kissed Dating Goodbye fame), the soul searching of Derek Webb, and the theological revisionings of Jen Hatmaker and Rob Bell. When used descriptively, it helpfully describes something that has become a common feature of evangelical celebrity-ism. Increasingly, however, the term "deconstruction" is being used prescriptively: recommended to believers, especially those questioning what they've grown up with, as the courageous thing to do. This recommendation lands somewhere between unhelpful and dangerous. It's one thing to describe doubting, questioning and, ultimately, shifting faith commitments as "deconstruction." It's another to prescribe it as the means of coming to terms with the unpopular truth claims of Christianity or the baggage of a Christian upbringing. Simply put, the word "deconstruction" itself carries too much worldview baggage to be helpful. To be clear, Scripture (especially the Psalms) not only creates plenty of space for doubting and questioning, but makes it clear that God meets us in our questions and doubts. If all that is meant by deconstruction is asking tough questions about God or faith, that's a normal part of the Christian life and need not mean deconversion. Or, if it is used to refer to untangling politics or other elements of American culture that have been corruptively bundled with Christian identity, deconstruction may simply mean discernment. At the same time, deconstruction is not the best term for either of these contexts, especially given the much better words available. Conversion, reform, and renewal are words provided in Scripture and church history to keep God's people squarely within a Christian vision of truth: that truth is revealed, not constructed, and objective, not subjective. More importantly, because God takes on Himself the burden of making truth known (and does not author confusion), real knowledge about God and self is possible. At the risk of committing an etymological fallacy, "deconstruction" carries too much of the philosophical baggage of postmodernism, particularly the denial that truth can truly be known. It carries the assumption of permanent doubt, and the culture-wide skepticism of authority. That's why, when applied to Christian faith, so much deconstruction has to do with severing the links between the Church and Jesus, Christianity and Jesus, moral teaching and Jesus, and (especially) the Bible and Jesus… as if the Church isn't His Bride, Christianity isn't His worldview, morality isn't His teaching, and the Bible isn't His Word. That's why, when applied to Christian faith, so often deconstruction means taking apart the faith and keeping only the palatable (like Jesus' love and compassion), while discarding the difficult (like sin and penal substitutionary atonement). Deconstructing faith rarely ends at rejecting corruption or jettisoning historical baggage, and instead culminates in the integration of what is culturally acceptable into an entirely new faith. Dropped along the way are essential doctrines of Christianity (like the deity and exclusivity of Christ or the authority of His Word), or ethics (especially those having to do with sexuality and abortion). Shaped as it is by a commitment to skepticism, "deconstruction" presumes that truth is an illusion and knowledge is impossible. On the other hand, words like "reform" and "renewal" point us back to things once held but now lost. We remember what our memory lost, retake what we once held, revisit places we've been before. Reform and renewal assume that faith and knowledge are rooted in something outside of ourselves. The New Testament is full of appeals by the Apostles to recover the truth once believed and the faith once loved. The Old Testament prophets continually called for people to restore the right worship and ethics they'd received at Sinai. "De-" words, on the other hand, are very different from "re-" words. Deconstruction is about tearing down, never building up; it's about rejecting, not returning; moving away from, not towards anything or Anyone. Francis Schaeffer, among others, offered and embodied a better way in his own life and ministry. He took seriously the questions of those disillusioned and skeptical, and wrestled deeply with the challenges to Christian faith that were contemporary to his time and place. Along the way, he found that it was possible to give good and sufficient reasons for the Christian worldview. He offered "honest answers to honest questions," guiding those with doubts and wounds toward Christ: the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The question of whether or not we live in a world in which it is possible to truly know Truth and its Author makes all the difference for those struggling through existential crises. Describing deconstruction is, tragically, sometimes necessary in our skeptical age. Prescribing it is not, because Truth does exist. In fact, I know Him.

There's something poetic about sending the famous Captain Kirk from Star Trek to space, for real, and his emotional response after touching back down was priceless. As he told Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, "I hope I never recover from this. I hope I can maintain what I feel now… I don't want to lose it." Here's a 90-year-old in childlike wonder, experiencing that almost spiritual part of space travel reflected by many astronauts throughout history. Often called the "overview effect," space tends to raise deep longings for significance. Pioneers of travel by plane probably thought that it could never bore anyone. But, it does, like anything that becomes normal. Maybe it's because the only thing that can permanently ground our sense of wonder is God Himself, who put eternity in human hearts and placed us in an incredibly created universe that ultimately points us to Himself. The only thing BIG enough to sustain our wonder.

Whenever I struggle to understand C.S. Lewis's nonfiction work, I find it helpful to go to Narnia. For example, so many of the concepts Lewis introduced in Mere Christianity are found in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Throughout each of the Narnia books, Aslan, the Pevensie children, and other characters embody many of the ideas he explored in his nonfiction. Another example is The Abolition of Man, a book critically important for our cultural moment. In the book's opening essay, "Men without Chests," Lewis thoroughly critiques modern education which, Lewis says, fills students' heads with knowledge and their bellies with passion, but does nothing to cultivate the chest. This idea from Lewis is based on something Aristotle taught, that the head is the seat of human reason and the belly is the seat of passion. Good citizens, Aristotle believed, are those whose heads govern their bellies. When someone is ruled by their passions, they are unstable. Aristotle thought that humans could govern their bellies through the formation of good habits. There's certainly a lot of truth to that. But anyone who has ever been in a real conflict between head and gut knows that, typically, the gut wins. Even more, our reason becomes merely instrumental to justify whatever it is we want. My friend Michael Miller, a senior fellow at the Acton Institute, once described the belly as an 800-pound gorilla constantly demanding, "Feed me, feed me, I want. I want, feed me, feed me." The head, on the other hand, is more like an 80-pound professor with a bowtie. Who's going to win the conflict between a massive gorilla and a tiny professor? The gorilla…every time. This is what C.S. Lewis was critiquing in his essay "Men Without Chests." A person will only function well if they are bolstered by a strong "chest," or virtue. Only a well-formed moral will, which cares for virtuous things, can overrule and ultimately govern the belly. For a story version of this opening essay of The Abolition of Man, see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This book has one of the best opening lines: "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." Eustace is the boy without a chest, as readers soon discover. He's a spoiled brat; as Lewis goes on to describe, he attended schools that filled his head with knowledge and his belly with passion, but did nothing to cultivate his chest. A thematic undercurrent in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is how Eustace developed a chest. Spoiler alert: it had a lot to do with his relationship with Reepicheep, one of Narnia's smallest characters. The mouse, a perennial favorite character in all of Narnia, had much moral courage. He had, to borrow Lewis' phrase, a chest. "Men Without Chests" is just one reason that The Abolition of Man is such an important book for understanding our current cultural moment. Lewis's analysis of culture in this book is more relevant now than ever. It is a must-read for any and every Christian. Recently, Dr. Michael Ward, one of the foremost C.S. Lewis scholars on the planet, a researcher from the University of Oxford, and a visiting professor at Houston Baptist University, has written a companion guide to the Abolition of Man. The guide is called After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. In this book, Dr. Ward takes readers on a chapter by chapter, essay by essay journey through the most important ideas in The Abolition of Man. Because the analysis in this book is so critical to understanding our cultural moment, the Colson Center will send a copy of both The Abolition of Man and After Humanity: A Guide to the Abolition of Man as our thank you for a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month. In fact, anyone who gives this month will also be able to join an exclusive set of video introductions from Dr. Ward and a live webinar to discuss the key concepts in the book. This special opportunity to study one of Lewis's most important books, guided by one of the world's top Lewis scholars, is only for friends of the Colson Center. Visit www.breakpoint.org/october to give a gift to the Colson Center and get your copies, along with access to the live webinar and prerecorded introductory videos.

Maria is joined on BreakPoint This Week by Edward Whelan, a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC's Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. The two discuss the oral arguments that started in the Supreme Court this month. Ed provides an overview of the court, why Christians should care, and explains some of the finer points of the inner-workings on the Court. He also discusses the most direct challenge to Roe v. Wade that we've seen reach the court, while also sharing some structure to how the court may handle a second amendment case, potential vaccine mandates, and other cases that are being presented.

Is it Narnia? Of course it isn't. But it's good. C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man has been called his most difficult work. It's a short but dense argument about how modern education and culture are removing our capacity for virtue and destroying what makes us human. "Abolition" is a must-read—especially in our cultural moment. And a new companion volume by Michael Ward called After Humanity can help you understand Lewis' message and its background. For instance, did you know that Lewis almost died in the trenches of World War I when he got hit with shrapnel? Ward notes how this near-death experience forever shaped the way Lewis thought about morality. And it left him with a haunting question: "Is it noble to die for your country?" Many in his day claimed moral judgments were just feelings. But Lewis knew that without morality, human beings act less than human. Now more than ever, it's a message we need to hear. Visit breakpoint.org and we'll tell you how you can get a copy of Michael Ward's outstanding new book, After Humanity.

After more than 35 years of various versions of what has come to be called "the one-child policy," which experts estimate cost the country between 200 and 400 million lives, China is attempting an about-face. In 2015, the government officially ended the one-child policy and allowed couples to have up to two children in some circumstances. In May of this year, that number was increased to three. Now, as of September, Chinese leaders have officially started discouraging "non-medical" abortions. Make no mistake: abortion is wrong. Preborn lives are human lives - and they're always worth protecting. However, that's not why China cares or is changing its policy. Instead, this seems to be about China's looming demographic crisis. The 2020 census revealed that China's fertility rate is the lowest since they started recording it in the 1950s. An aging population means fewer workers and more retirees. Decades of sex-selective abortions mean China is facing a disproportionate shortage of young women. The question is whether the country has entered an irreversible population decline. It's a serious crisis - but it's also one that the Chinese Communist Party created. In the late 1970s, reacting to fears of overpopulation and its impact on the state-planned economy, China went to extreme - often Orwellian - lengths to limit the number of children each woman could have. Now Chinese officials need to increase the fertility rate by any means necessary, or face the real possibility of economic disaster. This kind of policy whiplash creates its own cruel ironies. One is that a state which has forced hundreds of millions of abortions is now advising women about its negative health impacts. Chinese state media describes abortion as "very harmful" and argues it could cause "serious psychological disorders" for unmarried women. Given how recently the state was forcing Chinese women into abortions, it's hard to feel like the state's concern is genuine. After all, there's a human cost to these policies. One Chinese mother told the story of having to choose between aborting her second child or paying a 200,000 yuan fine - $31,250 in US dollars. She and her husband couldn't raise the money, and their preborn child was aborted. Two months later, Beijing rescinded the 0ne- child Policy. Their baby would have been born the following Spring. The ironies extend to China's Uyghur Muslims. A core element of China's genocide of this ethnic group is the practices of forced abortion and sterilization. Even as China seeks to boost fertility in some regions, there is little hope that forced abortions among Uyghur Muslim women will be stopped. The Chinese vision of a disposable population runs deep. In 1957, Chinese dictator Mao Zedong was asked whether he feared a nuclear attack on his country. "What if they killed 300 million of us?" he replied. "We would still have many people left." Chairman Mao's answer to that question may be different today, but the worldview underlying his answer wouldn't be. One commentator on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, put it this way: "The female body has become a tool. When (the state) wants you to bear a child, you must do it at all cost. When (the state) doesn't want it, you're not allowed to give birth even at the risk of death." It's not just the female body that's become a tool in China, it's every single person who's reduced to a tool of the state. Within such a system, there is neither respect for human life nor for the autonomy of Chinese women. In June, my colleague Roberto Rivera and I wondered if forced procreation might be China's logical next step. That doesn't seem nearly as far-fetched now as it did then. The bottom line is that no matter what the Chinese Communist Party does, whatever policies they enact, people are people. They aren't a means to an end that is the state; they are the end, and the state should be thought of as the means. That goes for unborn children, that goes for mothers, that goes for everyone. Human lives should not be contingent on the whims of the state, either to end them or to "spare" them. It is the purpose of a truly just government to protect people's God-given rights. America's founders, for all their flaws, enshrined this principle into law. They believed that people weren't products of the state but were endowed with "inalienable rights" by their Creator, rights that pre-existed the state. Of course, that should make Westerners ask whether we're living up to that belief. China might be sacrificing - or saving - preborn children for the good of the state, but we often do the same thing on the altar of individual preference. Nevertheless, China's attempt to restrict abortion does save lives, even if for all the wrong reasons. A worldview that elevates the state's role at all costs will inevitably bulldoze sound economic principles, the sanctity of life, and the fundamental rights of people again and again. The pendulum may swing, but the abuses will continue.

Admiral Rachel Levine, a man who identifies as a transgender woman, was commissioned into the U.S. Public Health Service's Commissioned Corps. Officials called Levine's promotion "historic" because, they assured everyone, Levine was the first female four-star admiral in the Commissioned Corps. When something like this is announced the way it was - surrounded by fanfare and reporters constantly reminding us that this is a woman - it's not cynical to wonder whether the job was earned by qualification or just a PR campaign. But it is unsettling to consider that the administration might promote someone more for the photo op than their abilities. And it's frankly condescending to the Admiral, though he didn't seem to see it that way. This feels a lot less like a culture that's soberly "following the science" and a lot more like a culture heading "through the looking glass."

Today is what some call "the professional sports equinox," the one night of the year where the NBA, NHL, MLB, and the NFL all have games. For sports fans, it's like Christmas, Easter, Labor Day, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. And, because of the new culture-wide push for sports gambling, Friday morning may bring quite the hangover. Between the non-stop commercials for DraftKings and FanDuel, and news segments on ESPN like Scott Van Pelt's "Winners" (where the SportsCenter host not only discusses who he thinks will win but also what's known as "the points spread"), we've clearly entered a new era in athletics. Sports gambling is now a national pastime that rivals the games themselves. Betting on sports is, of course, nothing new, but the story of its growth and acceptance is a perfect example of how culture changes. More than two dozen states have legalized sports betting in recent years, and more are lining up. What once was relegated to physical establishments in seedier parts of town is now available, via technology, on everyone's personal screens. No one has to place a bet, but the more it's normalized, the more people will. The growth of sports betting has already changed how we talk about sports. Just a few years ago, ESPN prohibited any mention of gambling on any of its shows. Now, entire segments are devoted to it, and no one is mad at Pete Rose anymore. It's changing the way we watch sports, too. A survey in 2018 found that 43 percent of all men ages 25 to 34 who watch sports on TV place at least one bet every week. That number is probably higher now since 2020 was a record-breaking year for sports betting. And online, gamblers can quickly bet on almost any aspect of the game, from final scores to individual plays to how long the National Anthem will last at the Super Bowl. Even before it was made digitally omnipresent, sports gambling proved damaging to the integrity of sports. A few years ago, 15 percent of professional tennis players reported knowledge of tennis matches being fixed. Earlier this month, an investigation into the 2016 summer Olympics found that nearly a dozen boxing matches had been fixed during the games. In 2007, a now-infamous NBA referee went to prison after the FBI found him deliberately influencing the outcomes of games on which he, a compulsive gambler, had placed bets. Now that so much of our culture is saturated by sports gambling, it's not difficult to imagine more players, more coaches, and more referees altering their performance to change outcomes, if only ever-so-slightly. To be clear, though sports betting will likely ruin plenty of bank accounts, lives, and locker rooms, it isn't significant enough to ruin America. It is, however, an expression of cultural undercurrents that can and will -- in particular, our growing inability to delay gratification in order to live for the future. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, among others, distinguished between those societies that were sensate, or living for the immediate gratification of the senses, and those that were ideational, those that lived for higher ideals. Ideational societies had a future. Sensate societies would eventually exhaust themselves in the constant pursuit of immediate gratification. Sports betting companies entice with the constant promise of a low-quality dopamine rush, whether from taking a financial risk or securing an elusive financial win. The possibility of the rush is available on every play. You don't have to wait three hours to see which team wins, because you can be invested in every individual play. And, all of this is happening within a culture largely devoid of big ideas about the meaning or purpose of life. What truths are there anymore that we collectively find to be "self-evident," other than our living from impulse and desire? What is there to point us to a narrative bigger than the immediate moment? Instead, the lie implied and perpetuated as sports gambling expands is that those who bet on sports could win big. But, of course, gambling empires aren't built on winners. You know the old adage: "The house always wins"? The internet hasn't changed that. Ubiquitous sports betting only complicates already dangerous dilemmas of modern society like smartphone addictions and rampant consumerism. Together, they all reflect that we are a culture trapped in the moment, unwilling and unable to delay gratification. This isn't just a recipe for more gambling addiction, it's a recipe for normalizing prolonged adolescence and self-indulgence, and that's not a recipe for a sustainable future.