Here’s a quick recap of the week’s top stories from Family Council and our friends.
From Family Council
A Christian Reflection on the Dangers of Sports Betting: A growing body of research shows sports betting carries serious social costs. Christians need to understand what is at stake when it comes to gambling on sports. Keep Reading.
Arkansas Attorney General Asks Court to Dismiss Abortion Lawsuit: Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin’s office has asked a Pulaski County court to dismiss a lawsuit trying to strike down the state’s pro-life laws. Keep Reading.
One in Four Likely Voters Now Supports Socialism: Earlier this month 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 favor free markets — but that support has dwindled. Keep Reading.
Yet Another Study Shows Marijuana Use Raises Risk of Stroke: Researchers at the University of Cambridge released a study this month that demonstrates marijuana use raises a person’s risk of stroke by 37%. The the results were based on health data from more than 100 million participants in multiple studies over the course of several years. Keep Reading.
Guest Column: Jesus Would Have Baked the Cake (and other nonsense Jesus would not have done.): On a Saturday morning in 2012, sitting on my porch reading an actual newspaper, I first learned of a Denver baker named Jack Phillips. Keep Reading.
Making Sense of Mixed Signals on Church Attendance, Religious Affiliation in America: Some reports seem to show Christianity growing in America while others suggest it’s declining. Which is it? Keep Reading.
We Knew What A Woman Was: Our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom and XX-XY Athletics recently produced a video in celebration of Women’s History Month. The ad highlights how the ACLU’s legal team could not define the word “woman” for the U.S. Supreme Court. Watch It Here.
From Our Friends
HHS Tells States Not to Remove Children From Parents Who Affirm Biological Reality. From Daily Citizen.
UN children’s book fair promotes polyamory and surrogacy. From Live Action.
$10,000 to Gamble: What Happened When a Journalist Tried Online Sports Betting? From Stop Predatory Gambling.
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.
Marco Rubio has made a name, and a meme, for himself as the indispensable figure in the American government. Last week, the Secretary of State added to his reputation at the Munich Security Conference, offering a statesman-like defense of the West, emphasizing the historic and religious foundations shared by America and Europe. He also critiqued a false and misleading view of civilizational history.
The fall of the Soviet Union, Rubio said, led to the dangerous delusion,
that we had entered, ‘the end of history;’ that every nation would now be a liberal democracy; that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood; that the rules-based global order—an overused term—would now replace the national interest; and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.
Though Fukuyama’s view helps explain why progressive politicians constantly claim to be on “the right side of history,” Rubio soundly rejected such thinking as “a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and . . . the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.” Such thinking, Rubio added, “has cost us dearly.”
Like Winston Churchill’s 1941 appeal to the United States—where he rallied the New World to partner with the Old World amid World War II—Rubio grounded a similar call in our shared heritage:
The men who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.
We are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir . . .
We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.
Rubio’s speech appealed to a different understanding of civilizational history and stressed two key points. First, civilizations decline if they are not stewarded and protected. They must be protected from threats from within. Second, civilizations conflict with other civilizations that are built on alternative visions. Thus, they must be defended from threats from without.
In response to Rubio’s speech, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) stated that Western culture has a “thin” foundation, and that culture itself is an “evolving thing that is a response to the conditions that we live in.” Instead, it is “material, class-based” interests which should prevail.
Ocasio-Cortez’s views of social Darwinism and neo-Marxism also adopt a Hegelian philosophy of “History.” All is explained by the economic class struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. After stumbling around a good bit, the Congresswoman advocated a rehashed form of Critical Theory, which radically misunderstands human nature and historical facts. For quick reference to the terror, torture, famine, massacres, and atrocities that result when history and culture are reduced to class struggle, see The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University.
In contrast, Rubio spoke to why America was committed to defending Western Civilization. Because doing so was defending “a way of life” that provided more freedom and opportunity than any other civilization in history. While not perfect, Western civilization “. . . has every reason to be proud of its history,” Rubio said.
Even more, it is the choices we make, not blind historical trends, that will shape the future. According to Rubio, “our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make . . ..[W]e in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”
Christians should be the first to defend and promote what is good and worthy of preserving. We should also reject the delusion that blind historical forces canbring inevitable progress to the world. As Os Guinness and others articulated in the recent documentary Truth Rising, Western civilization is at a critical moment. How will we respond?
This Breakpoint was co-authored by Andrew Carico.
Copyright 2026 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.
Above: Charlie Kirk speaks in Fayetteville, Arkansas. (File Photo: 2022)
Unsurprisingly, on September 11, 2001, I wept. I also wept, unexpectedly, on September 11, 2011. Perhaps it was delayed grief, but mostly, it was a delayed realization. Sitting that Sunday morning with my young daughters, only 6, 4, and 2 at the time, it struck me how different their world was from the one I wanted for them.
The same sense struck this week, on September 10. The assassination of Charlie Kirk seems to mark a new era, a world no one wants but may very well be here. Calling the murder a “tragedy for all of us,” U.K. comedian and commentator Konstantin Kisin wrote:
I hope I’m wrong. But tonight feels like some sort of invisible line has been crossed that we didn’t even know was there. … [T]o murder a young father simply for doing debates and mobilising young people to vote for a party that represents half of America? This is something else.
Charlie’s death is a tragedy for his wife, his children and his family. I don’t pray often. I am praying for them tonight. But I fear his murder will be a tragedy for all of us in ways we will only understand as time unfolds.
I hope I’m wrong. I fear I’m not.
Kisin is not wrong about lines being crossed, though the Christian must not fear. We must, however, squarely face the sober realities of this moment.
Kirk’s murder followed another this week, in Charlotte, of a young woman from Ukraine riding a public train. Iryna Zarutska was stabbed by a man who should have been in prison or at least institutionalized, and she was then left to die by people too engrossed in their screens to notice or too jaded to care. Together, these atrocities reveal realities about our culture and how it has shaped those within it that many will find unthinkable. But we had better think about it anyway.
Zarutska’s killer is a terrible example of the mental and social brokenness that permeates modern life. The bystanders who did not come to her defense or to her aid are, like the social media commenters and media personalities who callously commented on Kirk’s assassination, examples of the rabid and pervasive dehumanization that infects the Western world.
In a recent Breakpoint commentary, released prior to the atrocities of this week, Abdu Murray argued that this “post-truth world that elevates feelings and preferences above facts and truth has collapsed the distinction between a person’s ideas and their identity. And so, the social erasure of cancel culture has calcified into something darker.” That something darker, he argued, is “assassination culture.” He continued, “Unmoored from that objective standard for human value, we have made gods of ourselves and therefore justify eradicating any who dare to have other gods before us.”
This is precisely what Os Guinness warned of in the new film Truth Rising, that the West is squandering a unique heritage. A civilization built upon the ideal of human dignity, with a mixed and troubled history of working out that ideal, has now replaced it with something else. But racialized, sexualized, and politicized conceptions of human dignity only produce victims.
George Orwell is often credited as saying, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Charlie Kirk was a committed truth teller, with a remarkable gift for exposing and answering deceit. And yet, as he did this, he treated the deceived with the dignity they had as image bearers of their Creator, recognizing that they too were victims of their own bad ideas.
There is a cost to telling the truth. Our Lord has told us to count this cost. If Kisin is indeed correct, that cost is higher than we have imagined. This is indeed a civilizational moment. It is to this moment that we have been called as His people. As His people, we know that this moment is not some fatalistic inevitability, nor does it determine or define the Story of which we are part.
In a video circulating on social media, Charlie is asked why he went on campuses to talk with and try to persuade those who disagree with him. Charlie responded, “Because when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens.” It was a prophetic moment, but Kirk also demonstrated that we need not accept that. He showed that the conversation can be had; that it must be had. He showed that the truth still wins hearts and minds, and that lies can be opposed. And that it can all be done with a big smile.
It takes courage to tell the truth and to, as Paul wrote, “regard no one from a worldly point of view.” As Murray wrote, only the “ancient biblical truth about what it means to be human can heal our contemporary malady.”
It can be healed. This is not wishful thinking. This is the hope Christ secured for us all. As the banner on the Turning Point USA website proclaims, Charlie Kirk has been “received into the merciful arms of our loving Savior, who suffered and died for Charlie.”
Copyright 2025 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.
