Breakpoint

In early May, HHS announced new rules to ensure that “healthcare professionals will not feel compelled to leave the practice of medicine because they decline to participate in actions that violate their conscience such as abortion, sterilization, or assisted suicide.”

Not surprisingly, the new rule was immediately challenged in federal court by groups alleging, among other things, that the new rule “advances specific religious beliefs in violation of the First Amendment; violates patients’ rights to privacy, liberty and equal dignity as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment; and chills patients’ speech and expression in violation of the First Amendment, all to the detriment of patients’ health and well-being.”

Other left-wing websites such as Salon also joined the chorus of outrage. “Progressives fight back against Religious Right’s grotesque ‘religious freedom’ power play’” one of the headlines proclaimed.

In addition to the strange us of the word “grotesque,” the headline put religious freedom in scare quotes, and the article went on to claim that the new rule has “nothing to do with the genuine freedom to adhere to one's religious beliefs.”

No, instead, religious freedom is a “power play” to invent what they call “an imaginary right to discriminate.” I think a better use of the word “imaginary” would be repeated references to the Handmaid’s Tale we’ve all been forced to endure over the last two years.

Salon’s rhetoric is nothing new. But I was surprised by Salon’s claim that our nation’s new “theocratic direction,” as they put it, has its origin in, of all things, the Manhattan Declaration!

Theocratic? To paraphrase “The Princess Bride,” people keep using that word, but it does not mean what they think it means. A theocracy is “a form of government in which God or a deity is recognized as the supreme civil ruler,” and “His laws [are] interpreted by the ecclesiastical authorities.”

A theocracy was the last thing that Manhattan Declaration authors Chuck Colson, Robert George, and Timothy George had in mind. As Chuck Colson wrote, the Manhattan Declaration was “a clarion call to conscience, a wake-up call to the church.”

Then, and even more so now, Christians were in no position to “impose” their views on anyone. In fact, we’ve barely been able to impose them on ourselves, which was why the Manhattan Declaration was created in the first place.

In the ten years since the Declaration was issued, progressives have labeled any assertion of conscience, any refusal to conform one’s conduct to the prevailing cultural orthodoxy as an attempt at “theocracy.” Cue those protestors dressed as handmaids.

The issues raised by the Manhattan Declaration—life, marriage, and religious liberty—are more important now than ever. Even more important, however, is that we are able to articulate and explain why these issues are so important and non-negotiable for Christians in the first place—and why the authors and a half a million signers of the Manhattan Declaration solemnly declared that “We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” but under “no circumstances” can we “render to Caesar what belongs to God.”

That’s why in this 10th anniversary year of the Manhattan Declaration, I was pleased to work with the brilliant Dr. David Dockery on a new book, “Life, Marriage, and Religious Liberty: What Belongs to God, What Belongs to Caesar.” We assembled a stunning group of contributors, including both Dr. Georges, Joni Eareckson Tada, Randy Alcorn, Ryan Anderson, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Michael Farris, Kristen Waggoner, Mary Eberstadt and more.

The book is available at BreakPoint.org with your next donation to BreakPoint and the Colson Center. I hope you’ll get a copy for yourself, or for your small group.

Christians do not want a theocracy. We simply want the freedom to live out our faith in the way that has proven to be good for the world. But make no mistake, what opponents of religious liberty want is nothing less than secular tyranny.

Resources

The Manhattan Declaration

The First Freedom: The Primacy of Religious Freedom in the Quest for Liberty of Conscience

Timothy D. Padgett, BreakPoint, May 31, 2019

Life, Marriage, and Religious Liberty: What Belongs to God, What Belongs to Caesar (Essays for the Tenth Anniversary of the Manhattan Declaration).

John Stonestreet and David Dockery, editors, 2019

For two months in 1989, students gathered in Tiananmen Square demanding political reforms analogous to the economic reforms instituted by then-Chairman Deng Xiaoping.

After some initial indecision, the Communist Party decided to crack down. On May 20th, the government declared martial law and moved 250,000 troops into Beijing. On June 3rd, state-run television warned Beijing residents to stay inside.

The next day, the Army advanced toward Tiananmen Square. Protestors attempted to impede the army’s advance and destroyed more than 100 military vehicles, and damaged nearly 500 others.

But ultimately resistance would prove to be futile. Trucks and armored personnel carriers joined tanks and attack helicopters. The army’s principal target was a 10-meter tall statue dubbed the “Goddess of Democracy,” which was erected by the students and bore a more-than-passing resemblance to the Statue of Liberty.

After first firing warning shots, the troops fired directly on the protestors. Estimates of the death toll range widely, from hundreds to thousands. In addition, at least 1,600 people were arrested, many imprisoned for more than two decades, and others who were never seen again.

The message from the Communist Party was clear: To be rich might be, as Deng once put it, “glorious,” but forget about being free. The events of June 1989 made clear that the Communist Party was determined to retain complete political and social control.

Given this history with this regime, no one should be surprised at the recent crackdown on Chinese Christians and Muslim Uighurs.

But what is surprising  is how many Chinese today are untroubled by the events of June 1989. Even worse, the authors of a recent article in the Washington Post described a popular nostalgia for Mao Zedong. Mao’s rule was among the most brutal in all of history.

This is the Mao whose attempt to industrialize and collectivize China virtually overnight—called the “Great Leap Forward”—killed “at least 45 million people.” This is the Mao whose “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” attempted to purge Chinese society of capitalist and traditional elements by killing between 500 thousand and 3 million people, and sending countless more into internal exile. Among its victims were the father and aunt of current leader Xi Jinping, who committed suicide as a result of being persecuted.

The tragic irony is that any nostalgia for Mao only helps legitimize the authoritarianism and oppression now expanding under Xi.

How can we make sense of this selective and misguided historical memory? Most of the nostalgic are too young to have personally experienced Mao’s rule. Even more, they haven’t been taught the truth about Mao or Tiananmen and state-approved or state-run schools.

Of course, that same thing can’t be said of us in the West, whose memory is just as selective and just as wrong when it comes to communism. Writer Cathy Young, who lived in the USSR until she was 17, describes what she calls “Commie Chic.” She’s not referring to Soviet apologists or sympathizers prior to the 1991.

She’s talking about a 2018 Teen Vogue article that urged readers to use Karl Marx’s ideas to understand how Donald Trump was elected president. She’s referring to a 2017 New York Times op-ed insisting that women had better sex in communist East Germany. Or one hard-left publication that recently tweeted “For all the Soviet Union’s many faults, by traversing its vast architectural landscape, we can get a glimpse of what a built environment for the many, not the few, could look like.”

Now if all we knew about communism were its history of oppression and mass murder, that should be enough to disavow us of any nostalgia for it. As the authors of the “Black Book of Communism” wrote, “Communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government.” The result was 100 million-plus deaths, including the martyrs of Tiananmen Square.

But that tweet itself about building environments for the many, not the few, tells us all we need to know about the flawed worldview that undergirds this great historical evil. To a communist, the society is always more important than the individual. Individuals must be sacrificed for the utopian and fantastical ‘greater good’ that lies somewhere in the future and always just beyond reach.

Whenever it’s tried, in the past or in the future, this fatal flaw will leave fatalities, because bad ideas have victims.

The history of communism, like its worldview, is neither glorious nor worthy of nostalgia.

Nearly thirty years ago, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen wrote an essay in the New York Review of Books entitled “More than 100 Million Women are Missing.”

Sen didn’t mean “missing” as in “missing person.” He meant that in places like China and his native India there were more than 100 million fewer women than demographic trends suggested there should be.

Two decades later, journalist Mara Hvistendahl wrote “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.” By the time of the book’s publication, the estimate of missing women had grown to 160 million.

The “elephant in the room” behind this terrible trend is abortion. Demographers and other researchers first thought that the explanation must be that female infanticide—you know, the kind practiced in the ancient world—had somehow made a comeback.

Instead, they discovered that female children were being identified in utero, via amniocentesis or ultrasound, and then they were aborted. The combination of technology, preference for male children, government policies such as China’s infamous “One-Child Policy,” and legalized abortion had altered demographics from China to Albania.

Still, researchers downplayed this connection between abortion and the 100-million plus missing women. Hvistendahl, for example, placed far more emphasis on cultural attitudes and discrimination against women.

While these factors certainly play a role in the gender imbalance, without easy access to abortion this problem wouldn’t exist, at least not in its present form.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes the connection between abortion and gender imbalance more explicit. Researchers from Britain concluded that between 1970 and 2017, “sex-selective abortions resulted in about 23.1 million missing baby girls.”

According to a demographer from the American Enterprise Institute, that number “seems a bit low.” In China and India alone, men outnumber women by 70 million. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has estimated that by next year, 24 million Chinese men of marriageable age will be unable to find a spouse.

Since mortality rates are much higher for men than women, either Chinese and Indian women are exceptionally unlucky, or, as is more likely, the lion’s share of that 70-plus million represents women who were killed as the result of sex-selection abortion.

That’s why both China and India have done what the U. S. has not: outlaw sex-selection abortion. While their laws are honored more in the breach than in the observance, at least China and India have acknowledged the problem.

The cultural preference for boys and systemic discrimination against girls is nothing new. But the radical gender imbalance in places like China and India is. Not coincidentally, that imbalance emerged just as abortion became readily available in the 1970s. To put it bluntly, legal abortion made it easier to eliminate unwanted daughters.

To put it even more bluntly, gendercide isn’t the result of people having abortions for the “wrong reason”—it’s the result of abortion itself. And though a sexist act of violence halfway around the world should be just as intolerable to us as if it were happening in our own backyard, make no mistake. Elective abortion leads to sex-selective abortion. It is happening in America, too.

Of course, getting abortion-rights advocates to acknowledge this is like trying to swim against the current of the Ganges from the Bay of Bengal to its source in the Himalayas. Good luck with that.

Still, the savage truth is hundreds of millions of missing women is the price we’ve paid for legalized abortion. It’s the elephant in the room, and it isn’t going anywhere.

Ideas have consequences, bad ideas have victims. So what happens when words no longer have meaning? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg claims that women who are pregnant and want an abortion are not mothers. Justice Thomas disagrees (as should all rational human beings). Or take the case of a woman who identifies as a man going into a hospital with stomach pains. Turns out he--rather she--was pregnant. The baby died, and a major newspaper blames the nurse for misdiagnosing says the episode "raises larger issues about assigning labels or making assumptions."  As opposed to the episode raising the question of people--and society--denying biological reality and the meaning of "man" and "woman."

John Stonestreet and Warren Smith talk about "entertaining ourselves to death," as was on display when social media types blasted a Dayton weatherman for daring to preempt "The Bachelorette," just because he wanted to warn people that deadly tornadoes were on the way.

Also on today's program: The Maine legislature votes for death; new study confirms that religious, married people enjoy greater satisfaction in their sex lives than secular and non-married folk.

Resources

Forget the Tornadoes--the Bachelorette Is on

John Stonestreet and David Carlson, The Point, May 30, 2019

Meteorologist Jamie Simpson Goes off

YouTube

Foreword from "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman

The Bedroom and the Pew

John Stonestreet and G. Shane Morris, BreakPoint, May 29, 2019

Nurse mistakes pregnant transgender man as obese. Then, the man births a stillborn baby

Marilynne Marchione, USA Today, May 16, 2019

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman, Penguin, 2005 (20th Anniv. Edition)

One of the most important developments in American culture over the last few years has been the elevation of women. Especially since the #MeToo movement inspired victims to come forward, we’ve become serious about ending the harassment and silencing of women.

But there are still women being silenced. And there are still women being harassed. Ironically, though many progressives have claimed credit for this new state of wokeness, they’re the ones often telling a very specific group of women to essentially “sit down and shut up.”

Take Pennsylvania state representative Brian Sims, who twice filmed himself harassing peaceful pro-life protesters outside a Philadelphia abortion clinic. In the first encounter, this grown man descended on a group of teenage girls, offering $100 to anyone who could identify them. That’s what is called “doxing,” by the way, and it’s a very effective online intimidation tactic.

Later, Simms posted a video in which he harassed a woman that was praying in front of the same clinic, calling her “disgusting” and “racist,” and asking viewers to identify her and publish her home address.

But Simms is not the only one who is on a quest to intimidate and silence pro-life women.

Earlier this month, a woman protesting in front of another abortion clinic—this time in Huntsville, Alabama—was assaulted by an abortion supporter who jumped out of her car, punched her, and took her phone. That protester, Mary Baggett, caught the incident on video. And she’s just the latest victim in what’s become an increasing pattern of harassment and assault against pro-lifers, oftentimes pro-life women.

Abortion isn’t the only issue on which the tolerant can’t seem to tolerate any dissent. In the push to allow biologically male, transgender athletes to compete alongside females, women who don’t like the idea of permanently coming in second or third aren’t allowed to speak, either.

The Daily Signal recently interviewed Selina Soule, a high school junior competing in Connecticut’s Girls’ Track and Field State Championships. Selina didn’t make the cut for New England last year—not because any other girls ran better times, but because two boys who identified as girls took first and second place.

Obviously discouraged, Soule told the Signal, “When I’m at the start of the race—when I’m lining up and getting into my blocks—everyone already knows the outcome...there’s no way that one of us biological girls will be able to outrun those transgender athletes.” But no one seems willing to challenge this new arrangement.

Her mom explained why: “...girl athletes competing every week live in fear to speak out due to the possibility of retaliation from coaches, from school officials, as well as hurting their college scholarship opportunities.”

At a recent event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, one female weightlifter recounted how transgender activists disrupted her competition for ninety minutes after she dared to speak out. She’s even received death threats for, in her words, “trying to save women’s sports.”

Many progressives are more than willing to listen to women’s voices—as long as they don’t say anything contrary to left-wing ideology. But calling yourself pro-woman makes no sense when the only women you listen to are those who repeat your own opinions.

There are a couple of lessons to draw from this. First, don’t believe the rhetoric that says one side in today’s social debates is for women and the other against. Anyone who has ever walked into a pro-life pregnancy care center, or attended the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. knows what kind of propaganda and nonsense that is. These movements are led and propelled by women.

Second, empowering women and amplifying their voices must include those championing truly hard and unpopular causes—like those resisting the destruction of women’s spaces and women’s sports by transgender ideology.

It’s all well and good to call yourself, your organization, or your political party “pro-women,” but not if you harass, intimidate, and silence any woman who dares to go off script.

Resources

Feminist Charges, Physically Assaults Alabama Pro-Life Protester

Amanda Prestigiacomo | Dailywire.com | May 15, 2019

Are Transgender Athletes a Threat to Women’s Sports?

Steven Koskulitz | Academia.org | April 30, 2019

Pennsylvania Democrat Brian Sims defiant amid uproar over 'harassing' of anti-abortion protesters

William Cummings | USA TODAY | May 7, 2019

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” God’s commandment to Israel could not have been clearer, but for Israel, keeping it was not so easy. Each time God’s people turned to “other gods” like Baal or Molech—despite the dire and repeated warnings by the prophets—the result was disaster.

Of course, worshiping false gods is not a Middle Eastern specialty. The history of the Church is filled with battles against pagan gods, such as Zeus, Athena, Odin, or any number of Celtic and Slavic deities. Even today, we’ll sometimes hear of a pagan revival, but it’s typically some fringe story of an Icelander worshiping Thor.

Still, it would be a grave mistake to think idol worship is a thing only of the past or of primitive cultures. Throughout Western culture, scientifically advanced as it is, we are guilty of the sin of idolatry—including many Christians. The gods we worship don’t have personal names, but they do have their “high places.” They may not have statues or altars like Asherah poles, but they do have prophets and priestesses.

Here are four big idols of our age (and because I used to be Baptist, they all begin with the letter S):  Sex, State, Science, and Stuff.

Each of these things are good, in and of themselves. Without sex, there would be no us. Without state, chaos. Without science, ignorance. Without stuff, poverty. But when even good things come to occupy a place in our heart where only God belongs, when we put our trust in them and see ourselves in their image, they become our gods, and we become idolaters.

This is the topic of our next online short course: “The Gods of Our Age.” I’ll kick off the course talking about the god of Stuff, followed by Dr. Hunter Baker on the god of State. In so many ways, we look to government to supply our deepest needs, from safety to meaning and fulfillment. Then the one and only Dr. J. P . Moreland, who has just written an excellent book on scientism, the idea that science is the source of all knowledge, will join the course to talk about that idol. Finally, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse will talk about how sex has become an ends of personal fulfillment, rather than a means of something higher, and in that sense has become a god of our age, too.

There are many reasons why we must understand our idols. One reason is that they are so subtle. No one would ever stand up and announce, “I trust in stuff to fill the God-shaped hole in my heart,” of course. And yet the pull of materialism is so strong. How many Americans find themselves in debt, or addicted to the promise of the next adventure, or just being less generous than they should be out of worry or concern?

Another reason we should understand our idols is because our idols diminish our understanding of God. T. S. Elliot said that the essence of idolatry is entertaining thoughts about Him that are not worthy of Him. Our idols make us think less about God, and at the same time, make us think about God less. Either of those paths leads to disaster.

And finally, how we think about God affects how we think about people. Psalm 135 says that those who worship and trust in idols become “like them.” The false gods of our age—including sex, stuff, state, and science—are the primary drivers behind the dehumanization we see across our culture. There’s so much more we can say about that.

Our short course, “The Gods of Our Age: Sex, State, Science, and Stuff” is completely online and begins Tuesday June 4. The course is held on four consecutive Tuesday nights, and includes a presentation by our guest instructor and a Q&A session after that. Each session is recorded and made available to you, in case you have to miss a session or wish to review it. Go to BreakPoint.org to register while space is available. Again, that’s BreakPoint.org.

The warning of the prophets is as true as ever: The path of idols is the path of destruction. But the promise offered throughout Scripture remains just as true: to know God is to know ourselves and to know life. What other reason would we need to rid ourselves of idols and restore the worship of God in our lives, in our families, and in our culture?

The Church, that is, the body of Christ, is the single greatest force for good in the world. So says Pastor Rick Warren. And during his presentation at our recent Wilberforce Weekend, Pastor Rick backed up his claim.

We want to share that presentation with you today on the BreakPoint Podcast.

By the way, we will be sharing more talks from the weekend over the next few weeks on the BreakPoint Podcast. But as they say, you really had to be there to appreciate and experience the fellowship, the worship, as well as the amazing teaching.  So hWhy not register NOW for next year’s Wilberforce Weekend, and save big-time on registration? Now through May 31st, that’s the day after tomorrow, we are offering special “first crack” pricing for next year’s Wilberforce Weekend, which will again be held across the river from Washington, D. C.  Click here to find out more.

Resources

Secure Your Spot NOW at Next Year's Wilberforce Weekend, at the Best Possible Price!

One of our world’s most persistent myths is that religion is the enemy of good sex. The idea of Christians as repressed Puritan prudes—as historically inaccurate as that is—still exerts enormous power over our imaginations.

The other side of that myth is perpetuated in the glamorous portrayals in movies and TV of sexual liberation juxtaposed alongside frigid marriages. The message is clear: Faith and tradition are shackles that must be shed if we are to enjoy the kind of freedom the sexual revolution promises.

But here’s the truth: It’s a false promise—as false as the idea that religion puts a damper on sex. A sweeping new study by the Institute for Family Studies at Brigham Young University reveals that, in terms of both sexual satisfaction and relationship quality, highly religious couples fare better than the non-religious.

In their report, entitled, “The Ties that Bind: Is Faith a Global Force for Good or Ill in the Family?,” the authors looked at data from eleven countries, including the U.S., the U.K., France, Canada, and Argentina. What they found was striking: Highly religious couples “enjoy higher-quality relationships and more sexual satisfaction,” have more children on average, and are far less likely to have cheated on their spouse.

The correlation of religion with good relationships was especially pronounced among women. Those in highly religious marriages were fifty percent more likely to report being “strongly satisfied” sexually than their secular and less religious counterparts. And in a relationship quality index that took into account attachment, commitment, satisfaction, and stability, highly religious women whose husbands shared their faith were ahead of every other group.

So why are religious couples so doggone smitten? Why is religious devotion, in particular, such a powerful predictor of marital bliss? There are a couple of possible reasons.

First, as Bradford Wilcox and Lyman Stone write in The Atlantic, American young adults have been hit by two major recessions: one of happiness and the other of sex. Wilcox and Stone think the two are related. After all, as one Dartmouth study found, having sex at least once a week provides the same happiness boost as a $50,000 raise.

To be blunt, married couples get more raises. Contrary to the sitcom portrayals of marriage as the old ball-and-chain, those who say “I do” and stick with it have sex five times more often than their unmarried neighbors.

Second, another quirk the IFS report offers is that couples who regularly attend religious services—which overwhelmingly means Christian churches—enjoyed a boost in satisfaction and relationship quality regardless of whether they identified as progressive or traditional. Wilcox and his co-authors theorize that this may have to do with the strong correlation between religious observance and involved, committed fathers.

In other words, even religious husbands who think traditional gender roles are outdated still tend to stick around for their wives and kids more often than the less religious or secular. In doing so, they offer a kind of provision that goes well beyond bringing home the bacon.

Even more than that, I’d venture that religious commitment—especially Christian commitment—serves as a silent but inescapable reminder of what sex is for. In a time when meaningless encounters are pushed over on an increasingly miserable, lonely populace, religion serves as a signpost to couples that there’s meaning to sex beyond their own pleasure, beyond their own bodies. In essence, when they become “one flesh” they participate in God’s “very good” created order.

Whether I’m right about that or not, David French is certainly right as he observes that “sexual liberation has all too often brought neither sex nor liberation.” The science is clear: If you want a healthy, lasting, and yes—sexually satisfying relationship, go to the altar, and then stay in church.

According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control, the number of births in the U. S. has dropped to a three-decade low in 2018.

In just one year, the birth rate fell seven percent among women 15 to 19; four percent among those between the ages of 20 and 24; three percent among 25-to-29-year-olds; and one percent among those between the ages of thirty and thirty-four.

The only groups with rising birth rates were those aged 35 to 39 and those between the ages of 40 and 44, whose rates grew by one and two percent, respectively.

At this moment, our total fertility rate lies at 1.73 births per woman. That’s not only well below replacement level, it is lower than European countries such as France and the Scandinavian nations, and not much higher than China’s. Even more worrying is that these low numbers are happening during a period of economic expansion and low unemployment. Typically, fertility rates drop with economic downturns and recover during economic booms. Not this time.

We’ve talked a lot on BreakPoint about the economic and social consequences of declining fertility rates. Unfortunately, some are still committed to denying there is a problem. A recent Atlantic article called concerns about the declining birth rate “misplaced.” According to the article, the declining birth rate is a function of women postponing childbirth, not ruling it out altogether.

The author cites the increase in childbirth among women in their late thirties and early forties as evidence. The problem is, as the data I cited show, the increase isn’t very large and it’s certainly not enough to make up for the decline among women in their 20s and early 30s. Not to mention, of course, the ability to conceive and bear a child decreases with age. Despite our increasing technological “work-arounds” to this limitation, most people will not embrace parenting multiple teenagers in their sixties.

The reality is, no matter how much we much we pretend we aren’t facing a demographic winter, we are. The question before us is, “What, if anything, can we do about it?”

The honest answer is that we are not sure. Of course, the obvious answer is “have more kids.” But it’s more complicated than just that. Decades of reduced birth rates have shrunk what’s called “the mating market.” Bad ideas about marriage, sex and parenting, not to mention new visions of what is “the good life,” are deeply embedded in our culture, as are new norms of cohabitation, delayed marriage, and extended adolescence.

There is no silver bullet to correct all those things at once. Still, given the ruinous consequences of low birthrates, we should be open to any reasonable proposal that would reprioritize families in a culture that disincentivizes children.

One idea worthy of consideration is paid family leave. For example, Senator Marco Rubio is proposing allowing new parents to use future Social Security benefits to pay for several months leave after the birth or adoption of a child. Others have proposed requiring paid family leave, or offering tax credits to employers who provide such leave.

I’m not endorsing or criticizing any of these approaches, and I certainly do not believe that governmental policies alone will be able to solve demographic decline. Not even close. But policies that encourage folks to start families and remove obstacles once they do, have to be on the table.

The United States, like Europe and East Asia, is on an unsustainable path. It’s estimated that by 2035, the number of Americans over the age of 65 will outnumber those under the age of 18. That’s a recipe for economic and social disaster. We have to do whatever we can to help our culture become more kid and family friendly.

The only idea or proposal we shouldn’t consider is any that calls our concerns about the declining birth rate “misplaced.” After all, it was our “misplaced” priorities and values that got us here in the first place.

You’ve probably heard it or read it: The Church in America is dying, young people are leaving the faith in droves, the Nones are on the rise.

But Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton has examined the research. Some churches are indeed on the verge of collapse. Those churches that soft-peddle or even abandon the gospel.

Today on the BreakPoint podcast, Warren Cole Smith talks with Glenn about the myth of the dying church.

This interview was originally conducted for “Listening In” a program of WORLD magazine. To check out Listening in, click here.

And to get your copy of “The Myth of the Dying Church” come to our online bookstore.

Resources

The Myth of the Dying Church: How Christianity Is Actually Thriving in America and the World - eBook

Glenn Stanton, Worthy Books, 2019

The Myth of the Dying Church: How Christianity Is Actually Thriving in America and the World - Harback, pre-order at Amazon.com