Uh Hey Breakpoint listeners, Bob Titmer, producer of Breakpoint here. Recently, one of our listeners, a mom of college-age kids from Colorado Springs, shared how God has used the resources and programs of the Colson Center to impact her life. Here's what she said. I can engage my daughters. In discussions that are not fear-based or reactive.
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are gleaning The things that are going to help me deal with the current issues that I'm facing as a Christian, as a mother, as a wife, as a friend, as a daughter. And they're bringing these together through podcasts, through the Through the Colson Fellows Program, through the conference, and I feel like I have all these resources, and regardless of what I'm reading or listening to, everything. Is working together to shape, inform, and strengthen my worldview. To put it simply, that's why the Colson Center exists. We are humbled that God uses this ministry to equip Christians with clarity, confidence, and courage so they can live out their calling right where God has placed them.
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Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look in an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center on Johnstone Street.
Well, Friday was the 331st birthday of Voltaire, the brilliant, sarcastic French philosopher and author of influential works of the Enlightenment, such as Candide. Voltaire is also well known for his attacks on Christianity, especially the way he articulated the problem of evil and suffering in his poem on the Lisbon Disaster.
However, according to the eminent historian Dr. John Woodbridge, what made Voltaire really dangerous was his ability to make his readers laugh at things that were not funny.
Now, if Voltaire were a decade I think he'd be the 90s. Let me explain. Diane West opened her 2008 book, The Death of the Grown-Up, How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization, with this observation. Quote, there was a time literally when there were no teenagers.
Now, of course, West wasn't arguing that there was ever a time there was no one teenage. The argument was that adolescence as a stage of life was an invention of mid-20th century psychology, pop culture, and mass marketing. And that adolescence and our culture had replaced historic rites of passage into adulthood with what might be called Peter Pan syndrome, the refusal to ever grow up. In most cultures in the history of the world, teenagers were expected to act like adults. We now know how this facilitated maturity and ensured that essential neural connections were made.
But increasingly, West observed, adults were instead acting like teenagers in dress and behavior and spending habits, and this in turn lowered our expectations of seventeen and eighteen year olds.
Well, after all, they're just kids, we now say. Originally, The Death of the Grown-Up was supposed to be published in late 2001. But after the attacks of 9-11, West rewrote the book with an expanded thesis. We are a civilization of adolescence became, because we are a civilization of adolescence, we are unable to respond to the rise of militant radical Islam. In other words, just as the civilizational stakes were getting so much higher for the West, we had all become juveniles.
A telling mark of adolescence, whether in a culture or a teenager, is irreverence. The 90s was the decade of irreverence when postmodern film and television celebrated meaninglessness. Long gone were the family-centric sitcoms of the 80s, in which every episode ended with a lesson learned. Gone was the teenage rebel of the 70s who hated your rules. In its place was Beavis and Butthead, who didn't care enough to hate anything.
The sitcoms and the SNL movies of the 90s portrayed everything. Including sexuality, as just a big joke. Not a haha, laugh out loud joke, but a mindless, snarky and snickering kind of joke.
Now, a lot can be learned about a person and a society by what they laugh at. If everything's a joke, then nothing's sacred. Nothing's sacred, nothing's worth fighting for. If nothing's worth fighting for, Nothing's worth dying for. If nothing's worth dying for, nothing's worth living for.
Now to be clear, the problem here isn't humor. It's not laughter. The problem is the kind of humor. It's what we laugh at. We don't suffer today from too much joy.
We suffer from far too little meaning. In the book Shows About Nothing, Nihilism and Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld, which was published at the end of the 90s, philosophy professor Thomas Hibbs described the nihilism that was infecting American culture as, and I quote, a state of spiritual impoverishment. and shrunken aspirations, end quote. The nihilism that had dominated the popular entertainment of the 90s had, he thought, shaped a generation. As one Harvard student wrote in at the time in a Harvard Crimson article entitled The Beavis Generation, and I quote, there's a whole new generation out there that completely understands all of this society's foibles.
and can only laugh at them. But then again it was the 90s. The shows were funny. The foibles were pretty tame, comparatively speaking. The Cold War was over, the world was at peace.
Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations was really only a prediction at the time and was widely questioned by other tenured comfortable scholars. Clinton was president. Americans were wealthy and safe, or so we thought. And we entertained ourselves with angsty anthems by Nirvana and Alanis Morrissette about how life was miserable despite all the evidence to the contrary. The stakes today are much higher.
Of course, entertainment about nothing is not a sufficient explanation for the current epidemic of thinking life is about nothing. Mocking men and women is not the same as pretending men and women don't exist and then removing perfectly healthy body parts. Objectifying women's bodies with camera close-ups is always offensive. but seems quaint compared to women objectifying their own bodies on OnlyFans. In other words, there might not be a straight line from the irreverence of the 90s to what Carl Truman has called the desecration of modern life.
But it would be foolish to ignore that there's any connection, and it would be insufficient to describe that connection as mere desensitization. Just as Voltaire's skill in making his readers irreligiously laugh at things sacred, contributed to his readers' irreligion in the end, so to irreverence, when it's normalized for a society, can hamper our ability to recognize the sacred and order our lives and societies accordingly. As it turns out, Voltaire's legacy can still be seen, not just in 90s reruns, but also in the woke left and the woke right of today. and both Nikki Glasser and Nick Fuentes. and the loss of the sacred and the desecration of the holy, and the mocking and the name calling that has replaced reason and argument.
and in the loss of real humor. the kind that the human heart still needs. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. For a version of this commentary that you can download and share with others, visit us at breakpoint.org. And if you appreciate these daily commentaries, please leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
