Breakpoint

A lot of disinformation has been spread about the recent Supreme Court ruling in the case defending a Colorado graphic designer’s free speech rights. John and Maria discuss some new thoughts surrounding the ethics of medicine.   — Recommendations — Further Up & Further In The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession by Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen Section 1 - Correcting Misinformation on 303 Creative v. Elenis "The Smearing of Lorie Smith" The Wall Street Journal "Correcting the Record on 303 Creative" Breakpoint Section 2 - What is medicine for? "What is medicine for?" Kristin M Collier   Kristin Collier at the Colson Center National Conference   Section 3 - Further Up and Further In Great Lakes Symposium on Christian Worldview Further Up & Further In   For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

The cases involving affirmative action and Lorie Smith and 303 Creative have received the most attention from the recent Supreme Court term, but another ruling has important implications for religious liberty. The Court ruled that U.S. Post Office employee Gerald Groff could not be forced to work on Sundays.   Thanks are due to Groff and his lawyers at The First Liberty Institute. In the past, employers could get away with merely offering lip service to religious exemptions for workers because any vaguely defined “undue hardship” for the bosses overrode their faith concerns. Now, employers must demonstrate that accommodating an employee’s faith would entail a “substantial increased cost” before demanding their conformity.   The ruling is a final blow to the “now abrogated” Lemon Test that hampered religious liberty for a half-century. It also provides legal standing for challenging other impositions on religious liberty at work—such as being forced to use “preferred pronouns,” or post rainbow flags, or join “pride” marches.   For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

A recent CBS News article claims, in its very title in fact, to separate “medical facts from misinformation” around so-called “gender-affirming care.” However, rather than separate the facts from the falsehoods, the article peddles lies and half-truths, assuming the conclusions it claims to prove in a thinly veiled piece of progressive propaganda. And that’s about the nicest thing that can be said about it.  The first dead giveaway about the piece is how it smuggles transgender ideology into its chosen language and terminology. Rather than refer to boys and girls, or young males and females, the author refers to “kids with testes” and “those with ovaries.”   The piece then claims to set the record straight about what is involved in diagnosing gender dysphoria and administering “gender-affirming care.” Here, too, its claims could not be further from the truth. According to the author, “the process informing these treatments is a long and intensive one.” This directly conflicts with an increasing number of testimonies from whistleblowers and de-transitioners who sought out this kind of care, not to mention the information given by providers like Planned Parenthood.   According to a whistleblower and former case manager at Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, “[T]he majority” of young people who came to them “received hormone prescriptions.” Likewise, Helena Kirschner, a young woman who detransitioned, received testosterone as a teenager after her very first visit to Planned Parenthood.    It’s notable that Planned Parenthood doesn’t even cover up this information. On some office webpages, the abortion giant happily promotes that “[i]n most cases your clinician will be able to prescribe hormones the same day as your first visit. No letter from a mental health provider is required.” Getting high-powered, life-altering drugs on your first visit hardly involves a “long and intensive” diagnosis process.   The piece also falsely presents the effects of chemical “transition” interventions as reversible and harmless, peddling the lie that puberty blockers are like a “pause button” for puberty, which can be stopped and restarted with no long-term effect. Contrary to this claim, recent studies have found that the lasting adverse effects of the puberty-blocking drug Lupron, which is used to halt puberty primarily in young girls, include brittle bones and faulty joints. The piece also tries to soften the truth about cross-sex hormones by saying that some of their effects are reversible. However, changes caused in secondary sexual characteristics, such as deepened voices, facial hair, breast growth, and infertility are not reversible in the least.   At the heart of most transgender propaganda is the claim that transitioning children has mental health benefits and can save them from suicide. Unsurprisingly, this piece repeats that claim while ignoring the facts that do not line up. The piece cites a popular but deeply flawed study among trans-advocates that those who received cross-sex hormones as minors had better mental health outcomes than those who received them as adults.   However, the study’s flawed design makes it impossible to sufficiently isolate cross-sex hormones, or lack thereof, as the determining factor of mental health outcomes. In fact, better research shows the opposite conclusion. For example, in states where youth were able to access chemical “transition” interventions without parental consent, youth suicide rates were higher than those who required parental consent. Additionally, the longest-term study on the effects of transitioning has found that those who transition are over 19 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population.   Far from causing harm, denying irreversible and sterilizing chemical and surgical interventions actually helps children who are distressed by their bodies. Granted time and space, many learn to accept their bodies and God-given identities. However, propaganda pieces like this one published by CBS confuse those called to care for children and only contributes to their harm. If journalists and media outlets really want to dispel misinformation and help vulnerable children, they should stop blindly repeating the lies of gender ideologues.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Jared Eckert.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

This week in 1924, Eric Liddell (1902-1945) won an Olympic gold medal in the 400-meter race. As a devout Christian, Liddell decided to never race on Sundays. Imagine his dismay when he realized that his best race—the 100-meter—was scheduled for a Sunday.   Liddell withdrew, to the derision of many Britons who thought he was being disloyal to his nation. He quickly pivoted for the 200-meter and 400-meter races, taking third in the 200-meter and claiming the gold in the 400-meter.   Liddell was the son of Scottish missionaries to China, and his story was memorialized in the film Chariots of Fire, which won the Oscar in 1982 for Best Picture. Despite athletic success, Liddell returned to China the following year. During World War II, the Japanese took over his mission station and placed him in an internment camp, where he faithfully served Christ and others before dying of a brain tumor in 1945.    Liddell’s Olympic-time decision was consistent with the life he lived in faithful service to Christ, who “made [him] for China,” but who also “made [him] fast.” He ran every race, including the race of life, to “feel God’s pleasure.”  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org This Point was originally published 6.12.22.  

Recently, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s important decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis, a lie has been propagated about the case, a lie that purportedly implicates plaintiff Lorie Smith and the Alliance Defending Freedom. Thanks to the willingness of media outlets, public officials, and pundits to repeat these accusations and misrepresent what they mean, this lie has the potential to poison the cultural memory about this critically important case. The accusation is that 303 Creative, the graphic design company at the center of the lawsuit, and ADF invented a fake customer request for a same-sex wedding website and that, because of this deceit, the Court should have never heard the case in the first place.   It’s important to correct the record. Many Christians joined with other champions of free speech to celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision in the 303 case. However, Christians do not believe that the “ends justify the means.” A win derived out of false witness and deception cannot be celebrated. That’s the kind of win that headline after headline has proclaimed. However, that’s not what happened here, as Kristen Waggoner, president and general counsel of ADF, and Erin Hawley, senior counsel of ADF, explained this week in The Wall Street Journal.  The origin of the 303 Creative case dates to 2016, when Lorie Smith, who founded the creative design company four years earlier, wanted to include a disclaimer on her website. Hoping to add custom website design for weddings to her menu of services, she wanted to clarify that, as a Christian believer, she could not create custom wedding websites for “same-sex weddings.” Given the hostility the state of Colorado had leveled at cake baker Jack Phillips, Lorie knew that she’d likely be considered in violation of the state’s broad anti-discrimination law.   With the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, Lorie and 303 Creative filed a pre-enforcement challenge, a common legal procedure that allows people to challenge a law before they are penalized under it. This procedure recognizes what should be obvious, that free citizens should not have to first be punished under an unconstitutional law before they are able to challenge its constitutionality.  The day after ADF first filed Lorie’s case, Lorie received a request to create a custom wedding website for someone named Stewart, who said he was marrying someone named Mike. ADF included this request as an addendum to 303 Creative’s lawsuit, not as the basis for it, in order to demonstrate that Lorie was under real pressure to violate her beliefs.  From the very beginning of Lorie’s case—from the federal district court in Colorado where ADF first filed the lawsuit, through the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, all the way to the Supreme Court—each judge acknowledged that Lorie had both the right and the standing to bring her case as a pre-enforcement challenge. As Waggoner and Hawley wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Every one of the 12 appellate judges who heard the case agreed that Ms. Smith had standing, and none of their opinions even considered whether she received a request for a same-sex wedding website.” However, just days after the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects Lorie from state coercion and that she cannot be forced to say something that violates her beliefs, a news outlet alleged that the website request Lorie Smith had received was fake. According to the report, a man claiming to be Stewart, whose address and contact information matched what had been submitted in the 2016 request, denied ever making it.  Immediately, the false memory machine was in motion. Multiple news outlets seized on the accusation, suggesting the case was illegitimate. Even being accused of faking anti-Christian discrimination is often functionally sufficient to be convicted in the court of cultural memory.  The most likely scenario, of course, is that the request was made by an activist who either hoped that it would undermine the 303 Creative case or could be held (as it was) and brought out in case of an unfavorable decision. Still, whether the request came from a legitimate customer, an activist, or ChatGPT is irrelevant because the case was always a pre-enforcement challenge. Critics are free to dislike the ruling, in which case they should take it up with the U.S. Constitution. But they can’t change the facts. In fact, they are also free to express a lie about the case if they choose, though ironically, that’s at least partly due to what the Court ruled in this case they are committed to undermining.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Maria Baer.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

It is typically entertaining when two popular intellectuals get into a public spat. Recently, Canadian psychologist and YouTube star Jordan Peterson called out the famous British biologist Richard Dawkins with an “I told you so!”   After Dawkins complained on Twitter about New Zealand elevating traditional Maori stories to the same level as Western science, Peterson retorted, “Welcome to the world of post-humanism, sir. A world which you sadly helped birth. … [I]t wouldn’t surprise me at all if the woke polytheistic neopaganists destroy science faster than they destroy Christianity.”   On one hand, Dawkins is right that the whole genius of “Western” science is that it isn’t just Western. But, as Peterson not so gently noted, Dawkins has spent his career tearing down the religious foundations upon which Western science is built. Without God and all that His existence implies, there is no solid ground for saying that any knowledge, scientific or otherwise, is true for everyone.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Jessica Bates lost her husband a few years ago in a car wreck. This would be devastating for anyone, but through her grief over her loss, she’s decided to open her heart and home to others. As she lacks a husband, she’s now reaching out to those who have no parents, trying to adopt children in her home state of Oregon. Mind you, this is in addition to the five children left fatherless by her husband’s death. It takes a special love to take in those who need a home. It takes a strong love and a strong heart to do so while raising little ones alone.  You can imagine Jessica’s surprise when the state turned her down on ideological grounds. To warrant the state’s approval to care for parentless children, she had to sign off on “affirming” any potential adopted child’s desire for transgender pronouns, chemical sterilization, and other practices that would have been rightly seen as child abuse just a few years ago.  As the Alliance Defending Freedom said of her case,   "Oregon officials are preventing Jessica from adopting a child because of her Christian beliefs — despite the fact that they otherwise accommodate people of different religious and cultural backgrounds and try to pair children with families who are well suited to each other. It’s a blatant act of religious discrimination, and it must end." This ideological enforcement is not an isolated thing. Last year, the governor of Michigan used her veto power to cut from the state budget millions of dollars allocated to help pro-life groups and Christian adoption agencies. It’s not enough, apparently, that these groups work to help “the least of these.” To get state funds, they also must toe the party line when it comes to supporting abortion.  In America today, there are nearly 400,000 children in the foster care system and over 100,000 waiting to be adopted. Adoption is a beautiful gift that’s close to the heart of Christianity, a legacy of the Church’s earliest days when unwanted kids, mostly girls, were left on the trash heap by Roman parents. Christians responded by taking these little ones into their homes.  There’s hardly a better picture of who we are in Christ than adoption. As sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, lost through their Fall, we have been brought into the household of God. The Apostle Paul notes in Galatians,  "... born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So, you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God."  Drawing on this same beautiful theme, few acts live out this love that God has shown for us than this unique way of loving our neighbor. What better way to reflect the love poured out on us and to realize the restoring work to which our adoptive heavenly Father has called us than to fix what’s broken in these little lives?  This is an opportunity to move from outrage to a constructive strategy. If you are in a state that is holding back this Christian love from showing forth in children’s hearts, call on your representatives to tell them that this is not the way. Or, wherever you live, think of supporting adoption agencies and awaiting parents with funds and goods to help them bring the homeless into their families. Or, if God calls you in this way, prayerfully consider opening your home and heart to those either in temporary foster care or permanently orphaned.  As Chuck Colson said almost 30 years ago now,  "More than ever, we need to work to promote alternatives to abortion, especially adoption. Couples who take in needy infants and selflessly care for them should not be penalized by policies motivated by political correctness."  Working to free potential parents from unwarranted state restrictions and to support them in these adoptions is a clear case where Christian love meets civic duty.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

One of the most important and effective pro-life leaders is Kristan Hawkins, founder and president of Students for Life of America. Kristan became a pro-life advocate in her early teens when she began serving at a pregnancy care center. Her goal is to make abortion “unthinkable and unavailable across the US.”  For years she rallied and mobilized young Americans by calling them the “post-Roe generation.” Though the Dobbs decision last June in a sense fulfilled that rallying cry, the real vision of Students for Life of America has always been the end of all abortions, and the protection of life beginning at conception.   Recently, the headline of a BBC article on Kristan ominously said, “She Helped Kill Roe v Wade - now she wants to end all abortion,” as if that wasn’t always the goal. For Kristan, the end of Roe is a partial win on the way to building a culture of life. As she put it to the BBC, “I always tell our team: winners envision the win.” For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Several years ago, Max McLean and the Fellowship for Performing Arts staged The Most Reluctant Convert, a play about the life of C.S. Lewis up to his conversion. During the Covid shutdowns, that production was made into a film that received strong reviews. Now, McLean and FPA are offering a follow-up stage production dealing with Lewis’ life post-conversion.   Although Further Up and Further In includes some biographical information, such as the writing of The Problem of Pain and the recording of the BBC talks that were later published in Mere Christianity, this new production takes the much more challenging route of exploring the different aspects of Lewis’ ministry. Not surprisingly, much of the production is focused on his apologetics.  In his day, the great challenge to Christianity was materialism, the idea that everything is just matter and energy. Lewis responded to this by tracing out the implications of that view and showing its utter implausibility. He notes that scientists “observe the behavior of things within the universe. They cannot make statements about things beyond the universe.” Any time a scientist does that, for example by proclaiming that matter and energy are all that exist, he is no longer doing science.  Even more, Lewis says, if materialism is true, there is no reason to trust the scientist doing science. After all, he rightly observed,   "If the materialist view is true, our minds must in reality be merely chance arrangements of atoms in skulls. We never think a thought because it is true, only because blind Nature forces us to think it. We never do an act because it is right, only because blind Nature forces us to do it."   This argument, which can also be found in slightly different form in the work of Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, is a powerful response to atheism. If atheism is true, any foundation for trusting science or human reason is undermined.  Rather than defend a particular denomination of Christianity, Lewis believed that “the only service [he] could do for [his] unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians and at all times.” This led him to write The Problem of Pain and from there to do his broadcast talks for the BBC. As a result, he began receiving massive numbers of letters. Though he dismissed some, he felt obligated to respond to any serious inquiries received. Some evenings after work, Lewis wrote up to 35 letters.  Much of Further Up and Further In is adapted from volume two of Lewis’ collected letters, a 1,152-page tome. Through an adaptation of some of these letters, we see his work as an evangelist. For example, in the play, a young atheist contacts Lewis with questions, and Lewis responds. After a series of exchanges, the young atheist decides to take the step of committing himself to Christ. Lewis responds with advice on how to grow in faith and hang on to it through doubts. In the end, Lewis argues, “It all hinges on Jesus. If His statements are false, Christianity is of no importance. If true, it is of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.”   As a literary scholar, Lewis anticipated the argument that the Gospels cannot be trusted, pointing out that the Gospels include statements that would hardly be expected if they were made up by people trying to prove the divinity of Jesus. Rather, the difficulties that they pose are solid evidence for the truthfulness of the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’s teaching.  Toward the end of Further Up and Further In, the character of Lewis turns his focus to Christians, offering advice on temptation (something he had discussed in The Screwtape Letters), the crucial importance of prayer, the Second Coming and the end of the world, and heaven. Much of this advice remains as helpful today as when he first offered it.  Once again, Max McLean and the Fellowship for Performing Arts show why Lewis’ popularity and value have endured. Further Up and Further In is currently on tour. How Lewis engaged the materialists of his time is a model for engaging people today who, though coming from a different worldview, seem just as unable to acknowledge the reality that God has made known in His world.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Glenn Sunshine.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Recently, the FDA approved a brain-implanted computer chip, developed by Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, for human trials.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org