You're listening to Breakpoint This Week, where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian worldview. Today we're going to talk about the Artemis' mission around the moon and their pilot's Christian Witness. We're also going to talk about the way the president has been talking about Iran. We are so glad you're with us for this conversation. Please stick around.
Welcome to Breakpoint This Week. From the Coulson Center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer, alongside John Stone Street, president of the Coulson Center. John, sometimes we get accused of never talking about positive news, but I want to start on a super cool, amazing, incredible note this week.
So most people will hopefully have been following along with the Artemis mission, which is a group of astronauts who've made a 10 day journey orbiting the moon, going all the way around the dark side. farther than any human being has ever traveled from Earth before. Even going beyond where their communications capabilities were cut off with Houston. for about 40 minutes in a very dramatic half hour the other night. And then came back into contact.
It's been an incredible week. They are, as we're recording this, they're on their way back. I think they're supposed to get back. Tomorrow? Um we're recording this Thursday, but One of the incredible parts of this story, there are detail upon detail that are incredible.
And my girls are absolutely spellbound by this mission, which has been really fun to watch. I now officially have a. A NASA bumper sticker on my car. That was beyond my control. It just happened.
But one of the really cool details is that one of the pilots of this mission, Victor Glover, is a believer. And he's been interviewed, of course, all over the world, and he spoke with. You know, his mission commanders back in Houston about his incredible perspective of both the Earth and the Moon that most people will never get to see. And I want to read a quote from one of the things he said. While he was up there, he said.
Obviously, he still is. When I read the Bible and I look at all the amazing things that were done for us, who were created. You have this amazing place, this spaceship. You guys are talking to us because we're in a spaceship really far from Earth. But you're in a spaceship called Earth.
That was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos. And elsewhere he said something like: The universe is a vast void. There's nothing out here. It is unbelievable that we live. on this this planet that was created, it seems, especially for our survival.
And he's just had so much beautiful insight. And what an incredible pedestal from which to share that with everybody. Like he has so much credibility. Obviously, and an incredible vantage point. This is such a great witness, and I've loved watching every second of this.
Well, it was one of several kinds of Easter shout-outs. As much as it causes me pain, I need to mention. Yukon's Darius Reed, who had a wonderful run in the tournament and also, even though he lost, made a great shout out to his faith.
Now that was kind of saddling Easter, both after a win on Saturday and a loss on Monday. This is also in the vein of, of course, past missions. Basically. You know the first cosmonaut. And I uh to Tim Pageant on our team reminded us of this.
We remember the first cosmonaut to go into outer space. It was the first man to go in the outer space. You know, made the snarky comment that I didn't see God. They're almost Everyone after that has some sort of experience where they're pointing to something. Remarkable.
Like this, it was the sense of awe that made them think about something higher and bigger than themselves, which is. You know, incredible because the entire conversation leading up to the mission, especially since we haven't done anything like this for so many decades. The entire conversation leading up to the mission is about human ability. It's about engineering. It's about math.
It's about the stuff that we can do. And suddenly you get up there and it's like, oh, there's something way bigger than us. You know, there's a reference to God. There's a reference to faith. Glover's interesting because his reference is to what we might call human exceptionalism.
And as soon as I read that statement that you referred to, and he also said, you know, kind of this, you are special. But it wasn't like in a Barney, like, you know, you are special. It was in a, by the way, I mean Barney the dinosaur, not Barney Rubble from the Flintstones. But it was like this, you know. Remark that we are special because God is mindful of us.
And you reference that part of the quote, right? Which is... It's remarkable that in this big vast nothingness, that is beyond anything we could possibly imagine. We have this planet that actually looks like it was built for us.
Now, of course, you have to interpret that. I thought of. Two things when I read that quote. One is I thought of John Piper and the other is I thought of the movie Contact with Jodie Foster. John Piper famously said something along the lines of, you know, no one stands on the edge of the Grand Canyon and is like, I'm awesome.
And he didn't quite say it like that. He said it way more articulate than that, as John Piper tends to do. But that's kind of what this guy did. He didn't stand on the edge of the universe and say, Or, you know, it was right before he went into the silent zone. He didn't stand on the edge of there and go, I'm awesome.
He stand on the edge of there and said, we're special. Which is a different thing, because I'm awesome means I'm great. I'm special means somebody thinks I'm special. And in the context of what he was talking about, it It's God. It's what the psalmist said.
You know, what is man that you're mindful of him? It was a really, I thought, a remarkable witness. And then the other thing I thought of was the movie Contact, which I don't know if you remember. Did you ever see that movie with Jody Foster way back in the day? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's based on apparently on a book, which Tim, who reminds us of these kinds of things, reminded us of during. And apparently maybe the book goes a different direction than the movie, but I just remember it's got Matthew McConaughey in it too. And in the middle of it, they basically talk like, look, if we're the only ones here.
Then there's a big waste of space out there. It seems like an awful waste of space.
Well, that's what you're left with. if you are a naturalist, we are alone in the cosmos and all you basically have are grasping of straws, hoping that in some kind of multiverse or kind of the the luck of the bet Of the development of evolutionary process that somehow we're not alone. Right, but if we are alone and we're not alone, it's not because anyone planned it, it just is. And that's what has driven for so long this kind of futile search for extra intelligence. Then compare that.
All this is a waste of space to All this is really kind of made for us. And the fact of the matter is, that's the biblical position. And I thought it was a super cool witness, it was very Pascalian. You know, humans are the glory and the garbage of the universe. It was very...
Uh it was very in line with what we have heard from Those who have been up there, suddenly the conversation goes to awe. And when you start getting into the realm or the land of awe. Then, all of a sudden, you're having a different conversation. You're having a conversation: like, who am I and why am I here? And it it brings wonder and it takes you out of Kind of this immediate, even if it's super cool to think about how crazy the engineering is to make this even possible, especially before AI and the age of supercomputers.
Suddenly, you're in a bigger realm. You're asking ultimate questions, which is the way we were made. I mean, I think the witness even points to that amazing human ingenuity. Like, the reason it's worthwhile to study and to ask questions and to look out there. First of all, we do it from the safety of knowing that God is mindful of us.
But second of all, like, not without that desperation. Like, none of this will be meaningful unless we find that there's God out there that we can see and touch, or we find other existences or whatever else the cosmonauts are looking for. But also, just the freedom to have. questions and to look for it and to explore and to have like the philosophical grounding to explore. And that, you know, like the Kepler saying that science and these pursuits are thinking God's thoughts after him.
Like that is our heritage, too. I'm really proud to have somebody like Victor Glover on our team. But this whole thing also made me think about something else, which is I've said before that I think an underappreciated book that was kind of came out around COVID from Rostowth and on the decadent society. And basically, he's kind of exploring this idea of decadence as a way of understanding where Western culture has landed. One of the things of decadence isn't necessarily even moral evil or something like that.
It is just that we've run out of ideas. We don't do anything new. We don't try anything excited. Like, it's like we've become the The group of people that are portrayed in the movie WALL-E. You know, we're just sitting around fat and fed and just trying to watch movies, and we're not really caring about anything.
Even our greatest inventions are really just enhancements of things that somebody else invented a long time ago, right? And one of the things he brought up in that book, and you made me think of it when you were talking about your daughters kind of getting into this, which is super cool. One of the things That he mentions in that is that we haven't had a national event that brought us together. That wasn't bad. Since when?
moon landing The Moon Landing I mean, you might have like, you know, something like the Red Sox finally winning it after a long time, or you might have, you know, something that's small. At this point, we're talking about something that only a small part of the American nation cares about. But when you think about something where the whole nation and and even you know to your point in some in some ways the whole even beyond There was just something that gave us a sense of national pride, something that we all shared. You could probably even draw it beyond America to Western culture in general. But then since then, all the events like that that were kind of unifying events were like 9-11.
And I think there's a lot there. And so I don't think this kind of raises to the level of the moon landing, certainly. I think at some level it is repeating something we've already done, but there was great doubt that we could. There was great doubt that this could be done, even in the age of supercomputing.
So anyway, I don't know that there's anything to analyze there, but it is interesting. That this has the smack and the smell of that, which is a good thing. We need to accomplish some stuff because humans were made to accomplish some stuff.
Well, I think one point in favor of that thesis is that I've yet, maybe I haven't looked hard enough, but I've yet to see media coverage that's cynical about this. I mean, I'm sure some people didn't like what Victor Glover said, but. I mean, you know, we're going to talk about Iran in a minute. And even seeming sometimes, I turned on the news the other day to listen to updates about the ceasefire, and I'm hearing it spun like.
Well, here's why this is actually bad news. You know, and I've yet to find or hear news about this. Cynically, which is a point in the favor of maybe this is pointing us at least in the direction of another shared positive national experience. I certainly hope so. Yeah, it's an interesting idea.
And I think you're right, because I was thinking that same thought because I heard them talk about some network talk about in positive ways. And then I was like, Hey, you know, it was Trump in his first speech that said we were going to do this. You know, in other words, there's a very dark source. He's guiding this mission, and he's talking about his Christian faith. He's talking about faith, yeah.
So, and that is very different than how the Iranian war is being talked about, including by Trump himself. You know, the other message we got on Easter was from Truth Social. In his prediction that we were going to end a civilization tonight. We've talked about here. in other contexts, but including in Iran now.
just war theory. And I wanted to bring up this quote from Trump. which I took at first blush to be you know, another attempt at negotiation. Obviously, clumsy and really difficult to read, and horrifying in a lot of ways, but. He's trying to convince the Iranian regime to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
And now he's threatening the end of civilization for them. How does this fit into a Christian view of just war theory? Is this allowed? No, it's not. It doesn't.
It's an unjust thing to say. But there is also an enormous difference between what one says in the act of war and what one does in the act of war when it comes to just war theory. Words still matter if any of the actions. Of the president and of the United States and Israel mirror those words, a call to end to civilization, which, you know, it was sloppy. It was sloppily worded top to bottom.
Even at the bottom of the post, he said something about the great Iranian people, which if you're going to end a civilization, you're going to end the great Iranian.
So it was contradictory in a lot of ways that he did.
So you have groups of people. Who have already decided that what he did was call for genocide, and you get groups of people who decided that already what he did. Was basically a negotiation tactic. We'll see. Praise God, we're at a ceasefire.
That's better than not being at a ceasefire. We've reached a point in which a lot of the initial goals, and we had a long conversation with Eric Patterson about that in a special. bonus episode of the podcast to talk about what those goals were. and whether the initial act of going to war could be justified. I believe that it was.
Now, going at the time that he chose to do, that's another factor that needs to be measured. I think that passes muster two based on the limited information that we all have. And then beyond that, you have to say, how is it being waged? And how it's being waged. And now, you know, that has to have its own scrutiny.
I don't think we've batted 1,000 in this by any means. And then words actually do matter. It's an abhorrent thing to call for the end of a civilization, it shouldn't be done. I don't think he said it in, I mean, but then you look at the sloppy tweet and I think it was more of a matter of incompetence than it was a matter of evil when it comes to that. And that said, that top to bottom so far, there's goals yet to be achieved in this conflict.
If these goals are just, and if the pursuit of those goals remains just, then the world's going to be a better place. It already is a better place. because of a decapitated Iran, because of destroying capabilities of their missile program and how far they could reach into Europe. I mean, these are kind of real world things that have to be kind of measured in light of what's happening. And let's not forget too, what happened on Easter Sunday.
Which is the rescue of a downed pilot. That's crazy. That story. When you think about The amount of money The amount of time The amount of resources and the amount of energy spent to bring that one guy back. Listen, that's not something that many, many regimes would do.
In the history of the world, that stands in stark contrast to something we heard about from multiple sources this week, about the Iranian regime. surrounding potential targets. with civilians. or with People that were basically teenagers forced or conscripted to join the military. That's a really big stark contrast.
When you talk about comparing values and comparing morals and which one lines up. There was an awful lot of the 99, leave the 99 and go get the one that's lost, that's reflected. and what the military was willing and by the way able to do. You think about the plane. I mean, I saw, we had this conversation actually too.
It's like in some countries, they lose the planes that were lost just trying to get this guy back. Their military is over. You know, if you're, if you're a down pilot, you want to be a down pilot for the United States because A, they're not going to leave you behind. B, they're going to come after come at and get you. C, they have the ability to get you.
It's pretty remarkable rescue mission. And D, they're willing to spend what it takes.
So I think that all that needs to be considered too, in the waging of the war. But none of that justifies the language. It was, it was a. It was a foolish thing to say. It shouldn't have been said.
It was a wrong thing to say. And you know what? I heard um dozens and dozens of voices. that otherwise support the President. Condemn that language.
And I also think, sorry, I know I'm rambling here. I'll say one more thing. We can all say that that was an abhorrent thing to say. And you know what? We're going to be back on the radio next week.
There's a lot of countries. Where you say that kind of criticism of the leader, you're not even going to be home that night. You're going to disappear.
So it's just a foolish thing when we act like civilizations are all equal, as if there's not a moral component to the cultures. Of course there is.
Some cultures love their neighbors, other cultures eat their neighbors. And these aren't morally equivalent things. That's worth saying, John. I think that there are plenty of other nations where you are not allowed to criticize people in power and you'll be held physically responsible. But that's also a very low bar.
I don't want to lose sight of my gratitude for that. But I also feel like Human history? No, it's actually a pretty uncommon thing. No, it's too much. To our moral aspirations as a nation.
That's when it's a low bar. Which are unusual, is what I'm saying. Like, in other words, let's not forget. Like, you're right. I don't want to ever get below that bar.
I'm with you 100%. I just want to point out. It's an unusual bar in the history of the world. Fair enough. Yes.
Yes. And I'll I mean, I'm with you. This this week was a tough week and a proud week. The rescue of those pilots, the mission around the moon, and then, you know, the this language. Around the war, and you know, the, I don't know, the kind of scary prospects of its future.
It's been a big week. But You know, we'll follow the news and we'll continue to pray for everybody. I don't know what else to say other than that. I mean, sometimes that's all we can do. Let's take a quick break.
John, we'll be right back with more breakpoint this week. Hi, Breakpoint listeners. We've released 50 more tickets to the 2026 Colson Center National Conference, happening May 29th through 31st in Knoxville, Tennessee. These tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. This year's conference theme is You Are Here.
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We're back on breakpoint this week. John, I want to transition now. I'm using that language tongue-in-cheek. You're welcome to a new study out of Finland that. Looked at, this is an important study because it's the first of its kind that had a control group in this manner.
So I'm going to try to set it up as succinctly as I understand it. They took a cohort of people who are suffering from gender dysphoria. As a control group. And this control group did not undergo any kind of gender-challenging treatment, so chemical treatment or surgery. And then there was a group of patients that were suffering from gender dysphoria as well who did undergo that interventionist treatment.
And they looked at the results. And this was, you know, involved a couple thousand people who were similarly situated, similar gender, that kind of thing. And what they found, this was published in a journal, was that the interventions did not help. And in fact, what the cohort that went through the interventions had significantly more interactions with psychiatric specialists throughout the course of their treatment, which I think we could draw a couple of different conclusions from. Probably people who are willing to undergo such interventions Um have more You know, deep and profound mental health problems to begin with.
But the fact of the matter is, the interventions did not. prevent or go any measurable distance toward preventing suicide or improving you know, the immediate mental prospects of this cohort of people. This has been covered in a lot of places where you and I get our media, but it has been incredibly crickets in most of the rest of the mainstream media on this. I don't know if that will change. I hope so, especially as more studies like this come out.
You weren't surprised by these results, were you? Oh, I I think this is a biggie.
So I'm not surprised by the results, but This is a biggie. Not only because it's at the tail end of a lot of other things like the cast review, like the whistleblowers, like the lawsuit. And the decision to hold doctors accountable. in New York. There's something about this control group.
This was having to do with the National Health Service.
So This was comprehensive.
So, many of the studies on which the conclusion was just announced by people. who I think knew what they were doing, but still announced it anyway. That the science is settled in favor of so-called gender-affirming care. And anything that we want to do to experiment on these kids will necessarily be a good thing because the science is settled. Any study.
had incredible flaws. This was pointed out to the U.S. Supreme Court just this past. term in the child's case. There was a line of questioning.
About whether or not a counselor should be able to help a child who wants to. align with their body to do so and Justice Jackson Pointed to studies and just said it like it was true, which is what happened, right? The science is settled. It's a way of saying this. And just saying, oh yeah, yeah, there's studies that prove that this stuff harms.
Well, now we have a control group, first of all, that is large. Because this is a National Health Service, people didn't opt out or opt in, they were just in. Secondly, it wasn't small. We're talking about a large group. Third, we're not talking about those who self-select into the studies, which so many of the other studies were corrupted by.
We're also talking about a study that went over time. that that track this for over 20 years.
So now we're talking about Young people who were in their teens when it started. And now by the time it was over, we're talking they're in their 30s and even 40s. And I want to say the conclusion is even a little bit stronger than you said. Not only did it demonstrate that these treatments did not help. That's what some of the things, some of the previous reports that we mentioned were willing to say, like the cast review, like, oh, well, we just didn't see the improvement and that sort of stuff.
No, no, no. This showed actual harm done. That in these, there was a direct correlation with comorbidities. They don't talk about causation, but man, they flirt with it in this study and in this report pretty strongly. Yeah.
I bring this up because the old myths will die hard. I bring this up because based on the old myths a whole bunch of parents were threatened. were threatened with the suicide of their kid. This is a study that shows Actually, if what we mean by that, let's just go back and remind everyone: the suicide myth was being told, as Chloe Cole said very, very clearly in the Truth Rising documentary. That parents were threatened with the do you want a live son or a dead daughter or vice versa.
In other words, if you don't go along, With your child's understanding of who they are, even if it violates everything you know about them and their body shows about them, then you will be responsible for the suicide. What this study now demonstrates. The largest, the longest, the most comprehensive, not random, is this. That actually, when parents were deceived to go along with it, they were putting their kids in harm's way. That's the evil that was done to parents.
I mean, I just want to say that. They were threatened with suicide.
So, they went along with the recommendations. By going along with the recommendations, They made their children more vulnerable, especially if they went down the medication and surgical routes. They made them more vulnerable to mental health comorbidities, self-harm. And we're going to get these numbers soon. This study didn't exactly point to it, but we're going to get in terms of.
Who was really at more risk for suicide? It's horrible. It's a tragic thing. We're going to be on the other end of this, you know. Hopefully, within a decade or less, and we're just going to be like, How did we do this?
How did we do this? We're going to have, I think you've pointed out, we're going to have a lot of gaslighting of people going, I didn't say that. And they did say that. And I think you're exactly right about that, but this is a biggie. It is a big study.
But these old zombie ideas die hard. And we even heard the Supreme Court A Supreme Court justice, a sitting Supreme Court justice, point to this this kind of oh well the science shows that You know, so-called conversion therapy is harmful. That's not what the study has ever shown. Certainly not the kind that that Kaylee Chows is accused of doing. And it it But these zombie ideas are going to die hard.
We have a responsibility as the Christians, I think, to kill zombies. And I mean that kill zombie ideas. I just want to point out that the current president of WPATH, which is really the foremost national organization here in America that's been propagating this so called care for transgender people, In response to this study, she said, quote, Suicide is and has always been a poor way of measuring the efficacy of gender-affirming care.
So listen to what she's saying. If the interventions that we are propagating Did not help or prevent suicide, then suicide was a bad measure of whether it was effective. But then she goes on to say that sometimes suicide is used to promote these treatments because people who don't receive these treatments are at higher risk for suicide. And that's true. That's what she said.
So basically, if a patient, if a young person goes on to commit suicide after receiving this treatment, that has nothing to do with the treatment. If a person does not get the treatment and goes on to commit suicide, it's because they didn't get the treatment. None of this at any level has ever been scientific. And she gave this quote in public. They they don't care.
Like they're either buying their own nonsense or they genuinely don't care. And either way, the evil is still functionally propagated. It's a heads I win tells you lose, you know, kind of scenario, which if it helps me, I'm going to use it, which tells you right off the bat. But you know, from the leaked emails, we already learned that from these WPATH officials, that they knew that the science didn't back them up. They knew that they were socially experimenting, that they thought.
I think a lot about something that I learned two doctors. Or a doctor in Denver said, and this was, I'm kind of like two or three degrees of separation from this story. of a young man who was struggling with who he was. Parents were strong believers. It was early on in this conversation.
They were swept into the system. They found their, you know, on the wrong side of their public school counselor, and the counselor was basically keeping the parents at arm's length while basically taking, saying we need to hospitalize this kid who's at suicide risk and that sort of stuff. And the doctor said the quiet part out loud. Uh to these parents. He said, Hopefully one day children will be able to change their gender like they change their outfits.
You talk about not being scientific. That is a goal of social experimentation. That is trying to get to an end socially. and then using the m medicine as means to get there. There are people who need to go to prison.
I know everyone gets bad when I say that. But there when you know something is medical malpractice and you practice it, Even if you don't know something that's medical now, but even if it's an accident, you can still go to prison. This was no accident. There are people who need to go to prison because you got to kill the zombies, culturally speaking. And I think another part of this that's going to be.
Uh horrific to watch, but we're going to have to reckon with, is that this pseudoscience Because Enjoyed its rise at the same cultural moment in which we are losing our grip. on our ability to dissuade. kids, but all people, from suicide. Like, we are calling suicide the reason why this is necessary because we want to prevent suicide.
So, we've got to give these. you know, these chemicals and these Horrific surgeries to kids and that kind of thing at the very same moment, that is particularly in places like Finland. Um Where they're also saying suicide is a completely legitimate and sometimes might be like the best option for you. And that's going to muddy these waters to a degree that I don't even think I've reckoned with yet. But it's going to be really, really, this position that this current president of WPATH holds is going to just become, I mean, it was never philosophically tenable, but it's going to become even more impossible.
Because at some point, to talk ill of suicide is going to be politically, you know, not. Uh tenable? That's the direction we're heading anyway. And it's I can't understand how they will thread that needle.
Well, let's talk about the other zombie idea, because this is the other one that we were going to talk about last week and we didn't get to. That in City Journal, there was a really helpful article that was written. About a week and a half ago, I guess, or two weeks ago. Really kind of tracking the claim. Is white supremacy causing an epidemic of transgender murders?
Now this is a claim that takes a lot of forms. There's the Transgender Day of Visibility. By the way, I had a lot of sympathy with Eric Erickson's post-on X after President Trump's statement about ending Iranian civilization. Saying, look, if the choice really is between what he said and celebrating Easter with the trans day of visibility. You know, as the last White House did.
You can see why some of us are in a bind, you know, basically, in terms of what to say. I don't think we have to choose, but listen, you can see why some of us were in a bind. Um people got mad because at the Easter egg roll you know, Trump talked too much about Iran sitting standing beside the Easter bunny. I was grateful. That's way better than the trans activists with naked breasts flopping around in front of children, like what happened under the Biden White House.
But there is a uh something that the Human Rights Campaign and others say almost annually on the International Transgender Day of Visibility, which is a claim that there's an epidemic of deadly violence. And of course, the claim then is that it's done by white straight supremacy, that sort of thing. But this article, which was co-authored by Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright, just looks at the numbers. Is there an epidemic of trans violence? And the the conclusion is Really?
Fascinating. First, the homicide rate of those who identify as transgender is actually below the general population rate.
So basically, if you do kind of per deaths per 100,000, it's way below. The the average, just the average rate. You have a better chance essentially of being the victim of a homicide if you. are are not transgender than if you are. There is one group in which all of that is upside down, and that is that almost all the homicide risks for that population, and I'm quoting the article here.
is concentrated in one subgroup, which is young black men who identify as as women.
So then this this makes the whole r rate look unusually high. And When you talk about that, now you're talking about violence that's done. within the community. In other words, it's definitely not being done because of white supremacy. In almost every case that we have, and you can measure because there's just not many cases, it's done by another non-white person.
So it's certainly not something that you can chalk up to white supremacy. But it actually is something you can chalk up to the world of sexual perversion. In other words, you're talking about an inner community sort of act of violence.
Now, why does that matter?
Well, I don't know. Did you see this? That there was a Canadian lawmaker? this week who was talking about budget cuts. And she really went on and on and on about how bad it was, that the Prime Minister doesn't care.
about and I'm going to quote here, this is who she identified. M-M-I-W-G-2-S-L-G-B-T-Q-Q-I-A plus people. Did you see that? I make it a personal point to avoid Canadian politics, but I actually did see this because my husband showed me a meme about it that I cannot describe. Here, no, you can't.
I don't want to make fun of it, but here's the point. I mean, other than you got to make fun of that. M-M-I-W. Do you know what it means? It's mur murdered.
Do you want to explain something?
Well, it it's it's basically making this claim that there are uh that those who identify as sexual minority suffer an epidemic of violence. They use words like genocide. They use words like That there is increasing uh murders of the it it's it's just not it's just not true. And The fact of the matter is, I think the City Journal article is worth reading because so many, we're going to look back and we're going to say, where did all this come from? It's carried often when Lies are allowed to stand.
You're talking about two main ones, right? Uh number one. Um the the the the whole like the science is settled. Right? And the science was never settled?
It's absolutely pointing the opposite direction as, and it's all piling up. I was actually surprised, by the way, of how many mainstream outlets covered the Finland thing, but the Finland study. There was more than I think they're getting more comfortable doing it, but it's taking a long time.
So I'm with you on that. But this is the other one, that this is an oppression, it's the narrative of oppression, right? It's that critical theory mood that just hangs like a cloud over this. And Christians should love their neighbors. Christians should care about anyone who is being mistreated.
And being oppressed. But that doesn't mean that we go along with narratives. that aren't true, particularly if those narratives are being used. to change cultures and and and and change hearts and minds. There are victims of bad ideas.
These are bad, bad, bad ideas. Bad ideas.
Well, John, let's take another quick break. We'll be right back with more breakpoints this week in just a moment. Scripture offers us the capital T true truth account of the world as it actually is. If this is the story of the world, there is a storyteller. In a world that says live your truth, Christians have the responsibility to live out the truth.
Truth Rising the Study explores the true story of the world through creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. You'll see this cultural moment through the bigger story of reality written by God. Start this free study today at colsoncenter.org/slash study. That's Colson Center.org slash study. We're back on Breakpoint this week.
John, I want to pivot a little bit to another report that we've got this week. There was a story in NPR, and this has been covered elsewhere as well, but in the past year, the Well, in 2025, I should say, because they collect data in different seasons. It's not always right on year to year. But in 2025, the CDC now says. That the American teenage birth rate fell by 7%.
Gosh, let's see. In 1991. The teen birth rate was 62-ish births per 1,000.
Now it's just around 12 births per 1,000.
So that is a significant drop from the early 90s. It's always fascinating when something like this is covered by an outlet by NPR, which is not conservative by any stretch and certainly not religious. Because it's strange. You know, you look for whether they're going to tell you this is good news or bad news. And the person they interviewed.
towards the end of the story was so This was such a fascinating pivot. She said something like, We hope the declining teen birth rate doesn't make people think that the issue is gone. Quote, we can't get our foot off the gas pedal of continuing to invest in support for teen parents. to help them reach their goals.
So I was like, okay. Is teen parenthood? Could Is it bad? Is it just that we're not willing to say it's bad? This is just fascinating in a sort of cultural observer kind of way, and maybe we can get to that in a moment.
I think you and I can both agree. I think most people who aren't worried about whatever the next weird political cause du jour is. Are willing to say that fewer teen births is a positive development because it's fewer crises.
Now at the same time It is very likely that some of the things influencing this stat are not as good, those things being access to you know widespread abortion including like a burgeoning black market for the abortion pill, which we know kids are getting. But secondly, you know, a little bit less directly related, but certainly a tangential issue. is that teens are just less Sexually active, which I think you and I again would say is a positive development, but part of that is because they're less social with each other, which is not a positive development.
So, should we celebrate this? I mean, I feel like we should, but do you want to caveat it at all? No, I don't think it's celebratory. I think it's noticeable. I think it's something we should think about and talk about.
And we shouldn't just jump to conclusions like the NPR article did, you know, right after saying, you know, all we have really to come up with this data are birth certificates, and they don't actually tell us anything about why. Good news: there's a pediatrician and associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine that tells us why, which is all this has to do with continued access to abortion care and hiring. I mean, you just kind of go, these are just so stories. In other words, the only thing that could possibly serve this is this, and so therefore it must be this. It's a vicious circle of explanatory method.
Here's what we need to know in my mind. Number one. The lower birth rate is not the lower pregnancy rate. Those are two different things. And we do not have the data on the lower pregnancy rate because now we have actually cleared out all the different ways.
That a young person who may even be under duress, may be being abused, may be being kind of pressured. They never have to see a medical professional. This is what has been done with mail order. contraception and male order abortion. Pills.
This is what's done because of the FDA's changing regulation, something that. The court was asked to take up this year and they did not. This is going to be an answer, by the way, partly my answer to the question later that we got from someone who said, Prove to me that the GOP now is really pro-choice. And I will. We'll get to that a little bit later if we still have time.
We do not know the numbers of teenage pregnancies.
So we, now, if you look at how big this drop is, I think it's probably likely that the overall number of pregnancies has dropped. As well? But there's no question that the number of abortions I think, having gone through this legalization and access to abortion care, or at least Plan B, what's called emergency contraception, which is in and itself an abortive patient because it Does not prevent conception all the time, but the goal is to prevent implantation.
So it makes. the uterus hostile to as I go to a new life that has just formed.
So we just don't have any of those numbers. The second thing that I think is really important to point out in this study Is something that GK Chesterton said, and I think it has been. Uh mostly To me, it's mostly applicable to the area of sex, where he said, there's a lot of ways to fall down. There's only one way to stand up straight. Yes, young people are having less sex.
Americans are having less sex. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, if you're unmarried... It is good unless the reason you're not is because you're isolated, you're alone, you hate the opposite sex, or you're addicted to porn and you have. the access to now AI porn and who needs it. In other words, we have a generation that has been cultivated and catechized to always have relationships on their own terms. That means emotional relationships, physical relationships.
And sexual relationships. And if the internet, if our digital realities provide everything that we want. The reason we're not having enough sex. Or as much sex as we used to have as a nation isn't a good reason. It's still sexually broken.
And if we look at kind of the way things are, I think we're way. Further down the line on that. I mean, in some sense, it's comparable, and I want to be really careful. that one of the long term outcomes of some of the young people that we talked about in the last segment. who were deceived and went through so called gender affirming care.
is that they can never actually experience. Mm-hmm. sexual pleasure.
So Are we gonna say that hey, you know Because they can never do that, that this is somehow a good thing, that they're not having, in other words, we did that to them. But what I'm saying is, porn's done something similar to a generation, right? It's twisted the whole thing. And we're a generation that doesn't date. I think that's the other thing.
It's not just we're not having babies, we're not getting married. It's not just we're not getting married. People aren't dating. I honestly think it's time for a new movement. I mean, I don't know how old you were when the I Kiss Dating Goodbye movement kind of swept through American youth groups.
How old were you then? Were you like in the middle of that? I was right in the middle of that, John. I was like 15. Yeah.
And you know what? Like. I know he's disavowed all of it, but he actually had a point. At that point, dating was terrible because it was basically letting people just kind of randomly develop really serious romantic relationships with no point and no goal. On the flip side, I think we need a new movement.
Let's kiss dating hello again. Like, we need to recover dating. We need to recover the idea that men and women should have some sort of relational dynamic happening and we should learn how to treat the other one by being in a relationship with the other one. Let's keep the adults in the room. That was the big thing that he was writing, Josh Harris was writing about back then, is that dating should happen with adults.
And then they just called it courting. Maybe some more to it than that. The whole point is That right now we don't know how to be relational with one another. And The reason is, especially young people, is they don't have to be. They can get everything they want on their own terms.
without having another person in the room. And it's easier that way. It's a lot less messy that way. But think about if you're catechized to do relationships that way and then you become a husband. You're going to be a terrible husband.
So there are reasons to advocate for the return of dating to the American culture. Maybe different than what it was in the 90s. I think there were some legitimate complaints, but maybe it's time to at least call it back. I saw our friend Katie Faust had a piece in World Opinions talking a little bit about this. And she said something that I wish I had read when I was at that age.
But she said something too, like, you know, in some ways there was some overcorrection in the evangelical world, you know, with a concern about promiscuity and meaningless dating and all that. There was this push towards Unless you're dating with an eye towards marriage, it's like a worthless and probably a sinful pursuit. You should avoid that. And she pointed out like that, maybe unwittingly, but we then infused every single interaction between a young man and a young woman over the age of like 13 with such high stakes that it became completely unbearable for a generation of kids who are already in the most awkward phase of life. It was like if you pick up a phone call to call that girl in your seventh grade English class, you better have marriage on the table or you better not be wasting her time and also probably being promiscuous.
And anyway, I think Katie is pushing towards.
Something that I think I will hope for for my daughters, which is like part of being young is socializing and kind of practicing how to be together. This has nothing to do with being sexually active at all. That, of course, is just off the table. But There is something to be said for Like leaning into the, you know, the kind of beginnings of your romantic desires and those age groups without infusing it with these incredibly high stakes that kids are not ready to live up to. And that's a picture.
That's a picture of it that. That the secular world is now completely devoid of. They don't even know whether to talk about a decline in teen births as a positive or negative. This woman in the story says, this doctor says, I think we should celebrate this as long as it is aligned with what people are actually wanting for themselves. Any good journalist would follow up that question with, so you're suggesting if a 13-year-old was like, I'd really love to be a mom this year, that you as a doctor would be like, great, let's go for it.
I mean, yes. And they have to be in that camp though, because they've already sold their soul to that position. And listen, if you've sold your soul to that position on identity, to sell your soul on that position when it becomes to behavior, that's a much smaller step, if you ask me.
Now, I will say And I have the struggle, going back to the dating conversation, the struggle with this for me is I have committed to stop using. As much as I can. There's a couple of times I use my kids as kind of jokes or sermon illustrations, because I have some great stories, I really do, of kids and it fits. But when you get to the serious stuff, I've kind of decided, no, I'm not allowed to tell their stories on my behalf. And I would worry a little bit, given the way that some of this was advocated for, that we don't want to swing the pendulum back too far the other way, right?
And I think that there was a lot in the original conceptualization of dating in terms of age, in terms of, again, just because a kid thinks, oh, I'm in love, therefore they should. Act on their feelings as if feeling. No, we have to get rid of all that sort of stuff. And we've got to figure out how to deal with the pressure. I mean, listen.
You learned a lot of lessons back before when you actually had to pick up a phone and call a girl. Dude. You learned a lot. You learned a lot of lessons. The pressure, you know.
Manning up, like there's just not a lot of that these days. And, um, So let's maybe we should make a call out for somebody to write that book, Kiss Dating Hello Again. And see how it gets. I wonder how many comments we're going to get on this now, but anyway, we'll throw it out there. Just see how it goes.
If you have kids in this age, like I'm thinking like early, like high school age, if you have high school age kids. Would you please reach out? Just tell me what it's like as a parent of kids of those age today. What is the dating situation like in secular school and a Christian school? What are they doing?
What are they not doing? What how can you talk to them and tell me? Oh, John, offline. Offline. Offline.
Fair enough. Call my wife. She'll tell you. All right.
Well, John, speaking of feedback from our listeners, I do want to get to a question here that was sent from a 2024 Coulson Fellow. Meredith, who is asking a really, really prescient question. This has been on my mind this week. I'm starting to see some clips. I haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but of Ben Sass' interview on Ross Douthett's podcast.
And he, of course, I mean, he's dying. He has pancreatic cancer. He knows he's dying. And his witness is incredible, but it's truly gut-wrenching to hear his perspective as a dad.
So I've been thinking through this, but let me read some of this question from Meredith. Can you recommend any books or Bible studies on how to live well at the end of our lives? and prepare for heaven. I have been regularly leading Bible studies and book discussions over the past couple of years, and my church has recently. Experienced a difficult and painful loss of a couple of church members who were at the end of their lives.
I'm looking for ways to talk about how to understand God's will for us as we age. as our health and our quality of life decline. I know our central identity as a unique person created to worship and enjoy God remains unchanged. Throughout our lives, despite the decline in mental or physical state. But I'm looking for ways to talk about this and maybe about the role of our elders.
And she's talking about. elderly people, not church elders. In our families and communities, to talk about suffering patiently, trusting God to the end. Do you know any good literature you can point her to, John, and then maybe Um riff on that a little bit.
Well, what an incredible question. And you actually just pointed to a resource that is a great place to start. It just came out this week, which is the conversation that Ross Douthett had with Ben Sas. Uh which goes? For a long time, it's fascinating that this is on a New York Times podcast because you have two people.
Who are believers, certainly doubted Roman Catholic and Vincent Lutheran, but both serious about. Their faith serious about what the Bible says about things like suffering and dying. It's a remarkable conversation. I just finished it just a few minutes before we started to record and. There is a moment at the end where Ben Sasse.
kind of articulates Dying as a calling. And it's important to think about calling in the right way. We try to do this, I think, in. The Truth Rising study that calling is not just you're called to a life. You're called to a station, a time and place.
For example, I was just having this conversation with a friend who I'm working on a book with and Talking about uh whether singleness Is a gift or a calling. And I don't, I think it's a calling because. He and I were both called to be single at one point until we weren't. And death is a calling. We're not, you and I aren't called to that right now.
Ben Sasse. He's called T Two. to through dying. It's why the term medical assistance in dying, which the Canadians have picked up on, is such a crock. It's not medical.
It's not assistant. And it's not in dying, it's to die. And what we're asking here is how do we die well?
Now the church, this was a front and center question of theological reflection. And there is a volume called The Art of Dying. You gotta, there's a, by the way, there's a lot of books that are called that, but there's a. a book that dates back in church history. and which this was wrestled with.
It's fascinating how what it means to die well has changed. I think the conversation that is referenced in the question that took place at our conference last year. Is someone you should look to for a lot of these resources, at least the tech, the medical resource, the medical side of this question: like, how do I walk with somebody through this? How do I live with someone through this? And that is of course far curling.
Who challenged our ideas of hospice, and with that, challenged our ideas that. Dying well is no pain. To think about, and Bensas talks about this in his conversation, like wrestling through. How do I steward these moments well? How do I take responsibility for the relationships that I have?
And listen, at some point for many, many people, there's going to be a conflict. There's going to be a conflict between. alleviating pain and stewarding relationships. And that's why we have to go back to say what kind of creatures are we? We're dependent, not independent.
We're not isolated. We're not lonely. We're not individuals. We're individuals in community. And all of that has to inform the answer to this question.
So I would check out that podcast. I would check out the art of dying. I would check out the work of Far Curlin. And honestly, I wish I could send everyone to the feet, or at least every pastor I know. uh to the feet uh uh uh of uh My pastor, the rector of Saint George's Anglican Church.
uh for years who just stepped aside I had no idea when we went there. The kind of church body we would be a part of, and how it would impact my own children. To be so multi-generational. My my kids now have walked through the death of Half a dozen. Congregants that they knew.
spoke to on a consistent and frequent basis. and had a wonderful relationship with. They were older? Their deaths were not a surprise? but they have walked through what that means.
And part of that is the kind of church body that's been, I think, cultivated at St. George's. But I do not know. Another Minister, a person in Christian leadership who has walked more people to death. Then Don Armstrong.
They just uh retired after decades and decades and decades. It w we need to get them. To talk about this. He and I have talked about this. It is a remarkable thing.
I'll just give you an example. Uh I was probably j just uh at the church just a few years when my grandfather had suffered for a long time and just He he seemed to live longer than he needed to, you know, in pain. and in you know confusion and in suffering and as My grandmother had took care of him. They were married for seventy some years. And I just caught him one day coming out, and he said, Hey, how you doing?
I said, You know, I'm just. My grandfather just, you know, would you pray for him? And I said, I just don't know why God doesn't take him. Without missing a beat, this man looks at me and he goes, Oh. It's because He needs to understand his mortality more before he meets his Maker, and your grandmother needs to fulfil the vows that she made to him.
And he said it so directly, like in any other context, you'd say, man, that guy was being a jerk. He wasn't. I didn't take it that way. I didn't hear it that way. It was an explanation from someone who knew.
And there's dozens of other stories about this. I guess the reason I talk about him is because he needs to write this book. He needs to update this book. He needs to talk about this because he's done it and he's watched it and he's. He's led people to it.
And I think it's a wonderful ministry, and we need more of that. But the best I got right now is. Contemporary sources Check out the conversations that Ben Sasse is having right now on this topic. Check out the art of dying. The old annotated translation, or there's a new annotated translation of this that would be helpful.
You can hear how the early church talked about this and thought about this, and then. Check out the work of Farr Curlin as he's talking about as we make medical decisions, but also he's doing it in a theologically, I think, appropriate way.
so that there's a lot of personal application too. I'd recommend to you a couple books by Marilyn Robinson, who is a believer and a novelist. She wrote a book called Gilead a couple years ago, and then a sort of follow-up book called Lila, which actually somebody gifted me at the Coulson Center conference last year. If you have more books to gift me this year, I welcome those with open arms. But they're about an old pastor at a country church who's facing the end of his life.
And Gilead is: you're inside of his mind as he's wrestling with that. And then Lila, you're inside the mind of his wife. And it is again one of the most helpful parts of fiction for me, which is it allowed me the space to kind of practice. that moment in life before I've reached it. And it was really just even helpful for my imagination.
So I highly recommend those books as well. But I'm interested too, John, in not just thinking about. dying well. but aging well too. And I think that that's becoming more.
salient for us culturally, both because of this embrace of assisted suicide, but also because people are just genuinely living longer because of the technology that we have and the medicine we have, which is good. But you know, that is a question, including for churches like mine and yours, which are multi-generational, which is so beautiful. But I do see the challenge as people age. We tend to maybe be a little paternalistic toward them. We don't expect as much from them.
And it's hard to know how you know how to walk the line between respect for them as elders and condescension. And man, I don't know how to do that either. But these are all This is a beautiful question because these are the areas specifically that. That Christians can be a witness to the wider world who doesn't. You should submit a question.
Just don't submit it to us because I don't want to tackle that question. I'm in the middle of that question. I have to say we have an elderly woman at our church who is a part of our small group that meets on Wednesdays. And we all take turns picking her up to bring her to this because she's not comfortable driving anymore. And she lives in an apartment complex, and it got to the point where one of her neighbors was so suspicious: like, who are these people picking you up on what?
Like, this cannot be. And she would tell them, Well, they're picking me up for dinner. And then we have conversations about the Bible. And her neighbor was like, There's just no way. Like, that's not a thing people do.
Was so suspicious and so protective of her, which was lovely, that he came. He came one week and just sat there, kind of like, With his arms crossed, like waiting for us to, I don't know, steal money out of her purse or something, and apparently was pretty delighted by it.
So, like, this is an area for a really special kind of unexpected witness. But I want to do it well too, and I'm not sure exactly how to do that.
So. Yeah, maybe I'll submit my question next week.
Well, Meredith, thank you for that question. Thank you for thinking about this. And stay in touch with us as you continue in this ministry at your church. And John, please keep us posted on this book from your pastor too, because I want to know more.
Well, before we officially sign off for this week, John, I will ask this last question you alluded to it earlier. But just given that we talked about falling teen birth rates, I think this is apropos. In what way does the GOP openly support chemical abortions? Please provide your evidence of this. Oh, well, listen, the GOP is obviously any political party in the platform is dominated by the lead candidate.
So when the political platform of the GOP came out, when Trump was running for re-election, his party actually downplayed, and this was a very The headline story, you don't have to look very deeply to find it. They removed many. Of the pro-life aspects to that, including promoting IVF, which is something that leads to. More abortions than Planned Parenthood does in America right now, the way that it's done. But then also, They have been very defensive over chemical abortion.
So, for example, there have been states that have sued the FDA. Florida and Texas being two of them, because the FDA fast-tracked. Um a it new ways of regulating chemical abortion, mefopristone. That required No in-person visits that required, no follow-ups, anything like that. Florida and Texas have sued that.
This is just an article as recently as just three or four weeks ago. And the Trump administration filed a legal motion against the district court in Texas to stay or dismiss that lawsuit. They've done that every time. A state has come out and challenged how the FDA handles a chemical abortion. The Trump administration's DOJ does that.
The GOP as a party right now being kind of dominated. By Trumpism has a lot to do with it. I mean, a lot of good things to say about it. I think, you know, we look at the history of what Trump did. In terms of the Supreme Court and in terms of Roe v.
Way, but he made it really clear. He didn't hide this. He made it very clear that he'd done all that he'd wanted to do, that he returned it to the state, and he didn't want to do anything else about it. And on mefepristone and chemical abortion, he has not supported any move to bring back even Biden-era regulations over the administration of mefepristone. And at the same time has driven forward some other policies.
That are not fully pro-life. But none of this should be a surprise. We knew this going in. He promised what he promised. He delivered that when it came to the Supreme Court and Roe v.
Wade, it's returned to the States. His hands are now off of it. We don't hear a whole lot more about it.
Well, let's hope that changes.
Well, that's gonna do it for the show today. Thank you so much for listening to Breakpoint This Week. From the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer. Alongside John Stone Street, we'll see you all back here next week. God bless.
