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 a flurry of court cases involving Christians and some other worldview issues. We're also going to hear a special interview about the upcoming documentary, Truth Rising. We have a lot to get to this week, and we're so glad you're with us. Stick around.
Welcome to Breakpoint this week from the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. I'm Maria Baer, alongside John Stone Street, president of the Colson Center. I'm happy to be back with you, John, this week, and especially this week, because as we were just talking about offline, this seems like a really unique news week.
Now, I get teased a lot for saying at the top of the show that we have a lot to get to today. But if there was ever a day when we have a lot to get to, it is today.
So there have just been a lot of updates, it seems like, this week to a lot of news items we've covered in the past. And just to be clear, we cover news items from a worldview perspective. These are all stories that have worldview implications.
So I want to hit these as quick as we can and just kind of hit some of the highlights. I want to start with a case this week involving the Little Sisters of the Poor, if you remember them. Pennsylvania and New Jersey had sued. There's kind of some legal complications here, but basically the Trump. Trump administration number one had offered a religious exemption to the Obamacare mandate that mandated organizations provide contraceptives and abortive fashion contraceptives to their employees.
Several religious organizations, including the Little Sisters of the Poor, had asked for a religious exemption and under Obama were denied that. The Trump administration granted them that, but now a district court judge has said those exemptions were null because the government did not go about assigning them in the right way.
So, it sounds like this is going to continue to be appealed, but it has been how many years now that these little nuns have been fighting this? Yeah, listen, one of the things that came to me when I saw this is this is still going on. I had forgotten. I mean, really, I kind of knew it was, but I had forgotten. And a lot of times we forget that some of these culture war challenges in court, how long they go on.
We talk about Jack Phillips going on for a decade or more. This is a group of nuns that cares for people who are dying, and we want to force them to provide contraception. I mean, it really is one of those things that befuddles the imagination. And it did several years ago. But one of the things that hit me this week when I heard the ruling was like, This just sounds more bizarre than it did even back then.
And I'm wondering if that has something to do with the quote-unquote vibe shift or whatever. But good heavens, leave those poor little nuns alone. Let them do their really good work. Why interfere?
Well, speaking of abortion, let's talk about what's going on in Northern Virginia, one of the most challenging parts of the country, apparently. Governor Glenn Young announced this week he's going to launch an investigation into a public school where a social worker is alleged to have arranged for and paid for one of the minor students to get an abortion without her parents' knowledge. This is shocking. Yeah.
Well, it's shocking, except we forget that in the education system, especially, there are true believers. That became obvious during COVID. Where? Northern Virginia. Fairfax County is adjacent to Loudoun County.
I was actually texting with a family member this week who teaches in that part of the world. And I'm like, dude, Northern Virginia public schools are the worst. And this family member definitely agreed. But I guess one of the things this highlights, you know, every once in a while you have memes and you're like, you don't hate this enough. You know, those memes, the you don't hate this enough memes.
Like, this is worse than you thought. Northern Virginia has been that kind of consistent giver of these memes. Like you don't know how truly some of these folks in certain parts of the country deeply believe in progressive values. I mean, to pay for a student's abortion, for example, to arrange it, to do it secretly, to do it outside of parental notification. I mean, that indicates that you deeply believe that there's this inherent connection between.
Justice or reproductive justice. You believe these monikers used for abortion and you believe them at a deep level. I hate this too because of the progressive line about power imbalances. If you have somebody at school in authority over you who's encouraging you to do something like this and thereby implicitly saying, let's say you're pregnant, you cannot handle it. Like you are incapable of moving forward with this.
So you have to have this option. I mean, it violates basically every aspect of human dignity that you would hope people would uphold, especially in a school setting. But speaking of that and that power imbalance and the way that authorities can influence kids, the state of Illinois has signed a law mandating that kids from grades three to 12 will be given a mental health assessment.
Now, parents can opt out of this, but it's basically a little test that kids will take asking. them how they feel and whether they feel anxious or depressed. And these school administrators are saying this will help us catch, you know, trauma before it happens and help us funnel them into the right resources. I'm really grateful for Abigail Schreier, who has sounded the alarm on this kind of thing now for years, pointing out that the more you ask kids how they're feeling and to dwell on their inner experiences, the more you introduce what she calls iatrogenesis, which is you're introducing the harm, you're suggesting it. And that makes a lot of sense.
This seems like a horrible move to me.
Well, it's again, it's not that it's being made available, it's that it's being mandated. And, you know, the steps go like this, is that you make it available, then you mandate it, and then you remove the ability for parents either to know or to opt their kids out.
So I think that'll be the next stage. And I learned about this from Abigail Schreier's ex-account. I mean, because this is the sort of thing she's talking about. It's like, we need to stop talking about this all the time and then kind of putting it. Into the water that this is kind of a badge of courage to have seven diagnoses, you know, and that's what you hear from parents.
That's what you hear from a lot of kids. I'm so-and-so, and I'm, you know, this, that, or the other. The neurodivergent is, you know, kind of the overall category to which people can belong. And not that that stuff doesn't exist, it's that if it's overdiagnosed, then and it becomes it becomes itself the treatment. You know, it's an explanation that justifies away the need to become resilient.
And that's what we have actually seen is as the mental health diagnoses, what I call a hysteria growth. I mean, you know, kind of this fascination with it has exploded, then the resiliency of kids has declined. It's been literally an opposite matching grant.
So, look, I agree with you. I think this is a problem. I think it is something that is very easy to sell to the public in the name of good, right? It's very easy to say, this is what we should be doing. This is what we have to be doing.
And, um, Like all the other stuff that becomes the purview of schools and school teachers and school counselors that shouldn't. And what happens is, is parents get more and more and more elbowed out.
So it's the same vibe. It's the same approach to education that leads to a mandate like this that led to the actions of the Fairfax County school counselor that was in the last story. These are the same story, essentially. And if you pay attention to this, I guarantee if you watch this unfold over the next several years, not only will you see these diagnoses explode, you're never going to see an accurate or a meaningful measurement of whether this is helping, right? There's a lot of fear-mongering.
I will call it that, and I mean to call it that in this, where like your kids are struggling and there's no way to find out unless we give them this survey that they self-administer and then we read it and diagnose them or we send them away for a diagnosis. But there's never going to be a measurement to ask or the self-reflection to say, is this actually helping? Are kids improving socially and emotionally and our behavioral problems going down? They will never do that. They will just point to the, they'll point to the increase in diagnoses and tell you that this was why they had to do it.
Which is like the most self-fulfilling, you know, negative prophecy you could imagine. I am going to get in so much trouble for this, but this is exactly like the TSA right there. That's what it is. It's like the TSA self-justifies its own existence, and then the metrics that it uses to justify its success is an increased number of passengers that are screened, not how good the screen is. All right, I'm just going to let that go.
So, well, the other ironic part of this, and this leads us to our next story, is that I'm reading this story just with my jaw dropping, like they're going to mandate this testing. And then they said, and also the kids will be able to take it electronically if they want. This is also just, I mean, like, bizarrely ironic. It would be funny if it weren't so high stakes. That, okay, we know, we absolutely know, like, there is no arguing with the data and the research of how much screens and social media are harming kids' mental health.
But whenever we have these official conversations about how we're going to tackle the mental health crisis among children, we will not talk. Touch the issue of screens. Not only that, but we will take this test on a screen. In that vein, I want to talk about a court that has upheld Mississippi's ban on getting a social media account if you are under a certain age.
Sorry, I don't know the exact age. I don't want to say it's just a minor. I think it's younger than that, but you have to have, your age must be verified in Mississippi to sign up for an Instagram account and a couple other things. And that was challenged in court and has been upheld this week. I think this is a good ruling.
Well, it's not a full ruling. It was a request made as the decision is being litigated whether the Mississippi law is constitutional or not, whether the temporary kind of stay from a tech industry group was going to be upheld or not. And they rejected. And they said that, you know, that as this case basically proceeds, the law can stay in place. But you're exactly right.
I mean, we're concerned about the mental health ruling or the mental health condition of young people. It's directly connected with social media use. There's a one-to-one correspondence and so on. And we have age restrictions on all kinds of things. But somehow, when it comes to technology and the internet and social media, that that's supposed to be somehow a breach of freedom.
But yeah, it's a good ruling, right? I mean, it at least gets us closer to the finish line. And maybe one of the things that comes out of this ruling is everyone sees that it's not the apocalypse if kids cannot get on their phones. I would wager to say it's the opposite of that. It will stay the apocalypse if maybe more kids can get off of smartphones.
Okay, speaking of courts, let's talk about Kim Davis. She was the clerk who did not want to issue a same-sex marriage license after the Obergefell decision and was thereby, I think, suspended from her job. And she is continuing to fight that legal battle, now asking the Supreme Court to take up the case, basically, essentially challenging the ruling in Obergefell itself. I'm reading some legal analysis of this today, and that seems like a bit of a long shot just to have standing to challenge the full ruling of Obergefell. But I think it's encouraging that this issue is still alive and that people are willing to continue asking questions and to challenge what I think was an extremely poorly written ruling.
And I think you agree.
Well, it's the first legal challenge to Obergefell. And I do think a lot of people think that it's unlikely that the court's going to back off of that. But it's also something. That could provide a kind of relief, I think, for Kim Davis, who has faced penalties for her unwillingness as a public servant to go along with the government's mandate here, mandating same-sex marriage. This is in the state of Kentucky.
I think, in light of some of the recent rulings about freedom and freedom of speech and freedom of conscience that people hold, and the court has been pretty consistent ruling that people who work for the state also have those same sorts of freedoms. Though, you know, obviously there's always kind of limits and what's the word? boundaries of those uh uh of the of those freedoms.
So that's it's going to be interesting to see what comes out of this. But you're right, the the the the the lawsuit actually asked the court to o to to to overturn uh Obergefell. I I do think that's probably unlikely at this point, although I agree with many of Folks, including Katie Faust, who's been on a campaign on this, is that this is a terrible law and it does need to be overturned. And, you know, when you have these kind of sneaky, kind of, hey, we've uncovered the secret plot of those conservatives. They want to overturn Obergefell articles that are now starting to come out.
I want to say, yeah, I just raise my hand and say I'm on board with that secret plot, you know, completely. Like, let's figure out how to do it. It's a long way, I think, between here and there, but let's get started. I'd be a little concerned that a loss in this case is kind of portrayed as, again, the court settling or the matter or something like that. And sometimes there's a cultural perception that comes along with legal decisions, which is why the when and the why and the how of this sort of work is so very, very important.
But Kim's attorney, Davis's attorney is brilliant. He is a courageous guy.
So we'll see what happens.
Well, John, we are approaching. Approaching the end of our segment, and we still have some news stories left. You want to hit some headlines?
Well, no, it was a crazy thing. I mean, we did not have a chance to really get into the you can't make this up story of the week, which is the UK Women's March has now removed women from its branding. And then you kind of say, you know, listen, what we've been saying the whole time is that the critical theory erases women, and then this happens, and it's like, you can't make this up. This is actually the UK Women's March is now no longer featuring the word women. It's all about, I think, intersectionality now is the new branding, which somebody needs to, I think, revisit that PR campaign.
But that I thought was a really, really funny headline of the week. The more troubling one, we've been talking about Nigeria now for a couple of weeks. And here's what people need to know: 7,000 Nigerian Christians have been killed so far in Nigeria in 2025. 7,000. We're on the worst pace on record.
This is at the hands of Islamic violence. And continue to pray for. Your persecuted brothers and sisters. All right, John, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week.
Now it's cultural communism. It's not about the proletariat, the haves and the have-nots. It's about dividing society into the oppressor and the oppressed. That's Ayanne Hersi Ali in Truth Rising, a groundbreaking documentary film which premieres September the 5th from Focus on the Family and the Coulson Center. In the film, Ayan Hirsiad Lee unlocks the dangers of critical theory as she says in the film the West has dropped the ball.
at the worst time on the critical question of our day, the question of identity. What does it mean to be human? Ian's a human rights advocate and former atheist whose conversion to Christ made headlines just a few years ago. She has spent her life advocating against practices that violate the rights of women. You can hear her remarkable story in the global premiere of Truth Rising on September the 5th.
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That's Truthrising.com slash Colson. Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family. Thanks for joining us on Breakpoint this week. It is excellent to be with you just down the hall here at Focus. We're so glad you're a tenant here at Focus on the Family.
Listen, it's been such a cool thing this past year to work on the Truth Rising project with Focus on the Family, with you, with Oz Guinness. And I know why we're doing it. I know what we think. I mean, when we think about kind of the legacy of a Chuck Coulson who really challenged Christians to live into the cultural moment with the How Now Shall We Live book, which very consciously was a follow-up to Francis Schaefer, How Then Shall We Live? And the concerns are always the same.
We live in a critical cultural moment. What is God asking of us? What is God calling us to be and to do in this time and place?
So that's where we see this. How do you see the Truth Rising Project? Yeah, it's interesting because originally, this is probably now 18 months ago, I was looking at just cultural voices. listening to what people are saying. Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk.
It dawned on me that people were putting their finger on certain things, and I didn't know if they necessarily knew why they were unsettled. In the case of Elon Musk, he started talking about the need for us to have children. Right. And, you know, I agree, he may not be doing it the right way, but I'm not seeing him as a Christian leader or anything like that. He's just a secular person saying, there's a benefit to having children.
I went, wow, that's interesting. Then I heard Bill Maher. Yeah.
And he was starting to, and I've always watched comedy with an ear for the canary in the cave because comedians started to make jokes of the woke. And I was going, this is really interesting. I remember the one thing he said, Did anybody see the New York Gay Pride Parade? There were no gay people on the podium, only trans people. And people in his audience laughed.
And I thought, wow, that's really interesting.
So those components in my mind begin to shape the idea that it'd be great for folks. To do a follow-up on the Truth Project, but start to look and listen to these non-Christian voices and Christian voices around the world who are raising really interesting concerns. And I am thrilled with what we were able to capture on film. And let me just say thank you, John, because we didn't have that expertise in-house. We're working on marriages every day, helping parents do the best job they could do.
And, you know, I always appreciated Chuck Coulson and admired him, and we had interaction with him and always admired you taking over the Coulson Center. And I remember telling our COO, Ken Windebank, man, we should try to get John Stone Street to be the co-host of this, along with Oz Guinness, two powerhouse thinkers. Oh, well, gosh, to be mentioned in that name, you know, with that name is just such an honor for me. But we were watching the same thing in terms of some of these voices that just yesterday seemed to be telling us that religion is a poison. And God is a delusion.
Christianity is what's wrong with the world.
Now turning around going, wait, why is everything so crazy? There seemed to be a real shift, culturally speaking, in one direction. And then it quickly became something that people seemed really uncomfortable with. And I think the trans issue is a part of that as well, certainly. But where people were kind of backing up, going, Hold up.
I didn't sign up for this. I didn't sign up for canceling everyone and suppressing all free speech. And aren't we supposed to be tolerant? And now we're not tolerating people. And then, you know, how do we have a sustained future when there's such an enormous division?
And then, if that's the moment, you know. What should Christians believe and how should Christians live? You know, one of the challenges I think that we have as Christians is being kind in a moment like this. Yeah.
Because it's almost like, and I told you so. I can't believe how quickly woke is crumbling. You know, it built up for decades, but man, it has come down fast. And people have realized this is a dead end. This is the cul-de-sac of humanity.
We're not able to go anywhere for flourishing. And that's what's so great about the Christian message. Jesus is for you. He loves everyone He's created, right? And there's where we need as Christians to be prayerful toward those that don't agree with us, be mindful about speaking our peace and what we believe, not to be discouraged in that environment.
Remember the scripture in 2 Timothy where it says to endure evil patiently. Yeah.
Well, and I think that one of the themes of the project has been that a lot of the things that were foreseen by the Francis Schaefers and the Chuck Colstons of the world that were now being noticed by unexpected voices like Bill Maher. I mean, Bill Maher, who would have expected I did not have on my bingo card. How much? Yeah, I mean, how much we've agreed on things and how much he will say things. Not always, certainly, but that, you know, these were kind of theoretical things.
I remember, you know, Francis Schaefer talking about, oh, you know, existentialism as an ism and here's what it means for truth and here's what it means for beauty and talking about this on a theoretical level and Deltackett and the Truth Project, just a wonderful resource of helping explain different worldviews. If you're a Christian, this is what you should believe about XYZ. If you're a secular humanist, this is what that implies. For XYZ, here's why Christianity is better than that, and here's where this will lead. And now we turn around and we're in a cultural moment where a lot of those things that were theoretical a generation ago became real.
a real crisis for parents. Teach my kid what's true without being a bigot. I'm told that you can't do both. And how do I help them understand who they are and appreciate that? And that seems to be a theme that we're in this moment where these things that were predicted have become reality.
Yeah, it's so true. Just one element of Francis Schaefer, who this is back in the early 70s, late 60s, he was warning with the passage of Roe v. Wade that this will. lean culture into a Kind of an ease with which we look at human life. In other words, the taking of human life.
So he said abortion is going to lead into euthanasia. Right? And everybody attacked him for saying it. We're talking about the woman's right to choose. We're not talking about the dignity of old people.
Oh, but what happened? That floodgate? opened. He was right. He was absolutely abortion issue dehumanized us.
And then that led to passage of euthanasia for elderly, for those that are sick.
Now it's even for teens who don't feel That they can live. That's now coming on the forefront. That's where we're at. We're absolutely there. And I think the project really starts with these big civilizational realities.
Oz calls this a civilizational moment, which is such a loaded phrase. And he explains what he means by that. But then it ends with: okay. What does that mean for you? And I think one of the ways that Christians have embraced false ideas that come really from another worldview is by kind of seeing human history as outside of our actions, outside of our control.
Like, you know, it's just a matter of forces we can't. You know, we don't, it doesn't matter what we do, we're just swept along history. That's a secular view. You know, Christian view says that God is in charge of history, Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, so that secures where history is going, and that God has created us in His image.
So the things that we think, the things that we decide, how we live can make a real difference in the lives of others. And what I love is how the project. Starts with kind of this huge civilizational moment, but lands us in calling. What does that mean for you? What does that mean for me?
If I love Jesus and I'm serious about following him and I believe that he's called me to this time and place, how then should I live? Which is the question that Schaefer asked, right? You know, and it's a good one. And I think for me, when I look at that, what I'm finding is it comes to the closest circle in our life. What kind of a husband am I?
What kind of a father am I? I mean, that is what makes the ultimate difference. And then you can go out in concentric circles. What kind of person, what kind of person am I in this community? And that's how the Lord will change the world.
Yeah, we're not victims of this cultural moment. It feels like that. It feels like we're powerless. It feels like, I mean, I felt like that as a dad with kids and trying to get them to believe what's right and living in a cultural moment where so much crazy exists. But that's one of the things in the documentary part of this project is we tell stories.
Of people who could have been victims of the cultural moment, but instead have been. Called out by God, their lives changed in various ways, called to acts of courage, called to courageous truth-telling. I mean, you know, Jack Phillips, the baker in Colorado, to Chloe Cole, who was a victim of the really bad ideas about gender and how Christ actually lifted her out of that and has now put her on a mission to be an agent of restoration. It's just so beautiful. She's just become a Christian the last year.
And we have a challenge in this culture right now to speak boldly in truth and love, to say there's a better way. And it's hard to reach people that are not thinking. Straightly, about what this life is about. Where's our identity? Who are we?
Why are we here? I mean, what. What created me?
Well, listen, I mean, the documentary is really about explaining the cultural moment, which Oz calls a civilizational moment, and really propelling people to hope. And that there is a way that you can live to not just be kind of swept along and not just be a victim of this civilizational moment. And then the question is, what kind of people do we need to be? And the Bible is really clear about this. The Bible tells us that followers of Christ in any cultural moment need to be people of hope, people of truth, people with a clear sense of who they are, both made in the image of God and conformed to the image of Christ.
And then finally, people of calling who have been put on a mission.
So hope, truth, identity, calling. What we hope is, is that people will gain a sense of, I want to be a part of what God's doing in the world right now. I don't want this civilizational moment to push me out of the game. I don't want it to make me hide away. We want to jump in and engage at a new level.
And if we can understand what the Bible says is true about this moment, that we're people of hope, and what's true about reality, that Christ is risen and that's the truth about all of reality. And then what's true about the human person? And then how do I live? Hope, truth, identity, calling. It's a simple framework, but man, it's rich.
And I hope it's solid ground because it feels like we're playing whack-a-mole sometimes where all these cultural issues pop up. It feels like the ground's being swept under our feet or out from under our feet. But really, we have that solid ground of a Christian worldview. And we can simplify it. We can stand on that.
We can be the kind of people that God wants us to be. You know, you could probably. Say this better than I can say this with what you have studied because I'm more in the family space, not the theology space. But it feels like. You cannot cover up the truth of God's word, the truth of his nature.
Like it's just going to keep emerging out of the dirt you throw over it, whatever it is. And I I just I think it's folly. For us to think that somehow we're going to create a better way. Yeah.
God created the way. Yeah, I've heard somebody describe that like a beach ball, you know, in the pool. You can push it down, but it just keeps pops up. Yeah.
And I think that all four of those areas, you know, hope, truth, identity, calling, if you think about the things that have been, we've been lied to, you know, for the last several decades, you know, that the world's lost. There's nothing we can do. You know, there's a real sense of despair and meaninglessness. Especially in teens and 20s. Especially teens and 20s.
And they should be the brightest, the ones more vigorous than anybody about their future. It's just been just such a privilege to work on this with you, to work on this with Focus, to be able to do this with the great Osguinists. I mean, it's just been a wonderful time. And everyone can go and sign up. The premiere is coming in September, early September, the documentary project, as well as the study that people will be able to access for free.
And so TruthRising.com. Is the place to go. And thanks so much, Jim. It's been seriously a privilege to do this with you.
Well, thank you likewise. In a culture that's facing a crisis of mental illness and suicide, Christians of all people should be able to point people to hope. But you have to learn how to bring Christ's hope to those who are around you and are suffering. In the free online course, Hope Always, Dr. Matthew Sleeth, equips Christians to understand this current epidemic of mental illness and suicide and learn what the scripture says to those who are suffering and to those helping those who are suffering.
Especially if you're a parent, a pastor, a teacher, or a friend working with the next generation, Hope Always will help you break the silence. And offer real hope to those who need it most. Sign up today at colsoneducators.org. That's colsoneducators.org. We're back on Breakpoint this week, and you just had a quick break from my dulcet tones.
We're listening to an. Interview about Truth Rising. John, if listeners want to learn more about Truth Rising, where can they go? September 5th is the Global Streaming Premiere. And by the way, there's a whole set of resources that go along with it, including a four-part study that small groups who want to wrestle deeply with what it means to be a Christian in this cultural moment can go through to talk about what are the ingredients of a courageous life.
We're real excited about this project. The date is September the 5th. And all this is available by going to truthrising.com. That's truthrising.com. And you can sign up there to learn more, to host a watch event.
If you're a pastor, you can host a screening at your church. You can host a screening in your home. We're trying to remove every barrier, every paywall, every sign-up wall, just basically to be able to get this out. Very excited about this project. And I think it brings a level of clarity right now to this particular moment that the church desperately.
Need.
So, really excited to work with my friend, Hero Oz Gennis. What a great guy. I don't know that I've ever called him illustrious, but that's a good adjective for him. I think he's Gandalfian. I think he's Gandalfian.
So, that's how that's my adjective for him. I think Microsoft Word might underline that in red. I'm not sure that exists in the dictionary, but maybe that's because Microsoft Word is woke. Yeah, that's true.
Okay, well, John, let's turn now to there was an episode of Ross Douthett's podcast, Interesting Times. He, of course, is the illustrious Catholic representative on the New York Times Opinions Board. I feel I just, it's a feat that he's still there, but he's so, he's so talented and articulate. I love listening to him. He's just a great guy.
He had on the founder of Orchid, Nora Siddiqui. We've talked about Orchid before. A couple months ago, she wrote an opinion piece kind of introducing her worldview to the world and her company. Orchid is a company that will. Perform genetic screenings on your embryos.
I'm not sure if they are directly involved in the IVF process. Like, I don't know if they perform it themselves, but you have to go through IVF to use ORCID. But essentially, these are prospective parents who pay to have every embryo screened. For tons and tons and tons of supposed genetic markers.
Now, the markers are then put through an algorithm. Like there's mathematics involved, and I think it was helpful for Ross to go through that with this woman at the beginning of this podcast to understand exactly what she's selling. But they're telling parents that they can give them an idea of the likelihood that this embryo and that embryo will encounter certain diseases, but it goes beyond diseases too, right? It's also like superficial characteristics. Maybe this child has a higher likelihood of being bald and whatever.
This interview was really difficult to listen to. I thought Ross did an extremely adept job at teasing out her worldview. You got the sense, I got the sense at the beginning of it that she was taking the approach that too many people in her line of work take now, which is, I'm just a scientist here doing science. And if other people want to make ethical decisions or think about this ethically, that's on them. That's not my area.
I just want people to have as much information as they can get and be as free as they can be to make whatever decisions and nobody's forced to use this, which is. I think almost a criminal underselling of the way she is suggesting that we change culture and we change the view of making children and making families. She kept couching this as a way to protect your children. And of course, what she's talking about, she's saying, wouldn't we do anything for our children's safety? She's making it sound like you test an embryo, you find out, let's say that there's X percentage likelihood, which is hard to test, but X percentage likelihood they're gonna have cancer in this time in their life.
Well, then you could treat that. That's what she's making it sound like. That's not what she's selling. What she's saying is you test an embryo and you find that, you discard that embryo and you go with a different one. That's what she's selling.
It was hard. To come away from this interview. I mean, I think I texted you tongue-in-cheek a little bit. But I said, this is demonic. This is actually demonic.
And I think I really believe that at this point.
Well, first of all, it was an incredible job, I think, by Dow to tease this out. And I think that there is. The way to think about this is I guess I didn't take that she was kind of stepping away as a scientist from the ethics about it. I thought if it was, it was really thinly veiled, right? I mean, I think she was making the case not so much that this is a service that is available to parents, it's that this is the way that reproduction now should go.
And if people don't feel comfortable with that, they can opt out. In other words, she's the one, and by the way, she's also the one who's famous already for saying, which she repeated in the interview, sex is for pleasure, IVF is for babies.
So let's review. In vitro fertilization was a technology. That that is designed to help parents who are having trouble conceiving have children. What she now has done is taken that technology, added in this technology of genetic screening, and her company promises to sequence the entire genome way more than what, as she put it in the interview, is currently being done in the current IVF process.
So, all the way the IVF is being done, and we've talked about this a number of times, it involves screening for the most healthy embryos. It's a very limited amount of screening. There's a high failure rate to the implantation. All of this is kind of part of the process, which is why, as we've said, more embryos are killed in the way IVF is currently done in the United States than from all the Planned Parenthood abortions combined in America. There are, as a result of that in the tail end, you know, additional batches of quote-unquote excess embryos that weren't deemed the healthiest, that then are put into the freezer and waiting for to be implanted later on.
A week or two ago, we heard that the oldest frozen embryo has now. Had been born 30, conceived 30 years ago, born like two weeks ago. It's an incredible development.
So, what her company promises to do is to screen the entire sequence to be much more accurate.
Now, there's a get out of jail free card here in the technology, right? Because if you destroy an embryo because it pretends to be or measures up as being less healthy, you'll never know, right? You'll never know. And how many times do we hear about babies being born that the doctor said, oh, I think it's going to have a big disability, you know, it's probably not going to survive, and it ends up being perfectly healthy.
Now, you know, that's a utilitarian framework that we don't want to adopt or employ, but it's just like there's a get out of it. You'll never know if they killed a healthy embryo, right? You'll never know that. And there's also, you know, kind of these, well, we can't test for everything kind of caveats in the contracts so that if an embryo is implanted and has some sort of condition, then, you know, well, you did the best you can, we did the best we can, and, you know, off we go. But what I want to talk about here is the combination of these technologies.
Because, again, what this company is doing is taking the IVF technology and then taking The screening technology to a whole new level, combining them, and not arguing that this is the way we should go for. For people who are employing IVF, she's actually arguing this is the way human reproduction should go.
Now There's so much to say here. One is Is that this comes in light of another article that came out this week, which was crazy? Do we all remember the Chinese scientist who was put in jail for creating embryos that were edited, whose genes were edited by CRISPR? There was a moment in breakpoint history where we were talking about CRISPR an awful lot, and then it kind of went off the radar. CRISPR is a gene editing technology where literally you can go into the DNA and clip over here and clip over there and do improvements and remove disease and that sort of stuff.
Okay, there was definitely some ethical concern of what that might mean in the long run for human genetics. And so when the scientist announced that he had created a handful of embryos, the Chinese government went, ah, and put him in jail. And I always thought it was a show.
Well, he resurfaces now in this article in Austin, Texas. He had married this woman and then divorced her, who was interested in the same stuff. She's, I think, a In California. And now they have competing companies literally trying to push now in the same way that the ORCID founder is trying to push this into the mainstream. They're now trying to push gene editing.
So what do we do? Technology combines with other technology.
So we have then the IVF technology plus the gene screening technology.
Now the gene editing technology. Do we not think the future is sexless reproduction? All right. This is the math. This is where it goes.
G.K. Chesterton, in his many writings about marriage, talked about the and family, talked about the triangle of truisms. He called it father, mother, child. Another triangle of truisms in the biblical framing of how God made the world is sex, marriage, and babies. That sex, marriage, and babies go together.
We've always known sex and babies went together, right? The Judeo-Christian framework introduced marriage as part of that, which brought a lot of good to the world. It made sure that the dad was in the picture, you know, when a baby was born. It kept women from being abandoned and that sort of stuff.
So when we compromised marriage through, for example, no-fault divorce or justification of cohabitation, all kinds of things, what we're essentially doing in the wake of the sexual revolution is portraying sex, marriage, and babies as if they're not a package deal. Jennifer Roeback Morse talks about this is one of the key ideas of the sexual revolution, that sex, marriage, and babies are separable, right? And we can go through history. Remember, oh yeah, we separated sex from marriage. We did that by separating sex from babies.
That was the pill. And then we separated babies from marriage, right? That it's okay to have babies outside of marriage. And we separated marriage from babies, that it's okay to have marriage without babies. This is the final separation, right?
Sex from marriage, sex from babies, babies from marriage, marriage from babies. This is separating babies from sex. and not just as a workaround, For couples who are infertile and can't have babies a natural way. This is a push. The final push of quote unquote Birth control.
Do not only control Whether or not a baby is had, but control that a baby is now had outside of the context of sexuality. That's what I think is going on here. And if I'm calling where the The puck is is going. It is that final stage of the sexual revolution. This is the case that the ORCID Founder is making.
Not just that this should be available for parents who want it. What I got from that article, from that interview, is that really her vision is that. Responsible parenting. And do you not think that this kind of social pressure will be put on responsible parenting, responsible procreation? Just like responsible parenting is getting all your shots and getting all your da da da.
Now it's, you know, make sure you genetically screen your kid. and have the right kid. This is literally the eugenics. That the 20th century, the early 20th century eugenicists dreamed of. This is.
actually it. And it's not just for certain people, it's for everybody. At one point, Ross asks her, do you worry that this will create like a have and a have-not situation where people who have the financial means to do this will do it and will feel the pressure to do it. And then the people who don't don't. And her response to that, instead of tackling what the actual ethical issue there is, which is, should we be controlling the outcomes of our reproduction, she says, well, I do worry about that, which is why I think this should be available to everybody.
This, we should have, you know, some kind of single-payer healthcare system where everybody can just pay for it. Which I feel like is that for IBF. Yeah.
Right. So, in other words, on both accounts. Yeah.
Not only did not tackle the ethical issue of trying to control, but just maximized it. Like instead of saying, no, maybe we shouldn't control, it's, well, if everybody can, then it's fine. And she used this weird, you know, of course, I'm hearing all the breadcrumbs of a Christian framework. Like she says something, he asked her about what about these other characteristics that people are saying you can start screening for, like how tall somebody is or how smart they might be or how, whether they're bald or not. And she says, well, I think we all agree that that's just fundamentally gross.
Like we wouldn't do that kind of thing. And I was like, do we? Do we agree that? First of all, if you feel that way, where did that come from? Where did it come from that we find that fundamentally gross?
That came from us. That's me.
So you can culturally appropriate. I'll give that to you. That was Jesus who taught us that. But secondly, Mm. I don't think we all agree that, darling.
Like, we all agreed 10 minutes ago that. You know, sex makes babies, and we're disagreeing with that now.
So, no, I mean, listen. You and I have covered this. The limited screening that's already employed by IVF clinics. Parents are already using that to select between boys and girls. Oh, they may.
Parents are already using that. Ross asked her, and I loved this about his interview because. You could make a case why this was rude of him, but what she's doing and what she's recommending is so out, like, is so aggressive that I think it warranted. Probing like this, he asked her, So you've used this and what are your plans? And she said, Well, you know, we don't have kids yet, but I have this many embryos, and we're gonna have two boys and two girls.
Yeah, so she already admitted kind of selecting for sex. But we've already covered this. I mean, so essentially for her to answer that way, I thought that was a case of being disingenuous because. Um the the IVF technology is already being used to screen for superficial characteristics. And all she's offering now is a more efficient and more comprehensive and thorough testing of that.
There was another Line of questioning that I thought really got to a very interesting point, which I haven't heard come up either in the IVF conversation or in this brand new conversation about, you know, this is how we should now have babies, which is what are the consequences culturally of separating baby making from sex. In terms of the love. And the romance between The Father and mother. And because what Ross is doing, I think, in that question. Is really, you know, when Jesus says that the two shall become one flesh, he's talking about the sexual union.
In the question, as if there is such a thing as being one flesh, as if there is a physical union that takes place that goes beyond the achievement of pleasure.
Now, of course, that is the whole game of the sexual revolution: that sex is primarily for pleasure and can be separated from procreation. That's what the pill did, that's what the birth control mindset did, it separated sex from babies in that way. But he's reversing it and saying, What are the consequences for babies? What are the consequences for children? And I think it goes two ways.
The genius of putting sex, marriage, and babies together, and God was really smart in doing this. And by the way, that's a joke because God's always really smart, but he's really smart in doing this. I remember hearing, you know, years ago, Maggie Gallagher making this comment in some meeting I was in. She was a former head of the National Organization for Marriage. Whenever a baby's born, there's a mom nearby.
That part is obvious, right? What marriage does is it ensures that when a baby's born, it's way, way, way, way, way more likely. that a dad is nearby. And kids need both moms and dads, right? This is kind of a sociological reality that when you keep sex marriage and babies together, and even when you put it in order, right?
This is why you have things called shotgun weddings in the South, where a guy gets a girl pregnant and dad shows up at a guy's house with a shotgun, not to shoot him, but to make him marry the girl. Right? Because that's what the baby needs. This is what's the right thing to do. It's this vision that holds it all together.
All right. So you go to this question that. That Ross probes, I think, in the interview, which I thought was really interesting, is what happens when. you then separate that That act. From the achievement of a child.
What does that do to the union between man and woman? What does that do to robbing a kid of either a father and a mother? He said, Is anything lost? Yeah, and you know there's all this G.K. Chesterton going on in his head when he's asking that.
At least it was for me. There's a ton of G.K. Chesterton. There's an incredible amount lost when you separate the one-flesh union that the Bible describes and that we, you know. That's part of the human experience since the garden from the creation of other humans.
I mean, like, it's there's a union that makes it way more likely that child's gonna be cared for and taken care of and that the couple's gonna stay together and so on. There's a physical reality and basically the Gnostic treatment of sex, you know, that it's just about the experience of pleasure, it's not about the oneness, it's just about the experience of pleasure. It's this kind of 50-50 arrangement, not about the union. It's not about the next generation being brought into the world. That is a real, real loss.
And so that triangle, sex, marriage, and babies, holding that together is not just a moral category. And I think this is where maybe Christians have undersold it. It's not just morality. It's just not, oh, you ought not to have sex outside of marriage because God says so. I mean, that'd be good enough reason because God says so.
But what we're talking about is this is the way the world's actually made. And all of this stuff goes together. And when you compromise that design, you're going to lose things. You're going to lose really, really, really good things to answer Dalthit's question in the interview. But I think, you know.
To kind of maybe try to wrap this up a little bit, I was really alarmed to see these two things together. The Ross Douthett interview, although I was really grateful that he did it because you kind of said a lot of the quiet part out loud. But then the return of this gene editing technology and CRISPR and basically. What they're trying to do is do what Orchid's trying to do. They're trying to make another company that services the baby-making industry.
And when baby making becomes an industry, when kids become a product, which IVF buy, the other thing I kept thinking, I don't know if you thought this, Maria. is that the arguments she was using to justify The technology? Really, we're no different than the arguments that are being used to justify IVF as it is. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, I'm trying to see, like, if you accept all the premises of IVF, then.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't accept the premise, at least as it's currently done. And I always want to make that distinction because again, if you go through the process of one embryo at a time and plant that embryo immediately, Then you can at least eliminate a lot of the ethical problems with the With IVF as compared to how it's dominantly done across the West and across America.
So maybe that's a little bit different. But if you embrace the technology as it's currently done, I don't know what resistance, ethical resistance is possible to the technologies that she's proposing. Yeah, there's obviously there's fundamental differences, but. like philosophically, not so much. And I that's what you mean ethically.
Like the the arguments would be the same. No, I yeah, I I I think it is the same. I I think it it's a utilitarian I mean, she even started I I I I heard a a Christian speaker uh you know, justify IVF. And the argument was, well, your body already flushes a whole lot of embryos anyway. You know, the and that's where she began.
Remember that? That's exactly where she began.
Well, the loss of embryos is a loss of embryos. Ross was like, Okay, well, every human being dies eventually, but that doesn't lead us to look at murder and say, Well, they're gonna die at some point anyway. Mother nature is much more cruel. This should just be a part of life now. I mean, it's just such a sophomoric.
That's why I that's part of why I felt like she was distancing herself from the ethics of it because her, when she did try to make ethical arguments, they were so bad and so like immature almost that I was like, Well, this isn't real. She hasn't thought about this. Maybe she hasn't been challenged on it. I think that's when my spidey sense went off. Is that when she started there?
And it was in response to the question. But to say that there's no fundamental difference. Between creating excess embryos so that you might get one. kind of in this funnel way of thinking about baby making, right? If we have 14 or 15 embryos, which she also admitted there were that many embryos in her own IVF process, 15 or so that had been frozen.
In order to get one or two, you're creating embryos with the intent of killing them. That's a fundamentally different thing ethically in all kinds of and you're actually disposing of the ones. you know, intentionally that are not up to par. And is that different than I mean it is different when you go through the process and you agree, we're going to implant every embryo that we create, which some institutions require that. And people feel differently.
I'm sure you can logistically go through IVF and not do a genetic screening. There's people feel differently about it. They don't feel like they're doing that. They'll screen for viability, which I think is even questionable. I don't even know what they mean by that necessarily.
I don't know that that's really measurable in the way that they're selling it. But you could, you know, when I was. Pregnant, I didn't use IVF, but I refused all the genetic screening anyway. I'm sure it's possible to do that. Yeah, the viability itself asks a lot of the same questions.
The viability testing. I think my. The more these things come up, and the more the tech gets normalized and sophisticated, the more convinced I am that. We should be like dogmatically skeptical of things that threaten to put distance between our conception of ourself and our actual bodies. And this to me fits in that category.
To be human, part of the definition of being human is to be a body. And anything that puts distance between your perception of yourself and the functioning of your body should be viewed with extreme skepticism. And this is one of those things because that triangle of truisms isn't just mystical. There is mysticism, I think, in the sexual union, but there's also like observable physiological realities that when you have sex with your husband or wife, like hormones are released that foster intimacy and commitment between the two of you, like things that marriages need to thrive and be healthy, and things that kids need in their parents, like which is again part of the smartness, as you said, of God and the way He designed this. Like the act of it itself.
Yeah.
Fosters a positive and deeper relationship that is needed for the health of everyone involved afterwards. Look, I think that's exactly right. I think about the. The incredible technologies that we now have. And I think they're wasted.
Right now, on an ethically impoverished generation, there's so many headlines I read right now, and it makes me think of a line from Peter Kreft from years ago who said, Just when our weapons went from being sticks and stones to thermonuclear bombs, we became moral infants. There are technologies that are way different in the hands of different people than they are in the hands of other people, right? In other words, there are technologies that ethically formed people can handle, while ethically uninformed and unformed people cannot. Then there are technologies that wouldn't even be imagined. except by a utilitarian culture who's already embraced philosophical assumptions about things.
And I I guess I I Listen to this. And thought. It's it's we're at that stage where what she says The Orchid Founder says sounds still kind of bizarre to us, and we're not sure about that, and it seems so icky, and that sort of thing. And I think about the number of other things that felt that way thirty or forty or fifty years ago that now feel normal.
Okay. And again, When you put those two things together We we've got a generation that treats Kids like pets and pets like kids. We've got a generation that is facing a demographic winter, the greatest existential crisis to our civilization. and still parroting the nonsense of overpopulation. We've got a generation that Thinks that children are completely a choice, a right that we have, and that we have a right to have sex but not have kids.
We have a right to have as many kids as we want, exactly the kind of kids that we want. And all of this stuff is becoming more and more and more and more and more and more normal. And you kind of think about Christian witness. And You know, 10 years ago, we were saying, you know, it's going to be a Christian witness to the world when Christians can embrace chastity as a virtue and show how sex is better within the context of marriage and self-control and things like that. And now I think it's also like it's going to be a radical Christian witness in 20, 25 years if we hold these things together, if people have kids, if people have kids the old-fashioned way.
And the utopian promise that we can technologically control everything and give exactly the outcomes that we want. Is an illusion, but it's a powerful illusion. And it's dominated the West for a really long time. What a remarkable thing. And I go back to that line: if in 100 years Christians are known as those who did not kill their children and did not kill their elderly, we will have done well.
And by children, we're going to mean embryos because maybe we didn't produce embryos in mass, hoping to get one or two out of it or whatever. What we're looking at here, this is not just alarm, it is the final separation of sex, marriage, and babies. Done by a corporate entity, and ORCID may not be the final one, but there's going to be copycat companies. And then you add in the CRISPR technology. We will get better at this.
We will get really good. I'm not one who says we'll never be able to figure this out. We'll be able to figure it out. That's what the Tower of Babel story tells us. But we ought not know everything.
We ought not do everything that we can figure out. That's the fall chapter. That's what it tells us in a biblical worldview.
Okay, well. John, that is going to do it for the show today. Let's talk about recommendations quickly here, if we can. I would love to recommend, we talked a little bit about Mississippi's law requiring age verification for young kids to get social media accounts, and I'm happy about this. I would like to recommend The Tech Exit by Claire Morrell from the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
I had the chance to interview her for a special breakpoint podcast, which I believe is going to air this upcoming week.
So be sure to look for that in the Breakpoint podcast. But also get Claire's book, The Tech Exit. I actually bought two extra copies, one for the principal at my girls' school and one for the superintendent. I'm planning on sharing it with them. Also got a lot of really practical ideas about this.
She kind of takes a lot of the research from people like Jonathan Heidt and Gene Twangy and others who've looked at the impact of not just social media, but digital technology as a concept on kids. And their development. She's taken a lot of that research and put it into really practical recommendations, specifically for parents, but also for anybody who's, you know, caring for a child. And one of the really practical, helpful things that she lines up is getting together with other parents that have kids, your kids' ages, and endeavoring to do this thing together. Like, let's commit together to not have smartphones until we're at least 16.
And let's not, because we know this from the research as well, that it's much more difficult to provide this tech-free environment for your kid when every other kid in their circle is on it. And I think this is an opportunity for ministry as well, honestly, to talk about what it means to be human and how God made us and what's good for our kids and what we should and can give them.
So I'm planning on doing that this year at school, and I'm really excited about it. But I highly recommend The Tech Exit by Claire Morrell and look for that interview with her. Coming up in the next couple of days. This is a topic we're going to hit a little bit more in the coming week. I've got a friend who texted me this week and asked about resources dealing with the reports of the hunger crisis in Gaza and how should Christians think about this, particularly since Israel is being accused of a lot of wrongdoing here.
And how do we kind of put the details together? There's a lot of conflicting values, a lot of conflicting things happen. But there was an I thought a helpful summary in two places.
So I'm going to point people to these two places. The first is in Christianity Today. Jill Nelson wrote an article this week entitled Gaza's Hunger Crisis is Worsening. On the ground, Complexities Abound. And I think she does a really helpful job at getting to the Really, what is going on?
Who is at fault here? And It is a very, very complicated situation. Samaritan Purse spokesperson, they're on the ground there. She interviews them.
So I just thought it was a very helpful piece. And then I want to also recommend a piece in world opinions by A.S. Ibrahim. He's a professor at the Southern Seminary, more of an apologist than a theologian. But I think he articulates the complexities well.
And between these two articles, I think we'll get past a lot of the smokescreens that are being thrown around as people are reporting on this.
So those are my two recommendations. That's awesome. Thanks, John.
Well, thanks so much for listening to Breakpoint This Week from the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. I'm Maria Baer, alongside John Stone Street. Wishing you a great weekend. We'll see you all back here next week. God bless.
