Breakpoint

Increasingly threatened with a future of economic and cultural instability, the Chinese government has worked hard to guarantee public safety and deliver a kind of domestic tranquility that only comes by limiting freedoms. For example, several sources are reporting that yet again, Beijing has increased pressure on religious groups. Beginning this year, all "approved" religions must conform to its new Administrative Measures for Religious Institutions. As Cameron Hilditch put it in National Review: The Chinese Communists aren't trying to extirpate every last trace of theism … Instead, they're attempting to enervate religious opposition to the regime by taming and co-opting domestic religious belief, turning it into another thoroughfare for the regime's agenda of social control. Despite Beijing's formal claims that "[c]itizens of China may freely choose and express their religious beliefs," this isn't freedom. It isn't toleration. It cannot even be called benign neglect. This is an empty permission to only obey. Going forward, religious groups and individuals will be "free" to practice their faith only if that faith actively conforms to and works under state authority. Under these orders, not conspiring against the state or even passively complying with Beijing's orders will not be enough to avoid trouble. Proactive support of tyranny is required. In no way can the precepts of heaven be allowed to challenge the mandates of the state. Of course, Xi Jinping's regime, like most totalitarian powers, likes to style itself as the frontline of innovation. In reality, he's in a long line of tyrants who, through the ages, tried and failed to unseat God by compromising the loyalties of His people. Think of Daniel's friends refusing to bow before Nebuchadnezzar, to Daniel himself refusing to kowtow to a Persian emperor's vanity, to Christians facing down Roman Caesars. Like Xi, these tyrants didn't care to whom or to what God's people prayed, as long as that worship didn't spoil their worship of the tyrant. In Rome, Christians only had to accommodate the state with a little incense offered to the empire alongside their loyalty to Christ. This was a line they would not cross. They would not subject the claim Christ had on their lives and all of reality to the demands of Rome and the "gods" of their age. To be clear, it's not just in the ancient world or in Communist lands where Christians are called to conform. Recently, the French Minister of the Interior demanded the Church's submission, saying of evangelicals, "We cannot discuss with people who refuse to write on paper that the law of the Republic is superior to the law of God." In American history, pastors who refused to follow the pro-slavery or segregationist script often found themselves "cancelled," if not worse. Today, Christians who do not conform to the new progressive sexual orthodoxy are threatened with dismissal from polite society, and maybe even their jobs. Christians have faced cultural hostilities throughout history whenever there is a system or power that claims to be the absolute and final authority. It's not that certain kings and dictators throughout history were bad men, and therefore acted badly towards the Church and other dissidents. Any ruler and any ideology that presumes the omniscience and omnipotence that only belongs to God will inevitably see claims to transcendent truth as an existential and intolerable threat. As Francis Schaeffer put it, when describing the Roman-era persecution endured by the early Church, "No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions." This applied to the ancient world, it applies to Beijing, and it applies to Western ideologies that demand our absolute and total allegiance. The good news is that God always strengthens, preserves, and sustains His people. He did it for Daniel and his friends. He did it for the early church, including the persecuted and the martyrs. He's doing it for our brothers and sisters in China. And, we can be sure, He will do it for us. We must never bow our knee to false gods.

John and Maria discuss the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Tulsa Race massacre, and Memorial Day. They discuss the challenges associated with remembering difficult times in history. John shares important realities surrounding the Loudon county school district. John shares a story that is developing where a gym teacher was dismissed for his views on gender identity. Maria then introduces the landscape that surrounds the movement to ban Critical Theory from schools. John points out the impact boycotting and banning has on our view of truth and our confidence in the Christian worldview. -- Resources -- The Greatest Love - Chuck Colson on Memorial Day President Biden's Stutter and the Image of God Virginia teacher placed on leave after speech disputing 'biological boy can be a girl and vice versa' Robert George on Critical Race Theory Being Banned in States Challenges Role of History

Though it will be a while before we learn the full impact of this past year on children, The American Academy of Pediatrics recently warned that the mental health of younger Americans is suffering. Suicidal ideation and suicidal attempts are on the rise, as are childhood diagnoses of eating disorders and other obsessive-compulsive behaviors. While everyone was "flying blind" at the beginning of the pandemic, it is becoming more and more clear that, in the noble interest of protecting bodies, many public officials neglected to adequately consider the mental, emotional, and even spiritual aspects of our lives together. For kids, a full year without school and extracurricular activities has done terrible damage. The merits of school lockdowns as a public health strategy will certainly be hotly debated by policy makers and parents, but as American rhythms of life return to normal, we ought also to spend time evaluating just how we did at home, as families. And, like nearly every other issue that percolated to the top of our culture mid-pandemic, the health of our at-home habits pre-existed Covid. The rhythms of life shaping our families were more likely revealed by the lockdowns than created by them. Specifically, this is a question of three "L's": our loves, our loyalties, and our liturgies. If you were to ask me what I love more, my family or my phone, I wouldn't hesitate to reply, "My family." But how many times, while spending an afternoon with my kids, do I allow my buzzing phone to interrupt family time? The fact is, our loyalties aren't really tested by trivia questions or even with guns to our heads. We learn what we value most by looking at our everyday liturgies, those rhythms of life and relationships we embrace which, in turn, determine what gets our time and attention and what misses out. Of course, most people are unaware of just how much our loves, loyalties, and liturgies are shaped by unspoken cultural forces. Most Christians are shaped far more by cultural forces outside the Church than by anything inside. During the pandemic, most aspects of our lives were disrupted, in big and small ways. If some additional stress this year led to a little more screen time than usual, that is not necessarily a sign our houses are built on shifting sand. Still, we may have learned through the pandemic, just how much of our relative peace and safety comes from outside forces, rather than from inside our homes. We may have learned just how much our family liturgies rely on a busyness we love to prioritize. More and more, Christian parents will need to get used to saying "no" to things that are widely normal in American life, and not just because of the obvious moral shifting happening all around us. Counter-cultural priorities reconfigured around restored loves, renewed loyalties, and redeemed liturgies will earn us some strange looks, especially when it comes to money, to stuff, and to time. The forces that shape most American families today aren't centered around real needs, at least not spiritual needs. "Keeping up with the Joneses" and "perfecting leisure time" are much higher priorities for most of us than fostering and nurturing strong family bonds and bringing up kids who know and love Jesus. Covid caught all of us off guard, but unexpected challenges like it are wonderful opportunities to recalibrate. Now that the pandemic is subsiding, we may want to look carefully at whether or not "normal" is what we want to return to. Or if instead, we should rebuild the structures and habits that make a home a good place to land the next time the world throws us a curve.

Though it will be a while before we learn the full impact of this past year on children, The American Academy of Pediatrics recently warned that the mental health of younger Americans is suffering. Suicidal ideation and suicidal attempts are on the rise, as are childhood diagnoses of eating disorders and other obsessive-compulsive behaviors. While everyone was "flying blind" at the beginning of the pandemic, it is becoming more and more clear that, in the noble interest of protecting bodies, many public officials neglected to adequately consider the mental, emotional, and even spiritual aspects of our lives together. For kids, a full year without school and extracurricular activities has done terrible damage. The merits of school lockdowns as a public health strategy will certainly be hotly debated by policy makers and parents, but as American rhythms of life return to normal, we ought also to spend time evaluating just how we did at home, as families. And, like nearly every other issue that percolated to the top of our culture mid-pandemic, the health of our at-home habits pre-existed Covid. The rhythms of life shaping our families were more likely revealed by the lockdowns than created by them. Specifically, this is a question of three "L's": our loves, our loyalties, and our liturgies. If you were to ask me what I love more, my family or my phone, I wouldn't hesitate to reply, "My family." But how many times, while spending an afternoon with my kids, do I allow my buzzing phone to interrupt family time? The fact is, our loyalties aren't really tested by trivia questions or even with guns to our heads. We learn what we value most by looking at our everyday liturgies, those rhythms of life and relationships we embrace which, in turn, determine what gets our time and attention and what misses out. Of course, most people are unaware of just how much our loves, loyalties, and liturgies are shaped by unspoken cultural forces. Most Christians are shaped far more by cultural forces outside the Church than by anything inside. During the pandemic, most aspects of our lives were disrupted, in big and small ways. If some additional stress this year led to a little more screen time than usual, that is not necessarily a sign our houses are built on shifting sand. Still, we may have learned through the pandemic, just how much of our relative peace and safety comes from outside forces, rather than from inside our homes. We may have learned just how much our family liturgies rely on a busyness we love to prioritize. More and more, Christian parents will need to get used to saying "no" to things that are widely normal in American life, and not just because of the obvious moral shifting happening all around us. Counter-cultural priorities reconfigured around restored loves, renewed loyalties, and redeemed liturgies will earn us some strange looks, especially when it comes to money, to stuff, and to time. The forces that shape most American families today aren't centered around real needs, at least not spiritual needs. "Keeping up with the Joneses" and "perfecting leisure time" are much higher priorities for most of us than fostering and nurturing strong family bonds and bringing up kids who know and love Jesus. Covid caught all of us off guard, but unexpected challenges like it are wonderful opportunities to recalibrate. Now that the pandemic is subsiding, we may want to look carefully at whether or not "normal" is what we want to return to. Or if instead, we should rebuild the structures and habits that make a home a good place to land the next time the world throws us a curve.

Jane Goodall, the primatologist famous for living with chimpanzees and revealing their behaviors, has won the 2021 Templeton Prize. The prize honors those who "harness the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind's place and purpose within it." Goodall follows last year's winner, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, who led the Human Genome Project in mapping DNA. She also joins decades of laureates including Chuck Colson, who received the award in 1993 for progress in religion. At 87 years old, Goodall is a legend, and an obvious choice for the award, not just because of her work as a naturalist, but for rejecting naturalism as a worldview. In an interview with Religion News Service, she revealed that her time with the chimps in Tanzania gave her a "strong feeling of spiritual connection with the natural world." She went on to say: "…more scientists are saying there's an intelligence behind the universe, that's basically what the Templeton Foundation is about: We don't live in only a materialistic world. Francis Collins drove home that in every single cell in your body there's a code of several billion instructions. Could that be chance? No…[C]hance mutations couldn't possibly lead to the complexity of life on earth." She concluded: "…[S]cience and religion are coming together and more minds are seeing purpose behind the universe and intelligence." Intelligent design theorists who have spent decades trying to break the stranglehold of materialism on science can say "amen" to that. Yet Goodall's eye for purpose and intelligence when it comes to the natural world seems to fail her when she looks in the mirror. As Elizabeth Whately points out at Evolution News, Goodall has gone to great lengths to downplay the uniqueness of human beings. In the same interview, the primatologist scoffs: "I was actually taught in the early 1960s that the difference between us and animals was one of kind. We were elevated onto a pinnacle, separate from all the others. But my dog as a child had already taught me that wasn't true…we're not the only beings with personalities, minds and emotions." Goodall is also a longtime supporter of the Great Apes Personhood project, which seeks to confer human rights on primates. This blurring of the line between humans and animals is far from harmless. Fellow Great Apes Personhood supporters Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer have famously endorsed selective abortion and infanticide, and in Singer's case, have declared the worth of an adult pig to be greater than that of a person with mental disabilities. For all Goodall's talk of "intelligence," "purpose," and a "spark of divine energy" in living things, she misses the utterly unique place of human beings in creation. She's not alone. Recently, National Geographic released a documentary series by James Cameron entitled "Secrets of the Whales." The underwater photography is breathtaking, and some of the behaviors this team captured among orcas, belugas, humpbacks, and sperm whales have never before been filmed. Yet the narration by Sigourney Weaver is bogged down with anthropomorphic claims that whales have "culture," "language," and even self-awareness, making them "just like us." At no point does the series acknowledge the irony of making such a claim while only humans hold the cameras, breathe from SCUBA gear, engage in scientific reasoning, or sit in their living rooms reflecting on what all this natural wonder means. In spite of Cameron's childlike awe for living things, and in spite of Goodall's recognition that creation didn't create itself, both miss (or ignore) the most crucial fact: that one creature alone bears the image of its Creator. Indeed, the very curiosity that drove Goodall into the Tanzanian forest and the National Geographic crew into the briny depths leads us all to ask with the Psalmist: "What is man that you are mindful of him?" The answer is in the asking. No other creature reflects on its role and place in creation or its relationship with the Creator.

John and Shane provide encouragement for a listener whose community is hosting a gay pride weekend. A number of local businesses in this area are hosting adults-only fundraisers for the local teen LGBTQ+ organization. How can Christians correctly encourage the community in light of businesses that fail to think well about the LGBTQ+ lifestyle and the consequences of encouraging its ideology to young people? Shane then shares a question seeking clarity on God's design for marriage. The listener is concerned that the emphasis of procreation on marriage may insinuate some unions don't represent the image of God. In response, John speaks to a Christian worldview of marriage, encouraging believers to understand the expansive nature of God's design. To close, John replies to a pushback to a recent BreakPoint commentary critiquing the #LeaveLoud campaign. A listener argues that his majority white church doesn't understand the challenges of being a black man in their community and asks what kind of response he should give in such a situation. John and Shane offer important points on the purpose and role of Church, with John asking the man to engage his neighbors by providing feedback on important cultural realities for the church to understand.

In his important book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Dr. Carl Trueman argues that the key idea of our current cultural moment is expressive individualism. The only way to be "true to ourselves," we are told, is to define who we really are psychologically and sexually. This means that our identity is only truly known to ourselves, and others are morally responsible to embrace whoever or whatever we claim about ourselves even if, or especially if, what we reveal contradicts any observable realities. The Gnostics believed that there is a sharp distinction between the material and spiritual worlds, with the former being evil and the latter good. Since humans are both material and spiritual beings, our physical bodies are evil but our souls are good, possibly even fragments of God that yearn to return to Him. But they can't do this while trapped in our bodies. Salvation comes through secret knowledge, known as gnosis in Greek, hence Gnosticism. This knowledge differed from group to group. For one group, the secret knowledge was in passwords that would allow adherents to pass through crystal spheres until arriving at the highest heaven, the realm of pure Spirit. Gnosticism arose in parallel with Christianity. Some Gnostics considered themselves Christian, arguing that the God of the Old Testament was evil since He created the material world. The Father of Jesus, in contrast, was the true God and operated in the realm of spirit without mucking around with the material world. Some of these Gnostics even believed that Jesus was not a true physical being but only appeared to be one, an idea known as docetism. So, what does all this mean for how we live? Different Gnostic sects had different answers. For some, the body was a hindrance to spiritual development, and so they adopted an austere lifestyle. They might become vegetarians, drink only water rather than wine, and abstain from sexual activity. The last is particularly important since it could lead to babies, trapping another soul into a body. For others, the body was irrelevant to the spirit, and so they would adopt a hedonistic lifestyle, participating in orgies and the like, since these activities don't touch the soul. Although the details are different from ancient Gnosticism, our culture is awash with Gnostic concepts. It starts with the idea that we need to be true to ourselves, that if we follow the secret knowledge within us we will live a happy and authentic life. External rules about behavior shouldn't hold us back from the things we know in our soul will make us happy. As Woody Allen said to justify his affair with his girlfriend Mia Farrow's daughter, "The heart wants what the heart wants"—and following our heart, that secret knowledge within us, is the advice pop culture consistently drums into children and young adults. Thus, we follow both sides of ancient Gnosticism: We are sexually promiscuous but anti-natal, since children would hinder our pursuit of our happiness and truth. Looking within for our truth reaches its logical conclusion in transgenderism, the idea that our true self has nothing to do with our bodies. But, this Neo-Gnostic orthodoxy has nothing in common with God's Word or the reality of His world and the place of our bodies within it. The story of the Bible is that God created us good, both in body and soul, even if sin has marred both. Our own intuitions about ourselves, and about right and wrong are hopelessly distorted by sin, and so God in His mercy gave us His revelation to tell us about ourselves and to teach us what is good. Despite the reality of sin all around us, God doesn't make mistakes. Our bodies and souls are matched to each other, and any attempt to fight this will result in more brokenness in our lives. As Ryan T. Anderson put it recently at Wilberforce Weekend, "No one is born in the wrong body, because you are not 'in' a body. You are a body." God's directions for how to live are better for us than the advice of either our fallen desires or our fallen culture. We don't need secret, private truth. God has told us who we are, how we are to live, and united us with Christ who is the Truth to empower us to live in truth.

Because everyone is made in the image and likeness of God we have a responsibility to honor them as such. Even those we think are very, very wrong. In this cultural moment where everything from movies to sports to even the church is politicized, it's too easy to let our partisan team spirit shape whether or not we obey God and love our neighbors. But this part of the great commandment isn't optional. and we'll never be able to love others, especially those that are on the other side, those we think are very wrong, unless we settle the question of who they are. Image bearers who, like us, are corrupted by sin. Dr. Gerald McDermott is a friend and a brilliant scholar, and today on BreakPoint he shares an observation of seeing the Imago Dei in the life of one he's not inclined to view very favorably. Here's Dr. McDermott: It is hard for me to think of any Biden policies that I think are helpful to this country. Yet I must admit that I have deep sympathy for his struggle with stuttering. And I admire the grit he displays in soldiering on despite it. By now most of America has heard about the President's stutter, his honesty about it, and the perseverance he has shown trying to fight it. We have heard about the failure of his childhood speech therapy to cure it, his being bullied and mocked in school for it, the feeling of being betrayed by his own body, reciting Irish poetry rhythmically in front of a mirror to help control his tongue, and his vows to never give up fighting it. Keep pushing. Don't let it define you. Non-stutterers have little idea of the nightmares of the average stutterer. Unless they have seen the 2010 movie "The King's Speech," many who hear stutterers block on words think it might be trivial or a minor annoyance at most. But they don't know the times when occasional blocks mysteriously morph into paralysis, when even sounds that are normally effortless become mountains to climb. They have no idea of the apprehension when answering the phone, or the nervousness when, caught in conversation that goes quickly, we stutterers are afraid we won't be able to reply at the right pace, and all eyes will turn to us as the conversation suddenly stops. They don't know of the worry for weeks about upcoming speeches or presentations—not over what to say but whether we can get our tongue to cooperate. Other famous stutterers showed grit similar to Biden's. The ancient Athenian orator-statesman Demosthenes had a weak voice, and could not pronounce correctly words that started with "r." Yet Demosthenes became a great speaker by persistent determination. He practiced his speeches in a cave, repeated words with the "r" sound thousands of times, and ran up hills to strengthen his weak frame. Greater body strength helped him project his voice, which was essential in a world without microphones. The Yankee hero of the Battle of Gettysburg Joshua Chamberlain resolved when he was young that his stuttering was "intolerable." Rather than despair, he determined he would do whatever it took to find improvement. By strength of will and using a song-like rhythm, he eventually reached a state where he could get through nine of ten difficult words with no trouble. He was elected governor of Maine four times and after retirement went on the speakers' circuit. Winston Churchill practiced his speeches in the bathtub and spent hours rehearsing every speech. Repeated practice was his response to the terror he experienced early in his career when he lost his train of thought in a speech in Parliament. He had a complicated set of speech defects, one of which was stuttering. But disciplined practice helped him grow to become one of the world's greatest orators. Biden reminds me of John Updike, the great American novelist. He too stuttered, and like Biden he was a religious man of inner contradictions that were resolved by forging a faith that was captive to the spirit of the age. No one has ever described stuttering with such dead-on precision. Once Updike compared it to a traffic jam. "I have lots of words inside me: but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam." He painted a picture of facial tics that will make any relative of a stutterer groan with recognition. "Viewing myself on taped television, I see the repulsive symptoms of an approaching stammer take possession of my face—an electronically rapid flutter of the eyelids, a distortion of the mouth as of a leather purse being cinched, a terrified hardening of the upper lip, a fatal tensing and lifting of the voice." All stutterers will nod knowingly when they hear him refer to that "untrustworthy" part of himself that "can collapse at awkward or anxious moments into a stutter." They might smile at his philosophical conclusion that stuttering is a sign of the "duality of our existence, the ability of the body and soul to say no to one another." Or his reflection that a stammer is the acknowledgement of unacknowledged complexities surrounding even the simplest of verbal exchanges. They might laugh, as I did, when they read his depiction of stuttering as negotiating an obstacle course with an unhappy ending: "Sometimes, it is as if I have, hurrying to the end of my spoken sentence, carefully picked and plotted my way out of a room full of obstacles, and having almost attained (stealthily, cunningly) the door, I trip, calling painful attention to myself and spilling all the beans." Updike was a serial adulterer and public Christian at the same time. He resolved this contradiction by constructing a Christianity of comfort without commands, a gospel of love without holiness. Biden's own contradictions include his claim to be a serious Catholic while promoting a holocaust of the unborn. Or his declaration that he supports religious freedom while promoting the Equality Act that would make felons of orthodox believers. Biden would have approved Updike's declaration that religion includes "an acceptance and consecration of what is," as long as the "is" includes the dogmas of the sexual revolution. How can I love the man when I think he is presiding happily over the destruction of little human beings and the meltdown of our republic? Well, I can remember Jesus' command to love my (political and ideological) enemies. Recognizing Biden's struggle with the same demon that has afflicted me helps me understand how to follow the apostle Paul's admonition to "think of others as better than yourself" (Phil 2:3). My own speech therapy as an adult at a world-class facility gave me a breakthrough that Biden has apparently not been able to enjoy. Yet he has been willing to expose his affliction to the world in ways I might never have tolerated. I have to give him credit for that. Biden's infamous gaffes and public non -sequiturs might be as much from the stuttering demon as from alleged dementia. I know what it is like to block on words and search for substitutes, sometimes changing direction when the search comes up empty. So I have sympathy for his struggle and admire his determination to plough ahead. At the same time I hope his policies are frustrated. Gerald McDermott is the author of Famous Stutterers: Twelve inspiring people who achieved great things while struggling with an impediment.

John welcomes the Strong Women team to share a recent episode of the Strong Women podcast where Glenn Stanton dove into the theme of Strong Women. The episode reflects conversations John, Maria, and Shane have had on the BreakPoint Podcast recently.

Today on BreakPoint, we hear Chuck Colson's thoughts on Memorial Day and what he called, "The Greatest Love.": "It was February of 1945—three months before the end of World War II in Europe. Eighteen-year-old Sergeant Joseph George of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, was stationed in Lorient, France. It was evening, and George was preparing to go on patrol. The Americans were hoping to locate landmines buried by the Germans. Sergeant George had been on patrol duty the night before. As he told his friend Private James Caudill, he was tired—tired and scared. Private Caudill offered to take the patrol on his behalf. He pointed out that, at age 36, he was nearly two decades older than George. He told George—who had already been blown off a torpedoed ship in the English Channel—"You're young. Go home. Get married. Live a rich, full life." And then Private Caudill went out on patrol. A few hours later, he was killed by a German sniper. The actions of Private Caudill echo the values and valor of generations of military men and women we remember today. And they are an example of the sort of behavior we almost take for granted when it comes to our men and women in uniform who fight just wars. What is a just war? One that is defined as providing a proportionate response to evil, to protect non-combatants, among other considerations. Today, our military men and women around the world are fighting to resist evil. Ridding the world of Islamo-fascism—by just means—is a good and loving act. This willingness to sacrifice on behalf of our neighbors is why military service is considered such a high calling for Christians—and part of what makes just wars just. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica puts his discussion of just war in his chapter on charity—the love of God and neighbor. John Calvin agreed; he called soldiering justly a "God-like act," because "it imitates God's restraining evil out of love for His creatures." A world in which free nations refuse to fight just wars would be a world where evil is unchecked and where the strong would be free to prey on the weak—as we are now seeing in Darfur. Our soldiers' willingness to defend the defenseless around the world makes me proud to be an American. Their willingness to lay down their lives is a reflection of how the Christian worldview has influenced our society, which is why American soldiers, by the way, are welcomed all over the world, as historian Stephen Ambrose wrote, while soldiers from other cultures are feared. So what of Sgt. Joseph George? He returned safely home. He married, fathered five sons. One of them—Princeton Professor Robert George—is a good friend of mine. He's devoted much of his life to fighting the moral evils of our time: abortion, embryo-destructive research, and efforts to redefine marriage in a way that would destroy it. In John 15:13, Jesus said, "Greater love has no man than this, that [he] lay down his life for his friends." The story of Private Caudill and Sergeant George makes one realize more deeply what a tremendous gift this is. It's why the George family has remembered Private Caudill in prayers for sixty-one years. Today, Memorial Day, we ought to remember the sacrifices of all the Private Caudills in all the wars Americans have fought—and we should pray for those who are still in the field—laying down their lives for each other, for us, and for the freedom of strangers. That's a very Christian thing to do."