Breakpoint

John and Shane discuss challenges to the faith and when a Christian should do battle with culture. They then discuss a critique on a recent BreakPoint that outlined demisexuality. Another listener says their friend's child now identifies as bisexual. The listener is looking for ways to support the family, knowing the suicide rates for gender dysphoria are high. To close, John fields a question from a listener considering the best way forward when culture calls her to apologize for sins in history.

Earlier this year, France's President Emmanuel Macron announced that his government would give 300 euros to every 18-year-old in the country to spend on "the arts." Officials call it the "Culture Pass" and said the purpose is to revive museums, the ballet, and other cultural institutions that struggled during the pandemic shutdowns. The other purpose of the pass is to expose more young people to the arts. Of course handing someone — particularly a teenager — a large sum of money doesn't guarantee they'll do what you'd prefer with it; and while the Culture Pass has a few stipulations, like prohibiting the purchase of violent video games, it turns out French teens aren't as "high-art" minded as their benefactors had hoped. As of last month, almost half of all the money spent with the Culture Pass has gone toward a Japanese genre of comic books called manga. The Culture Pass initiative raises questions, even beyond the challenge of trying to steer teens toward something more "high-brow" than graphic novels. It's not clear how the Culture Pass handles religious materials, for example. But it is hard to imagine that France, the birthplace of postmodernism, would approve of its teens buying the Bible with government money, despite that as the best-selling book of all time, the Bible has made a bigger impact on global culture than any other work in history. Maybe it is allowed; we are not sure. The biggest problem with the Culture Pass isn't the potential for censorship. Or that it's asking French citizens to subsidize their nation's teenagers' questionable taste in art. The pass has put France in an odd position. French officials keep telling the media that its purpose is to expose French youth to "the arts." These officials have defined "arts" as things like the ballet, the theater, and museum exhibits. But that narrow definition doesn't take into account the radical way technology has changed how culture is both made and consumed over the last century. Say what you will about the mind-numbing effect of video games on young minds, for example, which is real and troublesome, but there's more money in video games today than an award-winning Broadway play - and far more people have access to video games. As a result, you'll find some of the most advanced, meticulously designed and beautiful "art" (if you're willing to call it that) inside these games rather than on the stage. This begs the bigger unanswered question. Why put in the effort to "expose kids to the arts" at all? Is there such a paradigm as "good art" and "bad art"? To put a finer point on it, is there "useful art" and "regressive art"? Christianity says the answer is a clear yes. Sometimes Christians think of "culture" as all the "bad" stuff "out there." But culture is simply what humans do with the world. When God told Adam and Eve to fill the earth and subdue it, He was telling them to make good culture. The result is that there are stories, art, music, and technological inventions that glorify God and build His Kingdom. Christian believers' contributions to culture and the arts have been historically some of the most beautiful and influential in the world. But evil corrupts culture-making, too. That's why humanity also makes art that spreads bad ideas, lifts up false idols, and hurts people. People have committed great evil, exploited one another and degraded themselves all throughout human history in the name of "art." Is it "bad" that French teens want comic books more than a ticket to the Louvre? To answer that with logical consistency, France needs more than its dominant worldview of postmodernism, which offers no moral grounding to determine what kind of "art" is beneficial and which is not. Christians should agree the arts can do great good for humankind. A good government will incentivize good culture, but it must define "good" first. Even if the Culture Pass is not the most coherent strategy, it is still an opportunity for Christians in France, and a reminder for Christians everywhere, to continue carrying out Adam and Eve's mandate. If kids are struggling to get along in the world, which today's kids definitely are, then good, true and beautiful things like art and inventions and scientific discovery can build culture that sets their imaginations towards redemption. And especially if France is going to foot the bill for a while, Christian culture-makers might as well flood the market.

Faithful watchers of the Olympics experience a letdown after the games are over. This year, with viewership in a freefall, there was likely not enough enthusiasm for there even to be a letdown on Monday morning. Many have tired of the politicization of this year's games, which started before the opening ceremonies. Patriotism, courage, and even "historic performance" were redefined in Tokyo, and for the worse. However, there is one protest, a quiet one, that demands our respect from the 2021 Olympics. Female athletes who are mothers earned well-deserved attention. Not merely with social media statements or corporate endorsements, but for winning medals and advocating for life. This Olympic narrative is not only heroic but counter-cultural in women's sports. In 2008, gold medal favorite Sanya Richards-Ross boarded a plane for the Beijing Olympics games after visiting an abortion clinic. Her husband, Aaron Ross, was in practice with the New York Giants, so Richards-Ross terminated her pregnancy alone. She came home with a bronze medal, writing later, "I made a decision that broke me." Richards-Ross went on to say that every female athlete she knows has had an abortion. This year, the U.S. Women's Olympic Track & Field team replaced a star runner in the 200 meters hurdles after she was slapped with a five-year ban on competition. The runner failed to follow anti-doping procedures because she was "traumatized after having an abortion". Her trauma lingers now even as she is facing repercussions for responding as she did to the anti-doping process. McNeal now speaks out against the pressure female athletes face in choosing career over motherhood. Now a truly historic performance in the 2021 Olympics games may change this narrative in profound ways. Allyson Felix is the most decorated track star in U.S. history. Tokyo was her fifth and final Olympics games, and she has left with two more Olympic medals. Perhaps she will display them beside a picture of her two-year-old daughter whom she carried and gave birth to despite pressures to abort her. The decision to carry her child nearly cost Felix her life. Felix had already won six gold medals and three silver medals before becoming pregnant in 2018. She chose to carry her child, even when her pregnancy was found to be high risk. At 32 weeks Felix underwent an emergency C-section. Throughout the pregnancy, faced intense pressure from her sponsor. After she opted to keep her baby, Nike, her corporate sponsor, pushed a new deal that included a 70 percent pay cut to her previous contract, with no maternity exceptions. The sports brand wagered that Felix's performance would falter as she bounced back and forth from competing to pregnancy to juggling motherhood. Felix spoke out, challenging the double-standard that exists in women's athletics for moms. Nike has since restructured how it works with mothers after Felix challenged the double standard. Following her Olympic successes, Felix is refocusing her attention on a new endeavor called "The Power of She Fund." The new organization is designed to support mom athletes in practical ways. The Power of She Fund will provide childcare for mothers who compete at high levels, offering them the support and encouragement they need. At least nine athletes who competed in Tokyo participated in Felix's program this year. These athletes received childcare grants that opened opportunities for greater training. Felix's work is also inspiring women's athletic brands to get behind mom athletes. Athleta and the Women's Sports Foundation are both corporate sponsors for The Power of She Fund. Felix's story is a tremendous example of what it takes to change culture. The ideas that are evil must be challenged; the imagination of what is possible must be expanded; new and better ideas must be offered. Also, very importantly, the direction of corporate pressure must be changed. In this case, it was from pro-abortion to pro-child. Hopefully, the important work of Allyson Felix will undo the abortion-minded atmosphere that currently surrounds women's athletics.

Dotting many U.S. main streets are the steeples and towers of beautiful and historic buildings, originally built as houses of worship. From its founding, mainline denominations gave America a kind of Protestant consensus, embracing much of our nation's charity, many of its most prestigious schools, and a significant number of congressional leaders and even presidents. Today, many of these buildings, especially those draped with rainbow flags, lie empty. On Sundays, only a small number of worshipers, mostly white and grey-haired, sit in the pews. Back in 2017, missiologist Ed Stetzer made a dramatic prediction in the Washington Post. "If it doesn't stem its decline," he wrote, "Mainline Protestantism has just 23 Easters left." Stetzer blamed the Mainline church's impending extinction on abysmally low birth rates, and the fact that many of them long ago "abandoned central doctrines that were deemed 'offensive' to the surrounding culture." However, last month a new survey from the Public Religion Institute challenged Stetzer's prediction. Called "The 2020 Census of American Religion," the report claimed that Mainline churches in America have experienced a dramatic recovery. According to this survey of 50,000 Americans, Mainline Protestants grew from 13 percent of the population five years ago to over 16 percent in 2020. Meanwhile, evangelicals seem to have entered rapid decline, tumbling from 23 percent of the U.S. population in 2006 to just 14 percent in 2020. Over at The New Yorker, Bill McKibben celebrated the "unlikely rebound" of Mainline Protestantism, and made conclusions that a political shift had happened in American Christianity. Others joined the celebration. Progressive church historian Diana Bass Butler declared, "A really important moment is here. The story of an old religious tradition hasn't ended the way critics once thought." Paraphrasing Monty Python she joked, "We're 'not dead yet,' we've just been awaiting resurrection." However, as Lyman Stone of the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out, the methodology used by the PRRI survey suffers from serious flaws. For example, all self-identifying white Christians who did not use the labels "evangelical" or "born again" were categorized as "white mainline Protestants." Stone called this categorization "bonkers," a little like assuming that anyone who doesn't identify as a New York Yankees fan must prefer hockey. More importantly, the terms "evangelical" and "born again" are "generationally-coded" as Stone puts it, not reliable indicators of beliefs or denominational affiliation. In fact, Stone points out, around 40 percent of members in evangelical churches would not describe themselves as "born again," while 20 percent of those in Mainline bodies would. A conservative resurgence in a handful of the mainline denominations would also be a problem for PRRI's methodology. A better measure of evangelical affiliation, suggest Stone and Stetzer, is what's known as the Bebbington Quadrilateral. David Bebbington, a British historian, distinguished evangelical identity by four essential beliefs: Biblicism, crucicentrism (a focus on Christ's atoning work on the cross), conversionism (believing that human beings need to be saved), and activism. Any announcement of a resurgence of Mainline liberalism is premature and probably exaggerated. These aging, shrinking communions will probably become irrelevant within our lifetimes, but it's not because evangelical Christianity is "winning" in any real sense. Liberal churches are shrinking because they are impossible to distinguish from the larger culture. Why get up and go to church on the weekend when the same teaching is available on NPR every day of the week? At the same time, evangelicalism is suffering an identity crisis featuring high-profile deconversions, scandals, and theological anemia. How many evangelical churches today could be described by Bebbington's four essentials? In some ways evangelicalism may be repeating the mistakes of mainline liberalism. Recently, on the Colson Center's Upstream podcast, my colleague Shane Morris spoke with Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, about the so-called "rebound" of Mainline churches. As a longtime member and observer of United Methodism, Mark gave a spirited defense of the good Mainline Protestant churches did in American history, and explained why permanent cultural exile isn't something evangelicals should be celebrating.

This week on BreakPoint This Week John and Maria discuss a recent report that verified the sexual harassment claims surrounding New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Then, Maria shares a recent podcast by Bari Weiss regarding Central Park Karen and how we respond to media outrage. To close Maria asks John for a worldview perspective of the new calls for masking in public places as the Delta variant of Covid-19 continues to spread across America.

Two features of our modern society are distrust and fear. First, we distrust the institutions that have long been the pillars of our society, and we distrust them for a reason. Many of them are broken. Many of them have fallen into disrepute. Many of them are simply untrustworthy. We are also fearful. Who knows what the next cultural land mine will be. We hesitate to align ourselves with any person, any leader, any church, any business, anything that might prove to fall apart under our feet. The only way forward is to go back to the basics. The basics found in Scripture. To the basics of the grand story that God is writing in the creation, fall, redemption, and restoration of the cosmos and his image bears. Recently, my friend Os Guiness gave a tremendous talk called Woke or Awakened. It was the first of a three week short course the Colson Center is offering this month. Os provides an alternative vision for addressing society's ills. Here's a portion of that talk by Os Guinness: What's affecting America? It's called revolutionary liberation. It isn't classical Marxism, but cultural Marxism. It goes back to a gentleman named Antonio Gramsci, who's a Marxist. Gramsci sat in jail under Mussolini in the 1920s. In fact, he died there. He was trying to figure out why revolution, as Marx predicted, never happened, and probably wouldn't. He shifted the thinking from economic determinism to what he called cultural dominance, in Germany. You probably know their tactics. They look at what they call discourse. In other words, how we speak. They're looking for who's the majority and who is the minority, who's the oppressor and who's the victim. When they find the victim, whoever it is, they're not really interested in the individual, say George Floyd. Instead, they want to weaponize a group and use that weaponized victim group in a struggle to overthrow the status quo. The revolutions on the radical left are not just classical Marxism, but also cultural Marxism. The revolutions have never succeeded and the oppression has never ended. That's different than the Biblical way we know. The Biblical way addresses truth to power, calling for repentance that leads to confession, leading to forgiveness, which leads to reconciliation and restoration. It's an incredible difference from cultural marxism. This is a tailor made kairos moment for Christians, who with confidence, step out and show how the answers of the Gospel address freedom, justice, and much more. This is far deeper, more profound, and more rich than anything on the radical left, which as I said, always fails and always leads to oppression. That was Os Guinness, presenting the first of a three week short course at the Colston Center. This month you can hear the full presentation and be registered for two additional upcoming presentations with pastor Chris brooks and Dr. Angela Franks. Visit breakpoint.org/july2021 and make a gift of any amount to the Colson Center to register for this important course.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and to a critical theorist everything looks like oppression. But what if that's not a big enough answer? I often paraphrase one of my favorite lines from G. K. Chesterton. He observed that there are a lot of ways to fall down but only one way to stand up straight. It's a lesson that many of us who want to better understand the world and to have a better world should learn. One of the commonest defenses of critical race theory (CRT) from its advocates is that people have misunderstood it. It's just not what people think it is; CRT is just a tool to understand the American legal system, they say. It's just an academic analysis of cultural trends. It's just an attempt to look at our nation's morally fraught racial history. But to say that CRT is just any of those things is like saying Disney is just a cartoon company. It certainly started that way. And it's kind of true. But today it's rather a meaningless way to describe this behemoth of a company. You can't travel anywhere in the world without encountering the power of the Mouse and his minions. In the same way, CRT has now extended beyond the academic realm into education, into corporate HR departments, into the Church, and, more influentially, into the cultural imagination. This framework of seeing all of life in terms of oppressor and oppressed is a deep part of the cultural mood. Racial identity and power dynamics — these are seen as the issues of the day. Whatever the formal source of CRT was, now functions practically as a theory of everything. It demands conformity in many areas of our life to the very specific political ends that it advocates. To many minds there is simply no way to ask questions about injustice, much less to offer answers unless they are aligned with critical race theory. And strangely enough, this seems to be the place where both critical theorists and their critics agree: that it's either all or nothing. The CRT crowd is quick to identify their favorite philosophy with any quest for racial justice. On the other hand, many of the foes of CRT write off any discussion of race at all, including that of America's history, as CRT nonsense. To be clear, racism is not the defining characteristic of American identity that CRT folks often make it out to be. At the same time, racism has been the defining wound of our past and its residue continues today. For 250 years in America, human beings were sold like cattle but with far less care. Sure, slavery was a feature in almost all cultures, but in American history, it took a more diabolical turn. Along with the sheer fact of enslavement, beatings, sexual abuse, and the intentional severing of families were all part of this American nightmare. For a century after slavery, Americans of African descent continued to be treated as inherently less than. Their political rights were denied, their businesses destroyed, their education hamstrung. On top of all this was the ever-present threat of lynchings. In fact, in the decades after the Civil War, over 3,000 African Americans were lynched for the so-called crime of refusing to act inferior. These are the well-known details. And then there were the Tulsa race riots, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and the redlining of African Americans housing opportunities. Of course, today real improvements have been made. Yet at the same time, there are disparities in incarceration rates, in poverty rates, and in health and mortality rates. Something is clearly not right in our land. While racism is certainly not enough to explain all of those disparities, it's also not true that tens of millions of people are coincidentally of a particular people group, making the same choices that lead to these outcomes. That's one of the problems with critical race theory. The reasons for these enduring problems are complicated, more complicated than the simplistic solutions that CRT offers. All the same, that these theories are wrong about the sources of poverty and oppression doesn't mean that poverty and oppression don't exist. We should do what we can to deal with them. To put it another way, just because someone is asking good questions doesn't mean that they are providing good answers. And, just because they are offering bad answers doesn't mean that the questions themselves are bad. What we don't want to do, like Chesterton's quote suggests, is to fall down in another wrong direction. The only way for us not to fall in the wrong direction is to join in the story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. This is the grand narrative of Christ redeeming His creation, using His people throughout the ages to work for the well-being of others and to change society. Until Christ comes again, the hurting will always be with us. But that doesn't mean we should tolerate it. Until Christ comes again, we are called to work with Him to restore all things in whatever time and whatever place He has put us. Our job is to work with Him to restore all things and whatever times and whatever places He has put us, offering better answers to better questions than the world and other worldviews can never provide.

John and Shane field a question from a listener who is looking at the state of affairs in the world and wonders how she can give a tithe to the church when the world might need her money more. They also discuss a finer point on the idea of the theology of being fired.

Leaders of the early Church, the Apostles, and their disciples wrote letters to churches facing difficult challenges. It was to help them overcome internal conflicts, or to deal with heresies creeping in, or, most likely, to help handle the persecution the churches were facing or would face soon. The letters served to encourage, and to instruct. I thought of these letters a few weeks ago. I was actually thinking about my friends, Jack Phillips and Barronelle Stutzman, two private business leaders and people of faith who wanted to order their businesses according to their deeply held convictions. But they were challenged in those convictions. Since then, they have faced incredibly difficult situations. There's no way that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission should have treated Jack Phillips and his faith with such disdain. And there's certainly no way that a Denver lawyer should be allowed to continually harass him, as the courts have allowed that lawyer to do. And when it comes to Barronelle Stutzman, there's not a nicer person on the planet. She actually served the same client that she is accused of not serving. But in another real sense, their stories aren't that unusual, at least when they are seen in light of the larger account of Church history. To be a Christian and to hold to Christian conviction about what is true about the nature and person of Jesus Christ, and about the place of Christian conviction in the public square, is to be out of step with the larger culture. From the very beginning, Christians have faced these challenges. They have had to choose between their well-being and their convictions. What happened in the stories of Jack Phillips and Barronelle Stutzman is that God was raising them up. This is not merely an indicator of where our culture has gone, but is (more importantly) a lesson for how we must think, the courage we must have, the choices we'll have to make, and the faith we must have in God, who is writing our stories. Last month on our Strong Women podcast, a family story was featured which might go down as an epistle for us all to read. Their story is simple, their faith is humble, and their situation is similar to one many of us might find ourselves in if we haven't already. It involves something as silly as a mask. A mask that says "Jesus loves you." It was too much for an elementary school to handle. The little girl who wore the Jesus loves you mask now finds herself in court, defending her right to simply share the joy that's in her heart. She is an amazing young girl, and her parents are impressive, too. Below is an edited transcript of Lydia's mother's account of the story from the Strong Women podcast episode: The principal called to tell me that Lydia needed to change her mask. She told me the students couldn't wear political or religious masks. I was shocked. I had read the school handbook and there was no such rule. I contacted the assistant superintendent. Even he verified that at that point it was not in the handbook. He told me that it was in a school restart plan document. Then he emailed me a copy of it. I went on the district webpage, and although the district didn't realize it, the original document was still archived on their website. When I pulled it up, I found that I was looking at two versions of the restart plan: the one that he had emailed me, and the one that had been released by the district at the beginning of the school year. The only difference between those two versions was the verbiage about the types of masks that were to be worn. I pulled the metadata on the emailed document. It showed that the superintendent had modified the document thirty minutes before he called me. When something wrong like this occurs and you just allow it, it goes that little things like these add up over time. This year it's the mask. Next year it will be t-shirts. At some point we won't even be able to say Jesus's name in school. Eventually my grandkids and great-grandkids won't be able to do what they're called to do as Christians: to share the Gospel and say Jesus's name in public. That was a snippet of the larger interview on the Strong Women podcast with Lydia Booth and her mother. Lydia is a third-grader forced to choose between her well-being and her faith. She made the right choice. Please join us in praying for the courage and confidence that the Booth family will need in these coming days, and for their attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom. I pray that this story of simple, courageous faith will encourage all of us today, as a kind of living epistle. It tells us the sort of thing that the early Church Fathers knew that the early Church would need to know. We ourselves will need to make decisions like this in the days to come.

Earlier this year, a prestigious Manhattan prep school fired its longtime director of health and wellness, Justine Fonte for teaching at another institution. It wasn't that she taught somewhere else. It's what she taught: "porn literacy." To high schoolers. Even more revealing than the course itself has been the ensuing debate about how best to help teenagers navigate the adult content found everywhere in online life. In a sympathetic writeup, the New York Times defended Fonte's class for "teach(ing) students how to critically assess what they see on the screen…how to recognize what is realistic and what is not, how to deconstruct implicit gender roles, and how to identify what types of behavior could be a health or safety risk." In other words, Fonte's class could help students consume online pornography ethically. As strange as that may sound, it's an approach more common than you might think. Three years ago, Nadia Bolz-Weber, a popular progressive writer, endorsed the idea. Still, as Samuel James put it in his article at First Things, "It is rather surprising that anyone who knows the name Harvey Weinstein could believe that progressive gender politics can infuse pornography with virtue." This is especially true for the New York Times. After all, their own Nicholas Kristof, just last year, broke the story that one of the Internet's largest porn sites featured videos depicting the exploitation of minors, sex trafficking, and even rape. On that particular streaming platform, which received 115 million views per day in 2019, a significant portion of visitors consumed footage of actual violence and sexual abuse against children. The videos remained despite being openly advertised as such by the users who uploaded the videos. Since Kristof's article, dozens of women have sued the website's parent company for profiting from their exploitation. Millions of hours of content have now been deleted in an effort to purge illegal material. Anyone with a smartphone can easily access this content, including students. Educating them about how to avoid the content, why to avoid the content, and the direct connection between pornography and exploitation would makes sense. Thinking that students can be trained to wade through this hellscape of exploitation to find "ethical" and politically correct content does not. Writing at The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig argues that "porn literacy" teachers have no idea how dark and exploitive modern pornography has become. The kids in Fonte's class who spoke to the New York Times recalled being "annoyed and bored" by her presentation, not shocked. They'd already seen it all, exposed to this material that is not just "dirty" but in Bruenig's words "brutal, cruel, vicious, and even genuinely criminal." In writing her article, Bruenig spoke with teenage girls who candidly told her that the boys they date expect them to participate in the violent, sadistic, and degrading acts they've seen online. "If anything," she concludes, porn literacy classes "aren't given nearly enough funding, time, or other resources to fully demonstrate just how onerous ethical porn use really is." But all the time and all the funding in the world couldn't achieve that. Bruenig, like most progressives, may hold out hope that pornography can be sanitized and subjected to politically correct sensibilities. But her own reporting shows the latest chapter of what's long been true. There is a deep relationship between pornography and crime that has only deepened and worsened as it has moved online. There is no such thing as "ethical porn use." Porn is premised on the notion that human beings can be abstracted from their personhood and consumed as collections of body parts. Porn assumes and trains consumers to believe that people are products to be bought and sold, and then discarded with the click of a mouse or the flick of a finger. To objectify fellow image-bearers in this way inevitably bears the fruit of objectifying them in other ways, often more extreme and degrading ways. The "progress" toward ever darker genres isn't a bug of pornography: it's a feature. Believing we can tame it is like believing we can invite a crocodile to dinner if only we teach it table manners. The answer to this ever-growing monster of Internet pornography isn't to housebreak it, but to rid our houses of it — culturally, personally, and legally. Education can't fix this problem. Smarter dehumanizers more tragically dehumanize. Until we're ready as a society to do what's necessary, the children on the screen and in our schools will continue to pay the price.