Breakpoint

Typically, People magazine publishes stories lamenting reduced access to abortion that has resulted for some women since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But earlier this month, the magazine published a heartbreaking story lamenting an abortion.

Las Vegas mom Tamika Thomas unexpectedly lost her two preborn babies after a local pharmacy wrongfully gave her an abortifacient. Having undergone in vitro fertilization, Thomas was picking up pills that she thought were going to help kickstart her pregnancy. Instead, the pharmacist, failing to decipher the doctor's note, prescribed Misoprostol, a drug used to abort preborn children within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Unaware she had received Misoprostol, Thomas took the pills and lost her children.

This heartbreaking story is not about victims of bad handwriting. Rather, these two children were the victims of bad ideas and our culture's upside-down thinking about women, the preborn, and the purpose of medicine.

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

A 2012 headline in U.S. News and World Report asked, "Is It Time to Rate Young Adult Books for Mature Content?" According to the article, there was an increase in profanity in children's books and sexual content in young adult novels. In fact, a survey that year revealed that 55% of the readers of young adult novels were adults, not teens.

A decade later, no one seems to be asking questions about graphic content in books for young people anymore. Rather, that content is being defended and promoted. Especially in fiction aimed at young adults, there is explicit content, including aggressive LGBTQ content, and themes of rape, abuse, BDSM, even incest.

There seems to be a commitment, in both literature and law, to relentlessly sexualize children in aggressive and even predatory ways. In a saner world, we would call this what it really is: abuse. In our world, sane adults must do everything we can to protect children.

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

A recent episode of The Daily podcast from The New York Times ominously warned, "The Mosquitoes Are Winning." Mosquitoes, believe it or not, are mankind's deadliest predators, carrying disease that result in over 219 million infections and over 400,000 deaths every year. Even that number is dramatically reduced from previous highs. Highly effective efforts to combat malaria through bed nets, vaccines, and insecticides have reduced global deaths by more than a third.

Today, however, the world's deadliest insect is making a comeback. A new breed of mosquito, Anopheles stephensi known to researchers as "Steve," has adapted to evade old methods of pest control. Not only does it reproduce year-round and in water as shallow as a bottlecap, but it also lives primarily in cities rather than more rural areas. Between 2019 and 2021, global malaria deaths rose by 8%, primarily because "Steve's" range expanded from Asia into Africa.

Pensées is a collection of writings from Blaise Pascal that were found and compiled after his death. It contains Pascal's astute observations about the human condition. For example,

"What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe! Who will unravel this tangle?"

Pascal was a brilliant mathematician who converted to Christ late in his life, a life that ended with his untimely death at just 39 years old. Many of his writings that can be found in Pensées are responses to the skeptics of his day. He especially wrote about the failure of these skeptics to grasp the human person. In one of his best-known passages, he wrote,

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this."

Had Pascal known, he may have referenced the mosquito instead of a vapor. After all, a child can swat a mosquito, but nothing has been more deadly in human terms than this little insect.

Despite his young faith, Pascal brilliantly articulated humanity's value, as well as our complex relationship with the rest of the world. His words stand in contrast to both pagan thinkers, who thought of humanity as subject to the whims of capricious deities, and to the utopian idealists of his day, who believed that man would soon fully master nature.

Today as well, different views of the human person emerge from different worldviews. Philosophical naturalists see human beings as animals, shaped purely by instinct and desire. Eastern pantheists think of human beings as part of the divine Oneness that includes all things. You might say that, for the atheists, humans are animals. For the New Ager, humans are gods. The truth, according to Scripture, is that we are made in the image of God but tend to act like animals.

Even the smallest living things remind us of our fragility. Contrary to the promises of transhumanism, we will always be forced to reckon with human frailty, both in our mortality and our morality. Yet, our situation is not as hopeless. We alone, among all of God's creation, have the capacity to shape the world around us.

The mosquito story is case in point. Malaria vaccines exist but need better methods of transportation and delivery. Better infrastructure can reduce the amount of stale, standing water, but building it requires capital supported by a robust private sector. Research and strategies that could improve things are often bogged down by government regulations.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Mistaken for our mother, [nature] is terrifying and even abominable. But if she is only our sister—if she and we have a common Creator—if she is our sparring partner—then the situation is quite tolerable." Even more, Christians know that the end of the story is God restoring all things, "on earth as it is in heaven." Thus, as "thinking reeds," fragile and powerful, we have every reason to do our best to advance good, reduce evil, and restore God's world in whatever ways we can.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander.

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

John Stonestreet sits down with Joel Rosenberg and Eric Patterson to discuss the war in Israel.

Joel Rosenberg is the host and executive producer of THE ROSENBERG REPORT, the only weekly, prime time news and commentary show about Israel on any American news channel. It launched on October 6, 2022 and airs at 9pm eastern Thursday nights on TBN, the world's most-watched Christian TV network. Joel and his wife, Lynn, are dual U.S.-Israeli citizens and live in Jerusalem.

Eric Patterson, Ph.D. serves as President of the Religious Freedom Institute. Patterson is past dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University and a Research Fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, where he previously served full-time. Patterson has provided briefings and seminars for multiple government agencies, including France's Ministry of Defense, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command, U.S. Naval War College, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. military academies, and many others.

Additional Resources

The Rosenberg Report

All Israel News

All Arab News

The Joshua Fund

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Religious Freedom Institute

A Basic Guide to the Just War Tradition by Eric Patterson

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Breakpoint: The Atrocities of Hamas and the Reality of Evil

Breakpoint: Moral Clarity and the Attack on Israel

Breakpoint This Week: The Attack on Israel

Breakpoint: Barbaric Norms: Hamas, Israel, and Just War

Breakpoint: A Critical Error

Breakpoint: The Hard Stats on Palestinian Viewpoints

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

According to the National Academy of Medicine, 17 million Americans care for an older parent, spouse, friend, or neighbor with medical limitations. It is costly, beautiful, and important work, especially as so many push to eliminate suffering by eliminating sufferers.

There are, as a full-time caregiver put it recently, important lessons learned and blessings received in bearing each other's burdens:

"Over the years, I have prayed many prayers for the people whom I've been entrusted to care for. But … more times than I can count, … the script has felt flipped, and it is I who walk away feeling tended, knowing I have received nurture, kindness, and patient love."

Any culture in which the call to care for others lessens, and the pressure to eliminate the sufferer intensifies, becomes an impoverished culture. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas put it, "In 100 years, if Christians are known as those who do not kill their children or their elderly, we will have done well."

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

Nearly 15 years ago, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike fled Germany in order to homeschool their children in the United States. Under Germany's education laws, the Romeikes were subject to severe financial penalties for attempting to homeschool. On a few occasions, police came to their home and escorted their children to school. In 2009, they moved to the U.S. and petitioned the government for asylum.

They've lived here since, mainly in Morristown, Tennessee. Never formally granted asylum, they were granted indefinite deferred action status in 2014 by the Obama administration. They've since added two children, their two oldest have married U.S. citizens, and they have even welcomed a grandchild.

Last month, during a "routine check-in," the Romeikes were told they had to return to Germany. According to Home School Legal Defense Association attorney Kevin Boden:

"They were basically given four weeks to come back. They (were given) a report date in October. They (didn't) know what (was) going to happen in that meeting. They (didn't) know if they're going to be forced to leave. They (didn't) know if they're going to be taken into custody."

Given how long the family has been in the United States and how unconcerned the Biden administration seems to be about illegal immigrants pouring across the Southern border, it's difficult to make sense of why they would be so concerned about the Romeike family status now. After a significant amount of public pressure, the INS has given the family a one-year reprieve, but their story seems part of an increasing hostility to religious refugees on the part of the U.S. government.

According to a 2023 report from World Relief and Open Doors US, the number of religious refugees admitted to the U.S. has plummeted, though the number of Christians facing persecution around the world continues to climb. An estimated 360 million Christians live under threat of persecution and discrimination, an increase of 100 million in the last three years. Last year, the United States only resettled 25,465 refugees, excluding the Afghans and Ukrainians who entered the U.S. via a separate parole program. This number represents a dramatic reduction from pre-2017 levels when the U.S. resettled an average of over 80,000 people per year.

And, as the World Relief and Open Doors report outlines, the number of religious (including Christian) refugees from historically dangerous parts of the world have decreased even more sharply. In 2022, refugees from Eritrea, Iran, Myanmar, and Iraq were down "85 percent, 95 percent, 92 percent and 94 percent, respectively" compared to 2016 levels. Between 2016 and 2022, refugees from Burma (including most Rohingya) declined by 62%, total Christian arrivals by 70%, and Yezidis by 100%. "America," the author concludes, "is no longer the safe haven for displaced persons that it once was."

Though refugee resettlement in the U.S. slowed to a trickle during the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend goes back earlier. In 2019, I observed in a Breakpoint commentary that though the Trump administration had stalwartly defended religious liberty at home, it had shut down legal channels for religious—including Christian—refugees while trying to stop the crisis of illegal immigration.

Now, America faces a heightened crisis of illegal crossings due to the Biden administration's open border policies, especially on the southern border. However, fixing that problem should not include closing off all options for religious asylum seekers. Especially since the administration promised to specifically increase the number of religious refugees but instead arranged for 472,000 Venezuelans to come work in the U.S.

The strange targeting of the Romeike family, along with an unaddressed crisis of green-card applications, which could see thousands of faith leaders in the U.S. sent home after years of residency, suggests that the religious aspect of these stories may be an outsized factor.

Admittedly, reversing this trend now seems impossible in light of the war between Israel and Hamas. None of the surrounding Muslim nations are opening their borders to those seeking to flee the imminent ground assault of Gaza. And large, angry, and violent immigrant populations are protesting in many Western cities in support of the atrocities committed against Israel. Though it is possible to secure our borders and to properly vet and assist refugees facing religious persecution, the system will need to be rebuilt around completely different assumptions.

The current system invites mistreatment and exploitation. Encouraging the lawlessness of some while abandoning others, especially many who belong to what Paul called "the household of faith," only feeds a narrative that America is becoming a more hostile place for religion, especially Christianity. That narrative is supported by more than enough evidence already.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. 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, visit Colsoncenter.org

Recently on the The Deep Map podcast, Robert Nicholson, founder of the Philos Project, a Christian Middle East advocacy group, said that he finds it "amazing" that "the people who claim to love Palestinians don't know anything about them, and they're not even trying to learn."

In the interview, Nicholson emphasized findings of The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. For example, over two-thirds of Palestinians reject a two-state solution. Ninety-three percent of Palestinians reject Israel's claim to the land, while 58% support armed confrontation. Even more shocking is that two-thirds (67%) of the residents of the Gaza strip support armed attacks on Israeli civilians.

Along with the capacity of fallen humans to do evil, there is also the power of cultural ideology. Radical Islamic ideology, such as is held by Hamas, has shaped that region for a long time. Westerners shaped by secularism tend to think of religion as personal and private, which makes the terror carried out in Israel even harder to understand.

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

Jesus of Nazareth is one of those rare historical figures who nearly everyone wants to claim. You might say that just as God made us in His image, people return the favor and remake Jesus in our image. In fact, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became academically popular to claim to know what Jesus taught while assuming the Gospel accounts, especially the miraculous parts, were not true. An assumption that was simply taken for granted is that Jesus never claimed to be God.

Though the scholarly world has largely progressed past these scholars and their "scholarship," Jesus is still reimagined by many as something other than Christ. He's embraced as a political avatar or lifestyle coach, or in a role for which He was ill-suited: that of merely a "good teacher." Christians know there's more to the Jesus story. But how should we respond to false claims about Him, especially those based on little knowledge of what the Gospels actually say?

A recent video in the What Would You Say? series tackled this question and offered three points to keep in mind. First, the Scriptures clearly tell us who Jesus was and what He claimed to be.

"People who reject that Jesus was God have to reject some of the things that the Gospel writers claim about Jesus while accepting others. But how do we know which parts we can trust and which parts we should reject? Often, skeptics end up keeping those parts of the Gospels that describe the kind of Jesus they want to accept and end up with a Jesus they've pieced together. In other words, skeptics can be guilty of what they are assuming about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Not only is that inconsistent, but it ignores the fact that the Gospel writers have provided a reliable account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Not only are the books full of eyewitness accounts of His life and ministry, the authors had strong incentive to rightly preserve and pass on the details they contain. … At the very least, to dismiss the Gospels up front, and assume that they could not possibly be reliable accounts, means we are left with no real sources about His life to conclude He was even a good teacher."

Second, the coming and work of the Messiah were long foretold, with prophetic details that were fulfilled in the life of Jesus.

"In 700 BC, the prophet Micah predicted the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem of Judea. The prophet Zechariah announced that the coming Savior would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. Some Psalms point to a crucifixion-like death, centuries before this became a common means of execution under the Romans.

Some skeptics claim that these prophecies were read back into the Old Testament by those in power in the early Church. However, there are far too many details mentioned to be mere coincidence. The odds of one man's life matching so many of these predicted details would be astronomical. In fact, according to Professor Peter Stoner, 'The probability that Jesus of Nazareth could have fulfilled even eight such prophecies would be only 1 in 10x17th power. That's 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000.'"

Finally, the Gospels record the eyewitness accounts of Jesus' ministry. One of the ways they confirm His identity as the Messiah is recording the miracles Jesus performed.

"In addition to the miraculous prophetic detail, Jesus performed miracles during His earthly ministry that were attested to by eyewitnesses and recorded in the Scripture and history. Even his enemies who denied that He was the Messiah never disputed that Jesus of Nazareth performed miracles and wonders. In fact, after the crucifixion and resurrection, Peter, in the Pentecost sermon to the crowd in Jerusalem, reminded his audience that Jesus had fed 5,000 people, had restored sight to the blind, and had raised the dead to life. Peter claimed that all these miracles were done by Jesus, 'in your midst' (Acts 2:22) "

Jesus wasn't just a nice guy who told stories and wanted others to be nice. He didn't come to simply "show us the way." He claimed to be the Way, the only way to God.

To see this video and others like it, and to use them in classes or conversation, go to whatwouldyousay.org.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett.

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

The same day that Hamas militants murdered thousands of innocent men, women, and children, over 30 Harvard University student groups signed a statement of solidarity … not with the victims, but with the militants. "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence … [T]he apartheid regime is the only one to blame," they wrote.

Harvard's administration was deafeningly silent for days. Only after 500 faculty and over 3,000 university affiliates condemned the statement did leadership issue a "tepid" response, which it has since attempted to clarify.

Their moral inabilities stood in contrast to even Playboy magazine, which promptly cut ties with adult film star Mia Khalifa for statements celebrating Hamas' attack.

You know things are upside down in education when an adult magazine reaches the moral clarity that a preeminent institution of higher learning does not. That some student groups finally backtracked, saying they never read the statement, only exposes just how broken their moral reasoning is.

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