Islamic Terror in Australia, the Cancelling of Christmas, Foreign Mega Families and Notes on Being a Man

Summary

Breakpoint Podcast Summary
Episode: Islamic Terror in Australia, the Cancelling of Christmas, Foreign Mega Families, and Notes on Being a Man
Date: December 19, 2025
Hosts: John Stonestreet & Maria Baer

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Episode Overview

This episode explores several disturbing trends and cultural stories from a Christian worldview: the resurgence of Islamic terrorism and antisemitism (highlighted by a deadly attack in Australia), escalating public security fears leading to the suppression of Christmas celebrations in Europe, the emergence of "foreign mega families" through surrogacy and IVF, and a cultural discussion on masculinity in crisis. Through these stories, John and Maria analyze the deeper moral and spiritual underpinnings affecting Western society, identity, and the dignity of life.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Islamic Terror and Resurgent Antisemitism

• Shooting at Bondi Beach, Australia ([00:02]–[05:30])

  • The hosts discuss the Hanukkah-time attack in Australia, where 15 were killed by two Islamic men.
  • John emphasizes this violence "makes an awful lot of sense in a fallen world... from a radicalized ideology," pointing to elements in Islamic teaching hostile to Jews.
  • He references historical precedent: “Antisemitism never goes away. It is this kind of recurring nightmare and there has to be a spiritual... even demonic dimension to it because it just never goes away.” – John Stonestreet ([04:21])
  • The discussion broadens to the global resurgence of antisemitism from multiple directions (left, right, Islam).

• Escalating Security and Canceled Celebrations ([05:30]–[13:20])

  • High-profile attacks and plots—e.g., market attacks in Germany and canceled holiday events in Paris and London—signal a changing security environment.
  • Maria asks: "Is this a story about Islam? Or... about the continued normalization of antisemitism, of violence? The world is changing, but what is this?" ([05:26])
  • John argues the solution of canceling public events due to fear, rather than confronting threats, is a societal loss: “The end result is a loss of freedom... a disconnect from a tradition, a cultural tradition that goes back a really, really long time.” ([08:13])
  • He quotes Joseph Pieper’s Leisure as the Basis of Culture to stress the importance of public celebrations and “free spaces” for cultural health.

Notable Quote

"Antisemitism never goes away. It is this kind of recurring nightmare and there has to be a spiritual dimension to it..."
— John Stonestreet ([04:21])

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2. Cultural Response: Freedom, Security, and Tradition

• Balancing Safety and Values ([12:24]–[18:06])
  • Maria suggests canceled festivities may be reasonable in the short term but hopes this provokes a civilizational reflection: "This celebration needs to continue next year. What do we need to change? ... These are deeper questions." ([12:24])
  • John contrasts decisive perseverance in the wake of past attacks ("...no, we are going to make sure this continues" — [13:20]) with the present climate of retreat.

Memorable Moment

• A comparison between global Christian resilience after repeated holiday attacks and the Western tendency to cancel events (“What do those [Nigerian] Christians do the very next Sunday? They go right back to church.” – John [13:53])

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3. Surrogacy, Foreign Mega Families, and the Commodification of Children

• Chinese Billionaires and Surrogacy in California ([22:56]–[30:42])

  • Maria recounts a shocking Wall Street Journal story about very wealthy Chinese men arranging for the birth of hundreds of babies via surrogacy in California, often never intending to parent them directly.
  • The California law allows “purchasers” to apply for parental rights in the seventh month, exposing surrogacy’s consumerist underpinnings.

• Ethical Critique of Surrogacy and IVF ([26:17]–[36:00])

  • John draws attention to how the entire industry treats children as commodities, a logical extension of “Big Fertility” practices.
  • Maria underscores that public disgust at this story should prompt ethical questions about all surrogacy and IVF, not just the “extreme” cases.

Notable Exchange

"This is the process completely working out as planned, better than planned. Business is booming." — John ([29:53])
"If you find yourself absolutely disgusted by stories like this, it is extremely helpful to ask yourself why...You'll find that there isn't [a moral difference]. The only real difference you'll come to is taste." — Maria ([37:09])

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4. Notes on Masculinity: Men in Crisis

• Discussion of Scott Galloway’s Book ([45:34]–[61:42])
  • The rise in “male malaise”—fewer men in the workforce, declining education and marriage rates, increased despair/addiction.
  • John highlights a cultural legacy of treating masculinity either as a problem or a pathology, “maleness itself was malevolent.”
  • Maria notes the shifting nature of work (from physical to knowledge-based jobs) as a catalyst for masculine disorientation, but also points to a broader crisis in meaning and ontology (identity as a male/female human being).
  • Both see an opportunity for the church to call men to agency, purpose, and a biblically-rooted design for masculinity.

Notable Quotes

"The large and growing cohort of bored, lonely, poorly educated men has become a malevolent force in society."
— John ([47:54])

"The analysis that makes the most sense is the culture-wide identity crisis that started with a...confusion about what it means to be human."
— John ([58:46])

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5. Ethics of Government Assistance & Christian Worldview ([62:34]–[68:55])

• Listener Q&A: Somali Medicaid Fraud in Minnesota
  • John explains the Christian principle of “subsidiarity”—societal problems are best handled at the most local competent level, not by blanket state programs.
  • He warns against over-reliance on government, advocating for spheres of responsibility (family, church, local community).
  • “The government has a role, but the government can’t get local. And you start local and you build out from there.” ([65:07])

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Additional Memorable Moments

• Light-hearted Correction ([61:42]–[62:27]):

  • Maria playfully calls out John’s mix-up recommending Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas as a Chesterton book.

• Christmas Recommendations ([69:01]–[70:13])

  • John: Attend church, especially “Lessons and Carols.”
  • Maria: Watch The Muppet Christmas Carol, and (for fun) listen to Forest Frank’s new Christmas song.

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Conclusion

The hosts weave together analysis of terror attacks, cultural traditions, ethical quandaries in family formation, and the crisis of masculinity—each linked by the recurring theme: when foundational truths and values are abandoned or distorted, societal confusion, loss of meaning, and moral peril follow. Throughout, they urge listeners (and the Church) to courage, clear thinking, and a recommitment to biblical anchors in an anxious and changing world.

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Suggested Listening Reference Points

• Islamic Terrorism & Antisemitism: [00:02] – [13:20]
• Cultural Response and Loss of Tradition: [09:28], [13:20] – [18:06]
• Surrogacy & Commodification of Children: [22:56] – [42:59]
• Crisis in Masculinity: [45:34] – [61:42]
• Q&A on Government Aid: [62:34] – [68:55]
• Christmas Recommendations: [69:01] – end

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For those who haven’t listened:
This episode delivers a thought-provoking, sometimes sobering application of Christian worldview thinking to global crises and domestic cultural transformations, challenging listeners to clarity, courage, and renewal in thought and action.

Transcript

[A]

You're listening to breakpoint this Week where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian perspective. Today we're going to talk about the deadly shooting in Australia, rising antisemitism, and a changing landscape of safety around the world. We're so glad you're with us. Please 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, we have to start this week with the shooting in Australia. And I'm gonna hand it over to you because we're recording this a week ahead of Christmas. We are just about wrapping up the Hanukkah season, which I and my husband observe with our girls. And it's really been a sweet week, but I really don't know what to say about this. So this was the shooting on Bondi beach in Australia during a Hanukkah celebration that killed 15 people, including a child and a Holocaust survivor by two Islamic men, a father and son. So can you help me work through this?

[B]

No, because this sort of thing is, it's not senseless in the sense that some people call acts of evil like this senseless. It makes an awful lot of sense in a fallen world, particularly coming from a radicalized ideology that goes kind of all the way down the rabbit hole of that ideology. What I mean by that is Islam on Islam's term, sees Jews as unworthy of life and actually those that need to be eliminated. And we've seen a resurgence not just in anti Semitism and attacks on Jewish people, although we have, but we've also seen a resurgence of Islamic violence against Jewish people. And you remember just two decades ago, in the wake of 9 11, we would have just consistent incidents like this around the world, in France, certainly in the United States with 9 11, but then also in other places as well. Subway bombing in London, for example. I mean, there's just a lot of examples of this. And at times it was Islamic violence just against the West. But you have these kind of targeted opportunities. And that's what we see. I mean, we saw it here in Colorado last May where a Muslim man from Colorado Springs went to a Jewish event and targeted Jewish people, not with guns, but with knives and stabbed people there. Look, there's enough examples of this, and it's built into the ideology. It's literally built into the system. It's built into the books that are considered and the writings that are considered to be authoritative. And it is a horrible, horrible thing it is worth noting that these acts of Islamic violence are corresponding with antisemitism from other sources as well. And not just words, although there are a lot of words also actual actions in terms of discrimination and hatred and things like. Like that you kind of look to, I think a lot about Chuck Colson and how he thought about, for example, crime and incarceration and also restorative justice and how to deal with the recidivism raid and so on. And part of his analysis was that the typical secular explanations for the trend lines that the society was going through at the time, he was talking about an explosion in the prison population. Population and you know, the traditional explanations that this is because of racism or this is because of poverty or this is because of education, that those things were factors, but not enough to explain it. And I, I think that when you look at these particular horrific actions and words against the Jewish people and you say, well, what is enough to explain it? You. You have to put all the, all the pieces on the table, all the cards on the table, and if one card or two cards continue to show up over and over and over, you need to take those seriously. And Chuck did that when it come, when it, when it, when it came to that topic of crime, incarceration, the exploding prison population and so on. And we need to do that here in the wake of a resurgence of Islamic violence and a resurgence of anti Semitism. And of course, it's worth mentioning as well, not to go on here, but it's worth mentioning that, good heavens, antisemitism never goes away. It is this kind of recurring nightmare and there has to be a spiritual dimension to it. There has to be a demonic dimension to it because it just never goes away. It just continues to surge again and again and again from various sources. So it feels senseless because it feels. So what is it that we can actually do about it? But it actually makes a lot of sense if you take people's own words seriously. And there's plenty of things to read and to hear both historically and recently of what's happening. I think we need to believe it.

[A]

Yeah, it is, I think in a lot of ways just a cycling through of history that tends to repeat itself. But it does also feel like it's escalating. I was reminded this week of, you know, a year ago, there was that horrific attack in Germany at the Christmas markets where people drove a car into a crowd. And just a couple hours ago, five Muslim men, including a Muslim, I don't know if he was an imam or Just a preacher were arrested in Germany for planning another of these kinds of attacks. And we of course know that Paris has canceled its New Year's celebrations, turning to some kind of dystopian like everybody watch online, we're going to do a prerecorded concert or something. Citing security concerns, London has increased security around its Christmas celebrations. Is this a result of migration? Is this a story about Islam? Or is this a story about the continued normalization of anti Semitism, of violence? The world is changing, but what is this?

[B]

Yeah, I don't know if the attacks on Christmas are an example of anti Semitism, although the antisemitism is certainly surging from both Islam and also on the left and also on the sources on the right. So it's coming from multi directions when we talk about antisemitism. The story of canceling Christmas, you might say, is also a story gaining steam from last year to this year. And it has to do with Christmas markets and it has to do with the danger getting, how do we say, high enough that local authorities feel like the solution is that these celebrations can't be protected or these markets cannot be protected. But, but it says an awful lot about a society when the solution to threats of violence are we're just going to get rid of any opportunity not by, you know, heightened security or heightened protection. In some cases there is a sense in which the authorities feel like to heighten security and to bring the kind of security that needs to be brought will look like racial profiling. And that in a certain mindset is a bigger sin. You know, that's the greatest evil that you can do. And we need to understand that that's a poisonous idea that goes through. This is not a call certainly for racial profiling, but there is a sense in which if you're not willing to do that or if you see the threat of racial profiling or being accused of racial profil as being a bigger crime, something bigger than actually protecting the citizens. I mean, that just says an awful lot about cultural priorities and how we think evil works, how we think evil proceeds. But it also says something, you know, at some point, you know, if we go back to one of the big stories of this past year, the murder of Charlie Kirk, it was in a venue, it was an open area in which it was basically impossible to defend. They made the decision, we're going to go ahead anyway and we're going to do this. And these cities, these communities aren't willing to do that. Or maybe they feel like these places are unguardable. But it's notable that the end result is a loss of freedom. It's notable that the end result is a disconnect from a tradition, a cultural tradition that in many of these places goes back a really, really long time and is one of the remaining. And I'm not saying a marketplace is the same as being connected to Christmas, but in these places, it kind of is. These places, it comes along with decoration and it comes along with celebration, and it comes along with festivity and so on. Joseph Pieper, of course, wrote the book Leisure as the Basis of Culture. And in other words, what we do with kind of these free spaces and free moments, both as individuals and as society, tells a lot about our values, and it tells a lot about kind of our priorities.

[A]

And, well, that's why these terrorists target these things. They're significant, they have meaning culturally.

[B]

They're symbolic. Yeah, but it's also symbolic within the community. Right. You know, you might say, well, you know, the attack in Australia was on a very specific Jewish celebration, so that motivates these individuals. But when a community says, we're going to now no longer protect this tradition, we're not going to protect this activity that has defined these free spaces and free moments for decades and connects us very specifically, then you're making a selection, whether you want to or not. You're selecting not to be connected to that, and you're selecting now to be connecting instead to safety. And that means you've allowed whatever you've allowed all the way up to that point, and you're making a decision not to backtrack, not to backpedal, which a lot of communities have, a lot of countries have. Certainly the United States has, Hungary has, and we are here talking about immigration. These are very, very difficult decisions to make. I don't want to undermine how difficult these decisions are, but you do have to decide what is the fundamental purpose of the state, what is our role, and how much does it matter, kind of our history. We've got a piece coming out in the next couple weeks on the uk, and it's on a silly topic, a new Robin Hood series which goes back and just completely retells the history. And of course, Robin Hood was mythical, but the scenario, the cultural backdrop there is being told as if Christianity was not a part of that community or was being forced and so on. And so Tim Padgett, one of our writers, sniffed that out, but it has to do. It's similar here. Right. Which is, why are we retelling the story as if Christianity were the oppressor well, because you've embraced a philosophy, you've embraced a worldview, and you're not allowed to tell a story in any other way. You have to tell it in a way in which Christianity is the oppressor. But that's pretty notable. You remember the British Parliamentarian who spoke to a largely empty room a couple months ago and basically said, look, we either tie ourselves to our past and our Christianity, or we lose a lot of the important things. This is the idea of a cut flower civilization. And canceling Christmas is an example of this. I'm not saying it's not a hard decision because you have to bring peace and order, but it's the conscience or the constable. You have a group of people who can govern themselves. You allow in people who can govern themselves. Or you have to actually increase the police presence. You have to take away the fun. You have to redefine leisure and free space and free time in your nation.

[A]

Yeah, I can appreciate if it were a sense of like, okay, this year got away from us, and we don't feel like we can adequately. Because if I go to a major public celebration, I want to have the reasonable expectation that whatever authorities are in place have thought about this and feel that it is a safe place to go. So if they don't feel that, then I appreciate, in a sense, them canceling it. But I would hope then that that would in turn cause the reflection you're talking about where they would then say, how did we get to this point and what do we need to do? Because this is absurd. We're not gonna go on this way. This celebration needs to continue next year. What do we need to change? And that's where we get to the hard questions. Like you're talking about looking at immigration, looking at why we seem to not be unable to police ourselves and why we can't trust our neighbors anymore, and why things like riding public transit feel fraught and a little bit more unsafe than they used to. And these are deeper questions that are harder to answer than what you do with a particular event.

[B]

But it's notable to look at the decisions made. Right? And I think, of course, that's the point. And so think about after 9 11, the intentional decision was made. We're gonna. We shut down the airports for a while, we're gonna open it back up, but it's gonna look very different, right? So there's a decreased amount of freedom. There's an increased amount of government intervention. Think about the New Year's Eve celebration right after September 11th and the dropping of the ball that continued to take place. I'm not sure if there was ever a year taken off or not. I'd have to Google that to know if even that following year. But I think it kind of went on, if I remember correctly. Anyway, I don't want to assume I'd have to Google it again to figure it out, but. But the decision was made eventually. Like, no, we are going to make sure this continues. Like, you know, that's a New York tradition. And it was a very important statement. Think about the Nigerian Christians who every Christmas and every Easter. In fact, there was predictions this week of expecting a Christmas attack in churches. And they should, because it's been going for 15 years straight where they're, you know, every Christmas we wake up to another horrific attack by Muslims on Christians in the church. What do those Christians do the very next Sunday? They go right back to church. In other words, these are more than symbolic things. They are choices you make as individuals to say, I'm attaching to my roots or I'm not. These are the things that are essential, and these are the things that are not. So again, how we get there to these decisions, very difficult. You need to protect people. Not. I'm not undermining any of that and the decisions that are made. But it says a lot of things about a lot of things.

[A]

If I values it reminds me of in the first summer of 2020, we were. Everybody was navigating the pandemic, and my husband and I were like, let's take the girls to Florida, because we go there a lot. And it was. You could go, actually go on the beach in Florida at that time, unlike a lot of other places, our public park in our neighborhood had caution tape around it. So we were really kind of scrambling. And my dad's best got very, very sick with COVID and was hospitalized for several weeks. And I remember calling my dad and saying, am I crazy for traveling? Like, has this situation made you more reticent or scared? And he said, if anything, it's made me feel more like you should live your life with your loved ones and do what you do. Like, you know. And thankfully, his friend survived and is healthy and well. But that was exactly what you're talking about. It was a reckoning with what your values are and what the essentials are and important and of course, being reasonable. I mean, we were young, we were low risk, all those things. But that's kind of what needs to happen now on a civilizational level. And it feels a little bit like it's happening here. It doesn't feel so much so like it's gonna happen. I don't have as high hopes that it's happening in Europe, unfortunately, at least Western Europe. But these are the moments when you have to make those kinds, have those kinds of conversations.

[B]

I guess it's almost a recommendation to watch Truth Rising if you haven't watched it, because these are the sorts of conversations that have emerged in that documentary project is what are the roots of civilization? What does it mean when a civilization is cut off? What kind of choices do we need to make as individuals? And the simplest terms in that film and in the stories of courage that are promoted are, make this choice. Make no other choice. Make the choice to tell the truth. Make the choice to know the truth. Make the choice to live by the truth. So that's part of it. But I do want to throw at least a bone that there are hard. In terms of the hard decision point which we made, which is going to Florida, which we did, too. Right after I got Covid. I mean, I basically woke up out of my stupor and said, we're going to Florida.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it was, it was. It was funny. But, you know, choosing not to get on a cruise ship at that point, maybe it was a good choice. You know what I mean? Like, at that point, not to mention, they were all.

[A]

Honestly, even for my parents, my parents were older. Like, there was all kinds of variables that would affect the matter.

[B]

Right? Yeah. But I remember, by the way, I went to Florida in the middle of. Of that for another factory to speak to, to a group of folks and ended up having one of my daughters with me. And we went over to the east coast of Florida and you could just see cruise ships lined up, you know, because they didn't have any place to park. They were just parked all up and down that coast. And you. They had crews on them that couldn't get off. And so the decision in March or April to not get in a cruise ship was. Or March was maybe February. Yeah. There were a lot of people stranded on cruise ships for a long time.

[A]

Yeah. What a wild time. This also reminded me when you were talking, John, about a mini series that was very popular several years ago, and that I thought was really good, but it was about terrorism. And I remember this one line where somebody accused one of the really great detectives. It was Mandy Patinkin, actually. And they said, aren't you engaging in racial profiling? And he said, it's not racial profiling. It's just profiling. And it was so cathartic, because this is what you're talking about. Are your values appearances and personal offense and politicization, or are your values accuracy, reasonableness and solving criminal problems? And those are the kinds of questions that we're being forced to ask right now. And unfortunately, not everybody's being reasonable answering them. But we certainly pray for everybody's safety as things move forward. I wanna mention just briefly, John, another tragedy news that broke this week, which was the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, now allegedly by his son, which it seems to point to just tragedy on tragedy. And then of course, President Trump just made an incredibly grotesque statement after it, somehow trying to make it about him and also disparaging a man who'd just been murdered, allegedly by his son. I don't know that there's a lot to comment on here other than that this was just, I mean, a tragedy and then embarrassing, frankly.

[B]

Yeah, it was a horrible statement, should never have been made. And it's not something that anyone, even those who support the President's actions and policies in many different areas, which a lot of people do, and I certainly am grateful for the movement on issues of life and other things. But you can call balls and strikes, you can say that this is wrong and we cannot succumb to a vision of morality which says because this person is on my side, I have to support everything that they do and quote, unquote. And this is where I was grateful to see so many voices that were very, very clear on this. And it was a little odd to see the silence about those who are supporters of Trump on this statement. There wasn't a silence. There was a lot of people saying this was a wretched thing to say. It was narcissistic, it was self centered, it was tragic what happened to Rob Reiner and his wife. And the fact that it happened at the hands of, of his son, allegedly is from where all the evidence seems to be pointing right now, just horrific. And we should also, by the way, mention that as we're recording this, the shooter at Brown University has been caught and he killed himself in a storage unit. At least again, the alleged shooter. It's early in that. I think this is a story that's going to be weird. That's my. This is a prediction already. It just seems like you don't usually get these things from Portugal.

[A]

And so it's a strange story. And it sounds like he also is suspected of being responsible for the murder of a physics professor at mit.

[B]

Yeah, a nuclear scientist. So there's a Whole lot of things going on.

[A]

We have a very, very dear friend who we went to church with for several years here in Columbus who now is a physics professor at Brown. And this has been a really, I know, very difficult and kind of shattering week for him and his wife and just, I mean, any illusions of safety and just confusion about what? This is a very, very strange story for sure. Yeah. And scary. Well, John, let's take a quick break. We're gonna get to some more news of the week in just a moment. We'll be right back with more breakpoint.

[B]

Hello, my name is Scott Miller and I have the privilege of serving as vice president of Finance at the Colson Center. As we approach the end of the year, I want to thank you for standing with us in this mission. Because of your generosity, countless believers are being equipped with a strong biblical worldview. And that work continues into 2026. Did you know there are ways to give beyond cash or check? Many partners choose to give through stock securities or a donor advised fund, which can also provide tax benefits. Every gift, no matter the form, helps us share truth and hope in a culture that desperately needs it. If you'd like to make this kind of gift, please ensure it reaches us by December 31st. Just email us at advancementcoulsoncenter.org that's advancementolsoncenter.org thank you for making this kingdom work possible. From all of us at the Colson center, have a blessed and merry Christmas.

[A]

We're back on breakpoint this week. John, I've got to bring up to you this story. Actually, you shared this with me from the Wall Street Journal. I read this story with my jaw just continuing to drop to the point where I then ran downstairs to try and describe to my husband what I just read. And I could not even get the words out to describe it. This is so utterly shocking and horrifying, but also somewhat predictable. The more I think about it. There is a growing situation. It sounds like it's primarily happening in California, at least that's where this coverage started of billionaires and presumably millionaires, very wealthy men from China paying for surrogacy through fertility clinics in the United States to have, in some cases, hundreds of children. Like, again, I. It sounds like I'm pitching a movie to you. Like, I don't know how to describe this without it sounding like I'm exaggerating, but I am not. This came to the attention of authorities in California first because California has this really grotesque law where people who are have paid for surrogacy can apply for parental rights in the seventh month of a woman's pregnancy. So a woman could be pregnant with a baby and two unrelated adults can apply through the courts to be considered legally that child's parents already. And the court generally just grants that the Kardashians did that. This is a big thing now in surrogacy. Well, this judge in California started to notice that the same man's name was popping up on all of these applications for parental rights through surrogacy. All these different fertility clinics, hundreds of babies. And so the judge put a stop to this. As she said, we started declining these, these parental rights applications. And then upon further investigation, found that there's a handful of these Chinese men. And they'll say things like. Or it will become apparent these are men who have, like, video game companies or some kind of tech companies or whatever. And it looks like they're, I don't know, building a workforce. In some cases, they never meet these children. They're hiring nannies and they're hiring companies that will pick up the children from the hospital and bring them home. And these men are still back in China. And it is an incredible, incredible story. But what stuck out to me about it, and I think you as well, is that there is nothing to complain about in this story that is not endemic and fundamental to the practice of surrogacy itself. There is a certain accounting for taste here. People seem to find this story in particular quite distasteful, and I'm happy for that. I think the 20th time we hear this kind of story, it will be less distasteful, cuz that's how it works. But whatever you're upset about, whatever this judge is upset about applies to surrogacy itself. And at the end of the day, who has the right to say, well, this is too many babies to have through surrogacy, and this is, you're not gonna meet this baby or you're not gonna care for it at this level that I would like. Who's to be the judge there? The more reasonable cutoff would be to say surrogacy is fundamentally grotesque and immoral and should not be happening. It is a violation of children's and human rights.

[B]

There's a lot to say about this. One is that the Wall Street Journal covered this, which was interesting. This was not some kind of, you know, outlet taking an exception or taking a rare occasion and then elevating it to being kind of endemic to the practice. The second thing I think of is the idea that in California the parental rights of those who order the child, the surrogates or the parents who are wanting to acquire the child can wait until seven months to become considered the parents. Now again, I think that this is not a conversation about surrogate rights right now as the biological mom or anything like that. We'll get to that in a second. But why wait for seven months? Why isn't it immediately acknowledged when pregnancy is achieved? And the reason is because this is considered a consumer product. And by it I mean the child is considered a consumer product. Product, the surrogate is considered to be a means of production. And if something goes wrong, you protect the buyer. You protect the customer.

[A]

Well, let me just really quick because I did some research on this a while ago. It is also partly because would be purchasers of these babies were forcing abortions or were trying to claim the legal right to demand an abortion earlier in the pregnancy and they were using their right to this baby, their so called right to a baby to claim the right to demand the abortion. All these problems are because of the endemic moral problems of the practice itself. But go on.

[B]

The consumer aspect of this is built into this from start to finish. And you know, we have talked about IVF and surrogacy in various ways and many, many times. Well, you have different stories. I was reminded this week of, for example, when Russia invaded Ukraine. And one of the stories were the children that were conceived through IVF and this surrogacy tourism industry that Ukraine imbibes in and you know, hundreds and hundreds of children who could not go to their quote unquote owners or their buyers. And how many of those who were kind of buying these children or ordering them were gay men? So again, they're completely consumers. They have no connection with the child other than the connection of kind of making the first purchase order. And so where do they go? The consumerist aspect of this, turning children into commodity is endemic to the process. So the best way to manage all the kind of contract law disputes is through this, you know, kind of seven month thing. And it just again, it's all built in right now. Why and to your point that the problems here are endemic. We have said that children are valuable. Children are not valuable as human beings, but should be given life if the adults want them. So all the priority here is put on adult desire. Gay men should have children if gay men want them. Rich Chinese billionaires should not have children. What if they want a hundred of them? Like the video game executive who's to say, in other words, this is the process completely Working out as planned, better than planned. Business is booming.

[A]

There are quotes in this story of fertility clinics allegedly saying, like, hey, send them my way. He wants five at one time. Great.

[B]

Yeah. Business is booming now. I can't explain for the life of me where the motivation is for the Chinese billionaire. Like, why. Why dozens? Why a hundred? Like, what's the in it for him or her? I imagine it's mostly him. If it's. If a Chinese billionaire that's almost always a man, what's in it for them? I don't know. That, to me, is a weird, weird part of the story. What's motivating them?

[A]

I mean, doesn't your mind immediately go to, like, Genghis Khan? Like, this is some kind of dystopian evil, like, male stereotypical?

[B]

I mean, not unlike Elon Musk, I guess. Right.

[A]

Well, several of them cited him. Like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah.

[B]

I mean, yeah, kind of a return to this is what humans are. And if you get human biology without a creator of human biology, you get the urge, the sexual urge, the reproductive urge, without any kind of ordering. Now, the other thing that I want to point out here is that again, this is working out exactly as the plan, you know, for IVF and surrogacy. The more the better, all that sort of stuff. I mean, and if you think life begins at conception, then there's really no fundamental difference, other than the surrogacy part of it, between a Chinese billionaire having dozens and dozens of children in a different country, in a different place, and wants nothing to do with them, and the way that IVF is currently practiced, which involves the creation of many, many human beings that are then left detached from their biological parents and freezers. Right. So you have frozen embryos. And whenever we bring this up, we get a lot of challenge on that from those who have participated in the process, saying, but that's not me. And I understand the intention is different. The intention of a child struggling with infertility. Going through the process, excess embryos are created and now they're there. And the intention is, well, we're going to implant them eventually, or we want to give them life. It's all intention. So the intention is different. And that's not a nothing within a Christian worldview of ethics. But the outcome is an awful lot of human beings that are detached from their parents, geographically separated. So it's really hard to see how the problem here is anything more than geography, that this is just a geographical difference where these children are, say, the Chinese billionaire in California and the children of IVF in America are in a state of frozen suspension. If human beings are human beings, you know, it's a, it's, it's a question of location. You know, if you go back to the SLED acronym, size, location, environment, degree of dependency, which are the differences between an embryo, a product of conception, quote, unquote, is what they're called, and a child, that, that's all the difference that, that there is. And this seems to be a difference of location, intent doesn't change, kind of what happens. And this speaks to me, to those who have defended ivf, those who have defended IVF and the president's policy or the push from the president publicly, even Christian voices that have done this and why, I can't understand this, I can't get there from here. If the president were saying, okay, we're going to go, we want to promote this kind of IVF with all of these limits and all of these ethical impositions and all of these kind of practices. So there's not excess embryos created and suspended in time, and there's not this kind of eugenics screening of embryos up front. And people can't just get them whenever they want them. So if a child is inherently sterile, that doesn't give him, you know, a couple of men rights to acquire a child in a purchase process. In other words, none of that's part of this plan and none of that's part of the president's push. The problem is endemic to how IVF is done. And then you add the surrogacy confusion on, and it's hard to understand any sort of ethical reason that surrogacy should be allowed or promoted. And again, on a legal. I'm going to go back to something you said at the beginning. You didn't say exactly this way, but we have said it in the past and you've said it in the past. And right now, the fertility industry, big fertility is the wild, wild west there basically is. If you want it, you can have it, you can pay for it, you can travel. It's a form of tourism. And the children are the ones that are being created and then victimized, either by being abandoned, being left, being screened out, being left frozen, or being left without a father who's a tech billionaire in China. Like it's endemic to the system. The system is working exactly as it was planned to work, and this is what you get. So if we all have an ickiness, which I hope we do, which a lot of people are like, what? You know, like, you were right and I was when I sent it around. Just know the system is making this happen. You may not have done it in the way that you pursued having children through ivf, but it just seems like we have to speak out on behalf of these children.

[A]

Yeah, I think stories like this are so helpfully clarifying. It is to our shame that it takes a story like this. It takes somebody who's gonna take the wild, wild west nature of this industry to its logical conclusions for us to reckon with the ethical depravity that it allows. But either way, if you find yourself with a sense of, as you said, ickiness, if you find yourself absolutely disgusted by stories like this, it is extremely helpful to ask yourself why. And then to determine whether or not the why is also applicable to the most. The rosiest picture you could paint of assisted reproductive technology, of surrogacy, of, you know, big IVF or whatever it is. Because it will get into a sort of murky territory where suddenly you've put yourself in the position of determining, well, how many babies is it okay for someone to order at one time? How long is it okay for a parent who's ordered a baby to not be in that child's life? How many other people is it okay for that person to hire to take care of that? How? What kinds of intentions are ethically okay as opposed to those that aren't? Why is it okay to say I want to continue to live an intentionally sterile life with this gay partner but also have children? Why is that better morally to you than a man who says, I want to create a family legacy workforce for my growing business? What is fundamentally different about that, especially when it comes to the actual lived, functional experience of the child who deserves a mom and a dad? There is, and you're gonna find that there isn't. The only real difference you'll come to is taste. Some things are gonna feel better to you than others just because of cultural conditions and the way we live. And like I said at the beginning, I'm happy that people still seem to be averse to this kind of story. But you've gotta know this about yourself and about cultures. The more this happens, the less distasteful it's gonna seem. Because that's we're very adaptive and that's how these things happen. And your taste can lie to you. It is a very, very poor stand in for real ethical decision making whether something feels right or wrong to you because it can be so conditioned by repetition and circumstances. So this I'm hoping, like again, it's to our shame that these things have to happen for us to ask these questions at large. Just like, you know, all the stories coming out about men who through sperm donation in our own country have fathered hundreds of kids. And all these people saying, how is this possible? Aren't limits. Nobody's keeping track of that. There's no actual regulation.

[B]

Yeah. The answer is no, there are not limits.

[A]

No, there are no limits. Of course not. And the women, you know, women who are like, well, I had no idea and I've been victimized by this. You paid for the sperm. This was the marketplace that you entered. Right. If we had asked these questions from the beginning, we should be coming to the same conclusion, which is from the most well intentioned childless couple here, whose pain is real and deserves compassion, to a Chinese billionaire who's a sociopath and is endeavoring to do something that's fundamentally evil. The functional working out of this industry is the same.

[B]

Yeah, I do want to say the intent is not a nothing. Right.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

In other words, it is more than taste. It is intent and taste. Taste is more. The rest of us looking at stories like this and saying, do we find this distasteful or not? But the choice of participation is certainly way different. And you know, I, I, but, but, but there's also a reality. You know, we're at the age where my son sometimes does things and, and he goes, I didn't mean, you know, to hit my sister or whatever, you know, I don't even, you know, I.

[A]

Did it out of love. Dad.

[B]

What is that? What is that? Does that change the fact that you, you did this? No. Right. And intention matters. Jesus took our actions back into the realm of intention. Right. But at the same time, you can have good intentions with bad results and you're still responsible for what you do. And our intents have to be governed themselves. And as a society, you have to put safeguards on them. So I would feel a lot better if there were those. You know, again, I, I struggle to see any ethical ivf. But, but there are way more ethical ways of doing IVF than others. There's, I struggle to see any ethical surrogacy. There are surrogates who engage in that, who have better intentions than, than others. But those who are, are calling for the president to subsidize this, to put it into insurance plans. The president's own goal here, thinking somehow if he does that it's connected with a pro life view. Big fertility ends more lives. Big fertility victimizes more children. So please at least join us in calling for the safeguards that will be put in place. It's almost as if we talk a lot about how in the tail end of the sexual revolution, the sexual revolutionaries tried to mitigate the disasters that were caused by bad men and bad women by saying, oh, it's about consent, right? You have to get consent. That has now been applied to having children. Not just sex, but also procreation, which should, by the way, tell us that there's an inherent connection between sex and procreation which we've tried to sever, which we can never sever fully because, you know, biology. But gosh, consent, I want it. That's enough to govern this industry. No, it's not. And there's enough examples of this right now. It's so obvious, it's so clear. We have to put safeguards here and you know, to the point that, you know, Katie Foust and others have been saying for a really long time, put the kids first. And there's nothing about this process from the beginning to the end that puts the kids first. The kids are subject to adult desires, consumer desires in this case, and whatever weird things are driving Chinese billionaires and Elon Musk to do these sorts of things. Yeah, the cat's out of the bag. It's the Wild West. We're seeing the results of our new technological prowess.

[A]

So anyway, well, to be fair, I don't think Elon Musk has used surrogacy. But yeah, the point is well taken.

[B]

No, but he's. But yeah, I mean, if you don't have safeguards built on some sort of ontology, some sort of given some sort.

[A]

Of actuals, what kids deserve what they need.

[B]

Exactly. And this is increasingly the case both with computer technology, but also like artificial intelligence, but also with certainly reproductive technologies, which is the possible drives, the ethical right, not the actual. In other words, this is the way the world is. And so let's frame our ethics out of the givens of the world versus let's imagine what's possible with our technological workarounds. And if it's possible, then it must be acceptable because we should never hold back human innovation. Hey, Breakpoint listeners. Bob Dittmer, producer of Breakpoint here. Recently one of our listeners, a mom of college age kids from Colorado Springs, shared how God has used the resources and programs of the Colson center to impact her life. Here's what she said.

[A]

I can engage my daughters discussions that are not fear based or reactive. And then also the daily, the current events that are happening real time that podcasts like Breakpoint and Strong Women are helping to inform me. It gives me that chance to think about it before the conversation happens. I need to think about things before I'm in that moment in the conversation. The Colson center serves a unique role in the supporting the church because it's looking at all of the best resources that are available out there. And I trust that the editors and the staff are gleaning the things that are going to help me deal with the current issues that I'm facing as a Christian, as a mother, as a wife, as a friend, as a daughter. And. And they're bringing these together through podcasts, through the Colson Fellows Program, through the conference. And I feel like I have all these resources and regardless of what I'm reading or listening to, everything is working together to shape and form and strengthen my worldview.

[B]

To put it simply, that's why the Colson center exists. We are humbled that that God uses this ministry to equip Christians with clarity, confidence and courage so they can live out their calling right where God has placed them. Perhaps you've been impacted by the ministry of the Colson center as well. If so, would you consider making your best gift to the colson center by December 31st? And thanks to a generous $500,000 challenge grant, your gift will have double the impact. Make your gift [e-mail] thecent that's colsoncenter.org December.

[A]

Well, John, I want to turn now to There's a new book out by Scott Galloway about men, kind of calling men to a higher ideal, noticing it's called Notes on Being a Man. And our friend Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies wrote a review of the book that was complimentary in the Wall Street Journal. What he noted was that he's kind of Scott Galloway is calling men to more purpose to procreation, which was a little bit surprising, but in a good way. He's just noting what we've talked about here before, which is kind of the male malaise, as Brad I think calls it, that fewer men are entering the workforce. Men aren't graduating from college at the same rates as women anymore. We know, of course, that fewer men are getting married, fewer people are getting married, they're having fewer children. There is deaths of despair are on the rise, particularly among men, addiction. So we agree that there's a problem. I like the idea of this book because it was calling men to live into their design, which I feel like five years ago you weren't even allowed to acknowledge that there was a specific design for men that may be different from the design for women, but just acknowledging the positive parts of masculinity and calling men to live into that. What do you think of this thesis here?

[B]

Well, the analysis isn't new. There have been many books that date back to, I'm sure, even before. But Christine Hoff Sommers book, the War Against Boys, that she wrote years ago, and that had to do mostly with education. You could talk about even beyond that. I mean, Margaret Mead, the feminist icon, said that the essential task of any society is to find a proper place for men. And I've joked here before that Margaret Mead thought the proper place for men was on a different planet than women and hers was a restrictive vision. But she's not wrong in and of the statement. I had a wonderful long conversation with the one and only Al Mohler this week, president of Southern Seminary, for one of his podcasts. And this is where the conversation went, is helping boys find their place. And of course, the feminist movement, as it became captivated by the sexual revolution and sold sexual freedom to women, had to do something to mitigate the male sexual urge. And so where that ended up, as it was then hijacked from the DEI movement, was essentially to say masculinity is a problem. And so we went from ordering a society primarily away from men to actually seeing maleness as a pathology, a pathology that needed to be condemned in all places. And we also had the age of distraction. I think the culture of adolescence, which men ironically were able to imbibe in as a way of getting out of the way and play video games, and that actually created the imbalances, and I lowered the marriage rates. And there's a lot of other things, I mean, to the point where adolescents, which was initially considered to be kind of a transitional stage, roughly between the ages of 13 to 18, you know, by the time the 20th century was over, was seen to be not a transitional stage, but a stage that many boys in particular entered and never left and went from 11 to 30. Now, the interesting thing about Galloway's, according to Brad Wilcox's analysis here in the Wall Street Journal, is this aspect of the analysis that the large and growing cohort of bored, lonely, poorly educated men, right? And all those things have been written about young men are bored, young men are lonely, young men are distracted, young men are not getting, not the not getting educated in the in the right ways has become a malevolent force in society. The malevolent idea of this, in other words, it's bad. These are young men, then, that are vulnerable to conspiracy theories, radicalization and nihilist politics. And I think there's probably a tendency of the human race to be kind of drawn to nihilist politics because of the power of nihilism for a long time. But we're certainly seeing a surge in that among young men. In other words, the chickens are coming home to roost. The ideas are having their consequences. The, the predictions of Frederick Nietzsche and the parable of the Madman in which he said, I've come too early. You know, now's when he should have, you know, been writing if he were still alive. He's talking about us. Up, upward, downward, left, right, going constantly. How do we know any of these things? Everything's cold and dark and dreary. We have nothing to warm us. We have to become gods ourselves, which is a very nihilistic idea in order to become worthy of the death of God. You know, things like that. Yeah, this is an analysis of this and what's encouraging to me, it's kind of like when Abigail Schreier, you know, first wrote Irreversible Damage, you know, putting her finger on and saying, look, this trans madness, which started with middle aged men trying to live out a sexual perversion, has affected young girls and it's infecting our systems, including education and counseling and so on. And let me tell you what it is it's causing. She sparked a conversation. She took a lot of heat for it, but she sparked a conversation. And then it seems to me that the conversation about young men is happening now. It's overdue. There certainly has been various pieces of it, but because the large and growing cohort of bored, lonely, poorly educated men has become a malevolent force. And we're starting to recognize the malevolent force. And the last decade, the malevolence was kind of chalked up to just being men. You know, that maleness itself was malevolent. Now we're basically willing to have a different conversation. And I see this happening from more directions and I, I'm encouraged by that. We're going to have to unravel an awful lot of things on a societal level, certainly in our institutions, education, and even in our churches, to take advantage of this moment, but we're seeing this. We've talked about this. Erica Kirk, during Charlie Kirk's memorial service, said that Charlie understood this and wanted to reach what she called the Lost Boys of the West. There's a lot of Lost Boys in the West. Are they going to go to Faith which some of them are. Are they going to go to some form of nihilism? Which a lot of them are. That is I think, a profound analysis where they're articulating the stakes and as they exist. And I think it's also a call to the church. The church has an opportunity and I hope the church leans into this opportunity. It's not going to be necessarily clean and shaven or clean shaven and easy, you know, but are we going to actually jump into this opportunity, to me is the question.

[A]

Yeah. There's another slight wrench in this analysis, I think, just in that the, to talk about this purely in the realm of ideas. And I don't know that that's exactly what you're doing, but like, you know, the fact that we turned maleness into a source of toxicity and told men that, you know, they don't have a place where they should, and all of that is true, but the nature of work has changed so much that I think that's part of it and was probably an unavoidable part of it. Like the, the kind of girl boss era feminism would never have been possible unless the majority of work had not turned non physical. Right. I mean, if we still were like primarily a manufacturing based economy, I don't think you'd see the level of women ascending in the universities and the workplaces that we do. But so the majority of like especially the higher paying work now is just not physical anymore, which is a real functional, like material difference. And I don't know that I necessarily have a solution for that other than I do think it's an opportunity, like you said, for the church, because men and women, but particularly men I think are called to provide. Especially because when you're building a family, women generally need, especially in the early years of their children's lives, need to have the freedom and space to be with their children more often than working, for example, not to open a can of worms. But if the church can continue to teach that all work, regardless of the kind of work, regardless of whether it's physical, regardless of whether it's work that only men could do and not a woman could feasibly do, is meaningful because it provides for your family or because it's work, or because it's cultivating whatever space of the world that you've been placed in, that that's meaningful and good, that's gonna be a really important message. And I think some, you know, you've talked about David Bonson's book and how special that is and what a Great contribution to this conversation. It is, and I'm grateful for him and others like him. But I agree it's an opportunity for the church. Just because the nature of work has changed so much.

[B]

I think that the nature of work has changed. That's obvious. But that dates. That predates this. It predates this pretty dramatically. The move to the information age made it worse. But the Industrial revolution separated manual labor, first of all from the home, and secondly, manual labor from non manual labor, which became the white collar, blue collar. And then of course, you had the building of economies of scale, you had the stock market, you had other ways of creating and generating wealth. And all of this historically, if you go to France during the Enlightenment or you go to kind of a theologically driven Europe, you had people dealing with ideas and people dealing with manual labor. So it's not new, it's worse, it's a contributing factor. It's not a sufficient explanation. There's a way of seeing it now where I. So I don't think it's enough to say that. It just has to do with the way work has changed. It has to do with how we think about work. I think, though, it also is in the structure of things. For example, one of the things that that is mentioned in this review, it's also mentioned, is that in other places is that the emptying out of industries that aren't manual labor of men. There was another piece, by the way, written this week that created quite a stir. What was the name of that article?

[A]

The Lost Generation by Josh Savage.

[B]

Yeah, and it created a lot of both critique, but also a lot of people saying this is a profound analysis where the actual push to rid the workplace and rid spaces of not just as an idea, but as an applied idea of white males have disenfranchised a generation of millennial white men. And this didn't happen to the Xers. The Xers were able to kind of secure places or grandfathered in. Yeah, an increasing number of spaces. Some of them just kind of bought into their fate and accepted their roles as mid management. And then others were able to achieve a particular level of career satisfaction. But that was not the case for this one cohort. And if you actually see the numbers in these industries and how dramatically they dropped and you could talk about, by the way, most of these aren't manual labor positions. Most of these are industries. They're newspapers, they're news media, they're, you know, corporate leadership, businesses that are, you know, being led. Certainly there is manual labor, but they're being led by those who are engaged in other, other things. So it was a. Prof. A fascinating analysis. I think it probably is guilty of the trying to explain everything. And a thesis usually can explain everything. There are contributing factors, but I think that there is a reckoning here. I don't think the change and the kind of work that we need explains as much as how we think about work. And we think about work as a means to an end, not as a source of meaning and purpose and expression of who we are. The idea of work is calling. There's a reason that that made this kind of comeback. The problem was they were trying to argue for calling without a caller. And that becomes, I think, confusing. And the other thing that makes the most sense is that there was this sustained, systemic, widespread attack on men as males. I'm not saying men are guiltless in all this. Men love the idea that, oh, I can be lazy and kind of stand here in the corner, stay on the couch and in the name of women's equality, play video games. Why my living girlfriend who gives me all the sex that I want, just doesn't require anything of me and works all day in the name of female empowerment. I mean, I think the analysis that makes the most sense is the culture wide identity crisis that started with a culture wide confusion about what it means to be human, where value comes from, and it ended in a full out confusion about whether or not there's anything essential to human nature at all, much less male and female, or whether everything itself is a show, everything is a stage, everything is a performance and a construct of individuals and societies. And when you start chipping away in any essential nature, any. The, you know, the conversation that I had with Dr. Mohler this week was about ontology. You know, whether there's a there, there, whether there is a substance to who we are and all the things that flow from that are pretty dramatic. So it's a fascinating conversation. It, you know, it's interesting that this review and then the piece Compact Magazine, is that where it was? You know, Abigail Schreier said it was the most profound piece of analysis that she had ever, that she had read in a long time or something like that. And then other people said, ah, it's got problems. I think it had problems too, but it's, it, you know, when you start to ask these questions, it's better for a society than when you're just assuming the conclusion that all men are bad, you know, because they're men. And that is an interesting thing. And I think, by the way, the Instruction here for Christians is to embrace the God given design of humans made in the image of God, and that there's only two kinds of image bearers, just like there are, you know, if you think about the creation story, there's different kinds of cats, there's different kinds of dogs, there's different kinds of horses, there's two kinds of image bearers, male and female, and that these are givens. These aren't things that we make up. These aren't things that we, you know, we express out of something substantial. And you have to start with the ideas now, to your point. It has to get practical. It has to get to application. It should actually get to the real world, where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. But you got to have the right ideas to start with. And Francis Schaeffer argued for, talked about this line of despair of ideas and how they eventually become practically implemented or creep into the real world and the wrong ideas will have victims. We have an idea, the right ideas, the true ideas. So we got to get those straight in our own minds and then hopefully start working them out. It is an opportunity. It's a moment, you know what I mean, where the conversation's happening. So I think for the people that are listening and say, you guys always talk about such bad news. The answer is yes, but this is some good possibility. This is an opportunity. This is a potential, I think, for the church to champion what's true. I hope so.

[A]

Well, Don, let's just get to one brief question. I think you led me astray last week, and I don't mean me. I mean the friend I was asking for who'd never read any GK Chesterton. And you recommended Letters from Father Christmas. Do you wanna own up to this mistake?

[B]

Yeah, I thought I was being super clever. And you know, those inklings all run together anyway, and Chesterton really wasn't an inkling, but all those people writing in that kind of whole thing. And anyway, I fumbled Letters from Father Christmas, which is still a good recommendation.

[A]

Especially for this, but it's by who?

[B]

JRR Tolkien.

[A]

By Tolkien, yeah.

[B]

So, okay, so the answer to the question is, if you want to start with Chesterton, start with orthodoxy, then go to heretics.

[A]

Very good. Thank you.

[B]

Yeah, but I think we should do the next question too. We have got time, right? Yeah, we got enough time. We got enough. But just do the next question from.

[A]

Minnesota from a listener named Walt. Thank you again for sending in questions, you guys. I always look forward to the weekly podcast. I noticed your segment on the Minnesota Scandal. This was talking about the Somali community that has defrauded the Medicaid system in Minnesota of over a billion dollars. At this point, you focused primarily on immigration within the Somali community, regardless of who perpetrated the scheme. Some analysis I saw focused the story more on the corrupting power of government assist. Isn't there an opportunity to speak more onto the Christian worldview on this? There are questions of efficacy, like when helping hurts the war on poverty. But then this incident adds the likely costs and impact of waste, fraud and abuse. What is your Christian worldview take.

[B]

Well, we speak about these sorts of things. I appreciated the question. And the problem is you can't always say everything about everything. So let me tell you the Christian worldview about government assistance. I contributed several years ago on the 50th anniversary on the war against poverty and along with several other thought leaders. It was a national review forum, I think, and the conclusion was, yes, we fought the war on poverty and we lost. By all the metrics, we lost this. Why? Well, because there are different segments of society. Kuyper talked about different spheres, those spheres having different authorities. And the government has a sphere. It has a role, it has a place to play. And when it does more than it should, that means that either it's overstepping its bounds or that means that whatever is responsible to operate in that sphere has fallen apart. A related view, which would also, I think, speak to your question of what's the Christian worldview on? That is a Catholic notion historically, but I think it has a lot of merit biblically. When you think about the creation mandate to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. This is called subsidiarity. And simply put, subsidiarity is all things considered equal. Those closest, most local to the problem are best suited to deal with the problem. So the example I like to use with the high school Sunday school class that I teach when this comes up is that because they all know my son, I said, my son disobeys, I don't call the police, right? Because I should be able to talk about that now. If my son goes crazy and starts bashing, you know, cars in the neighborhood and running wild and I can't control them, now the police have to step in, right? Because now all things are not considered equal. It's interesting because a couple weeks ago we got a question from Canada saying, hey, listen, the Canadians, the government does all this good stuff. And I'm like, well, no, the government then has to has a set of tools and the set of tools for the state is pretty blunt. So this is why we're seeing an increased call for medical assistance in dying on the poor. And they're calling it compassion. See the math. In other words, it's the state's job to care for the poor. That's the, that's the assumption. Right. And they're the primary ones who are going to deliver it. And you religious people stay away from it. You stay out of it. You local neighborhoods and communities, you stay out of it. Well, eventually it becomes a math problem because you don't have enough money to take care of all these things. Things. This is why, you know, for example, the in China they've tried to also step in to procreation, limit procreation 30 years ago to one child. Now they got a problem and they're trying to increase it. Why? Because they've got a social safety net problem. They've inverted the economic triangle. It's the state trying to do what the state is not good at. That's a key point of the when helping hurts framework. But, but there's also there a statement on kind of the complex of American Christians going around the world and doing mission trips. In other words, all of this is about spheres. All of this is about who's most local to the problem. And a government that actually allows local citizens and encourages and enables local citizens to care for their own communities is one then that will help solve the problem without getting in the way. And we've kind of come to this agreement, I think in disaster relief as an example. Right. There was an article after Hurricane Harvey five years ago, six years ago, whenever that was. USA Today said, hey, if you receive FEMA aid, you probably got it from a religious person. Why? Well, because Samaritan's purse is on the ground faster than FEMA every single time. Convoys of hope are there doing good work every single time. There's a wonderful story in Glenn Sunshine series how Christians who changed the world in China of a massive earthquake and a local Christian who had built up because he'd heard from the Lord. Medical supplies on the ground, serving victims. When the Communist party showed up and they were like, how can we help you do your good work? Because we can't do it. The government has a role, but the government can't get local. And you start local and you build out from there. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that about the American experience in democracy in America that everything just didn't chalk up to an individual citizen in the big state. There were these mediating structures, these Mediating structures. I think if they're done well, recognize the authority of the sphere, home sphere, the education sphere and so on. And the church and the state. And also kind of play these rules of subsidiarity. Who's most local that has the ability. Certainly if you run out of resources, you need additional help. You call on others who have maybe more resources. But outsourcing the parents job to the state, always a bad idea. Outsourcing the church's job to the state, always a bad idea. So the state has a role and that's how you order those according to a Christian worldview. Great question. Love the question. And it does speak to the Minnesota. It wasn't the Minnesota story. We weren't trying to say that the government is always corrupt. The Christian worldview is that everything is always corrupt because humans are always corrupt. Right. That's the Christian worldview. So you're going to find corruption everywhere you go. And it's better to start with what was God's created order, what is the created intent and then build out from there.

[A]

Yeah, that's helpful. Thanks. John. John, what do you want for Christmas? This is our last episode before Christmas.

[B]

This is a weird way to do recommendations. John, what do you recommend your wife get you for Christmas?

[A]

John, what do you recommend that everybody get you for Christmas?

[B]

Go to church. Christmas. Church and Christmas should not be separated. So that's one thing that I would say take advantage of that. If you can find a. Lessons in Carol's service. There's usually some during Advent, there's usually some during Christmas. These are wonderful things to. To. To. To. To. To liturgize and. And that sort of stuff. Yeah. I guess our next show will be the day after Christmas. Right. It's which we are not going to record the day of Christmas. We're the day before Christmas.

[A]

Yeah, I'm busy.

[B]

Yeah. So that's my recommendation is to next.

[A]

Week watch the Muppet Christmas Carol.

[B]

Oh yeah, we can do that one. Absolutely.

[A]

Never disappoints.

[B]

The best.

[A]

The music is so fantastic. And you know what I want for Christmas is to Christmas.

[B]

Didn't I recommend that to you though first?

[A]

No, sorry. I mean you've probably recommended it to me, but Aaron has been watching that since he was a kid. It is a major institution in my family every Christmas and has been since we started dating. So also what I want for Christmas is Forest Frank tickets. Are your kids into Forest Frank?

[B]

I don't even know who that is.

[A]

Oh, you should. Okay, everybody go look up Forest Frank. He has a new song out called I think the Present Present. It's a Christmas song. My girls are obsessed. Every kid at their school is obsessed. And I am super grateful for Forest Frank and I'm thrilled that I get to be the one to introduce him to you. John, you're gonna have to look him up after that. So please, somebody get my family Forest Frank tickets. Cause that would be so fun. Everybody, please. Have a wonderful, beautiful Merry Christmas. Thank you for listening to Breakpoint this week. Thank you for supporting the Colson center and this show. So it's a privilege for John and I to come and chat with you every week and to work through the news together and to think about life in a biblical way. Have a wonderful Christmas. We'll see you all back here next week. From the Coulson center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stonestreet. Merry Christmas.