Breakpoint

The Equality Act promises to impact nearly every aspect of life for men, women, and children. John Stonestreet, Shane Morris, and Maria Baer explore the impact the Equality Act will have on society. The trio also explores cancel culture and how it is causing big tech responses to ideas that aren't celebrated in progressive advances. Ryan T. Anderson's book When Harry Became Sally, presents strong evidence through research and stories to show the challenge in responding outside of physical reality for those challenged by gender dysphoria. They reference Rand Paul's recent interaction with Rachel Levine, formerly known as Richard Levine, over what is called gender mutilation around the world. Called gender transitioning in America, Levine responds saying, essentially, the science is complicated but firm and settled. John highlights how this issue impacts some of the most vulnerable in our society, namely children, and the culture is experimenting on the vulnerable with this issue. John calls Christians to respond in two ways. He calls Christians to research, build understanding, and discuss these issues in our circles. Christians cannot sit out on this issue. He also calls Christians to count the cost of participating in championing God's story on this matter. Maria highlights Solzhenitzyn's phrase Live Not By Lies, being made popular again by Rod Dreher.She notes that our call is simply to tell the truth, and helping others align their felt truth against physical reality. To close, Maria shares a story from Smith College where a student was eating lunch in a closed cafeteria. After being nicely engaged and escorted out, the young lady took to social media to claim racial bias. After an investigation the school found the claims were unfounded. The trio unpack this issue, highlighting the clashes that are happening inside intersectionality.

Last summer, outside a California courtroom, a group of protestors gathered, marched, chanted, took lots of selfies, and held signs that read, "Free Britney." Footage from that day now comprises the opening scene of a newly released New York Times documentary about Britney Spears, the pop music star who rose to fame as barely a teenager in the early 2000s. Spears is now in the middle of a legal battle over control of her financial estate. Her genuinely tragic story begins with her parents' insistence on making Britney a star at an extremely young age. Having achieved that goal, her innocent "bubble gum pop" persona turned into something far less innocent. After spending much of her career attempting to outdo her previous sexual explicitness, Britney Spears has spiraled into ongoing and severe mental health issues, worsened by broken relationships, and constantly being stalked by paparazzi. Objectifying others is not only a sin itself, it leads to other sins. Pride, contempt, jealousy, adultery, murder, sexual predation, even self-harming behaviors like drug abuse and sexual promiscuity are all rooted in seeing and using people, even ourselves, as objects instead of Image-bearers. Most Christians, and even non-Christians, would say that treating anyone in any of these ways is wrong. However, objectifying people has become so normal, we do it in ways we don't even realize. Some of those protestors who gathered outside the courthouse in California were probably genuinely concerned for her well-being. But what of the others, such as those telling reporters over and over how much they "love" this pop star they don't even know? Aren't they really using her, too? After all, they've turned her situation – her tragedy and pain – into something to consume. It's entertainment, or catharsis. They are using a person they cannot practically love, serve, sacrifice for, or even talk to, and making her fill a need they have. That's objectification, too. This behavior is different than admiring or honoring a well-known figure. There is a fundamental difference between, for example, the Americans who lined up along railroad tracks to honor the life of Abraham Lincoln as his body was taken to lie in state, and those who gathered for the "Free Britney" rally outside family court. Admiring virtue and being grateful for a life well-lived is different from looking to fill a need that should be met in real relationships. In a celebrity-driven culture like ours, it is tempting to think we have a celebrity-shaped hole in our hearts instead of a God-shaped one. For artists, this takes the form of seeking to be popular instead of seeking excellence. For consumers, this takes the form of elevating and worshiping celebrities in their prime and then ridiculing them and gawking at them afterwards. Celebrity-ism is as much a problem in the Church as out. We can be grateful for YouTube access to the teachings, articles, and sermons of our favorite pastors and for the inspiration from our favorite Christian authors or artists through Instagram. But are we idolizing? Are we angry if they say something we don't like, commenting as if they're not real people or as if their job is always to agree with us? Do we assume a level of intimacy that is not appropriate with someone we actually don't know? Do we use them to replace local churches or to provide spiritual authority in our lives, when that is not their place nor role? The dangerous mistake is confusing our ability to enjoy the consumable goods we get from Christians "celebrities" or social-media influencers with a right to access or intimacy with the people themselves to meet our needs. It is a mistake we make with people we don't agree with, too. Just look how Christians treat each other on Twitter, as if we are dealing with cartoon characters instead of real people. When it comes to the clarity we need on human value and boundaries with others, our culture is both out of ideas and off its foundation. Objectifying, idolizing, and "celebritizing" (I made that one up…) are all ways of treating image bearers as brands, not people, expecting them to fill our need, whether for diversion or community or meaning. In that context, mutual fandom and the hatred of a common enemy are two sides of the same coin. No matter how interesting, how talented, how fun to love or hate they are, people are not objects.

The Biden administration recently announced it will accelerate the process of replacing President Andrew Jackson image on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, at least on the front. Jackson would still appear on the reverse side. This plan was first announced under the Obama Administration but was halted by President Trump's Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. As the excellent 2019 film portrayed, Harriet Tubman was a towering figure of courage and faith who risked her own life and freedom, time and time again, to rescue men and women from slavery. Tubman was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation in 1822. As a young girl, she was trained as a nursemaid and made to work driving oxen and trapping muskrats in the woods. Harriet's owners frequently whipped her. She also endured the pain of seeing three of her sisters sold, never to be seen again. Even as a child, Harriet demonstrated a strong rebellious streak, running away for days at a time. She may have learned this from her mother. When her owner attempted to sell one of her brothers, Harriet's mother dissuaded the would-be buyer by announcing, "The first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." This may have been where Harriet learned that resistance to evil was not only right, but could even sometimes be successful. Harriet's deep and abiding faith also came from her mother, who would tell her stories from the Bible. At about 26 years old, when Harriett learned she might be sold away from her family, she made her escape along the Underground Railroad, traveling at night to avoid slave catchers and following the North Star until she reached Pennsylvania and freedom. Once there, she made a dangerous choice. She decided to risk her own freedom in order to give others theirs. For eight years, as America headed toward the cauldron of the Civil War, Tubman made many dangerous trips back to Maryland, leading scores of slaves north to freedom. During these trips she relied upon God to guide and protect her. She never once lost a runaway slave. As Tubman herself later put it, "I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger." Harriett never took credit for her remarkable success. Instead, she explained, "'Twant me, 'twas the Lord. I always told him, 'I trusts to you. I don't know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me,' and he always did." In the process, she earned an appropriate nickname: Moses. Abolitionist Thomas Garrett put it, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." During the Civil War, Harriet worked for the Union Army as a scout, spy, cook, and nurse to wounded and sick soldiers. Amazingly, she even helped lead an armed assault on Southern plantations in coastal South Carolina, during which 750 slaves were rescued. Many, she then recruited to join the Army. In later years, Tubman became an advocate for women's suffrage. She also donated property to be turned into a home for former slaves, despite the fact she lived in or near poverty for much of her life, mostly because she constantly worked to help others. It took 30 years for Tubman's service to the Union Army to finally be recognized by the U. S. government. She was awarded a widow's pension of $8 per month in 1895, and an additional $12 a month in 1899 for her war-time service as a nurse. If you do the math, that's $20. Now, 100-plus years after her death, the United States is ready to bestow on this heroic woman of faith the honor of placing her portrait on the $20 bill. Both ironic and fitting.

John and Shane walk through a challenging question related to perceived impressions that the church is slipping into moral deism. A Colson Fellow asked about John's Bene-Kuyper option, blending the Benedict Option and Kuyper's view of culture engagement. Another Colson Fellow asked John and Shane to explain how to engage a pastor and encourage a church that doesn't see the need to participate in conversations in the culture. The Fellow mentioned there is a growing fear the church could "lose our witness to the lost". To close, John is asked how believers should respond in the wake of the Ravi Zacharias report. When pastors, priests, and teachers fall morally, how should bewildered Christians move forward?

Late last week, Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives introduced the Equality Act, a grave threat to religious liberty and conscience rights that would, in effect, erase all legal distinctions between male and female in public life. The Equality Act would make gender identity and sexual orientation protected classes under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, forcing compliance in areas such as public accommodation and education. Until the GOP lost majority in the Senate, there wasn't much of a chance of the Equality Act becoming law. The outcome of the Senate runoff races in Georgia made it much more practical for President Biden to keep his promise of signing the Equality Act into law. Of course, its fate in the Democrat-controlled House was never really in doubt. To be clear, you should only care about the Equality Act if you are a Christian, or a person of faith, or a woman, or own a business, or run a non-profit, or go to school, or teach at a school, or are a medical or mental-health professional, or (especially) are a female athlete, or under the age of 18, or ever use a public restroom. That's not an exaggeration. In fact, here is the exact wording from the Equality Act: "An individual shall not be denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual's gender identity." This applies to… "any establishment that provides a good, service, or program, including a store, shopping center, online retailer or service provider, salon, bank, gas station, food bank, service or care center, shelter, travel agency or funeral parlor, or establishment that provides health care, accounting or legal services," along with any organization that receives any federal funding. So, for example, as Ryan Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center described in an op ed this week: "Medical doctors, secular and religious, whose ­expert judgment is that sex-reassignment procedures are misguided would now run afoul of our civil-rights laws. If you perform a mastectomy in the case of breast cancer, you will have to perform one on the teenage girl identifying as a boy. All in the name of equality." Shelters for battered women would be forced to admit biological males. Prisons would not be able to protect female inmates from predatory males who claim to be females. Biological males will be given the opportunities, scholarships, and championships of female athletes. It's not clear that women's sports would survive. More religious adoption and foster-care agencies would be forced to compromise their convictions about marriage and the family or shut down. School bathrooms and locker rooms would be open to both sexes. In addition to these specifics, the Equality Act would bring with it three broad, sweeping changes. First, specific conscience protections of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which have long been legal priorities, would be circumvented in cases deemed discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Effectively, conscience rights deemed religiously-based would be tossed aside. Second, anyone who affirms the biological reality of the sexes would be, in law, relegated to the same status as the racists whose oppression of African Americans made the 1964 Civil Rights Act necessary. Finally, The Equality Act would have a dramatic impact on education, public or private. According to a new coalition called "Promise to America's Children," a coalition I'm proud to be a part of, the Equality Act greases the skids for even more graphic curricula "about sex, abortion, and politicized ideas about sexual orientation and gender identity ideology . . ." Not only that, but as federal legislation, this would affect every state, not just progressive ones, "overriding efforts by concerned parents and community members at the local level." It's not over, however. The Equality Act still faces significant obstacles in the Senate. Here are three things you can do: Contact your Representative and your Senators and let them know to oppose the Equality Act. Share widely the resources and articles on the Equality Act found at BreakPoint.org. Go to promisetoamericaschildren.org and sign the statement committing to prioritize children's rights over adult happiness. That's PromiseToAmericasChildren.org, and share the resources found there with your pastor, church, and community.

Several months ago, Amazon began blocking the sale of books they deemed "dangerous" to LGBTQ people. Some of these books, to be frank, were hateful and demeaning. Others were deemed hateful for simply questioning the dominant narratives about homosexuality, gay marriage, or gender dysphoria. The most recent book banned by Amazon is among the most scholarly and thoroughly researched on the issue of transgenderism. When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment was written by Ryan Anderson, recently named president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Anderson's book, along with Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (which surprisingly hasn't been blocked by Amazon…yet) are the two essential reads on the topic. You can still buy both from our online bookstore at BreakPoint.org, even if you can't on Amazon. What Anderson does so well in When Harry Became Sally is to articulate how transgender ideology is advanced by misstatements and contradictions. For example, there's a dramatic disparity between what we're told about those who identify as transgender and what the research actually shows. We're told that children know if they are "born in the wrong bodies," but anywhere from 80 to 95 percent of children who question their gender identity eventually outgrow those feelings. We are told that gender transition surgery is necessary because of high suicide rates, but rather that reducing the risk among those who identify as transgendered, transition surgery may dramatically increase it. In other words, the process of learning the best way to care for those with gender dysphoria has been pre-empted by ideology, not led by evidence. In When Harry Became Sally, Anderson shares stories of people who aren't supposed to exist. "De-transitioners" are those who chose to identify and live as the opposite gender, often undergoing therapies and surgeries, only to come to regret their decision desperately. When Harry Became Sally is one of the few places to learn that there are people who realized these decisions only harmed their bodies but didn't make them happy. Through science, philosophy, and clear reason, When Harry Became Sally refutes the popular ideas of our day – that gender is a social construct, that sex isn't biological but assigned at birth, and that the only way to help those who feel "trapped" in their bodies is by altering their bodies and not their feelings. "The best biology, psychology, and philosophy all support an understanding of sex as a bodily reality, and an understanding of gender as a social manifestation of bodily sex," writes Anderson. The case is so clear, in fact, supporters of transgender ideology have to rely on coercion, power (think the Equality Act), and name-calling to end the debate and advance their cause. Enlisting corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter has proven particularly effective. Even so, too many Christians still wonder why this issue matters. Here are three reasons: First, our bodies matter. This is no trivial point of Christian theology. The opening chapters of Scripture reveal that being made in God's image means being made male and female. Jesus is revealed as the Word who became flesh and was bodily resurrected from the dead. In the New Heavens and New Earth, we will know Him by His scars. To deny the body is to deny God's created order and His self-revelation as Redeemer. Second, transgender ideology specifically teaches children they were born wrong, and that rejecting their bodies (maybe even mutilating it) is the best way forward. If we love our neighbors, especially the children in our culture, we cannot remain silent on this one. Finally, allowing transgender ideology to go unchallenged, to hijack social justice movements, and to be legislatively forced on society through the Equality Act will roll back every achievement of women's protections and rights, especially in privacy, education, and competition. Men will simply claim the rights of women. This is why so many women who identify as feminists and lesbians despise the way the transgender movement is hijacking their cause. As my friend Glenn Stanton says, transgender ideology is the new patriarchy. Pick up a copy of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment at our online bookstore. Amazon may not want you to read it, but that tells you everything you need to know about why you should.

Recently, a New York Times article quoted a French government official: "There's a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities.'' As the article went on to explain, "prominent [French] intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture." It's tempting here to channel the faux outrage of the French policeman in the movie "Casablanca." I'm shocked, shocked to learn that postmodern ideas born and bred in the rich soil of the French intelligentsia have mutated into something unsavory. Who could have predicted that divorcing truth from reality would lead to even more divisive and destructive ideas? The path from Parisian literary theorists puzzling over the power of words to the not-so-friendly neighborhood activist outraged by pronouns is pretty clear. Reacting to the overconfidence and over-promises of Modernism and the Enlightenment, French intellectuals in the mid-20th Century like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida proposed a way of thinking that was skeptical and largely cynical. Postmodernism took observable parts of human life, particularly cultural biases and the tendency of powerful people to oppress their neighbors and built an elaborate philosophical system around them. The end result was a worldview that denied that humans could have any real access to truth. Instead, all we have is words by which we attempt to describe reality and communicate. Our words, however, are hopelessly burdened with our culturally-determined biases shaped by the powerful. Our words so shape the way we see the world, postmodernism suggested, that we really have no access to reality at all. We are all trapped in our perspectives. The spectrum of postmodern thought vacillated between an uncertainty of knowledge to a focus on power. Describing this way of thinking, Angela Franks recently described in First Things, "we are not controlled by a puppet master. Rather, we live in a vast network of demands, commandments, inducements, sorting mechanisms, disciplines, and more. 'Power' has no center. It is the aggregate of multiple, shifting relationships." Other than much of the popular music of the 1990s (from Kurt Cobain to Eminem), postmodernism remained largely a scholar's game. Professors and students might tut-tut about there being nothing outside the text but, for ideas to escape the academy for the real world, humans need more than abstractions. It was the evolution of Critical Theory that gave the fundamental assumptions of postmodernism flesh. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay describe in their book, Cynical Theories, what began as a new way to interpret texts mutated into a quest "to reconstruct society in the image of an ideology." Proponents of Critical Theory are as adamantly against the powerful imposing their views on the oppressed as any postmodernist was. However, with a moralistic streak, they've added the demand that all views must be conformed to theirs, and they will use their newly acquired cultural power to punish anyone who fails to comply. What we're left with are directionless, insatiable demands to combat injustice and oppression but without any means to say one moral claim is better than another. Attempts to find or forge common ground between people or communities are cynically seen as a quest for power and oppression. In the end, as fun as it is to tease our friends in France about the ideas that were birthed on their shores, they are right about the dangers of Critical Theory, especially to those core French ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and their hope in the universal rights of a universal humanity. Of course, like postmodernism and Critical Theory, Christianity also objects to failed promises of the Enlightenment and Modernism. Christianity, however, is hopeful, not cynical. Rather than reducing life to a constant battle for status and power, Christianity offers the only historically solid ground for unity or progress. In the imago Dei, Christianity tethers universal human dignity and justice. In the doctrine of the Fall, we make sense of power and oppression. Within the framework of redemption, we have hope for a life propelled by love, not universal, unending, unwinnable competition. This framework tasks Christ-followers to work for justice but to be driven by mercy. We are called to love our neighbor, not see them as the hated "other." In other words, the Christian ethic provides the passion and foundation for a better humanity and a more just world, which postmodernism and its offspring sought, but could never find.

For more than a decade, LGBTQ advocates have sought to force Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips to decorate cakes with messages that violate his Christian faith. This despite his victory at the Supreme Court, this despite the Colorado Civil Rights Commission being forced to end the persecution. Jack is back in court again, this time defending himself from a lawsuit initiated by transgender attorney, who, as John Stonestreet explains passionately, is waging a vendetta against Jack Phillips. Also in this episode: John and Shane Morris discuss the ramifications and lessons learned from the revelations regarding the late Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias; the remarkable legacy of Rush Limbaugh, who passed this week; South Carolina's new heartbeat bill to protect the lives of the unborn--and just how ridiculous abortion advocates look when they insist on stopping a beating heart. They wrap up the show with their recommendations: Miracles by C. S. Lewis, and . . . the next time you're in Florida . . . The Kennedy Space Center. ------Resources------ Register for our Short Course with Thaddeus Williams, author of Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth "Jack Philips's Legal Battle Continues," by John Stonestreet, BreakPoint Support Jack Phillips "The Infinite Human Capacity to Deceive Ourselves and Then Rationalize It," by John Stonestreet, BreakPoint Miracles, by C. S. Lewis, available in the Colson Center online bookstore Visit the Kennedy Space Center

For more than a decade, LGBTQ advocates have sought to force Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips to decorate cakes with messages that violate his Christian faith. This despite his victory at the Supreme Court, this despite the Colorado Civil Rights Commission being forced to end the persecution. Jack is back in court again, this time defending himself from a lawsuit initiated by transgender attorney, who, as John Stonestreet explains passionately, is waging a vendetta against Jack Phillips. Also in this episode: John and Shane Morris discuss the ramifications and lessons learned from the revelations regarding the late Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias; the remarkable legacy of Rush Limbaugh, who passed this week; South Carolina's new heartbeat bill to protect the lives of the unborn--and just how ridiculous abortion advocates look when they insist on stopping a beating heart. They wrap up the show with their recommendations: Miracles by C. S. Lewis, and . . . the next time you're in Florida . . . The Kennedy Space Center. ------Resources------ Register for our Short Course with Thaddeus Williams, author of Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth "Jack Philips's Legal Battle Continues," by John Stonestreet, BreakPoint Support Jack Phillips "The Infinite Human Capacity to Deceive Ourselves and Then Rationalize It," by John Stonestreet, BreakPoint Miracles, by C. S. Lewis, available in the Colson Center online bookstore Visit the Kennedy Space Center

In 2015, Drag Queen Story Hour launched in San Francisco. Exactly what it sounds like - men dressed as women (often provocatively) reading stories (often provocatively) to young kids in schools or public libraries - the organization now operates across the country. "Dressing in drag" almost always involves exaggerated makeup, exaggerated hair, and gaudy, sexually suggestive clothing. One goal of Drag Queen Story Hour, according to its website, is to celebrate "people who defy rigid gender restrictions." It's a strange claim for a group that relies so heavily on exaggerated stereotypes of femininity. Instead of "defying rigid gender restrictions," their "performances" portray their small, shriveled imagination of what it is to be a woman. The larger transgender movement also relies almost completely on this kind of stereotyping. The feminist movement spent decades trying to dismantle stereotypical tropes such as "girls like pink and play with dolls" and "boys like sports and red meat," and yet, here we are telling boys who like pink or girls who like baseball they were born in the wrong bodies, on no other evidence but those same stereotypes. Christianity offers a far better message about who we are as male and female. To share it effectively, we'll need a strategy that goes beyond merely protecting religious liberty, as important as that is. To be clear, we must do that hard work of preserving conscience protections for individuals and institutions who do not capitulate to the demands of the transgender movement. At the same time, as more and more young people (especially middle school girls) suddenly claim to be the opposite gender, we have to do more than just say "no." We have to elevate God's good design. We have to articulate what it is to be a woman and not a man; or a man and not a woman. Unfortunately, with many exceptions, the Church hasn't always done a great job of this. In fact, the Church often resorts to stereotypes, too, though usually in a more positive direction and with better intentions. Still, in our zeal to resist harmful teachings on gender so prevalent in our culture for so long, we have often failed to understand why God would make men and women and make them so different. Instead, we have reduced the answers to these incredibly important questions to culturally contingent things such as "gender roles" or, even worse, gender-based restrictions, without careful theological reflection on God's design. It makes sense. After all, lists are easier to grasp a list than sacred mysteries, and the concept of "roles" isn't a bad one. Roles and lists are attempts to flesh out the implications of design within certain contexts. Some roles will never change. For example, only women will ever be mothers, and only men will ever be fathers. Other roles do change as cultural norms change. The biblical vision of male and female is beautiful. Men and women were made differently but point to the same dynamic God. When God created both Adam and Eve, He said they both were created in His Image and were "very good." It's notable that before the author of Genesis reveals Eve's name, he reveals she also was made in the image of God. According to theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand, the point of our gendered design is "to be transformed into Christ, to become holy and glorify God, and to reach eternal communion with God… [t]he specific tone of masculinity and femininity must appear by itself." The experience of living as men and women in the world will be varied, though there are certainly uncrossable boundaries. Our best expressions of our gender are demonstrated not by conforming to stereotypes, but by conforming to Christ in the unique ways men and women are each called. The men and women that appear throughout the Scriptures are not portrayed as epitomized versions of their gender. Rather, they reveal the glory and power of God, which is, Paul says, made perfect in our weakness. Women can't be men, and men can't be women. That may not sound like good news to someone suffering with gender dysphoria, but it is. Both men and women, in their differences, point in unique ways to Jesus. Across these differences, both men and women must carry crosses in order to follow Him. That maleness and femaleness are gifts, and not constraints, is very good news in an increasingly gender-hostile world.