Breakpoint

Most people don’t know this, but early feminists—including suffragette Susan B. Anthony—were deeply opposed to abortion. A surprisingly honest Saturday Night Live sketch from a couple of years ago captured the shock of a group of progressive young ladies, who when they meet Anthony are shocked to learn her less-than-progressive views on a woman’s so-called right to choose.

Even more, Anthony and other early feminists clearly stated why they opposed abortion. Besides calling it murder, they argued that abortion allows men to use women to satisfy their appetites, and then throw them aside. In an 1875 speech entitled “Social Purity,” Anthony put abortion alongside “breach of promise, divorce, adultery, bigamy, seduction, rape...wife murders...[and] infanticides” as evils perpetrated by men against women and children.

In an 1869 article in Anthony’s newspaper, an anonymous author (who most assume is Anthony herself), condemned abortion in no uncertain terms, laying it primarily at the feet of men: “No matter the motive,” she wrote, “[whether] love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!”

Times have changed. What was once a feminist argument against abortion has become a talking point for it. A recent editorial in the Huffington Post entitled “Access to Abortion Changes Cis Men’s Lives Too” makes exactly such a claim. For those who aren’t up-to-speed on gender-theory lingo, “Cis” is short for “Cisgender,” which just means non-trans and non-gay. Why that word even exists is another story.

In the HuffPo piece, Emma Gray argues that abortion is good for straight men, because it allows them to get rid of an unplanned child and get on with their educations and careers. She tells the stories of males (I cannot call them “men”) who say that “forced parenthood” would have been a disaster for them. She remarks how lucky they were to live in states where their girlfriends could just visit an abortion clinic, so they could dispose of the child and move on to more important things. As one pro-abortion journalist she approvingly quotes tweeted: “Behind millions of successful men is an abortion they don’t regret getting with their partner.”

Gray goes on: “...carrying an unintended pregnancy to term can mean giving up on professional and educational dreams. It can mean sacrificing financial stability. It can mean being tied to the wrong relationship forever....”

And then she quotes these fathers who—along with their partners—chose abortion over responsibility: “Access to abortion changed my life,” said one. Another said, “Anytime I am able to think about my career on a...normal trajectory and the fact that I was able to finish school...I can almost always tie it back to [the abortion].” “If your girlfriend breaks her leg,” said another, “you want to take her to the doctor instead of let it be a lingering issue that she has to deal with for the rest of her life.”

Wow. What a hero.

Apparently, for this man and the Huffington Post, a baby is like a broken bone, and abortion is the splint that can get unwilling parents’ lives back on track. Of course, the life of the innocent child killed in the name of convenience will never get back on track.

Susan B. Anthony and other early feminists decried abortion as a way for men to dodge responsibility. Today, abortion supporters see male irresponsibility as a positive good, no matter who dies in the process. By doing so, they’ve liberated men, but not women. They’ve enslaved women to male lusts, and given men a “get-out-of-jail-free” card.

What kind of a self-centered worldview puts a father’s dreams ahead of a child’s life? As Susan B. Anthony would have argued, it’s not a worldview that anybody who believes in women’s rights should ever embrace.

For the past five years, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, has conducted a survey of U.S. adults measuring what it calls the “accelerating acceptance” of LGBT people. Up till now, they’ve used these survey results to drive home the “right sight of history” narrative that seems so effective for the movement.

The survey asks people to describe how they feel about being around LGBT people, from “very comfortable” to “very uncomfortable,” in seven hypothetical situations, such as having gay people at their place of worship, or learning that a family member is transgender, to name just two.  As you might expect, until recently, the survey has shown an increased acceptance of LGBT people, but the results for 2018 are in, and GLAAD isn’t happy about them.

While the overall results among all adults “remained stable,” the survey showed that people between the ages of 18 and 34 “are becoming increasingly ‘uncomfortable’ with at least some of the hypotheticals.” If that’s not what you expected from Millennials and “Generation Z,” you’re not alone. As GLAAD’s press release put it, “The younger generation has traditionally been thought of as a beacon of progressive values.”

Though “the idea of ‘equal rights’ is largely supported by Americans . . . “legal equality,” said a GLAAD spokesperson “is not the same as acceptance… Acceptance cannot be legislated.”

Of course, the question of the hour is, why would younger Americans be increasingly uncomfortable with this movement that is supposed to be historically inevitable? Well I’d suggest, to borrow a phrase, it might have something to do with “overplaying your hand.”

The political, legal, and cultural victories of the past decade have led many LGBT activists and allies to believe that the kind of complete “acceptance” GLAAD is after was not only inevitable but imminent. So much so, they became impatient not only with people who overtly disagreed with them, but even with those who were a little ambivalent or expressed a “live and let live” attitude. Their attitude could be summed up in the words of the German poet Goethe: “To tolerate means to insult.”

I can think of at least a few ways in which this intolerance of anything less than full celebration has taken form. One is the consistent bullying by LGBTQ advocates of perceived foes. Young people dislike bullies. And Jack Phillips has been bullied. Barronelle Stutzman has been bullied. Any student who dares open their mouths in support of traditional sexual morality or gender norms, or even questions any extreme of the movement on any “woke” campus knows what it means to be bullied.

Then there’s how much the whole movement has changed since the “T”s and the “Q’s” have joined the acronym and taken it over. I think this is an especially relevant point given that it’s young women who are the most likely to be uncomfortable with LGBTQ situations. I can imagine plenty of young women resisting the unfairness of biological men competing against women in sports, for example, or the appropriation of scholarship dollars and business start-up grants designated for women going to men. And the more this happens, the more uncomfortable young women will be.

And here’s another reason: Back when it was just an LGB movement, we were told that what happens in the privacy of one’s bedroom is no one else’s business. Those days are long gone. Today, “tolerance” means supporting “drag queen story hours” at public libraries for children. And the demands don’t stop there. In a recent article in Medium, an author insisted that anyone who won’t date or sleep with a transgendered person is a “transphobe.”

We often say that “politics is downstream from culture.” In this case, the water flows both ways. Popular culture played a huge role in transforming the way Americans think about LGBT issues, which led to political and legal changes. But now, LGBT politics could be leading some people to rethink how they think about these issues in the first place.

And that makes GLAAD unhappy.

John Stonestreet and Warren Smith reflect on the life and influence of Christian apologist extraordinaire Norman Geisler.

They also discuss President Trump's 4th of July speech, the gross historical reinterpretation of the Stonewall riots (largely credited with being the launch of the LGBT movement), Sean McDowell's and J. Warner Wallace's new book, "So the Next Generation Will Know," and the crisis at our Southern border.

• Joe Carter, The Gospel Coalition, June 30, 2019

• Warren Cole Smith, BreakPoint.org, June 28, 2019

• Sean McDowell, J. Warner Wallace, 2019

America’s founders believed that the freedom to express political and religious opinions, even unpopular ones, was central to self-government. Still, the freedom of speech, like all freedoms, has its limits. We can’t just shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, for example.

Antifa, a group of leftist radicals, believes differently. Any ideas other than their own are not only wrong, they’re dangerous and must be shut down by, and I quote, “any means necessary.”

These are more than words. Just ask Quillette journalist Andy Ngo, a conservative, who has been documenting Antifa violence for a while now. This past weekend, in Portland, he was recording an Antifa mob as they “protested” another rally held by a right-wing group called “The Proud Boys.” Protesting is as American as apple pie. It’s especially common in Portland. But if you’re wearing a ski mask and holding a baseball bat, protester might not be the right word for you.

Antifa knew in advance that Ngo would be there, and he expressed concern for his own safety on social media before going. His concerns turned out to be valid. He was pelted with milkshakes, sprayed with silly string, then punched and kicked to the point that he was bleeding and had to go to the emergency room.

The media coverage, to put it lightly, was odd. CBS described the event only as a clash between Antifa and right-wing groups. The only mention of Ngo was that he claimed on Twitter to have been attacked. Never mind the fact that a journalist from the Portland Oregonian had filmed it.

Left-wing blogger Jesse Signal rightly called the attack insane, listing and documenting other journalists also physically assaulted by Antifa. But many others of the Punderati on the Left debated whether or not Ngo had it coming to him, and whether his politics made him an acceptable target for violence.

Despite their name, Antifa is not ultimately driven by their opposition to fascism. What they consider to be fascism is fully informed by a far-left worldview, including far-left ideologies like socialism, communism, and anarchy. These are ideologies which tend to see opponents not only as wrong, but as obstacles to their utopian fantasies.

The recent Portland “protest” and assault—actually assaults, because there were others—are just the latest in a long string of riots with Antifa at their center. During the Trump Inauguration, 230 so-called “protesters” were arrested for smashing windows and starting fires. In February of 2017 at Berkeley, Antifa demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails to halt a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos. The same month, the Portland city council was forced to shut down a public forum after Antifa threatened violence. In August of that year, Antifa members, trying to disrupt a free speech rally in Boston, threw urine-filled projectiles at police.

Given this history of violence, you’d think Portland authorities would have been better prepared. Mayor Ted Wheeler has come under fire for not containing the violence. In fact, the Portland Police Association has called on the mayor to “remove the handcuffs from our officers and let them stop the violence through strong and swift enforcement action.”

Now how exactly the mayor has handcuffed the Portland police, I don’t know, but let’s hope and pray he will take the necessary steps to preserve order and the safety of his citizens. If he can’t or won’t, he should step down.

In the same way, a truly free media can’t have it both ways. Criticizing President Trump for saying the media is “the enemy of the people” is absolutely justified, but staying mum when one of your own is beaten in the streets by Antifa, just because he is conservative, is absolutely not.

Good for folks like Jake Tapper, who tweeted: “Antifa regularly attacks journalists. It is reprehensible.” And good for CNN for allowing Ngo to tell what happened to him, on air.

As I said two years ago, people on both sides of the political aisle who disagree on nearly everything can still agree that the right to peacefully assemble, to debate and protest is a foundation of our Republic, and that political violence has no place in our country, whether it’s from the left or the right.

Words matter. Definitions matter. Christians, of all people, should understand how much words and definitions, especially today, are being used to either affirm or deny reality, and even shape our view of reality.

George Orwell, of course, understood the power of words. In fact, he so masterfully captured the notion in his novel 1984, that today the intentional misuse of words is named after him: “Orwellian.” Think of abortion, for example: Is “abortion” an issue of “reproductive rights” or is it the “taking of an innocent life”?

Not every new use of words is intentional malpractice, of course. Words often change over time as our culture changes. Sometimes words will change because the culture has changed. Sometimes culture changes because words have changed.

Either way, imagine how much a word or a phrase might have changed over 250 years.

The word “happiness,” for example, is part of the most memorable line in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Anyone who understands just how much the word “happiness” has changed, can also understand why the American experiment seems to be coming apart at the seams these days.

Dictionary.com offers a common definition of “happiness”: “pleasure; contentment; joy.”

In an age where radical individual autonomy and disordered passions are combined with nearly unlimited technological and financial resources, an unalienable right to pursue whatever make us “happy” in that sense is basically a downward spiral into the moral abyss.  What’s there to stop us from intoxicating ourselves into mindless distractions, eliminating consequences of our behavior – like unborn babies – that interfere with our freedom, or even ending our own lives when we think we can no longer be happy?

But what if I told you the founding fathers had a different definition of happiness? That’s the case Carli Conklin makes in her new book, The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History.

In the eighteenth century, happiness “refer[red] to man’s ability to know the law of nature,” Conklin says, “and … to choose to pursue a life of virtue or, in other words, a life lived in harmony with those natural law principles.”

This is exactly what Chuck Colson said back in 2010:

Our founding fathers understood the pursuit of happiness to mean the pursuit of a virtuous life. Happiness comes from a life well-lived, a life rooted in truth that orders our desires and pleasure. That is what every man and woman has an inalienable right to pursue.

Over at Public Discourse, Justin Dwyer adds an important point on the pursuit of happiness and The Declaration of Independence: that both are incomprehensible outside of the Declaration’s theological framework.

“Yes,” Dwyer says, “Jefferson and some of the principal Founders . . . held unorthodox religious beliefs. Nonetheless, all of these men publicly and privately affirmed a shared natural theology: that there is a Creator who has imbued the world with discernible natural laws, physical and moral, and who governs the affairs of men with his sustaining and intervening providence.”

I know this is intellectual heavy lifting for a day set aside for parades, cookouts, and fireworks. But the concept of true happiness is crucial not only for our nation, but also for the body of Christ.

In that same 2010 commentary, Chuck lamented a Barna survey that revealed “more than half of evangelicals agreed with the statement: ‘The purpose of life is enjoyment and personal fulfillment.’”

“Come on!” Chuck said. “If the last 50 years taught us anything, it’s that consumerism and . . . the pursuit of unbridled pleasure . . . do not lead to happiness, but instead to personal and societal misery… The goal is not pleasure; it is righteous living, decency, honor, doing good—in short, living a virtuous life.”

Amen. And Happy 4th of July.

Imagine you’re a college student, and your professor claims that science has disproved the idea of God, of the soul, of ultimate meaning, and of truth. What do you say to that professor?

The best answer is that his claim itself is not scientific. It’s a claim of a worldview called materialism, which says that everything that exists is the product of matter, energy, and purposeless processes. New atheist authors like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have spent years hawking materialism as science, and they’ve deceived a lot of people.

In response, a group of scientists, philosophers, and theologians have named the worldview mistake for what it is, and are now offering an exciting alternative: that the world is instead filled with meaning, mind, and design, and countless other things that cannot be reduced to raw physical materials.

The Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture has distilled the best arguments against materialism and for the God behind creation into a series of punchy, information-packed videos. They’re short—just a few minutes each—and were made to grab students’ attention, challenging them with thoughts materialists don’t want them thinking.

“Science Uprising” uses a fun, Internet “hacktivist” vibe complete with Guy Fawkes mask to show how deeply-entrenched materialism is, and how challenging this dogma could get you into academic trouble. But as the experts interviewed in each episode agree, we must challenge materialism, because it runs contrary to everything we know about ourselves and the world in which we live.

The first episode confronts the claim famously made by Carl Sagan—that “the cosmos is all that is, ever was, or ever will be.” We see clips of new atheists denying the existence of meaning and purpose and claiming that humanity is nothing but atoms. In response, experts in intelligent design like Jay Richards and Michael Egnor point to all the things we know are real that aren’t made of matter—things like joy, sorrow, right, wrong, truth, beauty, justice, and even our own sense of self.

What’s more, science itself isn’t made of matter. As Oxford Mathematician John Lennox explained at our recent Wilberforce Weekend, the claim that 'whatever science can’t study isn’t real' is self-refuting. Science, after all, can’t study itself. It’s based on a set of non-material assumptions—like the reality of the material world, the accuracy of our five senses, the existence of math and logic, and the predictability of the laws of nature. None of these are made of matter; yet without them, science is impossible.

Episode two tackles the materialist claim that we’re nothing but machines made out of meat. Over and over, new atheists have told us that human consciousness is an illusion created by chemical reactions in our brains. But there are powerful arguments that we are more than our gray matter. My favorite is that if our thoughts are nothing but hydrogen and sodium reacting, then there’s no reason to trust the thoughts of materialists in the first place!

“Science Uprising” also catches up with Stephen Meyer, who covers the problem DNA poses to materialism—specifically to Neo-Darwinism. All life is based on information, and information not only transcends matter, it always comes from a mind.

Episode four covers the improbable fine-tuning of the universe and solar system. While atheists like Lawrence Krauss and Bill Nye claim we’re just “a speck orbiting another speck in the middle of specklessness,” a world-renowned physicist and engineer at NASA begs to differ, citing the near-miraculous coincidences that produced a world as hospitable for life as ours is—a world which—as one of them notes, looks as if it expected us.

This series is a must watch for students, especially, but really for anyone ready to unmask the worldview currently masquerading as “settled” science.

Come to BreakPoint.org for a link to watch “Science Uprising.” You can forward these free videos to friends, family, pastors, and even materialist professors.

Our theme for this year’s Wilberforce Weekend was “Is Christianity Still Good for the World?”

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, we present historian and author Jeremiah Johnston’s talk, “Did Christianity Make the World Better or Worse?” Johnston is the author of “Unimaginable: What Our World Would Be Like without Christianity.”

Please note that in several spots of the talk, Johnston refers to various slides for the audience. Happily, his descriptions will give you a very good mental picture, so you’ll be able to follow along quite easily.

Resources

Unimaginable: What Our World Would Be Like Without Christianity

Jeremiah Johnston, Bethany House, 2019

The 1999 movie “The Cider House Rules” won writer John Irving an Oscar, and elevated him as a pro-abortion apologist.

In his acceptance speech, Irving thanked Harvey Weinstein’s movie company Miramax for “having the courage to make this movie.” He then thanked the Academy for honoring a movie about abortion, as well as “everyone at Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights League.”

Last week, twenty years later, in a recent New York Times op-ed, Irving once again took up the role of pro-abortion apologist, and in the process, exposed just how incoherent his particular pro-abortion argument really is.

I’m not even talking about the factual problems with the piece, like claiming that “Prior to the 1840s, abortion was widespread,” or that, “Our founding fathers got this right; the choice to have an abortion or a child belonged to the woman.” Sorry, John, our founders put no such right in our founding documents. Rather, Supreme Court justices imagined abortion rights from “penumbras” and “emanations.” They literally used those terms. As Ramesh Ponnuru wrote at National Review, if the founders thought about abortion at all, they certainly didn’t think in terms of a “right to choose.”

And then ignoring the overwhelming evidence for life from science and philosophy, Irving also argued that our First Amendment rights include being “protected from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.” Well then, I look forward to his next novel supporting polygamy, since any prohibition of that would be “having someone’s religion practiced on us.”

Still, where Irving’s piece really goes off the rails is in his self-promoting appeal to his own novel and movie, “The Cider House Rules,” as such a convincing apologetic for abortion. What’s stunning is that still, 20 years later, Irving completely misses the moral chaos that his story justifies.

The protagonist of “The Cider House Rules” is Homer Wells, who grows up in an orphanage in the years prior to World War II. The orphanage’s kind director, Dr. Larch, treats Homer as if he were his son and teaches him everything he knows about medicine, especially obstetrics. By the time Homer leaves the orphanage, he’s as well-trained as any doctor, despite never graduating from high school.

Dr. Larch is also an abortionist, which Irving naturally depicts as an act of kindness towards the women he meets in dire straits. But Homer refuses to perform abortions because, as Irving himself describes it, “He’s an orphan; his mother let him live.”

What changes Homer’s mind was a young girl who was raped and impregnated by her own father. Homer works with her father in a cider house, where mostly illiterate workers stay during harvest season.

Homer sets aside his objections and personal history to perform the abortion. And afterwards, the father asks Homer to read the rules posted on the wall for the cider house. Homer does, and then the father proclaims, “Someone who doesn’t live here made those rules. But they don’t know what it’s like to live here. We have to make up our own rules.”

So do you get the argument? Who are you to say someone shouldn’t have an abortion if you’ve never walked in their shoes? We shouldn’t force our moral values on others. It’s the same argument Irving makes in his op-ed. Of course, that same argument used to justify the abortion in the movie, couldn’t that also be used to justify the incest in the movie? Who are we to say it’s wrong if we don’t live there or walk in their shoes?

By the way, the kindly Dr. Larch was also a forger: He created fake educational and professional credentials for Homer and used those credentials to get him appointed as his successor. But what’s wrong with that if you’ve not walked in their shoes?

For those keeping score at home, John Irving’s apologetic for abortion-on-demand includes consequentialism, moral relativism that justifies abortion and incest, bad history and a mangling of the First Amendment.

But hey, other than that…

What’s the best way to bridge the intergenerational gap in our churches?  How do young people connect with older believers? The answer just might be prayer.

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, John Stonestreet talks with Tony Souder, executive director of the Chattanooga Youth Network, and the new “Pray for Me Campaign,” which is creating a vast web of intergenerational relationships for young people and is equipping adult believers to pass on a sustainable faith to the next generation.

www.prayformecampaign.com