The State of the Union, Backtracking on Trans Surgeries, Student Mental Health, More Religious Harassment in Colorado and Did Jesus Have a God Complex?

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 State of the Union and hit some of the cultural highlights mentioned by President Trump. We're also going to talk about the Olympics and how to approach sports and how to celebrate them and put them in their proper place. So we have a lot to chat about this week. We're so glad you're with us. 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 Colson Center. John, I'm not sure if you stayed up late past yours and definitely my bedtime this week to watch President Trump's very long State of the Union address. I think it was the longest in history. It was the longest in history. It was the longest in history. And I think he honored the most people in history as well, which according to World, which covered the State of the Union this week, that was a tradition started under Ronald Reagan. But President Trump honored quite a few people, which is always emotional and very sweet. But I wanted to start with the speech this week. I don't want to go down any political rabbit holes, but just kind of touch on some of the topics I think are relevant to our purposes. One of the things he mentioned, of course, was he brought up, you know, the need to put a stop to the continued march of transgender ideology in a lot of corners, including social transitions of kids at school without their parents' knowledge or kids being taken from their parents' custody because their parents refused to allow them to take hormones or to undergo surgeries. And that's been happening all over the country, unfortunately. And President Trump called it out by name and said, this needs to stop. Of course, none of the Democrats stood for that. That feels more political than anything. But what did you make of that? Do you think this is another positive sign. I think it's another in a long line of positive signs. I did not watch it live. Thankfully, there's always X clips that you can reduce it down. That's like the modern version of Cliff Notes. Yeah. Or like, yeah, the AI summary that they give you. Yeah. And of course, I mean, this is political, but he absolutely knew how long the record was and he wanted it. That's my take on it in terms of the length. It's not the first time he mentioned this, I think, in a state of the union or publicly. He's been pretty clear on it. His administration in HHS and other places are full of people who work on this issue. And this is one of the things that matters to them. So he's surrounded himself with people who I think are really clear on this issue of the transgender moment that we've been in and how far it's gone and what it's done, particularly to children. But it was especially moving to me, that moment in the speech, to highlight a young woman. And it's not just what it signifies, because we need more than just a political back and forth on this. And what I'm encouraged by is not that it was mentioned at the State of the Union, but that it was mentioned at the State of the Union. And we have medical folks who have clearly changed their policies and their own behavior on this. I think many have changed their minds on this. And I think we have seen it. And we'll talk about some of another set of kind of wins or backpedaling on this later on in the program. but there's just been one after another after another. I mean, how many weeks is this that you and I've talked about this? We felt the pressure began to lift, I think somewhere around 2023. And this is the year where if you divide culture up into segments, you know, political, family, medical, arts, the dominoes were all stacked in the direction of this lie. And now many of them have fallen the other direction. And that means it's going to be a lot more difficult for this to just become another political football that gets punted back and forth between administrations and executive orders. That's one thing. The second thing was I was really moved by the person who was honored because like Chloe Cole, who will be at our Colson National National Conference this year, was featured, whose story was featured in the Truth Rising documentary and is featured in the Truth Rising study. She wasn't supposed to exist. Remember just a couple of years ago, she wasn't supposed to exist. people who disagreed with transgender ideology were always accused of erasing trans people or saying that trans people didn't exist when the reality on the ground was that we said that that there's no such thing as being able to change this fundamental aspect of who you are and we were told that detransitioners didn't exist that four-year-olds knew exactly who they were from the inside out and certainly pre-adolescents did. And what we ended up having was scores and scores and scores, especially of young adolescent and pre-adolescent girls who were lied to, who believed it. Some of them underwent what Abigail Schreier called really early on permanent damage. To see how she was described, a student at Liberty University, How exciting that was. I've been to Liberty. I know Liberty well. We know the president at Liberty. And I love the shout out for that because it was a mark of a change. So to me, that part of it was encouraging because we now have detransitioner after detransitioner after detransitioner after detransitioner whose stories are being told, who were accused of lying, personally attacked, and everything else. Yeah, I think this follows a pattern that was predictable. This was really theoretical. There are staggering numbers. Like you mentioned, it was mostly teenage girls or prepubescent girls who fell down this hole. And I don't mean to at all minimize the individual experiences of girls and families who went through this. But still, numerically, for the majority of people, this was a theoretical exercise. This was people playing armchair academics for the past 15 years and pretending to believe in this weird theory that gender means nothing and sex means nothing and let's see how far we can take it kind of thing. But it was always inevitable that some people were going to take it seriously and literally. And it was going to jump from theory to practice. And it did. And it was also inevitable that once that happened, people were going to suffer incredibly. And, you know, I mentioned a couple weeks ago when my husband spoke at the Cleveland Club and there was a lot of protests, there was this sweet kind of pitiful woman that came to speak to him afterwards and said, you know, I just hope that, you know, you do all this work pushing these policies against trans people. And I hope that one day you will at least talk to one person who is actually affected by your policy. And he was very respectful, but he said, ma'am, the only reason I started talking about these issues was because we had a family from Cincinnati approach us in like 2017 who had lost custody of their daughter because they wouldn't let her go on hormones. Like, I don't know what you think has been happening, but this has been happening. People have been taking it literally and people are hurt. And I hate, like I truly reject and I'm repulsed by the fact that so many, especially young women, had to get hurt for this to get real and for us to reckon with what we were pretending. But that's what we're seeing. Well, and listen, let's be really, really clear about who the majority of the victims were. It was adolescent and pre-adolescent girls. Again, Abigail Schreier deserves a presidential medal of freedom, in my view. For saying that up front, calling it a social contagion, That's what we saw at the speech. That's what you see in the story of Chloe Cole. And let's also be clear of who was pushing this ideology on them. It wasn't a bunch of medical professionals. The medical professionals were forced in line themselves, which was in many ways for so many of them an act of cowardice and social experimentation. But it was a bunch of grown men. It was the people who were the vast majority of those who struggled with the bodies they were born into 20, 25 years ago when folks like Oliver O'Donovan were writing about it and saying that, you know, this issue who we're talking about 100 percent. And at the time, it was basically 100% of young men or middle-aged men who had a sexual perversion. And they needed a way of justifying their own behavior, their own confusion as being normalized. And the victims of that, like all the victims of the sexual revolution, have been children and women. This was another example of that. And let's be really clear. I want to say one more thing. I know we need to move on to the next thing. that is so important. What was beautiful too was the story of redemption that you saw in this young woman who was featured and you see in the story of Chloe. And you see the individuals, while a lot of other people did not stand for their best interest, there's going to be a lot of moms that we need to celebrate who knew and took the heat for even from their own confused children for a long time. I hope this also restores faith for every Christian about what salvation is, what redemption is. Now, he didn't get into that in the speech, but if she's at Liberty University, we can maybe guess that there's a Christian component to this. We know for Chloe, for example, she came in to understand that she wasn't this wrong image of who she thought, and then eventually came to that she was made and designed for a purpose and her body is good. And that is just such a wonderful picture. A, that salvation is possible. And B, that salvation brings all those rewords we read about in the New Testament, renewal, restoration, redemption, resurrection, reconciliation. Reword put us back to who we were intended to be. Salvation doesn't make us someone we weren't. Salvation makes us, again, someone who God made us to be that was stolen into the service of false gods, as Thomas Howard puts it, is now returned to us in the gospel. And that's such a, to me, it was just a picture, just a beautiful example of that. So that was easily the high moment of this long speech that I did not watch. Jesus came to make us fully human. Right, that's it. So unfortunately, in the State of the Union, though, there was crickets on the issue of life and abortion. I know that was a big disappointment for a lot of people, including myself. What do you make of that? What's the significance? I think that many commentaries about the speech are right, that this is perhaps is best. Now, State of the Unions don't usually move the needle politically one way or the other. They're really aimed at the base and a way to, yeah, I don't know. I'm not a fan of them in general, but at the same time, this was, I think, probably his best, but it is notable. In the longest one in history, there was nothing there about abortion. There was nothing there about life issues, and it's not because nothing's going on, right, because we're going state by state. We have a problem with chemical abortion. We have a problem with blue states, pro-abortion states advancing legislation and expanding abortion so-called rights more and more and more. Removing is another example where parents are being removed from the picture in these policies that are happening state by state. You know, we have people finding in state constitutions a constitutional right, you know, to take another life. And I mean, this is really alarming. So there's a lot going on in this administration has been very clear that this is not something that they're interested in dealing with anymore. Now, again, we'll say it, that what happened in the first term of the president was more than any other politician has given us to push back abortion rights in our lifetime, certainly. And that's good news. But there's also been a very clear signal that there's nothing else that he's interested in doing. I think there's also a real potential that the midterms historically and second terms of presidents don't go well, and then you find somebody to blame. And I think that this will be one of the things that gets blamed. So I think there's a real threat here of this issue being further separated from the platform, from the kind of the water of the GOP. And again, our hope does not lie in political parties, but one side has been a lot better on this than the other, without question. And if that's being lost, that's really notable. And the fact that it wasn't in the speech, I think, is another example of that, because it has been in all the other ones, right? And it's not right now. We'll see what it means. I don't think it's a good sign. Yeah, me either. It's hard to see any goodness in that. Briefly, let's touch on the hockey team. Are you a hockey fan? Not at all. I can't follow it. I went to a bunch as a kid. I mean, I'm in Colorado, so hockey's a little bit big. But I mean, it's an epic moment, right? Hockey's given us some of the great US moments in Olympic history. Both the men's and women's team here won the gold in overtime, which is sudden death, which I did know. I did know going in. A whole bunch of people watch more hockey than ever before. I knew that from the Mighty Ducks. Oh, did you? Okay, good. Good. As long as you get it from good, solid source material. Yeah. But it was beautiful. And I think there is something about the Olympic Games, you know, despite all the noise around it from, you know, opening ceremony, quote unquote, artists trying to make a postmodern, you know, desecration point like we had in Paris to the, you know, even, you know, the difference between the men's team and the women's team winning, becoming politicized. And it's another example of everything being political. And that's not a good thing for a society. But there is something about the beautiful moments that emerge in sport. There's something that sport reflects. We were talking about this in our editorial meeting this week. And the most unsporty member of our editorial crew was talking about sport. I thought it was somewhat interesting that even everyone can recognize. I'm a big sports guy. I've been a big sports guy for a long time, especially as folks know basketball. So the Winter Olympics are a little less interesting to me. But, you know, I grew up on the wide world of sports, ABC, and you had that kind of opening where they said the thrill of victory. And then the ski jumper just wiped out. And it's like the agony of defeat. Like that'll be in my mind, you know, forever. But there is something that contextualizes life that way. You put a lot of stuff into it. You put your heart and soul into it. You can rise to the highest levels. You're pushing yourself through discomfort and defeat and challenges, which is very anti, you know, modern culture. Yeah. And at the end of the day, still, like life, not everybody wins a trophy, nor should they. But, you know, in addition, you know, to the great, you know, kind of disappointments, the reality that sports can become an idol and sports, you know, particularly youth sports today can interrupt parental relationships, can interrupt the, you know, if we think about the inward and outward relationships of which it means to be made in the image of God, those outward relationships that are essential are home and church. and sports can interfere with all of that. So keeping all that in the right perspective is a real challenge today. But sports can also glorify God. We can glorify God, as Paul said, in our bodies, which are his. That's a really profound line that we not dug at enough I think in certainly Protestant evangelical theology There were several moments So my girls got really into watching the Olympics this year It became really fun for us as a family And there were, I don't know very much about any of these sports. There were several moments where I was like, the ingenuity and also the weirdness of some of the things we've invented. I forget the exact name of this one, this event, but it's where the skiers come down and they go over that huge ramp and then they do crazy flips in the air and then try to land. And you're just like, who was the first person who thought to do this? You know, it's just such a strange skill and obviously so few people that have it. But how cool that we've found out that we can do this and we were able to train our bodies how to do it. And all of that's so neat as well as I love and want to embrace and encourage, especially for my girls, anything that's physical at this point in culture. like things that get you out of virtual living and into physical living. I want to embrace that and celebrate it. And sports certainly for now do that. I mean, as far as I know, there's still rumors, if it hasn't happened already, that like gaming is going to become some kind of competitive sport. But anyway, so I want to celebrate that. At the same time, I did feel a little stressed out, John, because for the reason exactly what you're talking about. So my girls, of course, got extremely excited about figure skating. Like just, they got as excited as I remember getting as a little girl. Kind of right on schedule, right? Yeah. That's about that time. They're all choosing their favorite women. They're looking them up. My oldest wrote an essay about one of them for school. Like they love it. I remember loving it. And then of course comes the question like, mom, I want to do that. Can I do that? And my first response in my head, thankfully I didn't say out loud, was like, well, it's already too late. Like these Olympians started when they were three years old, you know. But then I'm also like just wrestling through looking at this excellent thing and wanting to celebrate it. But also like I actually think that that might be not a wise decision. You have to give your entire life in order to reach that elite level. The things you have to sacrifice for it, I'm not sure that that's available to us as followers of Jesus. And I think about this academically. my girls are not to humble brag here, but they're extremely smart and they test usually a lot higher than their grade level. And my husband and I have had these conversations about like, how do we steward this well? You know, we've, we've had moments of looking at each other, like, should they be astronauts? Like, what do we need to do with this? But then being like, no, I think what we want them to do is to love God and to prioritize our church family and our family family. And, And, but these are hard conversations and decisions to make, especially when your kids are my ages, which is we're making a lot of these decisions, how to spend your time. And yeah, I think that, um, that, that is one of the kind of the confusions, you know, kind of culturally is that the only reason to play a sport is to be an elite part of it. And rather than kind of the good of the activity itself. And I think that to reduce kids down to one aspect or another happens way too early for a lot of them. And trying to allow them to experience a lot of different things and let things emerge. And also realize that, you know, right now one of the best basketball players in the world did it exactly differently. Two of the best basketball players in the world did it exactly differently where they played multiple sports up well into high school. And that's just not done in the U.S. anymore because you're told you have to commit and you have to specialize and so on. And there are multiple aspects of your skill level that can develop by doing other sports. And also understanding things like spacing and sports psychology and gaming and the game part of it and so on. But I think that's also true across the board. I think, you know, the idea, for example, that with academic propensity, then, you know, we should make them less and less physical and more and more mental is reductionistic as well, right? And so, you know, stewarding the whole person. I also say I do think that there are elite athletes who have figured out how to still glorify God. I think it's really hard. We have more and more examples. We've talked about the Ohio State football program. We've talked about the change in coaching. There were several female Olympians this year that have children at home and we're celebrating that, which was really beautiful. Some of the skiers and yeah. And I like those examples because they push back. It is a real challenge. But I'm gonna go back to the most important thing that we've said so far in the program, which is who thought of some of these sports to begin with? I mean, like, I think the one I look at so many of them and I'm like, oh, that's where you taking. No, that is some that is some that is some good old boy from the south going, hey, y'all watch this. And he almost dies. And somebody else is like, oh, I could do that. I think I could do that. The problem is we're talking about snow, so it can't be people from Alabama. So I don't know. The mystery still exists. I'm watching alone right now. And I'm convinced that like in some of the more remote parts of Canada and northern Alaska, So that same vibe exists for sure. So that could be where it came from. I mean, it is very strange to watch, but it's also like, hey, that's cool. I love that you're getting physical and getting out there. All right, let's take a quick break, John. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week. 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This is an investment that lasts. John and his family have been at Summit every summer for the last several years because we know the impact it makes. Grab your spot now at summit.org slash breakpoint. We're back on Breakpoint this week. John, you teased a little bit earlier that we had some other stories to hit here in regards to this changing climate of transgender ideology. And indeed we do. Vanderbilt University announced this week that they're going to stop all plastic surgery for people who want, they're calling it gender affirming, whatever it is. gender-related plastic surgery, they're going to halt it. This was a really interesting announcement, not just because they're halting the surgeries, but because they claimed they had to do it because they don't have enough resources, which I was thinking, that's an interesting play. I guess that's the most politically safe thing to say. You can't admit that you should never have been doing it. You can't admit you don't have the evidence anymore and actually it never existed and this was always experimental and lots of people are being harmed by it. So I guess you have to claim that there's no resources. Now, I feel very confident that if I go back, I could find a dozen press releases from Vanderbilt and other hospitals saying that this is the single most important medical intervention that has ever existed on planet Earth, which would then beg the question, how do you run out of resources for something like that? But I don't mean to add insult to injury. I'm thrilled that this is happening. Do you think this will be the beginning of other institutions following suit. Well, this is following a whole lot of other institutions, except with a distinction. And I want to mention why this is an important story. And again, we continue to cover and mention these stories. The reason it matters at Vanderbilt is number one, this was the center at Vanderbilt of the case that became the Scrimetti case, I think. But remember Matt Walsh and that, you know, the testifying before the Tennessee legislature and so on. So that's huge. Second, they're not just ending it for minors. They're ending it for adults. That's a big shift. That is not a small thing. Now, whatever reason they give and so on, I think you're probably right. There was kind of a gotcha moment this week from a podcast where one of the previously recognized experts in this field on a podcast denied that he ever called this sort of thing from the hormone treatments and everything else medically necessary. And he was just like, I'd never said that. Who would ever say that? I'm a professional. I would never say that. And then the host read from the public documents in which it was called medically necessary. And then he said, oh, I just didn't read that part of the statement. And you're going to have a lot of this. And I think at some level, we should not let people get away with this. I said in my commentary that many of these people need to go to jail. And it was, we got some questions. Do you really think they need to go to jail? And I said, yes, because we have the laws in the books that if you knowingly harm a child, you should go to jail. And I think this probably falls into that category. Whether we'll get there or not, I don't know. But listen, this is pretty significant. We also had in Vermont, this was one of the states who were trying to enforce a ban on people of conscience, people who did not agree to trans their adopted children to actually prevent them from participating in the foster care system. By the way, they're not the only one. There's another ADF suit that took place, I think, in Oregon. And at least Vermont has abandoned this kind of ideological requirement for people to adopt. Now, this is what I meant earlier when I said, we're seeing it in more than just a president's speech at the State of the Union. It's more than just kind of strong language. It's more than just a political football. When it becomes institutionalized, both in medicine and then in state policy and childcare and foster care and foster care advocacy, these are much harder things to unravel now going forward. So, you know, we'll see where it all goes. But, you know, this is another, what, again, five or six or seven weeks in a row. Yeah. John, I haven't seen any numbers on this, but I imagine there's that the number of kids identifying as trans. No, there was a number on this not too long ago. And I don't remember what it was, but I actually was going to mention that. I'm glad you did. No, it's off the cliff. It's plummeting. That's what I thought. Isn't it interesting? It's plummeting. Yeah. So there are things like this that are considered edgy and then are constantly portrayed to kids, that kids who are kind of struggling to figure out who they are, which many kids do, especially in their teenage years, then basically they identify as this oppressed category. It's not because they are. And when that oppressed category stops being, I don't know, a lead category, you realize now that there weren't all these kids born this way. And so that's the numbers that we're seeing. We'll try to dig those up for next week. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's switch gears here real quick. I want to briefly touch on a new study I came across from our friends over at the Association of Christian Schools International, ACSI, they looked at a large survey, I think with a school in Denver, they composed the survey, but they surveyed teachers and other educational staff across the country about their interpretation of the mental health of their students. And they found a clear pattern, which is that students in Christian schools have much higher rated mental health than in public schools. You know, of course, this is a correlation and we can draw lots of conclusions. We can come up with a lot of questions here, you know, like whether it's a chicken and egg situation. But it was statistically significant, certainly. What does this tell you? Like what conclusions do you think is fair to draw from this result? Well, I mean, if I were a parent, I'd really be very, very interested in this because the epidemic that has corresponded with things like transgender confusion over the last several decades has been just an absolute explosion of mental health concerns among young people. I mean, we talked about during COVID, six months in that according to the NIH, about one out of four students had suicidal ideation just six or seven months in to being locked down. Now, this is a correspondence And you're going to get a different kind of family that takes advantage of Christian schools typically, or at least the majority of these kids are coming from a different kind of family. And there's no replacement for the health and well-being of young people than families. So I think there is a bit of correspondence, but at the same time, we know also, and again, thanks to Abigail Schreier, who I'll say it again, deserves a presidential medal of freedom, has talked about the idea of bad therapy and the integration of this kind of these therapeutic dependencies in the way counseling is often done and particularly how that's infiltrated schools. Now, this should point to, I think, a number of things. Number one is it's time to double down and lean in further on all the alternatives we can possibly lean into, all the alternatives to state-run public education. This is the most fragile this system has ever been. The system overall has failed. I'm not saying that there's not wonderful public school teachers who are there and working really hard and trying as missionaries. I don't subscribe to the send your kid to be a missionary at public school, but I do subscribe to Christians going into the lion's den as teachers and administrators and so on and be forces of redemption within the system. At the same time, we need a thousand flowers to bloom here from homeschool alternatives to Christian school alternatives and so on. And I think it says one other thing, which is Christian schools need to be Christian schools. And not all Christian schools would rate the same way. Not all Christian schools excel in helping kids adjust to who they are. Some have capitulated. Christian schools struggle to find teachers who do not subscribe to the same bad ideologies because they were educated at local secular universities, or they were educated at Christian colleges who have believed for decades that their main mission is to send teachers into public schools. And so they have become programs that have to bow down to the accreditation standards and the teaching method, the pedagogical kind of content that basically catechized them in different worldviews. This is not new, but what was teaching young teachers, basically post-modernism in English, has become teaching young teachers sexual ideologies and kind of this therapeutic mindset from social and emotional learning and everything else. We need Christian colleges to teach Christian teachers for Christian schools. We need Christian teachers to realize that what they got from their secular university education and many times from their Christian college education is not fully Christian, to be humbly willing to rethink the worldviews of their discipline. And we need Christian schools to be Christian schools, to be Christian schools. And I think this gives us another lens through which to do the sort of assessment. And I tell you, Lynn Swanner, who is one of the key researchers on this project, has been leading the way at ACSI. So kudos to her work because they are doing this assessment work. And this is another category that local Christian schools can use is in terms of mental health. Well, so this is my hesitancy here. Like all of this is good and speaks about the health and goodness of so many of our Christian schools and teachers But I worry So one of the stats in this study or one of the bullet points says respondents who reported that their schools paid attention to mental health gave more favorable assessments of their student mental health on average. That makes sense to me, and that's good. I guess I would want to know more about what it means to pay attention to mental health. Like, if it just means being empathetic and thinking about children as whole people as opposed to, you know, I don't know, robots, then that's good. But I don't want to see Christian schools go down the same path of almost prioritizing or putting too much weight on like the mental and social well-being of kids above their role of academically supporting them. And I know you've said in the past, which I think is really helpful, and I know our girls' school really focuses on this as that that our school's responsibility is to partner with parents. So anything that our school does that is not directly related to, you know, teaching math or science or STEM, they'll do discipleship work. They have chapel once a month, you know, and I am so grateful for that because it reiterates what we're learning at home and all of that's wonderful. But they don't do a lot of this like, hey, like almost like a counseling kind of mindset or, you know, I'm sure they do where it's necessary, but I could see where those lines could get blurred, if that makes sense. No, this is exactly what I meant when I said we have to have different rules of what it means to be a Christian teaching in a Christian school. And that's not just true for the teachers. That's also true then and how the school is actually run. I mean, sports should look differently. Everything should look differently, right? And I do want to point out what's mentioned in the second part of that bullet point that you read, which is possible forms of integration included school counselors or health professionals offering spiritually informed support options, religious service, devotional practice, and so on. I share your hesitation on that point, because if we are just adopting the same mental health strategies that are perpetuating the problem in wider society, we're going to perpetuate the problem here. and we're also, if we pride ourselves in having adopted those policies, then it's gonna be like asking the lesbian parents how good your kids are doing. How good of a parent are you? Yeah, according to all those studies, they're the greatest kids ever. And we need to have a different set of rules. We need to think about mental health as Christians. We need to think about education as Christians. We need to think about all the aspects of Christian education as Christian. And I imagine knowing kind of the sort of quality of projects that Lin Swanner in particular has led is that this study did what this study is designed to do and not anything else. But hopefully it's going to lead to further research questions like that that need to be evaluated. But, you know, it's a really good start. And I go back to something that we said before, that this is just an incredible opportunity to disrupt the system. And the system is not performing. It's not performing academically, and it's not performing mentally. It's not performing in terms of mental health and socially and everything else. And Christian schools need to be Christian schools top to bottom. And this is one of the reasons we've worked so closely with ACSI and Christian schools for the last several years. The conference that we co-sponsor in July called the Rooted Conference is all aimed and designed at rethinking what it means to be human and allowing education. That's this year's theme. And then allowing the educational definitions and the practices and the standards to flow out of that. And this will be one of the things that we discuss. Yeah. Well, we're going to take a break, but I'll just beat my drum one more time. If you want a really easy hack to improve the mental health of the kids at your school, get the phones out of your school. Start there and you will improve them immediately. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Breakpoint this week. Applications are now open for the 2026-2027 Colson Fellows Program. Participants take a 10-month deep dive into Christian worldview and learn how God's story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration explain the world better than any other worldview. They study how Christianity is more than a privatized individual faith, giving them confidence to see all of life through the lens of God's Word. Listen now to Kathy, a 2025 commissioned Colson Fellow, share the program's impact on her faith. I loved God before I started the Colson Fellowship Program, and I wanted to live for Him, and I did share Him with others, but I didn't feel equipped. And the Colson Fellowship gives Christians that don't feel equipped hope. Our culture today can feel chaotic for Christians, but the Colson Fellows Program wants to equip you with confidence for it, like Kathy said. Request more information today at colsonfellows.org. That's colsonfellows.org. We're back on Breakpoint this week. John, I want to head to your state one more time, Colorado. We're hearing this week that there's about to be oral arguments in the case of the Christian Bookstore and XXXY Athletics, which we've talked about before, which is an athletics brand started by Jennifer Say, formerly of Levi's, who has really advocated for the protection of women in women's sports. And they created this athletic wear company towards that end. They have sued the state of Colorado, which has said, you know, it passed this law that you cannot, you have to use preferred pronouns of your customers and of theoretical customers and all of your advertising and your in-person interactions. Otherwise you could be found legally liable. So oral arguments, I believe were heard this week. Is that right? No, no, no. There was an early decision or arguments were heard. The depositions were heard before and the judge as expected, unfortunately. Oh, shoot. If we put those things together. And I mean, you're not expected to get a judicial win in Colorado. You know, this is the way that it is. The state is hostile to religious faith. It has been historically. And then the judge basically says, oh, no, we're not. And then throws it out and then you appeal. And that's what happened with the XXXY and Born Again Christian Books, which is a bookstore in Colorado Springs owned by some very good friends of ours. And just a wonderful couple. No, it is not downtown, but downtown keeps getting bigger. But it's a wonderful used Christian books store, distinctly Christian. And the title Born Again used books serves a lot of families, a lot of homeschool families in particular. or just a wonderful place. And the outcome was as expected. Basically, the judge says you don't have any standing because this was what's called a pre-enforcement challenge where basically the law's really clear that if you misgender someone, quote unquote, it actually came with a fine and potential jail time. And here in this state, I've said this before, where at ADF events, It's actually kind of now almost a joke like, you know, Colorado is keeping them in business kind of thing because there's just lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit for the judge to say you don't have anything to worry about. It's just the language of the law is jail time and fines. And the history, the track record, just go to Jack Phillips. In fact, this week, I was not watching the State of the Union address because I had the privilege of being a part of an event at Colorado Christian University with Kristen Wagner, the CEO of ADF, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was a story featured in Truth Rising, and Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cake Shop. And you just look at that story and you're like, Colorado's track record is to harass people of faith to the extent that the Supreme Court has yelled at them twice now for doing this. At what point is the Supreme Court just like, you guys can't be a state for a little while. You need to just sit in the corner and take a deep breath. Yeah. So anyway, it's just an update. I just think that it's, you know, this suit continues. It's on appeal. Will it go to the Supreme Court? I don't know. I mean, you can never know these sorts of things. Potentially, yeah. Could a lot of things be done as this kind of momentum shifts away from these policies? I mean, look, if Vermont has backed off of its kind of foster care policy, is it possible that Colorado will? That seems like almost no, it's not, because Colorado has been in a trajectory of such extremism for a long time that's really unparalleled from any other state that I can see. I know everyone talks about California, but my goodness, the trajectory we're on is pretty stunning. But all that to say, it's disappointing, this lack of self-awareness of a judge saying, you have nothing to worry about in Colorado that has been yelled at twice by the Supreme Court for harassing people of faith on these things. I'm starting to think that anybody can be a judge. I want to see the qualifications at this point. I don't think that's true, but there's certainly some states where it's easier than others. It seems like that. Let's switch gears real quickly here to a new study that caught both of our eyes from an organization called Youthscape. This is in the UK. They've done a project called Translating God, where it's a survey of British teenagers, 14 to 17-year-olds. They're confronting them basically with the gospel or with the Bible and then asking them for their impressions of it. And we've covered, you know, the UK is decreasingly religious. So a lot of these kids, presumably this was their first interaction with anything from the Bible. And this was recording their responses to it. And Youthscape has released a report called Troubling Jesus. and what they found were a lot of responses to Jesus that were categorizing him as a chauvinist or as having, this was my favorite, having a God complex of, you know, mansplaining and being inappropriate, basically just taking these biblical stories and putting them through a very childish 2026 lens of, you know, power dynamics and oppression and class struggle and whatever else. but still disturbing. I think more disturbing, you know, not that kids would come up with ways to be offended by something because that's what they do at this point, but disturbing at the lack of context, like that it was so clear that they've literally never interacted with these stories. I mean, they, you know, they, one of the stories that they were asked to comment on was Jesus healing the paralytic man whose, you know, friends lowered him down through the roof. and instead, you know, that story, as you know, is a story of Jesus making the claim to be the Messiah. He says to the man, your sins are forgiven and everybody gasps. And he says, which do you think is easier to forgive your sins or to heal your body? And then he of course heals his body. And the kids almost unanimously in this study saw that story as like a weird metaphor for, you know, somebody who's telling you to have self-esteem or something like just the entire entire context of a man being on earth claiming to be God and the God who created the universe was just completely over their heads, which is dispiriting. Well, I found this fascinating on a couple levels. First of all, if we underestimate the power of education, I mean, you kind of said it quickly, you know, the childish views of oppression and critical theory. That's the headline of the story. The headline of the story is that if you teach someone that the moral framework of the universe is the story of oppression, oppressed oppressor, and you repeat that over and over and over and you catechize them in that framework, then they're going to use it. That's going to be the thing by which they judge any other story or event or things that they're reading or whatever. It's the same way that we, teach young people to go and look at the great works of literature and judge it through the lens of some kind of modern day enlightenment that we supposedly have. So we shouldn't be surprised that they do it with the Bible. I think that the punchline here is, or one of the punchlines here, is that these are people who have never really encountered the Bible. These are non-Christian families or non-Christian young people that responded this way. I don't know that we would expect them to respond any other way. I mean, I guess at some level, it's not their fault. That's what they were taught in every single category from every single direction of life. I would say that if your Christian kid is looking at life in the world or the Bible through that, then they don't have a Christian worldview. At some level, this should be, you know, are our kids thinking differently? Do we have a different moral framework? Is it that we are taking our moral framework that we've absorbed from culture and applying it to Scripture or taking a moral framework from Scripture? In a sense, this is kind of the update of a study that was incredibly important from Christian Smith 20 years ago, looking at young people and saying that their worldview was moralistic, therapeutic deism. that when they went to scripture or they went to church or where they talked about their spiritual lives, what they meant was they wanted to be a good, happy person. And they always had a phone a friend available named Jesus. This was at the time of who wants to be a millionaire and you could phone a friend, you know what I mean? And so that's the analogy. Yeah, I don't know if it was a great, I don't know if it was a great show. I just remember that was one of the episodes. Oh, I loved that show. That was a big deal in my family. Go on. But that was a very important analysis. It spoke to the kind of the underlying importance of how you think about the world. What story of the world do you think is the true story? Because through that, you'll see everything, including God and Jesus. So that's the first angle of this. We shouldn't underestimate the critical theory mood embedded through education. This speaks to everything we talked about in the last segment, like make sure Christian education is distinctly Christian and make sure that that is what's happening in church and make sure that's what's happening in school. Make sure that's most importantly what's happening in the home in terms of how we disciple our kids. So it speaks to that. The other thing that I thought was really, I don't know if it's ironic, but this is in the UK. They had specific views about God the Father being a bully. So that reflects more of the critical theory. But they recognized something that was actually true, that Jesus claimed to be God. This is in England where the Church of England for the last several decades has either downplayed or downright rejected that stuff. And these kids, unexposed to the Bible historically, kind of went, oh, this guy has a God complex. You know why he did have a God complex? Because he's God and he claimed to be God. And, you know, Tim Padgett on our writing team worked on a breakpoint commentary that will air maybe next week or something on this. And I, you know, rightfully brought up the trilemma from C.S. Lewis that talked about the nonsense, as he called it, patronizing nonsense of saying, oh, Jesus is just a good teacher and Jesus is just a good example. And Jesus is just about radical inclusivity and all the other stuff that many clergy in the Church of England has embraced. Now, there's some that haven't, and there's some that have been heroic and courageous in saying what's true. But a lot of Church of England folks have just kind of taught this squishy view of Jesus. And 60, 70 years ago, Lewis called it patronizing nonsense. because if you look at it, look, he might be a lunatic, crazy, as Lewis said, on the level of a man who says he a poached egg I remember or he might be evil a madman somebody seeking power or he God But there no category based on the life he lived and the words he said to say oh he a good moral teacher like Gandhi or Buddha You know Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins. Jesus appropriated language that is reserved for God, the Father in all the I am's that John clearly in his gospel, not writing a chronological or a holistic account of Jesus, doing a theological work in the gospel of John, I am, I am, I am. And even his enemies recognized when he said that after in the synagogue, that he was basically appropriating language that in that context was only reserved for God himself. He didn't speak with thus saith the Lord. He said, truly, truly, I say to you, you know, he was his own authority. There is a God complex there. There's no question about it because there's, he's God. Very few interactions in the gospels that Jesus had that would qualify by today's standards as like genial and just perfectly empathetic and kind. He was those things because he is the definition of those things because God is love. But his prerogative was to show the people that he was God and that he was the Messiah. And he had compassion that will make you weep to read. I mean, when he encounters the Roman soldier whose servant was dying or the woman whose daughter was sick, who was a Gentile, like incredible compassion. But most of his interactions are like frustration and dominance. And like rightly so because he's God. It's, you know, but I'll just say I have a friend at church who has a teenage son who is kind of going down this path of reading the scriptures through this lens. And I get the impression that for a lot of kids, the appeal is they want to feel like they're thinking for themselves. and challenging scripture, especially when it's something that they have been taught and they've been taught to view through a Christian lens, challenging it in this way feels like an act of independence for them. And I'm hopeful, I think one of the tools that we have to help them through that kind of dark night is to show them that this is the opposite of thinking for yourself. I mean, there was a piece in The Spectator about this study saying, some of the same things you've said all along, which is this is just Rousseau and Michel Foucault. And, you know, this is not new. So if that's helpful in a gentle way to bring that to kids who are maybe struggling with this or Gen Z that's struggling with this, like you're still reading a script. It's a different one. It's not the churches, but this is not independence. And actually this is going to lead to your destruction as well, which is more important. But maybe that would be helpful. Well, John, let's talk about some of the questions that we've received. which you can send in by going to breakpoint.org and clicking on contact us. We love to hear from you all. Let's start here. We spoke, I believe it was last week, gosh, I can't keep track of time anymore, about Secretary of State Marco Rubio's speech in Munich. And you had compared it to one of President Obama's speeches. And someone named Christian said he was curious about why you'd consider Obama's inaugural speech one of the best of the last half century. and then someone named Andrew chimed in and said, maybe you meant Obama's 2004 convention speech. Do you remember that comparison? You were talking about kind of great speeches in history. Well, I think there's probably two questions here. Number one is which speech was it? I'm just thinking of the one in Chicago after winning the nomination. That's the one that kind of is, you know, many people would, you know, mark as his greatest. Although the one he did at the convention when he was a senator, I actually saw that one live and thought this is the next Democratic nominee for president. And I was right on that. I don't usually make great prophetic statements, but that was it. I didn't mean great or best in terms of true or because I agree with it. I'm talking about the kind of speech it was and in the category of inspiring a lot of people. And, you know, again, presidential speeches, political speeches don't move the needle like they used to culturally. Then there are some that do. And the question was whether Rubio's did. Obviously, I don't find a lot of alignment or hardly any alignment with the former president, his policies, his understanding of faith, his understanding of sexuality, his evolving on the issue of gay marriage or anything like that. But when you look at the speeches that – the few speeches that did move the needle, that's probably one of them. So it was just a reference to that. Okay, the next question is referring to one of your commentaries called The Family in Crisis. And this person says they were surprised by this sentence that you wrote. Quote, the state should encourage religiosity, especially Christianity. The law can't make anyone a Christian, but it can and should promote religious involvement without penalizing it. In particular, the state should foster church participation, end quote. And this person says, I'm inclined to disagree with you, but maybe you meant something different. I'd like to have a more complete understanding regarding your view of what a wise and just interplay between church and state would look like. Well, I think it's historically there was a way in which the state got out of the way of local institutions, voluntary associations, including and especially church and religious involvement in the American context. There were others as well. I think you can look, for example, at the British Empire and kind of creating space for religious involvement, encouraging religious involvement, even at times portraying the state as being subservient to or at least in alliance with religious involvement. That was messy, obviously, through history, depending on how many of the kings had a religious leader complex at the same time. But in the United States, we're just talking about the spheres of society. We're talking about embracing the reality of what are called mediating institutions, nonpolitical institutions in which we live most of our lives rather than seeing most of our life being political. Now, this took the form in the United States of blue laws, basically preserving Sabbath, protecting workers from having to be seven days a week with no kind of a day off, not encouraging non-religious activity on Sunday mornings. certainly the tax law, being able to have tax write-offs because you're giving to institutions that can do in a non-political way things that the state cannot do. But today, the state tries to do. The state tries to play kind of the charity role and other roles. Now, the shifts have become realities of the church abdicating responsibility, and a lot of it is the state overstepping its responsibility. Just the state staying in its lane is a way of encouraging religious involvement. The state recognizing the fundamental good that religious involvement brings to citizens, right? This goes to the conscience or constable framework. If someone cannot govern themselves, they have to be governed from the outside. Someone who can govern themselves, if you believe and recognize that humans are inherently fallen creatures, then that has to be done by somebody. If you think that the state is the best way of forming a citizen, the state's not good at that stuff. The state should hold lines of citizenship. The state should hold lines of criminality and so on. But forming citizens, that's best done by the family. And that's also best served by religious institutions. Religious citizens are better citizens historically. They should be, by the way, And because of that simple teaching of Jesus that you should love your neighbor and not just think about yourself, that is something that gets inculcated one way or the other. And the state should let religious institutions be religious institutions. Now, compare this with where we're at today in the state of Colorado, that the state requires religious people to violate their conscience and say things that they don't believe. That's not forming a good citizen. That's actually getting in the way. So when I said the state should foster church participation and promote religious involvement without penalizing it, Colorado is evidence number one of a state penalizing religious involvement, religious conviction. That case you mentioned out of Vermont, the state of Vermont had revoked the foster care licenses of two families who had already fostered and adopted children. Hey, one of those families, one of those families, and this is kind of inside baseball, but one of those families was recognized within the foster system of being the best family they have. They were often held up as examples of exactly the kind of people that you need. Now, what does the foster care system do? Here you have a religious couple non-politically that's stepping in and taking care of a problem that if it's not handled non-politically, it has to be handled politically. If it's not handled by a pre-government kind of institution, then it has to be. So all I'm saying is policies that align with a vision that government has a lane and government should stay in that lane, but that there are also other realities, non-governmental, pre-political things that have a lane and they can do that job better. So that's what I mean. Okay, last question. What evidence or studies exist showing that a large majority of transgender individuals grow out of the disorder in early adulthood? What is the statistic? The statistics run 80 to 90%. Now, when you're talking about it in adulthood, you know, for adults, you know, again, remember a generation ago, this issue was 100% middle-aged men who were coming to this confusion as middle-aged men. That, I don't know what we have because you're talking about kind of long-standing pathologies that have been cultivated within these lives and broken them down. But what the question here is, is these children, and the number is 80 to 90 percent, that if you let puberty do what puberty does, not saying that it's not always difficult, and especially when you have other social factors involved, but the best numbers we have are 80 to 90 percent. when puberty takes its course, come to understand that the bodies that they have and that they are, and then come into alignment with it. And it's essentially how we handle every other sort of dysmorphia in which the mind and the body don't align. The most prominent being eating disorders. In the case of an eating disorder, somebody thinks that they're overweight when they actually are not. And we never treat that by saying, oh yeah, go get stomach stapling surgery so that we can align your, remake your body to align with your mental fantasy and wrong thinking about who you are. But we did that in this case, especially with minors. And so the treatment has always been to align the mind with the reality of the body, realizing that the mind is bringing a false perception. And the fact of the matter is the best numbers we have, say 80 to 90% will align with the bodies that they have because puberty is good at doing what puberty does. And especially if you don't have this constant barrage of false information coming from PBS and coming from school counselors and school teachers and celebrities. If you don't have this kind of barrage of false information and false teaching, then the alignment takes place. And I don't even like the framing because we're making it sound like some magical thing happens. Like hopefully this new thing will happen where your mind will align with your body. It's just acceptance of reality. And for some people that's harder than others because for some people life is really hard and circumstances are hard and things happen that make it harder. But eventually, everybody's got to get around to accepting the life that they have and the limits that they were given. That's what we're talking about here. We're not talking about a new thing we have to cross our fingers for and hope will happen down the line. It's just a reality of being human and growing in wisdom is being able to accept life as it is and accept the world on its terms as God made it. John, let's hit recommendations real quick. I will just recommend a couple weeks ago, I mentioned I was in Phoenix and got the chance to speak at my former church home, Redemption Arcadia. I spoke about what it means to be human using a lot of the things that I've learned from you, from O'Carter Sneed, from lots of other people, from Gilbert Mylander, a lot of other important writers and thinkers on this topic. And you can listen to that now if you search for Redemption Arcadia sermons. It's on there. So that's my recommendation. What have you got? Came across a wonderful new project out of the UK, since we've talked so much about the UK. I think in the era, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, that more of this needs to be done for the United States. But this one's relevant for us because of our heritage out of the UK, out of the history of Britain. It's the Proud of Us project. I'm not maybe a huge fan of the name, but it's different, I think, than pride to say I'm proud of us. This is an archive of videos and stories all done in the Wallace and Gromit claymation style, which is pretty clever, I thought, of the way that individuals throughout British history did good things. And that Western society, Western culture is not the worst thing that ever happens. So this narrative of oppression that certainly has become prominent in the UK, they're pushing back on that. Thomas Coram, the man who saved the babies, the Celts, a thousand years before, Alfred the Great, the fifth son who saved England, John Newton, the wretch who changed everything. everything. The one that I came across was about the Sunday school movement, which of course, wasn't initially to kind of add an education component to church. It was to give education to children who were sent to the factories and only had one day off during the early part of the industrial revolution. Do you know a quarter of a million, a quarter of a million British children were taught to read? Through Sunday school? Through Sunday school, before there was nationalized education. I mean, these numbers, there's not a progressive project in the history of the world that can claim that sort of success. There's a few that can claim that they've neglected to teach a quarter of a million kids to read. I would say that's ongoing, but yeah, you're right. The Miller who rewrote physics, the man who invented cinema, the man who discovered vitamins. These are all claymation little shorts. I think most of them are like eight to 10 minutes. I just think it's a really cool project and something that could be included, certainly, in a lot of classrooms. But anyway, I love this sort of stuff, telling the good stories. I hope that there's some folks who will pick this up as a cause for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. as well. Well, thanks so much for listening to Breakpoint this week. For 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. you