Breakpoint

As Bernie Sanders surges ahead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss his appeal--and the appeal of socialism--among young voters especially; that is, among voters who did not grow up at a time when socialism and communism posed an existential threat to the West.

They also discuss the horrific persecution faced by Christians in Nigeria and Burkina Faso and how freedom from violent persecution that Christians enjoy in the modern West is more the exception than the rule.

Also on today's episode: Is the nuclear family in trouble? Will the Boy Scouts fold? John and Shane wrap up the program discussing the Colson Fellows and how you can become a part of this life- and faith-changing program.

Learn more about the Colson Fellows!

“The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” by David Brooks, The Atlantic

Institute for Family Studies symposium in response to David Brooks’s article on the nuclear family

“Millennials and the False Gospel of Politics,” by John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, BreakPoint

“Clarissa’s Soviet Story,” by Rod Dreher, The American Conservative

“A defining moment for Christian” by Mindy Belz, WORLD Magazine

“Parenting Young Men after the Boy Scouts” by John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, BreakPoint

At one point in its history, most likely in the century after the return from the Babylonian exile, a swarm of locusts descended on Judah and ate everything in sight. That is, after all, what locusts do.

The calamity was the setting for the prophetic oracles contained in the Book of Joel. In the first part of the book, the prophet laments the damage done by the swarm and calls on God’s people to mourn, not only for their losses but also for their sins. If they do, the prophet proclaims, God will “restore the years the locusts have eaten.”

Locusts and leprosy are the quintessential biblical calamities, but few of us in the West have experienced either personally. In some parts of the world, they are far more familiar. In fact, right now, upwards of 13 million people in East Africa face famine as the result of locust swarms. Note that I said not “a swarm” but “swarms,” some covering more than 900 square miles and containing up to 80 million individual bugs. In one day they can consume as many crops as “would provide food for 35,000 people.”

This current plague of locusts originated in the southern Arabian Peninsula where heavy rainfall provided ideal breeding conditions and prevailing winds carried them to East Africa.

From there, the locusts spread into other areas, including South Sudan and the Turkana region of Kenya, both of which were already struggling with the effects of prolonged drought.

By some estimates, if weather conditions are right, “the swarms could increase by 500 times come June.” And, making efforts to eradicate the swarms even more difficult is that one of their preferred breeding sites is controlled by the Somali Islamist group, al-Shabaab.

Still, in the midst of the suffering, there are lights in the darkness, such as the group “Mary’s Meals.”

You may have guessed from the name that the group is named after Jesus’ mother. The founder of Mary’s Meals, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, is a devout Catholic who, before founding the group, spent years as a salmon farmer. After hearing about the refugee crisis created by the Bosnian War, Magnus and his brother Fergus drove a truck all the way from Scotland to Bosnia loaded with relief supplies.

This initial running – or in this case, driving – towards what other people were fleeing led to the creation of Mary’s Meals, whose vision is simple: “every child receives one daily meal in their place of education.”

It may sound modest, but that one meal makes a huge difference long term, with a measurable impact on school enrollment, attendance and performance, especially in poorer countries.

Today, the group feeds 1.3 million children around the world, including 20,000 in Turkana. Seventeen percent of all school children in Malawi are fed by Mary’s Meals.

These efforts are in stark contrast to those of the national governments in places like Kenya, which are accused by critics of only thinking about the crisis areas during election time.

The actions of Christian groups like Mary’s Meals and others are pretty much all that stands between a lot of people and mass starvation, and that was true even before this new plague of locusts. A crisis of biblical proportions demands a response by God’s people: specifically, running into, not away from, the plague. Thank God, that’s what Christians have done throughout history, and thank God, that’s what is happening today.

But what can we do from so far away? Of course, we can pray. That matters, a lot. And, we can spread the word. Amazingly, people can watch cable news all day and not be aware of this calamity of biblical proportions. We can also urge our leaders to help those affected.

Finally, we ourselves can be generous and support organizations like Mary’s Meals and others who provide this sort of care to those who need it the most.

The latest edition of the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index was released last month, rating more than a thousand of the largest corporations in the U.S. for their “commitment to LGBTQ equality and inclusion.”

In their press release, the HRC, which is the largest LGBTQ lobbying firm in the country and the self-appointed authority over corporate compliance to standards they created, excitedly announced that a record 686 of America’s leading companies and law firms now rigorously protect LGBTQ people.

Nearly half the world’s Fortune 500 companies earned a 100 rating—the highest possible—while more than half of the top 200 law firms in the United States received the same score.

It’s ironic how often orthodox Christians are accused of being obsessed with sex these days. After all, what’s more obsessive than investigating thousands of businesses to determine whether they’re “kind” and “inclusive” only to those who engage in certain types of sexual behavior, and not to anyone else?

It would be creepy enough if HRC kept this obsession to themselves, but they’ve successfully weaponized the Equality Index as a formidable force of their obsession. Corporations clamor to get a good score. They wear this new “good housekeeping seal of approval” proudly and loudly, joining marches and decorating their offices and social media feeds. And, becoming “HRC approved” is no small task. The Index not only measures whether or not businesses “support an inclusive culture…,” but also whether or not a business has sufficiently demonstrated “a public commitment to LGBTQ equality.”

In other words, companies must publicly advocate for LGBTQ equality to a degree acceptable to HRC ideologues. Companies know that failing to meet the ever-higher standards of inclusion and advocacy are put on another list: the acceptable targets of scorn and bullying list.

Such tactics work, as is evidenced by an entire sector of American culture bowing to self-appointed experts. The larger social pressure to conform that we all feel as individuals now applies to businesses small and large, such as Chick-fil-A’s corporate decision to not only drop support for certain Christian charities who were noticeably on the wrong side of the HRC, but also to publicly announce that decision.

The same pressure has also effectively leveraged state political bodies to take legal action against small businesses like Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado, or Arlene’s Flowers in Washington, both of which served LGBTQ customers but failed to pass muster because they refused to participate in same-sex weddings.

Give HRC and like-minded LGBTQ allies credit: Their work has been incredibly effective, largely bending not only corporate America to their will, but also city halls, state houses, and Congress. It’s essential we understand the ramifications if what they’ve achieved through social and economic pressure is then further enshrined into law. Specifically, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (or SOGI) laws would place sexual orientation and gender identity on par with race and religion as protected classes under the Civil Rights Act. The cultural transformation would then be complete.

As our friends at the Alliance Defending Freedom warn us, these laws, like the so-called “Equality Act” now in Congress, would finally enshrine LGBTQ ideology in schools and libraries; in public and private restrooms, homeless shelters, and havens for victims of abuse. “Creative professionals” would lose the ability to live out their faith in their work. Christian organizations that provide public services, like foster care facilities and adoption agencies, would be forced to choose between their convictions and their existence.

While some have sought to mitigate these sorts of consequences by proposing various compromises and exemptions, the substance and the influence of HRC’s corporate scorecard makes something perfectly clear: Compromise is not on the table for them.

Which leaves two important points all Christians must begin to consider. First, elections matter. Second, it’s more than likely the pressure, whether social or corporate or cultural or familial, will test our convictions. We should decide now where we must stand.

According to Pew Research, fewer and fewer American adults have a working historical knowledge of the Holocaust. While most of us have general knowledge about the time period, more than half do not know how many Jews were killed or how Hitler came to power. We’d be foolish to not connect our growing ignorance of history with the rise of anti-Semitism that we see around the world and even here in the United States.

In fact, renowned historian David McCullough recently admitted that the connection between our historical forgetfulness and current events keeps him up at night.

Specifically, he said, our leaders “have forgotten about history. They are unaware of the past, and uninterested in how they will be remembered in the future.”

To be clear, the amnesia we see in our leaders is the fruit of the problem, not the root. The root, as McCullough expressed at the most recent National Book Festival, lies in deeper structural realities, especially the lack of attention given to history in American schools.

“Eighty percent of our colleges don’t require history courses,” McCullough lamented, before adding, “That's wrong.”

McCullough is right. It is wrong. And dangerous. As philosopher George Santayana famously put it, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Or as Mark Twain (probably) said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Unfortunately, we don’t seem very committed to remembering the past, as is obvious from how very committed we are to rejecting it, especially anything that smacks of traditional morality. G.K. Chesterton called tradition “the democracy of the dead,” and wisely advised that “Before you remove a fence, you should ask why it is there in the first place.”

Though our challenges aren’t identical to those faced by previous societies, they are similar; in fact, they’re essentially variations of the same basic themes: What does it mean to be just? Who is one of us? What do we owe our neighbor? What obligation do we have towards those different from us?  What’s right and wrong, and who decides?

And, even if the challenges we face have changed, human nature hasn’t. We may believe we’re smarter and better and, as Justice Kennedy liked to say, “more morally evolved” than our forebears, but that’s only our prejudice speaking, a version of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.”  On the other hand, paying attention to history is a way to acknowledge that our forebears may have learned something about human nature, even if they learned it the hard way.

As I said in a recent commentary on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we are all capable of the evil and horror on display at places like Auschwitz. A proper knowledge of history and a proper understanding of human fallenness that history gives us, is a potent antidote to protect us from our own potential.

McCullough offered another important reason for knowing history, one that echoes both Chesterton and Chuck Colson: Knowing history cultivates a sense of gratitude. We are the beneficiaries of those who came before us. As Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” And he was Isaac Newton!

Even beyond the crisis of our moment and the cultivation of gratitude, Christians ought appreciate history because biblical religion is an historical faith. The scriptures tell the story of God’s actions, not in a “Once upon a time, far, far away” realm of imagination or mystery, but within human history.

Since the Exodus, God’s people have made remembering and reciting God’s historical acts a central part of life and worship. In fact, as many have said, the entire Old Testament can be summarized with the word “Remember!”

Of course, Christians believe that same commandment is not only repeated but also fulfilled by Jesus, when He said, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

History teaches us about ourselves, helps us avoid personal and cultural blind spots, reveals the debt we owe to the past, and reminds us of things essential to know about God, as He is revealed to us in Scripture. What other reasons could we need?

Fewer Christians today believe that Satan is a person, rather that he is an impersonal force. But the Bible has another view, that Satan, angels, and fallen angels are all creatures made by God, that they are quite real, and that they are involved in human history.

What is the history of these spiritual beings? How important is it that we understand their role in God’s plan for humanity? What do the Church fathers and modern apologists like C. S. Lewis have to say about them?

To answer these questions and more, John Stonestreet welcomes Dr. Graham Cole, author of Against the Darkness: The Doctrine of Angels, Satan, and Demons and Dean of the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Against the Darkness: The Doctrine of Angels, Satan, and Demons, by Dr. Graham Cole

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

Last week, actor John Rhys-Davies, best known for playing the dwarf Gimli in “The Lord of the Rings” films, gave a strong defense for Christianity.

         Speaking to the Christian Post from the red carpet at the Movieguide awards, Rhys-Davies said, “We seem to forget that Christian civilization has made the world a better place… We owe Christianity the greatest debt of thanks that a generation can ever have...” he went on, crediting it for the ideas of religious liberty, free speech, and individual rights.

         Rhys-Davies, who recently starred in an animated adaptation of “Pilgrim’s Progress” and is the lead in an upcoming biopic of Saint Patrick, said he often finds himself sticking up for Jesus in his line of work.

         The strange part of this story is that Rhys-Davies is a self-professed “rationalist and a skeptic,” not a Christian. Yet he is still able to see how the faith of Christ’s Church, as author Alvin J. Schmidt puts it, “changed the world” for the better.

         Rhys-Davis is just one of many skeptics, atheists, and secularists of late who reject the rhetoric of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and recognize the immense good the Gospel has done for the world. Whereas the so-called New Atheists slandered Christianity as being backward and poisonous, a new crop of unbelievers see it as beneficial, beautiful, and maybe even in some limited sense, true.

         Take Douglas Murray, British journalist, political commentator, and author of the new book, “The Madness of Crowds.” Though a self-professed non-believer and gay man, Murray admits to admiring Christianity and “the positive role it has played in building Western civilization.” He even labels himself, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a “Christian atheist.”

         In a recent dialogue with Christian writer Esther O’Reilly on the “Unbelievable” podcast, Murray praised Christianity’s “revolutionary moral insights” such as the command to “love and forgive your enemies.”

“The more atheists think on these things,” he confessed, “the more we may have to accept that...the sanctity of human life is a Judeo-Christian notion which might very easily not survive [the demise of] Judeo-Christian civilization.”

         But even more than recognizing Christianity’s usefulness, Murray sees the faith as meaningful. Describing a trip he took last year to the Sea of Galilee, Murray admitted he couldn’t stop thinking that, as he put it, “something happened here.”

         Murray was one of several “Christ-haunted unbelievers” discussed on a recent BreakPoint Podcast conversation between Shane Morris and Esther O’Reilly.

         In addition to her recent interaction with Murray, O’Reilly also contributed to an upcoming book about clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, another who has articulated a strong respect for Christianity from the perspective on non-belief.

         According to O’Reilly, skeptics admitting to the Christian faith’s positive influence on history is only the headline of this story (although we’d be remiss to not include the recent book Dominion by Tom Holland as yet another example). O’Reilly thinks that under the surface, spiritual truth is being found too, much like the skeptics C. S. Lewis describes in the essay entitled “Myth Became Fact.”

         Lewis, himself a convert from atheism, wrote, “A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than the one who assented [to it as fact] and did not think much about it.”

         With O’Reilly, we hope the flame of myth and meaning fans into full-blown belief, that they will come to see Christianity as “the place where the heart’s deepest longings and deepest intuitions about what is good...connect(s) with the mind’s deepest understanding [of what is true.]”

         After all, no unbelief can survive that moment. Just ask C.S. Lewis.

         Catch Shane Morris’ conversation with Esther O’Reilly on the BreakPoint podcast.

The stats are sobering. According to the American Psychological Association, the average age of a child’s first exposure to pornography is 13 years old, with some seeing it as young as five. According to another survey, 42 percent of children have been cyber-bullied, and more than a third have been actively threatened online. One in five twelve-year-olds has been contacted by a predator.   Other pitfalls of unsupervised and unlimited screen time may not be quite as awful, but still worth knowing. One doctor, writing at Psychology Today in 2015, described how overuse of technology leaves kids “moody, crazy, and lazy.” Phones and tablets overstimulate young nervous systems, resulting in disrupted sleep, fried reward circuits in the brain, multiplied stress, and fractured attention spans. The younger the child, the worse the damage seems to become.

All of this is why so many top executives and engineers in Silicon Valley refuse to give their own kids the mobile devices they make.

In 2018, the New York Times ran a feature describing these parents at Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and other tech giants who raise their own children tech-free. One Facebook veteran ominously told the Times, “I’m convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”

Are we taking the alarm being sounded by these executives seriously enough? Christopher Null at WIRED magazine thinks we are not. In a recent piece, he describes the “ethical debate” some parents think they must have over whether they should respect their children’s privacy online.

He quotes an author who makes the argument that supervising our kids’ tech use signals a lack of trust, and only conditions them to accept totalitarian surveillance.

I’d tell you how ridiculous I think this is, but Null has spared me the effort. He insists children should have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their online activity. In fact, and I fully agree with this, the least loving thing you can do as a parent is to leave your kids to their own devices on the Internet.

The rules and boundaries he’s set in his home are based on a simple fact: The devices our children use belong to us, not to them. Accordingly, we are entitled to see everything they see. In an age of predators, pornography, and cyber-bullying, to think otherwise is not only foolish, it’s unloving.

Brett Kunkle and I make these same points in our book “A Practical Guide to Culture.” For starters, kids and teens shouldn’t be using devices unsupervised. Computers, tablets, and phones should only be available for use in high-traffic areas of the home. No locked doors.

Second, there should be no way for our kids to keep secrets from us. Know their passwords and remind them often of the ability to check their online activity at any time.

M.I.T. psychologist and tech expert Sherry Turkle also suggests the idea of “tech-free zones.” Specifically, she suggests that the car, the dinner table, bedrooms, and vacations be designated times and places with no phones and tablets. This gives kids a chance to reset, to engage in other activities, and to practice social skills not mediated by text messages. In our home, we’ve found that a weekly Sabbath break from our devices better prepares us for the week ahead.

Most importantly, none of this works without strong, positive relationships with our children. Unless we say “yes” to them as people and not just “no” to their unbridled tech times, they won’t understand why we are making a decision that seems so abnormal in our culture.

“Only in the context of a true relationship,” says Null, can we show our children who they are apart from their devices and, I’ll add, only then can they get a sense of the weight of the responsibility we feel as their parents. Just as they must answer to us for what they do online, we must answer to God, who entrusted them to us.

Come to BreakPoint.org and we’ll link you to Null’s article and tell you how you can get a copy of “A Practical Guide to Culture.”

Esther O'Reilly joins Shane Morris to discuss the growing number of atheist or agnostic intellectuals--like Jordan Peterson,  Tom Holland, and Douglas Murray--who reject Christianity's historical and faith claims yet also value the faith's contributions to Western civilization and our shared humanity, to the point that they defend Christianity against those who would ban it from the public square.

What is it about Christianity that appeals to these almost-believers?

As a side note, if you're a fan of atheist-turned-Christian C. S. Lewis, you'll especially enjoy this episode of the BreakPoint Podcast.

Esther O’Reilly at Patheos: Young Fogey

Unbelievable? Douglas Murray and Esther O’Reilly – The Madness of Crowds and Christian atheism

With John Stonestreet traveling, Shane Morris takes the lead on this episode of “BreakPoint This Week,” and welcomes our old friend Warren Cole Smith back to the program.

Shane and Warren discuss the remarkable work of Chinese Christians to aid and evangelize their neighbors in the midst of the Coronavirus crisis–very much like their ancient Christian brethren did during the plagues of the Roman empire.

Also today: a new petition to for the government to take down a popular porn site that hosts videos of trafficked minors; Indiana lays to rest 2,411 aborted babies discovered in the garage of deceased abortionist Ulrich Klopfer; what’s with the Nones? Are the numbers reversing? And finally, they discuss David Brooks’s compelling article about the nuclear family–a much-revered model of the family that may not, in the end, be either sustainable nor reflective of God’s plan for families and human flourishing.

“Christians Sharing the Love of Jesus in Coronavirus Hotzone,” by Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post

“Time to Shut Pornhub Down,” by Laila Mickelwait, Washington Examiner

“A mass burial is held for more than 2,400 fetal remains found in a garage in Illinois,” by Faith Karimi, CNN

“New Analysis Suggests Growth of Religious ‘Nones’ May Be Slowing,” by Mikaela Mathews, Christian Headlines

“The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” by David Brooks, The Atlantic

Remember the good old days, when Valentine’s Day was so simple? A nice card, some flowers, maybe a box of chocolates…

These days, voices everywhere tell us that we dare not settle for such mundane gifts for that special someone. “Forget the chocolates and flowers,” says the Today Show. “Think creative and thoughtful.”

To help, they came up with their “Top 10 hottest gifts” for Valentine’s Day. For the guys? How about a heart-shaped box of beef jerky for the guys, or perhaps a bouquet of salami (I’m not kidding). For the ladies, they suggest a pair of Spanx Faux Leather Leggings or bubble-gum colored slip-on sneakers? Or couples might “gift” each other a heart-shaped waffle iron, or a “touch bracelet set” so you can send each other digital love messages that “vibrate and light up.”

Attempts to commercialize romantic love, what the Greeks called eros (more on that in a moment), is nothing new, but it’s quite clear that, in our Valentine’s Day traditions, we’ve lost the history of what was, historically, a feast day of the Church: The feast day of the third-century Christian martyr: Valentinus of Rome.

While no a lot is known about Valentinus, the most-widely accepted version of his martyrdom is that he ran afoul of emperor Claudius II. Believing that “Roman men were unwilling to join the army because of their strong attachment to their wives and families,” Claudius banned marriage.

Valentinus defied the emperor by marrying couples in secret. He was caught and executed for his crimes. Whether the story happened exactly that way, every ancient reference to Valentinus associates February 14th with his martyrdom and sacrifice.

Romantic love, what C.S. Lewis called “Eros,” is by no means a wrong or sinful expression of our humanity. In fact, it’s a gift from God. As Lewis wrote in “The Four Loves,” when rightly ordered, eros causes us to toss “personal happiness aside as a triviality and [plant] the interests of another in the center of our being.”

Romantic love can be, as Lewis put it, “a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival.”

In other words, there is a proper place for eros … not as an end in and of itself, but as a means. Eros points beyond itself, and points our hearts beyond ourselves, to a higher love, agape, a love that can only come from God Himself.

The imminent season of Lent turns our focus toward that total self-giving love of God, the love that caused God to become man, to live and die as one of us, for our sakes, despite our sin and rebellion.

The sexual revolution has, in so many ways, disordered eros, not only treating it as an end instead of a means, but also twisting it to such a degree that it is no longer selfless and life-giving. At the very least, eros offers another opportunity for retailers and advertisers to cash in, at its worst, eros devolves into a sort of mutant sensuality brings so much selfishness, damage, and brokenness to our culture.

The true meaning of Valentine’s Day reminds us that there’s so much more to life than sensual pleasures, more than salami bouquets or bubblegum slip-ons, more to love than the shriveled-up version that has captivated our Western imaginations.

The feast of St. Valentine should lead us to reflect on the wonder and nature of God’s love for us, and inwardly reflect on whether and how it is shaping us, and how from that love, we are able to love God and to love others. Valentinus’s response to God’s love was to give up his own life, in an attempt to re-order that which what was being disordered by the emperor.

For us too, like Valentinus, a similar kind of “death” is required, if we are to embrace God’s love and return it to Him and our neighbors. We are asked to die to self, which will include a death to the desires that our culture treats as ultimate.

Now, of course, none of this lets us off the hook with our wives. So guys, don’t forget the flowers.

And while I am at it, let me express my deep thanks for faithful and consistent support so many of you offer to the Colson Center. This makes it possible for us to continue to equip Christians every day through our daily BreakPoint commentaries with the clarity and courage they need to live out the Gospel.