A recent article on Fox News website was entitled “A look at white Evangelical angst over declining clout.”

I don’t know about you, but there were at least three words in that headline that gave me pause, and that was even before I read the article.

The first was “white.” That raises the important question of whether white Evangelicals are reacting to the implications of the cultural moment in ways different from African-American, Latino, and Asian-American Evangelicals.

This is a discussion I think all Evangelicals need to have, and frankly, apart from raising the question, I cannot adequately explore it in this single commentary.

But there are two other words from that headline that I can begin to address in our remaining time today: “angst” and “clout.”

The article, which is in the form of a Q&A, begins by recounting facts that regular BreakPoint listeners are already familiar with: the decline in the percentage of Americans who self-identify as Christians and the increasing willingness of previously nominal Christians, especially in the “Bible Belt,” to say that they have no religious affiliation. It also cites “the fallout from the spread of LGBT rights and the growth of secularism.”

While I obviously share these concerns, as should you, our response should have nothing do with either “angst” or the loss of “clout.”

“Angst” comes from the German word associated with the state of being “afraid, anxious, or alarmed.” In English it’s used to describe a “feeling of acute but vague anxiety or apprehension.”

Continue reading BreakPoint –  What Should Christians Do in an Age of Declining Christianity? →

In one of this summer’s most-awaited novels, “The City of Mirrors,” author Justin Cronin completes his unlikely literary trilogy about a world overrun by vampire-like creatures he dubs “virals.”

Unlike Bram Stoker’s creation, the disaster unleashed by his monsters is entirely man-made. Men, seeking to “play God,” created monstrous hybrids they could never hope to control, with disastrous but completely predictable results.

While Cronin’s work is fiction, its themes ring all too true. As one colleague of mine put it, the book reads like a “warning shot across our bow.”

As if to prove Cronin and my colleague right, a recent story proved that the impulse to “play God” isn’t limited to the fiction segment of the best-seller list. Just in the last few months, several news stories have described how scientists are creating embryos that are part human and part animal.

The purpose of these “chimeras,” as these hybrids are called, is ultimately to “help save the lives of people with a wide range of diseases.” As one report on NPR told listeners, “chimera embryos” might be used “to create better animal models to study how human diseases happen and how they progress.”

These hybrids are made, if not possible, at least significantly easier, by CRISPR, the gene-editing technology that I recently told you about on BreakPoint. In one instance, the “gene that pig [or sheep] embryos need to produce a pancreas” is removed. In its place researchers insert human-induced pluripotent stem cells.

Continue reading BreakPoint – Monster Madness of Our Own Making: Human-Animal Hybrids →

The late Christopher Hitchens was one of the world’s foremost and most committed atheists. You may remember him for his best-selling, outrageous polemic against monotheism: “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” Hitchens, who died of esophageal cancer in 2011, was one of the sharpest public intellectuals in the world. Hitch was master of quips such as “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence,” and “Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.” In his rampage against the Christian faith, Hitchens lustily debated some of the world’s greatest Christian apologists.

And one of them was my friend Larry Alex Taunton. Larry is on the best-seller lists because of his sensitive and powerfully written new book, “The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist.” He’s also in the news. And that’s because the book’s depiction of Hitchens as someone who took Christians and the Christian faith seriously is dangerous heresy for many who see the New Atheism as the only acceptable orthodoxy.

Yesterday I told you about the book itself, which describes Larry’s unlikely friendship with the famed atheist, including two long road trips in which they actually studied the Gospel of John together. (Taunton drove while the ailing Hitchens read aloud and drank Scotch.) Some who knew and debated Hitchens, such as Doug Wilson, say that the book is spot on.

But I want to focus for a minute on the response of the critics—or trolls, is more like it. For example, avenging anti-God hordes have crashed the book’s Amazon page, fulminating with one-star reviews labeling the book as “tripe” and “dishonest” and “morally reprehensible”—accusing the author of merely riding the beloved Hitch’s coattails “to make a fast buck.” But it’s pretty obvious that none of these “reviewers” has actually read the book. The question is: why haven’t they? What are they so afraid of?

Do they fear that Taunton is some Bible-believing Svengali, whose nefarious power over their ailing colleague was crass opportunism? Are they afraid that actually engaging with him and his ideas would put them in the same danger as their dear departed ally?

Continue reading BreakPoint – What are Atheists so Afraid of? ‘The Faith of Christopher Hitchens’ Part II →

A new book with a provocative title is sending shock waves through both the Christian and atheist communities. In “The Faith of Christopher Hitchens,” writer and commentator Larry Alex Taunton recounts his friendship with one of the most prominent and outspoken atheists—not to mention intellectual giants—of our time.

There is a lot to say about this book, and I’m not going to try to say it all in one program. Tomorrow I’ll talk about the firestorm ignited by this outstanding book and do my part to set the record straight.

But today I want to tell you about why you’ve got to read “The Faith of Christopher Hitchens” for yourself. It’s a story about a deeply remarkable friendship, a story that can teach all of us how to reach past barriers and show what genuine Christian love looks like.

Taunton first met Hitchens in 2008, when, as director of Fixed Point Ministries, he helped to set up a debate between Hitchens and the great Christian Oxford professor John Lennox. At that first meeting, Taunton recalls, “Our rapport was immediate.” Taunton, who had expected to find the author of “God Is Not Great” a bitter, angry man, was surprised to find himself drawn to Hitchens’ humor, thoughtfulness, and honesty.

Hitchens seems to have appreciated the same qualities in Taunton. It was the beginning of a friendship that would find the two men doing more events together, getting to know and like each others’ families, and even taking long car trips together, during which they discussed (among other things) the Gospel of John.

In public, they debated passionately about faith; in private, they often continued the debating, but they also simply enjoyed each other’s company.

Taunton does not gloss over their differences. He had serious reservations about some of Hitchens’ ideas and actions. But as he writes in the prologue to the book, “I speak exclusively to Christians when I say this: how are we to proclaim our faith if we cannot even build bridges with those who do not share it?” Friendship, he goes on to point out, is “one of the greatest of all redemptive themes.” Especially the kind of friendship that he’s describing here: the kind where friends are open with each other and challenge each other.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  ‘The Faith of Christopher Hitchens’: New Book Recounts Surprising Friendship →

When liberal journalists come out and confess their bias, it’s tempting to say, “The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.” But don’t. This is good news.

Writing at the New York Times recently, columnist Nicholas Kristof took that hard first step. The title of his piece says it all: “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance.”

“We progressives,” he writes, “believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table, so long as they aren’t conservatives.” (Or, one might reasonably add, evangelical Christians).

Kristof and fellow liberals profess a love for tolerance and diversity. But when it comes to the most important kind—diversity of thought—he admits that the gatekeepers in academia and the media actively stigmatize those who hold views different from their own.

“We’re fine with people who don’t look like us,” he writes, “as long as they think like us.”

Universities, once recognized as bastions of tolerance and diversity, bear perhaps the greatest blame. Kristof cites studies showing that just 6 to 11 percent of humanities professors are conservatives. Fewer than one in ten social-studies professors call themselves conservative. For perspective, consider that twice that number identify as Marxists!

Continue reading BreakPoint –  What Should Christians Do about the Media’s Liberal Bias? →

Visitors to Google.com are used to their “doodles,” the search engine’s creative drawings commemorating important anniversaries and people in history. Google has marked Independence Day, MLK, Jr. Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, and last week, the doodle honored the birthday of Japanese American political activist, Yuri Kochiyama, who died in 2014.

Now for those who don’t recognize the name, Google linked to the Wikipedia article on Kochiyama, which described her as an advocate for “human rights.” But that’s hardly an honest summary. Yes, she supported reparations for Japanese Americans and was an outspoken advocate of oppressed minorities, having herself been forced into an internment camp during World War II. But calling her a “human rights advocate” because of this is a bit like calling the Titanic a popular cruise ship that suffered a navigational setback.

The fact is, Kochiyama spent decades supporting some of the worst movements and political regimes on the planet.

An outspoken admirer of Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung, Kochiyama praised the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution—movements that claimed more lives than the Holocaust or Stalin’s ethnic cleansing. She encouraged urban guerrilla warfare as a means of racial liberation—contrary to the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr., who insisted on peaceful demonstration.

Kochiyama also became something of an apologist for the bloodiest Marxist revolutions of the last half-century, like the Peruvian communist party, popularly known as the Shining Path, which killed, raped, and tortured tens of thousands over the course of a decade. The Peruvian and U.S. governments, as well as the European Union, all classified the Shining Path as a terrorist organization.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Why We Should Choose Our Heroes/Heroines Wisely →

When you open your wallet in few years, you may be seeing something different on the $20 bill: The U.S. Treasury Department is proposing to take President Andrew Jackson off the front of the bill and replace him with one of my personal heroes: Harriet Tubman.

She is someone we should celebrate for what she did—rescue slaves—and for the lessons she teaches us today about when it’s appropriate to resist evil.

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation in 1822. As she grew up, she was made to work driving oxen, trapping muskrats in the woods, and as a nursemaid.

Harriet’s owners frequently whipped her. And she endured the pain of seeing three of her sisters sold, never to be seen again. But when her owner tried to sell one of her brothers, Harriet’s mother openly rebelled. The would-be buyer gave up after Harriet’s mother told him, “The first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open.”

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Harriet Tubman, on the Money: Resisting Evil, Trusting God →

Let’s face it, as Thomas Paine once said, these are the times that try men’s souls. America is in crisis, from within and without. We face new threats of terrorism on our shores, millions of angry and disenfranchised citizens, a reduction in moral standards, a contentious and unpredictable election, and a secular elite intent on restricting foundational principles such as religious liberty and freedom of speech.

As my colleague and friend John Stonestreet says, “If there’s ever been a time to drop to our knees and pray for our nation, this is it.” Indeed.

And we’ll be in good company. Abraham Lincoln once said, “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.”

Continue reading BreakPoint –  How to Pray for Our Nation: Today and Every Day →

The most important story of last year, in my view, was the exposure of Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in infant organs. But with the indictment of David Daleiden, the undercover journalist behind the incriminating videos, it seemed as if those responsible for the grisly exposed practices would not face any consequences.

All that may be changing, however. This month, lawmakers took a major step toward holding the abortion giant and its allies accountable. The Select Panel on Infant Lives, chaired by Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, held a hearing on April 20th to review the evidence. And what they uncovered was stomach-turning.

It’s important to know that a 1993 federal statute prohibits the sale of fetal tissue. However, witnesses called during this month’s hearing say abortion providers have ignored that law for decades, encouraging and profiting from a market in human body parts.

Here’s how the process works: Researchers at companies like Stem Express pay procurement technicians to shop around abortion clinics for suitable specimens. They obtain consent from the patients, and inform the clinic staff, who kill the unborn child and harvest its tissue. The technician then packages and transports the body parts to the customer, records invoices, and makes sure the clinic is paid.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Planned Parenthood under Investigation: Will Truth Get a Fair Hearing? →

God’s active act of creation, as described in Genesis 1, begins with those familiar words “Let there be light,” or, as my Latin-loving colleagues prefer, “fiat lux.”

Throughout the Scriptures, God’s presence and power is associated with light. This is most obviously true in all of the writings the Apostle John. In fact, as 1 John tells us, “God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all.”

But this is more than history and metaphor. As it turns out, it’s observable in the microscopic realm as well.

The lead to a recent article in the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper sums up a remarkable discovery by researchers at Northwestern University near Chicago: “Human life begins in bright flash of light as a sperm meets an egg, scientists have shown for the first time, after capturing the astonishing ‘fireworks’ on film. An explosion of tiny sparks erupts from the egg at the exact moment of conception.”

Continue reading BreakPoint – New Discovery of Light at Conception Should Direct Focus to God’s Creation, Not Ours →

“Anything you can do I can do better!” sang the title character in the 1950 “Annie, Get Your Gun.” That could be the motto of most of the female leads in blockbuster movies today. Consider Rey, played by Daisy Ridley in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” She’s hailed as an empowering role model for girls, but critics have pointed out how closely she follows the infamous “Mary Sue” trope—an adolescent with no prior experience whose improbable powers and skills save the day.

In the original trilogy, Luke Skywalker lost his hand the first time he confronted the bad guy. Rey, meanwhile, easily bests her story’s villain, despite never having picked up a lightsaber before.

Writing at “Mere Orthodoxy,” Alistair Roberts points to a pantheon of recent heroines from Merida, Katniss, and Black Widow, to Jyn Erso in the upcoming “Star Wars: Rogue I”—all of whom are more than equals to men in combat. These 98-pound kung fu masters routinely make guys look like clumsy idiots, all while showing off petite, department-store model figures.

This “strong female character” cliché, says Roberts, teaches audiences that in order to prove their equal dignity, ladies must be able to best men in hand-to-hand combat. But these portrayals, he argues, aren’t just “failures of imagination” that pit women against men in a “zero sum game.” They also fly in the face of biology.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Strong Female Characters: Here’s What’s Wrong with Hollywood’s Portrayal of Women →

I meet folks all the time who sense that things have changed. What Francis Schaeffer and Chuck Colson once called “a post-Christian” culture has become a “post-Christian-and-darn-proud-of-it” culture. Living out your faith is, well, difficult these days. And it’s frustrating.

Yet here we are. We, like every other generation of Christ followers, are still called to share our faith in this cultural moment. We’re still called to live our faith out in our communities, places of work, neighborhoods, etc. But how do we do this?

The most important thing, Chuck Colson believed, was to be equipped in Christian worldview, with the ability to communicate it in what he sometimes called “prudential language.” Here’s Chuck describing what that means.

Continue reading BreakPoint – How Can You Maintain a Christian Worldview in a Post-Modern Culture? →

In March, Major League baseball player Adam LaRoche shocked the sports world. LaRoche, a 12-year veteran who averaged more than 20 home runs a year and won many awards for his defensive skills at first base, unexpectedly retired.

By doing so, he walked away from $13 million—the amount left on the final year of a two-year contract with the Chicago White Sox.

Even more shocking than leaving $13 million on the table was the reason he did so: The White Sox had informed LaRoche that his 14-year-old son, Drake, could no longer accompany him in the club house every day.

If you can’t imagine walking away from that kind of money for that kind of reason, you’re not alone.

But then again, a lot of what LaRoche does is peculiar, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Continue reading BreakPoint –  Why Did Adam LaRoche Walk Away from Baseball and $13 Million? →

You’ve seen those ridiculous “Coexist” bumper stickers, right? You know, the ones where the word is spelled out using religious symbols from Christianity, Islam, Paganism, Gay rights, Judaism, and so on?

I call it ridiculous because, as someone once wrote: “The C wants to kill the E, X, T, and the O. The O offers peaceful non-resistance, which will be ineffective if real trouble breaks out. The E feels like it’s been oppressed, making it intolerant of the C, the X, and the T. The I and the S are numerically irrelevant, but are just necessary to spell out the word. And the sticker is mostly directed at the T (or the Christian), who ironically poses no threat whatsoever to any of the others.”

In other words, the “Coexist” bumper sticker slogan assumes that each ideology be emptied of its actual conviction if its to work. And according to Colson Center board member Jennifer Marshall, that’s what big business is currently trying to sell to the American people.

In a piece for Religion News Service, Marshall says the recent controversies over religious freedom amount to a test of whether those who so loudly proclaim the need for coexistence are prepared to live by it.

Continue reading BreakPoint – No Tolerance for Religious Tolerance? Denying True Coexistence →

Could I be dreaming? For decades the media has been a staunch defender of pornography—freedom of speech, freedom to choose, sexual liberation and all that, don’t ’ya know.

But now, wonder of wonders, America’s leading news sources seem to have awakened from their long slumber. They’re finally recognizing pornography for what it is: an unprecedented public health crisis.

TIME magazine, for example, just ran a cover story about the grassroots backlash against internet erotica. Belinda Luscombe documents a movement of former porn addicts helping their peers find ways to break the grip of online voyeurism. Guys like Gabe Deem, the 28-year-old founder of Reboot Nation, offer “advice and support for [fellow] young people who believe they are addicted to pornography…”

The reason some are swearing off smut, Luscombe explains, is simple: These mostly non-religious twenty-somethings who’ve been guzzling porn since puberty are realizing that porn has rewired their sexuality, leaving them crippled in real-life relationships.

Continue reading BreakPoint – Pornography: Media Finally Waking up to What Christians Have Warned about for Years →

A hearing that was held last week of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works consisted of Senator Barbara Boxer of California, Alex Epstein, the President for the Center for Industrial Progress, and Father Robert Sirico, a priest and president of the Acton Institute, among others.

The topic was how the president’s climate policies had impacted economic opportunity, national security, and related issues. As Mr. Epstein finished his testimony by telling a story from his book A Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Senator Boxer demanded: “Mr. Epstein, Are you a scientist?”

“No,” he replied. “I’m a philosopher.” When Boxer sarcastically implied that he didn’t belong in the hearing because he wasn’t a scientist, Epstein pointed out that philosophy helps folks think more clearly. Boxer snapped back, “I don’t need help thinking more clearly.”

Continue reading BreakPoint – Why are Philosophy and Science so Often Pitted against Each Other? →