Breakpoint

Breakpoint A daily look at an ever changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. with a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends.
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Since 1991, Breakpoint—a program of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview—has provided believers around the U.S. Our daily Breakpoint commentaries, co-hosted by Colson Center President John Stonestreet, air on some 1,400 radio outlets with an estimated weekly listening audience of eight million people. Its "Breakpoint This Week" counterpart, also hosted by Stonestreet and Shane Morris in

cludes a weekly conversation with leading Christian writers and thinkers on topics ranging from the sanctity of life to marriage, religious liberty, and the restoration of virtue and ethics to public life. Over at Breakpoint.org, Stonestreet is joined by other thoughtful Christian writers through columns and feature articles equipping believers to live and defend the Christian worldview. Check us out online for great worldview content and resources, including book reviews for teens and preteens, need-to-know news headlines and more.

You Won’t Regret Not Giving Your Child a Smart PhoneEvery parent of tweens or teens will likely hear these words at some...
21/07/2025

You Won’t Regret Not Giving Your Child a Smart Phone

Every parent of tweens or teens will likely hear these words at some point: “When can I have a phone? All my friends have them!” Countless parents have given in to this line, putting internet-connected devices into their child’s hands—often devices with no meaningful parental controls—all because of social pressure. They think that if they don’t, their child will be an outcast or just left behind the techno curve.

If that’s you, and you’re thinking of giving in, there are some facts you should know. First and foremost, many parents say they regret giving their kids smart phones and tablets, while almost none say they regret not giving them these devices.

Writing recently in The New York Times, psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, together with Will Johnson and Zach Rausch, described their findings in a national survey of parents and teens. Almost a third of parents whose children have access to social media, and nearly a quarter whose children have smart phones, say that with the benefit of hindsight, they gave them these things too young. By contrast, just 1% of parents said they wish they’d given their kids social media and smart phones earlier. In other words: “Parents regret the technologies they gave, not the technologies they withheld.”

Incredibly, kids who grew up with smart devices feel the same regret about technology, if anything more strongly than their parents. In their previous survey conducted by Harris Poll, Haidt and colleagues found that 30% of Gen Z adults agreed with the statement, “I had access to smartphones too early in life.” Over a third said the same about social media. 45% of Gen Z respondents said they would not allow their own children to have smartphones before high school. And half of Gen Z wished platforms like TikTok and X didn’t exist.

Consider these numbers and marvel at how many parents still fall prey to the “all my friends have a phone” argument. The “widespread feelings of entrapment and regret” Haidt and colleagues discovered among parents and children show that this line is effective, however false and misguided. Instead of giving in to such pressure, parents need to take findings like these seriously and learn to parent according to what’s ultimately good for our children, not just what will make them happy or shut them up.

As comedian Jimmy Carr pointed out, giving your kids everything they ask for right away isn’t being kind. If you give them McDonald’s, ice cream, TV, and video games every time they ask, you’ll end up with (in his words) “fat, stupid kids.” In my experience, if you don’t give your kids boundaries, they’ll run out into traffic, and then you’ll have no kids.

The alternative, Carr said, is to be kind to your children’s potential—to the people they can and will become, and to encourage exercise and a good diet and plenty of sleep and good grades. And, we can now add, to say “not yet” when they come asking for a smart phone.

One of the most important steps in taking and maintaining this countercultural stand is to build a counterculture—in other words, to find other families who will hold off on smartphones with you. It’s not an easy task. Haidt and his co-authors found that 55% of parents say their children were the primary users of a smartphone by age 12. And almost 40% of parents who had given their kids phones and 54% who had let them open social media accounts “would have preferred to wait but felt they had to give in because so many of their children’s friends already had one.”

A solution? Make friends who don’t have one. Share this information with other parents. Encourage those at church, your coworkers, and your extended family to take seriously the research on smart phone regret. Building peer groups committed to what Haidt calls a “play-based childhood,” insisting your school or co-op enforce a phone ban, and surrounding your kids with peers who aren’t hunched over digital devices are sure ways of turning peer-pressure to your advantage.

And maybe most importantly, understand where that regret which pollsters are discovering comes from. It comes from the early and devastating exposure to po*******hy, the crippling body image issues, the online bullying, the compulsive scrolling and dopamine addiction, and the resulting neglect of real-life experiences. It’s social contagions like transgenderism. It’s manipulative AI girlfriends and boyfriends.

All of these dark influences are literally a tap away from your child’s mind and heart the moment you hand them a smart phone. So . . . don’t! The solution is that straightforward. They’ll have plenty of years in adulthood to scroll. The research, even from secular sources, is becoming clearer on this by the day. And as those invested not only in the earthly health of our kids, but in their eternal and spiritual wellbeing, it’s up to us parents to love them in the long-term and not merely give in to the demands of the moment. If polls are any guide, they’ll probably thank you later.

On Anxiety Medication for Dogs... Each year, as fireworks light up the sky on the Fourth of July, social media lights u...
18/07/2025

On Anxiety Medication for Dogs...

Each year, as fireworks light up the sky on the Fourth of July, social media lights up with angry pet owners pleading against them. On July 5, ABC 10 News in San Diego reported that the local Humane Society had already picked up over 100 stray animals, mostly dogs, that were frightened away from their homes by the loud explosions. One employee told reporters she anticipated that number to quadruple in the coming days.

The increased concern over how pyrotechnics affect pets is partly due to Americans having way more pets than ever before. Since 2023, the number of dogs has increased by over three million, putting the nation’s total of domestic canines at over 68 million. At the same time, pet medication has become a lucrative medical industry. The pet supply website Chewy.com lists the ten most common medications for paranoid pups, and, according to a 2016 study, 83% of veterinarians prescribed anxiety meds for dogs as a standard part of their practice.

This coincides, of course, with the explosion of mental health diagnoses and “therapy speak” among humans, as described, for instance, in Abigail Shrier’s book, Bad Therapy. Thus, it may be possible that some owners are projecting their own mental struggles onto their pets. For instance, liberal political beliefs show strong correlation with mental health diagnoses. Little surprise, then, as noted in The Atlantic, that “vet behaviorists are mostly clustered in liberal areas . . .” Many assume that since their psychiatrist helps them cope with medication, the same can be done for their dog.

The press has pounced on this idea. In a 2022 New York Times piece entitled “Puppies on Prozac,” owners were told how to “spot the signs” of anxiety and other disorders in their pets. The article even described undesirable animal behaviors as “mental illness,” rather than a sign of insufficient training.

The worldview assumption at work here is that, if human emotional and spiritual problems can be solved with a prescription, so can Fido’s. This results from a culture that both promotes animals to human-like status and demotes humans to highly evolved animal status. Anthropomorphizing animals causes owners to interpret their behavior as more than just instinct or conditioning. “Darwin-ising” humans justifies eliminating unwanted people as we would pesky animals. The result is a culture in which both dogs and humans are treated in remarkably similar and inappropriate ways.

So, more people than ever refer to pets as children. Back in 2023 in The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch proposed that may be what is driving them crazy:

"As Americans have fewer kids, they’ve begun to think of their pets as children and to act as “helicopter” fur-parents . . . Animals tend to live longer under these conditions, but they miss out on mental stimulation and interaction with their own species. That might make them anxious or aggressive toward people and other dogs. "

In short, cramming an animal into a crate in an apartment for hours a day may not be what’s best. More fundamentally, the emotional demands made by increasingly isolated people on their pets may be too much for them to handle. Ironically, all the increased American sentimentality about pets may not be good for them. Horowitch’s conclusion is that “[i]t might be time, in other words, to reevaluate the way we approach dog ownership.”

She’s right, but much more important is what all this says about how we think about humans in our time and culture. Excessive mental health diagnoses, overmedication, epidemic loneliness and addictions, and looking for answers in all of the wrong places speaks of our deep spiritual confusion.

Animals are wonderful. Our connections with them are real and deep. They cannot, however, fill the human need for human friendship, love, or solace. Certainly, the God-shaped hole in our hearts can never be filled by a pet. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “I always like a dog, so long as he isn’t spelled backwards.” We would do well to remember this, and that we should not be giving pets medication for what is, in reality, our anxiety.

St. Catherine’s and the Bigness of the Church After 1,500 years of continuous Christian service, the world’s oldest mona...
17/07/2025

St. Catherine’s and the Bigness of the Church

After 1,500 years of continuous Christian service, the world’s oldest monastery is being forced to close its doors. According to several sources, St. Catherine’s Monastery will be annexed by the Egyptian government and turned into a museum and tourist attraction. Though the monks won’t be kicked out yet, the ruling is the latest incident in the already precarious situation of Christians in the Middle East.

Founded as a respite for wandering worshippers under Emperor Justinian in 527, St. Catherine’s sits at the foot of Mt. Sinai. It has been a center of Christian identity since shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, 70 years before there was an archbishop of Canterbury, and nearly a full century before the founding of Islam. And of course, it resides at one of the most significant places of the Old Testament.

A claim at the heart of this case was whether Christianity is a Western intrusion into an indigenous Muslim area, and therefore whether foreign Christian monks are occupying Egyptian land. It is true after Christianity made the West what it is, missionaries were sent around the world. However, Middle Eastern and African Christians were building churches when the ancestors of Westerners were still worshiping pagan gods like Tiw, Woden, and Thor.

The areas that now make up North Africa, Egypt, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey were once the heartland of Christianity and only lost after centuries of conquest and persecution by Muslim overlords. Today, in almost all of these nations, Christians are in trouble. And yet, as Philip Jenkins noted in his book The Next Christendom, the Church is a global phenomenon that spans cultures, languages, and history.

Last year, on Pentecost Sunday, I asked our youth Sunday School class about the significance of the day within Scripture and church history. A young man with autism, who is both a sweet kid and faithful member of the body of Christ, shouted out: “It’s the Church’s birthday!” I could not have said it better. As Luke recorded in Acts 2, it was at the first Pentecost where the proclamation of the good news first went out to all nations. According to the account, Peter and the Apostles preached Christ crucified to:

"Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians."

Yes, Egypt. At Pentecost, there is the first indication that the scattering of the nations at the Tower of Babel will be reversed. It is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham (in Genesis 12), that “[I]n you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” It is the foretaste of what is described in Revelation 7,

"[A] great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.
As my young friend described it, Pentecost was indeed the birthday of the Church, the redemptive instrument of God that proclaims that Christ is risen and is the true King of heaven and earth."

The Church was the focus of this year’s Colson Center National Conference in Louisville, KY. We’d love to share the sessions with you from “Be the Church.”

For a gift of any amount before August 31, we will give you FREE access to every mainstage session from the 2025 Colson Center National Conference. Each session focuses on what it means to be the Church today: Be Confident, Be Bold, Be Distinct, and Be Virtuous. Your gift helps us continue producing resources that empower the Church to live boldly and faithfully for Christ. If you have been equipped with more clarity, confidence, and courage through any of our content, make your gift and get free CCNC 2025 access today at colsoncenter.org/july.

As Christ’s Church is persecuted around the world, remember, we live in the age of Pentecost. God is renewing His world by His word through His Church. We are not just bystanders. We are part of that renewal.

Worldview on the Supreme Court Twice this summer, dissents written by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson have g...
16/07/2025

Worldview on the Supreme Court

Twice this summer, dissents written by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson have generated unusually sharp responses from others on the bench. Most notably, in response to Brown Jackson’s dissent of her majority opinion on injunctions and birthright citizenship, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote,

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary. ... She offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush.”

More recently, Justice Sonia Sotomayor schooled her fellow liberal colleague on a case in which Brown Jackson was the sole dissent. Though she didn’t exactly call Brown Jackson’s 15-page opinion a dumpster fire, Sotomayor pointed out that much of it was not relevant to the case before the Court.

Some conservative critics of Brown Jackson refer to her as “a DEI hire.” In addition to being disrespectful to her and the office, the actual situation is more complicated, best explained by her understanding of law and justice, as well as the role of the Supreme Court and what it means to be a Judge.

In a 2001 speech, prior to her own nomination to the High Court, Sotomayor summarized this understanding:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

This is a textbook example of “standpoint epistemology.” In this view, truth is determined by background and lived experience. Within the framing of Critical Theory, minorities and women have a different, broader range of experience to draw from and thus have superior wisdom and understanding than the majority culture. Thus, knowledge, language, and morality are to be understood in terms of power relations.

For Sotomayor, this must shape her work from the bench. In the same 2001 speech, quoting another law professor, she stated as much: “To judge is an exercise of power.” In other words, judicial decisions shape social and legal realities, so judges should draw from their background to interpret the law in ways that may not align with the law’s intent but will result in a fairer and more empathetic society. This is especially true in promoting the perspectives and interests of oppressed groups in society.

Though Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy clearly influences her jurisprudence, she understands that limits are imposed by the rules of the Court and submits to them. Brown Jackson does not. In a recent interview, she said,

“I have been privileged to ... use the writings that I do, the work that I do, to explain my views about the way our government does and should work; the way the Court does and should work. I think the nice part about being on the Court is you have the opportunity, whether you’re in the majority or in the dissent, to express your opinions. ... I just feel that I have a wonderful opportunity to tell people, in my opinions, how I feel about the issues. And that’s what I try to do.”

Whereas Sotomayor recognizes that her job is interpreting the law from her “wise Latina” perspective, Brown Jackson does not even mention the law. Her judicial opinions are inseparable from her personal opinions. Her job as a judge is to express her views about how the courts and government should work and her feelings about the issue. It is not to interpret the law or the Constitution.

While Sotomayor’s views are informed by Critical Theory, Brown Jackson’s judicial philosophy is a form of Expressive Individualism. In this view, truth is to express one’s sense of self, expecting others and reality to conform. Expressive Individualism was, of course, the underlying worldview that made transgenderism plausible, and it leads a Supreme Court justice to reduce judicial interpretation to nothing other than personal opinion, to which the law, the Constitution, and the rule of law should conform.

As Coney Barrett observed, this logic would lead to an imperial judiciary, and our laws would be made subject to the whims of the justices. Ideas have consequences. The consequences of Expressive Individualism on the Supreme Court would be judicial tyranny.

Hollywood’s Identity Crisis Before its debut late last month, Disney boasted that its newest animated film, Elio, “conti...
15/07/2025

Hollywood’s Identity Crisis

Before its debut late last month, Disney boasted that its newest animated film, Elio, “continues Pixar’s tradition of crafting films that resonate across generations.” But even after several iterations and attempts to hook test groups, Elio earned just $21 million during its domestic opening weekend, the worst debut in Pixar history and a huge disappointment after more than $200 million was spent to make the movie.

Elio, the title character, is a space fanatic with an active imagination. He finds himself on a cosmic misadventure where he must form bonds with alien lifeforms, navigate a crisis of intergalactic proportions, and somehow discover who he is truly meant to be. But that wasn’t the original story line.

According to sources reported by The Hollywood Reporter, the movie was supposed to be centered on a queer-coded 11-year-old protagonist with subtle details that hinted at a same-sex crush. Later versions of the film softened Elio’s homosexual identity but continued making “personality” the primary driver of the storyline. For example, an early version reportedly shown to the production crew portrayed Elio collecting trash on the beach and turning it into homemade apparel. This included a pink tank top which, according to multiple insiders, was to portray the character as queer-coded and reflect original director Adrian Molina’s identity as an openly gay filmmaker.

All of the changes failed to work. After a test screening held in Arizona in the summer of 2023, the audience was asked how many of them would watch it in theaters. According to reports, “Not a single hand was raised.”

A group of gay Pixar employees that go by the name “Pix Pride” are blaming the poor box office showing on the storyline changes that stripped the movie of its underlying gay themes. As one Pixar staffer put it, “You remove this big, key piece, which is all about identity, and Elio just becomes about totally nothing.”

That staffer is close to the truth. Pixar tried to rescue the movie from its focus on gay identity, but that was only one particularly annoying form of a larger problem. The perpetual insistence on postmodern notions of identity cannot replace good storytelling.

Of course, identity discovery and formation are essential aspects of the best stories. The redemptive narrative of Scripture, which culminates in the work of God to redeem the world He made, is built on the notion of identity that humans are made in the image of God. This explains both their significance in the created order and how serious are the consequences of the Fall. In the end, however, the story is compelling because it is one of redemption and renewal. How the sacrifice of God redeems and restores us to Who we were always intended to be.

In a postmodern vision, identity is self-determined and constructed, and everything else about reality must conform to it. According to GLAAD’s Studio Responsibility Index, the portrayals of that vision of identity, especially in the form of the ever-growing list of identities in the acronym, have increased significantly since the early 2000s. In 2022, 100 major studio films included gay characters, more than 28% of all films made that year.

These films claim to portray an elevated view of identity but only offer an impoverished view instead. In this view, sexuality is identity because autonomy is what gives us dignity. However, this is only plausible in certain times and cultures, like ours, which suffer from what sociologist Peter Berger called “the permanent identity crisis of modern man.”

The ideals of human equality and dignity are, as Friedrich Nietzsche noted, “another Christian concept” that “furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.” As I pointed out in my book, A Practical Guide to Culture, which I co-authored with Brett Kunkle, “Today, many want the fruit of human dignity while soundly condemning its roots.”

The Bible is filled with captivating narratives, from the epic tales of the patriarchs to Jesus’ miraculous ministry. They not only reveal God’s character, but they also reveal what it truly means to be human, created and redeemed in His image. The best stories tell the truth about who we are. Until Hollywood figures out identity, Elio won’t be its last flop.

Why Truth Telling is a Calling for Every Believer “Men have forgotten God.” That is the reason given by author and diss...
14/07/2025

Why Truth Telling is a Calling for Every Believer

“Men have forgotten God.”

That is the reason given by author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, after fifty years of studying and writing about the history of the Russian Revolution that led to the death of over 60 million people. In fact, he continued…

“What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.”

If that analysis were extended to today, to include the cultural chaos that emerged in the years after the Cold War into the first decades of the twenty-first century, it would be, “And, forgetting God, they abandoned truth.”

The abandonment of truth took the form of increasingly bizarre demands, especially within academia, government, and media, to accommodate what were obvious lies, myths, and falsehoods. According to Romans 1, the primary consequence of rejecting the Creator is to believe lies about reality, morality, and the human person. In our day, these lies are often sold with demands of “inclusion and equity” and with the promise of being free from traditional moral constraints and even the restrictions imposed by reality itself. These promises were as false as the lies. Instead of freedom, we’ve built a world with epidemic levels of unhappiness and isolation, not to mention the increased use of power and manipulation to enforce ideas that are obviously not true.

Men have forgotten God and thus abandoned the notion of truth. This is the basic description of what Os Guinness has called “our civilizational moment,” a pivotal time in the history of the West. A fascinating development in recent years has been watching as former skeptics of truth and God rethink the significance of both. Some who, just decades ago, proclaimed God a delusion and religion a poison talk about what we’ve lost in abandoning each. Of course, there are others who have doubled down on deception.

However, how God calls His people to engage this moment is no different than how He has called Christians at every other moment. We are called to bow our hearts and our knee to Jesus Christ, the Source of all Truth and the Embodiment of God’s love for the world. Christians are to be truth tellers, and to tell the truth in the way God has told us.

At the very least, we must not only know what is true, we must have confidence in what is true. Otherwise, we will respond to the deceptions and the deceivers of our time and place with either silence or anger. Silence is never appropriate. Anger is occasionally called for, but never in place of loving those who are the victims of lies. Love should never be confused with niceness. It is never loving to be co-opted into lies.

What it means to live out this essential calling that all Christians must be truth tellers in this critical moment, is the focus of the upcoming Great Lakes Symposium on Thursday, July 24. Joining me for “Truth, Love, and Humor: Faith Without Fear” will be Jim Daly of Focus on the Family to talk about “Truth and Love without Compromise,” and Seth Dillon, president and CEO of the Babylon Bee.

Not only is the Babylon Bee everyone’s favorite “Fake News Site,” they’ve mastered the art of using humor to tell truth. In fact, they were kicked off Twitter for it. That story has it all: Where does humor and satire fit within a Christian worldview? What truths are essential to tell in this cultural moment? What are the costs that might come for telling the truth? And what does it mean to commit to truth and leave the results up to God?

“Truth, Love, and Humor: Faith Without Fear” is absolutely free, but you must register. If you live near Bay Harbor, Michigan, please join us in person at the Great Lakes Center for the Arts at 7 p.m. Eastern time on July 24. Otherwise, join us for the livestream. Register at GreatLakesSymposium.org.

The promises of freedom by abandoning truth have failed us. Jesus’ promise of freedom is sure and certain, and it comes through knowing the truth. In other words, by calling people to the truth, Christians offer freedom. This is our calling, especially in this civilizational moment.

To Be Silent is to Be Complicit In recent days (and within days), the British Parliament rushed through legislation to l...
11/07/2025

To Be Silent is to Be Complicit

In recent days (and within days), the British Parliament rushed through legislation to legalize medically assisted death for terminally ill adults and passed a bill to “decriminalize” late-term abortion. Led by the increasingly extremist Labour party who are enabled by the moral confusion of a supposedly Conservative opposition, Britain is, as C.S. Lewis warned, progressing in the wrong direction. In response, Peter Hitchens asked, “Parliament votes for the abortion of the old, shortly after voting for the even more ruthless abortion of the unborn. Are we now ruled by a death cult?”

Speaking against bills like this is a bare minimum requirement of following Christ today. As Stanley Hauerwas has often challenged, “In a hundred years, if Christians are people identified as those who do not kill their children or their elderly, we will have been doing something right.” In the U.K. however, with few qualified exceptions, there’s been mainly silence. As Andrew Walker quipped, “The Church of England: proudly offering chaplaincy services to a culture it lost, a Parliament it is cravenly established to, and sermons to laws it won’t challenge.”

The Church of England is not alone in this guilt. In 2008, with important exceptions, efforts to equip and mobilize Colorado pastors to oppose doctor assisted su***de failed. Those of us working on the issue were told it was too political for the pulpit. The bill passed overwhelmingly. Now, of course, the state of Colorado is pushing legislation that would not only allow children to be permanently harmed by puberty blockers and hormone treatments without parental consent but force citizens to participate in various ways. Fifteen years ago, I doubt many pastors would have said that state-sponsored sexual abuse of children was “too political” to speak out on, but many of the same voices remain quiet today.

In fact, in the years between 2008 and today, some pastors and Christian leaders did take more of a stand on the issue of same-sex marriage. Many said that they would never be coerced by the government to officiate same-sex weddings or to hold ceremonies in their church. Unfortunately, many never made the connection that if pastors shouldn’t be forced to participate in a same-sex “wedding,” then neither should parishioners be forced to bake a cake, arrange flowers, or design a website for one.

But, as it turned out, it was the parishioners who were asked, and then harassed, and then threatened, to participate. Tragically, some were abandoned by their church families while their pastors stayed away from the mess. Missed along the way was the revolutionary idea recaptured during the Protestant Reformation that our work belongs to God, whether considered sacred or ordinary. This is the idea of vocation, that all callings are sacred. If true, then pastors should speak up for those working outside of church walls as much as inside.

On the most recent culturally divisive issue, there were loud and courageous voices. J.K. Rowling advocated for women on social media. Chloe Cole told her own story of deception and abuse, speaking up as a detransitioner harmed by progressive medical interventions as a minor. Riley Gaines loudly protested not only how she and other women swimmers were treated unfairly but also how they were subjected to privacy violations by the NCAA.

There were others, and the story has yet to be fully told. But did enough pastors and Christian leaders speak out? More importantly, how many parents were abandoned because the topic was “too political”? How many Christian voices spoke out but then were told to stay out of it?

In addition to a theology of getting fired, perhaps it’s time for a theology of saying what’s unpopular. Rather than allowing everything we say to turn on the hypothetical risk that it will “turn people away,” perhaps we should ask what it will mean to not live by lies? Perhaps we need to consider where the good intention of not offending people devolves into accommodating what “itching ears” want to hear.

In James 3, the Apostle wrote that “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” Most of the time, this means what not to say. But there’s also the reality that such leaders have been called to a particular time and place, “for such a time as this,” to speak God’s truth to God’s world.

Pastoral leadership is always needed, but especially now. In the U.K., little else can keep the current British parliament from going down in history as the “Death Parliament.” Everywhere else, it’s a matter of God’s people testifying to what is true. We ought always speak the truth in love, but that can never be done unless we actually speak the Truth.

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The truth is a powerful thing.

We live in a moment of cultural confusion. Fewer and fewer of the things that give meaning to our lives come easily. Family, community, beauty, truth seem to be constantly eroding around us—while our news feeds are full of despair, anger, and division.

How are Christians to make sense of the world around us? How can we make sure we have clarity in our daily lives?

Welcome to BreakPoint. A program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, our commentaries offer incisive content people can’t find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion.