Breakpoint

From the beginning, proponents of the sexual revolution have wrapped themselves in the mantle of science, especially social science. For example, in the 1950s, the “Kinsey Reports” helped normalize a range of sexual behaviors. They were also the source of the still-often-quoted “statistic” that 10 percent of people are same-sex oriented. Both that figure and the methodology behind Kinsey’s “research” has long ago been discredited. Still, that 10 percent number has stuck in many people’s heads.

A new wave of studies in recent years paint a rosy picture about the benefits of medical transitions for people with gender dysphoria. So much so that, as Paul Dirks recently wrote at Public Discourse, “lifelong experimental medicalization, sterilization, and complete removal of healthy body parts . . . is no longer a rarity. It is the recommended treatment for gender dysphoria.”

But what if these studies are like the Kinsey Reports? What if they reflect the bias and agendas of the authors rather than reality? Given what is at stake, this a vitally important question, especially since social science itself is in the midst of what’s called a “replication crisis.” In other words, when other researchers try to replicate the findings of studies in the social sciences, they often cannot. This failure of replication even includes studies that are regarded as canonical in some fields.

So how can we distinguish between solid research and what won’t withstand further scrutiny when it comes to the so-called “settled science” of gender transitioning? Paul Dirks' Public Discourse article, “Transition as Treatment: The Best Studies Show the Worst Outcomes,” sums up the results of his deep-dive into the research.

Dirks defines “best studies” as those that have followed people who underwent medical transition for the longest period of time. “It is well recognized in the literature,” Dirks states, “that the year after medical [gender] transition is a ‘honeymoon period, which ‘does not represent a realistic picture of long-term sexual and psychological status.’”

Yet most of the popular gender transition studies are limited to just a few years following medical transitioning. Other studies that support medical transitions fail to follow up with as much as half of the original participants. That’s well beyond the threshold of reliability.

Many of the studies, Dirks states, are “fraught with . . . design problems,” such as “small sample sizes, short study lengths, and enormously high drop-out rates,” to name just three. The problem is so bad that one systematic review of the literature, “rated only two out of twenty-nine studies as high-quality.”

In contrast, the best-designed and most rigorous studies, whose results are most likely to stand up over time, found that medical transition was not the solution to the patients’ problems, especially in the case of male-to-female transitions. They reveal much higher mortality rates due to increased rates of suicide, AIDS, drug abuse, and even cardiovascular disease.

Another high-quality study found a 7-fold increase in suicide attempts and a nineteen-fold increase in completed suicides after transitions.  Even when the findings are adjusted for pre-existing psychiatric problems, which are often treated as unrelated to the gender dysphoria, there was still a three-fold increase in psychiatric hospital admissions.

In other words, when it comes to medical gender transitioning, “the best studies show the worst outcomes,” and the current use of shoddy social science to support medical transitioning is not only misleading but dangerous.

In this case, as is common in the social sciences, especially throughout the history of the sexual revolution, ideology is overwhelming truth-finding. Too many researchers think they know what the data should tell us, so they, at times unconsciously and at times consciously, design their studies to make sure that it does.

Sadly, the consequences of their failure are far worse than professional embarrassment or tarnished reputations. In this case, the consequences can be permanent and even deadly.

According to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, we live in a decadent society. But when you think of the word “decadent,” you probably are thinking, lavish, immoral, wasteful, etc.

But that’s not exactly what Douthat means. What he means is a society that is prosperous, powerful, and stuck. Stuck in an economic rut, a creative rut, a political  rut; a society that is running out of spiritual and intellectual energy.

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, John Stonestreet talks with Douthat about his new book, “The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success.”

The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success, by Ross Douthat. Available in BreakPoint online bookstore.

Join us for the 2020 Wilberforce Weekend, May 14-17!

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss the Coronavirus from a Christian Worldview perspective. Where is God in this? What role do Christians have to play in fighting the disease?

They also discuss a slew of issues involving life and human sexuality: Abortion supporters again show their fangs by defeating a bill that would save babies born alive after botched abortions; gay men lead the charge to legalize surrogacy--that is the buying and selling of babies and women's wombs; Christianity Today's odd response to polyamory; and finally, the formerly liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a Trump Administration rule prohibiting organizations receiving Title X funds from performing or referring for abortions.

“Chinese Christians and the Coronavirus,” by John Stonestreet and David Carlson, The Point

“Women Are More than Wombs,” by John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, BreakPoint

“Polyamory: Pastors’ Next Frontier,” by Preston Sprinkle and Branson Parler, Christianity Today

Writing at The Federalist last week, Kaeley Triller Haver remembered sitting in the legislature as the state of Washington legalized commercial surrogacy. While surrogacy has long been legal in the U.S., commercial surrogacy has not. In fact, it’s banned in most countries because of the potential for human exploitation.

Haver was struck by the lack of safeguards in the legislation: no background checks for would-be parents, no limits on the number of children they could order, no minimum compensation for surrogate mothers, and no barriers against pedophiles or human traffickers who might exploit the kids created. Incredibly, the rights of the children themselves weren’t even a part of that 2018 discussion.

This month, New York is following suit, considering two similar bills that would legalize commercial surrogacy in that state. Like in Washington, the push in New York is being made with “heartstring rhetoric and celebrity endorsement,” Haver writes, but again, almost no restrictions to prevent opening floodgates for the “exploitation and commodification of women’s bodies,” and the “buying and selling of humans.”

An untold part of this story, by the way, is that among those pushing hardest for commercial surrogacy are gay couples. According to an informal study commissioned by the Chicago Tribune in 2016, ten to twenty percent of donor eggs in fertility clinics went to gay men ordering babies through surrogacy. The overall number that represents was, at the time, skyrocketing, having increased by fifty percent in just five years.

Now keep in mind that, if ten to twenty percent sounds like a low number, self-identified gay people make up only about three percent of the population. By the way, the sponsors of both bills currently before the New York State Assembly, just like the sponsor of the bill that became law in Washington state, are openly gay.

In New York, LGBT activists are mostly rooting for the less restrictive of the two bills on the table, insisting that any safeguards on commercial baby-making would “unfairly harm LGBTQ families.” The safeguards these activists oppose are the same as those applied to adoptive families: home studies, waiting periods, and protections for birth mothers.

According to a joint letter by several LGBT rights groups, such evaluations “would be unthinkable for parents who planned to have children through sexual intercourse.” Therefore, I suppose their logic goes, restrictive should also be unthinkable for couples unable to have procreative intercourse and instead wish to buy someone’s eggs and rent someone’s womb in order to gestate a baby they will call their own.

What we’re seeing here is the logical conclusion of the ideology that brought us same-sex “marriage.” Gay unions were sold to the world with the slogan, “love is love.” Of course, the only way that heterosexual love is the same as homosexual love is to make all the biological aspects of love irrelevant to the conversation in the first place, which is just another way of saying biological sex (i.e. that we are male and female) and procreation are both irrelevant to marriage.

Now, so many of those who have intentionally chosen sterile unions and argued that procreation is irrelevant to those unions, are now demanding children. They are demanding procreation without sex, and they’re demanding it as a right.

The only way to claim a right to what is impossible (same-sex couples cannot conceive children) is through a transactional workaround with women whose wombs they wish to rent.

In other words, the sponsors of these bills want the reproductive abilities of mothers, divorced from the mothers, themselves. They want the wombs, but not the women.

Of course, those who suffer in this cynical economic exchange, like in each and every chapter of the sexual revolution so far, are woman and children. As Haver points out, surrogate mothers or “gestational carriers” as they’re called, are at risk of permanent sterility or other serious health consequences from ovarian hyperstimulation. The children whose rights are not even considered will grow up, and as we’ve seen from other situations,  they’ll want to know who they are and where they come from. Many understandably condemn how they were conceived, bought, and sold like products.

The European Parliament has denounced surrogacy as “an act of violence against women,” and countries like India whose citizens stand to profit from renting wombs to rich Westerners have recognized the built-in exploitation and outlawed the practice.

Yet if activists and legislators get their way, New York it will soon welcome commercial surrogacy. By doing so, they’ll be endorsing the idea that families, including children, are commodities to be bought and sold. But it’s always the women and children, especially the most vulnerable ones, who will pay the highest price.

Once again, Senator Lindsey Graham has sponsored the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.” Once again, on Tuesday, the measure failed, this time 53-44, with two Democrats supporting it, and two Republicans voting against it. As Graham put it, “we vote on this every year.”

As the title suggests, the act would ban abortions after 20 weeks, once the fetus can feel pain. Right on cue, abortion supporters labeled the act “outrageously restrictive,” and the idea that children in the womb feel pain as “scientifically disputed.”

That the measure failed is no surprise, but to call it “outrageously restrictive” ignores abortion laws across the rest of the world. Germany and France both restrict abortions at 14 weeks of gestation. Norway restricts at 12 weeks, as does Ireland. Even notoriously liberal Sweden restricts abortions at 18 weeks.

In other words, the “Pain-Capable” Act, especially given the way we protect animals in our country, is quite reasonable. And if it’s reasonable, the other bill introduced Tuesday should be seen as downright obvious and humane.

As Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana described  from the Senate floor: “…the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act… mandates that if a baby is born alive following a botched abortion, the doctor must protect that baby and give the same medical care that any other baby would receive.” Then he added, “Is that too much to ask for?”

Unfortunately, once again, it was. 41 senators, all of them Democrats, voted to block the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which was sponsored by Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse.

Again, like the previous piece of legislation, the title accurately describes what the measure seeks to accomplish. Unlike many other pieces of legislation, the language of the measure is straightforward and easy to understand: “If an abortion results in the live birth of an infant, the infant is a legal person for all purposes under the laws of the United States, and entitled to all the protections of such laws.”

Furthermore, “Any health care practitioner present at the time the child is born alive shall . . . exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.”

That this Act is considered controversial proves that the ideology of abortion has slipped any of the surly bonds of rationality. Given the straightforward clarity of the Born Alive Protection Act’s title and substance, the language used by its opponents should be noted too.

In an online article that practically celebrates the failure of these two bills, CNN called the Born Alive Protection Act an “abortion restriction bill.” Perhaps they received that talking point from Planned Parenthood, who claimed in their communication that the bill pushes “misinformation meant to end access to abortion.”

But the bill says nothing at all about a woman’s access to abortion. In fact, it acknowledges the fact of abortion. It even assumes an abortion was attempted and does nothing to penalize or criminalize anyone seeking or anyone performing an abortion. All it does is confront the reality that babies sometimes survive abortion attempts.

But the worst abuse of language award still goes to CNN, for this line from the article, “…the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, would require abortion providers to work to 'preserve the life and health' of a fetus that was born following an attempted abortion as they would for a newborn baby…”

I am not making this up. CNN reporter Caroline Kelly literally referred to “a fetus that is born” and contrasted that with a “newborn baby.”

All of this underscores something Chesterton said, “If words aren’t worth fighting for, what on earth would be?” Or even better, one attributed to Confucius, “When words lose their meaning, people lose their lives.”

Simply put, Christians must engage this battle at the level of language. Words matter. Definitions matter. Truth matters. And human lives are at stake.

As Western culture becomes more and more secular, or to use Charles Taylor’s fascinating word “disenchanted,” traditions and practices once largely normal seem more and more strange. Large families, choosing church over Little League, or smudged foreheads just aren’t as normal as they used to be, and the second glances or raised eyebrows they create reveal more than a confusion about the thing itself.

In fact, I’m not sure there is a Christian observance that more directly collides with the widely accepted values of secularism than the “imposition of the ashes,” a tradition that goes back about ten centuries and marks the beginning of the season of Lent on the Church calendar.

Like Advent, the season of Lent is about preparation. Before Christmas, our Christian forbears thought it wise to prepare a bit, and that by diving deeply into Old Testament promises and prophecies we’d better understand the birth of Christ in the full context of redemptive history. So too, in Lent, our Christian forbears thought it wise to prepare for Holy week, especially for celebrating the resurrection on Easter Sunday.

A key distinction is that Lenten disciplines, beginning with Ash Wednesday’s reminder that “You are dust and to dust you shall return,” place our celebration of resurrection in the context of our humanity, both our mortality and our fallenness. Even if the church calendar and its accompanying disciplines is not part of your church tradition, these two aspects of our humanity deserve our focused, intentional, and extended reflection.

Of course, most Christians would quickly reply that, of course, sin and death affect us all post-Eden. The problem is, in a secular culture, these beliefs that are crucial to a Christian worldview can be subtly secularized in our own hearts and minds.

Years ago, when my grandfather was dying, he suffered terribly for three or four months. In sorrow, I asked my pastor, “Why doesn’t God just take him?” I expected him to say something along the lines of, “Well, God has His ways, and His own timing,” but instead he said something I’ll never forget: “Because you grandfather needs to know his mortality before he meets his maker.”

What Ponce de Leon once sought in the waters of a Fountain of Youth, we still seek today via genetic engineering, eugenics, and other technologies. In other words, we seek control over this world and even over death itself.

Despite our search, death remains the universal problem of the human condition, one that afflicts us all. A secular culture is led by the reality of death to fear death itself, so that we either attempt to control death or distract ourselves from the thought of it. As a result, we learn to live life in light of the moment, rather than eternity.

The reality of death should, instead, remind us to fear God. That after death, we will meet the maker of life, is worth pondering, not just at the moment of death, but constantly throughout our lives.

Theologian Craig Gay warned in his book "The Way of the Modern World" that many of us who believe in God live as if God were largely irrelevant to most of life. The reminder of our mortality in the words, “You are but dust and to dust you shall return,” is a wonderful antidote for what he called “practical” atheism.

Just like with the idea of mortality, our understanding of our own sinfulness is also under threat of being secularized in our own minds. In a culture committed, in the name of freedom, of removing the categories of “sin” or “guilt,” one quick to give away nearly universal “get-out-of-jail-free” cards in the name of sexual freedom, too many Christians lose any abhorrence for that which ought shock and shame us.

Perhaps this is why the salvation brought by Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is so often described as “a wonderful example of love and sacrifice” or “how to gain purpose and perspective,” but so rarely in the terms of judicial forgiveness and cosmic victory that Paul and Peter and Jesus Himself so often used.

Being confronted with our own sinfulness is certainly no fun, but God graciously does it. After all, the cruelest thing to tell someone who’s not okay is that they are, as both secularized cultures and secularized churches too often do. Repentance is a gift, the only way forward for those on the edge of the moral abyss, and proof that God is kind, the Scriptures say.

We just don’t hear these things often enough. So, thank God for Lent.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. But much more than the gloomy season of fasting and repentance preceding Easter, Lent, as our BreakPoint Podcast guest Rev. Kenneth Gillespie reminds us, is a time to place Christ once again at the center of our lives.

Rev. Gillespie also discusses the importance of the church year, or, the liturgical year, as a way to orient our entire lives around the faith.  He also provides some practical advice for those who are interested in observing Lent, maybe for the first time.

Join us at the 2020 Wilberforce Weekend, May 14-17!

You know what I’m happy to leave behind in the 2010s? The headlines about how Millennials are killing everything. “Millennials are killing mayonnaise,”  “Millennials are killing golf,” and “Millennials are killing real estate because they spend all their money on avocado toast.” Those are real headlines.

Sadly, there’s at least one Millennial-related headline we can’t leave in the last decade: Millennials are killing churches.

According to Pew Research, four in ten Americans between the ages of 23 and 38 now say they are religiously unaffiliated. This is the biggest drop in religiosity between generations ever recorded.

While part of the hemorrhaging is explained by the forty-year decline in mainline Protestant bodies, evangelicals are not off the hook. We cannot say that conservative theology, in and of itself, is enough to shrink-proof your church. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, America’s largest evangelical denomination, just hit a 30-year membership low.

Young people have left evangelical churches and are still leaving, and new data can fix some of our wrong thinking about it.

For instance, I’ve heard for years that young people who leave church in their college years will come back, as if nothing can or should be done about it. Let’s set aside for a moment what should be obvious: that we should never be okay with anyone ever rejecting Christ or His church. According to a study by the American Enterprise Institute, Millennials who drop out of church often end up staying away permanently. Maybe in the past, young adults who wandered away tended to become religious again when they get married and have kids. But things have changed, and there seems to be three main differences.

First, many young adults today who leave the church never had strong religious ties to begin with. Whether their parents didn’t attend services regularly or they were passed back and forth between homes with different beliefs, these young adults weren’t raised with God or His people at the center of their lives.

Second, those who drop out and have gotten married tend to have a spouse who is also not religious. For obvious reasons, this makes them less likely to go through the effort of making it to Sunday services or raising their families in the faith.

Finally, Millennial church dropouts are unlikely to view religion as a necessary part of teaching their own children morality. This is quite a change from past generations, which often returned to church after a youthful rumspringa because they had kids and wanted them to grow up to be good people.

Another claim I often hear these days is that growing numbers of dropouts is actually a good thing because it is separating true believers from cultural Christians. I get the spirit behind this claim, but it’s misguided in two ways. First, God often uses the culture we are born in to introduce us to Christ. Think about it: Are you more likely to hear about your need for Jesus in a culture with a church on every corner or in a culture in which churches have been turned into bars? And second, the Gospel still has an effect on those who come to church for the wrong reasons, like social acceptability.

So what lesson can we take from this new data? Firs the bad news: We really are losing a generation of young churchgoers, and they’re probably not coming back—at least not if we stay our current course.

The good news: We now know with even greater clarity the difference parents make, and we can apply that with members of Generation Z. Parents who prioritize church as a central part of their family life, who teach their children to take Christianity seriously, and who encourage them to marry fellow believers, have the best chance of seeing not only their children but also their grandchildren in the pews beside them.

That’s why I’m really excited to invite you to this year’s Wilberforce Weekend on May 14-17 in Washington D.C. On that Friday morning we kick off our special pre-conference focusing on how we can prepare the next generation of believers to face the challenges of our culture. Joining me will be Sean McDowell, Brett Koukl, J. Warner Wallace, and Natasha Crain. Come to WilberforceWeekend.org to learn more and to register.

A version of this commentary first aired January 7, 2020.

New York Times columnist David Brooks made waves last week with an essay published in the Atlantic. Brooks’ point is simple: What we call “the nuclear family,” a mother, a father, and their 2.5 children, often in a suburban home with a single income, is an invention of the 20th century. It’s not what the family looked like for most of history.

Instead, writes Brooks, humans have typically existed in multi-generational networks of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins supporting one another. The “extended family,” he argues, is the natural family.

The key here is context. Brooks admits the nuclear family has always existed, but without an extended circle of relatives, he thinks it’s unstable. History seems to back him up. The 1950s, he writes, were the “high water mark” of the nuclear family. But as the 50s economy and mass unionization became things of the past, nuclear families fragmented into ever smaller forms, with single-parent homes now being the most common.

Among the important points made by Brooks is that, certainly by the time American culture had absorbed the full impact of the sexual revolution, the American family had already been substantially transformed by industrialization and other forces of modernity, not least of which is the widespread separation of work from home.

Unfortunately, the title of Brooks’ essay is, well, terrible. To lead with “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” muddies the waters. Even muddier is Brooks’ suggestion that alternative forms of kinship, which he calls “chosen families,” are legitimate replacements for the nuclear family, with the only criteria for their success being that they are chosen.

And so, he praises networks of shared parenting in such places as African-American neighborhoods with low rates of fatherhood, same-sex and polyamorous arrangements in LGBTQ communities, and even groups of friends living together to support one another.

What Brooks misses is that all of these things are attempts to mitigate the situations caused when families break. They are not replacements. As noble as some of these attempts are, the outcomes for those involved in “chosen families,” especially outcomes related to the long-term health and well-being of children, are consistently worse than they are for those in nuclear families.

Critiquing Brooks’ essay at The Bulwark, Mona Charen reminds us that family, including extended families, are still built on marriage. A family is more than a mere social construct. It cannot be whatever we want it to be. It’s founded, she writes, on human nature and biology, including “the unique bond that ties parents and children.”

In a symposium at the Institute for Family Studies, others point out that the “chosen families” Brooks praises are often less stable than even the isolated nuclear family that he’s critiquing. In particular, the statistics on abuse and neglect in these contexts is alarming.

Where Brooks is right is that a mom, a dad, and a couple of kids are not the family most people throughout history have known, and that the forces of modernity have isolated the “nuclear” family arrangement away from extended families and other social networks that were once normal and that can support them. Another way to say this is marriage is hard. Parenting is hard. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and other extended family members are really helpful. Their presence was far more common in the past than it is now.

Andrew Walker’s response to Brooks’ essay makes the very important point that what Brooks is looking for in so-called “chosen families,” already exists in another institution that’s been around for a couple thousand years: the local church. Jesus didn’t start the Church to replace biological families, and what other social institution offers the love, support, and community that can help hold a household together? The reality to which Brooks points is a marvelous opportunity for the church to be the agent of restoration Christ has saved it to be.

Still, Brooks is wrong to suggest that love can dispense with biology. The natural family is built around the biological realities of male and female and procreation, and it’s therefore as irreplaceable as gravity. As books like Mary Eberstadt’s “Primal Screams” clearly document, the last several decades of ignoring this design has brought devastating consequences.

A brand-new documentary captures the stunning beauty of nature and extols the nature's Creator. Gordon Wilson, the host and narrator of "Riot and the Dance: Water" joins Shane Morris on the BreakPoint Podcast to talk about the film and the need for Christians to recapture the wonder of God's work in nature.

More information on “Riot and the Dance: Water”