Author: Kerby Anderson

Kerby Anderson
Arthur Brooks begins his article by asking if you are feeling a little guilty about reading his article. He explains that we might feel that way because it is taking time away from something else you might feel you should be doing. We have deadlines and obligations nipping at our heels.
The title of his article is “How to be Less Busy and More Happy.” As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, Arthur Brooks has been investigating what makes people happy. He has a podcast with the name, “How to Build a Happy Life.”
According to a recent survey by Pew Research Center, a majority (52%) of Americans are usually trying to do more than one thing at a time. The survey also found that nearly two-thirds (60%) said that sometimes they feel too busy to enjoy life. That number approached three-fourths (74%) when asking parents with children under the age of 18, who admit they feel too busy to enjoy life.
The solution to excessive busyness is simple: do less. But he acknowledges that is easier said than done. But don’t give up yet. Researchers have learned that well-being involves a “sweet spot” of busyness. Put another way, too little discretionary time or even too much free time reduces life satisfaction.
He also admits “that for most of us, too much discretionary time is scarier than too little, and we overcorrect to avoid it. If we don’t know how to use it, free time can become idleness, which leads to boredom, and humans hate boredom.”
The trouble for most people is the fact that their lives are far below the sweet spot of discretionary time. That’s why I suggest all of us take a moment to reevaluate our lives and time commitments.

Kerby Anderson
Ira Stoll begins his commentary by mentioning that Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, is currently the #1 New York Times bestseller. But he then adds that there may be “another, non-technology possible contributor to the mental health crisis that’s getting less attention but may be just as significant.”
That factor is church attendance. It appears that as church attendance goes down, mental health issues go up. A study in Harvard Public Health estimated “about 40 percent of the increasing suicide rate in the United States from 1999 to 2014 might be attributed to declines in attendance at religious services during this period.” Another study estimated that declining church attendance from 1991 to 2019 accounted for 28 percent of the increase in depression among teenagers.
A major review of 215 studies reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that “weekly religious service attendance is longitudinally associated with lower mortality risk, lower depression, less suicide, better cardiovascular disease survival, better health behaviors, and greater marital stability, happiness, and purpose in life.”
Ira Stoll observes that “plenty of mental-health clinicians I know see in religious-service attendance some of the habits and attitudes that can help to combat depression and anxiety. There’s the supportive community, the face-to-face interaction, the getting out of bed and out of the house, the sense of purpose and meaning, the expressions of gratitude and humility.”
And these are just the social benefits of church attendance. There are also spiritual benefits that come from committing your life to Jesus Christ, spending time in Bible study and prayer. That’s why going to church is so important.

Kerby Anderson
The fertility rate in this country hit a record-low last year. The total fertility rate dropped to 1.62 births per woman (we need 2.1 for replacement). But the US decline in fertility is not unique. Nearly every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline.
Columnist Don Feder was on my radio program recently to predict that a demographic winter is coming. He talked about countries in Asia that used to be known for their high birthrates. Japan’s economy is slipping into recession, due in part to lower domestic demand because of a falling population. China is set to lose 60 percent of its population by the end of the century.
South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate. Almost a quarter of the workforce is 70 and older. There are more Koreans in their 70s than in their 20s.
At the 2023 Natal Conference, Kevin Dolan warned that if birth rates continue to plummet, civilization will end. He predicts we “will pass through a bottleneck tighter than the Black Death.” As a millennial he laments that only 60 percent of his peers will marry and have children. The percentage will likely be even lower for Gen Z.
The one exception to this decline is religious people. Although he is Jewish, he acknowledged that Catholics and Evangelicals do have more children. To that list he also added Orthodox Jews and Mormons. Religious people have children because procreation is an act of faith. I quoted Psalm 127 that reminds us that “children are a heritage from the Lord,” and we can be blessed if we have a quiver full of them.
We are headed for a demographic winter unless we return to a biblical view of procreation and family.

Kerby Anderson
This election year is certain the bring some significant surprises, and one of those is the possibility of a presidential tie. Dr. Merrill Matthews was on my radio program recently to talk about his article in The Hill.
A presidential candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win. Most people believe that much of the electoral map is already determined. That means that President Joe Biden can be expected to win 226 electoral votes, while former president Donald Trump can be expected to win 219.  The remaining 93 electoral votes come from the seven “swing states.”
If Biden won North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona and Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada, both would have 269 electoral votes. Another scenario is if Biden won Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona and Trump won Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan, there would be a 269-vote tie. In either case, the House would determine who serves as president, and the Senate would determine who serves as vice-president.
This outcome is less likely because of the very real possibility of “faithless electors.” Most states require their electors to vote for the state’s winner (though there are two states, which can split their vote). Some states (including some swing states) do not have a law prohibiting faithless electors. In that case, one or two electors could decide who would be the next president.
One final point: a third-party candidate could change some of this calculation as well. Independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and prospective Green Party candidate Jill Stein will likely affect the vote, especially in some of these “swing states.”
Perhaps you can now see why I say that we may be in for some significant surprises in the election year.

Kerby Anderson
Perhaps you have heard of the white high school principal in Baltimore who was removed from his position for allegedly making racist and antisemitic comments. I say “allegedly” since he didn’t make any of those comments. The audio was an AI-generated attempt to mimic his voice so that the school’s former black athletic director could get him fired.
As one commentator quipped, “Jessie Smollett must be devastated he didn’t think of this first!” Anyone who wants to perpetrate a fake hate crime or ruin the reputation of someone they hate only needs to use AI to accomplish the task.
The clip was posted to a popular Instagram account in the Baltimore community. This prompted an investigation from school officials and the police department. It was also sent to three teachers. One of them forwarded the email with the phony audio clip to the media and to the NAACP. She also forwarded it to a student who she knew would spread the message around to various social media outlets and throughout the school.
You can imagine the results and the amount of grief that came down on the head of the high school principal. I have likened spreading gossip on social media to opening a down pillow in the wind. You will never get the feathers back into the pillow.
I have written many radio commentaries about fake hate crimes over the last 14 years of doing these commentaries. This is a first, but it will not be the last. As one commentator put it, “hate hoaxers are using AI. It was bound to come to this.”
My message to media is not to be so trusting of an audio or video clip. You need to be more skeptical. At the very least, report your story with a disclaimer that you haven’t checked the veracity of the clip.
My message to you is simple: don’t trust everything you see or hear.

Kerby Anderson
The Pro-Hamas campus protests could only last so long before some people in charge exercised some common sense. One of my cliches on radio is “common sense is breaking out all over.” We are seeing that in the words and actions of people who understand what is happening.
Even at Columbia University, police were called and arrested 108 protesters last month, but not much has happened. The President at the University of Texas at Austin took stronger action and was criticized by the faculty. But presidents and university administrators are starting to realize they cannot continue to function with these protests on campus. Classes have gone online, and graduations have been cancelled.
Bill Maher on his TV show encouraged the protesters to start protesting truly evil groups like: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He also wondered why they weren’t protesting North Korea, China, and Myanmar.
On radio, I’ve questioned why there has been no protest about other Muslims being killed. These students never protested when Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used poison gas against his own people. They have not been in the streets when Muslims in Sudan kill millions in an endless civil war. Boko Haram kidnaps whole villages of women, and yet we had a short protest ten years ago and but nothing since.
Common sense seems to be breaking out in the corporate world. Google recently fired 28 employees who were protesting the company’s cloud-computing contract with Israel. According to the company’s vice president, the employees “took over office spaces, defaced our property and physically impeded the work of other Googlers.” They were all shown the door.
We need more people in charge to exercise common sense. And we need to tell the protesting students they are focused on the wrong cause.

Kerby Anderson
Government gets bigger every year, but how government gets bigger isn’t so easy to understand. There seems to be about the same number of federal employees, but the size and scope of government continues to grow. John DiIulio writes about this in his book and scholarly paper at the Brookings Institution.
Government grows larger by using three types of “administrative proxies.” The first are state and local governments. The EPA, for example, has fewer than 20,000 employees. But 90 percent of EPA programs are completely administered by thousands of state government employees, largely funded by Washington.
Second, there are for-profit businesses and contractors that also mask the large size of the government. In the Defense Department, for example, the hundreds of thousands of civilian workers have been supplemented by hundreds of thousands of for-profit contract employees. Today, the government spends more on defense contracts than it does on all official federal bureaucrats.
Third, there are the various tax-exempt or independent sectors, which have more than doubled in the last thirty years. Many of them owe their jobs to federal or intergovernmental grant, contract, or fee funding.
These facts will be important to remember when Congress and the public debate the federal budget. Although the number of federal employees looks about the same as in previous decades, the federal budget is more than three times larger.
The federal workload has been dispersed and makes government look much smaller than it really is. We do have a big government and should not fall for this federal shell game that tries to hide from taxpayers the real size and scope of government.

Kerby Anderson
Today is the National Day of Prayer. It is a vital part of our American heritage. The first call to prayer happened before the American Revolution. In 1775, the Continental Congress called on the colonists to pray for wisdom as they considered how they would respond to the King of England.
Perhaps one of the most powerful calls to prayer came from President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. In 1863, he issued a proclamation for a day of “humiliation, fasting and prayer.” Here is some of that proclamation:

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand, which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

In 1952, Congress passed and President Harry Truman signed a resolution that declared an annual, national day of prayer. In 1988, President Reagan signed into law a bill that designated the first Thursday of May as the time for the National Day of Prayer.
It is estimated that there have been more than 130 national calls to prayer, humiliation, fasting, and thanksgiving by presidents of the United States. There have been 60 Presidential Proclamations for a National Day of Prayer because every president has signed these proclamations.
Today is the National Day of Prayer. Please pray for this nation and its leaders.

Kerby Anderson
What impact will robots and artificial intelligence have on jobs? In previous commentaries, I have discussed some of these questions and concerns. If you don’t want to be replaced by a robot, we are told, choose a service job, like cutting hair or serving food.
A recent article about fast-food robots dismantles that advice. Ryan Mills begins with a story of a restaurant providing high-quality, affordable Mediterranean dishes at a food truck park in San Francisco. It was created by three Stanford grad students. Each day, a small team prepares the ingredients. Then the robot takes over.
One review said: “The bad news: Artificial Intelligence is going to kill us. The good news: AI can sure serve up some tasty Mediterranean at a beautiful price.” The co-founder described their invention as what would happen if a vending machine and a restaurant had a baby.
There are many other examples. Sweetgreen (an LA salad chain) debuted its fully automated “Infinite Kitchen” at a restaurant in Illinois. Salad bowls move down a conveyor belt and the robot automatically portions out ingredients.
A CaliExpress burger joint has a robot that cooks burgers and fries. The kiosks, powered by artificial intelligence, allow customers to order and pay. Many believe this may be the first restaurant where all the cooking and ordering are fully automated. The inventor says the robots “don’t call in sick, they don’t get drunk the night before work and come in with a hangover.”
Other restaurants are experimenting with robots to deliver food. And robot bartenders and baristas are in the works. We will likely see more and more robots as states raise the minimum wage and labor costs increase.

Kerby Anderson
Jonathan Haidt has been on the Point of View radio talk show to discuss his previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind. He has now compiled his research in his new book: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
He begins his book by having us imagine that a visionary billionaire wants to establish the first permanent human settlement on Mars and chose your ten-year-old daughter for the endeavor. You don’t give permission since there would be significant danger to your child (radiation and cellular damage, less gravity affecting bone density and growth).
But then imagine there is another company that doesn’t seem to know anything about child development nor care about child safety. This company doesn’t even require parental permission. All the child needs to do is check a box stating she has obtained parental permission. Then she can blast off to Mars.
His first chapter focuses on “The Surge of Suffering.” He explains that there was little sign of an impending mental issues crisis in the 2000s. But suddenly in the early 2010s, things changed due to smart phones and social media.
When his co-author and he finished writing The Coddling of the American Mind, they already had data through 2016. Teenagers agreed with the statement that they had experienced a long period of feeling “sad, empty, or depressed.” Something changed between 2010 and 2015, which is the period he calls “The Great Rewiring.” His book has graphs on the increase in major depression among teens, an increase in mental illness among college students, and an increase in anxiety prevalence by age.
He concludes that parents need to be involved, but we also need some government action and some responsibility from tech companies. This is a crisis that needs our attention.

Kerby Anderson
George Barna has written a book to help parents discipline their children into spiritual champions. Raising children is a privilege, but also a daunting assignment. Parents have a God-given responsibility to guide their children, but it is often difficult to understand how to do that effectively and biblically.
One significant problem is the stark reality that so many Christian parents do not have a biblical worldview, as determined by the decades of surveys conducted by George Barna. As he reminded us on the radio program, it is difficult to pass on what you don’t have. The obvious first step is for parents to make sure they have a biblical worldview.
His first few chapters describe the importance of children and the need for parents to disciple them. His second section details what it takes to make a disciple, and lays out four practices that characterize genuine disciples of Jesus. The final section is a warning about how media and church-based ministries are affecting our children.
We cannot delegate disciple-making to the church for two reasons. First, it is the parent’s responsibility to disciple a child. Second, pastors may not be equipped to teach a biblical worldview. We talked about Barna’s latest research showing how many pastors (and especially youth pastors) do not have a biblical worldview.
It appears that most of what our children will be as adults is essentially determined by age 13. Their core beliefs, morals, values, and desires have become established by that time, though we can always have an influence on our children.
His book is a reminder that we need to be intentional in the teaching and modeling that parents and grandparents provide. We need to be “Raising Spiritual Champions,” and we need to begin today.

Kerby Anderson
Summer is months away but there is already news of an energy shortage on the Texas power grid. Most people would not think Texas would have an energy scare. But officials asked power generators to postpone scheduled maintenance “to help alleviate potential tight conditions.”
Usually the grid has excess power-generation capacity in the Spring, especially given that the temperatures are in the 80s. One reason for the shortage is population growth, but others have to do with the electricity needed for new data centers.
Data centers need power 24/7 and cannot be shut off in the way that manufacturing plants or even bitcoin mining can be shut down when there is peak energy demand. Although we need data servers in this cyber age, it is worth mentioning that one significant amount of energy is merely used for pornography. Internet usage accounts for 10 percent of the world’s total energy consumption and is estimated to reach 20 percent in a few years. One study estimated that 35 percent of the Internet bandwidth is pornography.
Data centers already account for about 2.5 percent of US electricity but are expected to use more than 20 percent by the end of this decade. The reason for that is artificial intelligence. A typical web search uses less than one watt of power. An AI-powered search requires 100 watts. Training an AI search uses 1,000 watts.
A decade ago, The Guardian warned that “viral cat videos are warming the planet.” We now know more about what sectors of the Internet use electricity. We also know that we have more electric vehicles on the road than any other time in history.
Before we get to hot summers that demand even more electricity, we need to have a serious conversation about energy use and energy demands.

Kerby Anderson
Jean Twenge begins her essay by suggesting a thought experiment. “Imagine that a company began mass-producing a new toy. This was not a toy for little kids; instead, it appealed most to adolescents. The toy became wildly popular, first with teens and eventually with younger children as well. The toy was so engaging that some teens stayed up until 2 a.m. just to play with it. Before long, teens spent so much time using the toy that they cut back on socializing in person.”
As you can probably guess, she is talking about the smartphone that began to change the lives of teenagers beginning around 2012. She argues that “the growing popularity of smartphones and social media over the past decade and a half has fundamentally changed the lives of teenagers.”
I would encourage parents and grandparents to read her article linked to this commentary. She provides graphs showing in-person socializing decreasing and an increasing number of sleep-deprived teens who are sleeping less than seven hours a night. There are graphs showing a significant increase in major depression and loneliness. Also, she documents teens decrease in adult activities (getting a driver’s license, going on a date).
She also takes the time to eliminate other possible explanations. Could the increase in depression be due to school shootings or the opioid crisis? She reminds us that these (and other) explanations are specific to the US. We see a similar uptick in other countries.
She concludes with specific recommendations that might strike some as radical. But she then explains the cost-benefit analysis for keeping children and young teens off social media. She makes a compelling case.

Kerby Anderson
Most left-leaning economists cannot understand why American consumers are complaining when many economic indicators are positive. One of those individuals is Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize-winning columnist for the New York Times.
He argued in a previous column that inflation was not a problem and used his recent trip to the grocery store to prove it. “Now, I go grocery shopping myself, and am occasionally startled by the total at the cash register—although that’s usually because I wasn’t factoring in the price of that bottle of scotch I picked up along with the meat and vegetables.” He did admit that he had “no idea” what he paid for the same groceries a few years ago.
Michael Powell, writing in The Atlantic, uses this story to illustrate the growing chasm between liberal economists and American consumers. Economists point to low unemployment and a cooling inflation rate (though the consumer price index was 3.5 percent higher in March than a year ago).
Meanwhile, consumers see higher prices just about everywhere they look. The consumer price index for food rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2023. Gas prices have gone up 50 percent in the past four years. Fuel-oil prices jumped by more than half in the same period. Home prices have gone up nearly 50 percent nationwide since the start of the pandemic.
Paul Krugman has an answer for Americans: “Maybe my message here sounds like Obi-Wan Kenobi in reverse: Look, don’t trust your feelings.” Michael Powell responds that Americans would be “wiser to trust their feelings and checking accounts than to rely on liberal economists riffing as Jedi masters.” That is why there is such a gap between liberal economists and American consumers.

Kerby Anderson
Over the last few months, the word “unsustainable” has been frequently used. The GAO (Government Accountability Office) proclaimed: “The federal government is on an unsustainable long-term fiscal path that poses serious economic, national security, and social challenges if not addressed.”
The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, said in his 60 Minutes interview: “The U.S. federal government is on an unsustainable fiscal path. And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy. So, it is unsustainable.”
The country burdened with more than $34 trillion in national debt should be having a serious conversation about how to turn the economy around. Don’t expect any serious discussion from most candidates this election season.
Fortunately, Scott Powell makes a convincing case for the need for “radical economic change.” The current US debt-to-GDP ratio now exceeds 122 percent. As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, that puts us in the danger zone.
He is realistic enough to show that we need both spending reductions as well as new sources of revenue. Cutting spending is politically difficult but also constitutionally difficult since two-thirds (65%) of the federal budget is mandatory spending. But something must be done to reduce the size of the federal government.
The other way to balance a budget is to get more sources of income. He points to the country’s massive oil and gas reserves. The US is number one among nations in both natural gas and oil reserves. He also argues that another way to pay down the national debt is for the federal government to “sell half of its 640 million acres of public land.”
These ideas might seem radical, but we need to ask candidates running for office this year whether they have a better solution. I doubt they do.

Kerby Anderson
Today is Earth Day. I was a participant in the first Earth Day as a high school student and remember one equation. It was I=PAT. The environmental impact (I) was equal to the population (P) multiplied by affluence (A) multiplied by technology (T). In other words, as a country grew in population and affluence and technology, the worse the pollution and environmental impact. The obvious conclusion was that the best way to protect the planet would be to have fewer people, less wealth, and simpler technology.
It was an interesting equation, but it turned out to be wrong as countries got richer. John Tierney pointed this out in his column in The New York Times. He acknowledges that the “IPAT theory may have made intuitive sense, but it didn’t jibe with the data that has been analyzed since that first Earth Day.” Researchers instead found that the graphs of environmental impact with a simple upward-sloping line were wrong. Instead, it turns out that the line flattens out and then slopes downward. This is called a Kuznets curve.
Here’s the trend: as countries get richer, they have more incentive and more financial means to clean up pollution. Of course, there are exceptions (especially with countries with inept governments and a poor system of property rights). But the general rule is that as incomes go up, people focus on pollution.
Tierney says: “As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy.”
I think this suggests a positive environmental future for developing countries. They may be ascending the Kuznets curve right now, but may soon be ready to address environmental concerns.

Kerby Anderson
A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal began with these sentences. “Memo to companies: Go ahead and cancel your DEI programs. That’s more or less the message of a recent report commissioned by the UK government finding that diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” The report found little evidence that DEI had any positive effect on corporate culture.
In fact, it is difficult to say what DEI means. The terms are, according to the report, “ambiguous, rapidly evolving, and often conflated.” Although the current fad is to focus on diversity among racial, social, or other lines, “a visibly diverse organization is not necessarily meaningfully heterogenous.” The Wall Street Journal editors concluded that “viewpoint diversity may be more important for a thriving company.”
As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, cancelling DEI programs, and closing DEI departments can save money. US companies spend $8 billion a year on DEI training. The other savings is in the legal area. Even in the UK, there have been lawsuits against companies because their DEI policies have “violated British protections on freedom of belief by punishing employees who dissented from the DEI orthodoxy on race or transgenderism.”
Last month I talked about the fact that the University of Florida announced it was ending its experiment with DEI. The college closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer and eliminated DEI positions, thereby saving more than $5 million each year on the controversial program. The Florida legislature passed a law prohibiting state funding of DEI programs and University of Florida President Ben Sasse implemented it.
I suggest other companies and universities follow their example.

Kerby Anderson
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban TikTok in this country unless the company was sold to Americans. Chinese national security laws require Chinese-owned companies to assist the government in intelligence-gathering.
But Lathan Watts reminds us that our own government has also been engaging in censorship and surveillance of US citizens. That is why he wonders if putting TikTok under American ownership would merely be an example of “jumping out of the wok and into the fire.”
He cites two recent Supreme Court cases that illustrate his concerns. The first is Murthy v. Missouri. The Biden administration is accused of a coordinated campaign to force social media companies to censor what the government deemed as “misinformation.” During the oral arguments, one Supreme Court justice announced to the attorneys that her biggest concern “is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government.” But isn’t that why the First Amendment was written in the first place?
The other case is NRA v. Vullo that involved the state of New York using its power to force banks and insurance companies to deny services to the National Rifle Association. Perhaps you don’t have any problem with that action. Would you feel differently if another state encouraged financial institutions to deny services to the ACLU or Greenpeace?
One week prior to the Supreme Court hearings, a US House subcommittee documented how the Treasury Department colluded with America’s largest banks to monitor customer financial transactions. The suggested criteria include transactions with stores like Cabela’s and the purchase of “religious texts.”
All of this illustrates the authoritarian impulses we see today in America. That is why Lathan and I wonder if transferring TikTok ownership to Americans would merely be jumping from the wok into the fire.

Kerby Anderson
Perhaps you have noticed that many young Christians are being convinced to deconstruct their faith. Occasionally we read about a prominent Christian author or musician who announces they are leaving the Christian faith.
The irony of this is the fact that there is an increasing amount of evidence for the Bible and Christian faith. We seem to be living in “the golden age of apologetics.” But it isn’t the evidence that causes these people to leave the faith but usually it’s their concern over social issues like abortion or transgenderism.
Fortunately, there are some excellent books that address this trend of deconstruction. Sean McDowell and John Marriott have written, Set Adrift: Deconstructing What You Believe Without Sinking Your Faith. They establish the biblical foundation for our faith and then provide practical advice on how to rethink and reassemble what is truly Christian and culturally relevant. They also utilize creeds as boundary markers for what is essential.
Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett have written, The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond. They argue that “deconstruction is a death of sorts.” It is not only a death of beliefs but a death of their community and relationships. That last point is significant since deconstruction not only affects the person going through it but also has an impact on friends, family, and the church.
People throughout the centuries have been questioning their faith and having doubt about biblical truth. But this current phenomenon of deconstruction comes from secular leaders and even progressive Christians promoting “inclusivity” and “tolerance.” It is therefore important to understand how our culture is promoting deconstruction and to know how to provide encouragement to people experiencing doubt.

Kerby Anderson
J.K. Rowling is best known as the Harry Potter author, but she is also beginning to be known as a political activist. She lives in Scotland and has been leading the charge against Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act.
The bill criminalizes “stirring up hatred” in such a way that “a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, abusive, or insulting.” There need not be any specific victim of the crime.
In order to draw attention to this authoritarian bill, she posted this statement. “I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”
She won’t be arrested, but it is likely that someone will be arrested sometime in the future for this abusive hate crime law. It is also ironic that when the law was first introduced, it was put forward as an attempt to amend an 1837 blasphemy law. Some critics have suggested that it merely swaps out one blasphemy law about religion for another blasphemy law about political correctness.
Most of the hate crime laws in this country or in other countries were drafted to address the problem of racism. This law clearly wants to expand the focus from racism to transgenderism. When J.K. Rowling heard she would not be arrested, she responded: “I hope every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement, and I trust that all women — irrespective of profile or financial means — will be treated equally under the law.”
Hate crime laws have always been a bad idea, but this is even worse. It criminalizes the commonsense observation about the difference between women and trans women.