The essay below written by Janice Shaw Crouse summarizes a study released last week in the The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Science that deals with the politicization of sex and gender over the last few decades in Western culture. The study “follows three years of lengthy, thorough work studying, analyzing and summarizing nearly 200 peer-reviewed studies beginning in 1950 and continuing to the present date.”

Crouse writes:

Quite obviously, ideology has overpowered research in numerous areas of individual and public well-being. It is equally obvious that there’s a huge disconnect when faulty claims about sexuality and gender are used to enact public policy that does not foster health and wellbeing and when there is a huge chasm between generally-accepted beliefs and what scientific findings show.

We’ve failed people who need understanding as well as support and help in order to lead healthy, productive lives. Pushing ideology serves the selfish goals and ambitions of those pushing the falsehoods rather than serving those who need help to get their lives on track in order to flourish.

View The New Atlantis study.

Source: The American Spectator

Exposing the Left’s Dogmatism on Sexual Orientation and Gender

A breakthrough report restores the primacy of scientific evidence.

By Janice Shaw Crouse

There’s a quote attributed to Ronald Reagan, “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.” It’s also that so many of those things that they know that “aren’t so” lead to bad policies based on those lies and distortions.

Take, for instance, the recent Supreme Court decision making same-sex marriage legal, overturning the vote of 31 states that had previously voted against it. That SCOTUS decision was based on the belief that science had established sexual orientation and gender identity as innate characteristics. Mainstream media had inundated the public with numerous arguments and feature stories about the problems faced by those individuals who, they said, cannot change their “inherent and unchangeable identity.” Those who seek to help individuals who are not happy with their perceived identity as LBGT have been subject to public and professional harassment, discrimination, ridicule and scorn. To assert that there’s no research basis for the position that sexual orientation is innate is an invitation to be dismissed as uninformed and cause for angry claims, without evidence, that people “are born” LGBT.

Now The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society released yesterday a whole issue focused on “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences.” The journal, published since 2003, has earned a reputation as “the nation’s premier journal of science, technology, and ethics.” Its editor, Adam Keiper, is equally well respected as a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Released internationally, this issue is a landmark report that follows three years of lengthy, thorough work studying, analyzing and summarizing nearly 200 peer-reviewed studies beginning in 1950 and continuing to the present date. This journal does not take a position in regard to the current controversies over these issues; instead, it identifies nearly 20 issues needing more research. Ironically, the study was prompted by an array of “enduring public health concerns.” Most importantly, it clearly identifies some pivotal findings in the biological, psychological, and social sciences.

• First, the journal reports that scientific evidence does not support the belief in sexual orientation as an “innate, biologically fixed human property.” Put simply, the assertion that people are “born that way” is not supported by peer-reviewed scientific studies.
• Second, the journal reports that no scientific evidence points to gender as an innate, fixed characteristic independent of biological sex. In other words, there is no such thing as “a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body.”
• Third, there is no evidence in the peer-reviewed research literature to support the idea that children who behave in gender-atypical ways will inevitably continue that behavior and, thus, should be encouraged to become transgender through hormone therapy or surgical alternation. Quite simply, a girl wearing jeans and playing with trucks or a boy who enjoys playing dolls with his sister will not inevitably grow up gender-confused and needing to be guided toward transgender identity.
• Fourth, discrimination — as a single factor — does not account for the fact that research establishes: non-heterosexual and transgender people have higher rates of mental health problems and far more behavioral and social problems than the general population. For instance, they are far more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and violence.

The Johns Hopkins University authors of the report are outstanding professors. Lawrence S. Mayer, M.B., M.S., Ph.D., is a scholar-in-residence at the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and is a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University. Paul R. McHugh, M.D. is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was, for twenty-five years, the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The facts are heart-rending: LGBT persons have higher rates of mental, behavioral and social problems. LGBT persons are 2 to 3 times more likely to have suffered childhood sexual abuse. LBGT persons have 2.5 times more risk of suicide than the general populations. Transgender individuals are almost 10 times more likely to attempt suicide. Individuals who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery are 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and a staggering 19 times more likely to succeed.

We’ve failed people who need understanding as well as support and help in order to lead healthy, productive lives. Pushing ideology serves the selfish goals and ambitions of those pushing the falsehoods rather than serving those who need help to get their lives on track in order to flourish.

Quite obviously, ideology has overpowered research in numerous areas of individual and public well-being. It is equally obvious that there’s a huge disconnect when faulty claims about sexuality and gender are used to enact public policy that does not foster health and wellbeing and when there is a huge chasm between generally-accepted beliefs and what scientific findings show. The two authors of this new research are not pushing an agenda; they are calling for honest, dispassionate research that will benefit those confused by these issues. Nobody benefits when ideology prevails over scientific research — least of all, those who are the subjects of the studies whose problems so often are swept under the rug of leftist certainty about “things they don’t know.”

Janice Shaw Crouse, a speechwriter for the first President Bush, is the author of Children at Risk and Marriage Matters.

By Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Socialism of any type leads to the destruction of the human spirit.” That premise, that truth, that touchstone, breaks the shackles that define economics as solely a materialist (and thus soulless) enterprise.

Source: Acton Commentary

The appeal of Bernie Sanders’ socialism is a puzzle to many, but it shouldn’t be, not if we understand how most people think about economics. Sanders’ appeal rises when economics is understood mechanistically, subject to impersonal forces and nefarious individuals. As a result, an economy can only be directed by the macro decisions of large and powerful entities like governments. Shallow moral appeals arise to justify socialist policies where success is not measured by the objective results of the policy, but by the moral good they ostensibly foster.

It is easy—very easy—to appeal to free education, the eradication of poverty, unlimited minimum wage ceilings and all the other promises made by those who don’t have any real experience in wealth creation. Most often their supporters don’t either, including the millennial followers of Bernie Sanders. We need to be patient with the ignorance of the young, but we should never acquiesce to it.

Economics is not a mechanistic enterprise. Economics is closely tied to human anthropology—the precepts that define what a human is, how one produces artifacts first for survival and then the building of culture, how one values nature and the principles applied to refashion matter into something new.

You can say that the presuppositions of economic theory draw from the anthropological dimension of human existence and not the other way around. This turns the common wisdom on its head, but historically the assertion finds support. A materialist reading of economics arose concurrently with the rise of the great materialist philosophers, chiefly Marx and the disciples that followed him.

Economics rightly understood then touches on deeper, transcendental truths. And, as the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn taught, any discussion about materialism and transcendence must answer the fundamental question about whether the final touchstone of truth lies inside or outside the human person. The answer determines how we comprehend the world around us and how we act in it. Here the materialist and traditionalist clash, and the first battleground is always language.

This point is often poorly understood by the traditionalist and contributes to his arguments falling on deaf ears. For example, the words capitalist and capitalism. The trap lies in the word itself. Capitalism sounds as bound to ideology as socialism is, albeit in different dress. It is perceived as a competing materialist economic theory. As a result, the shallow moral justifications of the socialist win the day, and the real and necessary connection between free markets and human flourishing is never comprehended.

The sad reality is that capitalist abuses abound (take crony capitalism for example, which in fact, is a type of soft fascism). Such abuses should not be defended, but using the terms implicitly defends them.

It is difficult to rebut the shallow moral appeals of the socialist. These moral arguments appeal to the young because they are inexperienced. Who can be against the eradication of poverty? This ignorance is aided and abetted by the tenured class who, lacking any experience in wealth creation and the risks associated with it, presume their paychecks appear as a divine right and conclude that the greedy withhold the largesse from others.

An April 2016 article in the Washington Post titled “A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows” provides some insights. The article’s author Max Ehrenfreund writes that the rejection of “capitalism” is a view held by a majority of millennials. Ehrenfreund says that millennials see capitalism as crony capitalism, and the lurch from one financial crisis to the next during their short lifetimes affirms it. Unfortunately, Ehrenfreund collapses the term “free market” into “capitalist,” thereby subsuming human flourishing into the same materialist worldview as the people he writes about. This mars his analysis, but the data remains valuable nonetheless.

Human flourishing is an anthropological issue, but if materialism holds the day, the density of economic ignorance will intensify. Christopher Ingraham took a cursory look at the reading lists of Ivy League universities in “What Ivy league students are reading that you aren’t.”

Conspicuously absent are the books that examine economics from the anthropological viewpoint. It would be good if universities added to their reading list books such as Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which rightly perceives socialism as an enslavement of the soul, or even Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, which clarifies the relationship between economics and human flourishing.

Ignorance is alleviated by knowledge, but knowledge is more than information. Plato speaks of phronesis, a type of knowledge related to how to act and think in ways related to virtue, a moral understanding that penetrates deeper than immediate practicality and reaches for first principles. These concepts reach deep but appeal to a near universal yearning to comprehend things beyond their immediate appearance.

Unemployed by Alexander Stavenitz (1930)

This yearning is the reason the banal moral appeals and shallow criticisms of the socialist are so powerful to the inexperienced young and their poorly educated elders. Critics of socialist ideologues can fault the shallow moralism that putatively justifies the soul-crushing bondage of slavery to the state. However, until they recognize and employ the moral dimension of economics in ways that comport to real experience (and thus the soul), they simply will not be heard or comprehended.

Let’s go back to Solzhenitsyn. He writes, “Socialism of any type leads to the destruction of the human spirit.” That premise, that truth, that touchstone, breaks the shackles that define economics as solely a materialist (and thus soulless) enterprise. It warns of the nascent totalitarianism lurking in the heart of socialism. It opens history, the real experience of real men as judges of the moral claims that hold the imagination of the socialist in paralytic thrall and seduces the inexperienced and uneducated.

Moral claims, then, are important—a point the socialist implicitly understands, but the free marketer/capitalist often overlooks. Stories must be told that deal with the real experiences of real people. The publication of Solzhenitsyn’s multi-volume Gulag Archipelago decimated the Marxist intellectual establishment of Western Europe. These books chronicled how destructive the materialist economic theories were in practice. Socialism destroys the soul and nation. Stories revealing that destruction can penetrate seduction and lies. As Solzhenitsyn puts it, “One word of truth outweighs the world.”

Closer-to-home moral arguments could be marshaled in events such as the collapse of Venezuela, where a once-thriving culture has been brought to its knees by socialist doctrine.

One impediment stands in the way of the needed clarity. If the defender of free markets does not comprehend the need for a transcendent touchstone, if they believe that human flourishing will simply emerge as a functioning of free agents left unfettered, then they are constricted in the same way as the materialist and will fail. Economic freedom is predicated on more than “self-interest.” It comes only when we see that our neighbor’s flourishing is also our own.

Rev. Johannes L. Jacobse is a priest at St. Peter the Apostle Orthodox Church in Bonita Springs, Florida, and president of the American Orthodox Institute. He is currently launching Another City: A Journal of Orthodox Culture with other Orthodox writers.

St. Nicholas Cathedral in Kronstadt, Russia

Editor’s Note: Readers will argue about the author’s positive assessment of Russian culture in this essay. Don’t get caught up in that. Look instead at the descriptions of ‘Democratic’ West, particularly the spiritual exhaustion we face and our refusal to resist the culture of death that grows around us. Those are indisputable.

Source: Russia Insider

By Iben Thranholm

Russians are returning to Christianity in a modern and contemporary context.

They are familiar with the bitter fruit of atheism and have no appetite for the bleak and barren wasteland it produced.

In Russia, Christianity is associated with being modern and progressive.

The young, the hip, the wise and the wealthy, express their Christianity as a completely natural and straightforward thing.

Today, the spirit of communism shows itself in western worship of human rights, freedom of speech and the elite’s utopian notions of so-called open societies. We are headed for the very wasteland that the Russians were relieved to leave behind.

Russians perceive activists like Pussy Riot as latter-day Bolsheviks.

The subject of this interview is a Danish journalist and theologian  who hosted a series of five programmes, entitled “From Russia with Love” on Danish national public service radio, Radio24syv, with the sub-heading “An Unbiased Look at Putin’s Russia.”

Inspired by Emperor Constantine, she believes Christianity in the West can be rejuvenated by looking to the East. Iben is aware of the sheer enormity of this task. “Such, alas, is the depth to which Western hatred for Christianity has sunk,” says the theologian, who does not hesitate to defend President Putin, on whom the Western media delights in heaping derision and scorn.

Pussy Riot

“I understood that Russia is a country that refuses to compromise on Christian values. Russia is not just a country or a nation, Russia is a spiritual concept, a state of mind. Criticism of President Putin was not the crime for which the activists were tried and convicted. Their crime was the invasion of the Christ-The-Saviour Cathedral, the holiest of places, and engaging in a blasphemous act in front of the iconostases.

In the West, freedom of speech is widely deployed for the purpose of desecrating religion, but Russia does not permit crossing the line into blasphemy. That really fascinated me, and so I travelled to Moscow to learn more and this eventually resulted in a series of radio programmes trying to help Danes move beyond the tedious and unhelpful caricature-like clichés and provide them with a nuanced view of Russia.”

What was your impression of Russia?

“I experienced a fantastic energy, a moral energy similar to America in the ’50s with the old moral values. I met helpful, poetic and cultured people with a spirit of self-sacrifice I have not seen before. The atmosphere in Moscow is completely different from that of any capital in Europe, and unlike here in the West, I feel much more spiritually free in the East.

While the West is deriding and disowning Christianity and Europe revels in self-loathing, Russians are returning to Christianity in a modern and contemporary context. Bear in mind that Christianity was suppressed under Communism, which was atheistic. Russians are familiar with the bitter fruit of atheism and have no appetite for the bleak and barren wasteland it produced.

The interesting thing is, that in Russia, Christianity is associated with being modern and progressive. It is the spirit of the young, the hip, the wise and the wealthy, who express their Christianity as a completely natural and straightforward way of life. Christianity is simply fashionable, but not in the superficial Western pop manner. Christianity’s roots grow deep in the soil of Russian life, and they look with amazement at how we guard, or rather, disregard, our spiritual heritage.

Not only that: They discern in our obsession with political correctness, and the social liberal opinion policing of the general media and academia, a new manifestation of the terror of totalitarianism they counted themselves blessed to escape after 75 terrible years.

After the Cold War, East and West swapped roles spiritually, culturally and morally. Cultural Marxism now holds unrestrained sway in the West.

But Communism and Social Democracy are probably not the same?

“Let me put it a different way. During the rule of Communism, Russia found itself in the grip of a culture of death, but she is returning to life, in the sense of Christian culture with a strong awareness of the historical roots and continuity.”

The situation in the West is the complete opposite. We celebrate death and have surrendered to the satanic view of man in a self-righteous rage and rant against God. We can divorce with ease on-line. We prioritise work and career above family responsibilities especially raising children. We favour euthanasia, abortion on demand, homosexual rights and same-sex marriage while our cities are submerged in Islam and growing segregation.

Russia has chosen a completely different direction, and it is one of the reasons that many Russians perceive activists like Pussy Riot as latter-day Bolsheviks. They invade and desecrate the sanctity of the church, a holy place. The West celebrates this as progress and prosperity. Russians are reminded that the spirit of communism is still alive. It merely assumes new forms and takes up residence in the West, where liberals and progressives love and adore Pussy Riot.

Today, the spirit of communism shows itself in western worship of human rights, freedom of speech and the elite’s utopian notions of so-called open societies. We are headed for the very wasteland that the Russians were relieved to leave behind. Patriarch Kirill has warned the West: “Do not take the path we took. We tried it and it leads to destruction!”

Recently the Russian military held an exercise based on the scenario of an attack on northern Norway, Aaland, Gotland and Bornholm. Do we just turn the other cheek?

“Well, that’s not the true way to look at it. The Russians hold such an exercise because of the geopolitical pressure that NATO creates by deploying hostile military forces along the Ukrainian border and in the old Warsaw Pact countries.

Russian foreign policy has long been demonized. Russia is compelled to respond to a situation it did not create, which is not the same as aggression. Why should Russia accept being cut off from access to the sea, from Saint Petersburg to Vladivostok? Such a thing is unthinkable. With bald-faced hypocrisy, the West makes it look like Russia is our new enemy. The truth is exactly the opposite. The West is its own worst enemy.

Many are noticing that the church is moving underground in America in the wake of growing persecution. Adam Lowell Roberts, an ordained reader in the Orthodox Church, talks with Fr John Peck, a priest in Arizona who is preparing for the coming underground church in our modern society in some interesting ways. This is two part interview.

These interviews come from the “Go Forth: Modern and Effective Evangelism” series on Ancient Faith Radio.

Listen here:

Fr. John Peck – The Underground Church Part 1

Fr. John Peck – The Underground Church Part 2

Fr. John Peck blogs at The Orthodox Church of Tomorrow and is a permaculture engineer.

Podcasts courtesy of Ancient Faith Radio.