Breakpoint

One of the most telling statistics from the General Social Survey, is that Americans are having less sex now than they did in 1980s and 1990s. Young men especially have become less sexually active. Since 2008, the share of men under 30 reporting no sex at all has nearly tripled. This stat is one of the clearest signs of what has turned into a counterintuitive but reliable pattern. The more “liberated” and “progressive” our culture becomes, the less interested in or capable of finding human partners we become. I say, “human partners,” because the decline of sex and the rise of high-tech sex alternatives have gone hand-in-hand. Online pornography use, for instance, has become ubiquitous. The Institute for Family Studies reported in 2022 that a majority of men ages 30-49 say they’ve watched pornography in the past month. And given the connection between porn and male sexual dysfunctions, this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Now, another emerging alternative to real women will likely draw even more men into unreality. British freelance writer Freya India recently highlighted the phenomenon of AI girlfriends, describing an array of new apps like Replika, Intimate, and Dream Girl Builder, which offer men the chance to craft “flawless” digital partners. These apps promise AI-airbrushed pornography. Users customize body type, face shape, and hair color to “create their dream companion,” that will “exceed [their] wildest desires,” and can join them on “hyper-realistic voice calls.” These apps offer not only simulated sex, but also the promise of companionship and emotional attention. As India writes: "Eva AI, for example, not only lets you choose the perfect face and body but customise the perfect personality, offering options like “hot, funny, bold”, “shy, modest, considerate” and “smart, strict, rational”. Create a girlfriend who is judgement-free! Who lets you hang out with your buddies without drama! Who laughs at all your jokes! “Control it all the way you want to,” promises Eva AI. Design a girl who is “always on your side”, says Replika." That last app has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and the industry seems poised to boom, with NBC reporting that “Ads for AI sex workers are flooding Instagram and TikTok.” This isn’t an expansion of sexual and romantic freedom or a tool that empowers people to make human connections. Rather, it is a retreat from human connection, a turning away from the very thing for which we are biologically, socially, and emotionally wired. And yet this has always been the end of the road we started on long ago, when we mixed a commitment to hyper-individualism with technology. As Sherry Turkle observed over a decade ago in her book, Alone Together, the process started with living our lives on the internet. Soon we began exploring alternative identities through social media. We crafted these identities and connections to perfection, pruning our “friends lists” to include only those people who pleased us. Before long, we came to prefer these digital relationships on our terms to the messy and often frustrating demands of in-person relationships. Now we have reached the stage at which many would rather cut out humans altogether, opting instead for “drama-free” companions who never have bad days, never grow old, always laugh at our jokes, never ask anything of us, and can be simply “paused” if it suits us. And AI technology is here to fill that demand. What’s next? C.S. Lewis was among many science-fiction authors to speculate. In That Hideous Strength, the last book of his Space Trilogy, he describes corrupted inhabitants of the Moon who do not sleep with each other when they marry, but “each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty … in their dreams of lust.” Perhaps AI girlfriends will eventually become robotic girlfriends, deceiving users into truly giving up on human relationships. But what insanity! We were never made for such nightmares. We were created with bodies for embodied relationships—among them the one-flesh union of marriage, through which God gives children. And at the heart of Christianity is the message that God values our embodied natures so highly that, in Christ, He assumed that nature in order to save us. Our human relationships don’t need replacing. They need redemption. As our culture’s retreat from humanity reaches new levels of strangeness, the task of the Church may increasingly be to call our neighbors back to being human. Few would have expected Christians to get a reputation for being the “pro-sex people,” but if falling in love with a computer is the alternative, we may be well on our way. This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Recently, The Guardian published an oddly intriguing article entitled, “The Case Against Pets: Is It Time to Give Up Our Cats and Dogs?” Though arguing from the perspective of the animals, the author actually made a powerful observation about humans. As one expert who was quoted put it,   The level of emotional dependence humans have on their companion animals is different from any time in the past. …   Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having pets. It’s a way of fulfilling the creation mandate. The problem comes when pets replace people, something increasingly common in a culture in which people struggle with meaninglessness and loneliness.   Blaise Pascal once wrote that “the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”  God created us first to need Him and, secondly, other people. Pets are a distant third. If we get the order of creation wrong, it just doesn’t work out like He intended.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

The Soviet Union was well known for rejecting so-called “bourgeois” morality in ways that led to rejecting reality. Economically this meant squashing human self-interest in favor of state control.  So, basic modern commodities like cars and plumbing could take years for the average Russian to secure. Marxist-inspired agricultural science rejected “Western” science and led to the deaths of millions as crops were planted in the dead of winter, too close together, and without pesticides in the mistaken belief that they could be “educated” to take on more beneficial traits.    In the 1920s, Revolutionary Russia rejected “bourgeois” sexual morality by attacking the institution of marriage and the nuclear family.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed the nuclear family was, like religion, just another means of keeping the working class oppressed. According to the Marxist dialectic version of history, prehistoric humanity lived in a state of free love, and the nuclear family only emerged to protect the property rights of the rich through inheritance, keep workers content with less, and enslave women to the home.    Engels, who spent a lot of time in Manchester’s red-light district, was more specific than Marx in his condemnations of the family.   He wrote, “[W]ith every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the foreground.” Together, Marx and Engels attacked “bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child.” In their view, family was a social construct that stood in the way of revolutionary progress.    When Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they put these anti-family theories into practice. In 1918, the Soviets issued decrees “on the abolition of marriage” and “on civil partnership, children and ownership.” Marriage could be declared without the involvement of the state, and divorce could be obtained just as easily. As one Russian journalist summarized, “Divorce was a matter of choice. Abortions were legalized. All of that implied a total liberation of family and sexual relations.”    Madame Smidovich, a leading Communist propagandist, put it this way: “To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup, and we did.”  Almost immediately, however, this experiment began to spiral the nation downward.    Men across the country divorced their wives and sought new sexual encounters. The number of illegitimate children swelled by hundreds of thousands. Women with children were abandoned, while the more enterprising among them blackmailed multiple men for child support. Despite the State’s decree that fathers must pay alimony to their children regardless of marital status, thousands of children were kicked to the curb because they could not—or would not—be cared for. From there, an ungovernable criminal element developed in Russia’s largest cities. Given Russia’s dismal economic situation, the idea that the state would care for these children proved laughable.    A Russian writer of that time observed, “It was not an unusual occurrence for a boy of twenty to have had three or four wives, or for a girl of the same age to have had three or four abortions.”   The status of women devolved as well. As Madame Smidovich described in Pravda, the Communist newspaper: “If a man lusts after a young girl, whether she is a student, a worker, or even a school-age girl, then the girl must obey his lust; otherwise, she will be considered a bourgeois daughter, unworthy to be called a true communist.”     As the 1920s wore on, however, Russia’s Soviet leaders were forced by reality to change course and desperately attempted to stem the tide of fatherlessness, crime, legal confusion, and economic disaster.   In many ways, the Russian family never recovered. Even today, Russia’s birth rate continues to plummet. As late as the 1990s, and despite decades of government propaganda encouraging population growth, one study found that in some parts of Russia, there were 770 abortions per 100 births—“by far the highest rate anywhere in the world.”   In 1920, on the other side of the world, G.K. Chesterton prophetically wrote that “[t]his triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilisations which disregard it.”     History is full of examples of societies that tamper with God’s design for marriage, sex, and the family. It’s no coincidence that en vogue progressive ideas today, ideas with distinct roots in cultural Marxism, also decry marriage and the family as oppressive institutions that should be reimagined and sexual morality as outdated and even harmful.   These things are not mere “social constructs,” however. They are laws of reality, like gravity. As Dallas Willard once observed, “We can’t choose to step off the roof and then choose to not hit the ground.” That’s true for individuals and societies alike.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Imagine Congress was considering a bill to protect “religious liberty.” Let’s say the bill’s author openly admitted his intention was to “allow maximum religious freedom.” Maybe he says he’s concerned about attempted governmental restrictions on Christian religious expression in particular.  Now imagine what the reaction to such a proposal would be on “X,” formerly known as Twitter. Surely this would be labeled “Christian Nationalism.” Congress would be accused of trying to establish a theocracy.   What if I told you that bill was real, and that it was called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and that it was introduced by one Democratic Representative Chuck Schumer and signed into law by President Bill Clinton 30 years ago next month?  It’s remarkable how quickly and dramatically the Overton Window has shifted in 30 years. It’s important to remember that RFRA was widely supported and uncontroversial up until about five minutes ago. Christians shouldn’t be ashamed or bullied into believing that the right to live out our faith is asking too much. The truth remains: Everyone benefits when the government respects “maximum religious freedom.” For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Two significant academic scandals from the past year underscore why the new book Critical Dilemma, written by Drs. Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer, is so timely and important. In my view, this book offers the definitive critique of critical theory from a Christian worldview. You can receive a copy for a gift to the Colson Center this month. (Just go to colsoncenter.org/October).  Eric Stewart, a former professor in the highly rated criminology department at Florida State University, is the principal author of a paper that concluded that, as Black and Latino populations increased, so did the public’s demand for more discriminatory sentencing. After the paper was published, his co-author Justin Pickett, a professor at the University of Albany, noticed problems with the data:   "Pickett found that their sample size somehow had increased from 500 to over 1,000 respondents, the counties polled had decreased from 326 to 91, and the data was altered to the point of mathematical impossibility."  When Pickett approached Stewart with his concerns, he replied with evasive answers and would not share the complete data set. In Pickett’s analysis of the data from the first set of 500, the results did not support the conclusion that an increasing Black or Latino population is linked to more severe sentencing. If anything, the initial results pointed to the opposite conclusion. Also in the original survey, unanswered questions left blank had been filled in with “imputed values,” presumably by Stewart.  Both the journal that originally published the paper and Florida State University were reluctant to retract the paper or to take action against Stewart. However, the university’s hand was forced by the discovery of five other papers by Stewart that were also based on falsified data. Once that came to light, Stewart abruptly left his $190,000 position at the university.  Perhaps Professor Stewart faked data for grants or due to the pressure to publish. Perhaps he was convinced his theories were correct and too important to be proven wrong. Whatever the case, the data was falsified in support of ideas central to Critical Race Theory, and the consequences were more than merely academic. It’s hard not to believe that his studies have been used to shape policy when he’s garnered over $3.5 million in grant funding from taxpayer-funded organizations.   The more recent scandal involves Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Kendi authored How to Be an Antiracist, a book that shot to the top of The New York Times bestseller list and remained there for nearly a year. Boston University launched a center dedicated to Kendi’s ideas and hired him to head it. By the end of 2021, the center had collected over $45 million in funding.  Despite that funding, the center recently laid off about half its staff due to significant budgetary problems. A few initiatives had been launched, but the center produced minimal research. Staffers accused the center of a dysfunctional work environment and mismanagement.  Unlike the leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization, Kendi has not been accused of misappropriating donations, though he commands extraordinarily high speaking fees. This seems to be a case of an academic superstar put in charge of a center, who lays out ambitious goals, but is not competent to run it.  Clearly, Kendi wasn’t properly vetted by the university or by donors. The corporations that donated clearly ignored an argument central to Kendi’s antiracism, that capitalism is oppressive and should be dismantled.   Each incident underscores both the pervasive influence of Critical Theory on academic culture and its flaws as a theory. Like all ideas, Critical Theory and its offshoots (Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, Queer Theory, and others) have consequences. Like all bad ideas, it has victims.   For the sake of truth and out of love for our neighbors, Christians must be prepared to push back against these bad ideas. This requires understanding these ideas and responding to them with competence and grace for the people who hold them.   Critical Dilemma: The Rise of Critical Theories and Social Justice Ideology is such a crucial resource right now. Authors Shenvi and Sawyer take seriously the worldview behind various versions of Critical Theory, identify each version’s central ideas, and define key terms such as “intersectionality,” “antiracism,” “privilege,” “wokeness,” “heteronormativity,” and others. They trace the history of these ideas and offer a thorough response from a Christian worldview. As our way of saying thank you for a gift to the Colson Center this month, you can receive a copy of Critical Dilemma by Drs. Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer. To request a copy, go to colsoncenter.org/October.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Glenn Sunshine. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

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