Breakpoint

In the competitive world of online status-mongering, courage involves little more than clicking “like” or earning a “mention” in a post that could risk losing a follower or two. Real courage is, of course, something else entirely. It’s about doing the right thing when there are real costs. It’s taking an unpopular stand, even a dangerous one when sitting back and doing nothing would be far easier.  During the dark days of Communist tyranny in Europe, governments spouted their dangerous nonsense, and citizens were expected, often by intimidation, to act as though their folly were true. Refusing meant social ostracization, police supervision, the loss of opportunity and freedom, and the compromise of personal safety. Most citizens ducked their heads and did what they could to survive.   Others, however, made the difficult choice to stand up. Their courage entailed not taking up arms or taking to the streets but, in a world where dissent was costly, a simple refusal to go along. Among those who showed this kind of courage was the Bendová family of Czechoslovakia, a family featured in the book Live Not By Lies by Rod Dreher. Kamila Bendová will be a featured guest at the Colson Center National Conference, along with Rod Dreher, to tell the story of her family’s courage, even when that courage brought suffering. As Dreher wrote,  "She too was a dissident. She kept the family together when the communists put her husband in prison. When Vaclav was tempted by an offer to accept exile in exchange for liberty, she bucked him up, and told him that the things they were fighting for were worth suffering for too."  Or, as Terry Mattingly put it,  "It didn’t matter if the Communists had imprisoned her husband — the late Vaclav Benda, a leading Czech dissident and Catholic intellectual. It didn’t matter that state officials had bugged their flat near the medieval heart of the city. It didn’t matter if a friend showed up after being tortured at the secret police facility a block away."  Faithfully, through years of pressure, threats, and fears, Kamila Bendová showed her children, local students, and fellow citizens that resistance is not futile. Her life is a lesson to us in this cultural moment. Though what we face is less openly dangerous, it is confusing and consequential. As Mattingly wrote,  "Traditional families now face threats that are harder to identify than those of the Communist era, said Kamila Bendova. Warning children about the secret police is one thing. In a way, it may be harder for today’s parents to convince their children to be truly countercultural in an age of social-media narcissism, gender confusion, online pornography and credit-card materialism."  In his book Live Not by Lies, Dreher tells story after story of courageous Christians from the recent past. Their courage can inspire and inform us in this moment, Dreher thinks.  "Should totalitarianism, hard or soft, come to America, the police state would not have to establish a web of informants to keep tabs on the private lives of the people. The system we have now already does this—and most Americans are scarcely aware of its thoroughness and ubiquity."  Though we do not face the exact tactics of Marxist regimes, we face the expansive power of a de facto social credit system, where holding the “wrong” opinion comes with a social cost. In Britain, railing against the Jewish people and the whole of Western civilization is acceptable, even encouraged, but silently praying outside an abortion clinic brings a visit from the police. Social pressure and government pressure, heightened by corporate pressures, have brought radical and dangerous ideologies into the mainstream.  So, now is a time for courage, the kind that refuses to go along with dominant paradigms when it would be easier to be quiet. The Bendová family knew that their children would require tools to think critically and carefully. Ours will too, especially in this age of expressive individualism and ever louder propaganda. We can learn from Kamila Bendová what this kind of intentional parenting entails.  How Christians can have a courageous faith is the focus of the 2024 Colson Center National Conference, to be held May 30-June 2 in Arlington, Texas. Joining Kamila Bendová and Rod Dreher are Dr. Albert Mohler, Fr. Calvin Robinson, Dr. Sean McDowell, Dr. Kathy Koch, and author Dr. Neil Shenvi. Only a few hundred spaces remain. To register, go to ColsonConference.org.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

Once again, a media outlet has discovered that Christian people believe Christian things. Recently, CNN unearthed audio of new House Speaker Mike Johnson saying things like abortion is a holocaust, people are “inherently evil,” homosexuality is wrong, and government should work to restrain evil.   In other news, my 6-year-old likes pizza and Spider-Man.  Part of what’s going on here is how far apart a progressive, secular vision of the world is from a Christian one. Part is that, at root, our national divisions are personal divisions, and many media elites simply do not know a Christian, despite the willingness to often assure us of what a real Christian would say or believe. The bigger part, in my view, is a failure on our part to be consistently clear about what we believe with the courage to say it out loud when called upon.  But remember, the first Christians and our Savior were misunderstood and maligned also, so we are in good company. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

Last month marked the one-year anniversary of a mass shooting at the “Club Q,” a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. The shooter, who killed five people and wounded 19 others, received multiple life sentences in June for his crimes, as well an additional sentence for “bias-motivated” crimes. This seemed to confirm the popular narrative that the shooter targeted the LGBTQ community out of hate.  That narrative was quickly and deliberately spread almost immediately after the shooting. In fact, just days after, The New York Times not-so-subtly suggested a connection between the murders and several conservative Christian ministries headquartered in Colorado Springs, including Focus on the Family. Other media outlets and voices were not as subtle in leveling that accusation. Days later, vandals spray-painted the words “their blood is on your hands” on the entrance to Focus on the Family.  The Club Q shooting was a horrible act of evil. Every one of the victims were made in the image and likeness of God and bore the inherent dignity and value that means. Not one deserved to be reduced to their sexual identity, not by the man who committed these crimes and not by those who would use the victims as pawns to push a false narrative.  In this case, the narrative is a fable that goes back at least as far as the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. Almost immediately after the teenager was brutally killed outside of town, his murder was framed in both national and international media as a clear, cut-and-dried hate crime. In 2009, Congress passed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Last year in her dissenting opinion in the 303 Creative case, in which the Supreme Court upheld a Colorado web designer’s right to free expression, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that Shepard’s murder was the result of a “social system of discrimination” that “created an environment in which LGBT people were unsafe.” In fact, just last week, a memorial service was held for Matthew Shepard at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where his ashes are interred.   The real story of Matthew Shepard, however, is anything but clear and cut-and-dried. In 2014, after more than a decade of researching the incident, a gay journalist named Stephen Jimenez released a book that revealed Shepard’s long history of drug use. He had, in fact, been selling crystal meth at the time of his murder. He’d also engaged in prostitution and had a sexual relationship with at least one of the men who killed him. The police who intercepted the killers shortly after they fled the scene believed they were heading to Shepard’s house to search for drug money. In other words, this murder was not a hate crime. It likely had nothing to do with Shepherd’s sexuality.  Many of the tragedies that have been made part of this narrative have similarly inconvenient details. For example, the convicted shooter in the Club Q massacre last year identified himself in court as “nonbinary” and had visited the nightclub multiple times. Though he posted anti-gay slurs online, he seemed quite fascinated with the Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter who targeted religious communities. He also came from an abusive background and exhibited significant signs of mental illness.  Justice Sotomayor also mentioned the 2016 shooting at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub in her dissenting opinion in 303 Creative. The shooter, who killed 49 people, was a Muslim man who claimed “solidarity” with Al-Qaeda and ISIS. His wife testified that his original plan to attack Disney World was abandoned because of the police presence at the amusement park. It’s not clear that the shooter was even aware that the Pulse was a gay club. Nevertheless, that shooting is now cemented in cultural memory as a hate crime against gays.   While there is little evidence that “anti-LGBTQ hatred” has led to many mass shootings, there is more evidence that suggests the opposite. The shooter at Covenant School in Nashville, for example, identified as transgender and seems to have targeted the Christian school on purpose. In August 2012, an LGBTQ activist stormed the headquarters of the Family Research Council with a gun and a Chick-fil-A bag and yelled “I don’t like your politics” before shooting a security guard. At least two other mass shooters identified as trans or nonbinary, though it is not clear that their identity motivated their actions.  The problem isn’t just that re-writing history is wrong, or that it often misplaces blame on some people while excusing others. It’s that the myth hurts everyone, including those it’s supposedly trying to protect, by ignoring the problems ailing the LGBTQ community. For example, members of this community have disproportionately high rates of substance abuse, childhood sexual abuse, mental illness, family breakdown, violence, and deaths of despair.  Suffering people need help. Conditioning them to be afraid of a nonexistent threat or to view their suffering as only someone else’s fault is cruel. These are hard truths indeed, but hard truths are more loving than false narratives.   For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

According to a recent study, nearly one-third of Gen Z women now “identify as lesbian, bisexual, or something else.” To be clear, these numbers only indicate how young people are identifying, not behaving, since Gen Z‘ers are not as sexually active as previous generations.  At the same time, these numbers do reflect how many teenage girls who are experiencing normal adolescent changes are being told they’re transgender. Is it any wonder that so many young women think being “straight” and “cisgender” is outdated, or even bad? Consider all the media messaging that depicts “traditional guy[s]” as undesirable long-term partners, encourages relationships that are inherently sterile, discusses fertility as a disease, and refuses to call women women. The erasure of women altogether is a strange, tragic, but consistent end for a culture that once claimed to fight for women.   As young women search for meaning and identity, Christians should safeguard the truth and beauty of what makes a woman special and valuable: being made in the image of God, female.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

One of the best features of our smartphones is the ability to apply a few tweaks to our photos before sending them to relatives or sharing them on social media. Using a phone’s built-in tools, we can bump up the brightness or fix red eye, with the desired result of a photo that looks more like the real-life moment when we snapped it. Of course, these same tools can now deliver photos even “better” than what we saw in real life. We can even create moments that didn’t happen in real life.  Is it okay to pass those off as real? What is the boundary between fiddling with a photo and faking one? Does it even matter?    Such questions will soon be forced on us through the integration of artificial intelligence with smartphones. Popular figures on Instagram have already demonstrated how easy it is to alter a mood or look, airbrushing a photo of a crying woman, for instance, into a beaming and happy version of herself. Images entirely generated by AI, often incorporating real people’s likenesses, are becoming nearly indistinguishable from photos.      Writing recently at The New York Times, tech editor Brian Chen described how devices like Google’s Pixel 8 come with an AI-powered “Magic Editor,” a tool that can remove and add objects, move subjects around, and even stitch together elements from multiple photos into a new one. The result is imagery that is partially make-believe and, though it comes from the camera app and is stored with other “photos,” can no longer strictly be called photography. These snapshots of alternate realities fudge the truth in front of your lens, which is the point, since they’re closer to “exactly the photo you want.”    According to Ren Ng, a computer science professor at Berkeley, this means that “[a]s we go boldly forth into this future, a photo is no longer a visual fact.” AI-powered photography and editing means that people will “increasingly have to question whether what they see in their images is real—including photos from loved ones.”  Of course, this goes further than just personal photos, and will contribute, Ng thinks, “to the spread of fake media online when misinformation is already rampant and it’s hard to know what to trust.”   Last month, in fact, Hamas falsely accused Israel of faking images of atrocities using AI. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see how future conflicts will be sparked by a convincing image posted online.  Increasingly, the fundamental worldview question of our age is “What is real?” Fake photos, artificial wombs, and AI chatbots posing as friends are just a few examples of technology that is challenging our understanding of reality, including our understanding of who we are and why and even whether we need each other.    Christians should have a clear answer. Nonnegotiable purposes and relationships have been built into creation by God, things humans were designed to pursue and steward in particular ways. This is not an infinitely malleable world. We are not infinitely malleable creatures, able to invent and reinvent ourselves as technology permits. This applies both to big changes like amniotic pods replacing mothers as well as seemingly trivial changes like “photography” tools.    Here are two principles to keep in mind as we “go boldly forth into this future” of AI, smartphones, and photography.    First, we should never lie, not even with AI. That means we need to define the term “photograph.” Is it a shared visual fact, a representation of reality that can establish everything from family memories to journalistic truth, or is it an idealized digital painting? We shouldn’t get in the habit of passing one off as the other.  Second, we shouldn’t look to technology to replace human ability. Somewhere between using AI to edit out a trash can in a family photo and using it to create a fake family member for Instagram, a moral line is crossed. That line is on a slope, and we are about to find out just how slippery it is. Planting your feet firmly and intentionally now is a good idea.    Christians should be pro-technology and pro-human. God gave humans the ingenuity to make such tools, and they can be used to glorify Him and love others. However, tools–like their users–need a purpose grounded in God’s design for reality. The moment our tools begin using us, or severing our relationship with that reality, something has gone wrong.   We need wisdom in the days ahead, not just artificial intelligence.     This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

The three-digit number 988 is quickly becoming as much a part of our shared life as 911. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is a national hotline that provides 24/7, free, and confidential mental health support to anyone in need. Within the first year, 5 million contacts were responded to. The numbers are staggering, and the hotline continues to find high-risk populations, including indigenous people, people with disabilities, and rural men.  But this remains a culturewide problem. From 2021 to 2022, the suicide rate increased by 2.6%. Christians have a significant role to play in offering hope. Parents, teachers, pastors, and other mentors need to be equipped to spot vulnerable young people and to connect with them, ultimately pointing them to Jesus Christ, the source of all hope. The “Hope Always” course featuring Dr. Matthew Sleeth is available online, can be accessed anytime, and can be studied alone or as part of a community committed to providing healing to hurting neighbors.   Go to educators.colsoncenter.org for more information. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

Guest Athanasius, Defender of the divinity of Christ, discusses his work On the Incarnation of the Word, defending Christ's divinity against Arius. He emphasizes the importance of Jesus' death on the cross in renewing the Image of God and restoring true knowledge of God. Athanasius' teachings are relevant in confronting modern heresies and reading old books is important for a broader understanding of Christianity.

John and Maria discuss the rise of antisemitism in America after the attacks by Hamas on Israel. They also explore the perception of evangelical marriages, addressing allegations of abuse. Furthermore, they examine claims of homophobia in the Bible due to a potential mistranslation of a word.

Henry Kissinger, a controversial figure from the Watergate era, died at the age of 100. Chuck Colson describes his significant impact and how God uses flawed individuals. It reminds us that we will all meet God one day.

The podcast discusses the recent surge of antisemitism worldwide, highlighting incidents in American schools, city council meetings, and protests. It explores the historical context of antisemitism and questions how such hatred can still exist today. The episode emphasizes the resilience of the Jewish people and their symbol of hope amidst adversity.