During the “Preparing for a Post-Roe World” event at the recent Wilberforce Weekend, Jim Daly described how the Focus on the Family team displayed the truth about preborn babies right in the middle of Times Square. The event not only made a powerful case against abortion, it showed how courage is contagious, and how Christians can be emboldened to speak the truth in love even in difficult situations.
Here’s Jim Daly, explaining what happened in Times Square before the pandemic:
Sexual abuse is just as horrible and evil within the Church as without, yet we are more guilty because we should know better. We know where the human propensity for sin, evil, and abuse comes from. We know the human capacity to deceive and deflect. We know our own vulnerability, and the sin nature shared by all after Eden. So, if our defense for the sins of the Church is that those among us are no more guilty than Harvey Weinstein and Hugh Hefner, it’s fair to say that we’ve lost the plot of our own story.
Pornography and sexually suggestive material of any kind objectifies women, training consumers that female bodies are things to be leered at, to be lusted after, rather than persons to be loved and valued.
People are more than most popular ideologies can explain. This is why Communist and Fascist dictatorships end up looking like each other over time. As my colleague Tim Padgett put it recently, “Sometimes worldviews simply give shape to the evil already within individuals.”
And that’s what a Christian worldview says: That evil is already within individuals. The more the social bonds of a culture unravel, the more people are pushed to their ideological extremes.
This is especially the case in a world where digital technologies both radicalize and incentivize bad behaviors.
It’s time to admit that the idea that consent could adequately govern human sexuality has failed. Consent may be the barest of moral necessities, but it cannot govern something as powerful as sex, especially when sex has been untethered from its purpose, design, and any other moral restraint.
According to Simon Morrison in a recent The Washington Post article, Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine has prompted a huge global push to disavow all things Russian. And while some of these measures are certainly warranted, others are not so clear. So, what should be done with Russian art?
An upstart group called “Unmasking Fidelity” is trying to expose conservative donors to harassment by demanding the nation’s largest grant-maker, Fidelity Charitable, publicly reveal contributions to ten key organizations. These include the Family Research Council, Turning Point USA, and Alliance Defending Freedom, which Unmasking Fidelity absurdly calls “white supremacist” and “fascist.”
Last week at our annual Wilberforce Weekend conference, we held a pre-event on Thursday evening to discuss what it means to prepare for a post-Roe future. The presentations were exceptional across the board. Today, I want you to hear from my friend Stephanie Gray Connors. She responded throughout the evening to various slogans used in our culture to promote abortion. Here’s one of the short talks she gave in response to the slogan, “legal abortion saves women’s lives.”
How do we respond when people say embryos aren’t people? The first thing we want to do is ask the question, “What are embryos? And what are people?”
Today launches our annual Wilberforce Weekend. Ten years ago, Chuck Colson gave what would be his final message, at a Wilberforce Weekend event. His message that day was that the world needed the Church to be the Church. His call that day remains the central purpose of the Wilberforce Weekend. This weekend, we will be looking at salvation and redemption from every possible angle we can, in order to better live a life that is redeemed.
Chuck’s life was a wonderful redemption story. Today on Breakpoint, I wanted you to hear Chuck Colson, in his own voice and his own words, tell his own redemption story.
