Breakpoint

In February, the Alliance Defending Freedom filed suit on behalf of three female high school track athletes who are being forced to compete against biological males. During the oral arguments, the presiding judge demanded that ADF attorneys refer to the biologically male athletes as females, and to do otherwise would not be “consistent with science” or “human decency.”

Of course, as ADF attorneys noted, the entire case is based on whether it’s a fact that biological males are males, and whether a chosen gender identity is consistent with science or reality. ADF has called for the judge’s recusal, and rightly so since, at least in this case, he’s not capable of adjudication. Only activism.

Francis Shaeffer and Chuck Colson were among the loudest prophetic voices of decades past, warning of the loss of what Schaeffer often called “true truth,” the idea that truth is objective and, to a large degree, knowable. When a federal judge announces that affirming observable biological reality is “indecent,” it demonstrates that more than our views about gender have changed. The basic definition of truth has changed. In other words, the most basic conflict in our culture is not just what is considered to be truth and what is not, but what we mean by truth in the first place.

The classic definition is that truth refers to that which corresponds to reality. For decades now, beginning among intellectual elites and then shaping the academy and now various segments of culture, the correspondence theory of truth has been challenged by another definition, that truth is nothing more than a social construct, views imposed on us by previous generations and those in power.

As the comments of this judge make clear, this new definition of truth is now largely taken for granted, not just in universities but across different segments of our culture. How this happened is important to understand.

At a very simple, but hopefully not simplistic level, humans can look to three resources in seeking knowledge: revelation, reason, and experience. By revelation, I mean we can know something because “God said it.” By reason, I mean that through our intellects and logic, we can arrive at truth. By experience, I mean we can know because of what we’ve been through, or what we feel or know to be true. Throughout history, different religions and philosophies would emphasize one or more of these over the others. For example, religions that believed in God, would prioritize revelation. Classic Greek thought often prioritized reason, as did the ideas of the secular enlightenment.

The Christian worldview teaches that God has revealed Himself through His creation, in His Word, and ultimately in Jesus Christ. By revelation, we know that as Image Bearers of God living in His orderly universe, our reason and intellect can grasp certain truths about the universe. In this view, knowledge is nothing less than what astronomer Johannes Kepler described as “…thinking God's thoughts after him.”

In the decades since the Enlightenment and especially into the 20th century, as scientific discovery and technological innovation exploded, reason became elevated as the central and definitive means of knowing truth. Skepticism about the supernatural led to a cynical distrust of revelation.

There’s so much more to this story than I have space for here, but the violence and bloodshed of the twentieth century, especially among those nations and cultures considered most scientifically advanced, damaged trust in reason. If revelation was a myth and pure reason a catastrophe, what’s left? Experience.

This is largely where we are today, where both revelation and reason are secondary, and even expected to serve our own internal sense of reality. Experiences may not be questioned. And so, here we are, with judges who insist that males are females, governors who call abortion “life sustaining,” with politicians claiming their own facts.

It's easy in such a situation for Christians to miss the deeper aspects of the real challenges we face, but it’s not simply this issue over here or this battle of ideas over there. The struggle of our time is, at its most basic level, a struggle to define reality. That’s why, as a friend of mine says, we so often find ourselves using the same vocabulary but not the same dictionary.

The battle for hearts and minds is quite often the battle over the definition of words. Defining truth is as essential as defending it.

The opening module of our Truth, Love, Together virtual event is all about recapturing a Christian vision of Truth, one that is, ultimately grounded in the person of Jesus Christ. This first module is entitled “What Is Truth.” Os Guinness opens the module in a session called, “The Roots of the Present Crisis.” Dr. Sean McDowell follows with “What Happened to Truth?” and Abdu Murray’s session is about “Loving Truth in a Post-Truth World.” After all, if truth is grounded in the person of Christ, our proper response must be to not only know truth, but love truth. And, in a special bonus session, Natasha Crain speaks on “Teaching Your Kids Truth in a Noisy World.”

Over 8,500 people have already registered for this free, weekly on-demand, online event.

Come to Conference.ColsonCenter.org to register today.

According to Summit Ministries President Jeff Meyers, unquestioned answers are Christians cliches that keep our faith at a shallow level--and not only are they excuses for Christians to avoid wrestling with the tough questions about our faith, but they are also bad apologetics in a time when many outside the faith are looking for real answers.

Shane Morris welcomes Jeff Meyers to the BreakPoint Podcast to discuss his new book Unquestioned Answers: Rethinking Ten Christian Cliches to Rediscover Biblical Truths.

Unquestioned Answers: Rethinking Ten Christian Cliches to Rediscover Biblical Truth by Jeff Meyers, available at the BreakPoint online bookstore

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss the departure of the Samaritan's Purse field hospital from New York City, having provided health care to hundreds of Gothamites during the pandemic.  Amazing how the city found no instance of discrimination by the Christian group, yet the New York Times all but buried the story. Meanwhile LGBTQ advocates continued their campaign of smearing the charity.

Shane and John also discuss the plight of surrogate babies stranded in Ukraine and the ethics of surrogacy; the death of a beloved pastor and the increasing pressure on those with depression and mental illness during the pandemic; and they wrap up with a tribute to Christian apologist extraordinaire Ravi Zacharias, whose family has announced that his  doctors have done all they can to free him of cancer.

Join us for “Truth. Love. Together,” our free virtual mega-event!

“Adoption Is Beautiful, Surrogacy Isn’t” by John Stonestreet and Maria Baer, BreakPoint 

“Anderson Cooper and the New Normal,” by John Stonestreet and Maria Baer, BreakPoint

BreakPoint: Lessons from the Coronavirus:

Pt 1 “We Can Only ‘Imagine’ Utopia”

Pt 2 “Deciding Who Gets Treated and Who Doesn’t”

Pt 3 “Gender Transition Surgeries in a Global Crisis”

Pt 4 “The Virtual Pandemic of Distrust and Misinformation”

Pt 5 “The Non-Essential Church?”

Pt 6 “A Christian View of Suffering” 

Pt 7 “God Is Always at Work Behind the Scenes”

Recently, prompted by the news that CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and his homosexual partner paid a woman to carry a child for them, my colleague Maria Baer and I released a BreakPoint commentary on the serious ethical problems of surrogacy. Surrogacy intentionally breaks the mother/father/child connection, commodifies both babies and women’s bodies, and puts both women and children at risk of exploitation. That this immoral practice is now normal is, as we said, another chapter in the bad ideas of the sexual revolution, and its victims.

A few readers and listeners wrote in to ask whether our concern that surrogacy intentionally severs the bond between mothers, fathers, and children also extends to adoption.

In short, the answer is no. Adoption repairs a fracture. Surrogacy creates one.

God’s design for the family is that a man and wife become one flesh and raise children together. The Fall frustrates this design in different ways. Families can break. Couples may find that their sexual union is infertile. Biological parents find themselves unable to care for their children for various reasons. A sexual act, disordered toward illegitimate pleasure or even selfish violence, produces a life unintended and unexpected.

Whatever the brokenness, adoption offers a means of restoration. Implicitly, the act of adoption recognizes that something is not as it should be, whether or not someone is morally culpable. A family break of some kind, typically at the beginning of the procreative act, is addressed and, many times, even restored by a new family. As open adoptions become more common, there is even, to some degree, a merging of families or of biological parents into the new family.

In all of these ways, adoption portrays God’s relationship with us. Adoption is among the many marriage and family metaphors used in Scripture to describe how God relates to His people. Paul, in Ephesians, calls Christians “adopted” sons and daughters of God, though Jesus Christ. The fracture created in the Garden and extended by our own brokenness is repaired by Jesus. As a result, we are adopted children of God, with all of the rights and benefits and status involved. 

In the comments we received about the previous commentary on surrogacy, some questioned whether a woman’s relationship to the children she bears is really all that important. This was asked by adoptive moms who are just as emotionally and spiritually connected to their children as any biological mother could be. In our view, that’s obviously and beautifully true, and not something we questioned in our commentary.

What we did say is that women who bear children do have an inherent connection to the children they bear. This is true whether or not she enters into a surrogacy situation or an adoption contract. When a mom relinquishes her right to raise a child, which in some adoptions cases is wise and selfless thing do, she is still a mom. Adoption recognizes that reality and attempts to, at some level, redeem the brokenness. Surrogacy intentionally creates the brokenness. A mother-child relationship is created only to be knowingly and intentionally severed.

Adoption is proof that physically bearing children is not the only way a woman becomes a mother. Among the darkest evils of surrogacy is that it treats a mother as less than a whole person, wanted for her procreational parts that are increasingly treated as consumer products, especially as commercial surrogacy becomes more common (driven as it is today as part of the LGBTQ remaking of marriage and sexuality). Surrogacy also treats children as consumer products, instead of as gifts.

We received other feedback on the surrogacy commentary, too. Unfortunately, it confirmed the concern that led us to take on this issue in the first place. Surrogacy has been so normalized, even in the Christian world, that speaking against it is quite controversial.

It shouldn’t be. In our fallen world families break, but we should never break them on purpose.

The 2020 Academy Award for best short subject documentary went to “Learning to Skateboard in a War Zone.” The film tells the story of “Afghan girls who learn to skate through a program run by a Berlin-based NGO.”  The NGO’s stated mission is to train young people to “become leaders for a better world,” through a combination of skateboarding lessons as well as “creative, arts-based education.” Though I’m a bit fuzzy how skateboarding lessons will produce “leaders for a better world,” Academy voters seemed to like the idea.

However, one person not enthralled by the film was Sahar Ghumkhor, a social scientist from the University of Melbourne. Writing for Al Jazeera, Ghumkhor called the film an example of “white savior” syndrome. Though that’s jarring term that too often gets thrown around indiscriminately, it does capture an underlying cultural attitude of those who see people in the developing world as victims of an “inherent backwardness.”

These are people who need saving, not just from sickness, or drought, or poverty, but from a way of life, specifically their traditional ways of thinking--typically about things like the role of sexual morality, gender and marriage roles, and the emphasis on “community norms” over “individual desire.”

In this case, teaching Afghan girls how to skateboard and providing “creative, arts-based education,” is, in the end, shorthand for making them more “Western” in their views about women, and thus, less “backward.” The hoped-for end products “are artists, hipsters, [and] rebels with a cause, who are often introduced as trailblazers.”

Reading Ghumkhor’s piece, it becomes clear that many of these NGO’s are nothing less than “secular missionaries.”

Of course, Christian missionaries are the ones so often depicted as judgmental and dismissive of native cultures. The history of Christian missions certainly does include bad ideas about native peoples and bad behavior by those tasked with bringing the Good News to them. Still, today, it’s Western liberal secularists leading the way in being judgmental and dismissive of native cultures.

In 2017, French president Emmanuel Macron lamented Africa’s high birth rates as a “civilizational problem,” snidely saying, “present me the woman who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight or nine children.”

Macron’s belief that large families are a sign of “backwardness” and patriarchy is, perhaps, the foundational doctrine being spread by secular missionaries, which explains why abortion is their sacrament. So, for instance, Canada’s “health care” response to COVID-19, both nationally and internationally, included increased funding for abortion.

Of course, progressive rhetoric about “women’s health” is, in reality, just a smokescreen for the larger goal of replacing native values about sex, marriage, and family with more “enlightened,” neo-Western values. And increasingly, the rhetoric we hear about “inclusiveness” and “justice” is merely cover for saving these developing nations from all antiquated views on homosexuality and gender.

Obianuju Ekeocha, the founder of Culture of Life Africa, rightly calls the secular Western assault on native values, “ideological colonialism.”

“Culturally, most of the African communities actually believe, by tradition, by their cultural standards, that abortion is a direct attack on human life,” she writes, “so for anybody to be able to convince any woman in Africa that abortion . . . can be a good thing, you first of all have to tell her that what her parents and her grandparents and her ancestors taught her is actually wrong.”

Ekeocha is one of 20 leading Christian worldview thinkers who will present for our “Truth. Love. Together” virtual event. Specifically, she will be talking about why speaking the truth is an act of love, even the hard truths she is so often speaking on international media outlets.

Teaching girls in Kabul to skateboard is fine, I suppose, but for secular missionaries to claim to “create a better world” when what they really mean is “recreate the world in their ideological image”?  Well, that’s just backwards.

And as for our “Truth. Love. Together” virtual event: Please join me and people like Obianuju Ekeocha, Os Guinness, Sean McDowell, Joni Eareckson Tada, Lee Strobel, John Lennox, Katy Faust, it’s an incredible line up. And it’s free. Please join us via live stream or on demand. All you have to do is go to ColsonCenterWorldview.org to register.

In 1965, a group of “bored witless” Catholic boarding school boys on the South Pacific island of Tonga, ages 13 to 16, decided to “borrow” a boat and escape to Fiji, which was 500 miles away, and maybe even to New Zealand.

As any parent of any teenage boy will tell you, their plans aren’t always fully thought-through. Such was the case with these boys. They set sail without a map or a compass. Caught in a storm, they drifted at sea for eight days before landing on an uninhabited island where they stayed, lost and thought dead, for fifteen months, before they were found.

If this story reminds you of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, in which a group of stranded boys quickly descend into debauchery and violence, in this case, life did not imitate art. As Dutch historian Rutger Bregman recounted in an article in the Guardian last week, the Tongan boys turned the uninhabitable island into a functioning and decent community, complete with food production, workout facilities, a permanent fire, and religious services–all of which was constructed using, as he put it, “an old knife blade and much determination.”

Even more impressive than the physical infrastructure was the social stability. As Bregman put it, “The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty.” Whenever there were disagreements and quarrels, instead of dropping a rock on “Piggy” (as they did in the novel), these boys imposed “a time-out” policy to let tempers cool.

How did these boys so thoroughly confound expectations? In the article, Bregman seems to suggest that fruitful cooperation comes naturally to most people. Instead of Golding’s dark assumptions about human nature in Lord of the Flies, we should instead “always look for what is good and positive in people,” and then expect to find it.

Unfortunately, Bregman’s interpretation of these events has two big problems. First, he assumes these boys from Tonga are the rule and not the exception which, given the sheer number of counterexamples from the daily news, is a stretch. Second, though Bregman did note that the boys “began and ended (each day) with song and prayer” and attended a “strict Catholic school,” he seems to miss the obvious connection between their formation and their behavior. Instead, he adopts a form of the “noble savage” thesis, as if how these boys behaved resulted from their inherent nature, not their schooling.

Of course, private religious education is certainly no guarantee against a Lord of the Flies descent to debauchery. As product of such an institution myself, I doubt the ending would have been nearly as happy if I were among their lot. And, to quote the greatest boys movie ever (“The Sandlot”), these boys got themselves in this “pickle” by stealing a boat. Still, not only did they survive, they nobly found ways to live together.

Did all that come from inside? Or was it put there?

I’m convinced that the best opening line in history is by C. S. Lewis’s in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” In selfish, snotty-nosed Eustace, Lewis personified how malforming and narcissistic, in both habit and pedagogy, education can be, especially when it encourages students to “look inside,” “express themselves,” and “be whoever they want to be.” He fully articulated his complaints about modern education in the essay, "The Abolition of Man," which might have the best closing line in history: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Does anyone actually think that a bunch of Eustaces, lost on an island without any laws or food or authority figures, could yield such impressive results?

Underneath the story of these real-life boys from Tonga is the fact that they were formed, at their boarding school and likely elsewhere too, by a Christian faith and worldview. As scholar and author Anthony Esolen wrote on Facebook in response to this story, “religious faith is the strongest bond for any human society, especially when times are tough. Both of these truths are eminently borne out by all that we know about human cultures . . .”

What’s more, religious faith socializes young men. As Ravi Zacharias has often noted, if you found yourself in a dark alley late at night, with a group of rough-looking, burly young men walking swiftly toward you, would you feel better knowing they were coming from a Bible study?

The Catholic schoolboys from Tonga weren’t angels, but their religious background had shaped them in profound ways. They found ways to cooperate when times were tough because they were given resources to recognize and govern their own fallen natures. Without these resources, humans quickly devolve into our own devices. It’s either Eustace or Lord of the Flies. To miss this connection between faith and virtue, is an oversight almost as big as setting off in a stolen boat without a map or compass.

What is it like to portray the lead character in the story of the entire universe? Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, Shane Morris welcomes Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus on the extremely well-done and enormously successful video series, "The Chosen." Roumie discusses the series's approach to the Gospels, to plausible "back stories" of the disciples, and how they wanted to focus on Christ's humanity--without underplaying the fact that He is the Son of God.

“‘The Chosen’ is Worth Your Time,” by John Stonestreet and Maria Baer, BreakPoint

“The Chosen” free to view on YouTube.

Join us for our online virtual event, “Truth. Love. Together”!

According to a new report by the National Center for Health Statistics, marriage in the United States of America has never been less popular. Today, in the U.S. there are only 6.5 weddings for every 1,000 people, the lowest rate since we started keeping records just after the Civil War, and despite the fact that millennials, who are the biggest generation in American history, are in their peak marriage years right now. And, these numbers are pre-COVID-19. As the report’s lead author suggests, the economic fallout of the virus will likely “further discourage marriage in the near term….”

Economic factors do, of course, affect marriage rates. Even before COVID closed everything down, single breadwinners could find it quite difficult to support a growing family. In recent decades, the “marriage gap,” the different marriage rates between upper and lower income Americans, has become more pronounced, with marriage becoming more and more a luxury of the wealthy.

At the same time, it’s a worldview mistake to think that economics alone can explain what's happening to marriage. As Bradford Wilcox with the Institute for Family Studies reminds us, “there was no marked increase in divorce, family instability, or single parenthood at the height of the Great Depression.” By contrast, Cornell sociologist Daniel Lichter points out that some of the biggest drops in marriage rates, at least in recent years, have occurred during economically prosperous times.

The bigger factor here is not money but culture. Exhibit A: As marriage has receded, cohabitation has both increased in both numbers and social acceptability. Pew reports that a quarter of unmarried young adults are living with a partner. That’s the highest percentage since our record-keeping began.

The rise of cohabitation has followed not only a shift of attitudes about out-of-wedlock sex, but about the institution of marriage itself. Several years ago, another Pew study found that more than half of young people in America thought marriage was “obsolete.” As one pastor remarked on Facebook, young people who pursue the skills necessary for marriage are often treated as if they’re wasting their “real” potential, and those who get married in their early or even mid-twenties can inspire a level of shock and shame that was once reserved only for couples “living in sin.”

Even worse, our culture’s current portrayal of the “good life” involves career-minded singles living in chic urban apartments, sowing their wild oats on casual dating and hookup apps, and leading lives incompatible with a spouse, much less children.

The road to rebuilding a culture that values marriage will be long and arduous, but we do have some clues about what works when it comes to creating and preserving that kind of culture. The Institute for Family Studies reports that, contrary to a popular but mistaken talking point, the institution that remains the single best refuge for marriage is the Church. It is still true, even today, that among the surest predictors that a couple will get and stay married is how regularly they attend religious services. That’s why bringing people to God and bringing people together are so often a package deal.

Even so, the Church simply must first embrace her God-given task of re-catechizing His people about what marriage is. Too often, the Church is trying to put a band-aid of sexual morality on the gaping wound of bad Christian thinking about marriage that is often no different than the larger culture: That marriage is either a lifestyle accessory, a waste of youth, or an institution of personal happiness. We won’t know what marriage is, or how to do it, unless we know what God created marriage for.

Hint: Though companionship is certainly a wonderful side-benefit of a healthy marriage, God didn’t create marriage to solve Adam’s loneliness problem. Check the text again: He created marriage to solve Adam’s aloneness problem. It’s an important distinction that not only explains what marriage is for, but sets the groundwork for all of the moral expectations God gives us about sex and marriage.

Even after the wedding, the Church is still the best place to strengthen marriages, a necessary task if we are to see the kind of culture where people think of lifelong marriage as part of the good life. Recently, J. P. DeGance joined me on the BreakPoint Podcast to talk about a unique, data-driven approach to helps pastors identify struggling marriages and then works to help save them in their communities. Working with pastors and churches in Jacksonville, Florida, DeGance’s organization, Communio, saw the divorce rate drop 24 percent in just three years. That's many times faster than the national average.

Saving existing marriages is essential to encouraging new ones. How many young people are out there that have never seen a single marriage work? How can we expect them to trust an institution that, in their view, not only consistently fails but also causes so much pain and heartbreak when it does?

J.P. DeGance will join Katy Faust, Pastor Bob Fu, and Student for Life president Kristan Hawkins for Module 5 of our upcoming  “Truth. Love. Together” virtual event. He’ll be talking about how the Church can help restore a marriage culture. The Truth.Love.Together event is absolutely free. Come to WilberforceWeekend.org to sign up and learn more.

Biographer, apologist, former BreakPoint co-host, and host of the popular radio show bearing his name, Eric Metaxas joins Shane Morris on the BreakPoint podcast to talk about his new book, Seven More Men and the Secret of Their Greatness.

Eric talks about his desire to re-introduce true heroes of the faith to modern believers, men like preacher George Whitfield, whom Eric asserts played just as much a role in the founding of the United States as George Washington; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ardent anti-Communist and also a severe critic of the increasingly secular West; and Sgt. Alvin York, arguably America's greatest war hero of the 20th century, a humble Christian man whose exploits in WWI seem to have long been forgotten.

7 More Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness, by Eric Metaxas, available at the BreakPoint online book store. 

Join us at the free online event, “Truth. Love. Together”!

Whoever said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” was certainly correct. Especially in times of crisis. For instance, it took a lawsuit to convince Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker to allow religious people to leave their homes to exercise their freedom of religion. Under his original executive order, the governor would permit “Essential Businesses and Operations” to have gatherings of 10 or more people, but not religious gatherings. Even stay-in-your-car drive-in services, as Pastor Steve Cassell of the Beloved Church found out when he was issued a cease and desist order, were forbidden with threats of arrest and prosecution.

Cassell and the Thomas More Society responded by filing a lawsuit. As Thomas Moore senior council Peter Breen said, “Keeping liquor stores open but indefinitely shutting down churches and religious ministries violates our constitution and our most basic liberties. If liquor stores are ‘essential,’ so are churches.” The governor quickly issued a replacement executive order explicitly allowing the free exercise of religion, as well as permitting gatherings that comply with social distancing.

Governor Pritzker is particularly easy to pick on here, but he’s certainly not alone. The Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly issued an order that exempted “26 types of secular activities from its gathering ban” but specifically prohibited “churches and other religious services or activities” with 10 or more people, even if they obeyed social distancing requirements. That order only lasted until the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a federal lawsuit. The governor has since issued a new order that didn’t single out churches.

Still, as ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer said, “It’s a shame that it took a federal lawsuit… in order to finally prompt the governor to issue an order that she could easily have issued in the first place: one that doesn’t… unconstitutionally target churches.”

It is more than a shame, actually. It’s revealing. Because from governors’ mansions to city halls across the country, from major metropolises like Bill de Blasio’s New York City to small cities and even smaller townships in the Bible Belt—like Chattanooga, Tennessee and Greenville, Mississippi—state and local officials are demonstrating just how badly they understand America's First Freedom. It’s bad enough that, as another ADF official admitted, ADF and the Thomas More Society and other religious freedom groups “can’t possibly monitor every situation across the nation."

Last week on Twitter Southern Seminary professor Andrew Walker wondered aloud on Twitter, why there has been such a "general mismanagement of religious liberty at the gubernatorial and municipal levels”?

I think, like so many other things I could point to during this time, this is a problem COVID-19 certainly didn’t create. So many cultural fault lines and foundational weaknesses of our theology and society are being revealed and exploited during this pandemic.

Specifically, I think Princeton Professor Robert George best articulated why we are seeing so many local officials fail so miserably on religious liberty right now, during an episode on the BreakPoint Podcast. Too many Americans, he told me, including lawmakers and even Christians—“essentially see (religion) as a hobby… like football, or going to the ballet, or collecting stamps.” These things are, of course, non-essential.

“But in our constitutional tradition,” George continued, religion “is singled out for special care... Our founding fathers, who bequeathed to us this great constitutional government … understood that religion has to do with the conscience.”

Of course, the government is fully entitled to curtail religious freedoms in a national emergency. That’s something recognized by both constitutional scholars and theologians, both contemporary and in the past. And in our podcast conversation, Dr. George clearly articulated the specific conditions under which religious freedoms might be limited by the state. First, the government must show a compelling interest when limiting full freedom of expression, such as public safety. For example, slowing the spread of COVID-19 could be deemed a compelling interest.

Second, the state cannot single out religious activities for restrictions that do not apply to other areas of life. This is a point Governors Pritzker and others are clearly struggling to grasp.

Third, if a compelling interest exists, the government must only curtail religious liberty in the least restrictive way possible. Any restrictions imposed cannot be more burdensome than necessary. For example, as Mayor de Blasio of New York clearly missed in his irrational threats against churches, restrictions must be temporary.

Look, we’ve clearly reached a point where we must re-educate ourselves, and our lawmakers, about the privileged place of religious freedom in our form of constitutional government. Religious freedom is not a second-class right and religion is not another lifestyle choice or a “hobby.”

But when Governor Pritzker announces, like he did last week (even after having his first idea smacked down) that bans on gatherings with 50 or more people—including churches—will stay in place for more than a year until a vaccine is developed? Good heavens, we’ve got our work cut out for us.

I mean, Governor Pritzker has a law degree, from a law school that bears his family name, no less. To paraphrase Professor Digory Kirke in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe": Bless me, what do they teach them at law schools these days?

And why we're asking that question, let's also ask: What are we teaching in our churches these days about religious freedom?