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Breakpoint
Iran and the Just War Theory, The Decline of LGB+ and Dating, and the Supreme Court Stops California's School Transgender Policy
01:06:39
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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 ongoing conflict in Iran from the perspective of just war theory. We're also going to talk about the plummeting rates of young people identifying as lgbt. So we have a lot to get to this week. We are glad you're with us. Stick around. Welcome to breakpoint this week from the Coulson center for Christian Worldview. I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stonestreet, president of the Coulson Center. John, I wanna jump right into what's going on in the Middle East. You had a special bonus episode of Breakpoint this week earlier with Dr. Eric Patterson, who is a Christian theologian who's written extensively about the just war theory and tradition in Christian thought and in ethics. I thought that was a really helpful conversation. If you haven't listened to that yet, do go back and listen to that bonus episode from earlier this week. I'm assuming most of our listeners know that last weekend we initiated a strike in Iran that we now know killed the Ayatollah as well as most of Iran's military leaders. Iran has responded by bombing several nations. Nellie Bowles at the Free Press was like they're just throwing deck chairs at this point wherever they can manage. It's been very one sided in terms of success, conflict. Our military along with Israel is clearly dominating the conflict, but there's still a lot unknown. I want to talk with you about the morals and ethics as it relates to just war theory, both the way we're approaching this, but also the calculations we made or that you would, you know, as a Christian that we should make before deciding how to think about this conflict. So we're about a week into this thing. Where is your mind?
- [01:59]
B
Well, you know, I think in a number of places. Number one, although I think in terms of the overall numbers of hits, things that have been destroyed, in terms of the declining capabilities of Iran both with missiles and drones, that's all to the best that we know. And right now it is so hard to know what's really happening on the ground and anywhere else. I mean, I think it is, I think your assessment of it at this point is probably correct. I think that when you talk about war, you've got all kinds of other things that are in there, which is the tolerance of people to withstand such things and the stability of leadership, the possibility of internal conflict, which I think is probably something else that will factor into Iran's capability to last look. There's also just something about Islamic regimes and the Islamic worldview where there's a lot more patience, there's a lot more willingness to wait, to stay, and we'll see how that happens. There were plenty of times, for example, although we're not talking specifically about Islam here, but where Russia seemed to just be overwhelming Ukraine and yet Ukraine's willingness to not surrender, not surrender land. There was something that kind of drove that. And this thing has, and that thing has gone on so long that gets into Warcraft, that gets into international things that I think are beyond certainly my understanding. But I tell you, what it has spoken to for me is that there's always been propaganda and war propaganda and the ability to know what's true and what's really happening on the ground. The number of comments we got, for example, even for the just war stuff that we did this week, of people who just seem absolutely certain of what's actually happening. And I'm not. I mean, how can you be? There's always been propaganda and war, but there's never been the mechanism of propaganda that we've had in this generation. And between fake videos and fake interviews and fake footage and fake claims, I mean, the ability to disperse such information and to convince such people. I mean, we've not talked here at all, for example, about Candace Owens and all the things that she's done to attack TP USA and Erica Kirk just because to me, it's just kind of wallowing in the mud. But you're talking about people that are gaining followings on both sides saying bizarrely different things, you know, just so out of touch with reality. And that's something where I think we can know a little bit more on the ground of what's real and what's true and what actually happened. And. And clearly, you know, the campaign that, that she's waged against Erica Kirk and TP usa, that's just an example of the misinformation age that we live in and kind of working to update some of the stuff we've done on culture and a practical guide to culture. We had these undercurrents in that book where we talked about living in the information age, and now that has to be updated to living in the misinformation age. And that takes the theory that truth is a social construct to the actuality of constructing little worlds and little, little realities and what that does to our ability to know the truth. So that's the first place my mind is. Second place my mind is is just the history of this stuff. I really became way more grateful for. The rest is history and Tom Holland series on Iran because really, Sandbrook, Dominic Sandbrook, that's who the. That's the last. That's the last name.
- [06:12]
A
He writes a series of kids books about history, just FYI, that I highly recommend, but go on.
- [06:18]
B
All right. You always cheat on recommendations and sneak them in all the way through.
- [06:21]
A
Dominic Sandbrook.
- [06:22]
B
There we go. But that was fascinating. But that's not the only backdrop of this. We did a piece a couple weeks ago kind of looking at the main theories coming out of the Cold War. One being Fukuyama's the End of History, basically that democratic capitalism was inevitable for the globe, which turned out to be just dead wrong. The other being Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, which isn't perfect in its analysis, but man came a lot closer about the civilizational fault lines and how long those things can fester and, and then spark up. The third place is where we went this week, which is on Just War. Look, just war is an attempt to manufacture or, you know, you don't go to a chapter and verse in the Bible to find the just war framework, Right? This is a way of postulating or articulating something that's in Holy Scripture, the fundamental principles about human dignity, about the state of nations, about right and wrong and applying it to, you know, a level of global chaos that war has always been. But in the technological era, well, even just what you said, Iran has, you know, spread its missiles to other nations. So, you know, Israel and the United States attack Iran, Iran attacks everybody else. There's just a technological capability there that just wasn't present 100, 200, 300, 400 years ago. To speak of another podcast, Hardcore History, in its series on World War I, he spends a lot of time talking about how in World War I, just the railroad made a level of devastation possible. So we're talking about trying to apply a man made framework that relies, hopefully, if you do it right, on biblical truths and biblical realities, and then applying it at a scale that Augustine could have never imagined. Right. I mean, thankfully we have Eric Patterson and Darrell Charles, who have spent a lot of time working on this and updating it, at least in an American evangelical context. But it's messy. You know, this. All the socks don't fit in the suitcase, to quote my theological. My theology professor in college. Because you're talking about a scale and you're talking about such quick moving realities on the ground that you can have a just cause to Go into it three days later. You know, we could have ways of carrying it out that aren't. And you're going to have a mix of that in any war because one of the realities you're dealing with is human fallenness. And we're not going to make the right decisions all the time, even if we try. And we're not going to make the right decisions all the time because we don't want to all the time. So all of that plays into this and it makes it a really difficult thing to understand. I just warn against this, everyone thinking they know exactly what's going on, because that's just not the way war is. This should be the thing that drives us to humility and our certainty, not the other way around. And that's not to say we shouldn't have a moral backbone and that this isn't the right move to make. I mean, look, I think Eric Patterson argued very convincingly that there was justification for this kind of action a long time ago. There has been a long history of bad acting by this regime and even in the last couple days, as you said it. But we need to have a good bit of humility kind of looking at it too.
- [10:08]
A
I think we should also resist the urge to feel like even we as individuals have a neat and tidy answer or perspective on the morality of something so large like this, or even of a small or like an individual military action or whatever it is. It is worthwhile and important that we, like, know what's just as a citizen of the world and the United States, to know what's going on, and this is part of working out your faith is thinking through things like this. But to be able to say, do you support it or not? And why and why not resist the temptation to have that answer at the tip of your tongue all the time or to, you know, then once you've made your decision that then you have to defend every action going forward or you have to oppose every action going forward. There's a respect of the authority that you're not in that we need to maintain. And whether or not the right people with the right moral compass are in every position of power, I don't know. I certainly pray for them. But I do know I'm grateful to not be in the driver's seat of something like this. And this further reiterates to me that that's not something I individually am called to. That doesn't mean we don't think about it. But you don't have to know exactly what you think and when you choose a perspective after gathering information and praying and thinking about it, that doesn't mean that perspective can't change. That's how I'm thinking through it anyway.
- [11:43]
B
Yeah. I mean, the problem is, is that those who do have that positioning Scripture tells us that position of power is from God, whether we think they're good or bad. You know, God is orchestrating this, and what they decide affects everybody else. And that is the temptation of. That speaks to the temptation of power. Lord Acton famously said, power corrupts and absolute power absolutely. And the trust factor has been deeply wounded in our culture. And I guess that's one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about in terms of the misinformation, but not just the misinformation, because, you know, I think Neil Ferguson called this Gulf War 3 and Gulf War 2 did not go well. It went for a really long time. And a whole lot of people feel deeply deceived by what had happened. And the same kind of promises and justifications that were used to push us into what people called an endless war because it was and ended with the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle. And I mean, it's kind of the same claims. It sounds really similar. You know, listen, Iran has been a bad state actor for a long time. I think that was a really helpful summary provided by Eric Patterson in the podcast. And we had, at least at the time when we recorded and aired that pretty clear, consistent reasoning offered by the Trump administration that also fit into the framework like, this is what we're trying to do. We're not going to do an endless war. We're not going to have troops on the ground. We're not going to. And you know, those goalposts always move in any conflict, in any war, period. And they've already moved in the last three, three, four or five days because we've heard different rationale, we've heard different reasonings, including some that sound an awful lot like revenge now. You know, I remember years ago, my. Another Prof. That I had talking about preaching, and he said, you know, I love to preach because I love to teach God's word. I love to see the transformation in people because of God's word. And I think God's word is powerful. And then he said, I love to preach because little old ladies come up to me afterwards and tell me how great I am. And it was a wonderful summary of mixed motivations. And if that's true for the country preacher, that's going to be true for the, the, you know, the most powerful People in the. In the. In the free world. So it is a moving target. I. I mean, let me just say one more thing about the idea of just war theory. It's the best we've got. There's. There's not a better way to actually start framing this stuff in a way that doesn't retreat to us versus them. And I think us versus them is so deeply ingrained in the water because of what, you know, you and I have talked about many times on the program, that critical theory, mood that affects both the left and the right and. And so many other parts of us. It always has to a degree, but not in this form. And so to give us some universals to plant our feet on, or at least, you know, I kind of think about it as refractive lenses. You know, if you go to the optometrist and you're sitting in the chair and they're like, is this better or is this better? And then they add all these lenses and. And at some level, you're not just looking through a single lens. You're trying to look through a clear lens, but you're looking through a multiple ones, and you're looking through multiple ones, and you got to put it all together. And so I think just Ward provides a series of lenses, and at the end of the day, at least approximates some moral clarity, which I think is. Is helpful. But we did get some pretty interesting critiques of it, or questions. Questions slash critiques. And I thought, just even in terms of. I know we usually do questions at the end, but they punted the questions here. I think it'd be helpful to put them in this first segment to talk about this.
- [15:35]
A
Yeah, the main, I would say, thread of feedback here was calling into question President Trump's authority to launch such an action. Because the way things are set up, the war powers in our country are given to Congress. And so to declare war according to our laws requires an act of Congress. And so some of our listeners, which I appreciate their thinking through this, they feel that in order to even apply just war theory, you have to start with who has the right to declare war or initially initiate war. And they're feeling conflicted, if not outright against this idea that President Trump was in his right to do what he did.
- [16:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. There was one question, compared this to the Bush presidencies, who both sought the support of Congress before a Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. They're exactly right. The power to declare war is given to Congress under that. But there is broad power given to the president for military action and the scale and scope of what's happening here, particularly working with the Israelis, who are, you know, as everyone knows, extremely precise and extremely aggressive. You know, Israel's military history is we don't do anything until we do it, and then when we do it, we're doing it. And so then it, you know. You know, one person said here that how do you not consider this an act of war? Well, you're right. I mean, I think in all kind of everything that we see. But the fact is that there's really clear criteria. It involves things like ground troops. It involves things like sustained action over a period of time. And within those criteria, within the broad range of rights that the President has to initiate military action. You know, technically he, as I understand it, he's still within those rights to initiate this. Now, these are a kind of, you know, broad set of criteria that gives a president an awful lot of room to act. So that's the first thing I say is technically he is within his power to do what he did. Even if we look at it and go, how is this in. I mean, you know, back in the day, warmen a ground invasion, but. But it doesn't. Now we can, you know, shoot from afar or do naval activity and so on. And just like in Venezuela, technically within the letter of the law, he seems to be within those rights. The second thing is, is, look, Congress has voted twice, and Congress has, I think, a way to maneuver here to take those war powers back from the president to be involved themselves in the process. And Congress has failed. Now, you might say Congress failed in their job in failing to rein in the President. I think that is a question that can be debated. But the fact is that the acts of Congress so far has been to not pull the power out of the President. Now he'll hit the deadline on dates and so on, and then at that point, you know, we have to have this conversation again. But that is what we talk about when we talk about that criteria in the just war of, as you put it, a legitimate authority waging this. And so far, he, it might be the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law, but it's. But, but, but it, it's there, as far as I can tell. But it's a good question and it won't go away. It's a question that will come back over and over and over.
- [19:10]
A
I think at its heart, like Eric Patterson said, the just, the, the helpfulness of just war theory, the existence of it is predicated on the idea that every human life is valuable. And the second part of it is not everyone agrees. So then how do we move forward with that? When a regime that doesn't agree acts on that belief, what do people who do believe that that's true unequivocally and universally do, especially when there's something in our power to do. And so it's a gift to have those questions like, there, you know, you brought up that these questions didn't exist before Christianity, and Dr. Patterson brought up that, you know, for Cicero and some of the ancient thinkers, there were questions of, like, practicality, but it was still utilitarian. It wasn't predicated on the idea that a single human life, regardless of where you find it or when you find it, has value. And that was a new thought under Jesus. It shouldn't have been. I mean, it was a new thought under the. The Mosaic Law, and it was always true. But this was. This is how we operate now. And when not everybody agrees, you're going to have questions.
- [20:24]
B
Yeah, and I know we got to wrap this up, but I. I think the other part of Dr. Patterson's thing that was helpful was extending that, the category to State's craft. I know it. I joked with him that he's, you know, challenging Augustine and supersede, trying to supersede Augustine or something like that, and he laughed about that. But we think about it in terms of just war. But when you talk about the scope and the scale of both national and multinational conflict, and not just the fact that we disagree, but we actually do believe and have good reason to believe somebody's actually crossed the line into evil as an individual tyrant or as a ruler. Now we're talking about the whole process, not just the act of war itself, but how do we do the things that we need to do. Building up in what he called statescraft in order to continue to do, you know, wage, adjust, campaign, and it won't be a perfectly just campaign. And then you have the question of if it's not, then do we just say stop? Well, no, because that can still, you know, violate the principle of more. More harm than good. So there's a lot of that in there. Again, this framework is unhelpful, except there's no other framework. So good luck. No, it's really helpful, I think, at the end of the day, because, again, we have to stand on what's true first and foremost, even in looking at something like this.
- [21:43]
A
Let's take a quick break, John. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week.
- [21:50]
C
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- [22:46]
A
We're back on Breakpoint this week. John I want to shift gears to domestic matters. Now. There was a surely controversial set of research that was published this week from Professor Gene Twenge looking at the number of teens or young adults between 18 and 24. So I guess older teens and then young adults identifying as something other than straight or heterosexual, having peaked a couple years ago and on a dramatic decline. Now, when I first saw the headline of this piece, I thought for sure it was going to be mostly a decline in identifying as bisexual because that to me always felt like a kind of a safe route for people who didn't want to say they were straight but were still going to live obviously heterosexual lives. But it was kind of a costume they could put on. They could use this word and then join this community and then claim to be part of it, all of that
- [23:46]
B
and change their mind later and then
- [23:48]
A
change their mind later or say they never. I don't know. But this goes a lot further than that. This includes young people who are identifying as gay, as lesbian, certainly as transgender, or as you know, some other gender, you know, makeup, I don't even know the whole. Across the spectrum it's declining. And I mean spectrum. Literally, it is declining precipitously. Your thoughts?
- [24:15]
B
Fascinating. I had the privilege of speaking at an event alongside Jean Twenge back in the fall. And the first time I met her, I certainly knew about her work and had a chance to speak to her just quickly. She's a rock star coming at it from a, you know, really the the same sort of respected, authoritative source like Jonathan Haidt, you know, as well, talking about primarily the social media use among students. And she has been tracking this in a way not unlike Sherry Turkle, has been on a broad cultural scale. She's targeted specifically, specifically adolescents and pre adolescents. And in that talk, because I, I don't think, at least she doesn't lead with this, that there's a, you know, religious conviction or something like that. She seemed to, at, at the time, to. Her focus. Well, her focus has been on social media use and how it's created mental health struggles. So there's a lot in there about comorbidities, about, you know, people identifying as these various things and, and the. So and the, the social epidemic that kind of spawned out of social media and tech use and that we're not doing our children right. She's been a huge advocate of just getting kids away from smartphones until they're much older. Talking about brain development. Again, very technical, very scientific, very reliable stuff. And just quietly, I asked her about this question. Is there a. There just seems to be a correspondence between this and this spike in identification, between LGBTQ identifications. And, you know, I, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, we were hearing all this stuff about gay and lesbian teenagers, but the numbers kept coming back as being, you know, 2% of the population, 5% of the population. We talked a lot about the 10% myth that had been propagated out of Alfred Kinsey studies and had no, you know, no, no correspondence to reality on the ground. And then all of a sudden there was this spike in identification. And the same graph that showed this, as you put it, huge decline, fall off the cliff now that we've had since 2022 also shows the buildup and it goes to smartphones. I mean, the correspondence is just hard to ignore. And the idea that it was a social contagion or all these things really were social contagions because of this virus, you might say, which is smartphones and so on. So. And, you know, at the time she was like, I think so. You know, she wasn't coming at it the same place that we were, which were, you know, inherently thinking that these identifications are harmful and bad and, and anti human, as they have, I think, proven to be. But now you see, these two trends lay on top of each other. Social media, cell phone use, and alternative identifications, particularly in sexuality. And it is incredible. I expected. Here's what I expected, Maria, is when I first saw this headline and didn't look at it carefully, I Was like, oh, the fall off in trans identification. Right. But the fact that it's just because it's out of vogue, just because, you know, it's not cool. Right. That that whole thing has, has, has really. Well, well, we talk, we talk about it literally every week. Another way that the dominoes are falling against this movement. But I didn't expect the same fall off in lgb. Maybe we should have just because of how that was argued. But maybe we missed it at the time of the buildup because the T sucked all the air out of the room in the acronym that really. The growing identifications of L and the G also could be traced directly almost to social media and cell phone use, by the way. I think there's other factors. There's, you know, what you call sufficient causes and necessary causes. And I don't think that the phone was a sufficient cause in and of itself, but in the environment that we were in, an environment of identity crisis, an environment post sexual revolution, an environment where you had the breakdown of families and the absence of dads and all of that, then you had this necessary component and that was the phone. And it's a pretty remarkable thing.
- [28:52]
A
Yeah, you know, this is a little niche, but I this week have been researching there's this new quasi diagnosis going around the kind of the mental health community. And it's not an official diagnosis, it's not in the DSM 5, but the name for it is complex PTSD. And the idea is that this is a disorder in which you don't have PTSD because you don't have an actual traumatic event that you can point back to, but you can point back to a childhood of traumatic patterns or bad treatment from people. And thankfully, the psychologist who's writing about this in the article I read this week in a medical journal was like, we need to be extremely cautious about this because what this is, how this is functioning is a meta narrative for people who are struggling to find meaning and struggling to explain their malaise. So you wake up one day in a very decadent culture like ours, and you realize that you're unhappy or you don't feel fulfilled, or you can't feel, you don't feel motivated because you're not sure what your purpose is. We are storytelling creatures, which is a good and inherent part of how we are, because we are made in the image of a God who is the master storyteller. But we're gonna naturally look for how this fits into our narrative. How's this possible when we are the most evolved, the most Open minded, the most libertarian that humans have ever been. Why am I so unhappy? And so, in this case, with this complex PTSD nonsense, this psychologist was saying, we really need to caution practitioners against using this as an answer that fits every question where it's like, well, you. If you're this unhappy, the only explanation is that you were mistreated. And then basically, the way people are practicing it in mental health communities is let's spend a lot of time digging into your past to find who mistreated you and to make sure they apologize and maybe you should avoid them. And all this stuff that's really not clinically proven or anything. If anything, it's contraindicated. But in any sense, I have a feeling that these kinds of alternative sexual identities was operating in the same way as people looking for a meta narrative to explain their unease or their natural confusion that comes with growing up in a culture that tells them that they really should have everything that they want. And the phones were the things that allowed that to spread. When you have a kid or any person who's looking for a narrative and then you propose one and they hear it proposed 40 times a day because they're on their phones all day, then they'll accept it, right?
- [31:41]
B
So listen, I think that is a really important analysis that we impose these narratives that we find when we feel like we don't have one. And if that narrative can explain whatever it is that we feel. I'll take you back 20 years ago or more, when in a little town in Tennessee, also known for another historic set of events in the clash of Christianity versus culture called the Scopes Monkey Trial. Ray County, Tennessee, years ago, the county commissioners were meeting. It's about 20 years ago, Maria. And it was right in the time where Vermont, I think, was the first state to propose same sex marriage on a state level. And the county commissioners were just sitting around the courthouse there, and one of them said, well, we don't want that around here, and let's pass that resolution. And it was just sloppy and it was just unprofessional. And what ended up happening is the county commission passed a. Essentially passed a resolution that gay people couldn't live in Ray County.
- [32:41]
A
Oh, boy.
- [32:42]
B
Oh, yeah. And even back then, it was just like. It was. It just. That's probably not what the guy. Man, I talked to one of the commissioners there. It was just. It was just. It was just a disaster. So then it became national news again. And we're sitting there living in that town. What's gonna happen to us? So there's another prominent. A guy who's a prominent Christian leader, plus the. The president of the college and all that. I don't want to. I don't want to name, you know, people who are necessarily involved. They may or may not want to be involved. But we were just looking at what do we do. And what was coming up was this was the Strawberry Festival, which was the big event where everybody would come to town and you would get, you know, people there that, let's just say, were intolerant. And so we knew that the. What the county commissioners had done was going to spark protests, that there was probably going to be, like, this whole turnout of people because it was a chance to have a national platform, and then you were going to have other people that were like, what are you doing in my town? And it was ripe for disaster. So a couple of us, you know, worked at calling, you know, different people and experts, all that. It's a long way to tell the story. It ended up fizzling out, praise God. And of course, a county commission resolution has to go to the state. And the state looked at. It was like, what? And then just that was the end of the story. But we actually were told by somebody who was thinking along these lines at the time. And again, 20, 25 years ago, we know when it was. It was at least that long ago. And we were told at the time, call the local high school and see what's happening. So we called the local high school and the guidance counselor was like, we have all these kids coming out as gay. It was like, what do you mean, all these kids? It's like, like, well, you always have a handful. And at this time, it was like a sprinkle, right? Because we were still at the 2 to 5% level of young people that would accept this as an identity. And all of a sudden, they have three or four or five times the amount of kids since that resolution was passed that were coming out. And we said, why? And this expert told us that when you have kids who don't know who they are and they see themselves as disenfranchised and disconnected, then they will identify with an identity group that they perceive to be oppressed. And what you're talking about is now the smartphone has kind of exploded the knowledge of the alternatives, the options. And this event, because it was such a big thing in this little town, did the same thing. It kind of created this option. And so you're right, we absolutely do that. Here's the only thing that I want to throw in the mix and It'll lead hopefully maybe to as well into the next story, which is unrelated but related I think, is that for years predatory pornography, I think, has been a source of trauma. And we were unwilling to say it. And it hit me as a young dad of a young girl when the Internet started forcing these images on our kids and normalizing them. And no one called it sexual abuse, but I thought, you know, what if a creepy old man was on the, on the side of the road and exposed himself to my daughter on, against her will, we would call that a crime, we would call that abuse. But suddenly if it's a pop up that says, you know, something or an image or something that, you know, of course now we have targeting through, was it Roblox or something like that? And I mean, that targeting has continued and the access has increased. I'm not ready to embrace this category that you're questioning here of what did you call it? Multi ptsd.
- [36:37]
A
Complex ptsd.
- [36:38]
B
Complex ptsd. But I do think that on a cultural level, we have had systematic assaults on the conscience and innocence of young people. And we've not reckoned with that. All right, so here's the thing. So Gene Twenge is saying, well, here's one example of it, right? Here's how the, the trend lines with smartphone use. And by the way, her stuff on the different generations, the Gen Z millennials, Gen X boomers, is the best there is. It's just, she's unbelievable. And of course, when she talks about millennials and Gen zers, that's when the technology comes in. But we've got this crazy thing, this crazy reality right now that has been maybe the unexpected result of the sexual revolution. Look, look, I, I, I, I started in help, you know, working with young people when we were telling them to kiss dating goodbye, right? And now we're like, maybe we should kiss dating hello again. I don't know if somebody needs to write that book like we were worried about. Well, Rod Dreher had it in his blog this morning. He goes, you know, we should be happy that far fewer young people outside of marriage are having sex because that would be, you know, because maybe they were returning to a sexual morality, but that's not what we're seeing. This is an indicator of a deep, I don't know, identity crisis, harm and all that. And hooking up is like not what we have to worry about. And I mean, we do. I mean, kids will always be kids, but we've got a relationship crisis. What Sherry Turkle called being alone together has become Just loneliness, isolation. And you were involved with. I mean, Brad Wilcox and IFS has been tracking this for a long time and doing incredible, incredible work. So I'll sneak that recommendation in of just IFS and all the great work. But you guys put something out on Fox News and it was referred to again this week of the dating crisis, which is connected to the sexual isolation. And none of this is healthy. So.
- [38:59]
A
Yeah, I know. So, yeah. And the. So the they ifs did a study with the Wheatley Institute at BYU and found that I think between the ages of 20 and 35, they surveyed people. And within the LA, among those age groups in the last year, only one in three had been on some kind of date or had even asked, like, had endeavored to be on a date that's from ages 20 to 35. That is shocking. If we're concerned about the marriage and the birth rates right now. I mean, this generation, it's wild. And so what was helpful about the study, too, is that they were they, you know, drilled down, why not? What are you doing instead? You know, trying to figure out, is this a. Is this an identity problem? Is it an isolation problem, Is it a phone problem? Is it a video game problem? And one of the most consistent responses they got, which may involve all of those things, is that kids said they just don't feel confident asking. They don't feel confident. One of them, one of the, one of the results was they don't feel confident in their own ability to read social cues. And I, you know, I'm sure you're experiencing this in the same way I'm experiencing this. I'm not in that age cohort, but when I, when you go to a restaurant or a store or whatever, how many times do clerks actually look at you in the face, let alone the eyes, but, like, actually look up and look at you and talk to you. You know.
- [40:23]
B
Who wrote about this? I first saw it was. Was Sherry Turkle, 2011, in her book Alone Together. I mean, she's talking about the. How technology, our technologies are isolating us from each other. And, you know, at the time she was making these predictions. But the thing she spent a lot of time on in that book and I always thought was profound. And also if you go to Proverbs, Proverbs talks a lot about the eyes and, you know, your countenance and things like that. But she, she said there, that kids longed for eye contact. You know, that there were these. And she was talking about it primarily between parents and kids. But if you are raised without Eye contact. You don't know how to make eye contact.
- [41:03]
A
Right, right. So that was my thing when I was reading this survey. And it's like, the kids aren't confident in their ability to read social cues. I'm like, well, sure, because you're never reading social cues. You've never put yourself in the position of reading them. It's not. It takes practice. And, you know, the one encouragement is if you're not confident, neither is anybody else, so you might as well go for it, you know, give it a try. But this is fascinating, this conversation about the eyes. Okay, because. So first of all, the ability to make eye contact, which is so intimate and so important. I mean, what you just said made me think of this video that I had to watch in my whatever Intro to psych class that I had to take in college undergrad, which showed this video of a mom making eye contact with her infant and then looking away. And the difference in the demeanor of the infant. I mean, full on Crisis mode within 20 seconds of the mom looking away. Like, we were built to need that. This is part of how God made us is human interaction. Our girls Christian school this week did an exercise with the first graders. My youngest is in first grade. Having them sit in rows and look at each other in the eye and talk. And my sweet. I went and hugged that teacher. I was like, brilliant. Thank you for doing this. Of course, my girl came home and said it was harder with the boys. I felt weird, you know, And I'm like, yeah, I know. That's how it goes. But such good practice. But I honestly think, John, this connects to what you said in the last topic we were talking about, because I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about what the continued exposure to predatory pornography has done, just because, frankly, that was not an experience that I have had to deal with in my life. And so I might not know the extent of what's out there, and. But I just last night found out that my daughters, when we were watching the super bowl, and I got enough details from them that I was able to go online and dig into this and realized what happened, because other people were upset about this, too. But apparently after the National Anthem at the super bowl, an ad played for the next installment in the Scream movies, which, of course, they're making some crazy sequel. Scream 7 or something after the national anthem, not even later into the game. And my youngest saw this image. She didn't know. She doesn't know what Scream is. She doesn't know what the movies is, but she confessed to me last night that this image has just been haunting her. And it was not sexual, but it was extremely creepy and graphic. And that's how I was able to find what it was. Cause she was able to describe, shot for shot, what she saw. And I ended up having this conversation with her about why it's important what we see. And I was struggling myself because I was telling her, images can't hurt you. You know, like, you don't have to be scared when you're in your room. If that image occurs to you, it can't hurt you. You know, and you just start talking to Jesus and that kind of stuff. But then I'm talking to my husband later and I'm like, it really can hurt you. Not in the way that she's imagining, but it is. Maybe I'm not giving it enough power when I think about it, you know, how do you, how do you help when a kid has been exposed to something that you can't unsee?
- [44:11]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, look, the, the terrifying moment for me was sitting in an Airport at 6 in the morning, running into Josh McDowell. The two of us had spoken at an event and we were talking. I didn't know him very well at the time, and, and he, he asked about my family. And Abigail was 4, my oldest. And he said, john, the question you have to ask is not will your daughter see these things? But what will she do when she sees these things? Because this isn't a choice maybe that she will make. And which is, you know, I think, you know, certainly so. So many kids didn't make that choice. It was made, made for them. And the fact that as a society, we have said that, well, they need to be able to, to see these things. And, you know, we put these. I mean, think about the image of the Scream poster. Edvard Monk's Scream, right, is where that mask comes from. That is part of that whole franchise. And then think of Drag Queen Story hour and tell me one's not as scary as the other. Or think about then just the fact. Listen, I remember 15 years ago watching America's Funniest Home Videos, which our kids loved at the time, and a commercial coming on, just hypersexual. And Sunday night, seven o' clock in the evening tv, right? And then, you know, you talk about the super bowl and the halftime shows. We've normalized. And the commercials. We've normalized. And there was a time in the 90s where every, every halftime or every super bowl commercial was hypersexual. Now, this was Hyper violent. But you get it. Like we've just normalized this as if there's not. It makes me think of a couple things. Number one is I think you handled it really well and you do talk to them about this because they live in a visual culture and you have to be able to discern, right? You don't. You don't. As the wonderful poem, you don't think with your eyes, you think through the eyes. And you have to be able to see things and discern them and understand them. Paul prayed that for the Church of Philippians. Secondly, this is probably connected to the first commandment, second commandment, sorry, you know, don't have any other gods before me. Don't make graven images of anything. And there's something about the images. Now, of course, the vast majority of human history, people have lived in context where graphic violence and awful things were not mediated to them. They were direct. If you live in a war zone, these kind of things are direct. But there is something that has happened in our constantly mediated culture. And you're right, those things can harm, but they also don't have to win. I guess I think the confidence is that we have to ground kids in the truth. And that can actually be really helpful. But if you don't think images can hurt, I mean, that's the story that Jean Twenge is telling in her research, is that it has. We have separated, not only given them these kind of awful images, but we've given them these awful images in place of reality, in place of real eyes, in place of real faces. And porn turns your attention from someone's face to other parts of them. Right. And that's a way that women have been violated forever, since the history of the world. And now again, the normalization, I just don't think we've reckoned with that. And how that has played itself into these deep, deep seated confusions. And the irony is it hasn't made them more sexual, it's made them less sexual. It's made them less relational. It's isolated them. And that, I think, is what we're. It's just kind of like no one expected this 25 years ago when we're like, man, kids are dating too early and dating's not healthy for me. And you know what? It wasn't the way people were, kids were dating was bad. And I'm not saying we should return to that dating or any dating. I know some people like the idea of courting, but here's what I. Here's the punchline. I know, we got to move on. The punchline is, you know, think about how blessed your daughter is to have you. So the breakdown of the family or the absence of the family or the absence of the mom or the dad who's not noticing anything because they're captured in their own little techno world, right? That leaves these kids without a guide. That leaves these kids without help. And I look and say, okay, well, if all this is real, if these trend lines are true, if the things that we've put into our kids hearts and minds and brains have been so damaging, where's redemption found? And we go back to the same answer in the home, in the church. Who else is going to do this? So what should the church do? The church should become a matchmaking center of kids and young adults who want to find, you know, not even who wanted to. I, I'm spending some of my time telling young adults, I don't care if you want to or not, you need it. You know, you may not want a date. You have to go to date.
- [49:38]
A
You don't think you want it, but you do.
- [49:40]
B
But there's a lot more to talk about, the eye contact, too. There's, it is an amazing thing.
- [49:45]
A
Start there. I just hadn't thought about it. But like, I guess start there. If you're coaching young people, teach them how to communicate with anybody, like not just the opposite sex, not just towards a dating relationship, but just what it means to look at someone in the eye and respect another person who's physically present with you. And that I would think it has to start there. All right, let's take a quick break, John. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week.
- [50:11]
D
Educators join us in Colorado Springs, June 15th through the 17th, for the 2026 Rooted Educators Worldview Summit. This year's theme is created and called Biblical Anthropology for Christian Education. We'll hear from John Stonestreet, Sean McDowell, Megan Allman, Elizabeth Urbanowitz and more. Save $50 when you register by March 31st with the code Rooted50 register@colsoneducators.org Rooted that's colsoneducators.org Rooted
- [50:41]
A
we're back on Breakpoint this week. John. The Supreme Court this week ruled that California's policy that bars public school teachers from telling parents when kids say they want to be identified by another pronoun or they want to socially transition at school but don't want to tell their parents. So until now, California has a rule that says teachers cannot tell parents. Well, that rule is being litigated and The Supreme Court this week said while it's being litigated, the state is not allowed to prohibit teachers and schools from telling parents. So this again, is going to continue. Like, this isn't a full decision on whether the state can have this law, but it does say that between now and whenever that's decided, schools do not have the right to hide this from parents. All of this is fascinating in light of, like, the really swiftly changing cultural realities here. Like, this stuff is just. It's starting to have the veneer of, like, they're still trying this stuff. Like, yikes. Okay. I mean, sure. But I mean, I'm grateful for this ruling. The dissent in the ruling, as far as I can tell from the normal actors who you'd assume would dissent, basically just dissented saying, we're being too hasty. We should let this play out in court and not involve ourselves and let the state, which is remarkable too, because they didn't dissent saying, kids are gonna die if you allow parents to tell, or if you allow schools to tell their parents. You know, I don't wanna predict where it's going, but how important is this one ruling?
- [52:12]
B
Oh, I think it's pretty important and tells you where it's gonna go. And I think two or three things popped into my mind. First I saw the story with the New York Times headline. And when you're like, good stuff. Wait, people are still doing this sort of stuff. And. And the New York Times is an example of that. Just like the state of California where they were like, oh, this was a ruling on behalf of religious parents.
- [52:33]
A
There's paragraph. It's like paragraph 10. The majority of the court said a broader set of parents beyond those with religious objections have a separate right to not be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children's mental health.
- [52:49]
B
Look, this wasn't a religious issue at all. It's an issue of parental rights. And this is why those who dissented said, let it play out in the courts. No, there are legal fundamentals within the American context that have been settled, and they were settled a long time ago. And they involved among them had to do with who do kids belong to? Do they belong to parents or do they belong to the state? And this whole issue has always been about the attempt of the state to gain control of over kids on behalf of the parents using the excuse, which was unfounded without evidence. And now we're seeing the evidence actually point to the opposite, that parents were harmful to kids if they did not actually support their gender dysphoria in this way. And that was never grounded. That was just a claim. It was what's called an assertion, not an argument. And the court, so even that dissent, I think you're right that it's interesting in how they're arguing for it. Not that a whole bunch of kids may be harmed in the case, but we need to let this play out. That's even bogus because the parental rights thing is settled law, the parental rights piece, unless there's case an indication of direct harm. And there was just a claim that there was harm and no evidence that there was harm or no evidence that the other side was there. So yes, this is a bit of reality returning to the world. And again, the sexual revolution has been waged by mostly confused sexually charged men, you know, trying to get kids on board. And I mean not just the trans issue. Listen, 25 years ago it was all middle aged men who were sexually confused. And now it's a bunch of middle adolescent children and pre adolescent children that has been at the center of this. They were subjected to it against their own will. And I think that there was a grooming movement that took place. Last thing I want to say, and it relates to the last story we talked about, isn't it interesting that the sexual revolution we thought was about behavior and it became about identity. Right. So even now we're talking about how sexual brokenness is being experienced by people who aren't having sex. Right. I mean, who are having sex at historic lows, but they're having sexual confusion at historic highs. And this is another example of that, that this thing moved from behavior. Because you're talking about adolescent and pre adolescent girls, some boys, mostly girls who aren't sexually active, but they were victimized by this and their own understanding of who they are. And I think it was enabled. I think it was not only enabled, I think it was driven by men who were sexually confused and wanting to normalize their behavior. And that stuff needs to be reckoned with on a social level to some degree.
- [55:49]
A
I need to read a quote quickly from California's Attorney General, who's of course arguing on the side of the right of California to prohibit teachers from telling parents what's going on. He wrote the consequences of compelling the disclosure of confidential information about kids. Gender identity would be irreversible. I just need to let that quote stand for itself. The consequences would be irreversible. I am thrilled to hear that California's Attorney General Rob Bonta is now worried about irreversible damage to kids. Now he's being completely Irrational about it.
- [56:24]
B
So mad about this, isn't it?
- [56:25]
A
Gosh, it's really hard. I don't think I'm succeeding. Well, John, let's quickly hit some questions that we received this one. Yes, I welcome. This is probably part of a larger conversation, but let me read this. Recently a pastor who's well known on social media on X went viral for a series of posts in which he argued that all of our societal breakdown is the result of allowing women to vote and to be in the workforce. This is a common theme I see in the Christian patriarchy movement. How do you analyze this through a biblical framework?
- [57:01]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, we gotta analyze it from two directions because just this week I saw another popular X poster, equate complementarianism with patriarchy. And so from the left, anything to the right often gets labeled patriarchy and that is an illegitimate title. It's not unlike the Christian nationalism problem, which is you have real people who claim Christian nationalism and have a wrong view of the relationship of the church and the state. And then you also have anybody who thinks that Christian morality should influence society are called Christian nationalists. This is the problem that has to be dealt with in the patriarchy question is what do we mean by that? And that is the most helpful question of any bit of cultural analysis is to start, well, what do you mean by Christian patriarchy? Now, this particular post that the question is referring to is someone who wears that title proudly and is someone who has argued again for a vision of reality that is not biblical. The Bible does not take these social norms from a past time and make them absolute. That is not what happens. The Bible, before we know Eve's name, for example, talks about Eve being fully made in the image of God. There's images, for example, of the Proverbs 31, woman that involves working and working, you know, and he's like, well, she's not working out of the home. Well, no one worked out of the home back then because she was pre industrial revolution.
- [58:28]
A
But sure.
- [58:28]
B
So one way to I would analyze this is to say is, is to walk through this. Number one, all image bearers come in two kinds, male or female. That's an absolute. We're not just made in the image of God in a disembodied kind of gnostic way. Our bodies are part of our image bearingness and bodies come in two kinds. Second, the history of the feminist movement has been a complicated one. First wave feminism argued that women and men should be interchangeable in rights. And that is a very important and helpful and necessary movement. At a time where women did not have the rights to. That men had. And there's no biblical justification for giving men some rights and women not those rights. And that's why, by the way, many of them were Christians, strong Christians. And one of the things they were pushing for is that men needed to be responsible to their homes. And also they were pushing the temperance movement and that men also. And that abortion was actually wrong because it was used by men to victimize women, primarily, which it was. And so what happened in the second wave of feminism, particularly when that movement got hijacked by the sexual revolution, is that interchangeability and rights became interchangeability in roles. And when you're talking about roles now, you're talking about cultural applications of realities. So you have the reality that image bearers come in two kinds, male and female. And they have to apply that to things that have changed, like industrialization or like a new environment where rights had been restored in many ways between men and women. And the roles became complicated because some of them, women were being kept out of roles for no good reason. Others, there was the push for women to embrace roles in society so that they would reject their design. And this is what many Catholic feminist theologians. And I'm saying feminist in the way that John Paul II called for Catholic feminist, not feminist in the second wave way. But he basically said, we need a new understanding of what it means to be male and female, especially female, based on this creation narrative. And what happened is, is that the clamoring for all roles became the rejection of some roles that were grounded in design. And we talked about that here a lot, where both men and women found it really convenient for women to reject their procreative design and seeing that as a problem, seeing that as an oppression. So you have the second wave feminists writing and talking about fertility being oppression, and you think, well, wait a minute, because when God created men and women, he looked at what he had made and he said it was really good. And the creation mandate, which included. Included procreation, and that was good. And that doesn't change after the fall. The fulfilling of that becomes difficult. But it's. This is not the story that, you know, because a woman has a child, she's, as one of our former president said, she gets punished with a child. But that mindset has creeped in. And of course, now we're at the point where, good heavens, we think men and women are interchangeable in reality itself, so that men have children and some women have male genitalia and all kinds of other things. And We've hit the absurd. And by the way, you can read all about that in Romans 1, which talks about when you reject God, eventually you reject reality. So the patriarchy movement has to be grounded in reality. I'm not saying that all this stuff is really easy to unravel, but when someone then says that the problem is we let women vote, that's crazy. There's no biblical justification for that. And that basically is arguing against what we know about the fundamental equality of human beings, male and female. And we're smart enough to navigate this. So the real story has to do with the confusion of roles. Not women driving or women voting or women being in the workforce, women being encouraged that their fulfillment is in the workforce and not in the home. That women being encouraged to say that the only way to a fulfilling life is to act like a man. That's the confusion of second wave feminism. And patriarchy pushes back on that, I think, in absolutely the wrong way. And what I mean by that is not complementarianism, which is often called patriarchy. Complementarianism has its problems, like, we're trying to work this out. And I don't always. In fact, I often don't agree with what I see in complementarian literature, even theological literature. But what we know is image bearers come in two kinds, and that's a solid ground for us to figure out. And the two kinds were made for each other, I would say.
- [63:36]
A
Just the sort of fundamental hypocrisy I see in kind of this brand of whatever patriarchy that we're seeing played out here is that on the one hand, we're trying to propagate the idea that men are, by necessity and just by function, in charge because of their dominance. But then also every problem or most problems, or most of the worst problems were caused by women. But if men are in charge, then the fact that women gained that foothold or were able to cause those problems is an indictment on men. So you can't have it both ways.
- [64:08]
B
There's a logical problem, is what you're saying.
- [64:10]
A
It's a logical problem. You know, my biggest advice is to both women and men, but it's just to live your life in the place and time that God put you. Too often we are obsessive about determining roles along gender lines and deciding where is too far and all that without considering that the much more weighty and important question is the cultivation of virtue. Sometimes we look at roles and say, well, if this was the role that was designed for men and women, then these other kinds of virtues are not available to them, which flies in the face of scripture, including Proverbs 31. Like I have. You've seen, everybody has seen that there's sometimes there's a stereotype that because women are called to nurture their families, they're not as called to the virtue of an intellectual faith or whatever it might. Those are just category errors and we should avoid them. But more importantly, you know, sit under the teaching of your pastor and under the teaching of the Lord and your husband, if that's part of your situation, and live your life the way that God has made you and continue to seek him and probably just don't give any attention to people who don't know you and are trying to come up with yet another metanarrative of who's responsible for all the problems in the world. So that's my advice. Well, John, before we wrap it up, I already recommended earlier in the show the kids history books by Dominic Sandbrook. But if you have a recommendation, why don't you hit us with it real quick?
- [65:45]
B
Super quick. Summit Ministries is that time to be thinking about what your high school students gonna do this summer. A great way to help them think through the culture and think through their faith and do it in a context where they get topknot teaching in a great environment. Summit Ministries is absolutely a tremendous resource. It has been for decades now. Go to summit.org and because the Colson center has a partnership with Summit Ministries, you can go to summit.org breakpoint summit.org breakpoint if you sign a student up for their Summit conferences, you can get a $500 discount.
- [66:19]
A
Summit.org BreakPoint John, that is all the time we have for the program today. Thank you so much for listening to Breakpoint this week. From the Colson center for Christian Work Worldview, I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stonestreet. Hope you have a great week. We'll see you all back here next time. God bless.