How can we possibly make sense of news firing at us all the time and from every direction? The answer is, we don’t. In fact, many don’t even try. We prefer our “news” pre-digested and delivered to our feeds. In other words, we have outsourced the hard work of discernment to others. 

Elon Musk recently found himself fighting the government of Brazil after his X social media platform was briefly banned there. Ironically, the censorship was marketed as a defense of democracy, i.e. the government “graciously” stepping in to save the people and the voting process from harmful disinformation.
Of course, claims of disinformation is a common tactic often employed by the powerful to silence critics. Once limits are placed on what can be written and spoken, many other liberties are at risk. Indeed, there are real dangers of an unchecked flood of information, too. In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman described this tension by comparing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984:
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
In the end, the explosion of information everywhere, all the time, has made us believe everything and nothing at all.
And our reputation precedes us. There’s been understandable concern about Russian interference in the last few U.S. Elections, but their strategy reveals as much about us as it does them. Imagine a group of operatives from Moscow planning and scheming how to dismantle America, and finally one of them announces, “I’ve got it! Memes! We’ll use memes to interfere with their democracy.”
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Despite how common war is, we still experience it as abnormal. Sure, there is more than a bit of normalization that can occur after long periods of unrest and conflict, but the fact that we recoil at violence, resist war as much as we do, and strive for peace says something else as well. The world is not as it should be. In other words, humans, broken by sin, have broken a world intended by God for flourishing. 

According to reports, the Russia-Ukraine war recently entered a new phase. When the Ukrainian army moved into Russia, it became arguably the first time in history a nuclear-armed nation lost part of its core territory. At the same time, the situation in the Middle East continues to unravel. For months, western naval forces in the Red Sea have been battling Islamist rebels out of Yemen, and Israel continues its retaliation in Gaza for the Hamas massacres last October while also having to respond to Hezbollah in Lebanon. All this, as the potential grows of a wider conflict involving Israel, Iran, and possibly the United States. 
Meanwhile, Venezuelan incumbent Nicolás Maduro lost re-election but, to no one’s surprise, his Marxist regime has refused to yield power, sparking riots across the country. The Prime Minister of Bangladesh was recently forced from office, which has opened the door to Islamist attacks on the Hindu minority. In Africa, from Nigeria to Sudan, a combination of Muslim insurgents and Russian mercenaries are attempting to take power. And, of course, tensions between America and China have been escalating in the Pacific for a while now. 
Future historians may refer to our moment as “the early days of World War III,” but is this an extraordinary time of crisis? In one sense, we live in a remarkably peaceful time. There has not been a war between any of the Great Powers in generations. On the other hand, there have been plenty of wars, and peace has been maintained by a mutual threat of mass destruction.  
And there have been numerous close calls. In 1983, Soviet authorities nearly mistook a NATO exercise in Europe as a prelude to invasion. Twenty years earlier, there was the Cuban Missile Crisis. 
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The Olympics are an example of what Augustine called the city of man. A city of man is self-serving and, ultimately, doomed to fall away. In our world, progressives claim to promote justice but make common cause with genocide in the name of intersectionality. Many conservatives are quick to take on a religious mantle when helpful but just as quick to drop it when no longer useful. Detached from the reality of the City of God, which aims to serve God and is therefore eternal, our imitations of righteousness are doomed to fail and to fall, often spectacularly. It’s all a show, one that doesn’t take the human condition seriously.  

Even after the controversy of a bizarre opening ceremony, the Olympic Games showed why it is unparalleled in the sports world. Just think of the memes generated from this year’s games. In just a few weeks, we got the “super-chill” Turkish marksman, a Clark Kent of American men’s gymnastics, and the Australian break dancer.  
Far more than the memes, of course, were stunning athletic performances. Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone broke her own world records, but never failed to give glory to God. Katie Ledecky became the most decorated U.S. female Olympian. As one writer described the swimmer, “She is beautifully human. Vulnerable. Not a machine, despite the power with which she moves through the water.” Simone Biles completed a personal redemption tour while also leading the women’s gymnastics team to gold. Also returning to gold was the young U.S. women’s soccer team, now in a new season after the retirement of the grandstanding Megan Rapinoe. And, of course, NBA rivals Lebron James and Steph Curry led Team USA in a come-from-behind win over Serbia before defeating France for the gold. Curry hit four straight three pointers in the last two and a half minutes to secure the win and his place as the greatest shooter anyone has ever seen. 
This year’s debacle notwithstanding, the opening ceremonies are, typically, a highlight. The drama, spectacle, and pageantry are, in a sense, a glimmer of Eden, an attempt to portray what humanity can be. Vigor, commitment, health, and determination are on full display as the nations of the world offer their treasures.
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Christians should be the first to proclaim that kids do not belong to the state. Like all human beings, children belong first to God, and He has entrusted them to mothers and fathers. Only in loco parentis do secondary authorities like relatives, neighbors, and teachers step in. To reverse this order has more in common with the worst totalitarian regimes of history than with nature, tradition, and God’s word. 

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill that will ban school districts from notifying parents about student gender identity changes. This move is in response to initiatives by several parents’ rights groups in California and a growing list of conservative states to ensure that moms and dads are kept in the loop if their child asks to identify as a gender different from what’s on their school record. Teachers and administrators will now be free to “keep the secret,” if the child so wishes.
In response, Elon Musk announced he would move the multibillion-dollar SpaceX corporation from California to Texas. While his stand is encouraging, the fact that he would even have to make a decision like this is disheartening to say the least. 
The new California law assumes that children belong to the state, and that the state is a better guardian for children than parents. However, according to a recent report published by The Federalist, one in 10 public school kids have experienced some kind of sexual abuse from a school employee, a shocking number that is far higher than the well-publicized scandal within the Roman Catholic Church. According to The Federalist:  
For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public. 
And yet, in various ways, cultural and political leaders continue to act as if children belong to them and even need them to be safe.
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Christians will need to think deeply about how to respond as our culture shifts, from a time of information choice and overload to information control, and especially the crisis of trust that it brings. It certainly will require of us a level of discernment. This, in turn, requires a solid grounding in truth, specifically the truth about reality and the truth about the human person.  

As the brilliant philosopher Newman once said to Jerry in an episode of Seinfeld, “[Y]ou remember this. When you control the mail, you control … information!” Of course, no one would suggest that the U.S. Postal Service has that sort of power today, having been duly replaced and far exceeded by digital gatekeepers. A recent case in point was something noted by several people who searched online about the recent assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump.  
The Heritage Foundation shared a screenshot on X of their Google search. Having typed “assassination attempt on t,” the search engine auto filled “Truman,” “Teddy Roosevelt,” and “the Pope.” James Lindsey asked Meta AI, “tell me about the assassination attempt on Trump,” and the reply was, “I can’t assist with that.” The same program did, however, offer a thorough (and positive) run-down of the Kamala Harris campaign when asked. Others reported that searching Google for “Trump Rally” returned results of a Kamala Harris rally, as did searching for “Kamala Harris rally.” Media giants quickly chalked up these incidents, as well as a few others, to the accidental quirks of AI algorithms, but not everyone believed that explanation. 
Historians love to name periods of time. Students of history will recognize descriptors such as the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, or the Gilded Age. When future historians write about our age, they will find it is already named. We live in the Information Age, a time in which information shapes life in unprecedented ways, and in which the sheer amount of information is overwhelming.  
Information, even at the present scale, is rarely neutral. Information contains, argues, assumes, and otherwise delivers ideas. Thus, the Information Age might also be called the Age of Competing Ideas. 
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What the world does not need is a westernization devoid of Christianity. Rather, the world needs a church committed to be the Church, as Chuck Colson often said, with Christians who self-consciously work to make the extraordinary truths of the Faith an integral part of everyday, ordinary living. Not just on Sunday mornings, but in our families, our jobs, our politics, and cultural work. Or, said differently, the world doesn’t need the West. It needs the Church. 

In a recent video posted on X, a Muslim cleric declared that the days of the West are numbered. Not only would formerly Islamic lands like Spain and Rome soon be retaken for Islam, he said, but the entire world would eventually fall to Islamic military rule.  
Predictions of Western humiliation are, of course, not new. To radical Islam, the West has always been the source of corruption and perversion infecting the rest of the world. This despite all that the West has given the world, from free markets to voting rights, universal education, liberty of conscience, among other things. In fact, by nearly every material measurement, societies that have embraced Western principles derived from Christian and Enlightenment ideas have fared better than those that have not. As many have noted, the flow of immigration between Western and non-Western nations trends strongly in one direction. 
And yet, the West is in a profound identity crisis, to the delight of anti-West ideologues. From Pride parades each June to intellectual elites, including a sitting member of the U.S. Supreme Court, who claim to not know what a woman is, Western society is increasingly unhitching from the traditional beliefs and values that grounded its understanding of human dignity. 
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From small artifacts to larger sites, recent discoveries lend proof to biblical accounts. For example, DNA found in the City of David confirmed that the Philistines, Israel’s main enemy during the reign of King David, turned out to be exactly the sort of people the Old Testament described. A smaller discovery was of a signet ring that confirmed the detail of an Old Testament character who only gets a passing mention in 2 Kings. And, of course, there was the discovery of the site of the Pool of Siloam, where we know Jesus walked.  

A recent article in Britain’s The Daily Mail suggested that the prophets Amos and Zechariah may have had something right. As the writer put it, 
A scientific breakthrough has exposed the truth about a site in ancient Jerusalem, overturning expert opinion and vindicating the Bible’s account. Until now, experts believed a stretch of wall in the original heart of the city was built by Hezekiah, King of Judah, whose reign straddled the seventh and eighth centuries BC. … But now an almost decade-long study has revealed it was built by his great-grandfather, Uzziah, after a huge earthquake, echoing the account of the Bible. 
“… echoing the account of the Bible.” The story reminds me of a scene from a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, when a character says to Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, “You actually were telling the truth.” To which Captain Jack replied, “I do that quite a lot. Yet people are always surprised.” 
Throughout the last century, and especially in the last few decades, the scholarly world has been “surprised” to find that the biblical authors were telling the truth. Skeptics assume that the content of the Bible is more “pious fraud” than history, a well-intentioned story to inspire the faithful. And yet the reliability of the Word of God has been repeatedly affirmed, as more biblical archaeological sites are discovered and more extra-biblical sources corroborate biblical events.  
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Written by John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett |
Monday, May 20, 2024
The problem with the word deconstruction, at the risk of committing an etymological fallacy, is that it carries the philosophical baggage of postmodernism, particularly the denial that truth can be known. It also carries the assumption of permanent doubt and the skepticism of authority. That’s why, when applied to Christian faith, so much deconstruction is about severing links, between the Church and Jesus, Christianity and Jesus, moral teaching and Jesus, and (especially) the Bible and Jesus … as if the Church isn’t His Bride, Christianity isn’t His worldview, morality isn’t His teaching, and the Bible isn’t His Word.

Variations of the word “deconstruction” have been used to describe everything from deconversions (like Kevin Max from DC Talk and Joshua Harris of I Kissed Dating Goodbye ) to soul searching (for example, Derek Webb) to theological revisioning (like Jen Hatmakerand Rob Bell). When used descriptively, the word can be helpful, describing what has become common features of evangelical celebrity-ism. 
Increasingly however the term “deconstruction” is used prescriptively. It is something that comes recommended to those questioning the faith they grew up with as being a courageous thing to do. This approach, to applaud or even recommend deconstruction, is unhelpful and can even be dangerous.   
It’s one thing to describe doubting, questioning and, ultimately, shifting faith commitments as “deconstruction.” It’s another to prescribe it as the means of coming to terms with Christianity’s unpopular truth claims or the baggage of a Christian upbringing. Simply put, the word carries too much worldview baggage.  
Scripture (especially in the Psalms) offers plenty of space for doubting and questioning and describes how God meets us in our questions and doubts. Doubting need not mean deconversion. And we should be very careful about political allegiances or other elements of American culture becoming corruptively bundled with Christian identity. We must constantly practice discernment.   
However, the word deconstruction is not the best term to use in these contexts given the much better words that are available. Not to mention, Scripture offers words such as conversion, reform, repentance, and renewal as ways of keeping God’s people squarely within a Christian vision of truth: that it is revealed, not constructed; and that it is objective, not subjective.  
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“Unhitching” our doctrine from our pastoral care makes sense if the goal of the Church is simply to help people live better lives. Reducing the Church this way only elevates the self. Ministry, once unhitched from doctrine, devolves into idolatry. Like the golden calf worshiped in the time of the Exodus, it is possible to claim God’s name while losing all moral direction.   

For the last few weeks, all eyes, at least evangelical eyes, have been locked on Atlanta. When North Point Community Church announced the “Unconditional” conference, held this past weekend, many noted that two of the speakers were men “married” to other men. Many of the rest were on the record as “affirming” same-sex relationships, recognizing LGBTQ as legitimate categories of human identity, and describing their work as hoping to convert Christians to their ideas about sex, identity, and marriage. Would this conference mark Andy Stanley’s final departure from historic Christian teaching on human sexuality?  
Stanley, who is among America’s most prominent pastors, defended the conference and choice of speakers due to the focus of the event. In his Sunday sermon, he responded to the criticism, stating that this conference was not about the theology of human sexuality, or even about talking someone out of an LGBTQ identity. Rather, he said, it was aimed at “parents of LGBTQ+ children and ministry leaders looking to discover ways to support parents and LGBTQ+ children;” in other words, parents who had already tried (and failed) to talk their children out of these identities and now only wished to stay in relationship with them.  
Even if the conference was intentionally designed to not address the questions of the morality of same-sex relationships and alternate sexual identities, as apologist and “Unconditional” conference attendee Alan Shlemon noted, it answered these questions “by virtue of who they platformed, their resources, their recommendations. It’s a confusing message at best, and at worst it’s … saying that homosexual sex would be permissible, (and) satisfying transgender ideations would be permissible. (To hear more of Shlemon’s perspective, watch his interview with fellow apologist professor Sean McDowell here.) 
On Sunday, Stanley maintained that the conference successfully met its stated goal without implying any kind of moral or theological shift. This is possible because of something Stanley has said both about this conference and about the overall work of the Church.
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The Family Research Council concluded that over 400 “acts of hostility” have been committed against churches in the last five years including “vandalism, arson, gun-related incidents, bomb threats, and more.” The headline is not that there are suddenly those who disagree with Christian conviction or similar beliefs. That has always been the case. However, the old-school atheists and secular humanists of yesterday were content enough to let Christians have their say, if for no other reason than to ridicule and deride. To think of something as “outdated,” or “silly,” or “non-scientific” is one thing. To think of it and the one who advances it as “evil,” “oppressive,” and “fascist” is something else.

In response to a Breakpoint commentary about the murders in Nashville in March, the Colson Center was identified by a critic as being “proudly, if quietly, Dominionist.” To be clear, we aren’t, but he was particularly troubled by how the commentary described Christians as victims which, of course, they were. 
In that commentary, we wondered aloud whether in fact we have entered a new cultural moment, characterized by an increased hostility toward Christians and others who are, shall we say, culturally non-conforming. The strange and shameful reversal of who is victim and who is guilty in the reporting on the Nashville incident has only continued since, and now there are additional incidents to consider as well. 
On March 29, while speaking on abortion at Virginia Commonwealth University, Kristan Hawkins and a group from Students for Life were confronted, threatened, and assaulted by an obscenity-crying crowd who failed to notice the irony of suppressing free speech by screaming “fascists!” Rather than remove those disrupting the presentation, the campus police removed the pro-lifers. 
Two days later, on March 31, authorities in Colorado arrested 19-year-old William Whitworth for two counts of attempted murder, in addition to other charges. Whitworth, who goes by the name Lily and was in the process of “transitioning,” was planning a series of bomb and gun attacks on several sites in Colorado Springs, including schools and churches. As with the Nashville shooter who identified as transgender, police have not revealed the “manifesto” that would reveal Whitworth’s specific motives. However, there is ample evidence that rhetoric about the so-called “trans genocide” is leading advocates to increasingly violent means to make their point.  
Then, on April 6, college swimmer Riley Gaines was physically assaulted while giving a speech at San Francisco State University. As she argued against the inclusion of men in women’s sports, she was berated, threatened, and blockaded in a room until she paid a ransom.
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