Breakpoint

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported late last year that Americans aren’t having enough babies to replace themselves. In fact, a record one in five American women will never have children, and those who do will, on average, never exceed two. As a result, the death rate is outpacing the birth rate, which means—except for immigration—the U.S. has joined many developed countries on the long, slow road of population decline.

That’s bad news. Not having enough children as a society has costs that are hard to appreciate on the individual level. We know from examples like Japan and much of Europe that aging countries become economically top-heavy, especially those that promise extensive government services to the elderly. This results in runaway aging and population decline, and negatively impacts every sector of the economy except for maybe healthcare, depending on how you look at that one. It also places heavier and heavier burdens on the shoulders of an ever-shrinking workforce of young people, which leaves them even less likely to have kids.

On a deeper level, young members of a graying society lose hope for the future, or stop planning for it altogether. In Japan, this hopelessness manifests as one of the highest rates of suicide among youth in the developed world.

To be clear, the United States is not Japan, but as Jonathan Last writes in his book, “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting,” there’s no example in history of a shrinking society experiencing long-term prosperity.

Given the impending demographic disaster, you might think this would be the wrong time to discourage people from having children. But some are doing just that. Citing numbers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the website Market Watch recently warned that the cost of raising children has grown an unbelievable 40 percent since the year 2000.

According to those USDA estimates, the average American parent spends almost a quarter million dollars raising a single child, not including college expenses. This translates to huge figures for families who have four, five, or even more kids. If these numbers are correct, a minivan-sized family will spend something on the order of a million dollars just to get their children through high school.

But I’m not buying those numbers, at least not totally. The USDA’s estimates don’t take into account things like shared living space, hand-me-down clothes, grandparents pitching in, or other common ways parents have learned to save money.

Such outlandish estimates of the cost of kids are now cited in article after article, making the case that few Americans can really afford kids. CNBC joined in recently with a piece called “Here’s how much money you save when you don’t have kids.” To make matters worse, they cited a study purporting to show parents are less happy than non-parents.

All of this bean-counting in the government and secular media comes at a moment when the thing we need most is babies. Even sadder, it coincides with one of the hardest pro-abortion legislative pushes we’ve seen in decades. Our culture is simply less welcoming to little lives than ever before.

And yet those of us who have kids and those who desperately long and pray to have kids know how fundamentally skewed these cost-benefit analyses are, even if their math was better. Because children are priceless, and as my friend Dr. Ben Mitchell says, anytime you put a price tag on something priceless, you cheapen it.

The question of whether kids are too expensive raises much bigger worldview questions, such as, “what’s the purpose of life?” and “what’s the good life?” Children aren’t a bucket list item, like paragliding or visiting Paris. It’s an others-centered way of living—a radical statement of hope for the future—a declaration that you and I are not the center of the universe, and that the here and now is not the only thing that matters.

In a society already suffering from a birth dearth, the question isn’t whether we can afford to have kids. It’s whether we can afford not to.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/02/breakpoint-the-cost-of-skipping-children/

Believing that the impossible becomes possible by congressional mandate is the essence of what Jacques Ellul called “the political illusion.” That illusion was on clear display last week when freshman New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey released what they call the “Green New Deal.”

The summary of their plan was posted on Ocasio-Cortez’s website Thursday but then taken down after mockery and criticism, even from within her own party. This Green New Deal was billed as a solution, not only to climate change but pretty much to all of society’s ills, and is more ambitious than either its Depression-era namesake or Al Gore’s wildest dreams.

Writing at The Federalist, David Harsanyi described the proposal as an “overhaul of modernity.” Among its stated goals was to eliminate all fossil fuels, including oil, coal, and natural gas, as well as nuclear energy—all within ten years. It also promised to phase out 99 percent of existing automobiles and all other “combustion-engine vehicle[s],” whether on land, air, or sea, replacing them with electric vehicles, for which charging stations will be built “everywhere.”

Once that’s done, the legislators want to “retrofit every building in America,”— yes, that’s a quote, again—with “state of the art energy efficiency.” They also want to ground all airplanes within a decade and replace them with “highspeed rail.” No word yet on how much the railway to Hawaii will cost.

The Green New Deal also promised a “family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and a pension” for every American, as well as free education for life, including college and trade school, “healthy food,” “safe, affordable, adequate housing,” and “economic security” for all, even if they are “unable” or—get this—“unwilling” to work—2 Thessalonians 3:10 gives a clear response to that idea.

As many commentators noted, the Green New Deal is really an attempt by a radical wing of the Democratic Party to signal its ideological purity. According to Jonah Goldberg at National Review, this is more utopian Christmas list than it is legislation. Even if Congress were to pass it—which would never happen—they couldn’t actually act on it in any real sense.

And yet, Harsanyi points out, it’s worth noting that during its very short life, the proposal garnered endorsements from Democratic presidential hopefuls Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and Beto O’Rourke. Because it struck such a chord with the up-and-coming of the party, we’d be foolish to dismiss it as mere posturing.

There is a worldview behind the Green New Deal, which as Goldberg writes, “is dangerous.” The proposal, like every worldview, answers at least two questions: (1) what’s wrong with the world, and (2) how can we fix it? On both counts, the Green New Deal is profoundly out-of-touch with reality.

Rather than human evil, the breakdown of the family, or the compromise of morality, the Green New Deal identifies the modern economy as the problem, and promises to dismantle it without offering any viable replacement. It also guarantees free money, housing, education, healthcare, and even food, without any realistic way to pay for it.

In short, what Ocasio-Cortez and Markey offer is the state as our savior. And they seem to believe that this is not only wise, but economically and technologically possible, if Washington will only decree it.

The Green New Deal, as unfeasible as it may be, is an expression of a worldview that is very popular and which dominates left-leaning universities and media. It sees all problems as political problems and therefore all solutions as political, too. Though the plan isn’t online anymore, you can be sure legislation is forthcoming. After all, so many of the legislators in power right now hold to some version of this utopian vision of the state, so it could hardly be otherwise.

If we don’t take this worldview seriously, especially in helping the next generation understand and dismantle it, it won’t be a laughing matter.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/02/breakpoint-the-green-new-deal/

Recently scientists in China and the U. S. have used CRISPR gene-editing technology to edit the human genome. The ethical questions raised by these developments are legion, but as John Stonestreet and C. Ben Mitchell discuss today on the BreakPoint podcast, they all boil down to the questions of what it means to be human and from where does human life derive its dignity.

C. Ben Mitchell is the Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University.

Last autumn, a Chinese scientist named Dr. He ignited a rhetorical firestorm when he announced he’d used the technology CRISPR to genetically alter human embryos, which were implanted and brought to birth.

The announcement was quickly followed by hand-wringing, outrage and condemnation from scientists around the world, including the same ones in the United Stated who had created CRISPR in the first place, not to mention let it loose into world with little more ethical guidance than “now, play nice.”

Since then, the only people who seem to have responded with any seriousness to He’s transgression is his now-former employer, the Southern University of Science and Technology in China.

Meanwhile, in the US, some scientists are following Dr. He’s footsteps, though maybe with a bit more caution.

According to a recent report on National Public Radio, “A scientist in New York is conducting experiments designed to modify DNA in human embryos as a step toward someday preventing inherited diseases.”

The report was about Columbia University developmental biologist Dieter Egli, who’s stated goal is “to determine whether CRISPR can safely repair mutations in human embryos to prevent genetic diseases from being passed down for generations.”

Specifically, Egli is using CRISPR to try and repair a genetic defect that cause blindness. If successful, this could prevent people with the mutant gene from passing it on to their children, and would potentially lead to other breakthroughs, such as the ability to “edit embryonic human DNA to prevent many inheritable diseases, like as Tay-Sachs disease, cystic fibrosis, or Huntington’s disease.”

Given the promise of alleviating the level of suffering these diseases cause, it’s difficult to fault Egli’s motives. Bu then again, the same could be said of Dr. He. His goal, as he said, was to prevent the children of HIV-positive parents from inheriting their parents’ condition.

So, given that we really can’t distinguish between the motives of the two projects, why was Dr. He vilified by the entire scientific world while Dr. Egli is not? Why did Dr. He lose his job, while Dr. Egli is enjoying puff-piece interviews by NPR?

The difference is this: Egli is killing the embryos he modifies.

Of course, NPR didn’t exactly put it like that. Instead, they told their listeners that, “So far, Egli has stopped any modified embryos from developing beyond one day so he can study them.” In Egli’s words, “Right now we are not trying to make babies. None of these cells will go into the womb of a person.”

I hope you caught that rhetorical sleight of hand. Though he denies it, Egli has already made “babies.” He can call it a “cell” if he wants, but an embryo is not a cell, certainly not in the same as hair cells or even stem cells.

Like Dr. He, Dr. Egli is experimenting on human persons: embryos.

Obviously, he doesn’t see it this way, and apparently neither did the reporter, hence the euphemism “stopped any modified embryos from developing.” Unless he’s frozen the embryos, the more accurate word for stopping a living being from developing is “killing.”

Let’s walk through the moral absurdity at work here: Both Dr. He and Dr. Egli “manufactured” embryos in a lab for the express purpose of experimenting on them. The Chinese scientist allowed them to develop and be born. This makes him a villain to the larger scientific world.

Egli manufactured embryos and experimented on them, but discarded them as medical waste. That makes it okay?

This is all just further proof that the pearl-clutching and caterwauling that followed the news about Dr. He was a farce. Not that he’s absolved of what he did: It was reckless and troubling and turned another human being into a research subject without consent. But to paraphrase our Lord, let those scientists without sin cast the first stone.

To hear more about this story, listen to the most recent episode of the BreakPoint Podcast, when Dr. Ben Mitchell, a bioethicist at Union University joins me to talk about CRISPR and out culture’s struggle with what it means to be human.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/02/breakpoint-crispr-and-faux-outrage/

John Stonestreet and Warren Cole Smith discuss the dubious scientific and worldview assumptions behind Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “New Green Deal.”

They start off the show, however, remarking on President Trump’s statement in the State of the Union address that every human being is made in the image of God. Is this the most pro-life statement we’ve ever heard from a State of the Union?

They also discuss the relentless persecution by the State of Colorado of cake designer Jack Philips, and President Trump’s shout-out to Chuck Colson and Prison Fellowship for their work with prisoners and the passage of the First-Step Act.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/02/bp-this-week-the-wacky-new-green-deal

Resources

Debunking Planned Parenthood's 3% Myth

Live Action

The State of the Pro-Life Movement

John Stonestreet and Lila Rose, BreakPoint Podcast, January 19, 2019

Check out the Colson Fellows Program!

The Empty Planet

John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, The Point, February 8, 2019

Sticks and Stones . . . and Discrimination

John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, The Point, February 6, 2019

Orcasio-Cortez and Markey propose "New Green Deal"

Harvest Prude, WORLD Magazine, February 8, 2019

Millennials have a pretty bad reputation these days. Some of it’s undeserved, of course, but there are also plenty of stories of perpetual adolescence, entitlement, and refusing to take on the responsibilities of adulthood. 

That description may be true of many young people today, but it’s usually not true of graduates of Summit Ministries, like Haley Halverson.

Haley is the Vice-President of Advocacy and Outreach at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.  This 25-year-old dynamo develops and executes national campaigns to change policies and raise awareness related to child exploitation and human trafficking.

 A list of her accomplishments would have us here all day, but here are a few:  She is a member of the Washington, D.C, Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect. She regularly speaks and writes on topics including child sexual abuse, sex trafficking, prostitution, sexual objectification, and more. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and other publications, and she’s been quoted or appeared in dozens of other media outlets, including the New York Times, NBC’s The Today Show, and USA Today.

 The message that drives her work is clear and distinctly Christian: because all humans have dignity, even the least among us, justice demands that we do everything in our power to protect them.

 Where did Haley Halverson learn these ideas? And how did she develop this passion for serving others? 

If you ask her, she will say that one of the formative experiences in her life was the two-weeks she spent at Summit Ministries in Manitou Springs, Colorado in 2010, just before her senior year in high school.

“The most powerful thing that Summit taught me,” she told my colleague Warren Smith, “is that ideas have consequences.” She said learning that simple phrase was a life-changer for her.

“It directly correlates to my work combatting all forms of sexual exploitation,” she said. “Because at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation we not only address sex trafficking and sexual violence, but we also address forms of sexual abuse and harm that our culture often fails to acknowledge, such as prostitution, pornography, and even sexual objectification in company advertisements or magazines.”

Haley’s training at Summit allowed her to “connect the dots” between ideas and actions. Haley told Warren, “All of these forms of sexual exploitation stem from the ideas that someone can use another person as an object, or that someone is entitled to cross another's sexual boundaries. Summit taught me to think critically about the core ideas or worldviews that motivate both actions and policies, and that's a lesson for which I'll always be grateful.”

I’ve got to admit that I’m not objective about Summit. Before coming to The Colson Center, I helped lead Summit’s summer programs, and I continue to speak there every summer.  I hear stories like Haley Halvorson’s all the time. Lila Rose, a recent guest on our podcast who is, according to the Atlantic, “leading the millennial pro-life movement, is a Summit grad. Federal prosecutor Brian Skaret, who led a team of prosecutors that put away dozens of gang members that terrorized the border town of Juarez, Mexico, is a Summit grad who points to his two-week experience as among the most formative in his life also.

Summit has been shaping students for more than 50 years. Tens of thousands of young people like Haley and Lila and Brian have been through Summit’s two-week worldview training. Today, they’re making a difference in the world.

The process often starts with a mom, dad, grandparent, or mentor seeing a trip to the Summit as an investment in the future. Haley said she had never heard of Summit until her parents brought the idea to her.

So if you’d like to make a lasting investment in the future of a student, aged 16 and up, send them to Summit. Chuck Colson called it the “gold standard” of training young people in worldview.

Conferences are being held in Colorado, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania this summer. Learn more at Summit.org. Or come to BreakPoint.org and click on this commentary. We’ll link you to Summit.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/02/breakpoint-summit-ministries/

In the whole run-up surrounding the push for same-sex marriage and LGBT “rights,” some predicted that the normalization of homosexuality would open the door to other deviant practices. Usually at the top of the list of things being warned against was pedophilia. But we were told over and over that this was offensive, and just an invalid “slippery slope” argument.

Well, it’s been just four years since so-called same-sex marriage was instituted by the Supreme Court, and it’s now clear that the slope was a lot more slippery than ever advertised.

Consider, for example, the growing, nationwide trend of “drag queen story hours” at public libraries. To be clear, these events are exactly what they sound like. Confused men, dressed in flamboyant makeup and women’s clothing, reading  often propagandistic story books to young children. Last weekend, Lansdale Public Library outside of Philadelphia hosted such an event, where a drag queen who goes by the stage name “Annie Christ”—I’m not kidding—read to dozens of elementary school-aged children while in full costume.

This has become an annual event in Lansdale, usually featuring performers who appear at gay night clubs, but drawing fewer and fewer protests from shocked parents and pastors in the community.

Later this month, a Greenville, South Carolina public library plans to hold its own drag queen story hour, and similar events have taken place in Houston, Detroit, and even here in Colorado Springs. The American Library Association gives it’s full approval, claiming that such events foster “a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive society.”

Now let me be clear, drag queen story hour is not the worst news of children being sexualized in our culture. Last month, Huck Magazine featured a 10-year-old Canadian boy named Nemis, who is one of the first so-called “child drag queens.” For the article, this young boy was photographed in full makeup and a dress alongside and touching a nearly naked man in high heels.

Nemis’ mother is not only fine with the photo, she promotes her son’s hyper-sexualization, insisting that he’s just having fun.

A few months earlier, in December, another boy, an 11-year-old named Desmond, reportedly performed a suggestive dance at a New York City-based gay bar while adult men in the audience threw dollar bills at him.

As one of my colleagues with a background in law pointed out, it’s hard to see how the boy’s parents and everyone at the bar aren’t being charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. New York’s newly-elected attorney general, Letitia James, should do exactly that. Every single adult involved in these stories should be prosecuted.

The very fact that no one is in jail yet is proof of just how slippery that slope I talked about earlier really was. But it wasn’t the "L," the "G," or the "B" that really greased the skids. It was the “T.” Normalizing the gender dysphoria of little boys and girls, and by that I mean imposing our radical new experimental ideas about sex and gender on children who have no say in the matter, has proven to be the means for sexualizing them. “They’re just expressing themselves,” we’re told, ignoring the fact that children have no business participating in any kind of sexual expression, least of all for the entertainment of adults.

The fact that I’m here in front of this microphone, telling you about this now on BreakPoint is a little bit disorienting. Thinking about it all as a father is a lot nauseating.  But how we got here is not complicated. Sexualizing children’s identity makes sexualizing their behavior inevitable.

So, what now? What does it mean to live in a culture where sexual displays for and by children are being accepted?

First, we should refuse to accept it—we should refuse to adopt both the language and the mindset that sees this as anything other than abuse. We should protest the daylights out of any library that holds a drag queen story hour, and if you’re in law enforcement or criminal justice, treat sexualizing children as the crime it is! Kids must be sexually off-limits. Why do we even have to say this?

Ultimately, we’re witnessing the de-civilizing of our society, a sickening illustration of how bad ideas create victims. No culture wakes up and decides to exploit its children, but the decades-long process of re-defining human beings according to our sexual ideologies rather than their God-designed dignity is what brought us here.

In the decades to come it will likely fall on Christians, as it did in ancient times, to be the ones who protect children, rather than preying on them.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/02/breakpoint-dragging-the-kids-into-it/

Last week was a rough one in Virginia. Governor Ralph Northam went on radio to justify what can only be called infanticide. Shortly thereafter his now infamous medical school yearbook photo of two men—one in black face and a KKK outfit—was broadcast across the country. 

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, John Stonestreet talks with Pastor Chris Brooks of Woodside Bible Church and host of Moody Radio’s “Equipped” program, about a Christian response to infanticide and to racism. Is the governor credible? Should he step down? What disqualifies an elected official from office?

More importantly, how do we as Christians respond to such outrages? Will we have the courage not only to not be racist, but to actually be anti-racism? Pastor Brooks gives his perspective as an African American pastor.

Resources

Equipped with Chris Brooks

Moody Radio

Virginia governor battles scandal

Harvest Prude, WORLD Magazine, February 4, 2019

Virginia lieutenant governor responds to assault accusations

Harvest Prude, WORLD Magazine, February 5, 2019

The world as we know it is made up of a lot of things, not least of which are ideas. You hear us talk about ideas all the time on BreakPoint, especially those underlying worldview ideas that have enormous cultural consequences. We believe that to understand the culture around us, Christians must understand the ideas that are at work. And we believe that without the right ideas, it will be impossible for Christians to impact the world around them.

Still, ideas alone never change culture. People, committed to ideas, are the ones who change culture. Let me repeat that: Ideas alone can’t change culture. People, committed to ideas, are the ones who change culture. Without people to embrace, articulate, repeat, apply, and embody ideas, ideas will have very little impact.

I think that’s at least partly what my friend and mentor, Dr. Bill Brown, who is now the national director of the Colson Fellows Program, means when he says: “One person committed to a cause is far more effective than a thousand who are merely interested.”

Most effective is when a group of individuals commit to embrace, articulate, repeat, and embody together certain ideas about life and the world, about what it means to be human, about what’s true and good and beautiful, about what the good life is, and about what human flourishing is all about.

Christians, of all people, are called to certain ideas about God, ourselves, life, and the world. But we’re called to more than mere assent to those ideas. We’re called to believe in what is revealed as truth to us, in the Hebrew sense of “belief,” not only to assent but to embrace – which means living it out.

That Christ-followers should live out their faith in the world was one of the ideas deeply embraced by Chuck Colson. And so, when he was challenged about his legacy, he chose to not just focus on launching organizations, writing books, or giving speeches. He believed the most important legacy he could leave would be people that he could train and mentor to engage the culture for Christ.

That vision is what led him to create what was once called the Centurions Program. Today, because it so much reflects what Chuck Colson was all about, we call it the Colson Fellows Program. Currently, over 200 individuals—men, women, young adults, retirees, business leaders, professionals, educators, artists, and more—are studying with us. They are on a deep dive into the ideas that undergird the Christian Worldview and its competing worldviews. They are taking a close look at the cultural issues that matter most. And they are wrestling together in a planning process to embody those true, good, and beautiful ideas in order to join God’s restorative project in the world, which will be fully completed in Jesus Christ.

Colson Fellows follow a curriculum reading significant books on Christian Worldview, learning and interacting online and in person from outstanding worldview teachers, and then meeting together at national and regional residencies. Near the end of the journey, they prepare a plan—with the help of Colson Fellows staff and other Colson Fellows—to articulate, repeat, embody, and advance Christian Worldview in our culture.

Commissioned Colson Fellows have argued cases before the Supreme Court, become university presidents, and been elected to public office. Others are parenting, grandparenting, teaching, loving, caring, and living out their faith wherever God has planted them. Think of it as professional development for Christians from a Christian Worldview.

If you join us this year at the Wilberforce Weekend, you’ll get to meet this amazing class of Colson Fellows and watch as they are commissioned, as well as so many alumni who join us year after year for that event. When commissioned, the Colson Fellows join an alumni network of nearly 2000 others, and it’s growing.

Or better yet, why not consider joining the ranks yourself? Right now, we’re accepting applications for next year’s class of Colson Fellows which will begin late summer of this year. Come to ColsonFellows.org to find out more information, see the curriculum, and hear from Colson Fellows themselves about what the program did for their lives. And you can sign up for a free informational webinar that will be held on Monday February 11.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing about some of the amazing work our commissioned Fellows are doing across the country. So again, come to ColsonFellows.org to learn more and to apply.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/02/breakpoint-ideas-alone-dont-change-the-culture/

Recently, the Department of Health and Human Services granted a Christian foster care agency in South Carolina an exemption from Obama-era anti-discrimination rules. The rules actually discriminated against religious agencies by forcing them to place children in the homes of same-sex couples—or, if they refused, forced them out of business.

The exemption from the Trump Administration is a big win for Miracle Hill Ministries in South Carolina, and it’s good news for Christian and other religious agencies across the country. We can expect that other exemptions will be granted.

Hopefully, the next step from the current administration will be to repeal the obviously discriminatory anti-discrimination rules of the previous administration!

The loyalties of the LGBT movement and its allies to their sexual ideologies far exceed their concern for the children in need of foster care, children who need the help of faith-based organizations like Miracle Hill Ministries.

So good for the Trump Administration. But Mr. President, it’s time to end the discrimination.

For more on faith and culture, come to BreakPoint.org.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/02/the-point-fostering-religious-freedom/