Breakpoint

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.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

This Breakpoint was revised from one first published on 2.18.22.

A recent study highlighted by King's College London suggests that, wait for it, sex is a greater predictor of athletic performance than gender identity. The study found that in the "nonbinary" category of races, men outperformed women.

The researchers were careful to note that not much research has been done in this area ... unless I'd add, you consider the history of sport.

That we need this study reveals much more about our cultural moment than it does about runners. To say that men and women are different is to say something that was universally obvious until just yesterday.

The created differences between men and women aren't a bug of our humanity but a feature, beautifully leading to differences in many areas of life. Women's sports should be protected because, if they aren't, men will continue to steal the place of women, not only on the winner's podium but in other areas of life too.

Chromosomes, like ideas, have consequences.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

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: home schooling. As a Washington Post analysis found late last year, home schooling is America's fastest growing form of education. Around 2.7 million students are home-schooled in America today, up by about a million since before the pandemic. For Washington Post reporters, this is scary.

One article described home schooling 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 home schooling 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 home-school researcher and advocate Brian Ray, who has long argued that home-schoolers out-perform their public-schooled peers. With little content to criticize Ray's methodology, the Post devoted space to quoting anti-home-schooling 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 home schooling 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 home-schoolers 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 home schooling 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 home-schoolers 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 home schooling while ignoring the massive failures of the current state-run system.

Ultimately, The Washington Post's breathless attacks on home schooling reveal an unquestioned assumption that children belong primarily to the state and not to parents. The rise in home schooling, 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 home schooling 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, visit Colsoncenter.org

Since Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned over accusations of plagiarism, many in the media have defended her. The Associated Press, for instance, tweeted: "Harvard's president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism."

It's not clear how Gay's lack of academic integrity could be a conservative "weapon," but, according to Neil Shenvi, this willingness to ignore or defend plagiarism reflects how Critical Theory "has saturated our culture."

In a thread on X, Shenvi documented how key texts of Critical Race Theory disparage objective truth, merit, and neutrality: "whether they know [it] or not, many progressives have imbibed [CRT] categories, its skepticism towards 'merit,' and its belief in the ubiquity of 'white supremacy culture.'"

In other words, for many in the press and academia, plagiarism is no big deal if you're from an oppressed class and have progressive views. These ideas challenge the very idea of truth and must be clarified and confronted.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Seventeen hundred years ago this year, Constantine defeated his co-emperor Licinius, ending a series of civil wars and consolidating power as sole emperor of Rome. At the time, Christians saw this as the defeat of old pagan ways and the triumph of a new Christian vision of Rome.

Constantine's turn to Christianity began before he abandoned Roman paganism. His children had been tutored by Lactantius, a Christian who opposed coerced worship and argued for religious liberty as long as a religious practice did not disrupt public order. Years later in 312, as Constantine went into battle against a rival, he claimed to have a vision of a symbol of Christ with the words, "in this sign, conquer." He had his soldiers paint the symbol on their shields. Constantine won the battle and converted to Christianity. The following year, he issued the Edict of Milan, which declared religious liberty across the Empire in terms that Constantine had learned from Lactantius.

Constantine has been a controversial figure throughout Church history. Both the genuineness of his conversion and his impact on the Church have been consistently questioned and scrutinized. Many think that Constantine's actions to tie the Church to the empire compromised the Gospel. Often, these arguments are based on a misunderstanding of what Constantine did and fail to consider what followed from the legalization of Christianity.

The Edict of Milan legalized Christianity, along with other religions. It did not declare Christianity the official imperial religion. Though Constantine's promotion of Christianity made it more popular, it was not named the imperial religion until Emperor Theodosius I in 380. Even then, Theodosius did not suppress paganism.

Despite what you may have read online or seen in The Da Vinci Code movie, Constantine did not dictate doctrine to the Church. When he called the Council of Nicaea in 325 to deal with the question of the nature of Christ, a controversy that was threatening to tear the Church apart, he was performing a traditional function of Roman emperors who often acted as mediators in religious conflicts.

Despite claims to the contrary, neither Constantine nor the Council of Nicaea had anything to do with the formation of the canon of Scripture. Constantine did not control the discussion at Nicaea, nor did he dictate the outcome. And even if he had tried, many bishops who attended the council had been tortured by his predecessor Diocletian. If they didn't compromise their faith then, it is silly to assume they would roll over for Constantine.

The most direct result of Constantine's conversion was the end of the persecution, torture, and execution of Christians. Obviously, this was welcomed by Christians in his day, but it should also be recognized as a historical good.

The Edict of Milan also furthered Christian evangelism. Prior to Constantine, the Gospel had spread to India, Armenia, and Persia, and then from Persia across Central Asia into China by the early 600s. The legalization of Christianity led to churches being founded across the Roman Empire and missionaries sent to regions outside the empire. St. Patrick was a Romanized Briton who grew up as a Christian and brought the Gospel to Ireland. In the fifth century, a Syrian Christian named Frumentius converted the king of Axum in modern Ethiopia. Together, they evangelized that kingdom. Cyril and Methodius brought the Gospel to the Slavic people of Central and Eastern Europe in the ninth century. The evangelization of these regions can be traced to the actions of Constantine.

Of course, the legalization of Christianity set up a tug-of-war between Church and state. Because the faith had existed as an illegal and sporadically persecuted minority religion for centuries, the Church functioned fully independent of the state. With Constantine came new questions, such as, what properly belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God?

That question remains a central issue of Western political thought today. Even in view of the historical difficulties that emerged from his conversion, we can thank God for Constantine and for the freedom for faith and the Gospel he established.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Glenn Sunshine.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson promised to not eliminate Chicago's selective-enrollment public schools, which require entry by test and target high-achieving students. However, in the name of "equity," he is now proposing ending the selective process to get them in.

Decades ago, in an essay called "Democratic Education," C.S. Lewis described why this understanding of "equity" is doomed to fail:

"[A]n education which gave the able and diligent boys no advantage over the stupid and idle ones, would be in one sense democratic. ... Then no boy, and no boy's parents, need feel inferior. An education on those lines will be pleasing to democratic feelings. It will have repaired the inequalities of nature. But it is quite another question whether it will breed a democratic nation which can survive, or even one whose survival is desirable.

Truth is not democratic. ... Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death."

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.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.

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, visit Colsoncenter.org

Harvard president Claudine Gay steps down over charges of plagiarism. John and Maria talk about the fallout for higher education. They also discuss the ongoing attacks on Christians in Nigeria and the expectation that billions will vote worldwide in 2024.

Recommendations

The New Book of Christian Martyrs by Johnnie Moore and Jerry Pattengale

ICON: International Committee on Nigeria

Bethel McGrew on Substack

Segment 1: Claudine Gay Resigns from Harvard

Claudine Gay hit with six new charges of plagiarism

Harvard's Bundy Standard

The Mind Virus is Finally Breaking

Segment 2: Christian Massacre in Nigeria

Christmas Massacres Challenge Secular Explanations of Nigeria Conflict

Nigeria Massacre Sees Over 100 Christians Dead

Segment 3: World Elections in 2024

Opinion: 2024 will be the biggest voting year in world history. Can democracy survive it?

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

According to the Pew Research Center, 2023 marked a record high of Americans over 40 who have never been married. In a related study earlier in the year, a majority of Americans said that an enjoyable career and friendships were at the top of the list of things that would provide a "fulfilling life," but thought that having children or being married was "not too or not at all important."

This while plenty of other studies are showing that these expectations are not yielding the expected results. American happiness is at an all-time low and the most consistently happy people in the U.S. are the married ones. Meanwhile, job satisfaction varies wildly based on income, age, and sense of meaningful contribution.

Of course, marriage alone cannot make the unhappy happy or the unfulfilled fulfilled, but there's a clear picture in these numbers. Those who live for more than themselves tend to find more satisfaction and more happiness. It's as if we were made that way.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Two hundred and thirty-one years ago this month, King Louis XVI of France lost his head. His execution by guillotine was a precursor of the Reign of Terror, a 10-month period from 1793 to 1794 when French Revolutionaries executed nearly 17,000 of their countrymen. Tens of thousands more died in prison or were murdered without a trial.

The French Revolution, one of history's most profound examples of the power of ideas, erupted out of the Enlightenment. In the mid-eighteenth century, philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot effectively argued that human reason and scientific inquiry, rather than religion, were the true path to progress and greater freedom. Diderot's hostility to Christianity also spilled over into his views of the nobility. After all, if there were no God then King Louis could not have been "divinely appointed." And if the king had no sacred claim to power, he had no right to live in outrageous luxury at Versailles while the French people were living in famine.

Some took these ideas further than others. In 1789, a few days before a mob stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, one of its longtime prisoners was transferred to a mental asylum. In his cell, he left a manuscript that would eventually be published under the title 120 Days of Sodom. The author was the infamous Marquis de Sade.

De Sade thought his novel to be the "most impure tale ever written." It depicted graphic scenes of sexual violence, torture, and murder. It was also, to the utter horror of de Sade's contemporaries and modern historians, semi-autobiographical. De Sade spent most of his life in prison or mental asylums because of his crimes against vulnerable young women and men, and his name is the source of our modern word "sadism."

More than an awful story, his book was a philosophical proposal. While Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot denied the existence of God, they still defended many distinctly Christian virtues, including the goodness of self-sacrifice and the dignity of the poor. De Sade, on the other hand, did not share these philosophical inconsistencies. According to author and pastor Andrew Wilson in his book Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, de Sade simply had "no time" for Christian morality:

"[De Sade] thought we should admit that there is no natural basis whatsoever for loving other people, forgiving them, or showing compassion. 'The doctrine of loving one's neighbor is a fantasy that we owe to Christianity and not to Nature,' [de Sade] explained. Virtue, likewise, is 'just a way of behaving that varies according to climate and consequently has nothing real about it.'"

A century after de Sade, another philosopher described in stark clarity what a world without God would look like. In his "Parable of the Madman," Friedrich Nietzsche described the death of God as "unchaining this earth from its sun." In terms of personal morality, the Marquis de Sade got there first. Like Nietzsche, he was willing to explore the realities of his evil ideas in practice.

Though even the most radical sexual revolutionaries today would hesitate to claim de Sade as their intellectual forefather, they must. Before Darwin, he embraced a world where the strongest survive and most brutal thrive. Before the sexual revolution, he explored sex as only a means of pleasure, with no regard for the dignity of people or their bodies. His disgusting depictions of torture foreshadowed the horrifying medical experiments that would be performed by the Nazis in the twentieth century. His open hatred for Christianity (he called Jesus "a scoundrel, a lecher, a showman who performed crude tricks") anticipated an argument common today that Christianity is not only anti-intellectual and anti-rational, but plain evil.

For de Sade, freedom was pure license without the constraints or consequences of morality or even, for that matter, biology. This is only thinkable in a world without God, and therefore a world without any design or moral order. Those who argue for such a world have neither cause nor moral means by which to denounce the despicable behavior of de Sade or, for that matter, of Jeffrey Epstein and the men exposed when court documents were unsealed earlier this week.

Thankfully, despite the terrible ideas of the Enlightenment and their consequences, the world remains securely chained to its Sun. In the real world, the freedom to be fully human is grounded in the way God made us. Thus, true freedom is always hemmed in by virtue. Among the many benefits of this worldview is the ability to fiercely repudiate the degeneracy of the Marquis de Sade, and to do so from sound philosophical footing.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org