Breakpoint

After claiming the U.S. Open's Women's Singles championship this week, Atlanta-born tennis star Coco Gauff paused to, in the words of ESPN's SportsCenter, "soak it all in." What she was really doing was kneeling with eyes closed and head bowed. In other words, she was praying, or as she told reporters later, "just saying thank you."

At just 19 years old, Gauff is only the third American teenager to win the U.S. Open, the most recent being Serena Williams in 1999. She broke onto the tennis scene by defeating Venus Williams at Wimbledon when she was 15.

All the while, her faith in Jesus Christ has been clear. She told The New York Times last year that she prays with her dad before every match—not for victory, but for the good health of both players. As she told reporters this week, "I don't pray for results. I just ask that I get the strength to give it my all."

Amen. That's a prayer we should all soak in.

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

For over 30 years, my friend Greg Koukl has taught Christians how to engage with people across worldview lines by asking questions. His first book Tactics has equipped thousands of Christians to communicate with wisdom and passion. This month, Koukl is releasing a follow-up to that book, entitled Street Smarts: Using Questions to Answer Christianity's Toughest Challenges.

Among the goals of the book is to make evangelism a less intimidating and more successful endeavor:

"There are few things that cause more nagging guilt for Christians than sharing their faith. They feel guilt because they don't witness enough. They don't witness enough because they're scared. And they're scared for good reason. Sharing the gospel and defending it—apologetics—often feels like navigating a minefield these days. For most of us, engaging others on spiritual matters does not come easy, especially when people are hostile."

Koukl helpfully distinguishes what he calls "harvesting," and "gardening." Because God brings the harvest, our goal is simply faithfulness to what is true about the world and about people. According to John's Gospel, some Christians harvest and others sow, so "that sower and reaper may rejoice together."

A singular focus only on "harvesting," Koukl argues, leads to a number of problems. For example, the very important "gardeners" are encouraged to sit out the evangelism process, in favor of the "harvesters." This is often the case when Christians fail to understand the power of the cultural forces shaping the worldview of non-believers, one reason our Gospel seeds seem to only bounce off "hard soil." Christians, therefore, must also commit to "spadework," or digging up the faulty preconceptions about life, God, and humanity that people hold, often unknowingly. One great way to do this "spadework" is by asking questions.

"Ask questions. Lots of them. Your first step in any encounter should be to gather as much information as possible. It's hard to know how to proceed—or even if to proceed—unless you first get the lay of the land. You need intel, and friendly queries get it for you.

When you need to buy some time to catch your wits, ask a question. When you face a challenge you're not sure how to deal with, ask a question. When the conversation bogs down and you think it best to move in a new direction, ask a question. Whenever you're in doubt about how to move forward, ask a question."

In Street Smarts, Koukl teaches the kinds of questions that are most effective while also providing sample conversations on the most common topics, which is another very important contribution of this book. In addition to answering the misconceptions about faith that people often have—from God's existence to the divinity of Jesus—Street Smarts helps believers engage others on the moral and social issues at the center of our cultural discourse, such as abortion and gender and the many topics related to human sexuality. Koukl provides the questions, the talking points, and the examples that can open up significant conversations, invite skeptics in, and challenge presuppositions. In the process, Christians will develop confidence in what is true.

Our job is to jump in. The results are up to God.

"You may be serving quietly, in the dark, often not knowing the true extent of your impact—going out in obedience, doing what is right, speaking what is true, laboring faithfully. The course of history is often changed by small things done by ordinary people at opportune times, even though they never realize it. We take what we have—our skills, our gifts, our capabilities, our opportunities—then place everything in the hands of the Savior. … A person may rebel at what you share, but if you're thoughtful in what you say and gracious in how you say it, chances are good you'll give him something to think about."

This month, for a gift of any amount to the Colson Center, we will send you a copy of Greg Koukl's book Street Smarts. As Koukl writes, both knowledge and action "breed courage." His book cultivates both. To receive a copy of Street Smarts: Using Questions to Answer Christianity's Toughest Challenges, visit colsoncenter.org/September. As Koukl writes,

"Now is not the time for fear of any kind. It's not the time to circle the wagons or to pull up the drawbridge. It's the time for ambassadors equipped with knowledge, tactical wisdom, and character to seize the moment as agents of change for the kingdom of heaven when the world needs them most." 

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

A California law decriminalizing loitering went into effect in January. When Governor Gavin Newsom signed it last year, neither its supporters nor its opponents attempted to hide what it was really about: prostitution.

Police previously could stop and question people they suspected of soliciting. This led to, advocates agreed, discrimination against so-called "transgendered adults." What wasn't said out loud is that transgendered adults apparently present themselves in ways that lead them to be confused for prostitutes.

According to a recent story in the Times of San Diego, the new law has led to an explosion in prostitution and sex trafficking in California. After all, the law says that police cannot try to identify prostitutes. It does not say that customers and traffickers can't.

Often, laws that are put forward as "safety" measures for the LGBT community endanger other people. It's what happens when up is down, wrong is right, and all kinds of other really important words are redefined.

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

In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper, a black professor from Bates College, argued that so-called "anti-racism" has gone too far.

"In their righteous crusade against the bad color-blindness of policies such as race-neutral college admissions, these contemporary anti-racists have also jettisoned the kind of good color-blindness that holds that we are more than our race, and that we should conduct our social life according to that idealized principle. Rather than balance a critique of color-blind law and policy with a continuing embrace of interpersonal color-blindness as a social etiquette, contemporary anti-racists throw the baby out with the bathwater."

The term "anti-racist" came from a recent explosion of writing such as Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist, and it carries enormous ideological implications. According to Kendi, "One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist.'"

For figures like Kendi and DiAngelo, anti-racism isn't just the commitment to combat racism wherever we happen to see it, it's the commitment to see racism everywhere, entrenched in the heart of society and present in all its aspects. Even more, to be "anti-racist" requires the adoption of a very narrow set of policy prescriptions, all of which come from an increasingly left side of the political world.

In this world, white people must move from a position of "neutrality" to actively "centering" race in all their discourse. Only then can "whiteness" and "implicit bias" be identified, admitted, and confessed. In practice, Harper warns, this only obliterates any distinctions between "structural" racism, a term referring to racial injustices embedded in wider society, and the interpersonal interactions with people of different races.

"It tends to rest on a troubling, even racist subtext: that white and Black Americans are so radically different that interracial relationships require careful management, constant eggshell-walking, and even expert guidance from professional anti-racists. Rather than producing racial harmony, this new ethos frequently has the opposite effect, making white-Black interactions stressful, unpleasant, or, perhaps most often, simply weird."

This weirdness that Harper described is the fruit of Critical Race Theory, a wrong way to diagnose and respond to racism, because it makes racial injustice "a theory of everything." Sixty years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a world in which his own children would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." However, "anti-racism" reverses that, presuming to know one's character, a priori, based only on the color of skin.

Another important insight from Harper's article is that our racial dialogue has been shaped by the "triumph of the therapeutic," which social critic Philip Rieff described as the "self, improved, (as) the ultimate concern of modern culture." In a moment in which everything is about the self, Harper believes that racial dialogue is often not about making real progress, but making ourselves feel better through confession and activism.

Throughout the biblical narrative, people are described as having a common parentage and heritage as image bearers. The Apostle Paul told the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in Athens that God "made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth." Those who are in Christ, no matter which tongue or tribe or nation or language they represent, are reconciled to their Creator and thus, to each other. Only Christianity can anchor this beautiful vision of the human condition on solid ground, and it has incredible implications for individuals and nations, for people and for social structures.

Harper rightly concludes that we must see each other, first and foremost, as people, a kind of colorblindness that will prove far more effective than performative racial confessions or racialized division. That, however, is only true if there is something universal to our identity, dignity, and value. If there is, it must be an intrinsic reality of the human person, given rather than acquired.

Only one vision of the human story, the biblical account of people and creation, offers anything like that.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander.

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

For a lot of people, writes Angela Chen in The Atlantic, "[s]ibling bonds are the longest relationships of our lives. We know siblings before we meet our partners (and before we have our own kids), and we'll know them after our parents die."

Some research even suggests that siblings have a higher impact than parents on whether teens do drugs and alcohol. Another study found that "subjects who had conflict or distance in their relationships with siblings before age 20 were more likely to be depressed at age 50."

What G.K. Chesterton once wrote about neighbors describes siblings even better,

"We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbor. Hence, he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain."

The fewer children that Western couples have, the fewer siblings there will be in the world. And that will be a poorer world indeed.

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

According to the Associated Press, nearly 50,000 people committed suicide last year, an absolute record in terms of raw numbers and the highest rate in nearly a century. Though, as one scholar noted, there's always the chance that the numbers are up on account of better reporting, that doesn't explain the consistent increase in these numbers over the last two decades. Something is broken in the United States, and it's us.

Why, in the most prosperous time to be alive in human history, do so many think that they would be better off dead? Nor do these numbers about suicide tell the complete story. Along with the dramatic increase in substance-abuse-related deaths, particularly opioids, deaths related to alcohol abuse and other addictions, and the suicide-by-slaughter of mass shootings, we face an outbreak of what is being called "deaths of despair."

Some of this could be the result of an increasingly vitriolic cultural environment. After all, it is hard to be hopeful when everyone is yelling at everyone else. Students in particular are victims of the ubiquity of smartphones and their amoral algorithms. And although the economy has, over the same period, seen incredible expansion overall, places like the Rust Belt now mirror the frustrations of inner cities as industries disappear along with opportunities for meaningful labor.

In addition to these structural concerns, we're also living downstream from particularly destructive ideas. For decades, American society has been steadily stripped of those meaning-making stories that made it, specifically the religious framing that placed our lives as part of something bigger. For even longer, we've been telling ourselves that transcendent things like truth, beauty, and goodness are imaginary, and that we are nothing more than matter in motion on a "pale blue dot" adrift in the heavens.

The more recent orthodoxies of Critical Theory preach self-loathing as the only means of salvation, while at the tail end of the sexual revolution, our identities have been uprooted, tethered only to what we feel and are willing to self-determine. In the process, we've created a culture of victimhood, much of it fabricated, and have positioned it as the goal of life.

All of this is a powerful recipe for social and individual instability, but that's not all. Voices of the state and media have, in the last several years, marketed suicide as a positive choice, the final solution to life's problems, and the final expression of autonomy and, thus, dignity. A growing number of U.S. states and the nation of Canada have embraced and now sell suicide to their citizens, using the language of "medical assistance." Though what they provide is neither. Argued with language of autonomy and avoiding suffering, the end result is always more death. By making it an option, we've made suicide more likely.

All this weighs most of all upon our neighbors and friends struggling with mental illnesses. In a culture broken and enmeshed by meaninglessness, double damage is done to these hurting souls. If we hope to prevent our neighbors from dying too soon, we'll first have to help them answer the question: "What is there to live for?". A life without meaning will remain empty, no matter how much we try to fill it with prosperity, status, technological gadgets, "autonomy," infinite choice, and distraction.

To borrow from Thomas Aquinas, an increasingly secular culture removes any real conviction we have that it's even possible to "share in the goodness of God." Thus, it'll take the Church, both as an institution and as individuals, to reach those who are hurting. Remaining open to our own pains and struggles, we can place them within a larger framework of meaning and hope. Christians, too, battle with despair but while knowing it will not have the final word. Christ does, so hope does.

To better prepare to offer this hope in this fragile moment, please consider our "Hope Always" course featuring Dr. Matthew Sleeth. This course is available online, can be accessed anytime, and can be studied alone or as part of a community committed to providing healing to hurting neighbors. Go to educators.colsoncenter.org for more information.

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

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

According to the editors at The Economist, "Republicans used to extol the benefits of free trade and free markets," but now, many support barriers to international trade, generous government spending, and condemn corporate America. At least part of the shift is corporate America's leftward lurch, especially the trend to enlist the marketplace in woke causes while threatening the freedom of speech.

Still, the urge to paint capitalism as the root of all evil is misguided. As civic education in the U.S. declines, fewer Americans on the left and the right understand how much better free markets are than every other alternative. Capitalism aligns better with the human condition than other systems, especially in seeing people as not only "consumers" but also "producers." Not merely as problems to be solved but as the best potential to solve the problems.

That's why the market has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in history. Throwing that away would be a serious mistake.

On September 26, the Colson Center is launching Breakpoint Forums, digital discussions about topics that matter. The first Breakpoint Forum will deal with this contentious idea of Christian nationalism. Joining me for this online discussion will be R.R. Reno, the editor-in-chief of First Things, an important journal of Christian thought, and Hunter Baker, professor of political science and dean at Union University. This online event will be September 26 at 8 p.m., ET. Registration is free, but you must sign up at breakpoint.org/forum.

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Päivi Räsänen, a member of the Finnish Parliament, is currently on trial, charged with hate crimes against a minority group. To be specific, Räsänen is being accused of violating a Finnish law that prohibits "War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity." According to state prosecutors, Räsänen committed the crime by quoting the Bible in support of traditional understandings of human nature and sexuality.

While prosecutors claim that they're not attempting to restrict religion per se, only certain public expressions, they are attempting to decide what can and cannot be said and done in the name of religion. In fact, the prosecution openly admitted that "[t]he point" of their case "isn't whether [what Räsänen said] is true or not but that it is insulting" (emphasis added).

This important case will carry dangerous precedent for just how free the Free World remains. Christians and others concerned with liberty of conscience should support Räsänen and ADF International as they champion the first freedom in what is ostensibly a Christian nation. While everyone in Finland "technically" enjoys full religious freedom, it is only in the sense that no one is required to be a part of the state church. Both the dominant Lutheranism and the minority Eastern Orthodoxy there are privileged and receive tax funds from their members. However, this official faith has not kept Finns from drifting further into atheism and relativism, nor has it prevented the open hostility to religion evidenced in this egregious court case. As Dr. Andrew Walker tweeted about the trial, "The Christian Nationalist regime of Finland is currently persecuting and prosecuting a Christian Member of Parliament for daring to quote the Bible."

Such is the problem when Christian is "in-name-only," whether nations or individuals. Being "officially" Christian, in other words, isn't the same as actually being one. And this goes for "nationalism," too.

We may appreciate a royal event that showcases the beauty of a deeply Christian liturgy to rest of the world and consider that a type of Christian nationalism, but other types are far more unsettling. For example, a Russian Orthodox priest recently blessed an image of notorious dictator and persecutor Joseph Stalin, saying that Christians should be grateful that Stalin "created" so many martyrs.

Whether we're talking about the Finns, the English, the Russians, or the Americans, the claim to be a Christian nation does not a Christian nation make. Even more important is defining the idea and determining if the idea of a Christian nation is even biblical, and in what sense. More than a few European nations remain Christian on paper, with laws that enshrine the Christian faith in a privileged position. However, many of these nations are among the most secular in the world, with church attendance falling consistently for the past few decades. At the same time, those voices that praise the demise of "Christendom" will soon realize just what the cultural rejection of Christianity entails.

The relationship between Church and state and culture is and has always been contentious. The recent cultural debate about the term "Christian nationalism" is confusing because participants in the debate tend to use mutually exclusive definitions of the term. For some, it's idolatry and a confusion of Gospel mission. For others, it's faithfulness– and the only thing remaining to prevent our children's co-option into an increasingly immoral culture. There are many questions that must be answered, for example:

With the culture and state so hostile to the Church, isn't it time to stand up for ourselves? Will nations exist in heaven? If God made the nations, then why have some disappeared? Even if Christian nationalism has its issues, is it the lesser of two evils? Why do critics of Christian nationalism only complain about partisanship when it's conservatives getting political? Is there a way we can be faithful in the public square without getting labeled "Christian nationalist"? Is longing for our nation to become more Christian the same as being a Christian nationalist? Weren't all Christians Christian nationalists until the American Revolution?

On September 26, the Colson Center is launching Breakpoint Forums, digital discussions about topics that matter. The first Breakpoint Forum will deal with this contentious idea of Christian nationalism. Joining me for this online discussion will be R.R. Reno, the editor-in-chief of First Things, an important journal of Christian thought, and Hunter Baker, professor of political science and dean at Union University. This online event will be September 26 at 8 p.m., ET. Registration is free, but you must sign up at breakpoint.org/forum.

All who register will receive a link to the recording of the forum after it's over.

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

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

Ever since the COVID-19 lockdowns, there's been an increase in disruptive behavior at public events and spaces. Concert attendees have disrupted performances. One fan threw water on rapper Cardi B, and a couple of fans distracted country singer Miranda Lambert with selfies. Movie theaters are increasingly lit by those scrolling through TikTok and Instagram, and ignoring or yelling at anyone who protests.

These incidents are the latest examples of how our private digital lives shape how we live publicly and in person. The habits of thought and action that are cultivated by, say, tweeting immediate reactions, doom scrolling, posting hot takes, or constantly sharing pictures, follow us off the screen.

Digital existence teaches us to think of ourselves as the center of the universe, making it easy to disregard how we treat others or behave in public. As Daniel Boorstin said, "We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them."

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

A year ago, The Economist urged readers not to bring their "whole selves" to work. While some corporate gurus suggest that we make work feel more like home, the authors beg to differ.

"Your professional self displays commitment to the job and eats lunch at a desk. Your whole self is planning the next holiday and binges ice cream on the sofa. Your professional self makes presentations to the board and says things like: 'Let's get the analytics team to kick the t[i]res on this.' Your whole self cannot operate a toaster and says things like: 'Has anyone seen my socks?' Pretending to be someone you are not is not a problem; it's essential."

That description speaks to what lies at the heart of the modern re-definition of "authenticity." From counselors pushing transgender ideology on kids, to Christians deconstructing faith, to the recent trend of "quiet quitting," many people today think that true authenticity is the only means to real happiness. It means always expressing our feelings, always feeling completely supported in whatever we say or do, and rejecting any relationship that asks us to do otherwise.

The problem, as the late Tim Keller once illustrated, is that this understanding of authenticity is based on a faulty premise.

"Imagine an Anglo-Saxon warrior in Britain in AD 800. He has two very strong inner impulses and feelings. One is aggression. He loves to smash and kill people when they show him disrespect. Living in a shame-and-honour culture with its warrior ethic, he will identify with that feeling. He will say to himself, That's me! That's who I am! I will express that. The other feeling he senses is same-sex attraction. To that he will say, That's not me. I will control and suppress that impulse."

Now imagine a young man walking around Manhattan today. He has the same two inward impulses, both equally strong, both difficult to control. What will he say? He will look at the aggression and think, This is not who I want to be, and will seek deliverance in therapy and anger-management programmes. He will look at his sexual desire, however, and conclude, That is who I am."

As Keller concluded, none of us simply choose to "be ourselves" in a vacuum. We constantly sift through contradictory feelings and evaluate them in the light of our values, which are often absorbed from our cultural setting.

The modern vision of "authenticity" is not born merely from an alternative understanding of morality, but from an alternative understanding of anthropology. In a world that has largely rejected God and objective truth as external realities, people increasingly turn inwards in deciding who they are and what they should do.

Any true understanding of self must begin by looking outward and upward, not inward. In the end, we may find conflict between what is true and how we feel. We must choose what is true. As Biola professor Erik Thoennes put it,

"There's this idea that to live out of conformity with how I feel is hypocrisy; but that's a wrong definition of hypocrisy. … To live out of conformity to what I believe is hypocrisy. To live in conformity with what I believe, in spite of what I feel, isn't hypocrisy; it's integrity."

In her latest book Live Your Truth and Other Lies, author and apologist Alisa Childers points out another problem with a feelings-first version of authenticity: "I can't love myself if I'm fooling myself about who I actually am. If I deny that there is something wrong with humanity (and thus, myself), the kind of love I will offer myself will be the opposite of authentic. It will be artificial authenticity."

While it is completely out of step to think this, Scripture is clear that "the heart is deceitful above all things." Today's worship of authenticity requires that we lie to ourselves about this difficult reality. If we do, however, we will never truly know who we are and how we should live.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. If you enjoy Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app.

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