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Foreign It's Friday, March 20, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. There are few organizations in human history that have been so cruelly named as Planned Parenthood because rather than Planning Parenthood, that organization has been more famous from the beginning about unplanning parents. Parenthood rather than planning it. It really began in a movement to support birth control and legalize contraception. It, of course, expanded itself vastly into the abortion industry in the better part of the 20th century, the last part of the 20th century, and into the 21st century. We know what we're talking about when we say Planned Parenthood. We're talking about active cheerleading for the moral revolution, the sexual revolution, the abortion revolution. You just go down the list. And furthermore, Planned Parenthood, of course, representing a very progressivist worldview, ideologically, very much on the left. It has also been delving into issues related to transgender identity, other things. No big surprise there. But there is a surprise still left. Planned Parenthood has been losing business, and I will credit the Trump administration for taking action to defund Planned Parenthood. This has been an issue of conservative activism and priority in the United States for decades now. And Planned Parenthood, state by state, is really on the defensive and they're trying to make up the money. And so to what have they turned? Well, you might be surprised by the answer. The answer is, at least in some cases, Botox. Now, remember, this is an organization that named itself Planned Parenthood while seeking to subvert the gift of life and parenthood. Here's how an article that recently appeared in the New York Times begins, quote, the Marmonte affiliate of Planned Parenthood, which includes 30 clinics across parts of California and Nevada, recently announced it would tiptoe into the lucrative and increasingly popular world of cosmetic procedures, end quote. Cosmetic procedures. Botox is one of them, quote. Faced with deep federal funding cuts designed to target the country's best known abortion rights organization, the Affiliates Health clinic in Sacramento expanded its services, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, to include cosmetic Botox injections and intravenous drips for hydration to keep the lights on. That is the lights on at the abortion clinic. You also have a statement from one of the doctors involved, quote, the reality is that our patients are now seeking esthetic services as part of their whole well being. The doctor went on to say, quote, so I think actually esthetics is in alignment with what Planned Parenthood stands for. Planned Parenthood stands for bodily autonomy. Planned Parenthood stands for. You decide what is best for you and what you need to feel good and feel like your body is what you want it to be. End quote. All right. I do credit the Wall Street Journal with breaking this story. It's interesting. The New York Times has decided this is a story. They have to give some attention. I think those words are explosive, especially the words spoken by Dr. Laura Dalton, I cited there, chief medical operating officer for Planned Parenthood, Marmonte. Now let me just go back to those words again. The reality is that our patients now are seeking aesthetic services as part of their whole wellbeing. Now you talk about expanding your medical portfolio. Now, I guess for Christians, the first thing we need to say is any step away from abortion, whatever the cause, is at least good in that effect. But it is not good that here you have Planned Parenthood, which is advertised right here, announced as the largest abortion provider in the United States. It is losing some of that business and losing some of the income. That is something that many Christians haven't taken into adequate consideration. The abortion industry is an industry. The abortion movement, it charges for abortions. And we're talking about vast amounts of money and all kinds of allied money attracted to that as well. But you have the admission here that the abortion business, so to speak, is drying up as a revenue stream. And so Planned Parenthood is turning to aesthetic treatments. And, you know, you look at that and you recognize that's a big admission. Let's just stop for a moment. The moment you use aesthetic in this context, you're not talking about any kind of medical urgency or emergency. Now let me just back up and speak from a Christian worldview and say something that I think Christians do need to think about. When we say in the main plastic surgery or aesthetic treatments or what you see here as in aesthetic services, the first thing we think of, of course, is the vast majority of those services, the vast number and the biggest part of that business, which is about matters merely cosmetic. I do think we just need to say that from the Christian worldview perspective, one of the issues that we believe about medicine is that medicine is rightly restorative. Now, what do we mean by that? We mean that if someone, for instance, is in an injury, in an accident, they're in a fire and they are burned, restoring natural function and natural appearance is not wrong. So let's just state that. Say it out loud. When we're talking about what Planned Parenthood is doing here and they're talking about these aesthetic services, let's just be clear. Insofar as something like this, some kind of treatment would be designed to restore natural appearance and natural function. The Christian worldview would say that is a part of the restorative and very helpful application of medicine. But that's not the industry. That's not where the big money is. The big money is in bigger lips, bigger. Well, let's just say bodily modifications for what are described as merely aesthetic purposes. And they largely have to do with sexualized presentation. Okay, so we just said it out loud. Sexualized presentation. I'm not going to go into anatomical details. You know, the advertisements, you know what's going on here. Planned Parenthood wants in on that business. And I just think it's fascinating to see how an organization as dark as Planned Parenthood tries to come up with a stupid explanation as some kind of rationalization for doing so because their patients need it as an extension of What. What did Dr. Dalton say is at stake? Personal bodily autonomy. When we look at the idolatrous attentions of our age, we look at the idols of our own age. This idea of personal bodily autonomy has to stand very high on that list, because that is the argument that's being used by women who say, I alone have the right to say I have a right not to be pregnant. If that means killing the unborn life within me, my personal bodily autonomy means it trumps everything else, including the right to life of an unborn child. You also see how this calculus operates in a very dark way in other parts of society. I just think it's really interesting. In defense of a new revenue stream for planned parenthood, this doctor, Dr. Laura Dalton, goes on to say, quote, so I think actually aesthetics is an alignment with what Planned Parenthood stands for. Now, let me just ask you a question. You know already what Planned Parenthood stands for. Is Botox on that list? You know, aesthetic services, quote. So I think actually aesthetics is in alignment with what Planned Parenthood stands for. Planned Parenthood stands for bodily autonomy. You decide what's best for you and then listen to these words and what you need to feel good and to feel like your body is what you wanted it to be. That's an astounding claim in the terms of a worldview collision between the Christian biblical worldview and the secular worldview. I can think of few sentences that pack that much punch into just a few words. Again, bodily autonomy, meaning you decide what is best for you and what you need. Again, this is a direct quote. To feel good and to feel like your body is what you want it to be. End quote. You know, one of the amazing things that happened in the 20th century is the expansion of basic human rights. And you could see this, for instance, in the United nations and in many of its declarations. You could see this in the ideological left, where you had all kinds of arguments presented. Of course, you saw this at the Supreme Court of the United States, where the Supreme Court in those dark decades actually moved to say that a woman has a right to an abortion because of personal autonomy. It's issue after issue. This idea of bodily autonomy really trumped over everything else. But now you have this incredible statement, you decide. I'm quoting again. You decide what is best for you and what you need to feel good and to feel like your body is what you want it to be. End quote. Let me just point out that that particular confusion is also at the heart of the transgender revolution. Have you seen the connection here about your body having now to be realigned to what you feel comfortable in and how you see your body in your own personal, idealized state? This is the kind of thing that previous generations of human beings didn't have the opportunity even to think about. And now we have the necessity of thinking through these things. I just wanted to point to this. Number one, it's a very dark realization that Planned Parenthood is out to get more revenue to make up for losses in the abortion business by going into basically Botox and other forms of aesthetic procedures and doing so in the name of the extension of bodily autonomy. You be you. Your body, too. Well, all right, we'll be tracking that issue. There's no telling, I guess, what Planned Parenthood we'll get into next as an extension, the next logical thing in the extension of your personal bodily autonomy when that ideology is set loose, let's just notice there is no end point. All right, now let's turn to questions. I always appreciate the questions sent, and we're never in want for questions. And by that I mean I think it's really interesting that listeners to the briefing have a lot of questions, and I see that as a very good thing. I also consider it an honor that you entrust these questions to us. The first question we're going to take today is, I think, urgent, and it's sent in by a 16 year old young man. And I think this really is important and it's going to take a little bit of time. And I think once you hear the question, you're going to understand why 16 year old young man writes in to say, I'm homeschooled. My question is in regards to the disturbing rise of conspiracy theories on the right, mainly in the belief that the theory, the theory that Israel or the Jews controlled the world. And he goes on to say some of the people who believe this theory call themselves Christians and are seemingly devout and truly love the Lord. He says some attend his church and he knows they're wonderful Christian people. He says, I struggle to believe that Christians can believe in a theory that all the world's problems, tragedies and even personal problems are the fault of an entire nation and people group. I'm going to just summarize. He says, my question boils down to three things. Do you believe that someone could be a Christian and believe this theory? Two, why is it that some Christians believe in conspiracy theories, not just this one? And three, how are Christians to think about these things and call out those beliefs and behaviors? All right, I just want to tell you I'm encouraged that again, here you have a 16 year old young man, homeschooled in a Christian family, asking questions of this kind of complexity and depth that encourages me from the get go. I'm discouraged by the question, but he had to ask it and we need to deal with it. Okay, first of all, he raises the issue of conspiracy theories and he basically wants to know why are we so prone? And these are conspiracy theories on the right. Let me just say conspiracy theories are universal. There is a book that just came out charging evangelical Christians with believing in too many conspiracy theories. And my first thought when I saw the book was, you know, let me see what you're saying. And so I read it and let me tell you, I think the book is itself a conspiracy theory from the left about people on the right falling prey to conspiracy theories. In other words, conspiracy theories are really all around us. And let's just ask the question, why? And I want to answer this. I think the reason conspiracy theories have such traction is because the world presents us with a lot of mysteries and a lot of questions with moral importance. And we believe that these questions need to be answered. And if we can have one answer or just a small number of answers that fit together. And in a conspiracy theory you can have a lot of things connected, a lot of dots connected, a lot of things explained. Well, I think that that helps us to cope with the world. So let me just tell you, I think the ideologies of any age after the fall, after sin has entered human existence, I think the ideologies of any age basically all are prone to conspiracy theories. But you know, this young man is not just Asking about conspiracy theories. And by the way, how do conspiracy theories. You recognize a conspiracy theory? Well, I'm not sure I have a great way of explaining that other than we need to understand how all of this fits into the big questions of life that are answered by scripture before we turn to any other understandings. The best antidote to conspiracy theories is to go back to scripture and just remind ourselves of how scripture lays out the human story and just creation, fall, redemption, new creation. And so conspiracy theories almost by definition, are at some point, if not multiple points in contradiction to that Christian biblical pattern of thought. The other way we recognize them is that they often come up with things that are just patently untrue or unprovable. And sometimes the latter category is some of the harder things to deal with. But let's just think about this for a moment because this young man's asking this question specifically about conspiracy theories that are now prevalent in some places on the right, on the conservative side of the equation, having to do with influence by the Jewish people and Israel. As he states here, the Jews control the world. Okay, you can go back and trace that kind of conspiracy theory to the medieval period, especially in Western civilization. And so you can look at a period like the 15th, and let's just go to the 16th century. The 16th century, because that's so important for Christians, because that was the very century that witnessed the emergence of the Protestant Reformation, Calvin and Luther and all the rest. One of the things you come to know when you look at that era is that it was rife, the medieval era at large was rife with conspiracy theories. And when you're looking, for instance, at the anti Semitism that shows up, Medieval European civilization was incredibly, horribly, unspeakably anti Semitic. One of the reasons why conspiracy theories had traction is because there is always the temptation to blame the problems of the society, the problems even of the community, on someone else. You also have people here who stood out as being distinctively separate from the culture and distinct from it. Now, when it comes to anti Semitism, a part of the problem is that the Jewish people were in a horrible predicament, especially in places like Eastern Europe and the borderlands of Europe during the medieval age, they were made to live separately from other people in the community. Then they were condemned for living separately. You understand the catch 22 there, so to speak. They were in a horrible predicament. They were condemned for being separate, and they were mandated to be separate. That enabled people in the community to blame everything on some kind of international Jewish conspiracy. Here's another thing. The Jewish people, after the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70, they were in the position of being dispersed among the nations. And so they have a fundamental identity. Okay, so here's something Christians should understand. This should come very clear in terms of a perception to Christians, the Jewish people, in terms even of their lineage going all the way back to God's promise to Abraham, they are a people by lineal descent. That is to say, they are a people. They are Jewish by birth. Once you have the destruction of the Temple, you have the dispersion of Jewish people, then they are wherever they are, outside of the Holy Land, outside of what had been the territory of Israel, you have Jewish people who are almost by definition, virtually everywhere, a minority in a larger gentile space. And so they were marked out as the other as being separate precisely because their culture was different, their religious practices were different, many things were different. And so you had the tendency to blame things that went wrong on people who are different. Okay, there is a further complication. And so we, as Christians, we need to think carefully about this. The further complication was due to the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. All right? The official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is that Christians should not be involved in what was defined as the sin of usury. That is the sin of making money off of other person's money. And so usury it was renting money. Okay? So when you take out a loan, in one sense, that's what you're doing. You're renting money. If you go to buy a car and you take out a loan for that car, you are borrowing the lender's money, and you're renting it because you're paying a price for it. The interest is the price. Now, let me just notice that the Roman Catholic Church didn't take this out of thin air, because some of this is based in Old Testament law. It's wrong to take advantage of someone in financial need. At the same time, you would not have a modern economy without the ability to rent money. And that's effectively what goes on in the society around us all the time. And these are also money transfers. Not just renting money, but also money transfers that involve some kind of percentage fee. And so the Roman Catholic Church said that Christians could not be involved in usury or in money lending for profit. So that business fell largely to the Jewish people who were not under the law of the Roman Catholic Church. And thus they could be involved in money lending and even in the emerging practice of banking. But then of Course, you could blame the financial problems on the banks and you could blame the financial problems on the Jewish people. And thus you have some of the conspiracies rooted in that. So it is true, it is true that you have massive Jewish fortunes built during the medieval period, something like the Rothschilds. And there's a continuation even right now with the Rothschilds being in the news about some major financial matters. In terms of that legacy, it's still there. However, the big point here is that when you have conspiracy theories, they almost never start with no dots on the page. They start with some dots on the page. The conspiracy is how they claim the dots are connected. And so here's where you need to note that this is something that has been the union of conspiracy minded thinking and antisemitism going back for more than a thousand years in Western civilization. It is something we need to name and recognize and understand. The conspiracy is in the anti Semitic claims about connecting the dots. Some of the dots are undoubtedly there, including the historic background, including the historic background of the involvement of Jewish people in banking and in financial circles and all the rest. What you're looking at here right now is the fact that there has always been on the right. Now, by the way, there is a very deep anti Semitism on the left, a very deep rabid, pernicious anti Semitism on the left. But our concern, the 16 year old listeners appropriately ask, what about on the right? What's our responsibility as conservatives to look at this? Well, number one, we need to remember to test all things by scripture and we also need to honor the truth. And we need to invest in some really serious thinking here to make certain that we're not slandering people or that we're not even just basing our understanding is upon lies. And so just taking this apart in an honest historical investigation is a good start. I think as Christians we also have to recognize we start out from a position, from a disposition of respect for and affection for the Jewish people. That also is a biblical mandate. Right now, of course there are a lot of headlines and there's a lot of speculation out there. Did Israel basically entrap America into a joint military effort against Iran? I do not believe there is any adequate evidence for that at all. Do I believe the United States and Israel have a vast Venn diagram of shared interests? I think absolutely. So there are people who are claiming that Israel and Jewish lobbying groups have too much influence in the United States Congress and elsewhere. Well, you know, we are in a constitutional system of government where all kinds of people can have influence, and Israel has a very urgent need to have that kind of influence. Can that influence be out of balance? And can it sometimes lead, say, the United States government to do something which isn't exactly seen in retrospect, in American interest? Of course that can happen, but it can happen with our relationship with England or Great Britain, one of our closest allies throughout all of American history, especially in the 20th century and beyond. It could be true with Japan. It could be true with any nation. Sometimes it's hard to disentangle those interests. Biblically minded Christians shouldn't fear thinking about some of these hard questions and answering, you know, what exactly should be the interest of the United States of America? How should we understand that? What is our interest vis a vis Israel? Obviously, I'm very friendly to Israel. I think that is a matter of national interest for the United States of America. As a Christian, I believe more than that, but I believe it's in the national interest of the United States of America. Do we need continually to make certain of where the United States stands over, against, or even alongside other nations? Of course we do. And so all I'm saying is we need to be very careful to privilege reality and to privilege the facts and to recognize antisemitism as a basic sin and problem, which is going to show up inevitably in conspiracy theories and in other arguments. That's not to say that everything that is said about Israeli, specifically Israeli influence is wrong. It is to say there are conjoined combined interests here that are very deep and long standing. And there are also problems we need to recognize in terms of conspiracy theories that are popular all over the digital media. They can just explode like wildfire. But you know, a conspiracy theory is best revealed by open conversation. And I hope that's what we have done today. Just shine some light and when the dots are there, affirm the reality of the dots, but connect the dots rightly, honestly and carefully. All right. Just to wrapping this particular consideration up, this young man asked, number one, do you believe that someone could be a Christian and believe this theory? I believe that Christians can be Christians and believe all kinds of ridiculous things. I think that's one of the reasons why we need to be open in conversation about these things and seek the mind of Christ and biblical teaching on these things in order to make clear what is true and what is false and what's appropriate for Christians to believe in the current context. One of the things I have just used with people to try to make this issue clear is I've said, okay, let's take Israel off the equation. Let's take Israel for a moment and bracket it and put it aside. Is Iran an implacable, deadly enemy of the United States of America? Yes, it is. And it has declared itself to be. They are not our enemy because we are Israel's friend. We are Israel's friend and thus both Israel and the United States are declared to be the enemies of Iran. And Iran has declared to seek the extinction of both. And by the way, that's not a conspiracy theory. Why? Because those words were uttered just that way by a succession of Iranian leaders and they backed up those words with action. That's just a pattern of fact. By the way, one last word. It is interesting. This came from a 16 year old young man. And I'm just going to tell you, I can say to this young man, I think there are probably a lot of listeners out there who would would say if they could, thank you for sending in that question because they've been thinking about it too. We all should be okay. Finally, a big, big question that's going to come down to something that I think I can answer pretty straightforwardly. A listener writes in to say, I work at a church where recently we had a homosexual couple dedicate their child at the church. I question if we as a church affirm their sin, if we allow that. On top of numerous issues I've had with the church. He says, okay, I think your numerous issues are made very clear in that one incident. Let me just tell you why. And it is because if you have, say, a homosexual couple walk in your church, you want them to hear the gospel, you want them to hear the Gospel. What you can't do is betray the scriptures and actually I think betray the gospel by recognizing them as a married couple as they may present themselves to be. And so let's just say that there are walls you just can't climb over, there are bridges you can't cross, and one of them is the recognition of the marriage, particularly in a formal way such as this. And so I just want to say to this young man, and I appreciate your question, this can't be something. My first thought when I saw this was this can't be something that's isolated and this can't be the first alarm bell that's gone off in your mind. And you know, the next sentence this listener wrote in, he's got other big alarm bells. I can just say they do all go together. But the good principle here, we just have to end with this for today is you can't affirm what Scripture makes very clear is not real and is actually even contrary to nature in terms of the sexual relationship. You just can't bless what Scripture condemns. But I don't think a church reaches that point without crossing a lot of other barriers in terms of Scripture and gospel. We want to reach every single human being with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and the power of God unto salvation, and that brings about the necessity of repentance. But when you look at this picture, you understand that's going to be really hard to clarify on the other side of the this picture. I'm sure a different angle on this will appear quite soon, but for now, thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmohler.com you can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological seminary, go to sbts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to voicecollege.com I'll meet you again on Monday for the briefing. Sam.