Breakpoint

My pastor recently told me that 25 years ago, the first person that people would contact when they faced a marriage crisis was their pastor. Ten years ago, he continued, it was their counselor or psychiatrist. Today, it’s their lawyers.

A recent study conducted by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago concurs. “Doctors, teachers, members of the military,” and scientists are, according to the survey, esteemed “more positively than clergy.” Among infrequent churchgoers, clergy are viewed as negatively as lawyers. (For the record, that last line came from a member of our editorial team who’s been admitted to the bar in two states.)

As my pastor observed, the declining respect for clergy is a trend both in and out of the church, including among those who attend church frequently. While 75 percent of churchgoers “hold clergy in high regard,” they aren’t as positive when it comes to personal attributes and character qualities of their clergy. Barely half consider clergy to be trustworthy, and only slightly more regard them as “honest and intelligent.”

Remember these are people who attend church at least once a month! Among those who seldom or never attend church, the respective numbers on those questions are 23 and 30 percent.

The obvious question is why?

At least a significant part of the answer is cultural. As Religion News Service pointed out, “Historians say public attitudes about clergy have been waning since the 1970s, in tandem with the loss of trust in institutions after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.”

Actually, the decline in trust and disregard for institutions predates Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War. After all, the 1964 Free Speech movement at Berkeley had a signature saying: “We don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It’s a line that came to sum up the view of many Baby Boomers towards all authority. Governmental, parental, and clerical included.

Institutions like governments and churches were, at best, obstacles, and at worst enemies of personal liberation. Though the VW vans that dotted the Woodstock landscape have long since rusted away, the commitment to personal liberation and autonomy has only intensified in the half-century since then. Today, many Americans embrace expressions of personal liberation that wouldn’t have even occurred to the people dancing to Santana in the New York mud. It’s one thing to think you’re liberated from “the man.” It’s another to think you’re liberated from observable reality.

But, if we Christians are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that cultural attitudes toward authority and institutions aren’t the only reason for the waning respect when it comes to clergy. Some is the result of self-inflicted wounds.

Scarcely a week goes by without another report of clergy sex-abuse and/or some other horrible conduct. Given the scope and sheer number of these scandals and the fact that they cross denominational lines from Roman Catholic to Protestant to Evangelical, it would be a miracle if regard for the clergy had not diminished.

This is tragic news because so many lives have been devastated, and because so many people personally know someone who’s life has been devastated. I don’t need to tell you that the vast majority of clergy are honest and caring people who have answered the Lord’s call to shepherd His flock and are doing what they do out of love for others. But, their reputation is harmed also.

That’s what makes this such a huge loss—because when done right, clergy can represent, embody, and offer a kind of love that is simply indispensable during the inevitable bad times we face. It’s indispensable to individuals, families, communities, and to our entire nation. Theirs is a role uniquely gifted to the church, and one that cannot be replicated across the spectrum of society. And what they offer is especially missed when it’s needed most.

Fake news, sex trafficking and #MeToo, corporate corruption, violence, soaring debts, the opioid crisis. It’s fair to say that now, in 2019, America has a moral crisis, or to put it another way, an ethical crisis.

Back in 2011, in the wake of the Great Recession and financial crisis, Chuck Colson and Princeton Professor Robert George combined to produce a 6-part video series on ethics called, “Doing the Right Thing.” They enlisted the help of Fox News contributor Brit Hume and gathered panels of scholars, theologians, business and government leaders on the campus of Princeton University to discuss America’s crisis of ethics in every sphere of public life—in government, education, and the market place.

Today on the BreakPoint podcast, we present episode 1, “How Did We Get into This Mess?”  This, and all the episodes of “Doing the Right Thing” were filmed in front of a student audience. Each session ends with the panel taking questions from the students.

The Doing the Right Thing DVD Series as well as small group study guides are available at our online bookstore.

I’m unapologetically Protestant but, as I’ve said for a while now, our Catholic friends have long led the way on many bioethical issues like abortion and assisted reproductive technologies. For example, back in 2008, the Vatican released a document called “Dignitatis personae,” which said that “The desire for a child, while good, cannot justify the ‘production’ of offspring, just as the desire to have a child cannot justify the abandonment or destruction of a child once he or she has been conceived.”

         Now, I recognize that Christians disagree about whether it’s intrinsically wrong to conceive children outside of the sexual union of husband and wife, including in vitro fertilization. Because God ordered the pleasure and intimacy of married sex toward procreation, I find the Catholic ethical teaching against IVF to be compelling.

         Still, like I said, not all Christians agree. For example, several months ago, I had a robust discussion on this issue on the BreakPoint Podcast with my friend Dr. David Stevens. David has long led the Christian Medical and Dental Society and has been one of the great medical missionaries of our lifetime.

What David and I did agree on, and what everyone should agree on (especially Christians), is that any fertility process that knowingly destroys or abandons human lives—including embryos—is immoral. And that’s what the debate over IVF must confront right now.

         Recently, NBC reported that frozen and abandoned embryos in U.S. fertility clinics may now number in the millions. Because of how IVF has been done for so long, we are facing a human rights crisis—namely, what should we do with these little abandoned lives?

         Throughout most of the history if the practice, in vitro fertilization has involved creating more embryos than any couple could ever bring to term. Standard practice is to retrieve scores of eggs per cycle from women and to fertilize all of them. A few of the resulting embryos are transferred one at a time to the gestational mother. Some may not implant. Some others may even be intentionally killed in reductive abortions. In other words, all-to-often this process involves destruction in the name of reproduction, justified because of efficiency.

         And, what happens to the embryos not transferred? These human individuals are suspended in the earliest stage of development within tanks of super-cooled nitrogen. With modern techniques, they can survive this way for a long time. But for many of their parents, life moves on while storage fees add up. Once they have the children they want, their embryos are abandoned, to either sit indefinitely in the freezer or to die.

         At one fertility clinic in Florida, a third of stored embryos face this fate. Because the CDC doesn’t require clinics to report the number of abandoned embryos, we have good reason to believe this is the case at clinics across the country.

         Now, let’s be clear. By every scientific standard, embryos are living, genetically-distinct human individuals that just need the right environment, nourishment, and time to develop.

         Given the scale of this overwhelming human rights crisis, the near silence about IVF in evangelical churches is inexcusable. How many pastors ever address this issue from the pulpit, or approach it in premarital counseling? How many uninformed Christian couples, in their laudable desire to have children, are using methods to create life that also destroy life?

There are clinics that use IVF methods that only involve fertilizing and implanting one embryo at a time. This type of IVF doesn’t result in excess embryos, and so it doesn’t destroy life. But how many Christian couples even understand the difference in these procedures?

         Protestant pastors, this is a softball: It’s objectively wrong to bring human beings into existence knowing they’ll languish in a freezer or be discarded. In many cases, these embryos can be adopted. Google the Snowflakes Adoption Program to learn more.

         Christians will have different answers to questions about the ethics of IVF. But in order to answer them, we first have to ask them. If we really believe that all human life is sacred, the technology behind this excess can’t remain a taboo subject, especially for the church.

n Jeremiah 15, God tells the prophet that “I will make [Jerusalem] an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what Manasseh, son of Hezekiah, king of Judah, did in Jerusalem.” Can you imagine God saying that He’s going to make you “an object of horror”?  

Well, as God does, He kept His word. The wealth of Jerusalem’s inhabitants was given as plunder to invaders, only after they were starved, put to the sword, or enslaved.

Of course, passages like this one, in which God “speaks,” are rarely taken seriously, much less historically, in academic circles. And, among other things, scholars have long assumed that the “real” Jerusalem was pretty insignificant, closer in size and splendor to Dayton, Tennessee than Dayton, Ohio, and not even close to being the Iron Age equivalent of Paris or New York.

In other words, many scholars have long assumed that the stories of Jerusalem’s rise and subsequent destruction were over-inflated, self-serving myths intended to serve theological and political purposes.

Then people started digging.

A recent story at CNN described an archaeological dig on Mount Zion, and the findings of things like “ash deposits, arrowheads and broken pieces of pots and lamps.”

Now, this may not sound like much, but to trained archaeologists and historians it speaks volumes. By itself, ash can be evidence of anything from ovens to burning trash heaps. Or it can be evidence of an immense conflagration associated with an invasion.

What archaeologists found with the ash strongly suggests the invasion interpretation.  As one historian put it, “nobody has arrowheads in their domestic refuse.”

And then there was this find: A piece of “jewelry, which appears to be a tassel or earring with a bell-shaped upper portion.” Just as “nobody has arrowheads in their domestic refuse,” “nobody abandons golden jewelry.”

The most reasonable explanation is that these findings reveal “some kind of devastation and destruction.” And what devastation and destruction could it have been?

The arrowheads provide the answer. A type known as Scythian arrowhead, these were “‘fairly commonplace’ in battle sites from the 7th and 6th centuries BC and were known to be used by Babylonian warriors.”

Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 and 586 B.C. Thus, CNN’s headline: “Archaeologists find evidence of Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem -- as told in the Bible.”

Not only do these findings corroborate the Babylonian conquest, they also back up what the Bible says about life in Jerusalem in the decades leading up to the conquest. Most notably, the project director told CNN, the jewelry is “clear indication of the wealth of the inhabitants of the city at the time of the siege.” Turns out, Jerusalem had wealth worth plundering after all.

I love telling about these sorts of discoveries on BreakPoint. Especially since the past quarter century, archaeology is constantly finding evidence for the historicity of biblical narratives long assumed to be myths, legends, or complete fabrications. We’ve gone from kings David and Solomon being fictional characters to being glorified tribal chieftains to -- what do you know? -- pretty big deals who left evidence of their reigns throughout the region.

The confirmation is not only gratifying, it’s extraordinary. After all, no other ancient text, especially those that offer the origin stories of other religions, nations, or regions, is even remotely equivalent to the Bible in its accuracy. For example, Rome was either founded by Romulus after he killed his twin brother Remus, or it was founded by refugees from Troy after the events described by Homer. These two stories cannot be reconciled but, then again, they aren’t intended to be actual history.

In contrast, the Biblical story of a distinct people and their relationship with the God who personally intervenes in their (and in our) history to effect His purposes is a remarkably coherent story. And discoveries like the one on Mount Zion reveal it’s a historically accurate story as well.

Last week, following the high profile falling away from faith of Joshua Harris, former Hillsong singer and songwriter Marty Sampson posted this on Instagram: “Time for some real talk...I’m genuinely losing my faith...and it doesn’t bother me.”

         The next day he deleted this post and clarified that he hasn’t fully renounced Christianity, at least not yet. Still, he admitted, his faith was quite shaky. He then reiterated his doubts and said that “the majority of a typical Christian’s life is not spent considering these things” because they fall into the “too hard basket.”

         Sampson’s claims, I’m sad to say, are not uncommon among young evangelicals. And let me just say this as directly and bluntly as I can: they reveal a failure on the part of the church to take the difficult but essential task of faith formation seriously enough.

As I read through his description of what was happening, I thought to myself, which faith is he falling away from. His words reveal a lot.

         First, he described a faith largely driven by emotions. Losing his faith, he said, did not bother him. In fact, he’s happy about it. So, if his doubts bothered him and his faith instead made him happy, would he then reconsider?

The fact is, too many churches sell Christianity with feelings. We’re told how interested God is in our own happiness, our own meaning, and our own sense of purpose. But our feelings cannot determine whether or not something is actually true.

Second, the faith Sampson describes is an uncritical faith. Science, he says, “keeps piercing the truth of every religion.” I’m not completely sure what that even means, but it seems to buy into the classic science vs. faith narrative. It’s just not true that science is ultimately opposed to faith. It’s not true historically, nor is it true today. Faith doesn’t need to reject critical investigation.

Third, Sampson describes an uneducated faith. He claimed that “no one talks about” the seeming contradictions in the Bible, the fact that Christian leaders fall, or how a loving God can condemn “four billion people to a place, all ‘coz they don’t believe.” This of course is just not true. Every apologetics book ever written tackles these questions, and the issues he raised here aren’t even the difficult ones.

Still, while Sampson is mistaken that “nobody” is talking about these issues, he’s not completely wrong in his critique. In fact, far too many churches avoid tough questions. Far too many fail to equip Christians on the current cultural controversies. In fact, too much of Christianity – especially evangelical Christianity – neglects intellectual discipleship altogether. Not even basic theology is articulated from some pulpits. I don’t know how else to say it: They fail God’s people.

Fourth, Sampson also wrote that “Lots of things help people change their lives, not just one version of truth.” This statement reveals a misguided faith, one that smacks of what sociologist Christian Smith called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” that the point of religion and faith is self-improvement. That’s not what Christian faith is about. Christian faith is discovering the truth about who God is and what He is doing in the world, and then through repentance and His grace, aligning ourselves to that truth.

         Now look, I have no problem with Sampson admitting doubt.  Most of us, at some point in our journey of faith, will encounter doubt about God’s love, about Scripture, about whether Jesus is really God, any number of things. In fact, I discussed doubt with apologist Brett Kunkle recently on the BreakPoint Podcast.

But Marty Sampson was a worship leader. He wrote modern Christian melodic catechism. He was tasked, as worship leaders are, with communicating theology to the body of Christ. Apparently, he was in a church where no one was talking about the questions he struggled with. The church failed him.

In his book “The Fabric of Faithfulness,” Steve Garber wrote that the reason so many young Christians lose their faith is that their worldview isn’t “big enough” for the world. This is a depressingly accurate description of what we can expect from a generation whose intellectual faith formation has been neglected.

What is it about the power of classical hymns? And worship that involves not just our minds and our voices, but our bodies as well? Today on the BreakPoint podcast, Warren Cole Smith interviews songwriter, recording artist, and Episcopal Priest Josh Bales about his music and ministry.

Bales, who is our newest Colson Center Senior Fellow, also talks about his participation in Colson Fellows residencies and the Wilberforce Weekend.

Please be sure to check out  Josh’s first monthly column in his new role as Senior Fellow at the Colson Center. It’s entitled, “Christ in my Heart, in my Mind, and in 10 Thousand Places.”

Since Great Britain seems to be a leading cultural indicator for the rest of the Western world, we should be concerned that some 90 percent of young people in Britain believe their lives have no purpose. John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss how in the world that the country that just a generation ago withstood the onslaught of the Nazi war machine has fallen into such a crisis of meaning.

John and Shane also discuss the massive protest in Hong Kong (and its Christian roots) as well as what John has called a human-rights crisis: A million or so frozen human embryos created through medical reproductive technology, a topic we Christians can no longer ignore.

RESOURCES

Why Are Christian Children Abandoning Their Children?

Joe Carter, The Gospel Coalition, August 14, 2019

A Christian View of Infertility and Reproductive Technology

John Stonestreet and David Stevens, The BreakPoint Podcast, May 14, 2018

The Hong Kong Protests: It’s Really a Clash of Worldviews

John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, BreakPoint, June 13, 2019

Millennial Melancholy: Nine in ten young Brits believe their life lacks purpose, according to shocking new study

The Sun, August 1, 2019

There’s so much talk these days about so-called “Millennials.” Millennials are the generation born between 1980 and 2000. They are “digital natives,” and the defining events of their lives include the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, the War on Terror, Harry Potter, the Great Recession, and the birth of social media. Oh, and by the way, they love avocado toast.

They are also the “biggest” generation: Some 78 million strong. In the next five or six years, they will comprise 75 percent of the American workforce.

On the whole, Millennials tend to be skeptical of absolutes, and anyone or anything claiming to be the authority on life and the world. Thus, they tend to be skeptical about the Bible. Only 9 percent of Millennials claim to read the Bible on a daily basis, and only 30 percent believe that the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God.

All of this leads to an acute challenge for many in older generations: How to pass on the faith to their children and grandchildren. I’m happy to tell you there’s a new book that can really help.

Two Millennial Christian thought leaders, Michael and Lauren Green McAfee, seeking to overcome the skepticism of their peers about the Bible, have written a new and engaging book, “Not What You Think: Why the Bible Might Be Nothing We Expected but Everything We Need.”

Michael is director of community initiatives at the Museum of the Bible. His wife Lauren, who now works at the Hobby Lobby corporate offices, helped get the museum up and running. So they both have a deep, sincere passion to share their love for the Bible.

The first part of “Not What You Think” is devoted to explaining exactly who Millennials are: their demographics, aspirations, preferences, etc. One of the key characteristics we must understand is that Millennials came of age at a time when the very notion of truth was, well, fuzzy at best.

“Our era is one in which truth has moved from objective reality to personal response,” they write. “Our generation generally hesitates to accept truth outside of personal experience and opinion.”

This is the first huge obstacle for approaching Millennials with traditional Christian apologetics, which depends on the absolute and objective Truth claims revealed in the Bible.  And yet, this is where these millennial authors succeed as they invite their fellow Millennials to engage Scripture. While being upfront and honest about the truth claims of the Bible, they make the case that the Old and New Testaments, unlike other religious holy books and texts, are not primarily a set of rules. Instead, they present a grand Story woven together by God through various authors over a millennium and a half. It’s a story that God invites us all to join.

Throughout their book, the McAfees argue convincingly—and in detail—that both Testaments, from Genesis through Revelation, point to the God-Man, Jesus. Thus, the Bible not only invites us into God’s cosmic drama, it invites us into a relationship with the Creator of the universe.

“What if,” they write, “truth is not just a point of view . . . not just a list of rules—yours, ours, or anyone else’s? What if truth is not the ever-changing consensus of the crowd but instead is a person whom you get to know and who knows you. This person’s story is told in the Bible. His name is Jesus.”

This is exactly the kind of book that will not only help you communicate the importance of Scripture to younger generations, it’s a book you can actually give to younger generations. And, it’s a great resource for Sunday School classes and small groups to learn more about the “biggest” generation, while also learning about how to better reach them.

During the month of August, we will send you a copy of Michael and Laura Green McAfee’s outstanding book, “Not What You Think: Why the Bible Might Be Nothing We Expected but Everything We Need” with your next donation to BreakPoint and the Colson Center.

The words “endangered species” brings to mind fatalistic headlines about animals on the verge of extinction. Landing on the endangered species list is, in the minds of many, as good as a death sentence. Lately, however, endangered species are more often making the news for being removed from the list, not making it.

         The giant panda, the southern white rhinoceros, the Florida manatee, the grizzly bear, the snow leopard, the gray wolf, the humpback whale, and the bald eagle have all graduated from the endangered species list in recent years, thanks to diligent conservation efforts.

         Other iconic animals are also on their way to recovery. Late last month, we learned that the California condor, one of the largest and rarest birds in the world, has now reached a population of 1,000, up from a mere 22 birds in the 1980s!

         And how about them tigers, which have staged maybe the most exciting recovery of all? In 2010, the Indian government committed to double the wild tiger population by 2022. Last week, they announced they’re ahead of schedule. An estimated three-thousand tigers now live in India, up by around 1,300 since the goal was set.

         Each of these conservation success stories is worth talking about, especially given the strong media bias toward bad news when it comes to the environment. In the current dominant narrative, humans are almost always portrayed as villains, the problem species that our planet would be better off without. However, the recovery of all these endangered animals shows that while humans are often the problem, we can also be the solution.

         Of course, there are the obvious means that humans can help, like protecting endangered creatures by law or treaty. And that doesn’t even require worshiping animals or equating them with humans, as too many with a secular worldview do. Believe it or not, humans sometimes help animals by killing them.

         As Oxford conservationist Amy Dickman wrote at CNN last year, well-managed trophy hunting has been a critical source of conservation income in Africa. It turns out that allowing hunters to purchase the right to bag a prize often helps save endangered animals like elephants and lions from the real forces that threaten them, like poaching and habitat loss.

         All of this good news left me in mind of Matthew 25, where Jesus gives the parable of the talents. In context, the passage is about stewarding the resources of the kingdom of God. Still, stay with me here, because I think there’s a principle that also applies to ecology.

         Remember, it was the servants who invested their master’s money and multiplied it who were praised as “good and faithful,” not the one who merely buried it.

         This should remind us that humans have a role to play in nature beyond just sitting back and letting it take its course. The condor, for instance, was saved through intervention—a captive breeding program. Likewise, the African animals benefiting from responsible, commercial hunting show that our stewardship of nature often means investing and increasing it, not merely preserving it.

         Beyond all of this, I’m also struck by how poorly our conservation efforts and animal success stories fit within a secular worldview. If humans are just one animal among many, then our impulse to save endangered species and our sense of responsibility for them don’t make much sense. Why should one animal care about others, some which would eat us if given the chance? If anything, we’re a plague on the planet that would do the most good by disappearing. In fact, that’s what many secular thinkers have concluded!

         Humans, of course, aren’t just another animal, and we aren’t just a problem for the creation. The unique charge our Creator who made us in His image gave us, was to tend His Garden, name his animals, and increase the natural wealth entrusted to us. That means we are a pretty important part of the solution as well. Conservation success stories make the most sense within a Christian worldview. After all, they’re the stories of Adam’s race doing our job.

Here’s a prediction: Thousands of years from now when archaeologists excavate American churches, they’ll identify the 1990s era by “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets, DC Talk CDs, and purity rings.

Today, 20 years later, that last artifact is even more controversial than when DC Talk evolved from rap music to a kind-of grunge. Purity rings are part of something now derogatorily called “purity culture.”

         Here’s some background. What most people mean by “purity culture” is the emphasis from pulpits, youth groups, conferences, and Christian authors, since the nineties especially, on maintaining sexual integrity. It started as an evangelical reaction within a culture in which sexual freedom had become the highest good. Remember, television in the ‘80s was dominated by family dramas: Full House, Family Ties, the Cosby Show. The ‘90s was the decade of Friends and Seinfeld. That’s quite a shift. Add in more risqué teen movies, music that would make even Madonna blush, and the emergence of Internet pornography, and suddenly teenagers were being catechized in casual sex on a whole new level.

         In reaction, many Christian efforts to counter this indoctrination and teach the biblical view of sex were well-intentioned but weren’t always consistent or even helpful.

I often identify three “wrong-but-well-intentioned” approaches: First, the fear approach.  Some, especially at the height of the AIDS crisis, responded to the sexual revolution with a scare tactic: “If you have sex before you’re married, you’ll get pregnant, maybe get an STD, and die.”

         The problem with the fear approach is that it’s utilitarian, as if something is wrong only because of its negative consequences. The problem with that, of course, is that our culture is bent on removing the consequences of risky sexual behavior, and at least when it comes to removing the physical consequences (like unborn lives and STDs), it’s been largely successful.

1990s “purity culture” developed a more positive attitude about sex. I call this the “Rally Approach” stage. Christian musicians wrote songs with lyrics like, “Wait for me, darling.” Youth pastors urged students to take “virginity pledges,” and often tens of thousands of Christian teenagers would do so at large, stadium events.

         Of course, there’s a lot of positives about letting students know they aren’t alone in their commitment to be pure. But, motivation to start a commitment is a lot easier to manufacture than motivation to keep a commitment. And, the statistics on that era bear that truth.

More recently, well-meaning parents and mentors have been tempted by what a friend of mine calls “the princess theology” approach. Christian young people are offered sexual purity as a kind of bargain: “If I save myself for marriage, God will send me my dream husband or dream wife.” That also led some to the impression that if they messed up, they’re now “damaged goods,” and no one would want to marry them. There’s no shortage of articles and books today from Christian and secular writers blaming “purity culture” for false expectations, dashed hopes, and ongoing trauma.

         Some of this blame is deserved, in my view. The promise of Prince Charming or Princess Charming is one the Bible never makes, and a promise human nature could never accommodate.

Still, for all of the teachers and organizations that took “purity culture” to an extreme, creating rules not found in the Bible, especially for young women, I think many of its harshest critics are running to throw the baby out with the bath water. Too often, the backlash against “purity culture” is a backlash against purity—and against Christian sexual morality.

         So, what should we make of all of this? We asked a wide range of Christian thinkers to comment on “purity culture,” to discuss whether criticisms of this movement are legitimate, and if they are, how Christians should change the way we advance a biblical sexual ethic in today’s culture.

         Jim Daly, Karen Swallow Prior, Sean McDowell, Frederica Mathewes-Green, and many others offer thoughtful responses that get to the heart of what “purity culture” was all about, what went wrong, and what went right. Most importantly, they offer ways the church can keep from compromising its millennia-old witness on God’s design for sex. It’s a witness we must make today more than ever—even if we do decide to toss out the purity rings.

         Check out this online symposium at BreakPoint.org.