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Breakpoint
Another Assassination Attempt. God, Creation and "The Story of Everything". Planned Parenthood Gender Transitions. And the Pope Downplays Focus on Sexual Activity
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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to breakpoint this week where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian Worldview. Today, we're going to talk about the attempted assassination of President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner and the professed Christian beliefs of the alleged shooter. We're also going to talk about a new documentary exploring the origins of the universe from a Christian perspective. We're so glad you're with us. Stick around. Welcome to breakpoint. This week from the Colson center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center. John, I think we have to start this week with the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner last weekend. Most of our listeners, I'm sure, will be aware of the incident. There was a man from Caltech who took a train across the country and, you know, published a manifesto claiming that he wanted to assassinate President Trump and he was thwarted by the Secret Service. But it was a terrifying incident. I mean, there's a lot of videos of it of the Secret Service kind of storming the event, getting the public officials off the stage, people diving under their tables. Unfortunately, it's kind of a familiar scene at this point, but still terrifying. I'm really grateful that he wasn't successful, but the reason I wanted to talk about it with you is that this incident in particular stands out in a few ways most of the previous assassination attempts of the president. And then I'm also thinking of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and kind of violent political activism, terrorism that we've seen in the last few years. Once we find out more about the perpetrator, it's somebody who is clearly mentally unwell and has a lot of comorbidities, we might call them. And you'll find family members saying, you know, we knew there was a problem or we've reported them before or we were worried. And that certainly doesn't help things necessarily on the other side of it. But this seems different because that does not seem to be the case here. There's not a lot of reports of people claiming that this was an erratic person or someone they were concerned about. And in his manifesto, he basically says, I did this because I thought this person needed to be stopped. Right, referring to President Trump. And then he even says in his manifesto that he's a Christian. And he says, I know that some of you may say I should have just turned the other cheek as a Christian. And he says, well, you know, that's not what the Bible means. The Bible actually is only. That's referring to when you yourself are the one being oppressed. But I'm doing this on behalf of others who are oppressed. I mean, it's obviously madness, but he invokes the Bible and Scripture. Does this event feel different to you like it does to me?
- [02:48]
B
I mean, I guess at some level, certainly the lucidity of the note was kind of striking. Kind of opened it up like a, hey, everybody, guess what I'm doing today? You know, almost like a social media post before going to Disney World or something like that. There has been a lot of conversation about the Christian upbringing that has actually been, I don't want to say, a feature of several acts of mass violence. There's been a handful, if you think of the Covenant School shooter in Nashville, for example. But in most cases, there was a rejection of the faith, there was a rejection of the upbringing. This was kind of an attempt to justify this act within a Christian tradition, which obviously was a bit absurd. I don't know that you can do something like this and be mentally well. But there's also a sense in which there was not the other kind of signs or maybe the extent of the disconnection from reality that you saw. For example, if you go back to the first act of political violence that in recent memory there in Arizona was shooting of Gabby Giffords, and immediately there was an attempt to specifically mark that as an act of right wing political violence. Turned out not to be true at all. Turned out to be. This guy was kind of ranting in his manifesto about all kinds of things. You know, the tyranny of grammar, as somebody mentioned, reminded me of that this, this week. I mean, he mentioned like crazy things. This was different in that sense. The other thing too, and I appreciate a world. I was asked about this on the world and everything in it. And we talked a little bit about the Christian connections. You know, both Nick Eicher and I use the word kid. You know, you talk about a kid growing up in a Christian home. And what we're talking about now is someone who's in their 30s. And there is, I think, also an aspect of a certain aspect of evangelical culture, specifically where a particular generation often is not. Well, it's a, I think, a deeper connection with a larger generational cohort. So I don't want to put it at the feet of evangelicalism, but I do want to say that there's a consistency within some of the mental health issues that we see in the larger generation of that age demographic and specifically the Christian cohort of it as well. There's a consistency, I guess, that you see across the board with high levels of anxiety, high levels of narcissism, high levels of kind of victimhood and so on. And I'm not saying that, you know, somehow us Gen Xers were immune from such sin nature because we have our own, you know, manifestations and expressions of the fall. There is, though, a, I think, a consistency or at least a trend line. I'm looking forward to asking some of these questions to Gene Twenge at the Colson Center National Conference, who's kind of done the definitive work on the generations on a book called Generations. Like she, you know, it's fun when you can, you know, listen to someone and have a conversation about something with someone who's actually written the book on it. And she has done that. And that's going to be, I think, really interesting. She's talked specifically about some of the things we've talked about, the comorbidities where you kind of lay down social media use and you lay down, you know, mental health struggles and you lay down LGBTQ or sexual identities. And these are trend lines that almost seem to mirror one another. They're kind of identical. And we have seen. So if we were going to add in that layer, in many, many other acts of violence or mass shootings recently in particular, there has been a trans identification. There has been an identification as a sexual minority. And people are pointing that out. Well, the media is not pointing that out, but a lot of people are pointing that out. I was thinking about that this week, because many of those acts of violence have taken place here in the state of Colorado. Many of the perpetrators of that violence here in Colorado have been trans identified or queer identified, self identified. And what we're doing instead is our state legislature is trying to skirt around the child's decision, the recent child's decision in the U.S. supreme Court by actually passing a law that says any sort of conversion therapy is harmful, including talk therapy. So they're trying to get around those rules, and there's no statute of limitations. So it's. We actually have evidence of the thing that has caused damage to society, and they're trying to, you know, kind of reverse engineer the whole thing and make it all backwards. You don't have that in this story. So in that sense, that's the, you know, kind of the oddity. In other words, there are several acts here that are outlier, including, to go back to where we started, the kind of lucidity of a note that just says, this is what I think I should do because. And my Christian identification has something to do with that. So it is a bit bizarre in that way. I hope it's still an outlier at some point. Outliers stop being outliers, and they move more and more to the center. And that's what I think remains, you know, to be. To be seen.
- [08:21]
A
Yeah, you know, it's really. When you were talking just now, I was thinking about Christopher Lasch's book about the rise of narcissism, and he was writing in, I think, the 70s or 80s, and he was talking about the rise in the actual diagnoses of, you know, narcissistic personality disorder. And I realize people might not find this as interesting as I do, but I think there is a distinction between mental illness in the sense that I think about it with regards to shooters. So people who, you know, are delusional or are having hallucinations, people with, like, schizophrenia and these, like, real, tangible disorders that you could almost see on an MRI or however that works. And that is certainly overrepresented in a lot of people who commit mass violence. But then there's a. At a certain point, you look at something like Christopher Lasch's study of the rise of narcissistic personality disorder, and you wonder if this is more a reflection of how people are being. I mean, if it's. If it's a reflection of worldview at some level. Like, it's not a chemical disorder in people. It's like an antisocial way people are viewing the world. And I feel like that applies for my limited knowledge of this guy in this case. And I think I told you yesterday when we were talking about this on the phone. I've been. Over the last couple of years, I've gotten really obsessed with reading about the era of King Henry VIII in Great Britain, who was just an absolutely fascinating, obvious narcissist. And it's really. I mean, as. As gory as it is. It's really interesting to read about that era. And we were in London a couple months ago and got to take the girls to go see, like, his coat of armor and all that. And one of the things that sticks out about that era is that they, including King Henry, but everybody around him as well, they considered England at that time to be, if not the most, one of the most civilized societies in the world. That they were beyond the times of barbarism, they had evolved beyond that. They were the place you went for peace and prosperity and right thinking and all of that. And it was Incredibly irrational and barbaric from our perspective. I mean, the beheadings were many, and they were often quick. And by quick, I mean like somebody was within the king's favor one day, and the next day he wasn't. And people went along with it out of sometimes fear, out of sometimes belief. But there was a man. I was reading about Anne Boleyn's beheading, and of course, we all know the schism in the church that. That caused and just the absolute upheaval at that time. But there was, you know, they called in a man from France who was trained. His entire livelihood was a person who beheads criminals. And he had learned how to do it well, and he'd learned how to use the weapons well. And by all accounts, this was a person who was just a part of society and who got hired. He was a laborer. But it's. I read that with my eyes, and I'm like, well, this person was clearly sick.
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B
Who.
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A
Who sets out to do that as a job, right? There's. There's a. A lesson in here for me about how powerful cultural norms and expectations are that you don't understand their impact on you. I think we are susceptible. As susceptible to this as anybody else. That you could be in the middle of a time like that and still have these weird distinctions and look at something like beheadings and say, yes, tis a part of our normal civilizational life.
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B
And you'd have to say, tiz, because it was that time when you'd have
- [11:52]
A
to say, tis, but do you know what I mean? And I'm increasingly scared that this kind of lucid, narcissistic political activist turned terrorist is less a reflection of mental illness and is more a reflection of changing cultural norms.
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B
Well, I think there's some obviously biblical precedent to say there's nothing new under the sun, that the age that's supposed to have ushered in another degree of civilization through technology, through moving more towards democracy in a way, from monarchy or whatever else. If we continue kind of the misguided thesis of cultural evolution was the 20th century, which turned out to be the bloodiest century in human history, and it was writing the promises of utopia. This is all in Nietzsche, for example, who predicted all of this and said that if you kind of have to now remake the rules, you may think yourself quite sophisticated as you do this, either as an individual or as a society, but there's going to be an awful lot of bloodshed to move forward. I'm also tempted to say, hey, it's all in Truman Right. Because the narcissism that Christopher Lasch first wrote about decades ago now has kind of emerged and borne fruit. And it's not just a kind of what we tend to think about, oh, that person's a narcissist, which usually is, you know, pre clinical diagnosis, sort of real sense. But yeah, I mean, it might be accurate, might not, but, but, but, but you have a culture that normalizes. Narcissism is really, at the end of the day, what the rise and triumph of the modern self argues, which is the world now has been built around this idea that the most significant thing we can do in our lives is to. Is to express ourselves. And that expression is who we are. And that expression then needs to be embraced by everyone else, and we have the responsibility to embrace everyone else's expression. And when you do all of that, what I think is the topic of Carl Truman's most recent book, which we're actually offering this month at the Colson Center. I was privileged enough to get an early copy of it. I've endorsed it. I was pretty honored to endorse it, honestly, because we have talked so much about the parable of the madman here. And Truman's book is really built around that parable coming true. Right? Which is the end of the parable. The madman who goes on this epic rant of life without God, then says, oh, I've come too early, but this is on its way. And Truman's making that argument which we've made, which is like, oh, it's here. That prophecy was here. And in other words, it's not just the disassociation from, you know, a world kind of built on norms and traditions. The earth was unchained from its son, to use the parable of the madman's wording. But now we've oriented it around something else, and it's completely unstable. And that's what he had written about in the first book. And so the desecration of man, which is the new one, really makes this. This. This argument. So, you know, while we talk about a specific extreme, and there's still something that shocks us in an act of brazen violence, like what happened at the White House correspondent's dinner, the question about norms is a really important one because might not be the normalization of an act of violence, but I appreciated Van Jones on CNN making the connection with Luis Mangione, who assassinated the United Healthcare CEO in broad daylight. His act was not normalized, but the reasoning for his act was justified. Remember, he was celebrated, and you had a Little bit of that here at a new level that okay, well, this is kind of going too far. But I agree with everything that he says up to this point. Well, that is a process of normalization. And it's not technology that makes us moral. It's not democracy that makes us moral. In fact, it's the opposite. John Adams said the kind of nation that we had in the United States could only be preserved and kept by a moral people. In other words, morality and virtue comes before this. This doesn't make you moral and virtuous. So it is an absolute misguided notion that somehow the world is in this kind of process of moral evolution. That we're becoming somehow different people because we have cooler stuff or because we have bigger buildings or because we have self driving cars or because we have, you know, maybe a form of government that, you know, recognizes a much broader degree of human rights. Now don't get me wrong, a world with these kind of governments is way better than the chaos of Henry VIII or you know, a million other civilizations that we could point to in the past. But I think also the argument of Os, Guinness and Truth Rising stands, which is, there's no reason to think this is going to go on if you don't have it attached to eternals, to those. There's no reason to think that this better civilization than all the ones before it is sustainable if it's unhooked or untethered from the thing that gave it life in the first place. So I think that's what we're talking about. So you know, it's worth kind of bringing. Bringing that up.
- [17:36]
A
Yeah, agreed. It's a scary moment. Well, John, let's talk now about a new movie that's coming out called the Story of Everything. This is from Fathom Entertainment and we have some friends that are featured in this movie. It's kind of filmed as a documentary style, just really beautifully done. It looks like moving picture about the story of creation and how the fingerprint of a maker is really imprinted on everything we see. Dr. Stephen Meyer, who has participated in past Colson center national conferences and has been involved in various things with the Colson Centers throughout the years, is featured in this. I've seen the trailer. I haven't seen the actual movie. Have you been able to see the full thing yet?
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B
No, no, I didn't get. I wasn't able to get an advanced kind of viewing mainly because it just came across my radar. But I just, I think it's a. It's a fascinating conversation that goes back. And I just wanted to hit it on a couple levels. First of all, I think it'll be a great film that the Discovery Institute does fantastic stuff, which is Steve Meyer's group, and he's helping produce this, obviously has John Lennox, who's a. I would say a national treasurer, but he's British, so I guess we have to say international treasurer. And he's speaking to this as well as a lot of other thought leaders about this. And I think it's such an interesting conversation. I'm old enough to remember talking to young people about what they were going to face in college. And what they were going to face was the tyranny of neo Darwinian theory and the tyranny of a naturalistic vision of evolution that was going to guide everything. And they were going to have to make the choice between, you know, sometimes between saying what's true, that God exists and God designed and created the world and a grade, you know, is there a way. We talked about third ways, like Daniel. Is there a way that you can demonstrate a knowledge of evolutionary theory while also pointing it out? And of course, now the challenges for kids at college have moved from origins to ethics. Now they get in a lot of trouble for saying things like sex belongs in the context of marriage and boys can't become girls and so on. But the conversation still matters because the preponderance of evidence for, first of all, that there's a beginning. And that's where this, I think, this documentary begins. If there's a beginning, there has to be a beginner, right? Because nothing comes from nothing. As Fraulein Maria sang in the Sound of Music, nothing ever could. So if there's ever a time in the history of the universe or in the story of everything, to borrow the phrase, the title of the movie, where there was nothing. And I mean, really nothing. You know, what happens is sometimes people want to smuggle in some things and call it nothings. They want to smuggle in energy, they want to smuggle in matter. They want to smuggle in something that banged and say, you know, it just came out of, you know, but that's not nothing, right? If something banged, it wasn't nothing, right? So you have to have something and then to go on and say, look, this is what we now know about the intricate design. So now you're talking about not just something, you're talking about someone with a purpose and with a design. And suddenly that hypothesis of naturalistic neo Darwinian theory becomes untenable, and it's a theory in crisis, as Many people have written it. I mean, look, we were talking 20 years ago about how if you did not embrace the Neo Darwinian assumptions, you would not be published in major scientific journals. There's still gatekeepers and there's still ideologues that are doing that, but there are cracks in the system. Just like at the turn of the century in academic philosophy, there was no kind of elbow room for anything other than analytic philosophy and the philosophy for religion was dead. And then you had a guy like Alvin Planaga and others who kind of created all this elbow room within the academic discipline of philosophy. And I think we've seen a lot of the same thing here. And there was a very motivated and intent movement to introduce this stuff back into the academy. The wedge hypothesis of Philip Johnson kind of pushing this out. There's a story of this too. So I don't know, I guess I just wanted to. To a endorse the film, but also say it is a fun time to see. This is in the spirit, I guess. Over the last couple months we got so many emails. Stop talking about all the bad stuff. Talk about the good stuff. Well, here you go. Here's another good stuff to talk about. That there is obvious things in the universe that point to something beyond the universe itself. It points to a beginning point and it points to a beginner and it points to a fact that the beginner was a designer. Now, that's not the same thing as, you know, the trinitarian God who sent Jesus as in the flesh, to save the world from sin and evil and death. But it's the right starting point and it is an amazing thing to see kind of where all this has gone. I'm not that old, clearly. I'm so young, and yet I've seen this development even in my, you know, kind of career.
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A
So bright eyes when she tailed.
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B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm at my prime as. As Doc Holliday would say. I just think that's a. It's a. It's a cool thing. So shout out to the Discovery Institute folks. Shout out to this film story of everything. And I think it's worthwhile.
- [23:24]
A
Isn't it interesting that there are so many fields that we are willing to say that there's still. There remains a lot of mystery or things to be discovered. Like if you go into any. I have a friend who is a physicist at Brown University. You talk to a physicist. He studies theoretical physicists. So he is the smartest person I know. Quite possibly. But if you talk to him or you Talk to people in mathematics or even medicine. There's still an approach even at the highest level institutions that there's a lot we don't know and we're still trying to study and find out. When it comes to this one question, right, the origins of things or the unit or how things came to be or how life happened, you're like not allowed to have that same spirit. And I think that just you have to say, like you're saying there's gatekeepers. You have to acknowledge it, it happened by accident, it was purely chemical. And you know, here's what we know about it. And that make all kinds of leaps and assumptions. I think that just reveals, like you said, people have a really deep seated spiritual commitment to not being open to the Creator and that that is the work of the enemy. That makes total sense to me. Because once you, if you allow that door to open as it should be opened, then you're in danger of finding the Lord.
- [24:41]
B
Yeah, well, look, the connection between how we think about the universe and what that means in terms of moral responsibility has been well documented, not only in Holy Scripture, but amidst some of these people who were philosophically committed to naturalism. You have that, you know, every once in a while you have that kind of honest philosopher like Thomas Nagel who says, it's not just that I don't believe in God, I don't want there to be a God. And he goes on to say, I don't want the universe to be like that. And it's interesting to me that kind of in the early days of. Not the early days, but just a couple decades ago, in the midst of this kind of debate about origins and the existence of God. A central figure was of course, Richard Dawkins. And he was part of a movement that says God is a delusion and religion poisons everything. And now he wants a universe like the one that Christianity developed, right? He wants a universe with moral norms. He wants a universe with wokeness stamped out. He wants that kind of a universe, but he doesn't want the origin story that brings you that kind of universe. It kind of goes to the conversation we had a couple weeks ago of the morality and the miracles of Jesus. Well, it's pointing back to the same kind of fundamental premise. Think about the. What Lewis said that the most profound statement of all time is in the beginning God. Because everything that follows is different based on how you answer that question. So it's important to stop and go, look, do we have a, you know, evidence for this? There's a Wall Street Journal piece on this documentary that actually kind of gets to the heart of why this is such a, I think, worthwhile to pay attention to, basically that the premise of the film is this bold claim that science has brought us to the point to undermine the thing that we assumed in science. Right. Like you can't let God in the door. Now, basically, what we know about a beginner, what we know about simply must points back. Yeah. So anyway, a lot of fun. And I think it comes out this evening here Friday night. So it's, it's something that could be checked out.
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A
Awesome. Let's take a quick break. John we'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week.
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B
The 2026 Rooted Educator worldview Summit is right around the corner. And this year's theme is created and called Biblical Anthropology for Christian Education. We will hear John Stonestreet, Sean McDowell, Michael Craven, Megan Allman, Elizabeth Urbanowitz and more. And you can save $30 when you register by May 31st with the code ROOTED30 register@colsoneducators.org Rooted. That's colsoneducators.org RootED.
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A
We're back on Breakpoint this week. John I want to turn now to a report from Concerned Women for America, which I really appreciate that they did this because they took a look at Planned Parenthood's own reporting on their activities, which is always helpful to do because Planned Parenthood knows how to fudge the numbers, let's say. And what Concerned Women for America found was that in the past year, in 2025, their involvement in, quote, unquote, gender care increased by 40%. This is interesting on a whole host of levels. So Planned Parenthood offers, you know, hormone treatment and so called, you know, like medicine basically, for chemicals for people who want to, you know, appear more masculine or appear more feminine, whatever it is. This is clearly we've talked, we've talked about this on the show before, that Planned Parenthood has been pivoting towards this in the last few years because of how dedicated they are to a sort of physical nihilism. And, you know, that clearly started with abortion, but now they're pivoting in part probably because chemical abortions are becoming such a large share of the number of abortions committed in the United States that in order to sustain their business model, they've got to find a new thing to sell. And this is clearly the direction that they're heading. Weirdly, they Planned Parenthood themselves are, it looks like, trying to downplay the amount of this that they're selling. And that's why Concerned Women for America went through the actual data and sort of compiled to look at how much this is increasing over the past couple of years. And it is really, really increasing. Do you think this is due to, you know, their business model suffering a little bit under chemical abortions, or is this just more die hard allegiance to, you know, the left wing cause of gender, whatever?
- [29:25]
B
Well, I don't. Yeah, I mean, listen, it is politically a left wing cause, but I don't want to reduce either of these things, either abortion to the. Or the gender stuff to being a political issue. This isn't, you know, prior to that, there's an ideological commitment to a way of thinking about life and the world and society that really has nothing to do with parenthood, has nothing to do with family. It's the exact opposite of this. So there's an. And this, by the way, of course, goes back to the very founder, right, who was essentially trying to free up sexual expression. And at that time, Margaret Sanger's main way of doing that was, you know, separating sex from babies to have the kind of world that she wanted to have, and that was a world in which sex could be freely experienced as a means of salvation. She talks about sex and that sort of way, but also that she could build a eugenics, a society through eugenics. She could have the right people having kids and not have, more importantly, the wrong people having kids. And for her, the wrong people were people of a lower socioeconomic status, which she saw as being kind of completely a genetic sort of thing, and also people of. Who were. Who were not white. So you put those two things together. This is all always been about an ordering of society moving us to the next stage of quote, unquote, sexual freedom goes from being able to free up the sexual act, from the natural consequences of potential children, to actually going to then sexual freedom of expression, you know, not just behaving, but being. And seeing sex as being. So all of this is ideologically consistent within the framework that they've embraced from the very beginning. It's interesting to me that it did have an uptick in 2025, because that's when, culturally speaking, across the board, we saw a downtick. You could say, right. More people questioning whether this move into the transgender revolution was the right one. You had medical, actual medical facilities completely backing off of this. That's when you really started. You really saw a start of these institutions that have embraced it, abandoning it. And of course, that's almost always done out of, you know, legal risk. It's because of the. The risk of being sued, the risk of liability. And there is. Planned Parenthood has been able to get around so much legal risk because they go unmonitored. They're untouchable. You know, the federal funding continues, including under this administration. So you. While some of it has been cut off, others, it has continued. So Planned Parenthood has this privileged state, so they can continue to put themselves as an architect of social engineering, which is what they've always been. And they've done it in this particular way, and it's been powerfully. I hate to use the word effective, because I don't mean that in a good way. I mean it in a bad way. But they've been able to actually orchestrate their model to reach their intended ends. Right. I mean, and somehow go beyond social scrutiny. There has not been a more systemically racist organization in the history of our nation than Planned Parenthood. When you talk about the sheer scale and the longevity. Okay. And somehow they're a champion of minorities. Right. I mean, the. The way that this has proceeded is really. This kind of. There's really not an explanation other than demonically protected, if you ask me. Right.
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A
Yeah. I was going to say they. They read like a character in a really badly written on the nose novel like that. They're the villain. We' as an organization that wants to eradicate a race, and then we're gonna build an empire on getting women to kill their babies. And then when that starts to maybe wane or change a little bit, then we'll move into the sphere where we just get people to mutilate their own bodies.
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B
Yeah. Well, and we're gonna. We're gonna convince the entire place while we're doing all of this that we're the good guys.
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A
We're gonna take the moral high ground. Yeah.
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B
And we're even gonna convince our own employees. Right. I mean, you know, that. That we are the ones that are doing what's right and the others are doing, you know, what's wrong.
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A
Yeah. Pretty disgusting. Yeah. I would just never. Just don't. Mamas, don't let your kids walk near a Planned Parenthood. It's. I believe it is truly demonic. What's going on in there. Speaking of John, because I. So I agree with you. We've talked about this before on the show. That these issues of who we are, including sexuality, are fundamental to our understanding of the world and how we interact with ourselves and with others and with morality generally. I'm bringing this up in light of some comments made by Pope Leo, recently somebody asked him about whether the Catholic Church should bless same sex unions, which under Pope Francis, that happened under a couple of cardinals. And there's been a. This has been an ongoing kind of bubbling debate within the Catholic Church for the last several years. And Pope Leo's response was a little inscrutable. But what he said was, my hope is that things like religious freedom and spiritual well being and the health of people and extreme poverty and war, that these issues will become more important, that we will weigh those with more importance than we weigh this issue. My reaction on its face was that that was a obfuscation and a really illogical kind of subsurf. What would. What's the word he was putting. Pretending that that issue was less important than it is, that it. That how we view what we say about sexuality and marriage and the human body and how we were made doesn't have something to say about every other area of life, including all of those things that he just mentioned.
- [35:31]
B
Yeah, well, I. I don't know. And. And this has been kind of the challenge with Francis during the papacy of. Of Francis as well. He said things off the cuff, often early and often right, that a group like the LGBTQ community looked to seize upon as a way of kind of claiming victory over yet another sphere of society. And his words were sloppy in the case of Pope Francis and sometimes just flat out wrong. But also the analysis of how important those words are in kind of the overall Catholic Church, with the exception of places like Germany, where the bishops are just rogue and doing whatever they want, and the discipline of them within the system was slow and lax, but overall, the movement didn't really happen. There wasn't really an embrace of this. I think this is kind of similar to that very sloppy language here by the Pope. There's not a hierarchy of issues when the fundamental question behind them is what does it mean to be human? That is the central issue in Western culture and modern society. The understanding of human dignity that comes only from Christianity is central to any sort of social issues that we can talk about. And the emergence of Western culture as being a place where Western human dignity was the most talked about, championed and protected. Not perfectly, of course, but you can't look at another civilization that did it better. All this comes from a biblical understanding of what it means to be human and being made in the image of God. And so to place some conversations over that, I think, is when sexuality has been so front and center. It was just kind of sloppy language. I don't know what he means. I Don't know if he has this kind of overall agenda. Some people quickly believe that he did and that he was in the realm or in the line of Francis. I don't know that we know that yet. But I also know that some people certainly seized upon this and certainly that community is going to seize upon this as, again, another example that we've got. The church too. Maybe you do. It's too early to see that the Catholic Church in particular works over centuries, not over papacies. And we'll see. It was sloppy language. It should not have been said. It's not true. And I don't think it will be true even in his papacy. And I think it's worth pointing out that, look, issues of sexuality are issues of human identity. Issues of human identity are the central concerns of our day. And you're not going to get, for example, immigration right. If you don't get what it means to be human. Right. And right now, the dominant counter to Christianity, understanding of what it means to be human, is coming out of the sexual revolution. So there's just no way to kind of skirt around that to try to flank the enemy on this one. You got to get this one. You got to get this one. Right.
- [38:47]
A
And the issue of religious freedom, I mean, in the west, the most dominant expression of religious illiberalism is to impede people's rights to live as if they believe that human sexuality is real and created by God.
- [39:04]
B
Yeah, My guess is he wasn't referring to that in religious freedom. My guess is he was talking about international persecution.
- [39:09]
A
I know, but even in other parts of the world, so much of persecution is sex based, which has again, has to do with who we are and how we were made and what it means to be man and woman. Like all of this is so related.
- [39:22]
B
Yeah, Well, I think it's primarily what you see in the West. I again, my guess is he's talking about Islam and he's talking about, which
- [39:30]
A
is North Korea involves sex based discrimination as well. Like, it's not all that. But Islam does not believe women are equal to men. Right. Like this is a real part of. Yeah, yeah, it's all. It's all a part of it. All right, let's take another break, John. We'll be right back with more breakpoint this week.
- [39:51]
C
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- [40:48]
A
Well, John, now I want to ask you if you saw a video this week of a hearing in the House in which a Republican representative from Texas, Brandon Gill, was speaking to a pro abortion lawyer. They were talking about the Face act, which is the freedom of access to, oh gosh, I can't remember. This is what's always used to prosecute people who pray or congregate outside of abortion clinics. And he started describing the abortion procedures to this lawyer and man, she did not want to hear it. Did you see this video?
- [41:19]
B
Yeah. I really appreciate, appreciate it when political leaders and legislators and so on are willing to actually not just talk about abortion in the abstract, but talk about it specifically. It was a very, very powerful video because abortion when it's hidden is because it was allowed to remain hidden for so long in the American experience. This evil was allowed to flourish and hidden evil flourishes. And that's, that's what we've seen with the issue of abortion. I do want to say too that we're now to the point where 60% of abortions are performed without these gruesome procedures. Still gruesome. It still is something where we're being told, oh, it's completely safe, it's completely safe, it's completely safe. It's like taking Tylenol. And gratefully, there are many people pushing back on that and doing so, I think in a very, very powerful way. Lila Rose began a debate this week, I think, in one of the California universities talking about a story in which a boyfriend or a husband, I think it was snuck in the abortion pill against his wife's knowledge. And so that's kind of the new face of this. But it doesn't change the fact that when surgical abortions are performed, it is a gruesome, gruesome procedure. And what we're talking about are things like dismemberment. So I think, look, the logic and the reason is still on the side of pro lifers. The gut level reaction to what is actually Happening in surgical procedure that's still on the side of life. And we need to continue to talk about that in as many places as we can. It is just so interesting that there just continues to be this willful blindness of saying, no, the right thing to do is to protect access to these gruesome procedures. People can say that out loud. And I think the more that that inconsistency or just kind of moral. I don't even know what you call it. It's not inconsistent. I guess it's just morally bizarre, irrational and awful. Needs to be exposed.
- [43:30]
A
Yeah. This feels like a norms conversation too. It feels like a moral fable that we're sitting here debating how many feet in front of a building you have to be and you're not willing to discuss what's happening inside.
- [43:42]
B
Yeah. What's happening in the building.
- [43:44]
A
Yeah. And the difference between those two things. There was a ruling from SCOTUS this week related to this a little bit. There is a pregnancy center in New Jersey that has been ordered by the state to release all of its donor lists. And the pregnancy center has pushed back, asking for the right not to do this, calling it a violation of the first amendment. And unanimously, the Supreme Court this week didn't decide necessarily on the merits of this case, but said that the pregnancy center can continue pursuing the case in federal court. It was a unanimous decision. That feels like a big deal.
- [44:19]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's not a decision that this New Jersey law is unconstitutional. It's a decision that these pregnancy centers can challenge the constitutionality of this New Jersey law. But that's big. And it's also big nine nothing. It's notable that the court said that the state cannot coerce organizations that are committed religiously or ideologically to a cause to expose their donor base. That's a way that the state, I think, will try and has tried to intimidate organizations that don't go along with what it thinks is important. We've seen attempts like that out of California and so on. So I think it's a significant thing that the court apparently wants to hear this. And it could be huge in states like Colorado and other places where you know that the legislature is trying kind of new ways to punish people who dissent from kind of the orthodoxy that the state wants to enforce.
- [45:25]
A
Yeah. Well, speaking of the Supreme Court, John, we did get a few questions this week from people about the other decision that made a lot of headlines this week. Not a unanimous decision in this case, but ruling that the state of Louisiana cannot create basically a purposefully gerrymandered district with the expressed purpose of having a majority black voting district, and that the district they tried to create didn't make a lot of sense geographically. It kind of went all the way up the state and, you know, according to what the original stated purposes of these districts are, which are to congregate people who have shared interests based on their location, it seemed to violate that. But the. The idea behind this district was that black voters have been underrepresented. And so this was going to remedy that. And the Supreme Court this week said, you cannot do that under the Voting Rights Act. It says you cannot explicitly create districts with race in mind. Does this mean, you know, one of our questioners asked, are we post racist now?
- [46:26]
B
Well, I don't. I think just to be clear, too, that the ruling wasn't that race can never be a consideration. It's in a way similar to the decision about Ivy League acceptance policies. If you remember that, in terms of, you know, where was Harvard and Yale and some other schools guilty of making only racial quotas? I think it's not just. It's exclusively kind of racial categories, but it does bring up that question, like, are we at a new place? Because obviously, the Civil Rights act, which tried to bring these kind of intentional reversing of racism into policy making. I think when you're talking about voting rights and you're talking about gerrymandering and creating districts and and so on, that you're just kind of in a strange. Another kind of strange category of the law and what it means to be a citizen. But there needed to be some law that preceded culture back in the 60s. There needed to be ways to ensure that people who were discriminated against could actually access all aspects of society. But I will say that the idea, I think, at the heart of this particular decision that we don't want to divide up our nation by race, either in a discriminatory way or in a way trying to reverse that discrimination. Right. And that that in and of itself is fraught with difficulty and problem, and in and of itself is racist. It tells us two things about the human condition. Number one is that we'll never be post race because we'll never be post sin, and we'll never be post sin. And because we'll never be post sin, we still have this kind of sin of partiality which the scripture talks about over and over and over. That's always there. Now, that sin takes various forms in the United States. Historically, it has taken a form of racism, and. But we have seen that across the board. We've seen that in all kinds of nations and throughout human history, and not just in one direction. We see it in all kinds of direction. And then also I think it says something else, which is the law cannot fix the human heart. In other words, you cannot socially engineer a society away from sin. You can't fix the human condition by politics. And so that is when trying to fix racism becomes in and of itself racist. And I think we've seen that in many ways in recent years, particularly through critical race theory and the application of that across the board. It's a damnable idea that is based on the same fundamental lie and the same fundamental mistake that the. That our primary identities are the color of our skin or the ethnicity to which we belong. There's so much more to what makes us human than that. And the reductionism of the human person down to that can look like the slavery of the past and can look like the attempts to reverse and eradicate human sin out of the equation today. We can't do it. And this tells us about, I think, the limits of politics. It tells us about the extent of the human condition. And I think that this is another place where a Christian worldview has so much to offer that we have a framing of what it means to be human that comes out of holy Scripture in which we're created in the image of God. And there's this essential category of who we are that grounds our human dignity, no matter who we belong to, no matter what race, no matter what socioeconomic status, no matter what, you know, whatever category of human identity that we've kind of added to this equation, and that there is a diversity to the human condition, to the human race, but that diversity, to reduce it down to silly things like diversity is our strength and that sort of thing, and then put everything kind of front load everything into that bucket, from the color of our skin to the ethnicity to sexual behavior. It's just a bizarre way of thinking about what it means to be human. And it's ultimately problematic when you try to apply that. So there's a lot to be said here. But the question, are we post racist as a society? Is we're not going to be post partiality, we're not going to be post fall, we're not going to be post sin. And the law cannot take us there. You know, what can take us there is a radical transformation of the human heart. And that's what I think about a lot. I was just reminded recently of Tom Torrance Story, who was a part of a white supremacist group, and then had his radical transformation. He did a lot of work with Chuck Colson, both in the prisons and also in the early days of the Centurions program to kind of wrestle with the sin of racism and how the gospel is what frees us from that. And that's the only thing ultimately that can change the human heart. Sometimes you need laws upstream from culture, but never think that a law can do more than a law can do, because it can't. It cannot change a human heart. Only Christ does that.
- [52:08]
A
Well, John, in the spirit of questions from some of our listeners, we have a few really interesting and weighty ones this week. I want to read part of this one. I have a daughter who, because of cancer treatment, is unable to have her own children. And she and her husband would like to adopt, but they would like to this time use an embryo. So not her, not her or her husband's genetic material, but I think they're talking about like a snowflake adoption. So an embryo that was created by a fertility clinic years ago with donor eggs and donor sperm. Would it be unethical for she and her husband to take one of these embryos and ask a surrogate to carry it for them?
- [52:48]
B
Well, it is an incredible question. What a scenario. Here you have a couple who have adopted. And adoption has historically been a uniquely Christian contribution to the world and something that can be rightly called, I think Christianity Today called it a couple several years ago now, the kind of the reformation of adoption. But it's not perfect. It's not without its own challenges, which is kind of part of this story as well. I am a big fan of snowflake adoption specifically because right now we have a human rights crisis on a scale that is unimaginable for most people that over somewhere between a million and a million and a half embryos are frozen in time because of the way we do ivf, which is why I'm critical of in vitro fertilization, especially how it's done right now in America, which is completely the Wild West. Not just in America, but across the Western world. It's created a marketplace of fertility. It's create turned children, embryos into commodities. When other people, including many other Christians, just uncritically say, oh, we need to be pro life, so therefore we're pro ivf. Either they don't know what they're talking about or they're hiding the actual human rights crisis that is at the heart of all of this. Just this past week, I actually ran into a couple who have our parents having adopted embryos, biological siblings, two little ones, super cute, by the way. And there's just a wonderful part of their story. And so I'm such a fan of the hope and the redemption that Christians have brought to the world through that kind of adoption. Introducing the surrogate conversation here, though, changes things for me. And the reason is because there is an inherent connection between the embryo and the mother who carries it. And that is something that should not be taken lightly and should not be violated. The difficulty here is you're introducing a third party parent typically is only a redemptive act if the brokenness is already there. So in this case, the brokenness is already there. This child is left suspended in time. What do you do? I think there's ethical issues here. I have a strong opposition to surrogacy because of introducing that third party. Typically a surrogate is used to carry a child that is created. So the brokenness is being created. The orphan is being created. In the case where there's already an orphaned embryo, you know, gosh, it becomes an ethically, I think maybe better scenario because, you know, the ultimate right that somebody has is the right to life. And that right should be protected. And if this is the way to do that. But, you know, we're still kind of contributing to an industry, the fertility industry, in a way that I think is problematic. It's a hard one. This is a really, really hard one. Snowflake adoption, I think, has had its own ethical challenges in and of the system because of the gatekeepers and the way that it's being handled. And some of the big adoption agencies that specialize in this have had their own issues. Introducing a surrogate in this conversation is part of a larger, I think, conversation about surrogacy. And it's problematic, but I understand the scenario here, which kind of brings up the fact that we should have an ethical conversation about, about procreation where the exceptions aren't the rule. And right now it's just kind of the wild west. And if you can think of it, you can do it. And it creates an ethical scenario here. That's a problem. So I struggle with this one. I think in and of itself, in a case like this, adoption is a redemptive act in which a couple can provide a loving home to a child that's been created and the embryo counts as that because there's no moral difference between an embryo that we all once were and the child that we will all once were. And. And that's the scenario Here. So I hesitate. And theoretically, you would say, well, why is there a difference between adopting a child that is already born an embryo, and it's the surrogate, it's the introducing of another mother figure. So I think you have less of an ethical challenge there.
- [57:43]
A
And we're starting to see, too. We know that the inherent challenges in adoption and most children who are adopted do develop, you know, a sense of longing or not everybody feels hurt. I won't, you know, I can't speak for everybody, but. But we know children, even through, you know, beautiful adoption stories, often express a longing to know about their birth parents. And they. They feel, you know, a certain loss associated with that. And introducing a surrogate into the process introduces another option for loss.
- [58:16]
B
That longing tells you something. It's not just a feeling. That longing points to something inherent to who we are and our understanding of who we are that's connected to mom and dad. You know, babies have a mom and a dad. We talked about this recently with the there is no mama video. There is a mama. Just the mama was being hidden. That biological reality is always there. And I would. It just seems problematic to introduce, because of that reality, another party into the process.
- [58:49]
A
The reason these questions are so hard is what we say all the time. Like, so many of these desires are good and rightly ordered. The desire for children, the desire to help children who need help to adopt embryos that have been suspended. Like you said, these are good desires. But, yeah, there's still a lot of really important things to consider before moving forward. John, there's one more question I want to make sure we get to this week. This listener just says succinctly, is anybody wrestling with the idea that the biblical Antichrist will be artificial intelligence? First of all, sounds like a great premise for a movie, but that's it.
- [59:27]
B
I'm sure that's. That's coming and, you know, to your. To your local Christian bookstore as such.
- [59:33]
A
But.
- [59:34]
B
Well, I think the answer is yes, because Christians in every generation who believe in a particular understanding of eschatology, how the end times will unfold, explore this idea. You know, we remember when Gorbachev was the Antichrist because of the mark on his forehead and the. His connection with the, you know, the Soviet Union during the Cold War and that was the enemy and so on. And I don't want to trivialize, you know, people who are thinking about this. We have talked about, for example, the thought of, listen, we believe that there is a demonic realm. Why wouldn't we then say that the demonic realm will have an influence over something like artificial intelligence. I think that there are some people wrestling with that as well. And there's reason to wrestle with that. The idea that there is an Antichrist again belongs to a particular understanding of eschatology. There are other understandings that don't reduce the Antichrist down to a singular person or a singular figure. You know, the New Testament talks about the spirit of Antichrist and Antichrists and so on, and there are plenty of examples. So I think there's probably only going to be a limited amount of helpfulness in wrestling with that. But yes, the short answer is there. There are some that are thinking about that, of course, as they always, as as always happens as people try to apply that. The impulse to try to understand current events through the lens of Scripture is the right one. We have to understand the challenges of the moment through what is the story. The challenge is, is when we have a, I think a very specific interpretation of Scripture and then try to understand the, the incidents that can be problematic. So people are. I'm not sure that I, that, that I would have the same concerns.
- [61:23]
A
My church this week has been doing something we do twice a year called waiting week. And we, we pray together and we usually fast together. But one of the reasons behind it is my pastor wants us to really remember that we are waiting for Jesus return and that we are to be looking for that. And I, I've been reading a lot of scriptures about this this week, A lot of things Jesus said and revelation and prophecies in Isaiah. And I would just say something that stuck out to me this time around is that I think it's probably less worth our time to look for the Antichrists and to look for the demonic powers and those. And it's more beneficial for us and healthy for us and good to look for Jesus and to look towards Jesus. And I don't mean like look around and figure out if your grocer just happens to be the Messiah who came back because Jesus says that's not how it's going to be, but just to orient your heart towards hopeful waiting expectation for his return and that you would welcome that and that you, as Jesus says, like that you'd be ready for that for when the door is open to us. Probably more worth our time to focus on that than anxiety or concern about who or what is demonic. That doesn't mean to not be on our guard and to not think about things like you said, through the lens of Scripture. But I don't know. That just stuck out to me this week. Let's look for Jesus. Well, that is all the. The time we have for our program this week. Thank you so much for listening to Breakpoint this week. From the Coulson center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stonestreet. Have a great week, you all. We'll see you next time.