Podcast appearances and mentions of Shane Morris

An feachtas olltoghcháin sa nGearmáin - tuairim Shane Morris atá ag cur faoi i bhFrankfurt.

Welcome back to TruthCurrents! The holidays are passed. It's 2025, and it's time for us to look forward. A new year usually brings out resolutions because we've decided that there are things in our lives we want to make better because we're chasing a nebulous idea: I want to be happy. Well, we now have scientific research that tells us the secret recipe for being happy. Katelyn Walls Shelton, “Who are the happiest people in America?” December 16, 2024. Shane Morris, “Looking for happiness?” August 2, 2024.

100 GREATEST MOTIVATIONAL QUOTES OF ALL TIME! We spent a lot of time researching and compiling the greatest motivational and inspirational quotes in history.Narrated by Shane Morris and Jarrett Grossmanhttp://www.shanemorrisvoiceovers.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The primal sound of prehistoric hand drums, brought to the present by space-defining ambient electronics. In the 1980s, elements of ancient indigenous music were embraced by electronic musicians searching for an earthy, vital sound to balance the dematerialized tones of electronic instruments, ground the atmospheric soundscapes of ambient, and gain the power of ritual experience. The new genre was originally called "Techno-Tribal," but as the Techno label became associated with electronic dance music, it was renamed "Tribal Ambient." Today, the period of discovery is long past, but a dedicated group of electro-acoustic artists with a taste for rhythm-powered trance continue to explore the sound and release new music. On this transmission of Hearts of Space, another ethno-tronic journey on psychoactive rhythms, on a program called TRIBAL AMBIENT 2. Music is by STEVE ROACH & ROBERT RICH, BYRON METCALF + ARI URBAN & MARK SEELIG, FRORE & SHANE MORRIS, SERENA GABRIEL, SOLITAIRE, and STEVE ROACH solo. [ view playlist ] [ view Flickr image gallery ] [ play 30 second MP3 promo ]

With the release of so many books critiquing purity culture, what has the backlash been like? Well, let's talk about it with Zachary Wagner, the author of Non-Toxic Masculinity as we celebrate the one-year anniversary of the launch of She Deserves Better. To Support Us:Join our Patreon for as little as $5 a month to support our workFor tax deductible donations in the U.S., support Good Fruit Faith Initiative through the Bosko FoundationAnd check out our Merch, or any of our courses!About Zachary Wagner: Find Zachary's book Non-Toxic MasculinityFind Zachary on InstagramThings Mentioned in the Podcast: Our book She Deserves Better!Zachary's response to the review from Shane Morris on The Gospel CoalitionBob and Dannah Gresh's appearance at Cedarville UniversityInformation about Dannah calling 8-year-old's bellies intoxicatingFred Stoeker's appearance on Focus on the FamilyMatthew West's podcast discussing Modest is HottestJoin Sheila at Bare Marriage.com!Check out her books: The Great Sex Rescue She Deserves Better The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex and The Good Guy's Guide to Great Sex And she has an Orgasm Course and a Libido course too!Check out all her courses, FREE resources, books, and so much more at Sheila's LinkTree.

Shane Morris is now a Senior Executive Advisor at Devis. Join us at our first in-person conference on June 25 all about AI Quality: https://www.aiqualityconference.com/ Huge thank you to  @WeightsBiases  for sponsoring this episode. WandB Free Courses - https://wandb.ai/telidavies/ml-news/reports/Introducing-W-B-MLOps-Courses-Free-Course-Effective-MLOps-Model-Development--VmlldzozMDk2ODA2 MLOps podcast #223 with Shane Morris, Senior Executive Advisor of Devis, Data Engineering in the Federal Sector. // Abstract Let's focus on autonomous systems rather than automation, and then super-narrow it down to smaller, cheaper, and more accessible autonomous systems. // Bio Former music and entertainment data and software person somehow moves into defense and national security, with hilarious and predictable results. // MLOps Jobs board https://mlops.pallet.xyz/jobs // MLOps Swag/Merch https://mlops-community.myshopify.com/ // Related Links AI Quality in Person Conference: https://www.aiqualityconference.com/ Website: https://shanemorris.sucks TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shanemorrisdotsucks WandB Free Courses - https://wandb.ai/telidavies/ml-news/reports/Introducing-W-B-MLOps-Courses-Free-Course-Effective-MLOps-Model-Development--VmlldzozMDk2ODA2 --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Shane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanetollmanmorris/

Highlights from this episode include avoiding emotional manipulation, canonizing personal preferences, the "narcissism" boogeyman, and weaponized feelings. Matt will be speaking at the upcoming King's Domain conference, "Gendered Virtue: Men and Women Who Take Dominion,” April 18-20, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. Other speakers include Joe Rigney, Michael Foster, Toby Sumpter, and Shane Morris. More details at www.genderedvirtue.com. Matt is the founding pastor of Christ the Lord Church in Dayton, OH. https://ctldayton.com/ Follow Matt on X: https://x.com/MattMcBee05 Follow Matt's podcast: The Withywindle: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-withywindle/id1685532188

Highlights from this episode include our discussion of awkward Christian sex manuals, woke movies, merchants of misery, why woke people are unhappy, bitterness traps, and the apologetics of joy. Michael will be speaking at the upcoming King's Domain conference, "Gendered Virtue: Men and Women Who Take Dominion,” April 18-20, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. Other speakers include Joe Rigney, Toby Sumpter, Shane Morris, and others. More details at www.genderedvirtue.com. Follow Michael on X: https://twitter.com/thisisfoster Follow Michael's podcast by searching for "This is Foster" on podcast platforms

Of the thousands of green revelers, few know about the slave and evangelist for whom St. Patrick's Day is named. To learn more about this man of faith and his consequential life, check out this Breakpoint interview between Shane Morris and T.M. Moore, a former colleague of Chuck's and the author of Celtic Flame: The Burden of St. Patrick. __________ Get your copy of The Deconstruction of Christianity with your gift of any amount this month at colsoncenter.org/march. 

In this episode, Shane Morris and I talk have a really interesting conversation about masculinity, femininity, anthropological heresies, and how the on-demand birth control broke everyone's brains. Shane will also be speaking at the upcoming King's Domain conference, "Gendered Virtue: Men and Women Who Take Dominion,” April 18-20, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. Other speakers include Michael Foster, Toby Sumpter, Joe Rigney, and others. More details at www.genderedvirtue.com Shane is the host of the Colson Center's Upstream Podcast. https://www.colsoncenter.org/upstream/ Follow Shane on X: https://twitter.com/GShaneMorris Follow Shane on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gregory.s.morris.9

In this episode, Dr. Joe Rigney and I have a fascinating conversation about a challenge of modern ministry leadership that is rarely discussed: emotional sabotage. We also talk about people pleasing, social stampedes, competitive victimhood, maternal vampires, and more. Joe will also be speaking at the upcoming King's Domain conference, "Gendered Virtue: Men and Women Who Take Dominion,” April 18-20, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. Other speakers include Michael Foster, Toby Sumpter, Shane Morris, and others. More details at www.genderedvirtue.com Check out Joe's book, "Leadership and Emotional Sabotage" at https://emotionalsabotage.com/ You can also bulk order 5 or more copies of his book and schedule a Private Q&A with your team & the author. This offer ends March 1st. Joe Rigney is a fellow of theology at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. Follow Joe on X: https://twitter.com/joe_rigney

Shane leaves the Gold Coast of Australia in 2003 to join Princess as a Casino Slot Tech without actually being a slot machine technician. He has a very long sleepless journey getting to the Carnival Glory - and then has even worse first week onboard. He tells the story about being selected for a random drug test after a crew party on the Diamond Princess.

In this episode, Pastor Toby Sumpter and I talk about joyful fatherhood, raising sons and daughters, God's grace for broken families, and more. Toby will be speaking at the upcoming King's Domain conference, "Gendered Virtue: Men and Women Who Take Dominion,” April 18-20, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. Other speakers include Michael Foster, Joe Rigney, Shane Morris, and others. More details at genderedvirtue.com Toby is the pastor of King's Cross church in Moscow, Idaho. https://www.kingscrossmoscow.com/ Toby's books are available from Canon Press. https://canonpress.com/search?q=sumpter Toby's podcasts can be found at  https://flfnetwork.com/ and https://crosspolitic.com/. Toby's blog is https://tobyjsumpter.com/ Follow Toby on X: https://twitter.com/TJSumpter

In a newly resurfaced clip from 2020, English philosopher A.C. Grayling claimed he could think of nothing truly unique that Christianity had given the world. Historian Tom Holland replied with what my colleague Shane Morris called, “one of his best ‘mic drop' moments.”   In about 90 seconds, Holland rattled off a list that included lifelong marriage, concepts of sexuality that protected women and children, the modern scientific project, the idea that humans bear the image of God, the universality of ethics, and more.  As Holland put it, “Essentially what I'm talking about … is … what makes Western civilization distinctive.” These ideas ended slavery, expanded care to the poor, established democracy, educated the masses, and insisted that everyone be under the same law. The source of every one of these ideas is centuries of Christian reflection on the truths of the Bible. In short, what has Christianity given the world? Nearly everything that matters the most. 

One feature of American life  for some time now is that women, as a group, tend to fall to the left of men politically. For much of the twentieth century, that gap was relatively minor. Until 1980, in fact, the sexes voted within a few percentage points of each other. Since then, things have changed dramatically.   Citing polling data from Gallup, Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies recently pointed out that the percentage of young men ages 18 to 29 who identify as Republican has risen by double digits in the last decade. “Some have doubted the idea that young men (18-29) are turning right,” he tweeted. “Time for them to wake up.”  As late as the mid-2000s, a similar portion of 18- to 29-year-olds of both sexes—just under 30%—identified as “liberal.” However, according to an American Enterprise Institute survey last year, 46% of white Gen Z women called themselves “liberal.”  Some conservative scholars like the Acton Institute's Anthony Bradley think this emerging divide extends beyond political commitments to other areas as well, including morality. Last week, he tweeted:  "Gen Z is different. Women are more liberal than the men and this includes personal morality as well. More and more guys are willing to wait until marriage & fewer women are. Women now celebrate having a “high body count” [a.k.a., many sexual partners] as a[n] empowerment. Today's young men are more traditional." More evidence is required before we can conclude that American young men have had some kind of moral awakening, especially given the popularity of morally objectionable figures like fitness influencer and depraved pickup artist Andrew Tate. Still, the trends in self-description seem to hold in other polls, even for high schoolers.   One factor behind this striking political divide between the sexes, especially the rightward turn among young men, is the Left's obsession with condemning “the patriarchy” and “toxic masculinity.” Many young men hear this as a condemnation of their very existence. Similarly, the leftward lurch among women could have something to do with the perception that abortion is a women's issue and the increasingly hysterical warnings that restricting abortion is the equivalent of subjecting women to Handmaid's Tale-style reproductive slavery.   Still, pollsters have noted for decades now one thing that reliably predicts conservative views and voting, especially among women: marriage. Pick pretty much any election in any year, and half or even most married women vote differently than their unmarried counterparts. In the 2020 election, for instance, the gap between how married and unmarried women voted was 15 points, compared with a 10-point gap between married and unmarried men. As we know, marriage has been in steep decline for years. In fact, Pew Research reports that the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married is higher today than at any time on record. Fertility, too, is near a record low, making our country more single and more childless than at any other time in its history. It would be foolish to think these numbers would not eventually show up in political behavior, and that one of the most likely proofs would be the widening gap between the voting habits of men and women.  Marriage and family are chief among what conservative writers have long called society's “mediating institutions,” those layers between individuals and the state that provide security, opportunity, and meaning without the government's intervention. As entering marriages and creating families becomes rarer, it's little wonder so many who historically would have looked for protection and provision in the home are now instead looking to Washington.  In other words, the wedges that radical feminism, the sexual revolution, and the breakdown of the family have driven between the sexes are likely the main reason for this growing political divide. Women and men were created for one another, not just to build families but to build societies. Since each sex is indispensable, both, in their own ways, are lost when isolated. As the Apostle Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians, “Woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God.”   Instead of pointing fingers at one another as Adam and Eve did after the fall, we should take this emerging political divide as clear evidence that without our oldest and most important mediating institution—the family, society unravels. There's no way forward if men and women remain at such loggerheads, not only does dating become a nightmare, but the future is at risk. After all, the government cannot birth new citizens, voters, and taxpayers. Men and women stand or fall together. A nation in which the sexes are at war is a house divided against itself at the most fundamental level. Such a house cannot stand.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.  _________ “Follow your heart!” How many times have we heard this self-centered “truth” that is really a dressed-up version of the oldest lie in the world?   In Don't Follow Your Heart: Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worship, author Thaddeus Williams exposes and refutes the false narratives enshrined in our secular culture. Exchange the futility of the “cult of self” that promises fulfillment and freedom for a life of courageous faith in Jesus, the true source of life. Request your copy today by visiting colsoncenter.org/january. 

In the last few years, the credibility of science or, more accurately, scientists, has taken more than a few hits. Take for instance the rush by many doctors, researchers, academics, and medical institutions to force transgender ideology on children. For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society have both issued guidelines for medically transitioning minors. From the beginning, maverick scientists have called foul, pointing out that the safety and long-term effectiveness of such “treatments” had not been evaluated. It seems now that only real-world consequences for actual children can curb the enthusiasm for untested and misguided experimentation on kids.   In 2022, the U.K.'s largest gender clinic announced its closure over a lack of evidence to support its ghoulish interventions. Shortly afterward, U.K. lawyer Tom Goodhead estimated that around 1,000 families would join in legal action against the clinic, claiming their children were “misdiagnosed and rushed into transitioning.” The first lawsuits against the American Academy of Pediatrics have also been filed by a child who grew up and regretted transitioning.   Transgender “medicine” isn't the only practice advanced as “scientifically proven” despite the absence of evidence. Even earlier, assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and surrogacy were pushed on the public with little understanding of or concern for the safety and long-term consequences for women and children. Like transgender medicine, the line is that the “science says the kids will be fine.” Don't buy it.   Recently, the Heritage Foundation's Emma Waters reviewed the available evidence about some of these technologies. “Despite what many experts want you to believe,” she writes, “we actually know very little about the impact of surrogacy on the long-term wellbeing of children and families.” As it turns out, babies gestated by a surrogate show a marked increase in preterm births, physical defects, and low weight. This is just what we know for certain, partly because we've been kept in the dark.   As Waters explains, scholars who review the literature on surrogacy typically use studies that are outdated, small, short-term, or based on self-reporting by the “parents” who paid for the children. A frequently cited U.K. study “relied on the parents' own assessment of the child's wellbeing, not objective outcomes or the child him/herself.” Using that study as proof that surrogacy doesn't harm children is kind of like asking students to grade their own exams.  Waters suggests two major red flags about the current research: first, studies in which “the conclusions are too squeaky clean;” and second, studies whose “self acknowledged goal” is “showing that there are no differences between same-sex, natural, and artificially conceived families and the impact … on children.” In other words, these studies are advocacy, not science.   Constructing better studies, Waters argues, will require tracking children over longer periods, having surrogates report their number of pregnancies, keeping tabs on who sells or donates eggs and sperm, and knowing who children born of surrogates are and who their biological parents are. As she warns, “There is a huge difference between ‘no harms' and no *known* harms.”  Still, even without that research, there are pragmatic and moral reasons to oppose the creation of children with the intent to implant them or place them with strangers. Children were designed to know their parents. Separation from the man and woman who made them is a tragedy. Arrangements like foster care and adoption respond to that tragedy, but conceiving children with the express purpose of separating them from their parents is very different. It creates the tragedy.   Similarly, paying women to carry children for nine months and then forcing them to walk away as part of a commercial transaction ignores the intimacy and sanctity of that bond, as well as its ongoing, powerful effects on both carrier and baby.      Pope Francis was recently crystal clear on this one, despite his confusing and misleading statements on other serious issues. In a recent speech to diplomats, he blasted surrogacy as “deplorable,” insisting it “represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child,” whom it turns into “an object of trafficking.” “A child,” he added, “is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.”  In this age of accelerating technology, and ideologues eager to wield it, the most vulnerable members of society need someone to hold so-called “experts” accountable and to ask the questions about human design, purpose, rights, and relationships that no study can answer. No matter how scientific sounding they are, claims that we can ignore God's design for sex and the family are expressions of an anti-human worldview, not objective research. And that's a very good reason to say “no” to this worldview's ongoing demand for tiny test subjects.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.  _______ Don't Follow Your Heart is an incredibly important book that will help you unlock the lies behind each of the cultural lies of self-worship while also encouraging you to live with courageous faith for Christ in this cultural moment. Request your copy by giving a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month! 

To see this What Would You Say? video in its entirety and to share it with others, go to whatwouldyousay.org. Or, you can look up the What Would You Say? channel on YouTube. Be sure to subscribe to be notified each time a new video is released.   _________ Among the unexpected stories of 2023 was a renewed interest in all things extraterrestrial: from images of alien corpses; to retired high-ranking military officials claiming secret government programs launched to capture UFOs; to a strange encounter with Las Vegas police officers. The public interest in whether there's anything out there is as high as ever. But what would the existence of alien life mean for Christianity?   That's the question tackled in a brand new video, part of the What Would You Say? series, called “Would the Discovery of Alien Life Disprove Christianity?”   Many people assume that if any evidence were to be discovered for extraterrestrial life, it would be devastating to the Christian worldview. However, according to my colleague, Shane Morris, that's not necessarily the case. In fact, according to Shane, “There's nothing in the Christian view of the world that excludes the possibility that God created life on other planets.” In this video, Shane offers three things to keep in mind. First, that “despite the hype of science fiction and decades of searching, there is currently no evidence for life on other planets.”   [A]fter decades of looking and listening and exploring the heavens for that life, we've come up empty-handed. So much so, in fact, that physicists and astronomers have named the emptiness the Fermi Paradox, which refers to “the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.” In other words, if life happens easily, “Where is everybody?”    Ward and his co-author, Donald Brownlee, argue in Rare Earth that life doesn't happen that easily, and assuming that it does is the real mistake. At least a dozen special conditions found on our planet are probably necessary for the existence of intelligent life, including a precise orbital distance from our star, heavy elements, liquid water, a moon, a magnetic field, not too much gravity, a nearby gas giant, and having a star like our Sun, which, as it turns out, is anything but “ordinary.”    Shane's second point is that “even if intelligent life were found elsewhere in the universe, it wouldn't necessarily present a problem for Christianity.”  Before Star Trek or Star Wars existed, C.S. Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy. In it, he famously imagined alien races that never fell into sin. And in a few essays, Lewis wrestled with whether the existence of real-life extraterrestrials would threaten Christianity. According to Lewis, the Bible never says God created the vast cosmos only for humans…   For Lewis, intelligent aliens created and loved by God posed no problem, nor would they contradict the Bible. In the same essay, he cautioned that the Bible was not intended to satisfy our curiosity about such things but as an instruction manual for salvation. But he also warned that humans are in no position to tell God what He can and cannot do with His vast universe.     And finally, Shane states that “the Bible teaches that there are other beings in the universe, but they're not what materialists expect, and they do not always come in peace.”   Some biblical scholars, like the late Dr. Michael Heiser, have suggested that some alleged alien encounters may be the result of demonic activity and possession. After all, in 2 Corinthians 11:14 Paul warned that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.    This means that Christians need not believe every story of alien abductions or close encounters, but we need not immediately dismiss them as jokes or conspiracy theories. Christianity teaches that we are not alone in the universe, that it is full of intelligent entities, both good and evil, and that all were created by and remain under the power of God.    The existence of extraterrestrial life is still speculation, but the Christian worldview has more room for mysteries than our secular, materialist age does. It offers a bigger, more thorough, and more satisfying explanation for the universe.    That was Shane Morris answering the question “What would the discovery of extraterrestrial life mean for Christianity?”  To see the whole video and to share it with others, go to whatwouldyousay.org. Or, you can look up the What Would You Say? channel on YouTube. Be sure to subscribe to be notified each time a new video is released.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.  ______ As a Breakpoint listener, you probably pick up on how the daily commentaries do the work of translation for you. We take a story or issue being discussed in our culture right now and model how to think through it from a Christian worldview. But, if you're interested in going deeper, in discovering how to develop the wisdom and skills needed to walk wisely in this cultural moment, then the Colson Fellows program might be for you. This ten-month program combines theological, spiritual, and worldview formation through a carefully curated combination of readings, daily devotions, live webinars, and monthly meetings with your peers. With both in-person and fully online offerings, you can choose the format that works best with your stage in life. Interested in learning more? You can explore the program and submit an application at colsonfellows.org.

Last week on NBC's Meet the Press, Joe Biden's deputy campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, was asked what the president's top priority would be if reelected. His reply: “First of all: Roe. … The president has been adamant that we need to restore Roe. It is unfathomable that women today wake up in a country with less rights than their ancestors had years ago.”  According to Politico, President Biden's pro-choice agenda is “the strongest abortion rights platform of any general election candidate,” and the president seems to sense that this is among the very few issues trending in his favor. Of a recent Texas Supreme Court case in which a woman was denied a medical exception for an abortion, the president declared: “No woman should be forced to go to court or flee her home state just to receive the health care she needs. … This should never happen in America, period.”  Judging by the string of pro-life legislative defeats, most recently in the otherwise red Ohio and Virginia, many Americans agree with the president. One Politico analysis concluded, “When abortion rights are on the ballot, they win with voters across the political spectrum—though they don't always boost Democratic candidates on ballots advocating for them.” In an imminent presidential election that promises to be especially contentious, the received wisdom among progressive candidates is this: Vow to preserve, at all costs, the so-called “right to choose,” and it's likely that voters will choose me.  Of course, this reveals as much about the rest of the progressive agenda as it does about “reproductive rights.” Immigration and the southern border? Ukraine and Israel? Housing prices? Inflation? LGBTQ issues? The mental health crisis? These pressing issues are political liabilities for the president right now, so all the attention is on abortion.   It is more than a little ironic to see the heightened emphasis on abortion, considering how often Christians were accused of being “one-issue” voters. Post-Roe, left-wing politicians are forced to be more honest about abortion's central role in their political project.  And make no mistake, abortion is central not only to a progressive political agenda, but to the vision of “freedom” and selfhood this agenda has enshrined in American law and culture. In so many ways, abortion symbolizes the worldview in which autonomy and self-expression are the highest possible values. It's the logical endpoint of the pursuit of freedom from constraints, devoid of any notion of freedom for a created purpose.  In this view, connections to other human beings—including the most intimate and dependent connection of all—are only worthwhile insofar as they help citizens achieve that vision of limitless autonomy. If such connections get in the way of our freedoms, we should be free to sever them, no matter who suffers.    This deadly logic has become increasingly obvious in recent years as imaging technology in neo-natal care has made the humanity of preborn babies undeniable. Quite a few pro-abortion activists have responded by swallowing the proverbial poison pill and giving up on pretending children in the womb are “clumps of cells.” So what if they're human? These activists retort. Their death is an acceptable price for women to maintain absolute control over their own bodies and futures! If our vision of freedom requires people to die, so be it.   Still, abortion is heavily restricted or banned in 24 states, mostly as a direct result of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and there are a few hopeful signs that the public hasn't fully bought the logic of the extreme activists. For example, pro-abortion candidates, at least on the national level, still feel the need to pretend they find abortion distasteful. Last year, President Biden prefaced his support of abortion by saying, “I'm a practicing Catholic. I'm not big on abortion.” Also, abortion is still typically defended in public, not as an absolute, on-demand right, but as a necessary accommodation in sad but rare circumstances like rape, incest, and the life of the mother. These “wedge” arguments are deeply flawed and do not change the fact that intentionally taking an innocent human life is always wrong. However, their continued use indicates that Americans aren't quite ready to stomach the unrestricted killing of little people we find inconvenient.  Ultimately, the pro-life argument remains unchanged. The preborn are innocent human beings, made in God's image, and no one should be able to take their lives without cause. In fact, the most basic purpose of government is to protect its citizens' right to life, and if the government fails to do this, it is failing in the most basic way. Simply put, if killing babies in the womb is not wrong, the very concept of “rights” is a joke.  The president's eagerness to make abortion his top reelection priority is deeply significant, and it would be a mistake to dismiss the statement as mere politics. This issue has taken on symbolic, moral, and spiritual weight for our nation, and it will continue to be a bitterly fought battleground. Despite setbacks and disappointments, we can agree with the president on one thing. De-prioritizing this issue is not an option. The stakes—for our society and its most vulnerable members—are simply too high.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.

 Many Christian parents worry about how best to pass faith onto their children. Tragically, statistics suggest they are right to worry. In 2020, the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University found that  just 2% of millennials, a generation now well into adulthood, have a biblical worldview. That is the lowest of any generation since surveys on the topic began. According to a Lifeway Research report , two-thirds of those who attend church as teenagers will drop out of church as adults.   A significant aspect of the battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation has to do with ideas. Helping students think correctly about life and the world, God and themselves, would be hard enough if they weren't also facing such strong cultural headwinds. Simply put, many young people today leave the faith because they lack the necessary immunity from the bad ideas of our culture. Christian parents must not only present truth to their kids, they must find ways to immunize them against lies.     Dr. William McGuire, a Yale psychology professor in the 1950s, suggested that bad ideas behave like viruses. Specifically, he thought that the more exposure one has to bad ideas in a controlled setting, the less likely they are to fall for those ideas later.  McGuire performed several experiments in which he tried to convince subjects of a lie, that brushing teeth is bad for them. Unsurprisingly, those given no preparation for what they were about to hear were more easily convinced of the lie than those warned against a specific bad argument they would hear.   However, the subgroups that were the easiest and the hardest to dupe were surprising. The group most vulnerable to falsehoods was not the one with zero preparation, but the one who had merely had the truth reinforced. In other words, the subjects most easily deceived were told things like, “You know brushing your teeth is good for you, right? You've been taught this since you were little. Trust us.” When they subsequently heard arguments they never had before, this group felt sheltered and even deceived.   The least vulnerable group were those who had not only been warned against a bad argument they would hear, but they were also taught how to respond. They were also warned they could face additional  bad arguments and needed to be aware and vigilant.   One thing we can learn from McGuire's experiment is that the method many Christian parents and churches use to pass on the faith—reinforcement without taking counter ideas seriously—is the one most vulnerable to failure. In fact, it can leave young people more vulnerable to lies, especially in high pressure environments. It also means that we don't have to give kids all the answers, but they do need to be aware and ready to think for themselves. This requires we give them a framework, or a pattern, of responding to bad ideas thoughtfully and confidently.    This is what Dr. Jeff Myers and the team at Summit Ministries has been doing with students for decades. Not only do they know how to immunize students against bad ideas by taking them seriously and preparing them to defend their faith, but Summit also helps students apply the truth claims of Christianity to every area of their life.   The results of Summit training are both measurable and impressive. An independent 2020 survey of Summit alumni showed that, before attending a student conference, just 40% felt able to defend their faith against challenges. After attending, that number skyrocketed to 90%. Before Summit, 87% claimed a strong commitment to Christianity. Afterward, 96% did. And, almost 97% of Summit alumni indicate they are currently attending a church that holds to the truth of the Bible.   Chuck Colson once called Summit Ministries “the gold standard” for training young adults in Christian worldview. I agree. In fact, I've personally witnessed the transformation that God brings through a Summit ministries two-week student conference. Held at Covenant College in Georgia and at the Summit headquarters in Manitou Springs, Colorado, young people are given a Christian worldview about topics like abortion, doubt and deconstruction, evolution, gender identity, God's existence, sexuality, and more.  If you know a student who needs to attend a Summit conference this summer, visit summit.org/breakpoint, and use code BREAKPOINT24 to receive $200 off.   The numbers speak for themselves. Passing on a Christian worldview to our kids requires much more than just telling them the truth. It requires us to help them love the truth and gain spiritual immunity against infectious bad ideas.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to colsoncenter.org.  This Breakpoint was revised from one first published on 2.18.22. 

If you're interested in discovering how to develop the wisdom and skills needed to walk wisely in this cultural moment, then the Colson Fellows program might be for you. This ten-month program combines theological, spiritual, and worldview formation through a carefully curated combination of readings, daily devotions, live webinars, and monthly meetings with your peers. With both in-person and fully online offerings, you can choose the format that works best with your stage in life. Interested in learning more? You can explore the program and submit an application at colsonfellows.org.  _______ A pitfall of the fallen human mind is how narratives shape our perception of the world, even outweighing facts and common sense. For example, nuclear power is one of the safest ways to generate electricity. According to the Our World in Data report, nuclear is 99.8% safer than coal in terms of deaths per unit of power. Yet because of three dramatic accidents and the press surrounding them—Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011—nuclear power is widely perceived as extraordinarily dangerous and in need of claustrophobic regulation.  Similarly, a narrative pushed by many in the press aims at rendering something else radioactive: homeschooling. As a Washington Post analysis found late last year, homeschooling is America's fastest growing form of education. Around 2.7 million students are homeschooled in America today, up by about a million since before the pandemic. For Washington Post reporters, this is scary.   One article described homeschooling as a “largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe,” whose rise in popularity is leading critics “to sound alarms.” In it, an emeritus Harvard Law professor ominously warned, “Policymakers should think, ‘Wow—this is a lot of kids.' We should worry about whether they're learning anything.'”   A school board member from Florida echoed their concern: “Many of these parents don't have any understanding of education. The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won't show up for a few years.”  In a Washington Post story from December 2, Peter Jamison recounted the tragic death of an 11-year-old California boy named Roman Lopez, from severe neglect and abuse. Though, as in most such cases, the story involved a broken and blended family—a factor children's rights activist Katy Faust points out is a consistent risk—according to The Washington Post, the thing to blame was that Lopez's stepmom said she was homeschooling him.   “Home education was an easy way to avoid the scrutiny of teachers, principals, guidance counselors,” suggests Jamison. Yet, he admits,   Little research exists on the link between home schooling and child abuse. The few studies conducted in recent years have not shown that home-schooled children are at significantly greater risk of mistreatment than those who attend public, private or charter schools.    And the Post wasn't finished. Nine days later, the Post devoted an article aimed at debunking the work of homeschool researcher and advocate Brian Ray, who has long argued that homeschoolers out-perform their public schooled peers. With little content to criticize Ray's methodology, the Post devoted space to quoting anti-homeschooling activists and Ray's aggrieved adult daughter.  And then, three days after Christmas, the Post ran another article by Peter Jamison on the growing fear among homeschooling families that state funding in the form of vouchers will come with increased government oversight. Leaving little doubt where he stands on the issue of state oversight, he threw in a story about a network of Nazi homeschoolers in Ohio.   These articles reveal not only the biases of Washington Post reporters and their willingness to use scare stories in place of data, but they also expose crucial questions they are unwilling to ask, as well as assumptions about the role of parents and the state when it comes to education.   To simultaneously note how homeschooling has exploded in popularity but, in almost every article, refuse to ask why the popularity, is at best, a stunning lack of curiosity. If asked, I suspect the parents of the over two-and-a-half million homeschoolers in America, would say something about endless school closures during COVID, ideological indoctrination in public school classrooms, the fact that standardized test scores are at a 30-year low, and that administrators and school boards act and, at times, articulate that they know better, and parents should butt out. Perhaps many parents concluded they could do a better job teaching their kids. Perhaps they didn't think they should “butt out.” Perhaps they are not comfortable with the lack of oversight in classrooms, and over teachers and school boards. Perhaps, they are skeptical of the “experts” who are “sounding alarms” about homeschooling while ignoring the massive failures of the current state-run system.  Ultimately, The Washington Post's breathless attacks on homeschooling reveal an unquestioned assumption that children belong primarily to the state and not to parents. The rise in homeschooling, Christian schooling, parent-run charter schools, and other innovations show that more and more families are rejecting that assumption. In doing so, they are acknowledging the biblical expectation that parents, not the state, are ultimately responsible for teaching and raising children.   If the press wants to keep giving homeschooling the nuclear power treatment, they should also develop some curiosity about why so many parents are choosing, often at great sacrifice, to take their children's education back into their own hands. And they should ask what that says about the status quo.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

It's not uncommon to hear artificial intelligence described as a new “tool” that extends and expands our technological capabilities. Already there are thousands of ways people are utilizing artificial intelligence. All tools help accomplish a task more easily or efficiently. Some tools, however, have the potential to change the task at a fundamental level.    This is among the challenges presented by AI. If in the end it is not clear what AI is helping us to achieve more efficiently, this emerging technology will be easily abused. AI's potential impact on education is a prime example.   Since the days of Socrates, the goal of education was not only for students to gain knowledge but also the wisdom and experience to use that knowledge well. Whether the class texts appeared on scrolls or screens mattered little. Learning remained the goal, regardless of the tools used.   In a recent article at The Hill, English professor Mark Massaro described a “wave” of chatbot cheating now making it nearly impossible to grade assignments or to know whether students even complete them. He has received essays written entirely by AI, complete with fake citations and statistics but meticulously formatted to appear legitimate. In addition to hurting the dishonest students who aren't learning anything, attempts to flag AI-generated assignments, a process often powered by AI, have the potential to yield false positives that bring honest students under suspicion.   Some professors are attempting to make peace with the technology, encouraging students to use AI-generated “scaffolding” to construct their essays. However, this is kind of like legalizing drugs: There's little evidence it will cut down on abuse.    Consider also the recent flood of fake news produced by AI. In an article in The Washington Post, Pranshu Verma reported that “since May, websites hosting AI-created false articles have increased by more than 1,000 percent.” According to one AI researcher, “Some of these sites are generating hundreds if not thousands of articles a day. … This is why we call it the next great misinformation superspreader.”  Sometimes, this faux journalism appears among otherwise legitimate articles. Often, the technology is used by publications to cut corners and feed the content machine. However, it can have sinister consequences.   A recent AI-generated story alleged that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had murdered his psychiatrist. The fact that this psychiatrist never existed didn't stop the story from circulating on TV, news sites, and social media in several languages. When confronted, the owners of the site said they republished a story that was “satire,” but the incident demonstrates that the volume of this kind of fake content would be nearly impossible to police.   Of course, there's no sense in trying to put the AI genie back in a bottle. For better or worse, the technology is here to stay. We must develop an ability to evaluate its legitimate uses from its illegitimate uses. In other words, we must know what AI is for, before experimenting with what it can do.   That will require first knowing what human beings are for. For example, Genesis is clear (and research confirms) that human beings were made to work. After the fall, toil “by the sweat of your brow” is a part of work. The best human inventions throughout history are the tools that reduce needless toil, blunt the effects of the curse, and restore some dignity to those who work.  We should ask whether a given application of AI helps achieve worthy human goals—for instance, teaching students or accurately reporting news—or if it offers shady shortcuts and clickbait instead. Does it restore dignity to human work, or will it leave us like the squashy passengers of the ship in Pixar's Wall-E—coddled, fed, entertained, and utterly useless?  Perhaps most importantly, we must govern what AI is doing to our relationships. Already, our most impressive human inventions—such as the printing press, the telephone, and the internet—facilitated more rapid and accurate human communication, but they also left us more isolated and disconnected from those closest to us. Obviously, artificial intelligence carries an even greater capacity to replace human communication and relationships (for example, chatbots and AI girlfriends).  In a sense, the most important questions as we enter the age of AI are not new. We must ask, what are humans for? And, how can we love one another well? These questions won't easily untangle every ethical dilemma, but they can help distinguish between tools designed to fulfill the creation mandate and technologies designed to rewrite it.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

Each of the Apostle Paul's letters to different first-century churches contains robust explanations of complex theological concepts, such as justification, sanctification, the connection between faith and works, and the role of Jewish law after Christ. In more than a few places, however, Paul drops punchy and simple statements such as, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). That's straightforward. Or how about this one: “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8). That's pretty clear, too.  Obviously, these statements have clear implications for husbands and fathers who abandon their spouses or children, or who fail to do what is necessary to provide for them. Today, these would also seem to indict those who pressure women into aborting a child they fathered; or those who, through IVF, create multiple embryos only to abandon some of them in freezers; or those who pressure aging parents into physician-assisted suicide. The implications of Paul's blunt and powerful statement about the responsibilities we have to those who depend on us are vast.  For example, I recently asked a Colson Fellow who has taught personal finance for years at a Christian college how he integrates worldview into that class. His answer was simple: stewardship. And, then he quoted Paul's clear, pithy statement about who is worse than an infidel.  Few words better encapsulate what it means to be created in the image of God than stewardship. Human beings were created by God to steward the world He made. He charged our first parents with tending His garden. Though Sin made that task more difficult, it hasn't altered His original command to His image bearers to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” In fact, this was how He intended for us to rule benevolently and wisely over all the works of God's hands.   It is in this concept of stewardship that we find the key to understanding Paul's blunt statement. It's also in this concept that the task of caring for this world is even possible, as finite people with finite resources and maybe a few hungry mouths to feed at home.    Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve's home was a garden that God planted for them “in the east.” This was more than a sacred flower bed. It was a sanctuary, a meeting place between God and man, and the embryonic form of the garden city that is described as complete in Revelation. The first man and woman weren't supposed to sit idly around in this garden. They were given work to do, work that would eventually involve the entire world. As theologian G.K. Beale explains, “Adam and his progeny were to expand Eden's borders until they circumscribed the earth so God's glory would thus be reflected throughout the whole world through his image-bearers.”   In other words, God gave humans a starting point, a home base, a focal point where their responsibilities as stewards began. They could not start with the whole world, or they never would have started.  This is still true today. No matter our roles, responsibilities, or calling, we are most responsible for the people, things, and places closest to us. This principle is often called “subsidiarity” and is the basis of sound thinking on family, finances, economics, government, and much more. The reason a person who fails to care for the members of his household is “worse than an unbeliever” is that these are the people closest to him, to whom he is most responsible.  As my friend pointed out, the heart of what it means to be a good manager of family finances, a good steward of church resources, a responsible leader for a Christian college, or a good city, state, or nation is to enable care for those closest. Proximity directs priority.   If true, subsidiarity means that the progressive strategies for child-rearing, welfare, healthcare, and other issues that abstract responsibility back to “society” are dangerously backward. The duties in these areas lie primarily with those closest to the needs. The concepts of stewardship and proximity also mean that leading people into a mess and then abandoning them is wrong, and reflects unbelief. This would apply to parents who create and abandon excess embryos (or “donate” their gametes), as well as to Christian colleges that sell teenagers enormous amounts of debt, have them marry each other, and then send them off to be youth pastors. It's not good stewardship, and to paraphrase Paul, potentially leaves these Christian young people in infidel territory.    Ultimately, this comes back to what St. Augustine called “rightly ordered loves.” It's as impossible to love all people, all families, and all nations as it was for Adam to tend the whole Earth by himself. Love in the abstract is not actually love. We must love and care for particular people in particular places, and according to one of Paul's least difficult-to-understand teachings, those closest to us should be top priority.    This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

Saint Augustine famously observed that the human heart is restless until its rest is found in God. That applies not only to individuals but also to cultures and entire generations. Practically speaking, this “restlessness” can take many forms, including an unprecedented mental health crisis.  The recent and much talked about report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes precisely that. As a CDC spokeswoman bluntly stated, “young people”—especially young women—“are in crisis.” An article in The New York Times summarized, “Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021 … and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide.” Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind, painted an even starker picture: “We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded.”  The timing of this unprecedented outbreak of anxiety, depression and other mental health problems, Haidt points out, corresponds suspiciously with the rise of smartphones and social media apps. This technology led to a culture-wide exchange of what he calls a “play-based childhood” for a “screen-based” one. That exchange likely helped create a generation with fragile psyches unable to deal with life's challenges.   A reason that teen girls are especially hard-hit in this crisis is they spend more time on social media platforms and websites that engender social and body anxiety. However, political views also predict psychological issues. Using Pew Research's American Trends Panel, Haidt demonstrates that liberal leanings predict the worst mental health outcomes. In fact, a majority of self-identified progressive women in Generation Z report that they have been diagnosed with a mental health condition.   Age, sex, and politics are not the only predictors of trouble. Using the same set of data, political scientist and pastor Ryan Burge suggests that religious commitment is another important factor. Those who rarely or never attend religious services suffer worse mental health than those who attend regularly or weekly.   Altogether, and controlling for economics and education, Americans under 25 are doing very badly when it comes to mental health. Those suffering the worst are young, female, liberal, and secular. For them, brokenness is, incredibly, the norm.   On the other hand, the apparent insulating effect of religious faith and conservative philosophy is fascinating. Highly religious people are, in fact, more likely than their secular peers to describe themselves as “very happy.” One explanation for this is the proven positive social effects of religious belonging, including higher occurrences of stable, loving family relationships. For example, in 2020, the Institute for Family Studies reported that those who attend church regularly are more likely to get married than their nonreligious neighbors and less likely to divorce.  Still, it's worth considering whether the social benefits of religious commitment have something to do with the belief itself. Does an active faith in God reduce the impact of the mental health crisis on young people? Does a lack of religious faith leave others more vulnerable to it?   Though a tough question to answer via social science, St. Augustine would say “yes.” Despite his lack of familiarity with Gen Z, he would speak of their “restless hearts” seeking in politics, gender identity, and self-expression what can only be found in a relationship with our Maker.  In the face of Gen Z's mental health crisis, it is the Gospel and not gloom that should motivate and inform us. As blogger and author Samuel James pointed out on Twitter, mentally broken young people may be primed to hear the truth: “Evangelicals need to disabuse themselves of the idea that Gen-Z is a wholly unreachable mass of buffered selves. The mental health crisis may cut right through secularization like butter.”   God has made us for Himself. The kind of postmodern individualism that Gen Z was raised with will never deliver on its promises. This mental health crisis is a spiritual crisis. We have the opportunity to introduce a generation of restless hearts to the One able to deliver on His promises to bring rest to their souls.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to colsoncenter.org.  This Breakpoint was originally published on April 13, 2023. 

Not that long ago, culturally speaking, someone known throughout the world for being neighborly said some things that most likely would have gotten him fired today. And, believe it or not, he said these things on public television!  Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood often performed songs he wrote to address issues that confused children or caused them to struggle. One of these songs, “Everybody's Fancy,” was featured in numerous episodes of his hit show from 1968 to 1991. He hoped to help children love and value their bodies and to respect other children, too. Rogers was, of course, completely unaware of the modern controversies over LGBTQ identities that would soon dominate the culture, but, in several lines of the song, he expressed truths that are no longer permitted to be said out loud.   Take a listen:   "Boys are boys from the beginning. Girls are girls right from the start. Everybody's fancy, everybody's fine. Your body's fancy and so is mine. ... Only girls can grow up to be the mommies. Only boys can grow up to be the daddies." Can you imagine someone saying these things on PBS today? In fact, in a segment last year from the Let's Learn TV series, PBS stations across the country featured a drag queen who goes by the stage name “Lil Miss Hot Mess” singing lines from his book, The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish, to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round.” “Hot Mess” is a grown man who dresses in flamboyant and exaggerated women's clothing and makeup, and then seeks an audience with children.   The most obvious takeaway is that any trust previous generations of parents and kids had for public television was, long ago, squandered. A second takeaway is just how quickly some ideas have shifted from being unthinkable to unquestionable. Therefore, we should doubt anyone who tries to gaslight us into thinking we're regressive bigots for believing male and female are realities built into human nature.   Only a short time ago, some facts were considered so obvious and universally accepted that Mister Rogers could sing about them to children on a publicly funded medium, and no one thought anything whatsoever about gender dysphoria, transgender identity, or drag queens when he did. Does that mean Fred Rogers was a bigot? Was he a transphobe? No. In fact, no one had ever heard of such accusations at the time.  As an ordained Presbyterian minister, Rogers viewed the world in a noticeably Christian way. Though he didn't often discuss his faith publicly, his dedication to and concern for children was, in very real ways, Christ-like. For example, Rogers did not avoid difficult subjects if he believed kids needed to talk about them. So, he dealt with death, divorce, and racism, and he had a way of empathizing with the especially deep sorrow and confusion children can feel over such things.   “Everybody's Fancy” was Rogers' way of teaching children that they are fearfully and wonderfully made. For Rogers, that included talking about the human body as something good, as worth appreciating and caring for. Mister Rogers even taught children that one thing that made bodies special was that they were gendered, and that this gender had significance for who and what they would become in life. As he said, only boys can grow up to be daddies, and only girls can grow up to be mommies.   In this, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was unlike so many children's shows that vaguely taught and sang about how “everyone is special.” Barney was not only irritating, it was gnostic. Mr. Rogers, at least in this song, had a robust applied creational theology.  That's not to say Mr. Rogers always got it right. It seems, for example, that his compassion eventually got in the way of clear thinking on sexuality and gender, though he kept his views quiet for the sake of avoiding controversy.  Even so, his strong affirmation of the goodness and permanence of male and female—and the fact that he generated no controversy for saying these things—should make us think. What he sang then is no less obviously true now, and it's absurd to suggest that Mister Rogers was some hate-filled bigot for holding these views, as our president seemed to imply recently.   No, it's those who tell children that their “fancy bodies” may, in fact, be the wrong bodies and in need of social, chemical, or surgical alteration, who are living in the land of make-believe.   Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to colsoncenter.org.   This Breakpoint was originally published on January 3, 2023.

Today, the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns seems, at least to most of us, like an extended nightmare of yesterday. However, some of the ways that our lives changed have stuck with us. For example, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans working primarily from home has tripled since 2019. Many people will never go back to full-time commuting, nor do they want to (though there are signs of a reset on the horizon).   Another change, one even more consequential for individuals and our society, is the large-scale exodus from in-person church services. According to Pew Research, though nearly all houses of worship had resumed regular, in-person services by this time last year, disappointingly few Christians had actually returned. There's the church, there's the steeple, open the door … but where are the people?   Researchers from the Survey Center on American Life and the University of Chicago found that, last year, one-third of Americans admitted to never attending religious services, up from a quarter of Americans before the pandemic. They also found no lockdown-induced surge in atheism nor drop in religious affiliation. Instead, for the most part, “religious identity remained stable through the pandemic.”  Apparently, large numbers of people who once identified as Christians have decided they no longer need to attend church. While COVID may have been the impetus behind this exodus, the root causes are preexisting and go much deeper. Too many Christians think of church as they would an event, concert, or TED Talk, optional experiences that can just as easily be consumed remotely.   When combined with pastors and leaders who view the core purpose of church as evangelism rather than discipleship or worship and are therefore willing to do whatever seems to “work,” success is just as easily measured by logins and views after the pandemic as it was by attendance numbers and growth size before the pandemic.  Much is behind these shifting numbers. First and foremost, God continues to prune and winnow His Church, seeking the health of His Beloved. The broader cultural shift away from truth-claims and anything that smacks of traditional morality has only intensified in recent years. And, we should at least consider the possibility that the decline in both numbers and influence is, at least in part, a self-inflicted wound.  Like C.S. Lewis' famous image of making mud pies in the slum when offered a trip to the seashore, we've baptized (and watered down) the habits of the world in place of the riches provided in the testimony of Scripture and the God-ordained practices of the Church. Why would our neighbors be drawn to warmed-over versions of the world's leftovers?  To use a pair of homespun metaphors, the kind of bait used determines the kind of fish caught. Or, more prosaically, what you win people with is what you win them to. After decades of appealing first and foremost to whatever people want and editing to whatever they think, we've essentially discipled a generation that will only follow a Church that leads where they want to go.  In every age, a true and real Christianity finds much to critique as well as to affirm. If we aren't willing to challenge the sacred cows of our day, if we aren't up to preaching what Tom Holland called the “weird stuff” of our faith, we will find (and perhaps even now we are finding) that no one is interested in what we have to say because we aren't saying much worth hearing.  Our embodied and relational nature, which required an embodied and relational salvation, is one of those things. Thus, the author of Hebrews warns his readers not to forsake gathering together “as is the habit of some.” And thus, when the Apostle Paul sought to explain the relationship between Christ and His Church, he invoked marriage. The love between a husband and wife symbolizes the love Jesus has for His Bride. The profound “mystery” to which Paul refers is the total union (body and soul) between the Savior and His saved people.   Our lives in Christ are just as physical as marriage. If you wouldn't try a purely virtual relationship with your spouse, you shouldn't try a virtual relationship with Christ or His people. Both require and deeply involve our bodies, and Christ could not have made this any clearer than He did by placing a family meal at the center of Christian worship, commanding us to “take and eat.”    Unless limited by a health issue, attending a house church, or using creative sanctuary furnishings, Christians should always choose pews over couches. And churches should choose the truth-claims and practices of Holy Scripture over market-driven research.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to colsoncenter.org.   This Breakpoint was originally published on February 16, 2023.

In the beloved movie The Princess Bride the character Vizzini frequently cries, “inconceivable!” about things that keep happening. Finally, another character observes, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” That scene comes to mind annually, when Merriam-Webster Dictionary announces its “word of the year.”   The announcement is intended to recognize words that have defined our cultural moment. In recent years, it has recognized words our cultural moment has redefined. For example, last year's word “gaslighting” describes unhealthy behavior in which someone tries to manipulate you into questioning your sanity. However, like the word “toxic” before it, “gaslighting” is now a catch-all term used by some to shut down pretty much anyone who disagrees with them. “They” was the 2019 word of the year, which, in ordinary English, is a third-person plural pronoun. In today's Newspeak, it's a mandatory way of referring to someone who claims to be “nonbinary,” also a redefined word.  This year's word is “authentic,” which the dictionary defines as “not false or imitation: real, actual,” or “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact.” However, the context in which this word is most frequently and passionately used is the debate over gender identity, as in “be your authentic self.” So, it now refers to anything but reality or conformity to fact. To be “authentic” in 2023 often means stubbornly ignoring fact, hormonally masking or surgically reconstructing fact, and demanding that others also ignore fact, even in classrooms, competitions, locker rooms, and in print. In short, “authenticity” now means conformity with subjective internal feelings that are widely assumed to be the defining feature of individuals and the highest value in society.  Theologian Carl Trueman documented how we got to this place—how the self became psychologized, how psychology became sexualized, and how sex became politicized—in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. This new definition of “authenticity” is part of that story—that living a fulfilling life consists primarily in looking within, discovering who you “truly are,” and then projecting that identity into the world. These are all central to his account.   Trueman explains:   "Expressive individualism particularly refers to the idea that in order to be fulfilled, in order to be an authentic person, in order to be genuinely me, I need to be able to express outwardly or perform publicly that which I feel I am inside. … In a society where the expressive individual is increasingly the norm and increasingly presented as that which we should all be, then the idea of society itself forcing us to play a role that we don't feel comfortable with inside makes us inauthentic." This new definition of “authentic,” that what I feel inside is the highest truth, would have baffled people in centuries past and still baffles many non-Westerners today. However, the real problem is that this new definition of “authentic” is utter nonsense. Truth is not primarily subjective but objective. Reality is not decided by individuals but given by a Creator. One of the things our Creator both demands of us and enables us to do through redemption is conform our inner selves to His will and design, which He reveals, objectively, in both creation and Scripture.   To be authentically me is to be who God says I am. Our identity is established by, guaranteed by, and secured in Jesus Christ. Even more important than getting words right is pointing to the reality to which words refer and are permanently tethered. Words become nonsense otherwise, and that should make this practice of redefining words truly “inconceivable.”  Before I sign off today, I wanted to say thank you for making Breakpoint a part of Christian worldview diet. Everywhere I travel, I meet listeners who share how these daily doses of clarity help them think biblically, have hard conversations, and disciple their kids and grandkids. If Breakpoint has been a help to you and your family, please consider making a year-end gift of support at colsoncenter.org/give.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

Last week, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT refused to condemn calls for Jewish genocide as bullying or harassment. While horrible antisemitic speech and behavior have long been defended on their campuses, this debacle occurred before the United States Congress. The presidents attempted to appeal to free speech rights, differentiating between speech and conduct via statements obviously crafted by lawyers. Their comments shocked and outraged many. Penn's president resigned, after initially attempting to walk back her comments. Harvard's president quickly apologized, while the MIT board of directors issued a statement in support of their president.  Recently, the pseudonymous Tyler Durden documented the scope of the left's stranglehold on academia at the ZeroHedge website. A new survey by The Harvard Crimson found that more than three-quarters of surveyed Harvard faculty identified as “liberal” or “very liberal,” while just 2.9% identified as “conservative” or “very conservative.” Another study by Kevin Tobia at Georgetown University and Eric Martínez of MIT found that just 9% of law school professors at the nation's top 50 law schools identify as conservative. A survey conducted last year by The College Fix found that 33 out of 65 academic departments across the nation lacked a single Republican professor.   Given this virtual monopoly, progressive academics should be confident enough to allow dissenting voices on campus every now and then. However, after years of conservative speakers being canceled and shouted down, it is clear that many progressives only wish to hear their own voices. Some professors have even resorted to denouncing free speech as a threat to their campus dominance.  Recently, a pair of faculty members from Arizona State University wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled (I am not making this up) “Dear Administrators: Enough with the Free-Speech Rhetoric! It concedes too much to right-wing agendas.” In the piece, Richard Amesbury and Catherine O'Donnell argue that “calls for greater freedom of speech on campuses, however well-intentioned, risk undermining colleges' central purpose,” which, according to them, is “the production of expert knowledge and understanding.” Not all opinions ought to be heard, they argue, even opinions from dissenting experts, because “not all opinions are equally valid.”  The timing of their piece, just prior to the testimonies of the three Ivy League presidents, must be divinely determined.   According to these professors, opinions that are valid are “the product of rigorous and reliable disciplines” like the humanities, which include and often prioritize “the study of race and gender.” These departments, insist Amesbury and O'Donnell, are not part of the “public sphere,” a “speaker's corner,” or even a “marketplace of ideas.” Instead, these departments and their campuses are sites of production for “expert knowledge and understanding,” and should therefore be exempt from free speech, democracy, and public debate. We should no more expect humanities departments to hire dissenting voices, they argue, than “a biology department to hire a creationist or a geography department to host a flat-earther.”  In other words, woke ideologies are above questioning, according to these professors. In the article, they express outrage that the “knowledge” produced in these fields is not “publicly perceived as authoritative.” That loss of credibility, they claim, is not because their ideas are absurd, but because of the “political efforts to delegitimize certain disciplines.”   As Durden wrote in his ZeroHedge piece, “many... academics would be outraged if conservatives were to take hold of faculties and start to exclude their views as ‘unworthy.'” Yet progressive faculties and administrators aggressively redefine “expert opinion” as those who agree with them, silencing those who disagree on the grounds that they're not experts.   The result is an echo chamber, not an education. Last week, the three Ivy League presidents discovered just how disconnected their echo chambers are from the rest of the world. Well, two of them did, anyway.   Polling confirms that institutions of higher learning suffer from a public credibility crisis. According to a recent Gallup poll, just 36% of Americans hold confidence in higher education, down 21 points since 2015. It's impossible to look at what has happened on campuses in the last decade, or before Congress last week, and not conclude that this has more than a little to do with the “products” of left-wing “experts.”   Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. Few institutions have propagated as many bad ideas and spat them into society as our universities. Among the needs of the hour is the proliferation of Christian scholarship and Christian colleges and universities. I'm hopeful that last week's debacle before Congress is for Christian higher education what the 2020 school board videos and COVID online classrooms were for Christian K-12 schools. However, it's only a win if the Christian colleges are truly Christian, truly colleges, and truly Christian colleges. Unfortunately, that seems to be a shrinking group of institutions. May God continue to raise up men and women willing to seek and speak truth, no matter how many so-called experts tell them to shut up.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.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, go to breakpoint.org. 

A few years ago, when professional athletes were criticized for kneeling during the national anthem, it wasn't always because critics disagreed with the cause that athletes were claiming or because of the irony of multi-millionaires denouncing the nation to which they owed their success. Many fans just didn't want to see football turned into yet another stage for political activism. Even when a cause is just, healthy societies have spaces where differences can be put aside in pursuit of a common experience, whether it's something as trivial as a televised sporting event or something as important as forming the next generation of civic leaders.  High school debate has long served this second role. The National Speech and Debate Association is the largest league of its kind in the nation. For nearly one hundred years, it has trained students to reason and speak effectively about issues significant to people and society. According to its Wikipedia page, the NSDA serves more than 140,000 students and coaches each year. It would be reasonable to think that the debaters who rise to the top of this league have become masters of reason and argument, able to speak persuasively on a range of topics. That is no longer the case.  In a clip that recently went viral, the final round of the NSDA's 2021 Tournament of Champions at the University of Kentucky featured two young women of Team A, one of whom identifies as transgender, and who apparently decided they would win the round by “out-woking” their opponent. They began the round by refusing to debate the resolution, which was about the costs and benefits of the International Monetary Fund. Instead, they highjacked the forum to protest the plight of transgender debaters, made the round “a debate about debate,” and promised to “occupy the debate space until trans debaters can participate safely.”  In a saner time (and league), such behavior would result in an immediate loss. However, that did not happen at this prestigious tournament. Instead, the young men of Team B immediately conceded the round and joined a 45-minute discussion on how debaters who misgender their opponents should automatically lose. One even offered, “It's important to recognize that debate is not about winning an argument. It's about making sure everyone feels okay and making sure everyone feels safe.” The judges then praised Team A for their “courage” and crowned them the national Public Forum Debate champions.  It would be easy to criticize these students for making a joke out of a competition that generations of their peers worked hard to win. However, that would miss the point. These debaters didn't invent these tactics or the ideology upon which it is based. They were taught to turn every forum into an opportunity for activism, to dismiss and denounce anyone who questions their claims, and to play the victim to be rewarded. It's the same training that taught the “Just Stop Oil” activists to deface and destroy priceless works of art to draw attention to their cause. Most recently, a pair of Just Stop Oil climate vandals took hammers to a famous painting in the National Gallery in London.   The painting had about as much to do with fossil fuels as much the IMF has to do with transgender debaters. To activists, however, that irrelevance is irrelevant. Their ideology, they've been taught, is the only thing in the world worth talking or doing anything about, and they will actively hijack or destroy all other human pursuits until everyone shares their singular obsession.  This reveals why such an all-consuming ideology is dangerous, no matter what you think of the causes behind it. The notion that no one should be able to do, pursue, appreciate, argue, or think about anything else but your cause is a form of intellectual tyranny that, if tolerated widely, can quickly erode the foundations of a free society. If everything must be sacrificed to your ideology, then it's much more than a cause that demands justice. It's an idol that demands worship.  “Good philosophy must exist,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.” Such bad philosophy, he warned, doesn't always take the form of “cool intellect” arguing wrongly, but often manifests as “muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether.” I can think of few better descriptions of a debate tournament won by “out-woking” your opponent.    This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton observed that even insane explanations for the world can have a perverse consistency. A madman who thinks he's the king of England has a ready explanation for anyone who denies his claim: They're conspirators trying to keep him from his throne. “His mind,” wrote Chesterton, “moves in a perfect but narrow circle.”   Chesterton's asylum example also applies to a recent article published at Phys.org about a scientist who has written a book to convince everyone that humans don't have free will. Neuroendocrinologist and MacArthur “genius grant” winner Robert Sapolsky has studied people and primates for over 40 years. In his book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Dr. Sapolsky argues that humans are molecular machines, wholly determined by our genes, our environments, and our past. Thus, our behavior, even when condemned as criminal or evil, is no more a choice than “the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.”  Of course, the implications if this were true would be incredible. As a Los Angeles Times reporter memorably put it:   This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.  However, rather than justifying or enabling acts of violence, Sapolsky believes his deterministic view of human choices could actually make society better:   The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over. We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there.  Sapolsky's argument isn't new. It is, in fact, the standard, reductive version of metaphysical naturalism, which teaches that all phenomena have material causes. Since these causes are themselves materially caused, nature is a closed system of dominoes. In this theory, an observer with perfect knowledge of the initial conditions of the universe could accurately predict every event that followed, right down to the choices individuals make about what to eat, where to live, who to love, what to believe, and even whether to kill.  The problem, which philosophers and writers over the years have pointed out, is that if everything is determined and humans do not have a free will, that would include the belief in metaphysical naturalism and every part of the thought process that led to it. Assuming this view, the reason Sapolsky believes what he does has nothing to do with what he has learned in his research or whether it's true. Instead, it is the predetermined result of a long process of material causes stretching back to the Big Bang. His book, his arguments, and his belief that they'll somehow make the world a better place are not meaningful. They're just the latest dominoes to have fallen, and it could never have been otherwise.   In his book Miracles, C. S. Lewis critiqued this brand of reductive naturalism:   [N]o account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.  To his credit, Sapolsky seems aware of this absurdity but just accepts it: “It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something ‘good' can happen to a machine,” he admits. “Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.”  But why is it good for people to be happier or have less pain if everything is determined? Why is it preferable to live in a society marked by peace and safety, instead of chaos and violence? And why appeal to people to make a meaningful choice between these options when their choice is already determined and meaningless?    Chesterton's answer to such small, reductive worldviews was to confront them with the immensity of the real world and human experience, and to notice how they do more explaining away than explaining.   We know our choices are not mere results of physical processes, and that they have a deep moral significance. We know it so deeply that even those trying to convince us we're mere machines must contradict themselves by treating some choices, such as their choice to write books to convince readers, as if they mean something.   In the very act of denying our moral responsibility in a moral universe, we must, in some sense, act as if meaning exists. It's a crazy effort to deny meaning, but that doesn't stop even geniuses from trying it. All the more evidence of our profound freedom, and of our ability to abuse it.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

Recently on the Upstream podcast, my colleague Shane Morris sat down with David Pileggi, the rector of Christ Church in Jerusalem. His work there involves helping Palestinian children through increased access to hospital care and combating trafficking. He also educates Christians about the Jewish context of their faith. Fr. Pileggi has served as an Anglican minister in Jerusalem for over 40 years.  From that perspective, he thinks that the most important aspect of the Israeli-Hamas conflict is missed by many in the West.   "Probably at its heart there is a religious underpinning that most secular people in the West don't understand because many Westerners, especially Western elites, can't take religion seriously. And so, they focus on land, or refugees, or human rights, etc., etc. And I don't want to deny that any of these are important, especially to the Palestinians. But there's something a lot deeper that's going on."   In general, shaped by a secular vision of life and the world, Westerners tend to underestimate the significance of religion. In particular, Westerners fail to understand how committed Islamists are to their vision of life and the world, especially considering Islam's most significant rival religions:   "The Islamicists in Palestinian society said, 'we don't want two states for two people. We want Palestine to be free from the river to the sea. We want Palestine to be an Islamic state. The Jews have no theological right. They have no claim theologically to a piece of territory that was once Islamic and really technically can't revert to or can't become Jewish, because Jews, like Christians, are second-class citizens within the Islamic world, and they have no right to rule or to reign over Muslims or have no right to take control of territory that was once Islamic.'"   There's also the issue of moral clarity, something that a secular vision of life and the world also cannot sufficiently undergird.  "What happened on October the seventh was a genocide. Genocide can never, ever be justified. And if people don't have enough maturity and enough historical nuance, or maybe even just common sense to say, 'I support the Palestinians, but at the same time, I'm going to condemn Hamas, or I cannot support what they did,' then our society is in huge trouble. And I almost worry more about the United States than I would worry about Israel."  Postmodernism further corrupts the secular vision by superimposing an alternative moral vision, a pre-determined moral vision built on Marxist categories of oppressed and oppressors. This inevitably devolves into what Fr. Pileggi called a “romanticized” view of people, rather than a realistic one.  "Being pro-Palestinian also means you don't romanticize the Palestinian people. You see them honestly for their good points and their bad points, for their weaknesses, for their strengths. And the same goes for Israel, right? Our relationship with the Jewish people, it's not based on certain romanticism or biblical fundamentalism. … And by the way, neither should the basis of our support for Israel be some kind of Islamophobia or dislike of Arabs, whatever that may be. … We look at Israel, we can see the good parts of the society and we can also see, you know, where the society is weak and perhaps fails ethically or morally."   Fr. Pileggi's realism is helpful, not only because of his decades of experience in this contentious part of the world, but also because it's a biblical realism. Though his prescription may sound simplistic, it's where any Christian vision of human conflict should leave us:  "You know, people tell me, 'Well, what's the answer to this Middle East problem?' The answer is Jesus. Right? Jesus is the answer. And I think one of the things that we've learned over the years [is] that saying you believe in Jesus, saying you admire Jesus, doesn't get you very far. … If there's going to be transformation in the lives of a community, or transformation in a family or a society, [we] have to put the teachings of Jesus into practice."  To hear the entire conversation with Father Pileggi, rector of Christ Church Jerusalem, search for the Upstream podcast with Shane Morris, wherever you listen to podcasts.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

In his book Doubts About Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design, Thomas Woodward described how early detractors of Darwin's theory criticized the way it personified nature. After all, according to Darwin, “the origin of species,” (the title of his book) occurred “by means of natural selection.” Who did the selecting? Nature.    Darwin's argument relied on an analogy between animal husbandry and what nature does when “she selects” only the fittest to survive, thus driving evolution. However, this analogy conflated the intentionality of human breeders with natural processes, implying that nature has a will and is trying to get somewhere—which is precisely the sort of intelligent causation that Darwinism supposedly refutes.     The result is a theory that often sounds suspiciously circular. Yet there are even bigger gaps in the Darwinian view of nature. The most daunting is how an intention-free universe made the leap from non-living matter to living things in the first place. This is a crucial question because, in conventional Darwinian thinking, only living things are subject to natural selection and thus evolve. The question here isn't just how the fittest survived: It's how the fittest arrived.   But what if natural selection could operate on non-living matter? What if, instead of a process limited only to biology, Darwinian evolution was promoted to a fundamental law governing all physical reality? That's exactly what some scientists have tried to do, most recently in a much-heralded paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   Entitled “On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems,” the paper proposes a new scientific principle called the Law of Increasing Functional Information, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Lead author Robert Hazen of The Carnegie Institution for Science explains: “We see evolution as a universal process that applies to numerous systems, both living and nonliving, that increase in diversity and patterning through time.” In other words, everything evolves in a Darwinian manner, including “atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more.”  How? According to the paper's nine authors, nonliving systems evolve toward greater complexity if they are, 1) formed from many different components, such as atoms, molecules, or cells that can be rearranged, 2) are subject to natural processes that cause different arrangements to be formed, and 3) if only a small fraction of all these configurations survives or is “selected” for “function.”  Nonliving things, by definition, don't “survive,” which is the function nature supposedly selects for in biological evolution. So, what “function” could nature possibly select in an atom or a galaxy? Believe it or not, these authors argue that existence itself is a kind of function, and that systems that tend to go on existing will be selected by nature, and that we know this, in part, because those systems do, in fact, exist.   Hazen explains:   Imagine a system of atoms or molecules that can exist in countless trillions of different arrangements or configurations. Only a small fraction of all possible configurations will “work”—that is, they will have some useful degree of function. So, nature just prefers those functional configurations.  Writing at Evolution News, intelligent design advocate David Coppedge points out the flagrant personification happening here. Nature “prefers … functional configurations?” It does no such thing, because at least according to Naturalism it has no goal, nor any notion of “function.”   In reality, the attempt to “Darwinize the entire universe,” as Coppedge puts it, is little more than a roundabout way of admitting how well-designed the universe is, and trying to come up with a force that allowed it to design itself. It's an admission that, despite nearly two centuries of claims to the contrary, the cosmos acts like it has an end in mind. It's asking us to assume a law that explains how everything came to be based only on the observation that things are. Set aside this circular reasoning for a moment and ask the real question: If there's a law, who is the lawgiver?   This theory gets us no closer to explaining the complexity, function, purpose, design, and beauty we see in the universe if they're not the handiwork of a Creator. Does nature have a preference for the kind of universe we have? Maybe so. But if “she” does, then that preference, itself, needs an explanation. Scientists trying to turn evolution into a theory of everything might expect nature to answer, “I am who I am.” But there's only One who can truly say that. Why not give Him credit for a change?  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

In a viral post back in July, entrepreneur Robert Sterling described what many people feel:   "There is something deeply unwell in our society right now. … I'm sure social media, economic malaise, Covid lockdowns, fentanyl, and every other reason we hear about factor into it."  Yet, all these reasons, he continued, “in aggregate, still feel insufficient.” Something “metaphysical,” seems to have shifted.   A Breakpoint commentary in April described the mental health crisis of American teens, especially teenage girls. As The New York Times reported, “Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021 … and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide.” Boys aren't doing much better, with so-called “deaths of despair” at an all-time high among the male population.    This widespread mental instability has culturewide consequences. In a recent documentary, filmmaker Christopher Rufo diagnosed what he calls our “Cluster B Society.” The rise of “woke” ideology and cancel culture, he argued, corresponds with the explosion of psychopathologies like narcissism and borderline personality disorder.  These “disorders of the self,” Rufo explains, wreck relationships and lead to profound social dysfunction. When they become “formalized and entrenched” in “human resource departments, government policies, cultural institutions, and civil rights law,” they lead to precisely the kinds of extremism and emotional instability that infects politics today, especially among the young.    What is this “metaphysical shift,” this feature of modern society, that is driving so many people into despair?  Writing for the Institute for Family Studies, University of Virginia sociologist Joseph Davis argues that our mental health crisis is the end of a long process that began well before the iPhone, social media, or fentanyl. The seeds of despair and derangement, he thinks, were sown when people stopped looking to timeless institutions and transcendent realities to give their lives meaning, and instead turned inward for answers.    Davis cites Jennifer Breheny Wallace, who in her book Never Enough notes that even successful and privileged young people often say they feel “utterly vacant inside.” The reason they are looking inward for meaning is because they've been taught for decades now, by everyone from Disney and Oprah to pop stars and professors, to reject external sources of meaning like God, family, or country. “Their truth” is found within, while external sources of authority are oppressive and stifle authentic individuality.    As a result, Davis argues, “the public frameworks that gave life direction and meaning—prescribed roles, rites of passage, compelling life scripts, stable occupational trajectories—continue to fade away.”  That's why, as he puts it,  "We feel empty, inadequate, and adrift because we have been thrown back on ourselves, forced to face the challenge—at younger and younger ages—of trying to establish an identity, make commitments, live with conviction, desire life, and find meaning without the very sources that make these things possible in the first place."  As theologian Carl Trueman demonstrated in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, the idea that life's greatest meaning comes from within and from there we express our authentic identity is a recent development. Our ancestors looked beyond self, to external sources of authority. In our culture of expressive individualists, many people are finding themselves, to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, unchained from a sun.    Writing of the death of God in his famous Parable of the Madman, Nietzsche accurately predicted the chaos to come but also noted that people in his day could not realize the implications of doing away with fixed, transcendent meaning. “I have come too early,” says the Madman. “This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men.”   Perhaps today, in the ruins of the institutions, traditions, churches, families, and cultures once tied to belief in an unchanging God, Nietzsche's prophecy has come true. We are adrift with only ourselves as gods. If the statistics are accurate, more and more people are finding this intolerable.    We were never meant to invent meaning for ourselves. The demands of our hyper-individualistic society feel unbearable because they're unreasonable. We put the weight of defining the world on our shoulders, and it's heavier than we ever imagined. The self is not big enough to define the truth.   This means that solving our mental health crisis will take much more than cutbacks on social media or crackdowns on opioids (though these are good ideas). It will take a return to older, less individualistic sources of identity and a willingness to stop treating “be yourself” or “you do you” as some kind of profound wisdom.    This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. To help us share Breakpoint with others, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.  

In a recent “X” post that went viral, a young woman lamented:   [I'm] Realizing at 32 that I don't care about building a career or climbing any corporate ladder. All I want to do is make the most amount of money working the least amount of hours possible so I can spend the MAJORITY of my time with my family, living life on my own terms instead of spending 40+ years working for a boss who's paying me what he thinks is “fair.”  This woman speaks for many 30-and-40-somethings who wish they'd prioritized marriage and children earlier. As births in the U.S. sink farther below the replacement rate, and the average age of first marriage hovers near an all-time high, a growing number of people are seeing the appeal of a life centered more around family than career, success, or status.    In fact, Gallup's Social Series survey recently found that desire for larger families is at a 50-year high: 45% of respondents said that three or more children is their ideal, a big change from 20 years ago, when only 33% of Americans wanted that many kids. This, however, only makes our nation's empty maternity wards and rock-bottom birth rates more puzzling. What is growing in America are not families, but the chasm between the families Americans say they want and the families they are forming.   In a Wall Street Journal article in May, Janet Adamy described how the “gap between women's intended number of children and their actual family size has widened considerably. ... [B]y the time women born in the late 1980s were in their early 30s, they had given birth, on average, to about one child less than they planned.”  Multiplied by tens of thousands, that's a lot of missing kids. This “birth dearth” has become so serious and undeniable that even mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have finally acknowledged it and even debated ways to reverse it. Adamy thinks that economic and social factors are to blame. Women cannot afford to have as many kids as they want and can't find mature, financially stable men with whom to have them.  These factors cannot sufficiently explain the numerous ways Americans actively opt for child-free lives. For instance, more and more households are choosing pets over children, and our spending on those pets increased by a whopping 30% between 2018 and 2021. More importantly, marriage is rarer than ever, especially among lower-income Americans even though marriage is the most reliable means of building and keeping the financial stability required for children.  Also, the rate of vasectomies has risen by more than a quarter in the last decade and are easier than ever to obtain. Planned Parenthood of Oklahoma City recently advertised free vasectomies on Facebook with the slogan “snip away the stress.” They were fully booked in two days.  And finally, if, as several writers have asked recently, our lack of fertility can be chalked up to “it's the economy, stupid,” how did previous generations manage far higher birth rates in much more difficult times?  Louise Perry offered a better explanation than any of these in an article published earlier this year in The Spectator. In it, she blamed our “progressive” lifestyle:   The key features of modernity—urbanism, affluence, secularism, the blurring of gender distinctions, and more time spent with strangers than with kin—all of these factors in combination shred fertility.  In other words, we are witnessing the domination of a life-script in which children feel superfluous. The way we live, the things we value, the roles we assume, and the priorities we set have made family an afterthought.   We've been culturally conditioned, at nearly every turn, to put other things ahead of marriage and children. We believe that marriage and family “will just happen when it's time.” But these things rarely do just happen in our culture, which is why so many find themselves like the woman in the viral video, wishing things had gone differently but painfully aware that lost time can never be reclaimed.   Mega trends like this cannot be changed overnight. Certainly, there are policy moves, like those recently suggested by Brad Wilcox and David Bass of the Institute for Family Studies, that can make change easier.  Ultimately, it comes down to individual choices to plan life in a way that centers, rather than marginalizes, marriage and family. That means these things can't be an afterthought, seen as a kind of “capstone” that young people expect to simply fall into place when the time is right. Rather, they must be thought of as foundational realities and, as such, things to pursue and around which other aspects of life should revolve.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss the barbarity of the Hamas attack on civilians in Israel and the worldview that brought us such barbarity.    Sections 1 and 2 - Israel and Hamas at War Breakpoint: The Atrocities of Hamas and the Reality of Evil Breakpoint: Moral Clarity and the Attack on Israel Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland Mindy Belz on Twitter

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, go to breakpoint.org. 

Last year, Pew Research reported that only 29% of Americans now are willing to say they have a “great deal of confidence” in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public. That represents an 11% decline since 2020. This dramatic drop is both significant, given the historic importance of medical research in shaping public opinion, and understandable, given a growing crisis in the reliability of scientific research overall.   A year ago, in a Breakpoint commentary, we described this crisis. For example, according to an analysis by University of California behavioral economists, the least reliable scientific studies are most likely to be cited by other scientists. After a review of 20,000 published papers, these researchers suggested in an article for the journal Science, that doubtful findings are cited more often because they're “interesting.”  And now, the problem has led some scientists to “moonlight” as detectives, combing through the scientific literature to sniff out fraud, negligence, and mistakes. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal described one such sleuthing trio. Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn run a website called Data Colada, which is dedicated to “debunking published studies built on faulty or fraudulent data.” According to the article, these scientists are able to recognize suspicious patterns in scientific papers, such as cherry-picked data, small sample sizes, bad math, or just results that make no sense.   In a sense, these moonlighters are doing the kind of work that scientists should be doing as a normal part of their work. However, the scientific enterprise is plagued by what has been called a “replication crisis.” In essence, findings are too often published without anyone confirming the results with other experiments. This became common knowledge in 2016 when the journal Nature reported that “more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.”  Thanks in large part to the efforts of sleuths like Data Colada, “[a]t least 5,500 faulty papers were retracted in 2022, compared with (only) 119 in 2002.” All the debunking has led to embarrassing resignations, including the former president of Stanford University, as well as “upended careers and retaliatory lawsuits.” And this is probably just the beginning. According to The Wall Street Journal report, of the nearly 800 papers one researcher reported in the last decade, “only a third had been corrected or retracted five years later.”  Of course, human fallenness is behind this mess. That may sound like an oversimplification, but it's significant considering the myth of the objective scientist always following wherever the evidence leads. In addition to faulty and fraudulent results being more “interesting,” there are material incentives to fudge research. Pumping out papers “can yield jobs, grants, speaking engagements and seats on corporate advisory boards.” This “pushes researchers to chase unique and interesting findings, sometimes at the expense of truth.”   And yet, as The Wall Street Journal piece described, scientific fraud has real-world costs:   Flawed social-science research can lead to faulty corporate decisions about consumer behavior or misguided government rules and policies. Errant medical research risks harm to patients. Researchers in all fields can waste years and millions of dollars in grants trying to advance what turn out to be fraudulent findings.  More fundamentally, scientific “authority” is often wielded as a cudgel to end all political, social, and cultural debates. On everything from evolution to abortion, pandemics to climate change, gender to gay adoptions, the “science is settled” line is frequently invoked, and people actually believe it. The more science is sold as unassailable but then corrupted by politics and personal ambition, the more its rightful authority will be compromised. That would be a real tragedy, given how vital a tool it is for discovering truth and how much it reveals about the world we live in and the kind of creatures we are.  Scientists like those at Data Colada who hope to restore integrity to the scientific enterprise must hold their peers accountable. In the process, they are calling our attention back to the human element in science. It can never be, strictly speaking, an objective enterprise. After all, it is humans who are looking through those microscopes, conducting the research, and writing those papers. Even when not intentionally dishonest, humans err. That should be enough to raise our Spidey senses whenever a scientific finding is sold as if it is a pronouncement from God.   Good science requires not just a sharp mind but also moral integrity, or what C.S. Lewis called “the chest” in The Abolition of Man. In this sense, the very existence of science depends on areas of knowledge that cannot be placed in a test tube: ethics, philosophy, even religion. Good science must be linked with good character. If science is to be a legitimate search for truth, then scientists must be people who love truth.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

Christians who work in politics to end legalized abortion do so because innocent lives are at stake. That would be enough cause in and of itself. However, abortion isn't just one of the many issues that we should care about.  In many ways, abortion, perhaps more than any other single issue, symbolizes our society's core beliefs. Simply put, Christian societies do not kill their smallest, most vulnerable members. Pagan societies, on the other hand, do.   In a fascinating recent essay published at First Things, Louise Perry argued that the fight over abortion is really about whether we will remain, in any real sense, a Christian society, or we will re-paganize to the beliefs and values of pre-Christian times. Perry, author of the recent book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, isn't a Christian, though she admits she finds Christianity attractive. Her academic journey seems to have become a spiritual journey, one that has led to a recognition that many of her secular and humanist values are, in fact, remnants of a Christian morality that remade the world.  Perry opened her article by citing Scottish poet Hollie McNish, who wrote that archaeologists know they've found a Greek or Roman brothel when they unearth “a pit of newborn babies' bones.” Hearing this poem gave Perry the same “painful, squeezing, swooping sensation” she first felt when hearing a graphic description of abortion. She realized something pro-lifers have long argued: abortion is really a form of legalized infanticide and not so different from the baby-killing of the ancient world.  Though Perry is still pro-choice in certain cases, she's clearly uneasy about it. This is in part because she's a mom, and because she sees how abortion and infanticide exist on a “continuum” that includes other ancient practices like slavery, the sexual exploitation of women and children, and general disregard for the weak and poor. Historically, only one group of people objected to these things. As Perry wrote:  The supremely strange thing about Christianity in anthropological terms is that it takes a topsy-turvy attitude toward weakness and strength. To put it crudely, most cultures look at the powerful and the wealthy and assume that they must be doing something right to have attained such might. The poor are poor because of some failing of their own, whether in this life or the last. The smallness and feebleness of women and children is a sign that they must be commanded by men. The suffering of slaves is not an argument against slavery, but an argument against allowing oneself to be enslaved.  Into this predatory, power-centric pagan world stepped Christ, who defeated the powerful through submission to death—“even death on a cross.” After His resurrection, Christ's followers began insisting on the innate and equal value of all human beings and began condemning practices like infanticide.   Christians, of course, have not always lived up to these ideas, but they were unique in holding them. As authors like Tom Holland have argued, these Christian ideals didn't vanish with the rise of secular humanism. Western progressives owe their moral instincts to protect the weak and vulnerable to the Christian revolution, even if they scoff at the idea of the Christian God.   And therein lies Perry's problem. There is no group weaker or more vulnerable than unborn babies. Yet these are precisely the victims that feminists and secular progressives insist we must ignore to advance sexual freedom. We have all seen how much the rhetoric is heating up, both against those who work to save preborn lives and now for the legal extension of so-called “medical aid in dying” to children with disabilities.  This is why, Perry concludes, “The legal status of abortion…represents the bleeding edge of dechristianization.” Stepping decisively away from the influence of Christianity will bring back an “older, darker” set of values in which the strong exploit the weak and no one objects. Such a world would truly be, once again, pagan. At least some non-Christian writers seem to realize that in this world, women, the poor, and other vulnerable classes would not fare well.    Historically speaking, equality, human rights, and protection of the weak aren't “self-evident.” They're part of a distinctly Christian heritage shaped by a distinctly Christian vision of the world. As the values of our pagan past grow more influential and pervasive, progressives should take note. A society built on babies' bones won't long respect the rights of anyone except the powerful. For that, you need Christ.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.  

Not long ago, most non-Christians treated pornography as a harmless expression of sexual freedom. For half a century, Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy dominated, teaching people to wink at porn use. Children discovering a relative's “stash” became a popular trope in TV and film and was played off for laughs.  In the digital age, distribution and access became easier and instant, and the content grew darker. Finally, more people are admitting that, though it was never harmless, this content now poses a life-altering danger to those who stumble across it—especially children.  In 2021, singer-songwriter Billie Eilish confessed to being one of those children harmed by pornography. In an interview, Eilish described her first encounter at age 11: “I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she said. The things she saw on screen gave her nightmares and led to her “not saying no” to things she should have refused in her own relationships.  Eilish was hardly a voice crying in the wilderness. In the wake of our collective reckoning with abuse and addiction, it has become clear that most children are introduced to sex through pornography, and the porn they're encountering is like nothing previous generations knew. Even if you don't count what is being forced on them in elementary school classrooms, what they are being exposed to is extreme, degrading, and, in many cases, criminal.   For example, mainstream, left-leaning publications such as The Atlantic and The New York Times have recently featured essays grappling with the explosion of online pornography featuring children, and how devilishly difficult it is to separate this illegal content from what many view as the acceptable, consensual kind. Those who still attempt to tame or domesticate pornography need to wake up to the devastation it has inflicted on kids and teens. A good start would be to listen to what children and teens have to say about it.    Recently, theater director Abbey Wright at The Guardian, wrote about her project discussing this topic with 10,000 children and young adults. These kids, some as young as six, described a reality nothing like that one scene in Home Alone.  “I was exposed to porn before I'd had a proper sexual experience,” one young man said. “[I]t is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You see something, and you re-enact it. That's what I like because that's what I did. That's what I did because that's what I saw.”  The average age at which kids are first exposed to pornography is now 12, and there are plenty of outliers. According to Wright, parents can be naïve about this fact: “Whenever I mention to the parent of a child that age that many six-year-olds have seen pornography, they say: ‘Oh, my child hasn't.'”  In what might be the most haunting line of the article, one teenager simply scoffed at that assumption: “If you put a phone in a child's hand, you are putting porn in a child's hand.”  Girls and young women described how warped their expectations and the expectations of boys about what's normal in a relationship are because of this content. “Young women told us about the pressure they felt from pornography... These porn women do it, so why won't you?'”  A young man from London summed it up this way, “I think pornography is a bit soul-sucking. …People can't do anything else. I don't want to get to a point where I feel like I'm not me any more.”   “Destroyed my brain,” “soul-sucking,” “I'm not me any more.” Are we listening?   Porn in any form is a radical distortion of God's design for human relationships, especially in how we are to treat each other. It's an attempt to force the transcendent into an immanent box and to pretend that something God intended as meaningful can be made meaningless.  It cannot. Any time something sacred is mocked and the image of God in all involved is denied, there will be victims. Now, a generation of young people are voicing sorrow and regret because of what we defended as “freedom” and “harmless fun.”  This was true when Hefner mainstreamed porn in the 1950s. It is even more true today. The internet and smartphones have merely cultivated this hideousness for what it is. We must keep unsupervised devices out of unsupervised young hands. Do it.   As a society, we must end this systematic assault on young eyes. Now that so many seem to be finally “getting it,” maybe the opportunity is here. To learn how you can join that cause, check out the terrific work of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

Pixar's Wall-E has proven to be among the most profound and prophetic films of the last 20 years. After hopelessly polluting the Earth and leaving an army of robots to clean up the planet, humans now live aboard a giant ship built by a company that promises to take care of all its passengers' needs. Thus, humans are left with nothing to do but amuse themselves and eat a lot.   Many Christians wrote off the Pixar classic because of its hyper-environmentalist message. However, the film's commentary on human exceptionalism and vocation, specifically the inability of our machines to do our most important work for us, was spot-on. In the world of Wall-E, human beings have a purpose, or a telos that cannot be reduced to maximizing comfort, safety, and convenience.   In the biblical account of reality, humans exist to glorify and love God, and to serve as His special representatives and co-rulers in creation. Human inventions should help towards achieving those ends, extending our abilities, and mitigating the effects of the Fall. Wanting to replace ourselves with our devices assumes that humanity is the central problem of the world that needs to be solved.  Recently in First Things, Matthew Crawford argued that an anti-human worldview like the one parodied in Wall-E now dominates our tech and governing classes. Those who are behind everything from smartphone apps to pandemic policy share a basic belief that human beings are inferior to machines. We are, as he puts it, “stupid,” “obsolete,” “fragile,” and “hateful.”   Crawford opens his essay with an example of a driverless car created by Google that froze at a four-way stop. Apparently, the drivers around the car didn't behave as it had been programmed to expect. However, rather than admit the limits of the car's “artificial intelligence,” one Google engineer remarked that what he'd learned from the incident is that humans need to be “less idiotic.” The premise is that humans are not the crown of creation but problems to be solved.   Of course, it is quite possible that, once they've worked out all the bugs, driverless cars will lead to less accidents and road deaths. However, one of the bugs to be worked out are the programmers who hate humans, which makes the point of this essay ring true. So much of our high-tech culture, from the social media algorithms that tell us what we want to the transhumanist fantasies about uploading our consciousness to computers, assumes that humanity is an obstacle to be overcome.  Much of our public life also assumes the basic idiocy and inadequacy of humans: take health officials more concerned with controlling people than limiting the spread of a virus or legislation quashing parental rights in order to “affirm” gender-confused minors.   C.S. Lewis saw this impulse decades ago and recognized how it would grant growing power to certain people over and above others. In his masterpiece The Abolition of Man, Lewis warned of those he called “conditioners,” who considered themselves above such common human frailties. Of course, as Lewis pointed out, the conditioners are also human, but in denial that they too are vulnerable to the same frailties as everyone else. Their danger lies in the fact that they are oblivious about their frailties, especially their moral frailties.   It is good that humans have bodies that limit us to one location and the need for food, sleep, and friendship. These limits are part of our design. Because we are designed, we must be guided by values and not merely algorithms. It is good that we take time to learn, to appreciate beauty, to feel wonder, and to have burning questions about what is behind all that we see. God made us this way, so that, eventually, our seeking would lead back to Him. Though He intends to redeem us from the ravages of sin, He never intends to optimize us into efficient machines. Apparently, He considers being human as something “good,” even “very good.” So much so, in fact, He took on flesh Himself.   Wall-E got it (mostly) right. Technology is good but needs a telos—a purpose for existing. That purpose cannot be to replace, transcend, or circumvent God's good design for human beings.   In short, technology and public policy should be human-shaped, not the other way around.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

If all there was to go on were sitcoms, movies, and mainstream editorials, we'd have to conclude that marriage is a direct path to misery, the “old ball and chain” that only ties us down, limits our freedom, and cramps our sexual fun. Many people now think of marriage less as “settling down” and more as “settling.” Young people are told, “You've got plenty of time, live a little, first,” as if life ends after the wedding.   The truth about marriage, however, is that it is, statistically, the single best predictor of long-term happiness. Making this even more important to understand is that for at least the last 20 years now, Americans have been steadily getting less happy.    Writing at UnHerd, sociologist Brad Wilcox and the Institute for Family Studies' David Bass point to new research from the University of Chicago that suggests that “Americans who are married with children are now leading happier and more prosperous lives, on average, than men and women who are single and childless.” And not just a little bit happier, either. According to Wilcox and Bass there is a “startling 30-percentage-point happiness divide between married and unmarried Americans.”  In other words, the happiness divide and the marriage divide are largely the same. Sam Peltzman, lead researcher behind the University of Chicago paper, isolated all other factors among thousands of respondents, including income, education, race, location, age, and gender. He concluded that “the most important differentiator” when it comes to who is happy and who is not is marriage. “Low happiness characterizes all types of non-married,” Peltzman writes, whether divorced, widowed, or never married. “No subsequent population categorization will yield so large a difference in happiness across so many people.”  In other words, the decline of marriage over the last several decades is causing the decline in happiness, or at least most of it. As Peltzman told The Atlantic in statistical hyperbole: “The only happy people for 50 years have been married people.”   Olga Khazan, who wrote the Atlantic piece and has been cohabiting with her partner for 15 years, says these stats also struck her as counterintuitive. However, she then admits that “this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.”  Of course, happiness isn't the sole or even the best reason to get married. Many things in life carry deep meaning and significance that don't necessarily make us happy. A life lived only for happiness is a futile “chasing after the wind.” Enduring suffering, overcoming trials and tragedy, or sacrificing time, energy, or even our lives for others are all richly worthwhile pursuits that yield rewards in eternity. Certainly, loving someone and raising godly children is worth it, even if it's not always fun.   And we should note, “happiness” is a malleable word. When survey participants say being married or having children made them “happy,” they may often mean that these permanent connections give them lasting joy, something more profound than fleeting happiness, which surveys seldom quantify.      Still, these consistently stark results are unmistakable. They should challenge the entire way of thinking in sitcoms, movies, and editorials. Marriage is one of the chief sources of wellbeing and satisfaction in life. The fact that marriage rates have declined so dramatically over the last 50 years has had real, population-wide consequences.  Because the reasons people are not marrying at the same rates are so complex, different solutions will be required to raise the marriage rate. According to Wilcox and Bass, one of the most important reasons is the fact that, for many Americans who are living together and may already have children, getting married incurs a tax “penalty.” The federal government needs to, in their words, stop “making marriage a bad financial bet for lower-income families.”   That would be a good start. Ultimately, however, our bad laws are reinforced by a low view of marriage that has infected hearts and minds via entertainment, media, culture, and individual choices. We have a worldview problem, which has led to a conflict between the values and priorities of millions of people and the way they were actually created to live.   Marriage is part of God's plan for humanity and for His creation. No other human institution forges such lasting and consequential bonds. So, it should surprise no one—least of all Christians—that our nation's 50-year experiment with alternatives to marriage has left huge numbers of people deeply unhappy. Thanks to social science, we know the solution. The question now, for each of us and for all of society, is whether we're willing to commit.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

When I was a college student in eastern Tennessee, classmates who felt called to teach in inner-city schools would take on student teaching practicums in the small town of Graysville. On the surface, a big city like Detroit could not seem more different than the tiny mountain town that was racially not diverse and overwhelmingly white. However, the issues that afflicted both were largely the same: a lack of upward mobility, extraordinary rates of fatherless homes, poorly performing schools, high rates of addiction, health problems, and an outsized dependence on welfare.   These issues, as conservative pundits are often quick to note when talking about inner cities, are a culture-wide problem. It's not just the economics and politics that keep people down. Individual choices matter, as does the way people perceive their situation. Social scientists have long noted how what they call a strong “locus of control,” or the view that your choices have a real impact on your life, tends to predict socioeconomic success. The opposite is also true: When someone views themselves as mainly a victim of things beyond their control, it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.   All of this came to mind last month when a country-folk song from out of nowhere became an anthem for populist outrage. In “Rich Men North of Richmond,” previously obscure Virginia songwriter Oliver Anthony rails against Washington elites for creating a world in which hardworking Americans can barely make ends meet and are dying of despair.  The song really struck a chord online, particularly with listeners on the political right, and shot to number one on the Billboard Singles chart. Days later, it was used as an opener at the first Republican presidential debate—a move Anthony himself slammed, saying “I wrote this song about those people.” For many listeners, the song's message reinforced the belief held by many: that elites of both parties have ruined America and are keeping ordinary working people down, and outrage is an appropriate response.   Because of Anthony's roots and the song's lyrics, listeners linked it with the plight of rural Appalachian communities, places like Graysville. In these mostly white regions, poverty, drug use, and dependence on welfare have become the subject of documentaries and books like J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. However, as Mark Antonio Wright pointed out at National Review, Hillbilly Elegy also identified and addressed subtler, cultural factors at work in the Coal Belt, such as opioid abuse, “young men immune to hard work,” and “a lack of agency—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”  While “Rich Men North of Richmond” laments real problems that can rightly be laid at the feet of corrupt politicians and government overreach, such as inflation, unemployment, and “deaths of despair,” fans of the song seem determined to blame these problems only on outsiders. There are, as Wright points out, reasons to doubt that framing. For instance, there are millions more job openings in the U.S. right now than there are unemployed workers, though the same opportunities are not available everywhere. And many of those jobs, contrary to the song, are well-paid blue-collar positions. Yet labor force participation is low even after Covid. When you consider also the personal agency involved in drug addiction and obesity—two scourges on rural America—the simple victim narrative gets even more complicated.   Wright's National Review article provoked quite a social media backlash. That's because a lot of Americans are angry. “Rich Men North of Richmond” gave them an outlet to express that anger. However, outrage anthems can only express so much and often obscure complex truths, including some that conservatives are happy to point out. Perhaps the most important of those complex truths is that cultures themselves can become toxic when built upon bad ideas and thus can create victims. In many cases, the problem is not as much the “rich men” in a faraway town but the lack of dads in ours. As Wright suggests, “We the People” have adopted plenty of self-destructive beliefs and habits.   None of this absolves politicians of what's been done to make Americans' lives worse. Ronald Reagan's adage that government is usually the problem rather than the solution is even more true than when he said it. However, I also believe that outrage is not a strategy, nor are outrage anthems.  Blaming our country's issues on shadowy oppressors “out there,” which political parties do whenever they assure their voters that they are victims, encourages the mindset that only perpetuates poverty, relational brokenness, and addictions. It's based on an impoverished worldview that replaces agency with anger and treats people as less than fully human, refusing them the dignity of being responsible moral actors whose fate and whose communities are at least partially within their purview and control. In fact, the victim worldview is the thing most likely to empower those “rich men north of Richmond” at the expense of everyone else.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

At least since the movie Inherit the Wind butchered the history of the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” many Americans—especially those on the left side of the political spectrum—have cherished a kind of myth about national debates being settled in dramatic courtroom clashes. In reality, they seldom are. However, that doesn't stop idealistic plaintiffs from trying.   The most recent controversy dragged before a judge was whether the state of Montana could be held responsible for climate change. Earlier this month, Montana District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that the state's failure to take climate change into account when greenlighting new oil and coal projects was unconstitutional. The plaintiffs were a group of young people called Our Children's Trust. They sued the state over fossil fuel production, claiming that Montana violated a section of its constitution that guarantees citizens “the right to a clean and healthful environment.”  Climate activists have hailed the decision as a significant victory and model for the nation but have not been clear on what exactly has been accomplished. As The New York Times put it, unless a higher court overturns the ruling, Montana must now “consider climate change when deciding whether to approve or renew fossil fuel projects.” That's all. They must “consider.”  Ed Whelan at National Review concluded that the impact of this “Children's Crusade to defeat climate change” on actual energy production and carbon emissions “might well be zero.” Perhaps future projects will involve a symbolic gesture, akin to the so-called “land acknowledgments” commonly seen in academia and on recent episodes of Alone Australia. These rituals involve a speaker beginning by naming the Native American tribes on whose ancestral land they're standing. Of course, such acknowledgments, as Princeton's Robert George recently remarked, “do no one any good.” No one gets land back. No de-colonization takes place. There aren't any reparations. It's “just a cost-free form of moral preening.”  Few issues are more consistently plagued by this kind of cost-free preening than the debate over climate change, and not only in America. Last month, Spanish Climate Minister Teresa Ribera dramatically arrived at a European Union climate conference by bicycle. Photographers and reporters weren't supposed to find out that that she took a limo for most of the trip and only pedaled the last couple of blocks. But I'm sure Mother Earth was grateful.  Almost everything about the Montana case was similarly theatrical, from the 16 children recruited and presumed to have standing to sue the state, to its arbitrary nature. Why Montana, which produces a lot of oil and gas but has only about a million residents, rather than, say, California, which has about 40 times the population, creates a significant demand for that fuel, and emits vastly more CO2?   Answering that question requires speculation about people's motives. All of it certainly looks as if the primary goals of so much climate activism isn't to cool the planet, but to display superior virtue. At heart, it is not so different than the Pharisee from Jesus' parable, who loudly thanked God that he was not like other men.  It's true that we have a responsibility to leave our children a healthy planet, but the work required to do that won't be done in the courtroom of sparsely populated states or by bicycle photo ops. It will take place in the workshops and imaginations of engineers who come up with better and cleaner energy sources. It will take place in legislatures that have the will and the ability to lift restrictions on existing alternatives like nuclear energy. It will take place when those who say they care about the planet stop trying to locate the problem with someone else “out there” (usually in red, flyover states) and start recognizing their personal responsibility for both the problem and the solutions.   Most of all (and here we move beyond just the climate change debate), we need to recognize how unhealthy our addiction to “cost-free moral preening” is. It's a habit at the heart of so much we fight over, from mommy blogs and those annoying “we believe in” yard signs to pandemic posturing and presidential elections. The constant need to be better than “those people”—and to be seen being better—betrays a deep spiritual anxiety that no amount of political posturing can cure.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche tells “The Parable of the Madman.” In it, a madman lights a lantern in the early morning, runs to the marketplace, and declares, “God is dead.” Nietzsche's point was that though Enlightenment philosophers had embraced atheism, they had not yet realized the huge implications. So, Nietzsche told them, via a rant from the Madman, which ends when he bursts into church buildings and asks, “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”  In 2023 in America, that last question feels uncomfortably relevant, even for those of us who know God is alive and well. U.S. church membership, as a percentage of the population, is now at a record low—down more than 20 points in the twenty-first century.   For years, this statistic could be attributed mostly to the decline of mainline Protestantism, a once dominant force in American life that is now a kind of hospice for graying liberal theology. However, recent news that the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination, lost half a million members last year makes clear that decline is no longer just a mainline problem.   Evangelicals, as a share of the population, have sunk to pre-1980s levels while the religiously unaffiliated have swelled to nearly a third of the population. Ryan Burge, a statistician and co-author of a forthcoming book entitled The Great Dechurching, calls the emptying of pews and the rise of the unaffiliated “the most significant shift in American society over the last thirty years.”  It is significant for reasons most Americans probably don't yet realize. Like the people in Nietzsche's parable, secular observers may shrug off or even celebrate America's “great dechurching.” But a less religiously observant society is, statistically, a much worse place to live. As Jake Meador wrote in his review of The Great Dechurching at The Atlantic, this change is “bad news” for America as a whole, because,   "Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and  more stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency."  Faith, particularly Christian faith, is an irreplaceable force for good in society. Its decline will leave America less healthy, less charitable, less connected, and less capable of dealing with major social ills without government intervention. Evidence suggests it already has.  At the same time, it is essential to remember that these benefits are byproducts of faith, not the main point. Anyone who hopes to halt and reverse church decline must remember what that main point is.   It's not to entertain people, as Carl Trueman reminded us recently in WORLD. For example, services with a Toy Story or Star Wars theme (I wish I were making these examples up) neither attract serious seekers nor make true disciples. Therapeutic appeals about how Christian principles can supplement or enrich otherwise complete lives also miss the point. Counterintuitively, part of the trend of decline may be churches that ask too little of those who darken their doors.    The authors of The Great Dechurching suggest that low expectations of those in the pews and widely embraced individualist assumptions have led to fewer and fewer Americans finding time for church. If Christianity is merely a kind of hobby or weekly pep talk designed to enhance psychological wellbeing or career success, then we can find better stuff on YouTube or Spotify. Why make time for this type of church every week?  But what if Christianity is a way of life, the thing it's all about. What if it demands our allegiance? What if following Christ restructures our priorities and pursuits, our beliefs and our behavior—including career, family, and even personal identity?  Everything else in our society directs our gaze inward, to ourselves, our feelings, our priorities, and our problems—as if every individual is the center of his or her own universe. Churches that accept and even participate in this idolatry may be leading millions away from Christianity, not by demanding everything of them but by demanding nothing.   Those who are happy or indifferent about the decline of American churches are beginning to get glimpses of what an America without Christian influence will look like. It can and will get worse. For 2,000 years, the knowledge and fear of a transcendent God, not helpful social programs, has built and filled churches. If the magnitude of that claim is forgotten or even obscured, our churches will indeed become sepulchers—but not for God, who lives and reigns forever and ever. They will become memorials of the squandered heritage of a once deeply, but no longer, Christian nation.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

Are bodies something we merely “have,” or are our bodies essential to who we are?  In an advertising video for a local fertility clinic, a doctor asks, “Are you ready to have children, but your body is not?” And then he goes on to describe the services on offer.  The question is an odd one. Even more, it's downright misleading. Of course, the desire to have a child and not being able to conceive is a terrible experience. Still, the assumptions in that question—that we are somehow disconnected from our bodies, and that what we feel or want is superior to our physical realities—are dangerous indeed.  Versions of these same assumptions have permeated Western culture since its alignment with the ideas of the sexual revolution. For example, think of the man who after an affair says to his wife, “It just happened. She meant nothing to me.” As if his body's desire, which meant everything during the act of adultery, wasn't really his desire and was therefore not important. Or think of the young gender-confused Christian who says, “I prayed that God would make me feel like a boy, but he didn't. Therefore, I must be a girl.” While God may not have changed the young man's feelings, it's important to note He also didn't change the young man's genitalia. So, why should a change of feelings be relevant to his identity but not a change of biological reality?  Or consider this example from an article authored by my Colson Center colleague Shane Morris of the Christian who justifies watching smutty movies or movie series with sex and nudity by saying, “They're just actors” or “It advances the story.” Even a ridiculous amount of makeup cannot change the fact that a real body is on display and therefore a real person is being exposed.  These examples are just new expressions of an age-old heresy—one of the first heresies, in fact, dealt with and condemned as such in the early Church: gnosticism. Gnosticism divides reality between the physical and the spiritual. The spiritual is labeled good, while physical matter is labeled bad, or at least irrelevant. Gnostics within the Church taught that Jesus could not have really taken on physical flesh because the physical is bad. He only appeared to be a man.  But the Church fathers saw this for the heresy that it was. If Jesus did not really have a body, who was crucified? And who rose from the dead? And how could He really be one who, in every respect, has been tempted as we are, yet without sin as Scripture says? Didn't Paul say if Christ has not risen from the dead, our faith is pointless, and we're without hope?  Contrary to gnosticism, Christianity does not teach that reality is divided between physical and spiritual. Christianity divides reality between Creator and creation. Think of the creation of Adam. God forms man out of the dust of the ground—that's physical—breathes into him the breath of life—that's spiritual. And man becomes a living soul. We don't have souls: We are souls. And to be a human soul is to be embodied. Our bodies are essential, not incidental, to our humanness.  For many of the ancient pagans, the most scandalous of Christian teachings was the resurrection of the body. Just as God raised Jesus' body from the dead, He will someday raise our bodies, too. When Jesus says in John 6 that He will raise believers “up on the last day,” He's talking about our bodies. How our glorified, resurrected bodies will resemble our current bodies is a mystery. But we do know the disciples recognized Jesus after the resurrection because of His body, including the wounds of His crucifixion. As Paul says, our bodies will be sown as perishable, but raised imperishable.  Or, to quote the late R.C. Sproul, “For the Christian, redemption is of the body, not from the body.”  It's odd that after years of being accused by atheists and materialists of being trapped in our spiritual fantasies and ignoring the real world, Christians now find themselves as the ones saying that the physical world—especially the human body—matters, is real, and is of utmost significance. But here we are. If Christ came in the likeness of men, if He promised to redeem humanity, and if our humanity includes the body, then our bodies really do matter.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.  (This commentary originally aired February 22, 2017.) 

Few voluntary associations in American history have had as deep and wide an influence as the Boy Scouts of America. The training ground of soldiers and senators, pastors and presidents, the organization effectively instilled values like trustworthiness, loyalty, courteousness, thrift, bravery, and reverence in many of the over 100 million young men who joined in its over 100-year history. In fact, for much of the 20th century at least, “Scout's honor” was among the highest assurances one could give of their honesty and integrity.   However, if the only evidence considered was the Boy Scouts of 2023, it would be hard to imagine that this long and storied history ever took place and that the organization ever helped boys mature into virtuous manhood. Ten years ago, the Boy Scouts of America allowed openly gay members for the first time. Soon thereafter, an avalanche of sexual abuse allegations, many of them decades old, forced the Scouts into bankruptcy and a 2.5-billion-dollar settlement. Since then, the organization has been in membership free fall.   This year, for the first time since 2017, the Scouts held their National Jamboree in the hills of West Virginia. Reporter Mike De Socio attended and, writing in The Washington Post, described the shell of an organization he encountered. This year's Jamboree drew only 15,000 scouts compared to 40,000 at the previous Jamboree in 2017. Between 2019 and 2021, the Boy Scouts lost 62% of its membership, and there's no sign of a post-COVID recovery. As Carnegie Mellon's student newspaper put it, the Boy Scouts “is a dying institution.”  Despite this, De Socio, who identifies himself as gay, praised the progressive palooza the Jamboree has become. Specifically, he touted the pride tent, complete with “LGBTQ Pride flags and a string of multicolored lights…tables covered with bowls of rainbow bracelets, pronoun stickers and diversity patches” and that a diversity merit badge is now required to become an Eagle Scout.  According to De Socio, the blame for the organization's near collapse should fall on the abuse scandal and the pandemic. Certainly, these factors hastened the demise we now witness, but it's as if the author cannot imagine how the Scouts' enthusiastic embrace of LGBT ideology over the last 10 years sealed its fate. In the same period, a Christian organization for boys called Trail Life USA saw a 70% increase in membership.  In fact, the pattern matches the long-term dwindling of mainline Protestant denominations. When an organization, whether a church or a youth association like the Boy Scouts, forgets or rejects why it exists in the first place, it soon stops existing. Once liberal mainline churches stopped offering anything distinctly Christian and offered the same progressive, all-accepting, therapeutic talking points as Oprah and NPR, why go to church?  Much the same can now be said for the once venerable organization we call the Boy Scouts. The sexual abuse scandal may have fatally undercut the group's claim to trustworthiness and integrity, as well as the perception that they provide a safe and wholesome place for boys to grow into men. However, throwing open the doors to LGBT ideology changed the very nature of the organization.   Not only did the Scouts begin (ironically) promoting sterile lifestyles that would deprive the organization of future members, it also became a place where evil is called good and children are herded into life-destroying behavior and beliefs. This not behind closed doors as with the scandals, but proudly in the open, on charter documents, and at Jamborees. By the time the Boy Scouts decided to undermine their name by admitting girls, I imagine most families had already asked themselves, “What's the point?”  To be clear, the loss of the Boy Scouts, despite its flaws, is huge. What other institution shepherded generations of boys toward responsibility, self-mastery, and moral living? Our whole society would be a poorer and less trustworthy place had it never existed. I hope that churches and Christian programs like AWANA and groups like Trail Life USA seize the moment and make up for this profound loss.  I also hope all organizations learn that they only remain good as long as they remember their purpose. When they succumb to trendy ideologies and the spirit of the age, they not only lead their members astray, they also make themselves unnecessary and, in this case, leave their very necessary work to someone with conviction.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.  

In 1973, evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.” Almost 50 years later, an increasing number of scientists are asking whether evolution makes any sense in light of what we now know from biology.   A recent long-form essay in The Guardian signals just how urgent the problem has become for the most dominant theory in the history of the sciences. In it, author Stephen Buranyi gives voice to a growing number of scientists who think it's time for a “new theory of evolution.”    For a long time, descent with slight modifications and natural selection have been “the basic” (and I'd add, unchallengeable) “story of evolution.” Organisms change, and those that survive pass on traits. Though massaged a bit to incorporate the discovery of DNA, the theory of evolution by natural selection has dominated for 150 years, especially in biology. The “drive to survive” is credited as the creative force behind all the artistry and engineering we see in nature.    “The problem,” writes Buranyi, is that “according to a growing number of scientists,” this basic story is “absurdly crude and misleading.” For one thing, Darwinian evolution assumes much of what it needs to be explained. For instance, consider the origin of light-sensitive cells that rearranged to become the first eye, or the blood vessels that became the first placenta. How did these things originate? According to one University of Indiana biologist, “we still do not have a good answer. The classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time,” he says, “has so far fallen flat.”   This scientific doubt about Darwin has been simmering for a while. In 2014, an article in the journal Nature, jointly authored by eight scientists from diverse fields, argued that evolutionary theory was in need of a serious rethink. They called their proposed rethink the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” and a year later, the Royal Society in London held a conference to discuss it.    Along with Darwinian blind spots like the origin of the eye, the Extended Synthesis seeks to deal with the discovery of epigenetics, an emerging field that studies inherited traits not mediated by DNA. Then there are the rapid mutations that evade natural selection, a fossil record that appears to move in “short, concentrated bursts” (or “explosions”), and something called “plasticity,” which is the ability we now know living things have to adapt physically to their environments in a single generation without genetically evolving.   These discoveries—some recent, others long ignored by mainstream biology—challenge natural selection as the “grand theory” of life. All of them hint that living things are greater marvels and mysteries than we ever imagined. And, unsurprisingly, all of these discoveries have been controversial.   The Guardian article describes how Royal Society scientists and Nobel laureates alike boycotted the conference, attacking the extended synthesis as “irritating” and “disgraceful,” and its proponents as “revolutionaries.” As Gerd Müller, head of the department of theoretical biology at the University of Vienna helpfully explained, “Parts of the modern synthesis are deeply ingrained in the whole scientific community, in funding networks, positions, professorships. It's a whole industry.”   Such resistance isn't too surprising for anyone who's been paying attention. Any challenges to the established theory of life's origins, whether from Bible-believing scientists or intelligent design theorists, have long been dismissed as religion in a lab coat.   The habit of fixing upon a dogma and calling it “settled science” is just bad science that stunts our understanding of the world. It is a kind of idolatry that places “science” in the seat of God, appoints certain scientists as priests capable of giving answers no fallible human can offer, and feigns certainty where real questions remain. The great irony is that this image of scientist-as-infallible-priest makes them seem like the caricature of medieval monks charging their hero Galileo with heresy for his dissent from the consensus.   As challenges to Darwin mount, we should be able to articulate why “settled science” makes such a poor god. And we should encourage the science and the scientists challenging this old theory-turned-dogma and holding it to its own standards. After all, if Darwinian evolution is as unfit as it now seems, it shouldn't survive.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.  This Breakpoint was originally published on August 3, 2022. 

If it is true, as Richard Weaver famously put it, that “ideas have consequences,” it is also true that bad ideas have victims. On no other contemporary issue today is the connection between a bad idea and its victims clearer than assisted suicide. In no other nation today are the bad ideas and their victims more aggressively embraced than in Canada.   In a lengthy and powerful essay at The Atlantic this month, David Brooks exposed just how monstrous Canada's so-called “medical aid in dying” regime has become since it was enacted in 2016. Originally, Canada only permitted the request for medical aid in dying to those with serious illness, in advanced or irreversible decline, unbearable physical or mental suffering, or whose death was “reasonably foreseeable.” The criteria are vague enough. Since the law went into effect, however, the number of Canadians killed annually has gone from 1,000 to over 10,000. In 2021, one in thirty Canadian deaths was by assisted suicide, and only 4% of those who applied to die were turned down.   Were all these people terminally ill or suffering from serious and irreversible conditions? Hardly. In fact, Brooks tells the story of a man whose only physical condition was hearing loss yet who was “put to death” over the objections of his family. Another patient had fibromyalgia and leukemia yet wrote that “the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical. I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.” One otherwise healthy 37-year-old who suffers from schizoaffective disorder and is unemployed said, “logistically, I really don't have a future. … I'm not going anywhere.” As of Brooks' writing, that man was awaiting approval for assisted suicide.   Simply put, Canadians who need help are instead being helped to kill themselves because they're depressed, lonely, or mentally ill. And the slope keeps getting slipperier. Brooks described patients who have been pressured by doctors and hospital staff into killing themselves to avoid medical bills. Earlier this year, the Canadian Parliament's Special Committee on Medical Assistance in Death recommended extending the program to “mature minors” as young as twelve.  Brooks observed, this is what happens “when a society takes individualism to its logical conclusion.” The core question “is no longer, ‘Should the state help those who are suffering at the end of life die?'” It is now whether any degree of suffering is worth living with. He concludes, “The lines between assisted suicide for medical reasons … and straight-up suicide are blurring.”  Brooks clearly identified the bad idea behind these victims: what he calls “autonomy-based liberalism.” In its place, he proposed something called “gifts-based liberalism,” which acknowledges that each of us is a “receiver of gifts … including the gift of life itself.” That life, Brooks insists, is “sacred” because each of us is endowed with “dignity,” and society has a duty to say, “No, suicide is out of bounds. … You don't have the right to make a choice you will never be able to revisit. … We are responsible for one another.” At least, that is, in most cases, according to Brooks.  He is so close to getting this one right and articulating the sanctity of life in the way Christianity does. That's why it's frustrating that Brooks seems to think it's possible to climb back up the slippery slope and re-establish assisted suicide only for “extreme” cases. He writes, “I don't have great moral qualms about assisted suicide for people who are suffering intensely in the face of imminent death.”  But, David, the moment you begin setting criteria for when a life is no longer worth living, no longer sacred, and a person no longer deserving of love instead of lethal injection, you let the bad idea that led to all those victims right back in the cultural door! For all his admirable reporting on how bad it has gotten in Canada, Brooks never gets around to answering his core question: Why did Canada's “medical aid in dying” law–which supposedly limited victims to only those he agrees should have the right to die–become government-sponsored mass suicide in just seven years?   The answer is simple: because the value of human life is not based on any extrinsic quality. Period. It's instead based on the fact that humans are made in God's image. We belong to Him, not to ourselves. This is ultimately why the slope from accepting some suicides to all suicides is so slippery. It's also why “gifts-based liberalism,” until it acknowledges the one who gave us life, will never be able to keep its footing or help those intent on throwing away the very gift.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

 In the parable of the sower, Jesus illustrated how the seed of God's Word flourishes or perishes depending on the kind of ground it falls on. Some seeds fell on a path, and birds ate them. Some fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the seedlings. “Other seeds,” said Jesus, “fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away.”   That rocky soil group aptly describes the rapid rise and decline of evangelicals in America in recent decades. Recently, political scientist Ryan Burge, co-author of The Great Dechurching, explained how, between 1983 and 1993, the share of Americans who identified as evangelicals exploded. In fact, at their height in the early '90s, nearly a third of Americans called themselves evangelical.   This growth overlapped with the sharpest period of decline for mainline Protestants which, between 1975 and 1988, fell from one in three Americans to less than one in five. As Burge points out, this coincide-ence was no coincidence. Evangelical gains resulted partly from “cannibalizing” the mainline denominations. By 2018, however, those gains had withered. Evangelicals returned to their pre-1980s percentage of the population, and by all indications, are still declining today, though more slowly.   Part of the story of what happened is the rise of the “nones,” those who claim no religious affiliation. Between 1991 and today, the percentage of Americans who identify as “nones” skyrocketed from 6% to 29%. Burge calls this “the most significant shift in American society over the last thirty years.”  Of course, pointing to the rise of the “nones” is basically a way of restating the problem. The evangelical bubble of the '80s and '90s, as well as the longer-term decline of American Christianity, requires a fuller explanation.    Perhaps, given how quickly the evangelical bubble burst, part of the problem was that it was filled with shallow belief. Or to switch back to Jesus' metaphor, perhaps some of the seeds that came up so quickly in the final decades of the 20th century—amid chart-topping Christian albums, huge music festivals, and sprouting non-denominational megachurches—lacked deep roots.  Of course, there is nothing wrong per se with creative outreach strategies, but Jesus never told us that the goal was to get bodies through the doors or bottoms in the chairs. It was to make disciples committed to Christ and His Kingdom—disciples who would in turn “bear much fruit.”  Given the rapid rise and fall of the evangelical crop, we might safely conclude that many of those who joined and helped it spring up so quickly had shallow roots. Overall, Christians were not cultivated with deep roots in the truth God has revealed about Himself, His world, human beings, and His plan to make all things new.   Much of that is the Holy Spirit's work through families and the church, of course. He prepares the soil, and He gives the growth. He also gives many commands in Scripture that indicate the part we play and the responsibility we have.    One of the most important ways to ensure deep roots is through the cultivating of a worldview informed by Christian truth, something in stark contrast from sprinkling Christian encouragements on top of the world's view. This means teaching the Bible as if it is the true account of reality, contrasting a Biblical understanding of things with those widely accepted, meeting challenges from the wider culture head-on, answering tough questions about the faith, teaching Christians to take seriously Christ's sovereignty over all of life, belonging and not merely attending church, and teaching worship as everything we do, not just when we sing.  It also means recognizing the role cultural currents play in eroding faith—especially those undermining marriage and the family. As Mary Eberstadt wrote almost 10 years ago in How the West Really Lost God, one of the most powerful forces behind secularization and the rise of the “nones” is the decline of the family. Subsequent research has only proven how right she was. If evangelicals or members of any Christian tradition want to have a future, we're going to have to prioritize intact, stable families. After all, families not only make new people, they teach them the language and categories God uses to describe His new family—the Church.   Despite the numbers, we should always maintain hope and expect a harvest. Those who've turned in the last few decades from Christian belief to no belief aren't doing well. We're in the midst of a historic mental health crisis, and people raised without faith in God are suffering the worst of it. Religious observance, by contrast, is strongly correlated with better mental health. As helpful as therapy can be, the greatest longings of the human heart and the greatest problems of human relationships are only redeemed in Christ.   That's why, despite evangelical decline in America, we continue to till the soil and trust the Sower, fully believing He can produce deeper roots than before and fully expecting the hundredfold harvest He described.   This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris. To help us share Breakpoint with others, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.