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Breakpoint
The Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Controversy, Huge Verdict for In Case of "Detransitioner," and Demographics and the Future of the Church
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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 super bowl and the halftime show and cultural clashes over the performances there. We're also going to talk about new pushback on so called medical care for kids with gender dysphoria. We are so glad you're with us this week. 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, it's good to be back and many thanks to Katie McCoy for sitting in for me last week. That was a fun episode. But I want to talk to you this week about the big game. Super bowl, whatever. I'm not good at reading Roman numerals is happening this weekend.
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B
I'm not good at reading.
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A
What? What is it?
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B
I don't know actually. I haven't really paid attention what number it is either. But super bowl lx, I mean, you can Google it. Google AI will tell you what the Roman numerals mean.
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A
Well, then I absolutely refuse to Google.
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B
Okay, there we go.
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A
I will just sit. I will sit in darkness. 60 the next, the next super bowl is happening.
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B
If this number, if this number on my notes is right, which I'm, I'm a little hesitant to go out on this live because I honestly haven't heard the number, but it's 60. So.
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A
Okay. Well, in this next ensuing super bowl, the the Patriots are going to play the Seahawks again. I am rooting for the Patriots. I have a little family connection to Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the Patriots. Fun fact about me, I sang at his brother's wedding, which is really funny to think of now. Many moons ago, my uncle was a high school football coach in northeast Ohio for 30 some years and he was Mike Vrabel's coach. And they have stayed in touch over the years and are still good friends. And my uncle has talked to the team a few times this year. So I'm really, really excited. And I'm especially excited that I don't have to root for Tom Brady and I can still root for the Patriots this year. So that's a little gift to me. I want to talk to you specifically, though, about the halftime show because this is a source of some cultural controversy this year. A musician who calls himself Bad Bunny, which is it me or do these names just keep getting more and more embarrassing? Like I can't imagine that guy turning 50 and being happy that that's what he called himself. But nevertheless, he is going to be doing the halftime show and has indicated that he intends it to be an homage to various LGBTQ and on icons. He's reportedly gonna wear a dress. Wow. Super edgy. So in response, Turning Point USA is doing an alternate halftime show that people can tune into, which I think Kid Rock is performing at. I'm old enough to remember when Kid Rock used to be edgy, but what do you make of this hullabaloo here? Will you be tuning into the TP USA halftime?
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B
What's interesting, that the halftime show has often become the kind of the storyline of the super bowl, if it's a bad game and if it's a particularly edgy show, but it's always afterward, you know what I mean? Like, usually there's kind of a hype going in and. And there's not really a lot of thought. And, you know, and we've had some doozies of performances that cross lines. And not just at the Super Bowl. You know, many people remember the satanic exorcism at the Grammys or the. The mass gay wedding, you know, 10 years ago. Fifteen I attended 15 years ago, the Super Bowl. It's usually like if something bad happens, many people remember the Janet Jackson, you know, wardrobe malfunction. This is interesting in the sense that it is creating the controversy going in, and a lot of people are, of course, trying to frame the controversy around it being racist, that this is about a Hispanic singer who is going to sing mostly, or maybe the whole thing I've seen in some reports in Spanish. And he has been critical of Ice, and he's been critical of the President, and he's been critical of America. And so therefore, that's what this is about. I don't think that that is what this is about. I think that this is about the fact that this guy's music is edgy in and of itself. He promised to cross lines, and he specifically has promised queer icons or something like that to be a part of this. And that's what's behind, for example, the 1 million mom, you know, urging the protests. But the turning point, I think halftime show is in response to the anti American aspect of this, and they're promising a more pro American thing. And I. I mean, there is part of it, as you said. I mean, if we went back 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and said, hey, guess what? Kid Rock is going to perform on tbn, I don't think anyone would believe It. Right. Or that a whole lot of conservative or, you know, Christian voices would recommend turning into Kid Rock because, you know, Kid Rock was really edgy. His lyrics are not things that are considered wholesome, family friendly things, at least a lot of them. You know, his. His turn toward conservatism has been political, not moral, not spiritual by any means that I can see. There's others that are going to be performing as well. But it is interesting now that we're kind of given this choice.
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A
I feel like a snob now about sports because I. Last week I went to exactly one and my first United Kingdom soccer game.
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B
You just couldn't get through this program without mentioning that, did you?
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A
You had to throw it out, name, drop it. Listen, I don't know if you've ever been to a match in the uk, but we had to whisper to each other. I was expecting pandemonium because I've seen, you know, what happens when people score a goal. There is a. There was a. So we went to Old Trafford in Manchester to watch Manchester United play Fulham. And there is one section of the stands where it's pretty rowdy. And they start the chants and they sing and they're yelling the whole game. The rest of the stand are whisper quiet. It was so civilized that I became in that moment a complete snob about professional sports. And I was laughing at trying to imagine some of these folks coming to the United States and attending like an NFL game and what they. They would have to leave a quarter in. I mean, nobody's heart could handle that. That type of noise and craziness, but it just, it was really, really fun to watch a game that was clearly just about the game. And I know next to nothing about soccer, but I was completely riveted. You got to just sit and watch the athletes do what they do. And I think in some ways, we've lost something. The Super Bowl's been like this for decades now, but it's such a money. I mean, it's hard not to look at the controversy over this halftime show as somewhat drummed up in an effort to gain viewers. And I don't necessarily blame people for that impulse, but I do mourn the sort of simplicity of like this was. This is actually a football game where people have trained their whole lives and are excelling at the highest levels at this sport. And we don't really enjoy that as much as we used to.
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B
Well, I think that's right. Although, you know, oftentimes, like you said, none of that's anything new. I mean, the amount of money that companies pay for commercials, which, by the way, parents, this is a great opportunity to teach logic. You should look at the commercials and use those to teach logic. And thankfully, at least in recent years, those commercials have become way less sexualized. There was kind of a moment in the 90s where everything was headed in this kind of sexualized direction. And even the halftime shows, I think, in general, have moved away from that. I think many people expected when they had the kind of icons of 80s and 90s rap that that should be. You know, their careers were very based on highly sexualized lyrics and so on, and it was pretty tame overall. Although it sounds like this one's headed back in that direction. The other undercurrent that I think that this all points to is how something we've talked about here a lot, which is how politicized the culture has become. And, you know, when you think about culture as a set of spheres or segments or mountains or whatever that represent different things, you know, the arts, entertainment, athletics or sports, education, law. And we've talked about business. We've talked about how business has been politicized. We've talked about how education has been kind of politically charged, where the kind of point of many schools seems to be to turn out political activists more than educated people. And here we have this one where the controversy around the halftime show is coming before the performance, not after the performance. And it's being couched in almost completely political terms. If you're a progressive, you're going to watch Bad Bunny. If you're a conservative, you're going to tune into, you know, Kid Rock over on tb. I still just never planned on saying those. Those words together. And so it's interesting, and I think on a meta level that that is a really important thing, because, again, as we've mentioned here many times, and this is just another example, there's a whole lot more to life than the political. And part of the American experiment was having a robust middle. All these other aspects of our life, family, volunteer associations, church life, volunteer life, business life, creativity, that were not political. Certainly we were political. I've always been political. People are political. We're political animals. Aristotle said, and I think he was right about that. And as we try to put our lives together, that necessitates politics. And I'm one who doesn't believe that politics was just merely a result or government at least merely a result of the fall, that there would have to be some way of organizing our lives together in that external relationship that all humans have with other humans, both personally and socially. But there is something really profound that has happened, and we're doing a revision right now of A Practical Guide to Culture. And when you talk about the way some things have shifted, that is a big shift right there, is how politicized the cultures. I remember, I mean, just in Sunday school a few months ago, There was an 8th grader in my class who said something about her friends, and she's like, yeah, she's a really good friend of mine, even though she's a Democrat. And she. This girl's in the eighth grade saying that about. And you're like, when it's. When it's hit junior high, like, we are just in a new moment. And I think this halftime show here is an example of that. And, of course, earlier this week, we had the Grammys. And the Grammys have always been political. It's always been an occasion for people who fly on private jets and have an incredible amount of wealth and are treated in particularly fashionable ways to complain about how bad the culture is, or at least the politics of the culture is. But this was another one, right? It's a chance for everyone to get up and. And say something political. There's just very few parts of our life that aren't touched by the political. And I think that this is a window for Christians that part of our Christian cultural engagement is to be more than political, not merely political. And I'm just looking. I'm just grasping here at cultural examples. We had another one, which was the prayer breakfast this week. And here you had the prayer breakfast, which is done in a political context, but has been nonpartisan. And you had, again, the president, and this isn't the first time he's done this, but really, for an hour and 20 minutes, turned the religious into the political. It was poor. I mean, there were some good things smuggled in and out of there. There's just something we've lost when all of our life becomes political. And I think that. I'm not saying don't be political. There's a lot of Christians that say being political is incompatible with being Christian. Absolutely not. Politics is part of life, but politics isn't all of life, and we shouldn't be reductionistic that way. And that seems to be one of the most significant cultural trends over the last decade or more. We certainly have had moments in history where a lot of things were political, but, man, it just has touched so much of our life, and I think we're poorer because of it.
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A
The other threat I see is money. And we've talked about before. This comes up whenever we talk about democracy being the best form of government or the worst form of government, except for all the others kind of thing, and how all of these things are predicated on virtue. I think capitalism is the same way. Capitalism without virtue starts a lot of the negative movements that we see now. And I mean, I'm reading this morning that the American Gaming association is estimating $1.7 billion in legal wagering on the super bowl this year. And I mean, also, it's hard. You know, all of the ads, all of the sexualized stuff, even the political stuff, honestly, is motivated by money in a lot of these cases. And this is just not healthy. This is not healthy at all. And I mean, we're gonna watch. We're recording this on Friday morning. Tonight is the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, which, of course, have offered notable examples in the past few years of the same kind of worldview, shall we say, of competing worldview creation. Absolutely, yeah. Do you have any predictions about what we're gonna see to.
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B
Well, I don't. I. I wonder if there's going to be a backpedaling from how edgy France was or if there's going to be attempt and an attempt to push it even further. You know, I think if it were in the United States, we would see a backpedaling because the US does seem to be coming off at least some of that kind of cliff of things. But. But, man, France, you know, the Paris Olympics was so over the top in terms of it's, as you use the word that Carl Truman is writing and speaking a lot about these days, and he will, at our national conference, a desecration, you know, this kind of intentionally attacking the profane. And many people have missed that as kind of a key aspect of, for example, the LGBTQ movement, which is, I think, what some of us expect from the Bad Bunny show. If you are indeed going into this queer icon direction as. As people have mentioned, I think his manager kind of said something about this or something, or his publicist, probably. You're going to get some more of that in the halftime show. And that's going to be the question is what are we going to see? Are we going to see a reflection and a respect for culture? It is interesting, right? You go to Beijing, the Beijing Olympics, and there was this kind of remarkable celebration of Chinese culture, and there's historically a lot of really interesting and unique things there. And then no mention whatsoever of communism and religious persecution and, you know, what they were doing.
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A
Whatever they did was forced and compelled under, you know, pain of duress.
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B
And I mean, remember at that moment they were persecuting Uyghurs, right? So there was just this.
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A
And their own people, of course you're.
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B
Going to show your best and ignore your worst. That's different than what we saw in Paris, which was not just ignore the worst, but celebrate the worst. Right? You know, pretend like the French Revolution wasn't this bloody mess of.
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A
And I just. Freedom maintain. Even from an art standpoint, like, you know, when you meet a 14 year old and they've just started to learn how to swear and they're just dropping it in every conversation, like, even out of context, and it doesn't make sense because of the thrill of transgression that they're experiencing for the first time where it's like that's, it's not even like it's. It's embarrassing that you're doing that. The true. If people wanted to be truly edgy in 2026 on a global stage, they would hold a worship service or something.
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B
No, no, no. They would hold up families, big families. They would walk out, kid, you can.
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A
Only do this kind of. Can you believe I'm talking about homosexuality and I'm wearing a low pant?
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B
That's not being euthanized.
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A
I mean, that would be, that would be it for three decades before. Like, when does it stop being considered edgy? That word is relative. And when you've been doing it for the last 50 years, it cannot be considered edgy anymore.
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B
Right. Edginess can be creative. There's no question. And we have examples of that. But when edgy is for edgy sake, you know, that's kind of the avant garde idea of, of the artistic, that you're just pushing boundaries.
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A
Sorry, I'm. I'm just still imagining. Here's my elderly grandmother that I refuse to euthanize. That is the, that is as edgy.
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B
As you can get. But Carl Truman, his, his new work, which is coming out in April, and I think it's going to be one of those landmark kind of helpful understandings of all of this. It's, it's not even just you got to continue to push boundaries. It's. You've got to start celebrating the transgression. And that framing has really helped me see a lot. So I remain hopeful about the Olympics. We'll see. By the way, there's an interesting story out of the Olympics too. I caught this quickly, so I may not have all the details right, but someone tried to write an article about the trans athlete. As if this trans athlete were controversial, but it was actually a woman competing with other women. And I think it was. I, gosh, I wish I had the details of this, but it's so interesting because I do think there's a vibe shift and this is the example that no one who opposed men competing with women cared at all. Right. Just like we don't care about the wnba. No one cares about a bunch of non binary or people who claim to be non binary but are biological females competing against other females. That's never been, you know, kind of the issue to begin with. So anyway, that, that was a little rabbit trail. I wanted to shoot that thing.
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A
Well, we'll keep our eyes peeled. I'm excited to watch figure skating. I'm sure that's what you're most excited to watch as well.
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B
Oh, gosh.
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A
Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week.
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C
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A
On Breakpoint this week. Well, John, on that note of the supposed trans athlete that isn't. I do wanna talk about some news in this arena. So there've been some big stories.
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B
Big stories.
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A
The first you covered with a commentary here at Breakpoint is a $2 million settlement in New York. This was a jury settlement in favor of a young woman who is now in her early 20s, who underwent a double mastectomy in service of so called gender medicine and is now, of course dealing with the lifelong consequences of that and regretful of that. And she filed a lawsuit against the doctors that she said rushed her into this procedure and won a $2 million settlement. To a lot of people, this seems to signal an opening of the floodgates. There are going to be more cases like this.
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B
That was incredible. And part of it is, again, you and I have been doing this long enough that we can kind of go back and remember when people were predicting this was going to happen. Do you remember? I mean, we talked about this from.
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A
The beginning, John, that there were gonna be lawsuits.
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B
And even at the time, I remember saying it thinking, man, I hope they're lawsuits, but not real sure that there were gonna be lawsuits. And yet here we are. Now, to be really clear, this isn't a judicial ruling on the effectiveness of so called gender affirming care, which again, as we said before, is the worst misnome somewhere that there is.
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A
Although I will say, John, if you've seen the national coverage of this case, including in the New York Times, they are not calling it that. They are now calling it medical care for kids with gender dysphoria. And that's notable.
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B
Oh, that is an interesting change. I haven't seen that. We should talk more about that at some point. You know, they were basically dealing with this young woman's case. And. But what was interesting is that three things emerged and I covered these in the commentary. But I think it's something we need to keep kind of front and center on all of our minds. And it matters because these three things are the things that tend to be consistent all the way through. The first thing that has emerged in the research and the data is that this young woman, Varian Fox, had comorbidities, she had autism, she had other psychological conditions, and those things were ignored as if her fundamental issue was that she had actually been born in the wrong body. The second part of it is something that also we hear. Chloe Cole talks about this in Truth Rising as well as in the Truth Rising study, especially when we go more deeply into her full story in a 15 minute video that's a part of that curriculum is how quickly these young people were fast tracked. Which, by the way, also meant that they basically self diagnosed. Right? They basically went and said, this is what's happening to me. And the doctors said, I agree with your assessment in a way that we've used this analogy before. And it's the only analogy That I think that works, which is a young woman goes in and says I'm overweight when she's actually anorexic. And then the doctor basically agrees and gives her stomach stapling surgery or something like that. This became an incredible methodology which is just doctors allowing kids to self diagnose and then fast tracking them through the whole thing. And then the third part of this, which also tends to be, I don't want to say it's the most troubling trend because what's happens to these young people is the most troubling thing. But man, I can't imagine being told as a parent, if you don't go along with this, the blackmail and manipulation of saying if you don't go along with this, your daughter will kill herself and you'll be responsible. The whole would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son? And all of this happened in service of ideology. There was not data to back this up and the whole thing progressed under the guise of hijacking so called gay rights and then also basically announcing the science being settled when the science wasn't settled. So the fact that these three things emerged in this case, even though this isn't kind of a blanket decision, you know that there are a lot of medical professionals, a lot of institutions that are really afraid and we know this because we're seeing more and more backpedal from the treatment. Right Almost immediately in response to this and even before. And I just think get them all, charge all of them, you know, send.
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A
Them, take away their licenses, put them in jail.
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B
You know, this is the malpractice stuff that is just so it harmed children and it was done without expertise and without knowledge. And I tell you what, it also makes the leak of the WPATH emails where you have a bunch of self anointed experts admitting that they're basically driving an ideology and they don't have the data to back it up. It makes it all the more relevant.
- [24:10]
A
Well, and then notably this week too, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons as well as the American Medical association have come out and said we recommend waiting until adulthood for some of these for surgical interventions. And again they use the term for kids with gender dysphoria, which is extremely notable. It's also worth asking, like the B in my bonnet here is, well, why in adulthood? Like I understand their reasoning, they're saying, oh, kids can't make informed decisions. All of those things are correct, but we still need to reckon with whether these things make any sense for any person at any time. But this is a fascinating turn of events that was inevitable. And the other thing I found fascinating about these announcements from these two medical societies, and I imagine that the Pediatric Society has got to be close on the heels of this, because at this point it's a liability question, is they're all saying there's insufficient evidence to support these interventions, which is really notable because I would have imagined they would say we have new evidence that suggests that these things aren't working like we thought they would. They were. But for them to admit that there's. If there's insufficient evidence. Now, how insufficient was the evidence five and ten years ago when you started doing this? So a couple of weeks ago, my husband Aaron, who runs the center for Christian Virtue, which is a family policy council here in Ohio, was invited to speak at the Metropolitan Club in Cleveland. And this is kind of like this club has been around for a hundred years. A handful of sitting presidents have spoken there. And this became a subject of much controversy because of primarily Aaron's organization's work in the past two years on banning these procedures for minors in the state of Ohio and banning boys from playing in girls sports. And there were protests leading up to it. There were protests on the day of his speech. People threw fake blood on the building. The police had to come and get involved. We had to have private security. It was a whole thing. The speech itself and the interview he did went really well. It was very calm and wonderful and they covered a wide range of issues. But the most shocking part of it for both him and me was that the strongest reaction came when he mentioned double mastectomies being done on young girls. And half the audience were people in the LGBT community who had bought tickets as a way of protest. And they absolutely erupted when he said that. And afterwards he and I were like, man, we were expecting some pushback on several opinions that he shared. But John, I'm starting to believe that most people did not know that this was happening to young kids, even people in that community. The leader of the Ohio chapter of pflag, which is like parents of kids that are lesbian and gay or whatever, got up and made a public statement, this is not happening. We don't do this on minors. And Aaron was like, I am looking at a study that was written by the chief of anesthesiology at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, Ohio, that found over 70,000 kids between 10 and 18 since 2016 have had some sort of gender related surgery across the U.S. like John, they. I don't think they thought it was happening unless you were a parent, a family, or you were within these hospital systems. Now they bear the burden of telling me why they wouldn't have wanted it to happen. Right, because all of the arguments for it are arguments they're making elsewhere. But this is shocking to me.
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B
Well, listen, it's, there's so many, there's so many things to say about this. One is, is I had breakfast over 10 years ago with a teaching doctor at Ohio State University at their medical center who was being pressured into going along with this whole thing. And that brings up too, at least in these cases, we're talking about things like double mastectomies. And by the way, that's the most common surgical intervention we talked about by far. Because remember, what we saw in this whole social contagion is that the, the thought that you were born in the wrong body or you wanted to be the opposite sex 25 years ago was all middle aged men who had a sexual fetish of some kind and suddenly imagine, you know, out of nowhere in our cultural moment, it became five to one adolescent or pre adolescent girls who, who hated their bodies. I mean, that is a completely different thing that we, we, we basically created in this cultural moment. But let's be really clear. And I think Abigail Schreier, this is one angle we just need to say thank you. She was the first, she was the loudest, she was persistent, she took a lot of heat on this. And she also pointed out that it is not just the surgical part of this that is irreversible. When you talk about the hormone treatment, puberty suppressants, things like that, these also have kind of permanent things. Chloe Cole, by the way, talks about this as well. She also obviously was a victim of the surgical mutilation, but that there are other aspects of this whole quote unquote treatment that are irreversible. And we need to know that. If people were unaware that it wasn't happening, then I guess I go back and forth between they were willingly ignorant because there were enough stories. And by the way, there are 40 lawsuits right now that are already kind of going down the pike that I know of. I talked about the law firm of Campbell, Miller and Payne, which was founded just specifically to handle these things. They're out of, I think, Fort Worth, Texas. And, and so if you know someone or you know, you, or as a parent or whatever were victimized, send them, send them that way. But they're either, you know, kind of willingly, kind of ignorant about this. And I guess I go back and forth between Saying that and saying the church should have been louder.
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A
The church should have been louder. The church.
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B
Either way, yeah, the church should have been louder. You know, thank God for Brian Anderson, for adf, for Katie Faust, for a number of people who were just. Jennifer Roback Morris. I mean, there's a number of, obviously people of faith we can point to who were really loud on this, but we needed people kind of in the pews. And I had someone actually ask me this week and just say, really? Are the doctors guilty? There was a young man in Denver who was struggling that he was suicidal, had some emotional problems, thought he was born in the wrong body. The doctors seized on this and really tried to drive this home with the parents. And one of the doctors, who by the way, was gay, one of the doctors said to the father of this young man, hopefully one day kids will be able to change their gender like they change their outfits. And I was asked this week, like, the doctors really believe this without the evidence? Well, this doctor did. This doctor didn't even believe the science. The science to him was irrelevant. It was the ideology that was driving all of this. I think we need to say that. I also think, by the way, as soon as we kind of round up the medical professionals and charge them, fine them, jail them, we need to go after the school officials. We need to do the same thing with school counselors, with school boards, with administrators, the therapists. You don't need to be in this category as well. This was direct harm done to children. And I don't think you can claim ignorance on it.
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A
I agree. The people involved in the actual situations and the families. I think the other part of this that's gonna come out is Medicaid fraud. Like, if you think that the fraud in Minnesota was a big thing, and it was. I cannot imagine the wave of Medicaid fraud that is going to be unveiled as this continues down the line. I know for a fact that. So, for example, Medicaid claims are public information because it's funded by the states and it's going to be de identified, right? So you wouldn't be able to connect actual patients with what happened to them. But I know for a fact that in states where this is a little bit less politically tenable, so not California, but Michigan, for example, they are coding every. Every medical procedure has a medic has a code attached for insurance purposes, including Medicaid. They are coding things like breast removal for women as the removal of breasts for a young man who had precocious puberty when the patient was actually A girl. Or they will code giving hormones to suppress the puberty of a young girl, or, excuse me, a young boy. They'll call it a young girl who had a syndrome which makes them grow too tall or grow too quickly. They will literally code the wrong gender so that they're not having to code that this was some kind of gender related intervention. But if you look at the data, you'll see, like, in the past five years, the number of kids in Michigan who had this precocious tallness just absolutely skyrocketed.
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B
Precocious tallness. Every boy that I know wants to be taller. I.
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A
There's, there's some kind. There's some kind of condition where that actually happens, you know, and it's bad for your bones or whatever. But instead of saying this is an intervention for a young boy who wants to be a girl and doesn't want to be that tall or whatever it is, they're literally just calling it a young girl and giving the hormones. It's outrageous. This is just going to keep coming out well.
- [34:01]
B
And, you know, and I think they coded it wrong again, because they were true believers in this ideology. They actually believed these young boys were girls and these young girls were boys. And, you know, in the spirit of good news, because this is good news that this jury awarded $2 million and that it was enough to really scare the bejeebis out of, you know, a whole bunch of other doctors who are complicit in this. And the good news that we have the American Medical association and the plastic surgery group kind of backing off this for minors. There was other good news in this area, and it has to do with another aspect of culture, which is corporations. The hrc, the Human Rights Campaign basically threatened and manipulated and bullied a group of businesses. Forbes. I mean, they were successful in doing it with Forbes 500 companies to join their DEI index and that they needed to study themselves and rate themselves and meet their qualifications and standards so that they could put it on their website. And they were intimidated if they didn't participate. And many, many, many came along and remember we had the conversation about Harley Davidson and Farm and the tractor supply company.
- [35:15]
A
Supply. Right. And this was about, like, how they ran their companies, right? Whether they were LGBT friendly and in the workplace.
- [35:22]
B
And of course, everything in the LGBTQ thing was hijacked by the trans stuff. So the trans stuff was front and center on all this. Well, a report came out just last night and someone shared it with me and I was grateful that they did that. 65% involvement in that dropped, in other words, the number of companies who chose to self flagellate by participating in this Fortune 500 companies. Fortune 5. Yeah, we're not even talking about across the board. Basically they were just like, yeah, we're not buying this anymore. And that is actually really good news. And it definitely relates to the fact that these companies don't fear being bullied anymore. They saw the negative bottom line results of having participated in reorienting their companies so that they could meet these made up standards out of thin air. And that's good news as well. And so you kind of look at this and we're kind of in this new moment as we're trying to say, okay, where are we in this whole kind of weird last decade of things kind of going all the way onto the, you know, the edge of the precipice. And now we' where are we? And I want to ask you about something. You remember probably four or five years ago we talked about it here on the program where a British, I think she was a counselor, maybe observed that it's going to be really, really hard for a group of moms who went along with this all the way through to the surgical stuff and the irreversible damage stuff to say that they were wrong. Because what would they be admitting out loud? So we have the medical profession backing off. We certainly have the state actors backing off. Although there's still, by the way, and this is another kind of side rabbit trail. There's 19 states in the District of Columbia that sued the Department of Health and Human Services before HHS putting out new recommendations against the gender, this gender, quote unquote, care for minors. So it's going to be interesting in light of this jury, what they do with this lawsuit. So you still have those government forces, certainly in Colorado we have a bunch of legislators that still think this is the way they should go. But you have all of these different aspects kind of backing off of this. I think fewer schools are really kind of driving it as hard as they once did and kind of what's maintaining this. And you still have a lot of moms who made really bad decisions. And I got to tell you, I think the church, who else has the answer for that sort of forgiveness, redemption, who, who else has the answer for them? These poor moms are in a terrible spot. Now you can say, well, they deserve it, okay? But my goodness, they were, they were scared, they were manipulated, they were deceived. And gosh, what a. My heart breaks for that group, honestly right now.
- [38:18]
A
You know, the Analog. I see you and I both know of women who had abortions and have later come to see that that baby was their baby and was a baby, and have been just unbelievably courageous and humble in speaking publicly about that, repenting publicly about it, and then even advocating for pro life policies. That to me is the closest analog I can think of. Or people like Abby Johnson, who presided over the killing of babies or who killed them themselves as doctors or nurses who've since come out and said, I now see what I really did and I can't let it go on or whatever else. That takes a level of humility and just courage that I would hope we would see here. And a lot of those women have been embraced by the church to our credit, and I hope we continue to do that. And we're gonna have to do that with these parents that you're talking about as well.
- [39:18]
B
You know, there have been incredible programs and studies and discipleship groups created around post abortive women and men, by the way. And I don't think it's just the moms in this other. There's also dads involved and family members and so on. But I do think we need to have kind of that parallel to post abortive counseling or post abortive Bible studies for those that were, you know, walk their children down there as well. All of this can sound like bad news, but this is good news when evil is exposed and the way that this evil is being exposed right now, culturally, again, I think back five years ago when it seemed like this train that was running over all of our culture could not be stopped. And we think what made the difference, what made the difference was certainly God working in history. God loves children, we know that. Him intervening and our stupidity. But a lot of courageous voices and a lot of people that were willing to go, no way. I think that should embolden us in two ways. Number one, to join those voices. But number two, in revising the Practical Guide to Culture, I came across an anecdote that my co author, Brett Kunkel, I remember he told me this back in the day where a youth pastor of a major big church, I can't remember which church it is, and I wouldn't say it if it were, but basically told him about same sex marriage at the time. So the book was published in 2017, I think told him about same sex marriage at the time. You know, that ship has sailed. I'm not going to talk about this anymore. And he basically had bought into the cultural inevitability there's nothing we can do. It's not that big of a deal anyway. And I just think, man, that temptation, because you can take such cultural heat, just look at the response to the Greater Than campaign that it's tempting to do that. And this temptation to be on the right side of history, or at least not be on the wrong side of history, is strong. And we have to put ourselves on the right side of the right things. Yeah. Anyway, I think this is all good news. It's hard news. It's gonna be hard to walk through this. But it's worth it for the kids, right? It's worth it for the kids.
- [41:41]
A
We'll be right back with more break. This week.
- [41:46]
B
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.
- [42:17]
A
We're back on Breakpoint this week. John, let's talk about a new piece by Ryan Burge at Substack, who's looking at some of the demographics in America's largest Protestant and evangelical denominations. And he is making kind of a provocative argument. So we've looked for years at kind of especially the declining mainline Protestant denominations, that their memberships are going down. You know, the popularity of these churches are closing. He's arguing that we're looking at a cliff, not a slow decline. And it has to do with demographics. And he has a kind of a shocking chart in his piece showing the age makeup of some of the largest denominations, you know, Protestant denominations in the US and most of them are dominated by elderly and retiree folks. And at some point when that generation is no longer with us, we're gonna see a huge, huge kind of sudden seeming drop in attendance at these churches. Do you think this is truly what we're looking at?
- [43:18]
B
Well, you know, I appreciate Ryan Burge a lot. Theologically, we're not on the same page. He's gonna come and speak at the Colson Center National Conference because I do think he's an honest broker of a lot of this data. There's a business book that talks about you need someone who will just tell you the cold, hard facts. And I think Burge has been doing that and doing that in an interesting way. We have looked at various denominational bodies and how they're emptying out and kind of the emptying out, for example, in the mainline Protestant churches. And putting the demographic lens over this, I think is really important and really helpful because it really does say, are you going to replace the boomers when the boomers die out? Which is kind of a morbid way of saying it. Are there going to be younger generations that populate these churches? And of course, we've had a lot of reports of the quiet revival or the revival after the Charlie Kirk assassination and young people coming back to church. And there are real anecdotes across the board, but we're struggling to see real evidence that this is happening on a mass scale. Interestingly enough, and I'll come back to this in a second, the anecdotes seem to be coming out of a particular kind of church, a church that has higher expectations, a church that is not kind of basically just embracing the cultural trends of either ideology or, you know, methodology, but actually, you know, preaching the gospel. Well, no, yes and no. What I mean by that is we have a piece coming out on this next week I wrote with Glenn Sunshine and we kind of wrestled with this for a couple weeks is you're seeing this in anecdotally into all kinds of religious bodies that ask for more from their adherents. Right. And it also aligns then with these kind of racist groups even, or these extremist, political, extremist groups that you're not just talking about social club stuff, you're not talking about seeker friendly stuff, you're talking about orthodoxy, you're talking about extremism.
- [45:19]
A
People want to be called to something, to something bigger.
- [45:22]
B
Yeah, that, that, that's really what's there. But you know, just before we get there, I mean, just the demographic lens is really important. I mean, we've talked about how demographics is reshaping the world. I think demographics points to a modern day example of what sociologists have talked about. I think Peter Sorokin, for example, and his outlining of civilizations as being primarily either sensate, you know, living for the moment or ideational living for ideals. And then a line of evidence that you're a sensei culture is demographics. Right. If you don't have children, if the demographic crisis that affects almost every nation in the world, particularly every western nation in the world and has only gotten worse in the 15 years that I've been following the numbers, I mean, and a lot worse in those 15 years, if it's going to impact civilization, it's going to impact the church. Right. It's going to impact the various aspects of it. We know it's impacting colleges, that there's just less students that are available to go. And then when you add in the fact that the, you know, the cost benefit analysis doesn't turn out and actually being worth the investment in a lot of cases, you just end up kind of in a strange spot. So I guess it shouldn't surprise us, I guess, is what I'm trying to say, that it would have this sort of impact on not only Protestant mainline liberal denominations, which we know have been in decline and are aging out essentially, but here you're talking about the share of each denomination's adults who are baby boomers. That's the chart. And at the top of the list, the Episcopal Church, United Methodists, Lutheran, Missouri Senate, elca, pcusa. What we might, you know, historically kind of consider these mainline things, except for the Missouri Senate. But, you know, interestingly enough, the percentage of the congregation that is baby boomer is the same for the PCA as the PCUSA, according to this chart. So here you have a conservative and a strange. Isn't that interesting? Because we've talked about. If the only issue is what you teach, then that doesn't make sense. Right? We've talked about what, you know, the reason mainline liberal denominations, or at least a reason, is because they taught the same thing that was indistinguishable from npr. And if you just listen to npr, you don't have to go to church and hear a sermon. You can stay at home on a Sunday morning cozied up with a cup of coffee, and you don't need to actually, you know, do the same thing. And there was no distinction, there was no distinct message from this kind of liberal message that had dominated culture. Well, the PCA is known kind of for doctrinal purity or at least trying to do that in many ways. So here you have that we not only need to believe orthodox theology and teach orthodox theology, but you got to live it out. You got to have babies. You know, you can't, you can't embrace the cultural practices in the same way. And I, you know, I think there's probably more to this story than just what I've said. And I'm not trying to condemn the PCA in any sense, because right below that, Southern Baptist, 45%, that's just 2% points different and 4% different from the Episcopal Church. So is it that we're not having enough babies as conservatives if we're not living out what we believe. Are we not winning the young people? Are we losing the young people? Obviously, that's the problem that some administrators and others have been trying to tackle, that young people who are in church, once they go to college, they leave church. I think all of these things need to be looked at because demographics is destiny. And it turns out that's seems to be the case for the church as well.
- [49:05]
A
Well, you know, and I'm going to say this from the advantage of not being a pastor in charge of a church or shouldering the concern of maybe a dwindling congregation. But, you know, I look at this and just think the church will always be the exact size and shape and median age that the Lord knew it would be and that he called it to be and intended for it to be. You know, what calms me down in moments of crisis, whether it's demographic or otherwise, is that our job is, you know, whether it' to be a pastor or a layperson is to serve faithfully where and when we are. And if you're a pastor to pastor the people that the Lord has entrusted to you and your community, whatever the size is, you know, because at the end of the day, you know, you have a call and that might be to share the gospel with others and to invite other people in and to be, you know, to maintain fidelity to the truth and to right practices and good doctrine. But outside of that, the results are not up to you and they're not on your shoulders. And the church, maybe it will fall off a cliff and it will be a tiny minority of the population for a while until Christians repopulate the world, frankly, because we're the only ones who are willing to do it and who see the value in it and all that kind of stuff. And then maybe the church will grow again and then maybe it will fall off another cliff. But it's always gonna be the church that Jesus called and wanted. And, you know, that's. I see your skepticism. There's a balance because I'm not saying like retreat and don't, don't make any attempt to grow the ranks, but just maybe don't wring your hands too much about it.
- [50:40]
B
Well, I mean, I'm a Calvinist. I believe that the church belongs to God and that we're faithful and we leave the results up to him. So listen, let's say we're talking about a church in a time of great persecution or a great winnowing. As people have talked about where people are being clarified, the clarity is being brought to it. If that's all we were talking about, yeah, then you kind of leave the results up to God. In other words, if we are doing everything we can to be faithful and then on the back end, I don't think it's appropriate then to just apply the secular growth metrics to the church because sometimes God shrinks his people or the people shrink at it, so on. That's different though than a case in which we're not obeying God. And that's the question. And what I mean by obeying God is remember the Great Commission is preach the gospel and teach them to observe everything that I have commanded you. One of the things that we have been commanded to do is the cultural mandate to be fruitful, multiply. Do you see what I mean? I am completely with you in the sense that I think it's always our job, not sometimes, but always our job to share the gospel and to point people to Christ and so on. But the model shifted and, and the model shifted from go and proclaim, go and live to come and see, come and see, come and see what we're doing in here. This is where we have the gospel come and we'll get you saved. That's the seeker mindset that put all the weight of this on the church professionals to do church in a really compelling way that made people want to be compelled to come and to stay. And we remember the kind of the internal study that was done by a major seeker friendly church historically where they were like, well, we brought a lot of people in, but we didn't make a whole lot of disciples. The Great Commission isn't come and see, it's to go and tell. It's let's equip Christians to obey God in every area in which he has authority and then send them out to point people to be able to give an answer for the hope that we have. That's a, by the way, way more efficient model. It's harder because you're basically decentralizing and equipping everyday Christians to do the work of the ministry as it says in, as Paul says in Ephesians. And I do think that this is part of the reckoning of having adopted by and large that come and see, come and see, come and see, come and see model as opposed to that model. Now listen, am I questioning for one second here that God is in charge and Christ said he will build his church and the gates of hell will not stand against it and, and so on? Not one bit. You know, we have to have complete confidence the whole truth Rising study begins with talking about hope and believing that all of this is the work of Christ and we just get to join it. And so our hope isn't that something changes. Our hope is in something that will never change, that Christ is risen and Christ is Lord and Christ is making all things new. We believe that. So, yeah, but it's, you know, this is the dynamic of the biblical story, that God is out working out his redemptive purposes in history. We're participating, but we also have expectations. You know, are we doing that? And I think that two things are kind of showing their fruit. Number one is this kind of come and see model versus the go and tell model. The second thing that's showing its fruit is kind of our Gnosticism, where we've considered obedience fundamentally to be spiritual being moral, which it is. But we haven't really reckoned with a theology of embodiment, what God created us to be in the garden, what that means for male and female in marriage and all that sort of stuff. And so we have scandalously high rates of divorce and intentionally childless couples. I mean, I remember hearing someone say that they sacrificed their perfectly fertile couple, saying, we sacrificed having our own children out of obedience to God. And I'm like, so God told you something different than the creation mandate? No, I mean, this is just. It was a weird Gnostic kind of way of thinking about obedience. And I think at least they were willing to come out and save their heresy. That's different than, I think, the absorbing the cultural water, so to speak. So I'm with you with a nuance. How's that?
- [55:19]
A
Yeah, fair enough. Okay, well, John, let's see if we can tackle a couple questions before we call it today. I'm gonna read this first one in Regards to Christian Creativity, which I love. It says, my son is working on a humanities project that I would love to be informed by a Christian worldview. He wants to write about why are humans creative and how do we express it? Do you have some sources that could be helpful? Love that project.
- [55:45]
B
Oh, yeah, I think it's great. Hans Ruckmacher has one of the great works on Christian creativity. And I'm blanking on the name of the title of the book.
- [55:56]
A
He's the guy, famously, who said, jesus did not come to make us Christians, he came to make us fully human.
- [56:03]
B
There we go, a couple books. Art Needs no Justification. The Creative Gift. Those are really important things. That's the title of the books by Hans Rickmacher that has to do with the connection between our redeemed being a redeemed human and what God created us to do in the beginning. And he really, I think, helped us with that.
- [56:23]
A
I'd say Flannery o' Connor as well. And depending on the age of your son, you may need to read it first.
- [56:27]
B
Did she do the how to or she just exhibit it?
- [56:30]
A
She's no, she talked about it. She talks about why art is a reflection of our being made in the image of God and beauty.
- [56:37]
B
Francis Schaeffer has Art in the Bible. That's another wonderful resource. And also Saving Leonardo by Nancy Pearcey. It's really a remarkable work having to do with this. And a more recent book or set of works on this is Makoto Fujimura and he's the author of a book called Art and Faith, the Theology of Making and Art is a Journey into the Light. I don't know the second one, but I'll recommend the first one, Art and Faith, the Theology of Making. So I think there's lots of great sources and I love the topic. So I would love to see the project once it is done. So have somebody send it to me.
- [57:17]
A
Oh, me too.
- [57:17]
B
Yeah, it'd be cool.
- [57:18]
A
Yes, please do. Okay. Second question comes from a woman named Kathy. She's responding to the breakpoint commentary you shared about the Greater Than campaign, headlined by Katie Foust. She says, Kathy says this premise seems right, but I'm curious if these same arguments get applied to adoption and what that would mean.
- [57:38]
B
Yeah, listen, I actually did a follow up breakpoint today, Tim Padgett and myself, and really kind of reframed it around this question about whether this idea that kids do best and deserve and have a right to their married biological mom and dad. What does that mean for adoption? And listen, adoption in the context of a culture that treats kids as accessories can in and of itself be problematic if that's the motivation. But that's so rare. I just don't see that as a big problem that needs to be solved. I think that adoption is used in the Bible as one of the many metaphors having to do with marriage and family that demonstrates to us how God loves his children and we're adopted into the family of God. Jesus calls us his siblings, his brothers and sisters, and that we have the same father. And that's all adoption. And it was a more remarkable and unusual thing in the Roman context. So his hearers would hear it as even more punchy than maybe even we hear it today in a world. Well, actually it's not a world, it's just a United States, where adoption is as common as it is. The basic argument is this, and I'll point you to the breakpoint commentary is that something like surrogacy or same sex marriage that demands children even though it's an infertile union, and therefore has to rely on IVF or sperm donation or surrogacy. The big difference is this, that those things create a fracture and adoption is a redemptive act in the midst of the fracture or the brokenness in surrogacy in particular, you're creating an orphan, you're separating, you're creating a life and separating it from a mom and a dad. And adoption, that separation has happened. And in a broken world, that happens. And now you're doing a redemptive act to bring restoration. And the Bible talks about that as being something that God does for us. So I think that there's very few things right now that we can say is most being like God as adoption, you know, for the right reasons. And I think it's beautiful. And by the way, I hope it's obvious I we could maybe deal with this in a future episode where we have more time that why that applies to adoption within a context of a true marriage and why that doesn't apply to same sex adoption. Because now instead of a redemptive act, bringing a mom and dad into the life of a child, you're still robbing a second time a child of either a mom or a dad and same sex adoption and it's not the same thing.
- [60:18]
A
Well, John, that is gonna do it for the program today. I do wanna do a really quick recommendation. This coming Wednesday, I'm gonna be speaking at Redemption Church in Phoenix. So in its Redemption Church Arcadia, I'm giving a talk that is basically, I've been developing it for about a year. It is my working definition of what it actually means to be human and then working through some of the cultural and technological trends that would kind of threaten our vision of humanity. So I'm doing that at Redemption Church Arcadia in Phoenix if you want to come. I think we're having Chick Fil A for dinner. Go to arcadia. Redemptionaz.com and you can sign up for that. It's totally free and I would love to meet any and all of you if you can make it. Well, that is going to do it for the program today. Thank you so much for listening. Listening to Breakpoint this week from the Colson center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer alongside John Stonestreet. Wishing you a great week. We'll see you all back here next week. God bless.