Breakpoint

When President Biden quoted St. Augustine and Scripture in his inaugural address, he was doing what almost every President before him has done: drawing on America's Christian tradition. Today on "BreakPoint This week," John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss America's "civil religion," the shared values of liberty and the dignity of all--but firmly rooted in Christianity. Ironically enough, even those vehemently opposed to Christianity in the public square (or opposed to causes Christians feel passionately about, such as protecting the unborn) profess these values, even though they are nonsensical outside of a Christian understanding of God's created order.

Also on today's episode: The rise in deaths from despair and acts of desperation; the plague of pornography; and the thinning of civil society,

As for their recommendations of the week, Shane slips into a Southern twang as he sings the praises of the folk group The Arcadian Wild and their decidedly Christian themes.

And John invites us all to join in with the Colson Center every Wednesday morning through March 31st for a time of guided prayer for our nation, informed by the wisdom of the Book of Proverbs.

When President Biden quoted St. Augustine and Scripture in his inaugural address, he was doing what almost every President before him has done: drawing on America's Christian tradition. Today on "BreakPoint This week," John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss America's "civil religion," the shared values of liberty and the dignity of all--but firmly rooted in Christianity. Ironically enough, even those vehemently opposed to Christianity in the public square (or opposed to causes Christians feel passionately about, such as protecting the unborn) profess these values, even though they are nonsensical outside of a Christian understanding of God's created order.

Also on today's episode: The rise in deaths from despair and acts of desperation; the plague of pornography; and the thinning of civil society,

As for their recommendations of the week, Shane slips into a Southern twang as he sings the praises of the folk group The Arcadian Wild and their decidedly Christian themes.

And John invites us all to join in with the Colson Center every Wednesday morning through March 31st for a time of guided prayer for our nation, informed by the wisdom of the Book of Proverbs.

Recently, I've had occasion to ponder suffering in a deeper way than ever before. I say this not because the situation I'm in is worse than it has ever been, but because I've become more familiar with the true character of suffering. It isn't about circumstances. Not really.

As pro-life author Stephanie Gray Connors explained in our recent conversation on the Upstream Podcast, suffering is the gulf between what we desperately want and what we actually have—between (for instance) the healing for which we pour out our hearts in prayer night after night and the apparent silence that answers from Heaven. My family's return to this familiar and dreaded gulf occasions suffering precisely because it is so familiar—We thought we'd learned the lessons God intended to teach us by this. How much more gold could He possibly refine out of us?

No, I've realized that suffering isn't about circumstances. It's about the fear that your circumstances are meaningless—that God has abandoned you. I've always thought that anyone could suffer indefinitely if they clearly understood and believed in the purpose they were accomplishing. But what if there is no purpose?

What if you've learned every conceivable lesson and undergone every imaginable sanctification and the drumbeat of sorrow continues, with no end in sight? What do you do when the spiritual shepherds who assured you God was preparing a weight of glory through your momentary affliction stammer and look away, no longer able to meet your questions?

According to Connors, you stop asking "why?" and start asking "what?" That is, "What good can I bring out of this situation?"

Two months ago, I might have dismissed this reframing as trite and Pollyannaish—as a clunky way of chirping, "Look for the silver lining!" But now I'm not so sure. We Christians may have done a great disservice to each other by framing the New Testament's words about suffering as behavior-modification. After all, if God is trying to sanctify us in the sense of weaning us off sin and self, then suffering ought to be more evenly distributed. I don't presume to know how much dross is left in anyone's soul, but surely it's time for God to go work the bellows on someone else.

Again and again I asked these kinds of questions. "Why, why, why?" But I never asked "What?" As in, "What if this is the Kingdom work He called me to do?"

Connors draws inspiration from Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who said that humans, by nature, have the capacity to draw meaning from any situation. "Whatever circumstances we find ourselves in," Connors paraphrases, "the last of the freedoms that can never be taken from us is the freedom to choose how we respond to the situation." Our response to suffering, she says, can "unleash beauty and creativity—things that are really affirming to what it means not only to be human, but to image God."

The reason Christ crucified is the ultimate answer to both sin and sorrow isn't simply that His death absolves us of guilt, although it certainly does. Jesus triumphed in His agony by introducing into our fallen world something it could not possibly swallow: the infinite creative power of redemptive suffering.

To lay down your life for a loved one—to keep on turning pages when the story seems to be over— to clutch your faith on that fourth 2 AM drive to the hospital—to look up from your wheelchair and sing like Joni Eareckson Tada—these responses to suffering shake our sin-wracked world and silence the demands for intellectual answers. They do this by following the pattern God established when He gave us His Son instead of a clever theodicy.

Our Father is not preparing us for a future battle. We're in the thick of it right now. And our faithfulness and love for one another in the fray are, you know, kind of the point. But this raises a fearful possibility—one that C. S. Lewis explored in his essay, "On the Efficacy of Prayer": What if our kinship with Christ runs as deep as the ancient martyrs believed? What if the strongest Christians should expect the heaviest crosses? What if we are not just likely but certain to find ourselves crying along with Jesus, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"

As Lewis concluded, "There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore." Perhaps the path to meaning inevitably runs through suffering, and always has. In that case it's comforting to know Someone has blazed the trail.

Chuck Colson liked to say that the Kingdom of God will never arrive on Air Force One. It's still true. Any reprieve the last few years in the areas of religious liberty and the sanctity of life is coming to an end, and recent events should make the truth of Chuck's statement obvious. Whether politics are upstream or downstream from culture (and the right answer is that it's really both), it is not the vehicle for lasting cultural change.

In fact, the history of Christianity shows that lasting cultural change rarely comes about in ways we are expecting. Christian influence requires that Christians cultivate virtue in both our private and public lives. One virtue that once changed the world is patience.

In his book, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, the late Mennonite historian Alan Kreider explained Christianity's extraordinary rise from a beleaguered sect to the movement that transformed the Roman Empire.

As one reviewer of Kreider's book put it, "Christianity probably shouldn't exist." Not only did its Roman contemporaries hate the Church, but Christians didn't make it easy to join up. With a stringent moral code and an extended period of catechesis prior to baptism, which only happened one a year around Easter, the Early Church wasn't very "seeker friendly."

Yet, it grew.

Why? Surprisingly, it wasn't because of an emphasis on evangelism, public preaching, or other missionary activities. The Church Fathers seldom wrote about those subjects, perhaps because they didn't need to. But they did emphasize patience, which Kreider defined as "not controlling events, not anxious or in a hurry, and never using force to achieve [their] ends."

If this sounds like a boring and timid church-growth strategy, it wasn't.

In the ancient world, patience was a trait associated with subordinates, such as slaves and victims. People at the bottom of the social hierarchy were expected to exercise patience, not those at the top. By emphasizing patience, the Church Fathers mobilized early Christians to be profoundly counter-cultural, which, to borrow a line from the Book of Acts, turned the world upside-down.

Patience, enacted in habits such as teaching and worship, produced the "ferment" of Kreider's title. People lived lives that were not only in marked contrast to the lives of their neighbors but were better than those practiced in the larger society. Christians ran towards the plague when others ran away from it. They didn't kill their children, and even adopted children left to die. They treated their spouses and children with love and respect while others treated their own families as little more than household slaves.

At the Colson Center's Truth. Love. Together virtual event last year, Andy Crouch marvelously described the patient ferment of the Early Church. As he put it, people took notice and asked Christians "to give an account for the hope that was within them." As a result, the Church grew from being a persecuted sect numbering in the thousands at the end of the first century to half the empire by the start of the fourth. The "patient ferment" of the Early Church transformed the world.

As Crouch put it, instead of "fermentation," we often prefer "carbonation," hoping a quick shot of power or a new clever church-growth method will do the trick. There might be some fizz, but the effects are short-lived. The Early Church understood that long-lasting change requires long-lasting effort. It requires understanding that the fruit of our labors may not be seen until after we are gone. It requires that we live for faithfulness, not success.

Now none of this means that Christians should abandon the public square or the political process. No one is saying that this exempts us at all. This certainly doesn't exempt us at every level from speaking the truth, and it includes speaking, when necessary, those very hard truths our culture won't tolerate right now.

A prime example of cultural fermentation was, of course, British Parliamentarian William Wilberforce. Wilberforce and his committed band of Christian co-laborers worked for decades to abolish the slave trade and restore virtue in the British Empire. Yet, neither he nor his children lived to see the full fruit of their labors. Why should we expect things to be different? Why should we be exempt from the need for patience?

We shouldn't. And to think otherwise is to confuse carbonation for fermentation and Air Force One for the Second Coming.

John and Shane field concerns from listeners related to repairing and restoring relationships inside the church after the recent political season.

John and Shane provide pathways of thought to recalibrate our approach to reconnecting with Biblical mandates without building kingdoms.

A listener also asked how Christians should respond to the recent censorship from technology companies. There are real civil reasons some speech has been curbed, however what does that do to freedoms and are those freedoms that incite civil unrest worth protecting? John helps identify the contradictions inside the censorship practices impacting citizens and helps organize thinking inside a Biblical framework.

In July 1864, some 14,000 Confederate troops stood just six miles—within sight— from the Capitol Dome. For President Lincoln, it was a rude shock. After all, this was a year after the Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg. The Confederacy seemed near defeat.

In the nick of time, 17,000 Union troops dispatched by Ulysses S. Grant arrived and pushed the Confederates back. Washington was saved. Today, as Joe Biden is sworn in as 46th President of the United States, 20,000 National Guardsmen will defend that same Capitol from enraged citizens.

It's impossible to understand how we've reached this point, unless we look beyond the last few weeks, even beyond the election, to pre-existing conditions, such as the decades-long thinning of civil society.

The most recent lawlessness at the Capitol reflects an escalating lawlessness that spans political parties, religious affiliations, age brackets, and social classes. Will a militarized America be the new normal? Will the armed troops protecting the Citadel of Democracy today be patrolling the streets of rioting cities tomorrow? Will the blatant failures of our institutions and our leaders continue to fester to an explosive level of distrust?

Chuck Colson often said that unless a people are governed by the conscience, they will be governed by the constable. When people are unable to govern themselves, they face a choice between order and chaos. Most often, the people ultimate choose order, which inevitably means the loss of freedoms.

The freedom to assemble peacefully is impossible to maintain when assemblies frequently turn into riots, looting, or sedition. The freedom of speech seems particularly vulnerable today, when Big Tech wields all the power and decides, like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram already have, to crack down on political speech they deem offensive or dangerous. Last week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke openly about forming a committee to "rein in our media environment," something that should alarm anyone who has ever read any dystopian novel, ever. Our Second Amendment freedoms are most vulnerable when used as cover by mass shooters or insurrectionists.

Perhaps the most consistent refrain from America's Founders is that our national experiment would prove unsustainable without a virtuous citizenry. Our Constitution simply cannot govern those who refuse to govern themselves. John Adams, our second President, said it most clearly: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Yet, Americans are becoming increasingly immoral and irreligious, our shocking lack of conscience is on display in rising numbers of both "deaths from despair" (addictions, self-harm and suicide) and "acts of desperation" (violent acts, riots, self-mutilation in pursuit of identity or sexual pleasure). We pump poisonous ideas into our hearts and minds and call it entertainment. We pump lies into our children and call it education.

In other words, America is in a dark, deeply divided place, a place Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn accurately described in his 1978 speech at Harvard. We have, he said, very "little defense against the abyss of human decadence…such as the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror." Even strict laws, said Solzhenitsyn (and, I might add, 20,000 National Guard troops), are powerless to defend a people against such moral corrosion.

The situation is dire, but not without hope. As Chuck Colson often said, despair is a sin. Christ is risen from the dead. God, in his gracious goodness, has revealed to us what is true and what is good. He has given us His Word and, through prayer, He has made Himself available to us.

Today, the Colson Center is launching a time of prayer, which will continue every week until Easter. Each week, often led by our ministry colleagues, we'll pray according to the profound instruction God has given us in the book of Proverbs. We launch this today, and you can learn all about it at breakpoint.org/proverbs.

The devolution of our collective conscience may continue. The replacement of constitutional rights with constables might be inevitable. May it never be! But even if so, may God's people not be reduced to outrage or cowardice. May we be the reservoir of strength and renewal our nation so desperately needs.

Recently, police in Hong Kong arrested 53 pro-democracy activists for holding a primary election. The Communist Chinese government made the sweep of political opponents under cover of its new national security law. The same day as these arrests, China-based tech firm Alibaba's stock jumped 30 percent when word circulated that Jack Ma, Alibaba's eccentric founder, might actually be alive. Ma vanished two months ago after publicly criticizing China's banking system. Apparently, stockholders had assumed the Chinese Communist Party killed him.

Juxtaposed to these stories was a New York Times article that ran the same week describing everyday life in China now that the Coronavirus is nearly nonexistent there. The headline of the article was, "In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom." Underneath the headline was this summary: "Surveillance and censorship bolster Beijing's uncompromising grip on power. But in the country's cities and streets, people have resumed normal lives." Hmmm.

According to the veteran reporter, life in the Communist country now resembles "what 'normal' was like in the pre-pandemic world." "Restaurants are packed," she wrote. "Hotels are full. Long lines form outside luxury brands stores. Instead of Zoom calls, people are meeting face to face to talk business or celebrate the new year."

Yes, the Times reporter admitted (via a few throwaway lines early in her report), "Chinese citizens don't have freedom of speech, freedom of worship, or even freedom from fear," but they do have the freedom to "lead a normal day-to-day life."

In the book I co-authored with Brett Kunkle, A Practical Guide to Culture, we wrote that "the battle of ideas begins with the battle over definitions." How we define certain words is incredibly consequential. It's jarring to consider just how malleable definitions of words such as "freedom" have become. Pro-democracy activists are arrested by the dozens… a billionaire tech CEO is presumed missing after criticizing his government… but shopping at a designer store without a mask is freedom?

For the record, even if we granted the Times the benefit of the doubt here, China still wouldn't live up to the Times's grotesquely skewed definition of freedom. An estimated one million (and counting) Muslim Uighurs are currently detained in concentration camps in Xinjiang province. Inmates are forced into physical labor and sometimes tortured. Women, according to reports, are often forcibly sterilized or forced to undergo abortions. Even according to the New York Times definition, the Uighurs are anything but free.

The Chinese government is, of course, well-known for playing loose with language. In a now-removed tweet, the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. recently claimed that their holocaust-like treatment of Uighur women had, in fact, liberated them because, after all, they were now more open to abortion. Even Twitter thought that crossed a line.

Even so, the way this New York Times piece defined freedom down commits another error. Any grammar nerd will blanche at a rhetorical redundancy, such as, for example, the phrase "completely destroyed." That's because there aren't degrees of destruction. Something is either destroyed or it isn't, no qualifier is necessary. Freedom is similar. The ability to shop at a mall while not being able to worship, speak, or assemble isn't freedom.

This is not to say that freedom is without limits. No one is "free" to murder or yell "fire" in a crowded theater. In fact, the definition of freedom increasingly embraced across the West—that we are free from rules, from consequences, from restraint, or from truth itself—is actually license. As the apostle Paul says, license only enslaves us. True freedom isn't freedom from but freedom for… the freedom for living fully into our created design.

Christians, of all people, should be able to clearly and accurately define freedom. Better yet, we must be able to show what freedom is. Our brothers and sisters in China are not free to worship together on Sundays without fear or oversight. American Christians who don't live Monday to Saturday as if Jesus is Lord aren't free, either, if freedom ends up being nothing more than enslavement to every passing fad.

True freedom is only in Christ, in seeing and living all of life as if it belongs to Him. Even when new COVID-19 cases across the globe finally reach zero, we'll only be truly free if the Son has set us free. Then we are free indeed.

In an eloquent defense of life, marriage, and religious liberty known as The Manhattan Declaration, authors Chuck Colson, Professor Robert George, and Dr. Timothy George wrote, "There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

Recently, new allegations from biographer and historian Dr. David Garrow have escalated concerns about Dr. King's moral failings, especially his sexual exploits and mistreatment of women. Many Christians are also rightly troubled by Dr. King's unorthodox theological views, especially his views about the resurrection of Christ and salvation that are outside of historic Christianity.

At the same time, as a work of moral philosophy, Colson and the Georges are absolutely correct about their assessment of Dr. King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." It is unparalleled in its clarity about the nature of law, what constitutes an unjust law, and our responsibility to respond to unjust laws.

Twenty years ago, Chuck Colson reflected on Dr. King's legacy, and the most important contributions from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: Here is Chuck Colson:

"A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is out of harmony with the moral law."

It was with these very words, in his memorable "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," that Martin Luther King, Jr., threw down the gauntlet in his great Civil Rights crusade. King refused to obey what he regarded as an immoral law that did not square with the law of God.

All across America today, millions of people are celebrating the birthday of this courageous man, and deservedly so. He was a fearless battler for truth, and all of us are in his debt because he remedied past wrongs and brought millions of Americans into the full riches of citizenship.

In schools and on courthouse steps, people will be quoting his "I Have a Dream" speech today. It is an elegant and powerful classic. But I would suggest that one of Dr. King's greatest accomplishments, one which will be little mentioned today because it has suddenly become "politically incorrect," is his advocacy of the true moral foundations of law.

King defended the transcendent source of the law's authority. In doing so he took a conservative Christian view of law. In fact, he was perhaps the most eloquent advocate of this viewpoint in his time, as, interestingly, Justice Clarence Thomas may be today.

Writing from a jail cell, King declared that the code of justice is not man's law: It is God's law. Imagine a politician making such a comment today. We all remember the controversy that erupted weeks ago when George W. Bush made reference to his Christian faith in a televised national debate.

But King built his whole case on the argument, set forth by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that "An unjust law is no law at all." To be just, King argued, our laws must always reflect God's Law.

This is the great issue today in the public square: Is the law rooted in truth? Is it transcendent, immutable, and morally binding? Or is it, as liberal interpreters have suggested, simply what courts say it is? Do we discover the law, or do we create it?

Ever since Dr. King's day, the United States Supreme Court has been moving us step-by-step away from the positions of this great Civil Rights leader. To continue in this direction, as I have written, can only lead to disastrous consequences—indeed, the loss of self-governing democracy.

So, I would challenge each of us today to use this occasion to reflect not just on his great crusade for Civil Rights but also on Martin Luther King's wisdom in bringing law back to its moral foundations.

Many think of King as some kind of liberal firebrand, but when it comes to the law he was a great conservative who stood on the shoulders of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, striving without apology to restore our heritage of justice.

This is a story I tell in my book, How Now Shall We Live?: a great moment in history when a courageous man applied the law of God to the unjust laws of our time, and made a difference. And that is the lesson we should teach our kids on this holiday. It is not just another day off from school or a day to go to the mall."

That was Chuck Colson. Read through King's letter today. Discuss it with your kids. I think you will find it to be an incredibly important civics lesson.

This commentary by Chuck Colson's first aired February 18, 1998.

In the past, Civil religion united America. Not anymore. Following a recent exchange on Twitter, John Stonestreet called on Mark Tooley and Andrew Walker to discuss the current political movements, including Christian nationalism, and how they impact Christianity.

Tooley and Walker discuss the future of America in a post-Christian, pseudo-Christian context. The pair believe there needs to be a resurgence in building institutional Christianity to counter the prevailing individualism of our age.

Together they call for a greater unity in the Church to provide stronger discipleship in online relationships. They both believe there needs to be better thinking in political involvement, sharing that we're likely giving Washington way more of our attention than it deserves.

Mark Tooley is the President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) – Editor of IRD's magazine Providence.

Dr. Andrew Walker is the Associate professor of Christian Ethics and Apologetics, Associate Dean for the School of Theology, and the Director of the Carl F H Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

There are deaths from despair and acts of desperation that mark this cultural moment. Some are lacking peace and many are struggling to find hope from our cultural institutions and leaders. John Stonestreet invites Maria Baer to discuss the challenges we and our loved ones face currently. The two also identify how the Christian worldview offers great perspective and encompassing hope to participate in our modern world.

John and Maria also visit on the role of family and the challenges to thin society. Maria highlights that some might call a challenging person 'toxic'. In doing this many will avoid seeking restoration. John highlights how this thinking has flowed downstream and is greatly impacting how Christians live in church, culture, and even their own families.

To close John spends significant time discussing the persecution of Christians around the world. He notes Open Doors' World Watch List, an orderly explanation and ranking of persecution across the globe.