Business and the Christian Life: Guest Column

Economics, , , ,

President Calvin Coolidge once said that “the business of America is business.” Too many Christians think of business as either inherently bad, immoral, or perhaps amoral, something set apart from their faith. At best, it pays the bills and support the missionaries, but many fail to see it as also under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. 

Recently, Colson Center COO Pete Marra challenged a group of business leaders to rethink business according to a Christian worldview, especially in light of emerging cultural challenges:  

I believe there’s one thing that changes the world, and that’s the Church. There is no plan B. There’s no alternative to that. It’s the Church. But I also believe that there’s something that is equally under it, so not exactly equal, but equal and under, and I would say that is enterprise. Enterprise being business. 

What we have at our disposal through business, the ability to organize, to solve problems, to create value, to deploy capital, to steward the things that God has given us, is something that’s very unique to enterprise itself. … So, with that kind of framework, I want to talk a little bit about calling and think about place. 

There’s a reason that we use the idea, “You are here.” This can’t be missed on us in this cultural moment, particularly as business leaders—leaders of enterprises—that you were brought to a time and place that God has called you to and God has brought you to. And it’s now. 

[I]t’s not an accident. I believe not only has God brought you to this place and called you to this space, but he’s equipped you for it. [T]here’s something that’s happening inside the world that we’re speaking to in theological spaces, and philosophers and some politicians and business leaders are talking about it, and that’s the age of AI.  

But AI is just a new tool for a bigger problem. The bigger problem that we’re facing—and one that I think is going to impact business and enterprise in a way that we have never seen, at least in my short lifetime—is the fundamental question of, “What does it mean to be human?” 

I know that sounds a little bit heavy or like I’m trying to make a bold statement, but I just want you to think about something like your corporate culture. I want you to think about how you use enterprise when you have an opportunity to become more efficient, make more money, which generates more profit, which gives you more to steward, which is the reason we get into business. 

Let’s not be confused. I’ll stand here and tell you, I love profit. I am never confused about for-profit. In fact, I’ve often joked, I sometimes prefer for-profit businesses over nonprofit, because no one’s confused about what we’re doing. 

But here’s the challenge we’re facing: What happens when that idea of profit and the deployment of capital face a maybe once-in-a-generational upheaval to where we no longer need a workforce? What if the ways we used to think about automating production factory lines, we can now automate everybody? 

Now, is that going to happen next year? No. But these are questions I think business leaders have to start wrestling with now so that they can do that. We need a framework to be able to think through that. That framework is something you’ve seen inside the Truth Rising: The Study, which is that idea of hope, truth, identity, and calling.  

[W]e must remember through these things that that idea of hope is what drives us. Our hope is in Christ, and Christ alone. Never be confused. If that is where we find our hope, then the truth of the world, the truth of God’s story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration is the thing that gives us not only meaning, but it helps us anchor the why we do business. 

The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper famously said that “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” This is as true about business as about anything else. 

Copyright 2026 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

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Beyond Crispr: Recreating Man with Genetic Editing

Bioethics, , ,

The “man-moulders of the new age” vs. Imago Dei.

Recently, the New York Times reported that scientists at Columbia University have used a new technology called “base editing” to alter the DNA of early human embryos with unprecedented accuracy.  

As the Times noted,  

On the one hand, the technology might one day enable parents to safely repair disease-causing mutations in embryos. But it might also be used to select desired traits—a practice that some ethicists have argued is nothing short of eugenics.  

These recent approaches differ from earlier gene-editing methods like CRISPR, which remove defective genes rather than improve them. So, what the Times has reported is not just a difference in degree, but in kind, though with the same moral questions still unanswered. As Andrew Walker said at WORLD, “We should recognize that this technology occupies a morally gray zone . . . Therapeutic intervention differs from genetic enhancement . . . Base editing enables both.”  

Neither base editing nor CRISPR will be the last foray into this kind of eugenics. In fact, some of us predicted that the imprisonment by the CCP of a Chinese scientist who used CRISPR to modify human embryos was more of a distraction than a punishment. If so, it worked. The public has moved on. The outrage at Dr. He has died down. His work continues, even as Columbia researchers add a degree of academic respectability to the efforts to edit human beings. 

And it always goes like this. As one of the geneticists from Columbia put it, we need a public “discussion” about gene editing. Do we? Before or after we do it? No, these scientists behave as if the moral questions are settled, or at least a matter of personal interest, and all that’s left is to discuss how best to use this technology.  

Both history and the Bible warn what happens when our technologies outrun our ethics. Many have now forgotten the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell (1927). Caught up in the euphoria of the Progressive Era’s zeal for scientific improvement, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for an 8-1 majority and upheld a compulsory sterilization law of the mentally disabled. The aim of the law was, as the Court said, to “prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” According to Holmes, in the case of Carrie Buck being sterilized, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Lawyers representing the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials after World War II cited Holmes’ opinion in Buck v. Bell to justify their own eugenics efforts in the Nazi regime.  

New developments in gene editing are still plagued by essential questions regarding human nature. First, is human nature permanently flawed or are we constantly progressing toward perfection? And, second what will stop us from using this technology not just to repair, but to pursue perfection, or—dare I say—a master race?  

These aren’t far-fetched questions. One scientist quoted by the Times raised exactly that concern when he said, “In regular I.V.F., embryos are screened for genetic abnormalities,” but base line editing “is providing the ‘baby improvers’ with a how-to manual for forays beyond the ethical pale.” 

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis foresaw these dangers: 

Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men…But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the power of an omnicompetent state and irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please. 

Yet, what governs these “conditioners”? A “public discussion?” No. Without moral standards, we are left to the impulses of those in charge. 

Recently, Christian ethicist Scott Rae argued that those things resulting from the Fall are within the domain of medical treatment (such as disease), while those not resulting from the Fall are the “givens” of life and not in the realm of enhancement (such as your biological sex, eye color, etc.). This distinction is helpful, despite the real challenge of drawing such an ethical line in a Fallen world, much less expecting others to comply. 

Scripture is plain. Every person is made in God’s image and is endowed with eternal dignity, worth, and beauty. Any potential value to be found in this new base-editing technology will be outweighed by the consequences of not recognizing what is true of the human condition, both our value and our potential for evil. In this case as well, the potential consequences far outweigh the potential benefits.

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America Flirts with Democratic Socialism

Current Events,

Recently, in primary elections in both New York and Colorado, self-professed Communist and Democratic Socialist candidates beat even progressive-wing candidates to claim Democratic nominations for office. The political wave is moving through the States. Today on Breakpoint, Eric Patterson, president of the Victims of Communism Museum and Memorial Foundation, discusses how a Marxist worldview operates and why it matters that one of America’s political parties is being pushed in this direction. Here’s Dr. Patterson: 

Today’s so-called Democratic Socialists like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have recognized some real problems in the bureaucracy: things like inefficiency, red tape, lack of accountability, and other problems in urban environments such as in Baltimore, New York, and Chicago. But they fail to recognize that it was their own progressive party’s imposition of bigger and bigger government, restrictions on private property and innovation, and efforts to create a class of citizens dependent on government that has caused the problems of bad government and high prices. 

Should Americans be worried, or is this all just youthful enthusiasm? True, there is a faddish “pop Marxism” among many young adults and teens. It is cool to “rage against the machine” and even cooler to have government subsidize your college degree, housing, groceries, and transportation. 

But there is something much more sinister going on. Americans should always ask three questions when considering any political candidate, platform, or party: Do we want statism or individual liberty with limited government? Do we want to buttress American institutions or attack them? And can we justify or denounce political violence? 

Considering the first question, are the policies that Democratic Socialists advocate for designed to protect religious freedom, freedom of conscience, private property, the family, and private enterprise? Or do they rely on increasing state power to regulate social, economic, and political life? Remember, Marx said that control of the economy (Socialism) was the first step toward control of everything (Communism). It’s noteworthy that Democratic Socialists attack private property, an innovative business environment, and often call freedoms of religion and conscience smokescreens for superstition and intolerance of their progressive agenda. 

Second, do Democratic Socialists defend our American constitutional order and its institutions, or do they attack them? Look out for those who call into question our Constitution, who advocate Supreme Court packing, and those who call outdated or illegitimate our modes of government (federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, democratic processes). 

Third, do they justify violence or advocate violence? Radical socialism is always an “ends justify the means” worldview. Look at the environment we are in with multiple assassination attempts against a sitting president, violence and threats targeting Supreme Court justices, and all the destructiveness, from Occupy Wall Street to Seattle’s “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone”to anti-Semitism on American college campuses. So often, Democratic Socialists like Mamdani, NY’s Andrea Ocasio-Cortez, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, and Seattle’s mayor have justified such extremism. 

The official Democratic Socialists of America website suggests major taxation and redistribution of wealth by unaccountable government bureaucrats to fund “universal public systems for healthcare, college, and housing.” It undermines America’s constitutional order by calling for dramatic changes to the Supreme Court and Congress and the elimination of the Electoral College. 

Perhaps even more stunning? DSA calls for full voting rights for non-citizens, punitive taxation on “the richest earners,” and statehood for the city of Washington, DC. 

What most of the candidates who call themselves Democratic Socialists also have in common is a fealty not to ecological conservation, but to the philosophically radical, budget-busting, so-called Green New Deal. Moreover, since the grotesque attacks of October 7, many have squarely sided with Hamas’ murderers rather than the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel. This latter movement has produced the return of an ugly anti-Semitism to American public life from the hard Left. 

This year, we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, best expressed in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, the Declaration was not fully realized in 1776 but was a promissory note to future generations that we must all be working to fulfill. The great American story is one of scars and triumphs in the general motion toward greater individual liberty and the full recognition of our common human dignity. 

The Founders knew that unrestrained government power was the first enemy of freedom. The British government kept changing the social contract by waving trial by jury, quartering troops in private homes, appropriating private land and businesses, revoking the colonial charters, etc. Then, after a decade of taking more and more rights away from the colonists, the British killed citizens at Lexington and Concord, marking the start of the American Revolutionary War.

So, the Founders were determined to buttress individual rights, our federal system, private property, and other fundamental liberties. Today, we too must be on the lookout for those who advocate for a massive, unaccountable state, undermine our fundamental rights and institutions, and are willing to justify violence. 

That was Eric Patterson, president of the Victims of Communism Museum and Memorial Foundation, Learn more about their work at vocmuseum.org.

Copyright 2026 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

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