Breakpoint

You might think this is another story about transgender activism. And in a way, it is. But at an even deeper level, this is a story about postmodernism. Stick with me on this.

Canada’s National Post recently reported that a British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal heard the case of Jessica Yaniv, who accused a home beauty salon owner of illegal discrimination. The owner refused to give Yaniv a Brazilian wax. If you don’t know that term, it means the complete removal of hair from, well, sensitive areas.

Yaniv is a transgender woman. In other words, Yaniv is biologically and anatomically male, identifies as a woman, and has not undergone any kind of surgical transition.

Salon owner Marcia Da Silva normally offers this service to women. She told the tribunal that she has no problem with LGBT individuals, and that she’d even be okay offering her services to a biological man who’d already surgically transitioned. But she was not comfortable working on male body parts. She was so shaken by the incident, she chose to shut down her business. And she’s not the first victim.

Apparently, Yaniv is something of an activist. He’s filed over a dozen civil rights complaints against salons who refused to wax him. According to the National Post, while some of these cases have been dropped or settled, Da Silva’s case went to hearing, where Yaniv compared her to a Neo-Nazi, and said that if she wasn’t forced to give him the wax he wanted, it would set a “dangerous” precedent.

Now, we could talk about how this circus is the inevitable result of LGBT ideology, and how, once again, the “how will my private choice affect you” line has been demonstrated false. To paraphrase one popular Twitter user, we sure escalated quickly from “bake my cake.”

It’s important to notice that the crusade of this narcissistic individual is based on the same claim made by those who sued Jack Philips: that a business should not discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Well, if that’s really something principle courts and tribunals want to enforce, it won’t just apply to gay wedding cakes. It will mean compelling beauty salon owners to do and see things in way that amounts to a sexual violation.

While transgenderism is certainly one of the branches bearing this new troubling fruit of violating other’s consciences, decency, and innocence, it’s not the root. The root idea is an older idea: postmodernism.

At its heart, postmodernism posits that neither revelation nor reason can give us the story of reality. In fact, according to postmodernism, there is no universal, discernible story of reality. Truth is a social construct for the postmodernist, even observable truths like male and female. External, seemingly objective facts are, to the postmodernist, clouded by our endless interpretations, which are shaped by our own experiences and cultural biases, and whatever meanings we want to attach to them.

Postmodernists hold that certain viewpoints and interpretations have been oppressed and disempowered. So, for the last few decades, there’s been a concerted effort to elevate and prioritize those viewpoints, whether they correspond to reality or not.

This is how people like Marcia Da Silva find themselves dragged before human rights tribunals for not landscaping male genitalia. Somehow, in a strange ideological twist of reality, she is the oppressor, and Yaniv is the oppressed. This is exactly what’s happened wherever a postmodern worldview has been applied – in the name of elevating a viewpoint, another one is oppressed.

Of course, Yaniv may have never even read a postmodern philosopher. But bad ideas can become entrenched and unquestioned in our minds and our culture in all kinds of ways. And as long as we’re committed to reality being something individuals can never really know, but can always remake and impose on others, the victims of these bad ideas will continue to multiply, and the demands will become ever more nakedly absurd.         

One of the most repeated themes of science fiction movies is humans merging with or being replaced by machines. Entire movie franchises are built around these ideas, such as “The Matrix” and “The Terminator.” One of “Star Trek’s” most iconic antagonists were the “Borg,” a blend of biological and technological elements that were pretty-near invincible. They told every species they encountered that “resistance is futile.”

In movies, the merger of man and machine is sometimes a blessing and sometimes a curse. In real life, however, there’s an entire movement committed to seeing this synthesis all the way to its logical and biological end, which—they promise—will be terrific. It’s called Transhumanism.

Transhumanism is the subject of the most recent, must-read two-part series by Dr. Glenn Sunshine at BreakPoint.org. There’s a lot more in his articles than I can cover here, so I’ll limit my discussion today to the Transhumanist dream, or as I’d call it, a “nightmare,” of merging humans and computers.

Popularized by the 2005 book, “The Singularity is Near,” futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that advances in computing will eventually allow machines to match and then exceed the ability of the human brain to process information.

In a parallel development, technologies such as PET scans and MRIs will enable us to “reverse-engineer” the human brain. While this may sound like science fiction, Kurzweil insists that it’s inevitably “science fact.” After all, as he put it, our brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, “but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.”

As our computational power increases, the “reverse-engineering” of the human brain will supposedly make it possible to “upload” a human brain into a computer. To oversimplify what is a very complicated prediction, “uploading” our brains will result in neural implants that will “augment” our natural abilities. Over time, this “augmentation” will blur the line between the natural and the synthetic until any distinction is meaningless.

Of course, trusting in Kurzweil’s scenario (especially that even if it is possible it will also be good) is every bit an act of faith as believing in the Second Coming, only without a Resurrection.

Underlying the Transhumanist faith is a purely materialistic worldview. As Glenn Sunshine writes, materialism “assumes that matter and energy are all that exist. Our minds are thus a product of our brains, which are nothing more than highly complex computers.” In such a world, it only makes sense that we could eventually create machines that can do everything human brains can do, and maybe even more.

And if, as materialism suggests and Kurzweil predicts, there is no “essential difference between our brains and computers . . . we should be able to create interfaces between our brain and the super-intelligent computer network, allowing us immediate access to all the information on whatever replaces the internet.”

Still, as Glenn reminds us, this is quite an assumption. Not to mention is such a worldview forced to regard human consciousness—the awareness of ourselves and the world around us—as an illusion of sorts because, as physicist Adam Frank has written, it can’t explain consciousness or even the nature of the “matter” in “materialism.”

To put it in computer terms, for the materialist, there is no software. There’s only hardware. It’s like answering the question “What’s a MacBook?” by listing components such as processor and storage drive, but completely ignoring its operating system.

(Go ahead, by the way. Delete the operating system from your computer and see how well it works. Hint: it won’t...)

Though Transhumanism should remain the stuff of science fiction, a lot of money is being invested in order to make it science fact. Just this week, for instance, Microsoft invested about a billion bucks in one of Elon Musk’s Transhumanist projects.

Which is just another reason for all of us to understand the worldview behind Transhumanism—before resistance becomes futile.

More than twenty years ago, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus penned one of his most memorable sayings. When you come across an article titled ‘Whither Incest?’, he said, it’s safe to assume it won’t be a “vigorous defense of traditional morality.”

To paraphrase Father Neuhaus, whenever the American Psychological Association (APA) addresses an aspect of human sexuality, you can bet it won’t be a vigorous defense of traditional morality.

Recently, the APA announced the creation of a special task force  “to address the needs of people who practice consensual non-monogamy, including their intersecting marginalized identities.” Isn’t that a lot of words that need to be unpacked? So here it goes.

First, “Consensual non-monogamy” is a euphemism for polyamory. Polyamory “is the practice of, or desire for, emotionally intimate relationships with more than one partner.” And “intersecting marginalized identities” means the task force will look into how the desire to have more than one partner is, in fact, a deep-seated identity, and anyone who thinks otherwise is discriminating against people who were “born that way.” Or as the APA put it in their announcement, “…the ability to engage in desired intimacy without social and medical stigmatization is not a liberty for all.”

Many of us predicted polyamory would, in fact, be the next cause of the sexual revolution. Polyamorous marriage seems, for now, inevitable. That would mean marriage between more than two people, and why not? If marriage is officially severed from procreation, as so-called “same-sex marriage” has now legislated, then there is no reason to keep it to two people, instead of three, four, or more.

Or, as a member of the task force wrote on Medium, “Monogamy is privileged . . .” Implying, of course, that it shouldn’t be.

The task force will study all kinds of polyamorous relationships with the stated goal, according to the same task-force member, of helping “mental health professionals  . . . examine [their] biases and take a nonjudgmental posture toward clients engaged in consensual non-monogamy—just as [they] would with LGBTQ clients.”

Notice the assumption here: As long as the behavior in question is “consensual,” whatever that means, “mental health professionals” should “take a nonjudgmental posture.”

The real goal of the task force, however, goes beyond helping to remove the bias of mental health professionals. Remember that phrase from the announcement that I quoted earlier about “medical and social stigmatization”? As has been the case time after time with the APA, the goal is to promote an ideology by giving it a scientific veneer.

This ideology reduces all sexual morality to “consent,” and assumes that there is no good or bad way to define or engage in “desired intimacy.” Any discomfort that anyone has must be the result of “stigmatization.”

As Andre Van Mol, a physician who has studied adolescent sexuality, told the Christian Post "this is the entirely expected and predicted consequence of what happens when ideology replaces science. The APA is yet again showing us that they are a professional guild and not a scientific organization.”

It’s also the “entirely and predicted consequence” of our cultural trajectory regarding human sexuality. Four years ago, Robbie George wrote an article in “The American Interest” entitled “Is Polyamory Next?” Everything he pointed to there has happened: sympathetic depictions of polyamory in the media, opinion pieces by legal scholars, and call after call for us “to keep our minds open towards polygamy and other multiple-partner sexual relationships.” He made it clear that the same logic that justified same-sex marriage would eventually be applied to polyamory, which many same-sex advocates, even then, freely admitted.

Given the changes in the Supreme Court, we may not get an Obergefell-type decision for polyamory. But this move by the APA suggests it may not be necessary. If enough people are convinced that disapproving of polyamory is bigotry, the politics and law, especially in some jurisdictions, will quickly follow suit.

Is Christianity anti-woman? That’s the question tackled by Dr. Jo Vitale at the 2019 Wilberforce Weekend. Dr. Vitale discusses Jesus’ utterly revolutionary and counter-cultural attitude toward women—and how the Judeo-Christian concept of human beings, male and female, as being made in the image of God provides the only basis for treating women with dignity and as equals to men.

The year 2019 is the ten-year anniversary of a statement that drew the line for Christians on three central issues: life, marriage, and religious liberty. There were many prophetic lines in the Manhattan Declaration, which was co-authored by Chuck Colson, Dr. Timothy George of Beeson Divinity School, and Dr. Robert George of Princeton University, but none were more important than the last line:  that “we will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar," but under “no circumstances” could we “render to Caesar what belongs to God.” Half-a-million Christians signed on.

In the ten years since those words were written, Caesar (in other words, the state) has claimed more and more of what belongs to God, especially in the areas of life, marriage, and religious liberty.

Just think of New York lawmakers high-fiving each other after they ensured unrestricted abortion up to the point of birth, or the governor of Virginia advocating infanticide. Or consider that doctor-assisted suicide is now legal in seven states and the District of Columbia. And what about marriage? Recall the White House lit up in rainbow colors after the Obergefell decision mandated same-sex “marriage” on all fifty states.

And think of all the stories we’ve now heard of believers forced to choose between their faith and their livelihood, or adoption agencies forced to choose between their existence and their convictions. Or business owners like Jack Phillips and Barronelle Stutzman having to go to court to fend off Caesar’s demands.

Still, let’s be clear. Far more important than what Caesar demands is what Christians are willing to concede. Just this week, a new Barna survey revealed that the number of Protestant pastors who are “very concerned” about religious freedom has dropped significantly in just three years—from 55 percent to only 34 percent.

This is why Christians must decide where they stand, not based on the pressure of the cultural moment, but on the rock-solid, unchanging truth revealed to us in the Story of Scripture. We cannot render to Caesar what belongs to God.

I don’t think I can say it any better than Dr. Robert George did in his entry to our BreakPoint.org symposium about the Manhattan Declaration: “In the gospels, our Lord says . . .'be not afraid.’ As we stand boldly for life, marriage, and religious liberty, let us heed His admonition. It is not for us to know when or even precisely how the victories will be won. Our task and duty is simply to be faithful and obedient—to bear witness and do what is right . . . When things look bleak, we must not give up hope, for to yield to despair is to fail to trust in Jesus.”

To that I say Amen. If you've signed the Manhattan Declaration, I urge you to read it again. Consider again what we must do to honor God in this culture. If you’ve not read it or signed it, I urge you to consider doing so.

You can find a link to the full text of the Manhattan Declaration, as well as to our online symposium, featuring Dr. George’s comments along with those of 15 other thought leaders, at BreakPoint.org.

And finally, I was pleased to work with the brilliant Dr. David Dockery on a new book, which is now available, that reflects on Christian conviction. It’s called “Life, Marriage, and Religious Liberty: What Belongs to God, and What Belongs to Caesar.” An absolutely stunning group contributed to the book, including Dr. George, Joni Eareckson Tada, Randy Alcorn, Ryan Anderson, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Michael Farris, Kristen Waggoner, Mary Eberstadt and more. It’s available for purchase here at the Colson Center Bookstore. 

This is worth repeating: We will ungrudgingly render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but we can never render to Caesar what belongs to God.

Back in January of last year, Cecile Richards stepped down as president of Planned Parenthood. She left behind her a political lightning rod of an organization—plagued with scandals involving the sale of fetal body parts, illegal and underage abortions, and fighting for its millions of dollars in annual federal funding from Congress.

         Her successor, who took the reins of the country’s largest abortion provider in November, is a surprisingly different person. Leana Wen, a former Health Commissioner and emergency room doctor from Baltimore, was the first actual physician to lead this so-called healthcare organization in half a century.

         When her appointment was announced last year, I called on-air for Christians to pray for Dr. Wen—that God would change her heart, bring her to faith in Christ, and end her bloody work. I’m not sure whether those prayers have been answered in the way I hoped, but her work at Planned Parenthood has come to an end.

         In a Twitter post last week, Dr. Wen announced that the Planned Parenthood board had met in secret and decided to fire her. The reasons for her firing, she said, were “philosophical differences” about the messaging and future of Planned Parenthood.

         Since then, we’ve learned a bit more about those differences. The New York Times reports that Dr. Wen just wasn’t “aggressive” enough about explaining and promoting abortion—at least in the eyes of many at Planned Parenthood. In light of new state-level pro-life laws, veterans of the abortion giant wanted a fighter. Not a physician.

         It seems Dr. Wen might have tried to run Planned Parenthood as if it really were a healthcare organization. As part of that, she sought to appeal to people outside of the organization’s far-left donor base.

         For instance, Buzzfeed reports that Wen refused to use “trans-inclusive” language in her messaging, talking about “women’s” healthcare being for, well, women—and excluding men and non-binary individuals.

         And so, less than a year after hiring Wen, the Planned Parenthood board voted at a “secret meeting” to fire her.

         As one writer at Slate observes, “Planned Parenthood, it seems, didn’t fully grasp that by tapping a doctor with progressive chops but no political experience it was getting...a doctor with progressive chops but no political experience.”

         For Planned Parenthood, this likely means a search for a new, radically pro-abortion, political firebrand to helm their organization—someone more like Cecile Richards. In fact, descriptions of the interim president are very much in line with this prediction. But here’s another question: What will this mean for Dr. Wen?

         I’m with Abby Johnson—former Planned Parenthood worker and the subject of the recent pro-life film, “Unplanned.” When she heard about Wen’s firing, she addressed her in a tweet: “I know what this feels like; they did it to me too. If you’d like to talk, I’m here...”

         Later, Johnson pointed out something many pro-lifers missed: earlier this summer, Dr. Wen—already a mother—suffered a miscarriage. In fact, she wrote about it in The Washington Post.

         Imagine for a second the mental, moral, and spiritual conflict of grieving for a lost child while running an organization that routinely kills children of the same age and level of development. And then, on top of it all, they fire you.

         All of this makes me wonder: Could Dr. Wen be wavering in her pro-choice convictions? Even beyond the miscarriage, a change of career like this—being terminated—can really make you rethink everything. Now I don’t know that, and I have no way of knowing. But what I do know is that Jesus sometimes shows up in dramatic fashion, and that no one is beyond His reach, or the prayers of His people. So that’s what I’m praying—that Dr. Wen will meet Jesus, find His grace, and become a champion of life.

         As Planned Parenthood doubles down on its abortion extremism and political activism, would you also commit to doubling down on prayer? Prayer that this evil organization and its evil practices would come to an end, and that Dr. Leana Wen would find a new beginning.

Is it true that young Christians are no longer interested in apologetics, in a rational defense of the faith? Absolutely untrue says apologist Mark Middelberg, author of several books, including “Confident Faith” and “The Reason Why Faith Makes Sense.”

Today on the BreakPoint podcast, Warren Cole Smith interviews Mark Mittleberg about effective apologetics and his passion for, as Mittelberg says, “populating heaven.”

• Mark Mittelberg, Tyndale, 2013

So the Next Generation Will Know

• Sean McDowell and J. Warner Wallace, Available with your next donation to BreakPoint and the Colson Center

This week, John Stonestreet and Warren Cole Smith wade into the tempest over President Trump’s latest controversial tweets, in which he suggested that a group of far-left congresswomen of color “go back” to their countries of origin--(which for all but one, is America). Was what the president said racist? Should Christians support this kind of rhetoric? Was it even necessary? Our hosts also cover the firing of Planned Parenthood president, Leana Wen, a new Title X policy that will cut federal funding for abortion providers, and the second annual State Department meeting on religious freedom, which created a new international alliance and sanctions against leaders who persecute religious minorities—especially Christians.

Planck’s constant is “the amount of energy carried by a photon with the frequency of its electromagnetic wave.” For the curious, it’s 6.62607015* times 10 to the negative 34th Joule seconds. A curious thing about Planck’s constant is that it changes every few years, as

as physicists make ever more precise measurements.

I’d venture to guess that a few million more people now know of Planck’s constant today than just a month ago.  That’s because it’s a featured part of the final episode of Stranger Thing’s third season.

          For those who don’t know, “Stranger Things” is a sci-fi/thriller series set in the Midwestern town of Hawkins in the 1980s, where mad government scientists accidentally open a door to another dimension, letting in all the monsters. In the third season, the cast of middle school heroes use Planck’s constant to break a secret Russian code and save Hawkins from its latest inter-dimensional infestation.

There’s just one problem: as sharp-eared and exceptionally nerdy fans noticed, the value of Planck’s constant used on the show was from 2014. Back in 1985, when the show is set, it was officially different by a couple of decimal places. Because the hit Netflix series is known for uncanny accuracy in depicting the 1980s, the fact that “Stranger Things” flubbed a bit of science trivia made the news.

What’s gone unmentioned are a couple of other glaring anachronisms in the show’s third season, which almost perfectly recreates the culture of small-town America when I was growing up: music, gaming arcades, nauseating neon clothing, and of course, teenagers hanging out at the town’s brand-new shopping mall. The show’s nostalgia is at times overwhelming.

But as one pastor pointed out on Facebook, the show almost completely leaves out religion. Back in the 1980s, suburban Indiana would have been filled with Christianity. Churches with signs advertising Sunday’s message, prayers before meals, and families actually going to church would have been common sights. Yet of the four main families involved in the show, the only hint we get that any of them is the least bit religious is a funeral in season one conducted by a minister.

          In a show that goes out of its way to recreate small-town life in the 80s, this out-of-place secularism is a bigger oversight than a couple of digits in Planck’s constant.

          But there’s more. I’ve wondered now for three seasons whether the show would submit to having the obligatory LGBTQ character. They did in season three, adding a lesbian character, who in her strangely-timed coming out, talks about her sexuality in a way that feels far too 2019. As one self-identified gay commenter on Facebook remarked, a teenager in a small town in the 1980s wouldn’t even have the vocabulary to “come out” the way this character does. And yet the show’s writers included it, with loud praise from secular media.

          For a series known for its unpredictable and opaque plot, the political priorities in “Stranger Things” were all-too-clear this season. And for a series known for its accurate retelling of the 1980s, this scene came across like a wristwatch in Braveheart. Wrong time. Wrong place.

          Now, please don’t take this as either an endorsement or a rejection of the show.  I will say, as I mentioned on BreakPoint This Week, “Stranger Things” isn’t a family show. There’s smoking, drinking, plenty of language, and occasional teen sex.

But Season 3 is a reminder that, as C.S. Lewis once said, the most dangerous ideas in a culture are not the ones argued, but the ones that are assumed. Stories can powerfully assume ideas, and unless we’ve got a strong sense of discernment, things can appear normal that, well, shouldn’t be.  

          And the fact that fans noticed a minute mistake about quantum theory while largely accepting the show’s embedded secularism and up-to-date LGBT lingo says a lot about us.

          “Stranger Things” is about contact with another dimension—a world radically different from our own. On these two issues, it’s strangely out-of-touch with the world many of us grew up in and remember. That world, unlike the “upside-down” filled with horrifying monsters, is just too strange for entertainers in 2019 to imagine.

Back in 1970, the Nixon administration enacted the Title X Family Funding Program. As described on the HHS website, “For more than 40 years, Title X family planning clinics have played a critical role in ensuring access to a broad range of family planning and related preventive health services for millions of low-income or uninsured individuals.”

For years abortion providers were unable to access these funds, until President Clinton decided otherwise. Since then, abortion mills like Planned Parenthood have happily tapped into these funds to make sure that, utilizing some creative bookkeeping, women from low-income households have access to abortion and abortion counseling.

But no more. In June of last year, the Trump Administration announced the Protect Life Rule, which prohibits fund recipients from providing abortion counseling or being “co-located” with an abortion clinic.

Planned Parenthood and a number of states immediately sued to block the Protect Life Rule from taking effect.

Last week, after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to stop the Rule, the Administration announced that the Rule will take effect immediately.

Naturally, Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen called the decision “devastating news,” and promised to continue legal action. (Wen has since been removed as president).

Here’s why she said this. According to the Catholic News Agency, “The Protect Life Rule will strip about $60 million in federal funding from Planned Parenthood, whose clinics both refer for abortion services and are often co-located within abortion facilities. Planned Parenthood presently receives about one-fifth of the total amount of Title X funds distributed and serves about 40 percent of all clients who benefit from Title X.”

Planned Parenthood quickly announced plans to create an emergency fund (meaning they’ll shake down their donors) to replace the lost dollars, and we’re already starting to hear about the tragedy of lost “health care” funds for low-income women. The head of California’s largest recipient of Title X funds provided a typical response, “We will continue to pursue relief through the courts to protect access to essential health services for the millions of low-income patients served by Title X nationwide.” Don’t buy the frantic wording.

Not a single penny has been reduced from Title X funding. Title X money is still available to, and I quote, “assist in the establishment and operation of voluntary family planning projects which provide … natural family planning methods, infertility services, and services for adolescents; highly effective contraceptive methods; breast and cervical cancer screening and prevention services that correspond with nationally recognized standards of care; STD and HIV prevention education, counseling, testing, and referrals . . . and other preventive health services.”

That sounds like a pretty robust list of services available to low-income women. The money simply can’t be used to further abortion.

And it’s unclear why this should bother Planned Parenthood anyway, given its claim that abortion is just 3 percent of the services it provides to women. All this gnashing of teeth reveals how ludicrous that claim has always been.

Now, as Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But here’s mine: The Protect Life Rule will probably remain in effect during the remainder of the Trump Administration, but should a Democratic contender take residence in the White House, it will be dead on day 1 of their administration.

This brings me to three points. First, elections matter. Second, while I am grateful for the Trump Administration’s commitment to life, shame on the Republican majority in Congress that has consistently failed to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Governance by administrative rule will not protect the lives of the unborn in the long run.

And third, the fight remains: Not only to make abortion illegal, but also unthinkable.