Culture – Family Council

Reinventing the Sabbath: Guest Column

Aug 26, 2026John StonestreetCultureChristianity, Culture, Sabbath

A recent article by science writer Elizabeth Svoboda at the Wall Street Journal argued that an occasional 24-hour break is good for mind and body. As she wrote:

These micro-retreats have proven so energizing that I now take a few each year—and science suggests such hiatuses, despite their brief duration, can renew enthusiasm and relieve mental exhaustion in potent ways. They’re a welcome temporary escape from a chaotic and overclocked world.

This is not about getting away from reality, she explained, but about getting into a better head space. Because modern work involves jumping from one task to another without time to properly focus, a regular break is a simple, constructive way to improve life.

Christians and Jews might think, “Congrats! You’ve invented the Sabbath!” Thousands of years ago, before anyone had done studies on rest and brain activity, Moses told God’s people to take off one day in every seven. In fact, secular takes on life practices and rituals often reflect truths the Bible has always proclaimed.

Svoboda learned to prize rest and time away as a mom with small kids. But everyone needs rest. This is especially difficult for Americans, who can have trouble taking vacation, at least compared to our European counterparts. We might blame our bosses, but even when given the chance, Americans aren’t good at rest.

As Jay Dixit wrote in an article a few years ago, “We’re Doing Downtime Wrong,” the habit of scrolling or streaming to “relax” still requires the brain to focus, even if on irrelevant things. By contrast, Dixit noted, studies suggest that the “imagination network” of the brain is as essential as the “task-positive” network.

That’s why Archimedes’ Eureka moment came to him when he was sitting in the bath, and why Newton formulated the law of gravity when he saw an apple fall in an orchard. The epiphanies that seem to bubble up from nowhere when your mind is wandering are actually products of the imagination network.

Though the average working American still works a roughly 40-hour work week, there is far less shut-off time. Our phones function more like our computers, keeping us tethered to work at all hours. In other words, the rhythm of constant activity in our culture—even while lying on the couch or sitting on a beach—is not the rest we read about in Scripture.

In his book 24/6: A Prescription for a Happier, Healthier Life, physician Matthew Sleeth noted that the only one of the Ten Commandments to begin with the word “remember” is the one about the Sabbath. As Sleeth put it, “It’s almost as if God knew we would forget.” If we do remember, we often think of the Sabbath as a burden instead of a gift. But as Jesus said, man was not made for the Sabbath; the Sabbath was made for man.

And that is because God is for us, not against us. Remember the Sabbath, not to follow a rule but to receive one of God’s gift to His creation. In doing so, we remember our frailty, and we can be refreshed by hearing His voice and better following His calling for our lives.

Speaker Johnson Warns About the Threat Socialism and Communism Pose to Americans

Aug 20, 2026Jerry CoxCultureCommunism, Socialism

Recently, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins sat down with House Speaker Mike Johnson to discuss some of the issues facing our nation. Among them was the rise of socialism and socialist candidates as well as the threat that socialist ideology poses to everyday Americans.

Earlier this year Rasmussen reported that support for capitalism has declined since 2023, and a growing share of likely voters now say socialism is better. On the whole, most Americans still support free markets — but that support has dwindled.

During their conversation, Speaker Johnson discussed socialism’s appeal among younger Americans, saying,

You have a lot of young people who are swayed with this idea that they’ll get free stuff, you know, and no one seems to want to finish and explain to them, you might get a few free things for a short while, but you’re going to give up your freedom and ultimately you might have to give up your life. That’s what’s happened in history.

Last November, Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral election. Mamdani, 34, belongs to the socialist Working Families Party. In his victory speech, Mamdani promised New Yorkers a “new age,” saying, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

Unfortunately, there is nothing “new” about what Mamdani is saying. During the last century, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, and others made similar promises to their citizens, and they all met with the same results. Many young people have been taught that socialism and communism failed in the past because they weren’t properly implemented, but that’s not the case. Socialism and communism failed every time they were implemented, because they are fatally flawed.

After the election, our friend Joseph Backholm published a list of some of socialism’s and communism’s basic flaws:

1. Socialism misunderstands human nature and implies that people will be virtuous as long as they have enough money. Then, ironically, it assumes everyone with money is sinister.

2. Socialism takes from the capable and gives to the less capable, ensuring that resources won’t ever be used productively.

3. Socialism destroys competition and consequently destroys innovation.

4. Socialism destroys people’s incentive to be productive by denying them the benefit of their labor. It always produces fewer, lower-quality products.

5. Socialism assumes I have the right to other people’s property just because they have more than I do. It depends upon and incentivizes greed.

6. Socialism denies people the dignity of having what they earn and earning what they have.

7. Socialism assumes people engaged in commerce always operate with corrupt motives, but people in government never do.

8. While claiming to decentralize power, it always centralizes power with a handful of bureaucrats.

9. Socialism assumes it’s always unjust for one person to have more than another, when real justice means the dishonest and unskilled shouldn’t have as much as the honest and skilled.

10. Socialism assumes humanity’s natural state is prosperity and rages over the fact that we aren’t all rich, when in reality the natural state is poverty, and capitalism is the only reason we aren’t all poor.

Joseph concluded by rightly pointing out, “Of course, none of this means a capitalist system doesn’t have weaknesses, but it can produce good outcomes and has. Communism never has because it assumes a world that does not exist and never will.”

Over the decades, other pundits have pointed out that socialism and communism are oppressive because they cannot work without using force against everyday citizens.

Americans — and especially Christians — need to understand socialism’s basic problems and its track record. This is a fatally flawed belief system that has produced disastrous results every time.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

Return to What Built the West

Aug 5, 2026Erin HoganCultureCultural Commentaries, Culture, Western Civilization

C.S. Lewis, when writing the final book of his interplanetary science fiction series, decided on a name for his climax book based on a poem by sixteenth century Scottish poet David Lyndsay. In this poem, Lindsey referenced the shade of the biblical Tower of Babel as “the shadow of that hideous strength.” When Lewis wrote his book That Hideous Strength, he had already faced a tumultuous twentieth century. Two world wars had torn through the world and the hearts of thousands of battle-worn soldiers across the globe. The twentieth century also brought about a significant rise in industrialization and technocratic society which dehumanized society in ways that were new and disturbing. Politics became controversial as totalitarian measures like emergency private property seizures were taking place and a new technological reproduction preventative called contraception was on the rise. Dictators like Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler dominated the national picture of the century with the mass killing of millions.

As Lewis predicted, man’s technological advances took on a dramatically different result than its original intent. Technology was supposed to make life easier, provide additional protections for national security, and improve the health and quality of life for all humanity. Thankfully, many of these advances did result in a better livelihood for millions of people across the world. On the other hand, technological advances, in many ways, have resulted in the loss of understanding of what it means to be human. As ethics and morality, stemming from Christianity, have been set aside for secularism and postmodernism, the advances that were supposed to advance and help humanity have also dehumanized it. This can be seen in the advancement of radical abortion as a form of birth control and transgenderism as a way to express yourself, ignoring biological reality.

In his new book The Desecration of Man, Dr. Carl Trueman describes this radical drifting away from God when he writes, “We have desecrated that which should be sacred and yet failed to fulfill either the Marxist goal of true liberation or the Nietzschean goal of creating our own rich, sacred meanings to replace those we have destroyed.” In other words, secularism, postmodernism, Marxism, and other false ideologies failed humanity and dehumanized it in the process. Only a return to Christianity and what built the West will direct humanity in the right direction again. This is a return to truth worth fighting for.