Breakpoint

Despite protests from around the world, Turkey has decided to convert the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. One supporter of Prime Minister Erdogan told Al Jazeera he’d been waiting fifty years for the holy site’s “original identity as a mosque” to be “restored.” In truth, the original identity of the Hagia Sophia was as the Christian cathedral of Constantinople.

Now why should a building halfway around the world matter to us today. Well, that’s because, unfortunately, the Turkish government has a long track record of revising history. For example, between 1915 and 1923, in what’s known as the Armenian Genocide, an estimated 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed and expelled from the Ottoman Empire, what is now Turkey.  What the Ottomans did to their Christian subjects served as a model for the Holocaust. As Adolf Hitler told military commanders just prior to the invasion of Poland, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Well, to answer his question, certainly not the Turks. Turkey and its ethnically related neighbor, Azerbaijan, are the only nations in the world that deny that the Armenian Genocide happened. What’s more, Turkey has prosecuted scholars and journalists who say otherwise, accusing them of “insulting Turkishness.” One such journalist, Hrant Dink, was murdered while awaiting trial in 2007.

Over the years, Turkey spent millions of dollars, literally, lobbying American politicians to prevent the United States from officially recognizing what happened to the Armenians as genocide.  In fact, it was only after Turkish-American relations had deteriorated because of other issues that the U.S. Congress only recognized the genocide as genocide.

When their cash has failed, Turkey has applied pressure by making threats against both governments and individuals. For example, They threatened to withhold cooperation with the EU during the 2015 refugee crisis over the issue, and threatened to cut off relations with Austria.

The war against the truth is also taking place in Lebanon, home to many Armenian Christian exiles. Last month, a television host, Neshan Der Haroutiounian, received an anti-Armenian message while broadcasting live. When Haroutiounian responded by criticizing what he called the “insidious” history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish President Erdogan, anti-Armenian rhetoric and violence there escalated. One viral video not only contained threats against the television host but threatened a massacre in Beirut’s primary Armenian neighborhood.

Then, according to reports, “Turkish authorities . . . requested that legal proceedings [be brought] against [the host]” to “guarantee the respect of the Turkish President in all Lebanese media.”

How has the Lebanese government responded? Der Haroutiounian has been placed on trial for “insulting the Turkish president and the Turkish people.” In Lebanon!

According to International Christian Concern, what’s happening in Lebanon is part of a larger pattern: “… [Turkey] will not tolerate references to [its] own genocidal history, [but instead]… perpetuates a policy which not only violates the other country’s national sovereignty, but also worsens religious freedom within that locale.” 

International Christian Concern cited Turkey’s intervention in Libya’s civil war as an example, an intervention that “placed Christians in the crosshairs.” And, just last year, Turkey unleashed brutal military attacks against Christians in the midst of the chaos in Syria.

Denying history, or simply re-writing it, seems to be a major goal of Turkey’s Islamist regime. Otherwise, they’d be forced to acknowledge that centuries before the coming of Islam, and a millennium before the arrival of the Ottomans, Armenians embraced Christianity and lived in what is now Turkey.

That, in turn, would the question, “What happened to them?” And that’s the question Turkey wants to avoid at all costs.

The outstanding new book by Abdu Murray and the late apologist Ravi Zacharias, entitled Seeing Jesus from the East: A Fresh Look at History’s Most Influential Figure, unlocks the Eastern backdrop of the Scriptures, and especially Jesus. After all, Jesus entered human history as a First-Century Middle Eastern Jew.

And that’s no accident, according to the Scriptures. From Genesis to Revelation, God reveals Himself as a God concerned with time and place, most notably in Galatians, where Paul tells us that God orchestrated the incarnation at just the right time and in just the right place in human history.

Understanding that time and that place in which Jesus Christ entered human history is an incredibly helpful tool in understanding Him. However, that time, that place, and that culture can seem mysterious and even inaccessible to Western Christians, which is why this new book by Ravi and Abdu is such a gift. 

Last week, Abdu joined me on a Colson Center webinar to talk about the book, which was the brain-child of the late apologist and former Muslim Nabeel Quereshi. You can listen to the whole webinar at BreakPoint.org, but I’d like to share with you an excerpt of Abdu sharing the moving story about how this book came about. Here is Abdu Murray:

There's something people often miss, when they miss Jesus’s easternness. So Nabeel approached Ravi and said we really need to recapture this. Not only to speak to Westerners about why they should care about how Eastern Jesus is but also to speak to Easterners so they can see that Jesus is not the icon of sort of a white imperialistic religion. He's them. He speaks their language. That was Nabeel’s idea.

And so Nabeel crafted a proposal. Ravi accepted and wanted to do it, but before Nabeel could put pen to paper he was diagnosed with stomach cancer . . . And then of course, the Lord took him home .

Ravi called me some months after as we were both mourning, and he said “I really want you join me on this project, taking up the mantle from Nabeel. It would really enhance the project. I come from a Middle Eastern background and Ravi came from an eastern background. And of course, I am a former Muslim yourself.

It took me no time to answer “Yes!”

I did ask Ravi, “Is it OK with you if I call Michelle, Nabeel’s wife? I do want to get her permission. I know we don't need it. But I do want to get her blessing,” which is a very eastern thing to do. Ravi understood immediately. And of course, she was enthusiastic because she wanted to see her late husband's work come to fruition and be out there because this was a project that was near and dear to Nabeel’s heart. And it was a project near and dear to Ravi’s heart. 

So I sit here now talking to you from a place where we dedicated the book to Nabeel. And so strangely, I think about it now, Ravi wrote, and I wrote with him that this book is about seeing Jesus from the East. And we wrote how Nabeel must be smiling, seeing Jesus so clearly and how little we actually know now. And now, of course, Ravi joins Nabeel.

Now they're both smiling. Maybe they even guffawing and laughing about how little we actually know about the Jesus they are seeing face to face.

That was Abdu Murray, during last week’s Colson Center webinar, talking about Seeing Jesus From the East. The whole webinar is available to view at BreakPoint.org.

Seeing Jesus from the East offers great insights on the importance of stories and symbols in eastern culture, the power of the “honor and shame” mentality that pervades the East, the meaning and rewards of sacrifice, the role of teachers and prophets within a wisdom-oriented culture, and – my favorite - the use of parables in the East. Understanding these things will unlock the Biblical witness about Jesus Christ.

The central claim of Christianity is that the timeless, transcendent Creator of all entered human history in bodily form, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Some religions see the Divine as only transcendent. Other religions see the Divine as only immanent. In Christ, the transcendent God became imminent.

You can receive a copy of Seeing Jesus from the East with a gift of any amount to the Colson Center during the month of July. Simply go to BreakPoint.org/July to receive your copy.

Woody Allen once quipped, “I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.” Funny or not, this is the kind of thing said by a man whose art and life are a testimony to the power of neurosis.

What’s not-so-funny is that many people really do feel this way about death. During our recent Colson Center short course on “Responding to a Broken Culture,” Dr. Ben Mitchell observed that, if you asked people how they would most like to die, most would say they would prefer to go quickly: A sudden heart attack, preferably while doing something they love.

But is this the way a Christians should see death and dying?

Mitchell, a leading Southern Baptist bioethicist and, on a personal note, my former teacher, said “no.” In fact, he said, the preference for dropping dead is quite modern. Until recently, Christians aimed for a holy death, not a quick one. And, they thought about it. A lot. For example, “The Litany of the Saints,” which dates to the early middle ages, pleads with God to deliver His faithful from a sudden and unprepared-for death.

Instead, according to a 15th century theological work called The Art of Dying, Christians should define a “good death” as one in which people had been reconciled with their loved ones and to the God in whose presence they would soon stand.

In addition to prayers that were to be recited on one’s deathbed, the work included rules on proper deathbed behavior. More importantly, it instructed readers that they need not fear death, and provided “seven questions to ask a dying man, along with consolation available to him through the redemptive powers of Christ’s love.”

Western attitudes towards death have changed dramatically, especially in attempts to “tame death” or somehow hold it back. Examples today, include talk about manipulating our genes to extend lifespans, or, if that fails, “uploading our consciousness to the cloud.”

Even those who don’t put much stock in science fiction often opt instead for denying death. Not denying that we will die one day, but instead, in Ben Mitchell’s words, “outsourcing” death. While death used to happen at home with family surrounding, it now usually happens in medical settings.

Of course, advances in medical technologies to cure disease and extend life-expectancy are amazing gifts of God provided through human ingenuity. Still, our relatively new approaches and habits when it comes to the act of dying has made us, in troubling ways, a “death-denying” culture.

For example, we often have a kind of callousness towards the death of others. To paraphrase Stalin’s infamous quip, the death of other people become statistics, not tragedies. Or, in a time of pandemic, trends on a graph.

Replacing the “art of dying” with medical sterility is, perhaps, one reason many people have died alone during this pandemic, isolated and cut off from the love and comfort of their families. This is a tragedy and, at times, completely unnecessary.

In May, my friend Steve Reiter, the audio producer of this BreakPoint commentary, lost his lovely wife Elizabeth. Chronic heart and lung problems sent her to a Denver hospital. Both she and Steve tested negative for COVID. The hospital was not overrun with COVID patients. Yet, Steve and their sons were not allowed to visit. Not once. Not even on Mother’s Day. He even had all the necessary protective gear. After three weeks in the hospital, Elizabeth died. Alone.

Multiply this story by thousands, and COVID-19 has not only killed those it did infect, it left them alone. And, it left family members without closure. This is wrong.

Steve Reiter has started a new non-profit organization, The Never Alone Project, which aims to end the needless separation of families from their ill loved ones. I’ll link you to it at BreakPoint.org.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas once said that “if a hundred years from now, Christians are known as those who didn’t kill their babies or their elderly, we will have done well.” I certainly hope this generation of Christ-followers will not be known for less, but I also hope we will be known for far more.

Especially during a pandemic, our broken, frightened culture desperately needs examples of people who, after a lifetime of living well, are prepared to die well and to be with those who die. In this, the Church must be the Church: a living body of Christ-followers who console and grieve and are with the dying, but not as those who have no hope. What a witness we can be to a culture that has forgotten how to die.

Millions know of Corrie ten Boom through her book The Hiding Place, in which she recounts her family' efforts to protect Dutch Jews from the Nazis--as well as her arrest and suffering in German concentration camps. But what about the rest of Corrie ten Boom's story?  Where did she find such indomitable faith in Christ? And what can she teach us today about defending human dignity of the weak and persecuted?  About holding on to our faith when God seems far away?

Stan Guthrie, author of Victorious: Corrie ten Boom and the Hiding Place, joins Shane Morris to answer these and other questions about the life of this Christian heroine.

Victorious: Corrie ten Boom and the Hiding Place, by Stan Guthrie, available in Colson Center online bookstore

One fall afternoon in 1994, as a not-new but newly serious believer, I wandered into a small Christian bookstore in Tennessee, a book caught my eye. Actually, the title of the book caught my eye: Knowing God, written by someone who, at the time, I’d never heard of… J.I. Packer.

However, the name of almost every Christian leader I did know (like Chuck Colson, Joni Eareckson Tada, Chuck Swindoll, Elisabeth Elliot, Billy Graham, and others) was on the dust jacket, offering their endorsement of the book. Each was along the lines of: “This is one of the most important books I’ve ever read other than the Bible itself.” So, I picked it up, read it, and I’ve been recommending Knowing God ever since.

The book is best described as a work of “devotional theology.” For many Christians, “devotional” and “theology” are two incompatible words, as if diving deep into theological truth is the stuff of the “head,” while walking with God is more a matter of the “heart.” Packer, in a thoroughly biblical way, destroys that false dichotomy in Knowing God.

Two statements which this Oxford-trained theologian made in the second chapter of the book hit me like a ton of bricks. First, “One can know a great deal about God without much knowledge of Him,” and second, “One can know a great deal about godliness without much knowledge of Him.”

In Knowing God, Packer describes four characteristics of those who truly know God. First, they have great energy for God. Second, they have great thoughts of God. Third, they show great boldness for God. And finally, those who know God have great contentment in God.

Throughout the book, Packer clarifies that God must be known on His own terms.  Too often, the God Christians claim to know is One made in our own image. We must know the God revealed in Scripture and clarified by proper theology.

That’s why I recommend this book, even for those who have studied theology deeply. Even though Packer is one of the brightest theological minds of our time, he never forgot what theology was all about. And if you’ve never studied theology, or even think that theology gets in the way of personal devotion to Christ, I’ll wager that Packer’s classic will convince you otherwise.

A few years ago, Dr. Packer announced the end of his public ministry. The eminent pastor theologian, who authored more than 300 books, book reviews, journal articles, dictionary entries, and forewords, and preached and lectured around the world, was losing his vision. He was sustained during the last several years not by his feelings, by what he knew to be true about the God he knew.

On The Gospel Coalition website, Dr. Packer told interviewer Ivan Mesa that “in the days when it was physically possible for me to do these things I was concerned, even anxious, to get ahead with doing them. Now that it’s no longer possible I acknowledge the sovereignty of God.” Describing what he called Christian realism, Dr. Packer continued, “God knows what he’s up to. And I’ve had enough experiences of his goodness in all sorts of ways not to have any doubt about the present circumstances. Some good, something for his glory, is going to come out of it.”

That’s a good word for all of us. Aging is one of the stages of life that our youth-fixated culture doesn’t prepare us for. Years ago, Dr. Packer wrote, “How should we view the onset of old age? The common assumption is that it is mainly a process of loss. But here the Bible breaks in, highlighting the further thought that spiritual ripeness is worth far more than material wealth in any form, and that spiritual ripeness should continue to increase as one gets older.”

That kind of perspective comes not merely from knowing about God, or knowing about godliness, but only comes from truly knowing God. (You can pick up a copy of Knowing God by J.I. Packer at the BreakPoint.org online bookstore).

This past Friday, July 17, Dr. J.I. Packer, aged 93, died. When asked for his final words to the church, Packer said: “Glorify Christ every way.” He has now entered his eternal rest, and I join with thousands and thousands of others and thank God that his faith is now sight. Now, at last, he truly and fully knows the God he faithfully studied, and taught so many of us about, for many years.

Writing recently in the New York Times, Stanford Law School professor Michael McConnell takes an optimistic view, not only of the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court term, but of the court’s track record on religious freedom. “In 13 cases involving religion since 2012,” he writes, “the religious side prevailed in 12 of them, sometimes by lopsided majorities.”

This string of victories are part of what McConnell calls a “jurisprudence of pluralism” which, as he puts it, “seems to side with the party defending the right to live in accordance with one’s identity.” This includes “the right of a religious order to refuse to provide employees with coverage for contraceptive drugs that violate its teachings, or the right of religious schools to be free of government interference with their choice of people to teach religious doctrine or practice to their children.”

While it is certainly good news that Court recognizes the rights of religious institutions to be, well, religious, the “jurisprudence of pluralism” also includes, as we found out in this term’s Bostock decision, a newly discovered “right” for men to dress as women at their place of employment.

In other words, if this term of the Supreme Court reveals anything, it’s that it is committed to balancing religious freedom protections with honoring the “right to define one’s own concept of existence,” a concept infamously invented by Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1992.  In my opinion, the Court is not succeeding at threading this needle.

Once again, the Court did protect the religious freedom rights of definitively religious institutions, something it’s been repeatedly clear about for years. However, the Court did not protect the religious freedom of religious individuals. Instead, the Court curtailed the conscience rights of employers by decreeing that sexual orientation and gender identity are essentially protected categories in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Not only is this a net loss for religious freedom, it continues the erosion of religious freedom that Chuck Colson talked about 10 years ago. Religious freedom is not merely the ability to believe what you want in the privacy of your own head, your own home, and your own house of worship. Religious freedom is the ability to live out your faith in the public square, and to orient your public life, including your business, around your deeply held convictions.

By creating and elevating LGBT rights over employer rights in the Bostock decision, the Court has effectively drawn a hard, fast line (or, at least, a harder, faster line) between religious and non-religious entities when it comes to religious freedom. Therefore, the Supreme Court will now be forced to decide what counts as a religious institution and what doesn’t, something we’ve already seen federal, state, and local jurisdictions try to do.

For example, under President Obama, the Department of Health and Human Services only exempted religious institutions from its contraception mandate that did not serve anyone outside its belief system. By that definition, Catholic hospitals, Salvation Army homeless shelters, and church missions agencies would not qualify as religious institutions.

The situation is potentially worse now that religious rights have been compromised in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Title IX of the Civil Rights Act has to do with funding for educational institutions. Will Christian colleges that accept federal dollars be forced to accommodate the housing requests of same-sex couples, and allow biological men to reside in women’s dormitories and to compete on women’s sports teams?

Upstream from the Court, there’s also the ongoing cultural problem of defining religious liberty. As the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan T. Anderson tweeted, “The fact that there were 15 flagrant religious liberty violations that rose to the Supreme Court in a decade is not a sign of a winning streak at large (even at the Court)  but [of a] new and heightened hostility” to religion.

He’s right. How else can one explain why Pennsylvania would take the Little Sisters of the Poor, a society of nuns, to court over the HHS mandate after the Sisters had already won against HHS at the Supreme Court? And, did the state of Montana really believe it could get away with discriminating against religious schools after the Court had ruled in favor of religious schools in the Trinity Lutheran case?

The ever-growing but still mistaken notion that faith is nothing more than matter of personal, private preference (or worse, a license to discriminate), rather than a fundamental right enshrined in the First Amendment, is upstream from the politics, the laws, and the Supreme Court decisions shaping our nation. This means that, in the short term, elections have consequences. In the long term, nothing short of re-catechizing our culture about the nature of faith and the fundamental good of religious freedom will do.

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, Ryan T. Anderson unpacks with me the significance of this year’s Court decisions. Check it out at BreakPoint.org or subscribe to the BreakPoint Podcast wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

On today’s episode, The Heritage Foundation’s Ryan T. Anderson joins John Stonestreet to discuss the significance of the Supreme Court’s recent term. How will the Court’s ruling on employment law, religious freedom, and abortion affect not only Christian institutions, but individual religious believers? On the one hand, religious freedom is enjoying a winning streak at the Court, but why are so many outrageous violations of religious freedom reaching the Supreme Court? What does that say about the culture, and the status of religious freedom?

“Supreme Court Affirms Religious Institutions Are Allowed to Be Religious,” by John Stonestreet, BreakPoint

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss the remarkable resignation of Bari Weiss from the New York Times and her accusation that “America’s paper of record” is driven by the Twitter mob. They also discuss the open letter protesting cancel culture signed by left-of-center luminaries.

Also on today’s program: the world’s population bust; the need for the U. S. and other nations to accept Christian refugees fleeing deadly persecution.

Plus: A segment of Shane Morris’s interview with Dr. Glenn Sunshine on our cultural moment and your questions about pastors, marriage, and poverty answered.

“Fewer Humans Won’t Heal the Planet,” by John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera

“Globe Trot” column at WORLD Magazine, by Mindy Belz

“Pastor or Parrot?” by John Stonestreet and Maria Baer, BreakPoint 

“Is There Hope for American Marriage?” by Caitlin Flanagan, TIME

Poverty, Inc., Acton Institute

“Where Are We in This Cultural Moment?” a BreakPoint Podcast interview with Dr. Glenn Sunshine

Available at the BreakPoint online bookstore:

Discipling Nations, by Darrow Miller, available at the BreakPoint online bookstore

Same-Sex Marriage: A Thoughtful Approach to God’s Design for Marriage, by John Stonestreet and Sean McDowell

The Poverty of Nations, by Wayne Grudem and Barry Asmus

You’d think that a global pandemic that’s killed hundreds of thousands would at least temper the advance of legal killing. It hasn’t. While headlines worldwide were praising New Zealand’s prime minister for her handling of COVID-19, she was working to pass what might be described as the most extreme abortion laws on the planet.

In late March, New Zealand’s parliament voted, in the words of the New York Times, to “loosen” the nation’s abortion laws, particularly in the latter half of pregnancy when babies become viable outside of the womb. “Loosen” may be the understatement of the decade.

New Zealand’s “loosened” laws now allows abortion on-demand, up to the moment of birth, for essentially any reason. That means sex-selective and disability-selective abortions, including for conditions like cleft lip and Down syndrome. The “loosening” happened despite the protests of over 1,200 New Zealanders with Down syndrome and their families, who called on Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to keep her campaign promise not to allow this kind of deadly discrimination.

Even more horrific still, New Zealand’s new law includes no requirement that babies born alive after botched abortions be given medical support. This was no accident. Prime Minister Ardern was herself among the loudest voices resisting any attempt to add protections for babies born alive.

According to the New York Times article, “public opinion surveys show that most New Zealanders” favored liberalizing their country’s abortion laws. However, independent polling shows that the vast majority oppose specific features in this law. For instance, just 2% of Kiwi women support abortion on-demand up to birth. 93% oppose sex-selective abortion, in which a child is killed for no other reason than his or her sex. And, 94% of women polled support longstanding legal standards for New Zealand’s abortion providers. In other words, they didn’t want them relaxed at all. 

Perhaps the unpopularity of abortion-on-demand-for-any-reason-whatsoever is why pro-abortion politicians in New Zealand felt the need to rush through this legislation while everyone was distracted by a global pandemic. According to RightToLife.org, as the bill went through successive readings in Parliament, it lost support. In fact, the Abortion Legislation Committee heard from only 139 of the over 25,000 people who submitted public comments on the bill. For perspective, 1,500 people were allowed to speak on a recent climate change bill that received less than half as many submissions.

By taking advantage of the few people paying attention and by ignoring those who were, New Zealand’s government has now enacted the most extreme abortion law in the democratic world.

As a spokesperson for New Zealand’s Voice for Life described, “Our Parliament has a duty of care to consider the wellbeing and protection of all New Zealanders, including the vulnerable…they failed in that basic duty of care by passing this extreme Bill, but the hundreds of thousands of voters who opposed this Bill will not forget this failure when it is time to vote in the General Election in a few short months.”

I hope this spokesperson is right. I know several prominent pro-life spokespersons in New Zealand who care deeply about the unborn, and who mourn this evil law. I also know how entrenched and relentless pro-abortion advocates can be, and how effective they are in passing increasingly extreme legislation. We’ve certainly witnessed as much in this country, most memorably in New York, where legislators applauded and lit the One World Trade Center in pink to celebrate.

Bad laws are built on bad ideas, and bad ideas have victims. The precious and unique lives made in God’s image which will now be legally targeted is a stain on one of the world’s most naturally beautiful and culturally enjoyable nations. I join so many of my friends in New Zealand who hope and pray that this law will prove a step too far, betraying an abortion movement opposed not just by champions of life, but by growing scientific knowledge, by growing compassion for children with disabilities, by the amazing medical breakthroughs in life-saving technologies, and by the unshakeable truth that unborn persons are fully human and worthy of life.

Pro-lifers have a lot of work to do; not just here but around the world. May God strengthen our hands, our hearts, and our voices to stay at the task.

Each summer, I teach high school and college students at Summit Ministries on the topic of marriage and the family, including what marriage is, what it’s for, cultural trends about the family, etc. Ever since the Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, legalized so-called same-sex marriage, I’ve told them that polyamory will be legal in their lifetime.

Last Tuesday, while teaching at a Summit Virtual conference, that prediction had additional punch. Recently, the city council of Somerville, Massachusetts, legally recognized polyamory. Groups of “3 or more” people can now register with the city to seek the same rights as married couples.

My predictive powers, I admit, are not all at that keen. Anyone following the deconstruction of marriage and the family over the past two decades could see this coming. Once marriage, at least in the eyes of the state, was essentially divorced from the bearing and well-being of children, first through no-fault divorce and then ultimately through same-sex “marriage,” the life-long commitment of one man and one woman were no longer the fundamental ingredient of a marital union. Once that happened, the number of people involved was up for debate. After all, if it’s no longer about a mom and a dad, why should marriage be limited to two?

The Somerville city council now recognizes polyamorous arrangements like they do civil unions. The same-sex marriage movement, we should recall, also began with the push to recognize homosexual couples as civil unions, and included arguments about insurance, inheritance rights, and hospital visits (all of which, by the way, though not assumed rights for non-married people are perfectly achievable for non-married parties through an extra bit of paperwork).

At the time, conservatives warned gay civil unions would lead to gay marriage. Advocates said, “Nonsense.” However, when gay civil unions were achieved, advocates of same-sex marriage used it as proof of discrimination. When gay marriage was being debated, conservatives warned that, if legalized, polyamorous marriages would be inevitable. We were quickly decried for using a fallacious slippery slope argument.

Yet, here we are, sliding down the slippery slope. The next mile marker on the journey will be, and I also make this prediction to my students, consensual incestuous marriages. After all, if marriage is simply an institution of adult happiness justified by a sincere mutual affection, how can we deny siblings in love of that same recognition?

The Somerville city council expects their new ordinance will be challenged and, eventually, will be decided upon by the courts. And, to be clear, though the city will now extend marriage-like benefits to its polyamorous employees, private companies are not forced to comply.  Still, as the New York Times reported, at least one council member has already been “inundated” by phone calls from lawyers interested “in pursuing a similar measure at the state or federal level.”

Right on schedule, along with entertainment that normalizes polyamorous relationships in the culture. Joe Biden once said that “Will and Grace,” a television show from the 1990’s “did more than anything anyone’s done so far” to normalize homosexuality and same-sex “marriage.” 

A Netflix series called “The Politician” is among a few carrying that weight for polyamory. As the headline of Mens’ Health magazine gushed, “If You Think 'Throuple' Relationships (Like on The Politician) Can't Possibly Work, You're Wrong.”

The article goes on to define that new term: “The word, which is a [combination] of “three-person” and “couple” is a specific form of polyamory where all three partners are in a relationship with one another, and this unique relationship style can take many forms.”

Last summer, America’s paper of record, the New York Times, ran an article entitled “Polyamory Works for Them.” I won’t bother to link you to it.

As Chuck Colson always said, the only way to truly understand a worldview is follow it to its logical conclusion. The worldview of the sexual revolution is built on three ideas. First, sex, marriage, and babies are separable. Second, men and women are interchangeable. And, third, sexual autonomy is human dignity.

Various forms of reimagined marriage, like polyamory and incestuous unions, are the necessary conclusions of these ideas, but there will be more.

At the heart of these ideas of the sexual revolution is a lie: that what we do sexually is, whatever makes us happy, is no one else’s business.

But that’s not true. Why? Because, children. Redefining marriage and redefining family (which, by the way, is exactly what the Somerville city council said it wants to do) are bad ideas. The victims of the bad ideas of the sexual revolution have always been children.

When no-fault divorce became legal, we were told, “The kids will be fine.” They weren’t. The same refrain has been repeated for cohabitation, for intentional single parenting, for same-sex marriage, and, now, for polyamorous unions. Imagine, we are told, instead of just two parents loving kids, they’ll have three or four or more!

But the research continues to show us that children don’t need “parents.” They need a mother and a father, each uniquely gifted by God to love and form young people. The data is clear. And we have it for you at BreakPoint.org.