Breakpoint

Philosopher John Gray started his 2007 book “Black Mass” with this declaration: “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.” Now, Gray is an atheist, but he realized that so much of modern politics is an attempt to re-inspire a world originally inspired by religion, especially Christianity.

Gray specifically pointed to the political “utopian projects,” like Marxism and Nazism, that came with an eschatological promise of a perfected world, just like Christian theology.

But even beyond Marx and Hitler, Gray considered any political project that aspired to “an all-encompassing transformation of human life,” including the Enlightenment belief in progress, to be a “secular reincarnation of early Christian beliefs.”

Today, secular political discourse includes not only utopian substitutes of the New Heaven and New Earth, but also secular versions of the Apocalypse. Just consider the tenor of our current debates around climate change and the environment.

For example, the new book by Bill McKibben, entitled “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?” comes across like a “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God” for climate-change activists. The excerpt just published in Rolling Stone magazine brings to mind certain visions that Jesus gave John on the island of Patmos.

In McKibben’s first scenario, the oceans warm to the point that by 2100, “it stops oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis’” which, he says, would likely result in the “mass mortality of animals and humans.”

The boiling seas scenario is just one of his apocalyptic horsemen. Others ways that world could end by rising temperatures include melting glaciers and permafrost that unleash “Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and Alaska.”

Of course, no apocalyptic scenario is complete without earthquakes and famine, so McKibben tells us that as “ice sheets melt, they take [the] weight off [the] land, and that can trigger earthquakes.”  In addition, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust. ‘That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot.’”

Meanwhile back on land, increasing global temperatures could bring to a halt all the gains in agricultural productivity we’ve had since the end of World War II. Even if crop yields aren’t affected that much by all the catastrophe, climate change could still affect our ability to transport what we’re still able to grow.

Now it may sound like I’m mocking McKibben, but I’m not. At least not entirely. While many of his scenarios are far-fetched, and filled with the sort of “mights,” “mays,” and “could haves” we’ve be hearing for a very long time, no one, least of all Christians, should be indifferent to the human impact on the environment.

Still, I’m struck by how often secular, scientific garb is adorned with pseudo-religious appeal.

Throughout "Falter," McKibben uses the language of sin and punishment, judgment and condemnation. The sins are against “nature” or “the planet” instead of God, but the argument is the same: “Be careful to obey all these words that I command you, that it may go well with you and with your children after you forever.”

Failure to do so risks not only punishment but permanent exile, i.e., extinction.

I’m also struck by how people can be more open to “secular reincarnations of Christian beliefs” than they are to the real thing. If you talk about Christ’s coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead to readers of Rolling Stone, eyes will roll. Talk about climate change causing human extinction, and we’ll demand immediate action.

It turns out John Gray was right, but I’d say modern politics isn’t just a “chapter in” the history of religion. Often it’s a parody of it.

What is transhumanism, exactly? And how do the ways we interact with technology affect our humanity? These are the questions Jacob Shatzer tackles today on the BreakPoint podcast with John Stonestreet.

Shatzer is assistant professor and associate dean in the school of theology and missions at Union University and the author of “Transhumanism and the Image of God.”

What is transhumanism, exactly? And how do the ways we interact with technology affect our humanity? These are the questions Jacob Shatzer tackles today on the BreakPoint podcast with John Stonestreet.

Shatzer is assistant professor and associate dean in the school of theology and missions at Union University and the author of “Transhumanism and the Image of God.”

In the 1976 made-for-television movie, “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” a then-unknown John Travolta introduced Americans to a condition technically called “X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency.” Or, as people have called it since the movie, “bubble boy disease.”

Children with “bubble boy disease” can’t fight off infections that the rest of us can, because their immune system doesn’t work properly. Like Travolta’s character, many who suffer from the condition live in sealed, sterile enclosures that protect them from being exposed to the infections that could kill them.

In the movie, Travolta’s character somehow develops enough immunity to risk leaving the plastic bubble in search of true love, but many of his real-world counterparts aren’t so fortunate. At least they weren’t.

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine announced that doctors might have found a cure for “bubble boy disease.” Doctors at St. Jude’s Children's Research Hospital in Memphis used an “inactivated form of HIV to introduce genetic changes into the patient's bone marrow cells. These changes fix the bone marrow so it starts doing its job, pumping out all three types of immune cells.”

Seven infants with the condition, which is caused by a genetic defect, were treated between 2016 and 2018. Six of them were able to leave the hospital within four weeks and the seventh is apparently on the way to joining them.

For parents of the estimated thirty to forty children born with the condition every year, what happened in Memphis is nothing less than miraculous. Children who were virtually certain to die, sometimes by the age of two, now have a chance at life.

The same week the results at St. Jude’s were announced, we learned that Israeli scientists had succeeded in manufacturing a 3D printed heart made from human cells.

While it doesn’t beat and is the size of a rabbit’s heart, it’s a potential first step in what was previously the stuff of science fiction: printing human organs for use in transplants. Every day, 22 people in the U.S. alone die while awaiting an organ transplant. Being able to manufacture them from human cells instead of just waiting for other people to die would save thousands, if not more, lives.

In addition to giving hope to people suffering from life-threatening illnesses, these stories offer a chance for us to discuss the right and wrong uses of biotechnology.

Several times over the last few years, I’ve talked on BreakPoint about the pitfalls of technologies like CRISPR, the gene-editing technology used by a Chinese scientist to genetically-modify two embryos last year. I called the criticism of this scientist “faux outrage,” not because I approved of what he did, but because his critics, including those who invented CRISPR, knew this would happen and still did nothing to prevent it.

So how do we know which of advances in biotechnology is moral, and which is not? Where can we begin to draw a moral line?

Here’s a suggestion: We have to distinguish between healing and enhancing.

What happened in Memphis is definitely healing. The goal was to keep these infants from dying. Similarly, attempts to manufacture organs for transplant seems rooted in a desire to heal, though one could easily imagine a scenario in the near future in which printed parts out-perform those we’re born with. What then? Should we allow humans to upgrade?

The use of human creativity and ingenuity to heal keeps with our status as co-creators with God. Obviously, the difference between our creative powers and God’s is literally infinite. But, part of being created in God’s image is the ability to use our creativity to care for creation including ourselves.

In contrast, using biotechnology to enhance humans, or even to create super humans, is an attempt to usurp God-as-creator. We seek to create ourselves in our own image instead of conforming to God’s intentions for us.

So far, what happened in Memphis and Israel didn’t cross that line between healing and enhancement. But as fast as technology advances these days, we can never stop asking the question.

The death toll from the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka continued to climb all week. As of Thursday, the official count was 359 dead.

Reading and listening to reports about the attacks, it’s apparent that the number of victims in Sri Lanka isn’t the only uncertainty. Many people, especially politicians and media outlets, seem to be having trouble deciding how to identify the victims. I don’t mean individual names. I mean identifying what the large majority of victims had in common besides being Sri Lankan: They were Christians.

The default identifier by left-leaning politicians on Twitter was “Easter worshippers.” Seeing a phrase that hardly anyone every uses repeated by so many was, well, just weird. In fact, when I first saw the trending “Easter worshippers” controversy blow up on Twitter, I wondered aloud if this was a redo of the made-up controversy over Starbuck’s red cups at Christmas from a few years ago. Like then, I wondered if a few isolated examples were being blown out of proportion.

I don’t know who originally decided to use the expression “Easter worshipper,” but it definitely caught on. So much so that it almost looks like there must have been a memo somewhere advising people to use the expression instead of calling the victims “Christians.”

President Obama tweeted “The attacks on tourists and Easter worshippers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity.” Leaving aside the fact that Christians, not “humanity” writ large, were the ones attacked, it’s still an odd choice of words.

Even odder was Secretary Hillary Clinton’s response: “On this holy weekend for many faiths, we must stand united against hatred and violence. I'm praying for everyone affected by today's horrific attacks on Easter worshippers and travelers in Sri Lanka.”

“Holy weekend for many faiths?” OK, Jews celebrated Passover on Saturday, but as the New York Times podcast “The Daily” pointed out from the start, the group behind the attacks targeted Catholic churches and attacked on Easter Sunday, which is holy to only one faith: Christianity. But even they struggled to identify the victims as Christians, preferring instead to call them “non-Muslims” on a number of occasions. And more than one NPR program I heard described how the rampant anti-Muslim environment of Sri Lanka contributed to the attacks.

Even if we dismiss the odd victim nomenclature as an anomaly, many commentators talked as if it were the buildings instead of the people inside them, and their beliefs, that were the terrorists’ target.

This seeming denial or at least ignoring the fact that victims were targeted because they were Christians is so odd that it prompts the question “Why?”

As Ross Douthat of the New York Times helpfully explained, at least part of the answer is that many Western commentators have trouble seeing Christianity and Christians as anything but privileged. However true or not that may be of Western Christians—and now is not the time to debate that—the events in Sri Lanka are, to paraphrase the opening line of Rick Warren’s “The Purpose-Driven Life,” not about us.

It’s about, as Douthat put it, “Christians like the murdered first communicants in Sri Lanka, or the jailed pastors in China, or the Coptic martyrs of North Africa, or any of the millions of non-Western Christians who live under constant threat of persecution.”

The reluctance to call them “Christians” trivializes their suffering; obviously, not in God’s sight or in ours, but in the eyes of the non-Christian world. It’s as if they died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, like someone who gets run over by a bus while crossing the street.

Whatever gripes you have with American Christians, in much of the world Christians “live under the constant threat of persecution” and, as we saw this past Sunday, even death. Why? Because they are Christians.

As I’ve said before, the failure to do more to protect them is a disgrace. And failing to call them by their proper name, “Christians,” adds gratuitous insult to already-grievous injury.

As the Notre Dame cathedral burned, many mourned—some for the destruction of history and beauty and others because it was one of the world’s most iconic houses of Christian worship, where for centuries, French Catholics lifted up prayer, song, and sacrament to God.

As of now, the devastating fire has been ruled an accident, but earlier suspicions that the blaze may have been deliberately set weren’t unfounded. In the months prior to the Notre Dame fire, historic churches across France were set ablaze, altars and crosses and statues were knocked down, and treasures were looted, all by vandals. Some churches were even fouled with human excrement. By some reports, over 800 churches were hit just last year.

In fact, there’s been a startling surge in church desecration worldwide. Back in January, the Guardian reported on a new wave of anti-Christian persecution in China. Hundreds of churches have been shut down, defaced, even demolished by the Chinese government. Last year, officials in Shanxi province dynamited the sanctuary of Golden Lampstand Church, one of China’s largest houses of Christian worship.

And that’s not all. Here in the States, a Louisiana man was just charged with setting fire to three African American churches in St. Landry Parish. And just last week, in the wake of the Notre Dame fire, New York police arrested a philosophy professor at St. Patrick’s Cathedral who was “carrying cans of gasoline and lighter fluid.” Heaven only knows what he had planned.

Of course, in addition to hundreds of people tragically killed by Islamic militants in the Sri Lanka terror attacks on Easter Sunday, many church buildings were devastated too.

Godless governments, racists, radical Islamists, and common arsonists seem to understand that places matter, especially sacred spaces. But before the smoke had even cleared above Notre Dame last week, well-meaning Christians took to social media to remind us that the Church isn’t a building, it’s a people.

Of course, that’s true... in the same way that a family isn’t a house. But that doesn’t make it less tragic, painful, or awful when someone’s house burns down! Why are so many, especially evangelical Christian, so quick to dismiss the importance and value of tangible beauty and creative expression, including sacred space?

Since the very first days of the early church, Christians have struggled with the temptation to stray into a Gnostic way of thinking. Gnosticism takes various forms, but believes that the material world is ultimately bad, and therefore only “spiritual” things matter.

Terrorists, racists, and vandals attack sacred space because of what it means, not only to those who worship but to the histories of the communities in which they exist. Sacred space is defined by a purpose, set aside for the worship of God. When the early Christians were finally free to publicly worship, they responded by setting aside space for corporate and individual worship, some that are amazing feats of architecture and design. For two millennia Christians sought to fill these spaces with beauty—in art, song, and in reverence. It’s an amazing heritage.

The fact that so many churches today are seen primarily as functional spaces, and therefore made to look like shopping malls or performance venues, suggests that we’ve lost something. Charles Taylor called it “disenchantment.” That’s a fancy way of describing how a sacramental view of reality has been replaced by an efficient, functional view.

Of course, true worship often happens in plain, simple buildings. The book of Acts describes a pretty amazing worship service once held in a Philippian jail. Still, the human impulse to beautify spaces, and to mourn the loss of spaces points to a truth about God and ourselves.

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky may have overstated it when he said “beauty will save the world,” but to downplay the loss of beauty is to miss something very important about ourselves and our world.

No, buildings aren’t the Church. But in a time when attacking church buildings has become a favorite means of attacking God, His people, and even cultural order, we should never forget what even arsonists and vandals know: that beauty matters, and stones can sometimes preach.

There’s a passage in N. T. Wright’s masterpiece, “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” in which he describes two kinds of people who refuse to even consider that Jesus actually rose from the dead: “hard-headed historians and soft-headed theologians.”

The hard-headed historians proclaim that, when it comes to any supernatural event, “We can go no further.” People don’t rise from the dead, they say, and so Jesus didn’t either. Full stop. As methodological naturalists they refuse to consider anything supernatural.

Those Wright called “soft-headed theologians” come in two types. The first type is captive to a kind of faux spiritual superiority, and believes that to even consider evidence outside of Scripture amounts to “a lack of faith.”

The second type of soft-headed theologians are basically hard-headed historians with a twist. Also convinced that miracles aren’t “reasonable,” they proclaim it doesn’t actually matter whether Jesus rose from the dead. The real message of Easter is that “love conquers death,” or that “Jesus lived on in the hearts of His disciples,” or some other sort of rhetorical abstraction.

Wright’s description came to mind the day before Easter when I came across the latest installment of Nick Kristof’s “occasional conversations with a Christian” series. Published in the New York Times, Kristof asked the president of Union Theological Seminary, Serene Jones, as he has several other religious leaders, to explain Christianity.

Jones missed the mark throughout the interview, mocking the idea of substitutionary atonement, scoffing at the idea of “an all-powerful, all controlling omnipotent, omniscient being,” and calling the virgin birth “a bizarre claim.”

But it was her answer to Kristof’s very first question that called to mind Wright’s book.

Kristof asked Jones if she believed Jesus actually rose from the dead. She replied, “Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves. But that empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed… For me,” she went on to say, “the message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death. That’s a much more awesome claim than that they put Jesus in the tomb and three days later he wasn’t there… What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie?”

Well, Reverend Jones, the answer is “yes.” The earliest witness of the church, the thing that altered their Jewish faith, the thing that they lived and died for, was that Jesus not only rose from the dead, but that if He did not, as Paul wrote in I Corinthians 15, “our faith is futile; you are still in your sins… (and) we are of all people most to be pitied.”

The message Reverend Jones thinks the resurrection proclaims—that love is more powerful than death—is neither earth-shattering nor unique to Christianity. Good heavens—it’s the message of “The Lion King.” But the Apostles didn’t preach some sort of ghostly Mufasa-like Savior. And they certainly didn’t suffer or die for a Disney-worthy truism.

But even beyond what the Apostles thought happened, there are, as N. T. Wright aptly argues, at least two broadly accepted historical facts that have to be dealt with: first, the empty tomb, and second, the numerous encounters with the risen Lord, including by skeptics. It’s amazing that the grounding truth of all of Christianity rests not on a private vision from a prophet or the ruminations of a guru, but on a public event that happened in history, one fully open to scrutiny and investigation.

And people have investigated the resurrection. Lee Strobel was so convinced by the evidence, he went from atheist news reporter to follower of Jesus. And one of the most important atheist philosophers of the 20th century, Antony Flew, concluded: “The evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion. It’s outstandingly different in quality and quantity.”

You can investigate it too. If it happened, it’s the most important event in history. If it didn’t, Christianity is false. But the one thing the bodily resurrection of Jesus can’t be is simply unimportant.

In February, the Yale Law School chapter of the Federalist Society invited Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom to speak on campus.

This, to put it mildly, didn’t go over well with some of the law school’s more “woke” students. Using talking points straight from the Southern Poverty Law Center, students protested Waggoner’s visit, calling the ADF a “homophobic, transphobic hate group."

If that’s all that had happened, it would “merely” have been yet another example of progressive intolerance. However, the way things escalated makes clear how serious the on-campus threats to religious freedom have become, and just where those threats are coming from.

The protesters not only protested, they had a list of demands, including that Yale Law would make it “more difficult for students to work at ‘discriminatory’ organizations” like ADF and that the school would “consider denying admission to applicants who worked on certain religious liberty efforts before law school.”

As Yale Law School alum Samuel Adkisson wrote in USA Today, these kinds of demands are usually greeted with laughter. But not this time.

Not only did Yale cave into the demands, they went beyond them by announcing an expanded anti-discrimination policy. Under the new policy, employers who hire Yale students or graduates who benefit from the school’s “public-interest funding, its loan-repayment program, and its post-graduate fellowships,” must promise that they “will not consider an applicant’s ‘religion,’ ‘religious creed,’ ‘gender identity’ or ‘gender expression’” in the hiring decision.

The sound you hear is doors of opportunity for students slamming shut everywhere. Basically, any organization that runs afoul of the new sexual orthodoxy that’s driving this new policy, will find it much more difficult to recruit Yale Law School grads. And those grads whose motivations run toward non-profit or public service will find their choices significantly narrowed.

Yale’s blatant discrimination against people with traditional religious beliefs is an important reminder of where the greatest challenge to religious freedom currently lies in our culture.

As David French wrote at National Review, one of “the prime sources of [culture war] conflict is the increasing progressive tendency to use the financial and cultural power of progressive institutions to force social change regardless of the underlying mission of the institution.”

Think back to the controversy over Indiana’s attempt to enact a state-level Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The most vocal and well-funded opposition came from companies like Salesforce, which threatened to boycott the state, and Angie’s List, which said it would shelve plans to expand its headquarters in Indianapolis.

Even the NCAA, which is based in Indianapolis, threatened to no longer hold the Final Four in the city.

Private-sector threats to religious liberty are dangerous precisely because, unlike governments, universities or a Fortune 500 company aren’t covered by the First Amendment or RFRA. While they can run afoul of anti-discrimination laws, as French wrote, “we should not confuse Yale’s actions with a constitutional violation.” Thus, legal recourse against Yale is unlikely.

This is another example where politics tends to be downstream from the rest of culture. As more and more private entities act in concert with activists who have declared traditional Christian morality beyond the pale, the more likely we are to see public policy follow suit.

And this allows private companies and colleges to divert attention from other things they’re doing, like dangerous working conditions in Chinese factories or trampling their customers’ privacy online or selling an education that delivers no return. Whenever they’re challenged, they simply yell, “Hey! Check out our rainbow flag!”

All of this is why corporate and academic wokeness, even more than the government, is a primary threat to religious freedom.

Why are we witnessing a surge in what is now known as rapid-onset gender dysphoria? That is, why are so many teenagers, especially girls, all of a sudden trying to change their sex?

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, Warren Cole Smith interviews WORLD Magazine's Jamie Dean about her eye-opening and disturbing article, "Pressure to Conform: LGBT activists are dialing up the heat on parents and researchers who question transgender dogma."

Resources

Pressure to conform

Jamie Dean, WORLD Magazine, January 30, 2019

Suffer the Children

Jamie Dean, WORLD Magazine, March 28, 2017

God and the Transgender Debate

I’ve said before on BreakPoint that if your God never tells you to do anything you don’t want to do, your god is probably you. If there were an Americanized translation of the Apostle’s Creed for today, it would be something like this: “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, who always supports my feelings.”

This kind of self-centered faith is epidemic both within the church and without, in conservative congregations and progressive ones.

The most recent case in point is Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana mayor, Pete Buttigieg. At a recent fundraiser, he said of his same-sex “marriage”: “[it] has made me a better man [and]...moved me closer to God. If being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far above my pay grade.”

He then added, somewhat out-of-the-blue: “That’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand, that if you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”

This was, of course, a political cheap shot. Mike Pence’s anti-LGBTQ reputation was secured a long time ago when, as governor of Indiana, he supported religious freedom legislation that sent progressives into hysterics (even though it was a mirror state-level copy of federal legislation that Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy had proposed).

As Mayor Pete and the long list of Democratic presidential contenders gear up for their primaries, they have to pander to their liberal base. And what better way to do that than bashing the guy whose boss you hope to unseat? For his part, Vice-President Pence refused the bait, offering compliments instead for Mayor Pete’s years of public service and adding, “He knows me better than that.”

But Mayor Pete’s comments are worth thinking through, if for no other reason than it would’ve been unthinkable not that long ago to try to enlist God in support of homosexual relationships. Feelings have become so central to personal identity across our culture, even in religion, that to suggest the Bible, God, the Church, or any other authority has a right to question those feelings is tantamount to heresy.

Buttigieg and authors like Matthew Vines, who wrote the book, “God and the Gay Christian,” are in essence saying, “God made me this way—and I know this because He would never ask me to go against my feelings.”

Unsurprisingly, the secular press has claimed that this new culturally-conformed Christianity as articulated by Mayor Pete will, of course, win the day. Terry Mattingly at Get Religion noted USA Today’s almost “evangelistic tone” in reporting Buttigieg’s words, and how they wrote as if the mayor’s reading of the Bible is a defensible theological position.

The reality, of course, is that the mayor’s quarrel isn’t with Mike Pence. His quarrel is with the clear texts of Scripture that both identify what marriage is and what it is for, as well as how homosexual behavior is sinful. His quarrel is with natural law, reflected in the biological roles our bodies play and the universally embraced connection of marriage and procreation, even by societies not influenced by Christian morality. And of course, his quarrel is with 2,000 years of unanimous Christian witness on marriage and sexual morality.

As Everett Piper wrote at the Washington Times in reply to Mayor Pete, we don’t get to make up our own version of Christianity. The faith delivered once for all is a faith delivered—it was delivered to the saints. It’s a revealed faith. The religions we make up based on our feelings are different religions altogether.

Buttigieg may feel that his same-sex relationship has somehow brought him closer to God, but it has not. “If you love me,” Jesus says in John 14:15, “you will keep my commandments.” Now, gay people aren’t singled out by Jesus’ words here, but they are absolutely included.

And to be clear, Mike Pence’s feelings on the issue aren’t of any more authority than Mayor Pete’s feelings. No, this decision was made way above either man’s pay grade.