Breakpoint

Yesterday on BreakPoint, we talked about the rise in addictions and overdose deaths due to our nation's opioid crisis. Through a constellation of unemployment rates, cultural darkness, and opioid availability, thousands in America's "Rust Belt" are falling to what are being called "deaths of despair." All of which was worsened by the greed and deception of pharmaceutical companies and the FDA.

And now, thanks to a new report, we know that the largely rural pain of opioid deaths is being matched by a predominantly urban crime scourge. In the last year, there's been an increase in crimes of all kinds, from shoplifting flash mobs to property crimes to outright murder. Just as with the opioid crisis, a network of causes is behind the uptick in lawlessness, and the consequences are particularly devastating for the poor living in many of our nation's urban centers.

Though violent crime per capita isn't as bad as it was in the early 90s, at least twelve major U.S. cities broke annual homicide records this year, before the first week of December. This includes Portland, Oregon, Tuscon, Arizona, and St. Paul, Minnesota. Philadelphia, a city of nearly 1.5 million people, had more homicides this year than New York and Los Angeles, a 13% rise from 2020 and breaking the homicide record set in 1990. Overall, major American cities have seen a 33% rise in homicides since the "new normal" of Covid began. 63 of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one violent crime category in 2020, those being homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

An obvious factor is that, in many cities, deterrents to crime have been removed. Facing accusations of police brutality, activists and municipal leaders called for defunding the police, diminishing the presence of law enforcement, and scaling back arrests and prosecution for certain crimes. The results have not been good. Target, Walgreens, and CVS have largely pulled out of the Bay Area after stores were targeted for "smash and grab" looting. Criminals were slapped with only misdemeanors if they lifted less than $950 worth of merchandise. Cities like Chicago have seen crime waves that began downtown nut now have hit the suburbs as well. Many cities which advocated for defunding the police last year are now looking to beef up police departments as crime continues to rise. But for too many, this is too late. As one study put it, "marginalized communities endure endemically high levels of violence. The events of 2020 exacerbated disparities in several forms of violence."

Communities already suffering from economic hardship and crime are now stripped of the legal and police protection their more affluent neighbors take for granted. Many corporations and shop-owners who experience not only a rise in crime, but a corresponding drop in profits conclude it's best to take their business elsewhere. This can leave already doubly-afflicted communities without food stores and jobs.

Still, it would be mistake to place all the blame for this crime surge only on fewer police officers and reduced law enforcement. After all, in 19th century Victorian London, the police force shrank without precipitating more crime. The difference is, in that case, they were no longer needed. A people able to govern themselves by the conscience is not in need of the constables. In our moment, those pushing to reduce law enforcement got the math exactly backward. As our culture is showing an inability to govern itself, evidenced by dual epidemics of "deaths from despair" and what could be called "acts of desperation," is not the time to lose the constable.

A word used often in Scripture is Shalom, often translated peace. So much more than the mere absence of conflict, shalom means wholeness, rightness, the state of being when things are ordered as they ought to be. It is right to insist that those who "protect and serve" do just that. Security is a non-negotiable prerequisite to shalom in civic life. Without it, outside investors will stay away from poverty-stricken areas and residents seek a better life elsewhere, taking their talent and resources with them.

Even so, security is only a first step. Communities must develop around virtuous citizens and mutual responsibility. The more shalom is cultivated within a community, the less "the stick" of coercion is needed. An essential ingredient is what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons" of society, the flourishing of non-governmental, local networks and institutions, an often intangible infrastructure of education, creativity, care, and problem-solving.

Without it, communities only experience a peace born of force.

This, of course, is precisely where the Church can thrive, doing what it's always done, caring for those in need through things like charity and education and care, as well as by proactively encouraging the other spheres of society to live out their roles as God intended.

John and Shane discuss the role of subsidiarity in the life of Christians before they answer a question for resources on caring for the elderly and those with disabilities. Then, Shane asks John how Christians should prepare for a post-Roe world before John answers a question for resources on building a four-chapter Gospel framework.

Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The case is about a Mississippi law that effectively bans abortion after 15 weeks. Abortion advocates claim this law and others like it assault the fundamental rights of women and "force them to have babies."

Last week, the French National Assembly adopted a bill extending the abortion limit from 12 to 14 weeks in that country. Most European countries restrict abortion to the first trimester, but we keep hearing that a 15-week ban would effectively keep women from full participation in society?

The fact is, the US has some of the most liberal abortion laws in the world—laws that place us alongside countries like China and North Korea. Eight states allow abortion up to the moment of birth!.

When the hysterics start, it's important to know the truth. America's current abortion laws are what's extreme, not the restrictions being proposed.

The United States just passed a grim milestone: over 100,000 deaths from opioid overdoses in the past year. Most of these deaths were due to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. Though sometimes prescribed as a painkiller, fentanyl is also a street drug that is often combined with heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamines.

America's battle with opioids is now 25 years old. Dopesick, a new streaming series on HULU based on a book by the same name, tells how Purdue pharma sold opioids to the public as non-addictive miracle cures for pain. The series also describes the Federal Drug Administration's complicity in creating what's been called "the worst drug overdose epidemic in (US) history,"

Statistically, fentanyl or other opioids are prescribed for pain for women at a higher rate than for men. Therefore, women are far more likely to become addicted after a prescription, while men are much more likely to become addicted to recreational drugs. In fact, over twice as many men die of opioid overdoses than women. Non-Hispanic whites die at a rate five times that of Blacks and seven times that of Hispanics.

The states that have seen the most significant increase in opioid death rates are "rust belt" states, specifically Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. These states have experienced a 300% to 500% increase in deaths over the last ten years.

Though abuse of prescription medications or addictions originating in prescriptions may not be the most significant factor of the opioid crisis, they are still a major concern, especially for women. This is partly due to an inordinate faith in medical experts. In 2014, properly prescribed medicines were the third leading cause of death in the US and Europe, according to the National Institutes of Health. This raises important questions about the role that pharmaceutical marketing practices and incentives for doctors play in prescribing these drugs, as well as the responsibility of major pharmaceutical corporations for practices that lead to addictions.

There are also questions about the pharmacies that distribute the drugs. Recently, a federal jury in Ohio found that CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart had contributed to the overdoses and deaths in two counties by overselling benefits and downplaying the negatives of opioid drugs. Though this does not absolve individuals from responsibility for choices that led to their addiction, medical, pharmaceutical, and regulatory entities failed in their roles as so-called "trusted experts."

That failure also contributed to the other side of the opioid epidemic, addiction from "recreational" use. So much so that addiction has become an aspect, perhaps the darkest aspect, of the crisis of meaning among young men in America. Factor opioid addiction into what's been aptly called "the war on boys" and our culture's consistent portrayal of men as dolts and masculinity as toxic, and we've got a systemic problem of epic proportions on our hands. This is particularly acute in the rust belt, where a sharp and years-long decline in both marriage and employment upend men's sense of purpose and direction.

This all is a complicating factor in the increasing social isolation men face in American culture, something documented many years ago by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. Many men have few, if any, close friends has significant implications for the opioid crisis. Soldiers who used heroin and other drugs in Vietnam sometimes came home as addicts, but a surprising number were able to drop their drug use on their return. The difference was often made by whether the veteran returned to a rich social network, a job, and a family.

What was true then is only more pronounced today. The lack of jobs and a clear sense of purpose, along with diminished or vanishing friendships and social networks create a vacuum that too many fill with drugs. Covid lockdowns only made the situation worse, leading to the spike in what are being called "deaths of despair." The 100k plus opioid deaths are a dark chapter in this larger story.

So how can the church help in this crisis? Before we talk about how, we need to discuss why we must. It's not clear that any other institution, particularly those that lost so much public trust in the last 25 years, has anything much to offer. They are largely exhausted.

The Gospel is not. It offers a clear sense of who we are, a source for meaning and purpose that goes beyond our age's radical individualism, and a potential source of the kind of social support men need. It also offers a call: to run into the brokenness, not away from it. To go where people are, into broken communities and families, often to those beyond our comfort zones, and be part of the solution. The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost; can we, who claim him as Lord, do less in the face of this challenge?

Washington State now allows convicted male felons who identify as female to move to women's prisons. No surprise but tragic nonetheless, reports are already emerging of biological males abusing and sexually exploiting female inmates.

One convicted child molester was transferred to a Seattle women's prison after claiming to be a woman and changing his name. He's now accused of raping a developmentally disabled female inmate.

A former guard told National Review that this predator was one of six men transferred there during his tenure. Another was also a convicted child molester. And all inmates must do to make the switch is convince an administrative panel they're transgender.

California passed a similar measure, and already nearly 300 inmates have requested transfers... all men, no women. Now, prisons are reportedly handing out birth control. Ideas have consequences, bad ideas have victims—in this case, victims who can't escape

Le Petit Robert, a popular dictionary of the French language, recently created a gender-neutral pronoun. The word is "iel," a merging of the masculine pronoun "il" with the feminine pronoun "elle." But, it isn't sitting well with many French folks.

Some see the move as an export of American wokeism into French culture, while others hail it as a travesty, an abuse of the French language. After all, French, like other Romance languages, is very gendered. Most nouns are either masculine, such as "book" or "hat," or feminine, such as "table" or "coronavirus."

This isn't the first attempt to degender French or the other Romantic languages. These endeavors tend to go nowhere, except for those proposing the changes. For everyday speakers or official language guardians, there's simply too much to change or too much at stake. This is especially true for the French. As one article put it years ago, attempts to de-gender the language of love "make (French) look like algebra."

The defense of gender in the Romance languages isn't just a clinging to tradition or living in the past. Many believe the gendered reality of French isvan essential part of its beauty. For example, Birgitte Macron, wife to French President Emmanuel Macron, said, "Our language is beautiful. And two pronouns are appropriate."

Every noun, from professions to household objects, is either masculine or feminine in French, as are the articles preceding them. In the case of things that actually come in both male and female, like people and animals, gender-specific articles and endings clear up any possible confusion. Thus a male political candidate is "le candidat," while a female one is "la candidate."

In defense of its new pronoun, La Petit Robert, claims their suggested change is a way of reflecting the world as it now is. Since language is evolving and changing, the country of France needs to adapt as well.

But is it really? Are we really moving away from male and female? Or are some just trying to, but failing? Is this about language reflecting reality, or is this change more an example of using language to force a new understanding of reality?

According to Jean-Michel Blanquer, the French Minister of Education, the answer is the latter. He tweeted last month that "inclusive writing is not the future of the French language." Others, like French Parliamentarian Francois Jolivet, see the move as nothing less than an attack on France itself, accusing the authors of the dictionary of being "militants of a cause that has nothing French about it: le wokisme." And, many in France are looking to the L'Academie Francaise, a 400-year-old gatekeeper of the French language, to undo what Jolivet called a "solitary campaign" - an obvious ideological intrusion to undermine France's common language and influence.

It's hard not to be impressed by these French officials committed to defending their language. Those who push for gendered pronouns aren't concerned about linguistic sense, nor do they care how now-dead folks like Victor Hugo once thought about life and the world. They're concerned with advancing a way of seeing the world… one rid of gender differentiation.

Attempts to degender language in the United States certainly aren't met with this same level of passion, not to mention this same level of thought. Here, inventing gender-neutral pronouns was so 2016. In fact, we've now moved on from inventing gender-neutral pronouns to determining God's pronouns, and replacing terms like mothers and pregnant women with "birthing people." We're teaching first graders to declare their pronouns, and telling teens to replace boyfriend or girlfriend with "partner."

Most Americans, out of a desire not to offend (or maybe because they're scared out of their wits about their employment prospects) comply, failing to realize just how much is at stake. They've overlooked, or are unaware, of just how much of a culture's collective thinking is shaped by language.

French officials, on the other hand, seem clear about what's at stake, and how a seemingly silly thing like gender-neutral pronouns indicates a serious worldview shift. Christians should be clear as well. As G.K. Chesterton once said, "The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only things worth fighting about."

Scripture describes God's words as creating the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing. As His image-bearers, our words also have incredible power. We cannot create ex nihilo, but our words either properly describe reality, or they distort it. In that sense, our words have the power to create impressions, beliefs, and even consequences. In a sense, our words are an essential aspect of the human ability to create entire worlds out of the world that God made. Defending language, like these French officials, is a move to recognize the structure of Creation, as God has designed and organized it, and our roles within it.

Any worldview that denies that the world is a creation of God inevitably sees reality as more pliable than it actually is. In the Biblical account, this world is a place we inhabit and steward for the glory of God. Today, reality is increasingly seen as a place we construct and control. In that view of the world, there are no words higher than our own, not even God's.

Because so much is at stake, we ought choose our words wisely.

In the heart of the 1980s, there was a spate of "Aid" music projects. We had "We Are the World," "Farm Aid," and, for the holiday junkies, a song to raise money for starving Africans which contained the lines, "There won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime . . . Do they know it's Christmastime at all?"

This is sweet, but it's also silly.

From Christianity's earliest days, some of the most important Christian thinkers and leaders hailed from Africa: Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, and Augustine of Hippo, to name just a few. African cities like Alexandria and Carthage incubated core Christian theology still held around the world, and Egyptian and Ethiopian churches have a longer history than English or Russian ones.

Not only this, but there is good reason to believe that there are more Christians in Africa today than on any other continent. This is so much the case that, in the face of doctrinal drift in their home countries, many Western churches now look to Africa for leadership.

So, just in case you were still worried about this, yes, they know it's Christmastime in Africa - probably better than we do.

Recently, the Economist reported that "in any given year one person in six is afflicted by a mental illness… [yet] two-thirds of people with a mental health problem do not receive any treatment for it. In poor countries, hardly any do. And almost everywhere, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists are scarce."

After painting this bleak picture, the same authors propose a solution with promising results: Non-experts, trained in the basics of "talk therapy." After a year of training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or CBT), lay practitioners in England and Zimbabwe reported significant improvement in their clients' mental health, sometimes after only a few sessions. It's a trend that many healthcare experts are taking seriously.

That's great news that, in light of a Christian worldview, has even bigger implications. And, it points to the irreplaceable value of community in a culture trapped in individualism and plagued by isolation.

The skyrocketing rates of loneliness in our world correspond with high rates of mental health issues. People were created to live in relationship. Humanity's interdependence is a feature of how we were intentionally designed by God to both create and live in community.

One of the cruel ironies of the modern world is that, having achieved previously unbelievable levels of wealth and convenience, we've lost so much of that vital sense of interdependence. In ways that Covid-19 only made worse, our work and friendship networks—which include churches, civil societies, and volunteer organizations—have grown increasingly thin. As a result, we now outsource to professionals a role previously delegated to these irreplaceable institutions.

To be clear, many mental health problems require professional diagnosis and treatment. By and large, de-stigmatizing counseling and mental health care have been a positive development, and the lay practitioners mentioned by the Economist had some level of training. Even so, the success of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) suggests that mental health support can be far more accessible than many think.

In his book The Coddling of the American Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt breaks down why CBT is one of the best-studied and most effective forms of psychotherapy. In stark contrast to the worldviews and our culture's dominant mood which tells people their feelings are always right, CBT encourages people to think critically about their feelings and evaluate whether they are true.

In other words, CBT affirms that ideas, including those we believe about ourselves, have consequences. The Biblical admonition to "be transformed by the renewing of your minds," is both practical and vital. Even better, God never asks us to ignore our problems, but encourages us to bring them to Him and to each other, and so "fulfill the law of Christ." Active, compassionate listening is in concert with another Biblical admonition, to speak the truth in love.

This kind of Christian fellowship has produced results for centuries. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about this in his classic work Life Together. "Secular education today is aware [that] a person can be helped merely by having someone who will listen to him seriously, but Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God, that we may speak the Word of God."

The Apostle Paul encourages older Christians to mentor younger ones, and for Christians to "not forsake assembling together." Proverbs 20:5 puts it succinctly: "The purposes of a person's heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out."

Listeners like this are too rare these days. The damnable lie of expressive individualism is that we each have our own truth inside. This leaves many of us ready to do all the talking (or social media posting) but not the listening. Instead of seeking truth outside of ourselves, in the time-tested wisdom of Scripture and the counsel of others, we keep looking inside and are surprised when nothing seems to change.

Within a truly Christian worldview, we recognize the legitimate role of mental health experts, but that should never stop the rest of us from acting. We should never expect the professionals to replace what family, friends, and Churches are meant to do: love our neighbors enough to listen.

John and Maria outline the worldview angles behind President Biden's "Build Back Better Plan." Notably, John points to the inherent issue with the Department of Health and Human Services directing relief money sent to families to be used specifically in professional child-care services.

Then, John explains the current issues with the Olympics and China. Maria asks John a series of important questions on how the United States should respond to the human rights abuses China is committing against faith-based groups in China. John outlines two important options before the State Department, considering how the United States can bring attention to the abuses and seek protection for those impacted.

To close, Maria asks John a question related to how important it is to continually question worldview and faith-growth for Christians. She shares that it can be distracting for believers to continually be concerned about how we're thinking, failing to consider Christ in an effort to think Biblically. John shares important insights and encouragement.

To hear the NCAA tell the story, an average swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania became a nationally ranked superstar overnight. Check the receipts, and we learn Will Thomas only started breaking records and winning meets by comically huge margins when he began going by "Lia" Thomas this past year.

Similar incidents are increasingly happening in various sports at all levels, but swimming offers an especially clear picture of what it means when we allow men to compete against women. Success in swimming is heavily dependent on physiology. The length of the body, the body's center of gravity, and even the placement of a person's belly button can mean the difference between an average swimmer and a major competitor. A man can identify however he wants, and can even take dangerous hormone supplements, but his belly button isn't going anywhere.

This sort of let's-all-pretend-we-don't-know-what's-happening groupthink isn't good for college sports or for women's rights. It's not good for Lia Thomas, his teammates, or his competitors. No matter how fast he swims, no man really breaks a women's record.