Breakpoint

Does Christianity offer hope to those trapped in poverty? Star Parker, founder of Urban Care and who herself escaped the world of poverty, crime, and dependency, answered that question passionately and decisively at the 2019 Wilberforce Weekend.

Americans are afraid… perhaps more than at any time since 9/11. It’s understandable. Despite the fact that most of us are safer today than we think, the sheer evil that’s behind a mass shooting or a violent attack is put right in our face by the 24-hour news cycle.

And then, of course, there’s the whole uncertainty of it all. Since El Paso and Dayton, there’s been a deadly knife attack in California, a highway shooting in Houston, and an armed guy in fatigues who walked into a Missouri Wal-Mart with 100 rounds of ammo.

When people are afraid, they either lash out (just watch the news or go on social media), or they look for something, often anything, that can save them from what they fear.

The public outcry in the last few weeks was articulated by what protesters demanded of the President during his visit to Dayton last week: “Do something! Do something!”

As I said to Warren Smith in our discussion this past Friday on “BreakPoint This Week,” I find the command to “do something” troubling on two levels. First, “do something” is a cry for help. It’s not a strategy or tactic. Doing something isn’t helpful if it’s the wrong thing or if it’s an irrelevant thing. Doing “something” might even be the worst thing to do. We have to know what to do, and that requires being clear on what the problem is.

The only thing made clear in all the debates since the most recent shootings and violent outbursts is that we’re not clear about what the problem is.

Second, the demand to “do something” is almost always addressed to the government. The demands are almost always directed to the President, the governor, or Congress. That says something troubling about us as a people: We are looking to government to fix all our problems.

The problem of alienated, often fatherless young men espousing either hateful extremism or nihilistic meaninglessness who aim their anger and violence at the defenseless? That’s not government caused, and it can’t be government fixed.

Our tendency to think that all problems are to be politically understood, are politically motivated, and can only be politically fixed is symptomatic of something Chuck Colson talked about frequently, and we still talk about on BreakPoint: The political illusion. But no policy, no political ideology, no bureaucracy can heal wounded psyches, rebuild the mediating institutions of civil society, provide meaning and a sense of belonging, or overcome hatred with love.

Those tasks belong to the very institutions that have been dismissed and even dismantled across our society: The family and the Church.

As Thane Bellomo wrote over at the Federalist, the decline of these institutions is “mirrored” not only in the rise in mass shooters,

“but more broadly in a host of statistics that reveal an epidemic of despair.” As Bellomo points out, in the first 17 years of this century, suicide rates have risen 14 percent, and the death rate from drug overdoses increased by a mind-boggling 400 percent.

In the midst of that level of cultural chaos and in this current climate of fear, our hope is not in government or legislation, as important as those are.

I’ll quote Chuck Colson again. “Where is the hope? The hope that each of us have is not in who governs us, or what laws are passed, or what great things that we do as a nation. Our hope is in the power of God working through the hearts of people, and that’s where our hope is in this country; that’s where our hope is in life.”

As Warren Smith said during our “BreakPoint This Week” conversation, it’s gut-check time for the Church. God has appointed this time and this place for us to live out our faith, to bring the hope and peace of Christ to our friends, our families, our neighbors, our communities—even to the frightened, the hate-filled, and the alienated.

That’s the “something” we must do.

Recently, a friend shared with me a statement on a personal issue that she wanted to post on social media. I urged her not to do it, partly because of my own experiences with social media, and partly because I’m convinced that what happens on these platforms isn’t nearly as consequential as we often feel they are. 

         I learned a lot about this a few months ago, when an article I wrote kicked off a pretty serious social media reaction. While many expressed gratitude for the article, it also set off a backlash on Twitter. Thousands of responses flooded my feed, most of them filled with outrage. It seemed overwhelming at the time, but a wise friend advised me to lay low, predicting it would be over in 72 hours. He was right. In fact, a few weeks afterward, when I asked people about the whole incident, hardly anyone was aware of it.

         I thought about this recently when one of our Colson Center board members sent around a video from a recent Senate hearing. Last month, Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist with Google and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, testified on Capitol Hill about social media.

         In his testimony, Harris made startling comments about Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. By far the most telling was how he described these platforms. He called them “outrage amplifiers.” That emotion—outrage—is the secret sauce in social media’s success.

         According to Harris, Twitter in particular is deliberately designed to spark, exploit, and perpetuate moral outrage. He cited one study showing that every outrage-word a user adds to their tweet increases their retweet rate by 17 percent!

         Article after article has documented the rise of “call-out culture,” the kind of online feeding frenzy that grips users and drives them—often in the space of hours—to destroy individuals’ lives and careers for the smallest offenses. If Harris is to be believed, this outrage amplification isn’t a bug in social media, it’s a feature. In fact, it’s their “business model.”

         So far, my Twitter storms, and there have been a few, have blown over without any permanent damage. Many others aren’t so lucky. Jobs, friends, good names, even personal and family security have been lost by many people, all because a small, outraged, and ultra-amplified group of online activists decided to target them.

         And, here’s something we may not know but should: Despite the constant buzzing of notifications on your phone, those Twitter mobs are a small group. As economist Arthur Brooks points out, only 22 percent of American adults are even on Twitter, and 80 percent of tweets come from just 10 percent of those users. In Brooks’ words, “If you rely on Twitter for political information, you are being informed by ersatz pundits residing within 2.2 percent of the population.”

         I love the way that Colson Center board member put it: We’re not so much being informed by social media as we’re being “herded, goaded, addicted and otherwise cyber-farmed.”

         For all of its bluster and potential damage, social media is an artificial and highly-curated world where the anger of a minority is amplified to earsplitting volume. To put it simply, Twitter just isn’t real life. Therefore, its outrage-based business model shouldn’t determine what we think about, talk about, care about, or believe.

         Now look, I’m still on Twitter. And I’m not necessarily telling anyone to shut down their account. But one thing we often say on BreakPoint is that outrage is not a strategy. It is on Twitter, but it ought not be for Christians. Not only is outrage on Twitter almost always based on soundbites and a lack of thoughtful discussion, it’s dishonest. Online mobs don’t care about the truth, nor do they wait for all the details to emerge.  Outrage habits run counter to everything followers of Christ should be known for.

         So, if you don’t opt out of social media, at least opt out of the outrage. And before you hit that “tweet” button on that issue you feel strongly about and you think everybody else is talking about, maybe ask a friend’s advice, first.

Randy Alcorn joins John Stonestreet to tell the amazing story of God's provision during years of lawsuits and multi-million dollar judgments resulting from Randy's arrest for protesting peacefully outside a Portland, Oregon, abortion clinic--and how that arrest changed the course of his life and ministry, and may have saved the lives of countless unborn children in the long run.

Resources

Why Pro-Life? Caring for the Unborn and Their Mothers, Revised and Updated Edition

Randy Alcorn, Hendrickson Publishers, 2012

Heaven

Randy Alcorn, Tyndale House, 2004

Other books by Randy Alcorn available at the BreakPoint online book store

"Do not be afraid!" or "Fear not" may be the  most-repeated admonitions in all of Scripture, and, as John Stonestreet and Warren Smith discuss today, these are the words of hope and peace believers are called to bring into this fear-gripped culture.

John and Warren also address why Ohio protesters chanting "Do something!" at the President should trouble us; the abuse scandal that could bring down the Boy Scouts of America; and the outrage over actor Michael Lopez's common-sense, rational claim that  three-year-olds should not decide their own gender.

Resources

Young Men in Crisis: How Does the Church Respond?

John Stonestreet and G. Shane Morris, BreakPoint Podcast, August 7, 2019

What We’re Missing About Mass-Shootings

John Stonestreet and G. Shane Morris, BreakPoint, August 7, 2018

El Paso, Dayton, and Gilroy

John Stonestreet, BreakPoint, August 6, 2019

In his book, “The Reason for God,” Tim Keller argues that Christianity is the only truly global religion. Indeed, within a few generations of Christ, the Christian faith had spread across much of the known world—from India to North Africa to furthest reaches of the Roman Empire and into the barbarian lands of Northern Europe. Yet up until a hundred years or so ago, for all kinds of historical and sociological reasons, Christianity became a predominantly Western religion.

The missionary efforts of the last hundred years began to change that, and now Pew Research predicts that Africa will be the most Christian continent within about 40 years.

         The story behind this geographical relocation is overwhelmingly a story of missions. For centuries, the West sent evangelists to Africa, Asia, and South America to preach the Gospel, plant churches, and create Christian communities where none existed. Whereas the heroes of the faith in the ancient church were theologians and bishops, and those during the Reformation were, well, reformers, most of the names we recognize since the Reformation are the missionaries: William Carey, Hudson Taylor, Gladys Aylward, Eric Liddell, Jim Elliot, Amy Carmichael.

         This move of the Gospel from the West to the South and the East could be one of the largest scale fulfillments of the Great Commission since Jesus first gave it.

         Yet, as a fascinating piece in The Economist explains, the direction of the flow of Christian missions has now largely reversed. As it did, the geographic center of the faith also shifted. A century ago, as Pew reports, over ninety percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and the Americas, and less than six percent in Africa and Asia. Today, over a third of all Christians hail from those continents.

         As this Christian population shift has taken place, something else interesting has also happened. Poor, developing countries that once benefited from Western missionaries coming into their cultures have started sending missionaries of their own back to the rich and increasingly irreligious West.

         While the U.S. still leads the world in sending missionaries—something that has been true for a long time—our market share is dropping. The largest growth seen in global missions output is in non-Western countries. And it’s happening fast.

         Between 2010 and 2015, the number of African missionaries jumped 32 percent to over 27,000. Korean missionaries jumped 50 percent to 30,000 in the same period. And the countries receiving the lion’s share of these missionaries are Brazil, Russia, and—wait for it—the United States.

         As one whose church has been largely shaped by the missionary efforts of African Christians, I thank God for this new trend. At the same time, anyone trying to convert Westerners has their work cut out for them. As The Economist piece observed, “Saving the rich is difficult,” though Jesus said it wasn’t impossible. Among the compelling stories of Christian history we may read about one day will be whether missionaries from the Global South coaxed Western camels through the needle’s eye.

         Those bringing the good news back to our shores—and even more so to Europe’s shores—often remark how jaded and difficult it can be to convert Westerners. Having once had the faith but having (at least partially) lost it, we’re like the bird-infested path or the thorny ground in Jesus’ parable.

         Even so, to whatever scale the effort to reconvert the West succeeds or not, it ought to leave us in awe of God’s wisdom. Within just the span of a few centuries the Church went global, and it was precisely at the time the West began to lose its faith.

         Both the work of the missionaries who planted those seeds abroad and the return of that fruit to our own shores are testaments to providence. We ought be reminded through them that God is no respecter of persons, nations, or even continents. I only wish those early global missionaries could see all of this unfold. Of course, as those who’ve now joined the great cloud of witnesses, they have a perspective on the whole story that’s better than our own. They obeyed Jesus’ command to make disciples of all nations. I wonder if they had any idea that those nations would one day return the favor.

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 state of our national discourse is, to put it mildly, discouraging and unhelpful, and the reaction to the recent shootings only amplified how bad it is. Once again, everyone took their place along partisan battle lines to pound the same old drums, but it’s past time we admit that there’s something deeper going on in America than too many guns, or too few guns, or violent video games, or the president’s rhetoric, or even the evil of white supremacy.

         That’s not to say there are no good policy proposals out there to address these issues, which need to be addressed. As a Second Amendment guy, I could buy into something like what David French proposed last year in National Review: a system for family and employers to report warning signs and separate unstable individuals from their guns. 

         But, as French admits, the best that policy would do is keep troubled young men from acting on their violent impulses. It doesn’t address the young men themselves, or the source of those impulses. And that’s exactly the issue we can no longer ignore. Yesterday, I highlighted the crisis of virtue across our culture, and how that will lead to the loss of freedom. It’s an historical inevitability. Today, I want to zero in on the problem of men in our culture, especially young men. They aren’t okay.

         Writing at the LA Times, professor of criminology Jillian Peterson and sociologist James Densley offer a revealing look at America’s mass-shooters. They’ve studied every shooter since 1966, and the vast majority have four things in common: “early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age”; seeking “validation” in extreme communities, often online; openly admiring the work of prior shooters; and nearly all are longtime loners with an identifiable “crisis point” like getting fired or expelled from school. Oh, and by the way, they are men.

         In fact, the young men who appear on CNN’s list of the “27 Deadliest Mass Shootings in U.S. History” have something else in common: almost all of them grew up without fathers. 

         In other words, with few exceptions, the signs that a young man is headed down a dark road overlap noticeably with signs we see across our culture that young men in general are not doing well.

         Lacking strong role models and healthy social groups, increasingly left behind academically and vocationally, and floundering for a purpose in life beyond video games, countless males have sought solace in the only communities they can find—usually online—where the foulest kinds of hate, conspiracy theories, and nihilism await them.

         Of course, these factors don’t always lead one to become a mass-shooter. For every young man catechized into some toxic radicalism (like Dylan Roof or the El Paso Shooter) or into nihilistic unbelief (like Dylan Klebold and the Aurora theatre shooter), and then chooses to act on it with a gun, millions of others do not.

Still, that doesn’t mean they’re doing well either. Quite the opposite: our society largely fails to cultivate young men, to teach them about their fallen natures, and to morally form them to choose love over hate and courage over violence. Thus, the epidemics of addiction, aimlessness, depression, irresponsibility, perversion, selfishness, victimhood, and low expectations continue.

Until we face the fact that the root of our problem lies here, the fruit will continue to be bitter. Unless we rebuild the institutions of civil society that cultivate young men, there is no way forward.

We certainly won’t fix this problem through government policies or mindless distractions. Only the church, with its kingdom vision and distributed work force, has the necessary resources to target young men with truth, forgiveness, accountability, and hope.

And on today’s BreakPoint podcast, Shane Morris and I dive even more deeply into the issues confronting so many of our young men–and how the church can and must respond.

What do the mass shooters of the past decades have in common? The vast majority are disaffected young men who are either filled with hate or have lost all hope. What kind of culture produces such young men? What does the church have to offer these young men, and how must the church respond?

• John Stonestreet, BreakPoint, August 6, 2019

• John Stonestreet and Brett Kunkle, 2017

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.”

Of course, there are evil people. We know that far too well, especially after this past weekend. In fact, that there are evil people out there is the one thing, maybe the only thing, everyone still agrees on. We disagree on who the people are: The evil shooter. The evil racist president. The evil progressives who want to take our guns. So we go on and on, identifying who the evil people are—always them—and we go on and on missing the real problem right in front of our face.

Solzhenitsyn’s point wasn’t, as some argue, that people aren’t really evil. Far from it. His point was that to assume evil exists only in them (whoever our “them” is) and not in us, is just plain wrong. Rather, as he continued: “… the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

The finger pointing that immediately followed the mass shootings in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton started before any facts were known, and came even quicker than usual. (Let’s pause there… “than usual.” What a tragic way to talk about mass murders.) The finger pointers had already decided who the bad guys were, and many of us joined in on the chorus. So, we tweeted and reported and assumed the evil ones belonged to the other side while hoping they did not belong to ours. If it’s discovered the evildoer does belong to us, we know how to twist and contort and accuse in order to explain any connection away. But, if he belongs to them, we also know how to leverage the tragedy to indict the entire lot.

I say this as a 2nd Amendment guy. I fully agree that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Read the online manifestos of these young men and tell me that they wouldn’t eventually find some other way to carry out their violent fantasies. Even if gun control were the answer, how would we ever go about implementing it? Does anyone really think someone so radicalized to that degree of hatred would trade in their weapons for a gift card?

At the same time, the idea that “the best way to stop bad guys with guns is with good guys with guns” needs to be reconsidered. At face value, I fully agree. What I fear, however, is that those who repeat this idea are working off of old math. When bad guys are willing to target innocents, even children, at schools, movie theatres, churches, festivals, and Wal-Marts… what then? In Dayton, the good guys showed up in one minute, one minute, and the bad guy still killed nine people. Facing that sort of evil, how many good guys with guns will we need to protect us? Where exactly will we need them? Everywhere? That’s called a “police state,” and it’s the inevitable end of any society that sinks so deeply into moral chaos.

If that is our fate, make no mistake, we’ll have brought it on ourselves. And by “we,” I mean us and them. As the progressive left finds new ways to deconstruct the family, reconstruct morality, and scandalize the innocence of children at every level and in every area of culture while demonizing their evil other by state force and financial leveraging, the libertarian right demands unfettered license to say whatever and think whatever and post whatever on 8chan while demonizing its own evil other as the cause for all so-called ills.  All this while the church faces scandal after scandal of its own making.

Yet, we wonder how lonely young men without meaning or moral formation or fathers, who have no way to fulfill their pornographic-fueled fantasies but have access to plenty of self-medication options, could be driven to white-supremacist or progressive extremism.  We need to ask what it is about our culture that’s producing these young men bent on killing and chaos. And we need to ask: Where is the church?

Do we really think we are immune to the historically repetitive realities that have marked every crumbling civilization since the dawn of time? Do we really think we can keep our freedom in a society not only without virtue, but without any of the “little platoons” that form virtue?

Can freedom be sustained where virtue is not flourishing? Chuck Colson asked this every time he spoke the last few years of his life. The answer to Chuck’s question is still, of course, no. 

As Chuck said, it’s either the conscience or the constable. Unless we are willing to look at us, to as Solzhenitsyn said, “destroy a piece of our own heart,” our future is increasingly obvious.

Only Christ can restore this mess. We must be about His work of restoration.