Breakpoint

As I record this commentary, the death toll in the horrific terrorist attack in New Zealand has risen to 50 souls.

Though New Zealand is 7,500 miles away from where I live, this one hit close to home for me. I’ve visited New Zealand many times over the last twenty years, and I have developed marvelous friendships with many folks there, particularly on the North Island, but also in the city of Christchurch, where the massacre took place.

That this murderer chose a beautiful and peaceful place like Christchurch, and that he chose to gun down people as they were particularly vulnerable during a time of worship, only adds to how sickening the whole event is.

I do not have the stomach to read the killer’s so-called manifesto, but I’ve read enough about it to know that for the New Zealand killer, what’s wrong with the world is “the other.” People not like him. People he saw as a threat to Western, or specifically “white,” civilization. The so-called invaders, as he called them, were even, in his mind, threats to the environment, because they were overpopulating the world (even as white European birthrates decline).

The Muslim worshippers became the targets of the killer’s hatred of the “other.” In his eyes, they were not individual, valuable human beings. They were a faceless group who represented foreign religion and lesser races. The elevation of himself and those “like him” as being somehow better, in tandem with the dehumanization of those not “like him” as the source of our world’s problems, led him to think his act of evil was somehow good, and that any chaos he succeeded in creating was somehow necessary to “fix” the world.

Like all worldviews, the killer’s addressed two fundamental questions: what’s wrong with the world? And, how do we fix it? His bad ideas had many, many victims.

Even so, in a sense, the killer’s actions were the extreme but logical consequence of an ideological pariah infecting Western culture right now: what Andrew Walker of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission called on yesterday’s BreakPoint Podcast “the decline of the concept of our shared humanity.”

Andrew reminded us that the human heart is bent towards “not seeing our neighbor as our fellow man and as a partaker of our fellow humanity. The heart apart from Christ is driven towards animus and resentment toward those who are not like us.”

He is exactly right. At the root of jihadism, and white supremacism, and most of the other odious “isms,” is that same tendency to demonize another as the source of evil in the world. The obvious irony too few in the media are discussing is that in the name of defending Western civilization, this terrorist struck at a foundational premise of Western civilization: that all men are created equal and therefore possess the same human rights.

Instead, to a much lesser and less-deadly degree, the tendency to demonize the “other” is reflected in the media’s persistent description of the murderer as “right-wing.” His denouncement of capitalism, admiration for Communist China and self-proclaimed “eco-fascism” (whatever that is) should be enough to prove otherwise. Labeling him as this or that only feeds a narrative that says, “Those people are what’s wrong with the world.”

Of course, that is the standard way humans have operated throughout history since the fall. But, as voices as disparate as Friedrich Nietzsche and Chuck Colson have pointed out, Christianity, with its rock-solid foundational conviction that all human beings are made in the image of God, brought the idea of a shared humanity to Western civilization, and subsequently to much of the rest of the world.

It took a long time for that idea of the image of God to take root and bear fruit in the world, and Christians have not always lived up to what it demands. Still, we should not be surprised that the more the Western world drifts away from, spurns and rejects the only solid foundational source for human value, the more we see the demonizing of “the other;” the more we will see our civic and political dialogue descend into the gutter; and the more we will see acts of extreme violence.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

 

 

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/breakpoint-looking-for-evil-in-all-the-wrong-places/

The House Democrats have introduced the so-called “Equality Act,” which would grant civil rights protections based on gender identity and sexual orientation—explicitly at the expense of religious liberty.

Andrew Walker of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention joins Colson Center President John Stonestreet to talk about this very real threat to our religious freedoms.

But to start the podcast, they share their thoughts on the horrific massacre in New Zealand.

Resources   The Equality Act Accelerates Anti-Christian Bias Andrew Walker, Gospel Coalition, March 11, 2019     God and the Transgender Debate Andrew Walker, Good Book Company, 2017

Everything we do at the Colson Center, including BreakPoint, the Point, BreakPoint This Week, the BreakPoint podcast, and the Wilberforce Weekend, is designed to provide clarity on the culture from a Christian Worldview.

But the goal isn’t just to think clearly. It’s to live redemptively—to develop a robust Christian worldview so that we can thoughtfully engage this post-Christian culture and join God’s work in re-shaping the world in the light of His Kingdom. Now, if this kind of Christian living is what you are after, and if you’re ready to take a deep dive into Christian Worldview to prepare, I want to invite you to consider applying for the Colson Fellows program.

Here’s how it works. Every year, people from around the country—even around the world--apply for the program. Those who are accepted learn how to articulate and defend biblical truth in the marketplace of ideas. They spend the next ten months in intensive instruction on worldview and cultural analysis. They read both Christian classics and the best contemporary writers. They watch films and debates, and learn to identify the worldview messages in everything they read or watch.

Colson Fellows also take part in bi-monthly webinars with top Christian thinkers and authors such as John Stonestreet, Os Guinness, and Joni Eareckson Tada. They join other Fellows in weekend residencies to meet one another and learn directly from great worldview teachers. And they develop a plan that allows them to live what they’ve learned for the benefit of others.  And they join a network of more than 1,500 commissioned Colson Fellows that have studied with us and are committed to living it out in a broken world.

So, who becomes a Colson Fellow?

Professors. Homemakers. Filmmakers. Pastors. Educators. Lawmakers. Businessmen. Entrepreneurs. Ministry leaders. University presidents. College students. Ministers. People like Kristen Waggoner, now Vice-President at the Alliance Defending Freedom. Last year, she successfully defended Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips before the Supreme Court. People like Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, and Gabe Lyons, author and founder of “Q” ideas.

People like Steve and Margaret Lindsay.  Steve is a former Boeing executive, and Margaret is the founder of a non-profit art studio and gallery. Together they launched the Center for Faith and Work in Los Angeles to help Christians integrate their faith and work not only to thrive in the secular workforce, but also to become agents of renewal in the city of Los Angeles.

People like Billy Hutchinson, a teacher of Bible and psychology at Hickory Grove Christian School in North Carolina, who grew up a fan of Chuck Colson and BreakPoint. Despite a heavy ministry and teaching workload, he became a Colson Fellow, precisely because, as he put it, Chuck Colson “told us to apply the Christian Worldview to every sphere of culture. Christianity is not just a set of doctrines, but a way of thinking, believing, and acting that should infiltrate every area of life.”

Besides the time commitment, Billy also had to consider the financial cost of the Fellows program, given that he had student loans and lived on a teacher’s salary. Thanks to the generosity of Colson Center donors and his own school, he was able to receive a scholarship that made his participation possible.

Make no mistake, the Colson Fellows Program is demanding of your time, but know that God uses this program to prepare people for frontline Kingdom work. Chuck Colson’s great goal in the final years of his life was to teach people how to think Christianly about our fallen world, and to use their gifts to begin repairing the damage in their own neighborhoods and communities.

To learn more about the Colson Fellows Program, come to  www.colsonfellows.org. In addition to the national cohort, we have regional Colson Fellows cohorts in 18 cities around the country. Regional cohorts offer the same robust content but deliver it within a community setting. They meet monthly and are led by commissioned Colson Fellows.

Are you ready to answer the call? Learn more and apply today at  www.Colsonfellows.org.

 

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/breakpoint-its-time-to-apply-to-the-colson-fellows/

 

“If you got the dough, you go to the show.” So says Warren Smith about the College admissions scandal. He and John Stonestreet also discuss what’s really missing in all the discussion about the scandal: Many students today go to college not to learn, but, as John says, “to get a job, to get money to buy stuff, to retire, then die.”

John and Warren also take up the growing divided between conservative and liberal states when it comes to abortion laws, and the predicament that Tucker Carlson finds himself in for remarks he made years ago.

John also shares his experience of how technology and good neighbors helped rescue a stranded motorist in blizzard-bound Colorado.

Please note:  John and Warren recorded this week’s conversation before the horrific killing of 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand. The Colson Center mourns with that nation, including many personal friends there, and especially with the families of those taken in this evil act of violence.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/bp-this-week-college-admissions-if-you-got-the-dough-you-go-to-the-show/

 

 

Resources

Apply to the Colson Fellows!

The College Admissions Scandal

John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, BreakPoint, March 15, 2019

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the indictment of fifty people, including a pair of well-known actresses, for their participation in a series of schemes to get their kids admitted to elite colleges and universities.

According to one of the FBI agents involved, what’s been uncovered is “a sham that strikes at the core of the college admissions process.” But for many Americans, the indictments only underscored how different life looks for the wealthy. After all, even if they wanted to, not everyone could afford to participate in these costly shenanigans. Parents paid up to $75,000 for someone to take the ACT or SAT for their kids, or in some cases, to bribe test administrators to correct answers after tests were taken.

The Edge College & Career Network provided these crooked services, and then funneled funds through a charity called the Key Worldwide Foundation.

By covering their tracks, many students “had no idea that they didn’t get the score that they thought they got.”

And what if, in the hyper-competitive world of elite college admissions, acing standardized tests wasn’t enough? Well, colleges often hold spots open for athletes in certain sports, and for the right price, that very same Edge College & Career Network offered a different service of “bribing college coaches and administrators into designating (your) children as recruited athletes,” even if they never played the sport.

Since the scandal broke, most headlines have focused on which celebrity kid got into what school, and on which colleges have had employees implicated. What’s largely missing in the coverage is what the story says about the overall sorry state of higher education.

As the 2009 book “The Price of Admission” aptly described, entrance to elite colleges has been up for sale for quite a while. In some ways the people under indictment got a pretty good deal: They “only” spent hundreds of thousands instead of giving up millions in donations.

But still, the rot in higher education, especially at the elite level, goes far beyond the often-corrupt admissions process. The very idea of education itself is fundamentally misunderstood.

T.S. Eliot wrote about this a few generations ago in an essay called “Modern Education and the Classics.” In it, he identified, even then, a “crisis of education,” that largely resulted from a kind of utilitarianism that dominated the university, what Eliot called “getting on.”

“The individual wants more education,” he wrote, “not as an aid to the acquisition of wisdom but in order to get on; the nation wants more in order to get the better of other nations, the class wants it to get the better of other classes, or at least to hold its own against them.”

Today, “getting on” is the only reason many universities exist. We tell student to go to college so they can get a job, so they can make money, so they can buy stuff, so they can retire, so they can die. There’s no ultimate “why” involved.

Of course, even if the utilitarian vision currently captivating higher education wasn’t an infectious cancer throughout the whole system, it’s been a long time since many of the courses or degrees that students pay so much for can deliver on the investment, especially given the university’s captivity to progressive ideals and a dismissal of any real debate. Often, students graduate today un-hire-able.

Even so, what’s missing is a bigger vision of why we learn, why we stretch our minds, why we explore the unknown, and why we sharpen our skills. That’s what happens when the goal is to get a credential, not become a better person.

Or as one Duke University student put it, as quoted by Steven Garber in his book “The Fabric of Faithfulness,” “We’ve got no idea what it is we want by the time we graduate. The so-called curriculum is a set of hoops someone says we ought to jump through. No one seems to be asking, ‘how do people become good people.’”

All of this means that Christian colleges have an incredible opportunity to offer a meaningful alternative, given they don’t—as too many already have—fall into the utilitarian trap themselves. Christianity’s robust vision of what it means to be human, grounded in the idea of our being made in the image of God, has been the most powerful force in history driving the educational impulse and educational innovation.

It can do so again, without bribes and without indictments.

Now, you may remember that BreakPoint’s offer for this month is scientist John Lennox’s outstanding book, “Can Science Explain Everything?” If you’d like to download a sample chapter of his book, you can do so at BreakPoint.org/free.

 

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/breakpoint-the-college-admissions-scandal/

 

Resources

Actresses, Business Leaders and Other Wealthy Parents Charged in U.S. College Entry Fraud

Jennifer Medina, Katie Benner and Kate Taylor | New York Times | March 12, 2019

The following is not a hypothetical scenario.

Your four-year old daughter comes home from school and says, “I can wear my brother’s clothes and he can wear mine. I can change my name to a boy’s name.”

Again, this scenario is not hypothetical. This is exactly what happened to British mum Mariam Ahmed recently.

According to the UK Telegraph, Ahmed immediately checked with the parents of other children who attend the same school. Many, according to Ahmed, “had the same story to tell.”

They learned that their Birmingham school, Parkview Community School, was participating in the “No Outsiders” program. The goal of the program is to “raise awareness of LGBTQ+ issues” for children ages 4 through 11. “No Outsider” was launched by Parkview Community’s assistant headmaster, Andrew Moffatt, an openly gay educator who’s received awards from the Queen for “services to equality and diversity in education.”

Now, as you might have guessed by the name, Ahmed is a Muslim. In fact, Parkview Community School is 98 percent Muslim. And as you may have guessed, most Muslim parents take a pretty dim view of this kind of thing. They believe that such programs aren’t really about “raising awareness of LGBTQ+ issues,” but more about the “sexual indoctrination” of their children.

As Tariq Iqbal, the father of two children at Parkview Community told Britain’s iNews: “My children and nieces and nephews are going around school corridors, hearing it’s okay to be gay or lesbian. We don’t have an issue with the orientation. That’s a personal concern and a personal debate. But what we’re not happy with is the way that they’re drumming it into the children.”

For many, like Mohammed Aslam, age is an issue. Aslam reports that his daughter, age six, came home from school one day confused and crying. “She said she was told children can have two mummies and two daddies,” and that she can wear boys’ clothes.

In response, the Muslim community has decided not to take this indoctrination lying down. Ahmed started a petition against the “No Outsiders” program. Parents organized a protest outside the school, which has been going on for weeks. On one Friday, 600 of the school’s 740 families kept their children at home.

Now those from other communities are joining in the protest. Dr. Lisa Nolland, a Christian professional, drove from Bristol to congratulate the Muslim parents for “showing the way” on how to deal with indoctrination. As Nolland told the Telegraph, “This isn’t about religion, it isn’t even about parents, it’s about what’s best for kids . . . This is literally eroticising child development. This is damaging children. The numbers of child-on-child sex abuse are awful. Turn the volume down.”

While the Parkview parents have in some measure succeeded—the school has temporarily suspended the program—the national attention garnered by the protests has not been always favorable.

For instance, one Muslim politician who sided with the parents and said the students were “too young” to be taught about homosexuality, “has since apologised for his comments and has been formally reported to Birmingham City Council’s Standards Committee by Conservative councillor Gareth Moore, who is gay.”

Commenting on the situation, Rod Dreher at the American Conservative wrote, “Notice that the parents, even though they believe homosexuality is immoral, do not object to age-sensitive treatment of the issue in schools. What they object to is this gender ideology being jammed down the throats of their young ones.”

That critical distinction is crucial for American parents as well. The Muslims in Birmingham realize that British society accepts homosexuality and there’s no way their children can avoid the issue. But these parents insist that the indoctrination, especially at such a young age, must stop. American parents can learn from this, and also insist, forcefully and civilly and no matter the pushback, that the government stop indoctrinating and sexualizing our children.

 

 

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/breakpoint-eroticising-children/

 

Today’s podcast features Emily Colson, daughter of Colson Center founder, Chuck Colson.  In today’s program she asks the question:  How can the Church gain true credibility when it comes to defending life?  Her answer is that a good place to start would be to openly welcome those with disabilities into our congregations. Emily, whose son Max has been diagnosed with autism, recently spoke to the staff of Focus on the Family about her journey with Max, and how one church in particular affirmed life by affirming the value of Max.

 

Resources Dancing with Max Emily Colson, Zondervan, 2012

A chilling quote is often attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin: “One death is a tragedy. One million deaths are a statistic.” Stalin is alleged to have said this in the days leading up to one of the largest man-made disasters and mass-murders in history: the 1932 Ukrainian famine.

It may be that the quote actually date back even earlier, to a 1916 anarchist periodical. Either way, the line captures the awful reason that mass-murders like Stalin’s are so often overlooked or ignored while they’re happening. As the anarchist periodical explained, we tend to find the starvation of one child more shocking than the starvation of a million children because our minds are simply “unable to grasp” death on such a scale. “Suffering,” said the publication, “is so intimately personal a thing that it must be explained through the personal equation, if at all.”

Anyone who wants to truly communicate the horror of killing needs to do more than cite statistics. They have to tell stories. This holds true for any atrocity, including one that has claimed more lives than even the highest estimates of Stalin’s regime.

Princeton professor Robert George recently shared a collection of five abortion survivors’ stories on Facebook. The stories were compiled by the pro-life website Human Defense and include detailed videos of each man or woman giving their gut-wrenching, first-hand testimonies of an ongoing, legal mass-killing—and how they escaped it.

Some of these are names you may have heard before, like Gianna Jessen who survived a saline abortion at seven months gestation. As a result, she was born with cerebral palsy. Gianna has overcome her disability to become a powerful speaker, a household pro-life name, and one of the world’s most effective advocates for the unborn.

Other survivors on the list you may not have heard of. Melissa Ohden survived a second-trimester abortion attempt because she was actually older than doctors thought. Ohden was subsequently adopted, and only found out about the abortion as a teenager. She responded by tracking down her birth parents and forgiving them. Since then, she’s linked up with over 200 others with similar stories through her organization, Abortion Survivors Network.

Then there’s Nik Hoot. A botched abortion that destroyed parts of both of his legs and several fingers. Nik was adopted by an Indiana family and soon learned, faster than anyone expected, how to get around on prosthetic legs. In 2013, he made it to his state high school wrestling championship and finished the season with 24 wins. He’s also played baseball, basketball, and football, and says he considers his life a miracle.

But it’s more than a miracle. His life, and the life of every abortion survivor is a profoundly powerful testimony to the humanity of the millions whose lives end when abortion succeeds. The scars and disabilities many survivors bear are a silent witness to the grisly reality of what our society calls “choice.”

Among the miracles of these stories are how many abortion survivors make a very different choice. In story after story, the children of abortion say they’ve forgiven their birth parents—often even in person. Can you even imagine that? Well, with God, even this is possible. Many survivors of abortion are outspoken about their Christian faith and they’ll share it with anyone who will listen.

Come to BreakPoint.org, and I will link you to these stories of survival. I hope you’ll read all of them and watch their videos.  These incredible men and women have a razor-sharp moral clarity about abortion. After all, for them abortion is not an issue. It can’t be understood merely by the scale of the numbers. Abortion is part of their biography.

I’m convinced that if we are to see this legal atrocity end in our lifetimes, it will largely be because enough people come face-to-face with the real victims who find themselves on the other end of the so-called right to choose.

 

 

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/breakpoint-abortion-survivors-speak-out/

 

I still remember when Papa Johns came to my hometown. Man, I loved their pizza. Still do. And I loved that it became the pizza of choice for my church’s youth group… But counting on pizza for the success of any youth group is banking on the wrong papa. According to the best available data, the most reliable predictor of children’s ongoing church attendance is how consistently their own father attends.

In a classic article at Touchstone, Robbie Low describes stunning research by Swiss demographers that compares families in which one parent, both, or neither regularly attended church. In households where only the mother went to services every week, a minuscule 2-3 percent of children grew up to do the same. In households where both father and mother attended, that number jumped to 33 percent of their children, with a further 41 percent coming to church irregularly. Only a quarter of kids whose mom and dad both made church a priority dropped out entirely. Clearly, dad makes a difference.

But here’s where the research got kind of strange. In families where only the father attended church regularly, the percentage of children following his example was actually higher than in families where both parents faithfully showed up on Sunday. As many as 44 percent of children whose fathers regularly attended church but mothers never did, followed in their dad’s footsteps. And that’s not counting those who became irregular churchgoers.

Now, I’m not suggesting moms should drop out of church. We could propose all kinds of theories to explain the incredible loyalty kids show to their dads’ religious convictions. For instance, maybe the fact that women are on average more religious than men means that children with a highly religious father and an agnostic mom uniquely appreciate what they have and follow their old man.

Whatever the reason, the finding isn’t unique. In his book, “Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down Across Generations,” University of Southern California research professor Vern Bengtson corroborates the out-sized importance of dads when it comes to religious observance.

He zeroes in on closeness between fathers and their children, and the spiritual power it exerts on their lives. Bengtson reports that 56 percent of kids who have a close relationship with their dads share his level of religious commitment, while just 36 percent of kids with a weaker relationship to their father can say the same thing. In other words, the closeness between dads and his kids can make a 20-point difference in how serious they are about their faith!

This all fits with broader findings about the importance of dads in preventing poverty, teen pregnancy, delinquency, drug use, and school dropout. The message we should take from all of this is clear: dads matter. If we want our kids in church, we must lead by example. Even in this egalitarian age, dads have a unique ability to spiritually shepherd their family, and our children will most likely go where we go—and will keep going for the rest of their lives.

Of course, none of this diminishes the role of mothers. As I said on a BreakPoint commentary back in August, it is mom, not dad, whose love shapes the neurological circuits that will enable a child to form relationships for the rest of life. Live Science reports that loving mothers actually help their babies develop bigger brains more capable of learning, memorizing, and responding to stress. In many ways, moms give their children the equipment they need to follow dad later on.

And let me also say to those moms who, for whatever reason, find themselves going it alone, the Bible and church history are clear: God uses you. Paul says that Timothy was raised in faith by his mother and grandmother. St. Augustine credits the ceaseless prayers of his mother, Monica, for bringing him out of the Manichean religion into Christianity. And we could talk about so many others, too. Moms, you do have influence on your kids’ faith, not least of which is on your knees in prayer.

So parents of faith, be encouraged, and keep leading your kids to Christ. And we should add, denominations of faith that are tempted to embrace a definition of marriage and parenting that will eliminate either mom or dad, don’t do it. You’ll only be putting kids in spiritual jeopardy.

 

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/breakpoint-dads-take-your-kids-to-church/

 

What are the elements of great literature? And what do Christian writers and storytellers have access to that unbelieving authors don't? According to author Jonathan Rogers, we have a truer story to tell.

Today on the BreakPoint podcast, Warren Smith talks to Jonathan Rogers about that “truer story,” and about the writers who influenced Rogers in his work, including Flannery O’Connor and Mark Twain.

 

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/podcast-a-truer-story-to-tell-with-jonathan-rogers/

 

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/03/podcast-a-truer-story-to-tell-with-jonathan-rogers/

Resources

The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor

Jonathan Rogers, Thomas Nelson, 2012

 

Come to the Wilberforce Weekend, May 17-19!