In his book "A Free People's Suicide," Os Guinness argues that America has become a "flower-cut" society. Though we still have the trappings of liberty and morality, he argues, we are cut off from our roots. Just as with flowers, there's a lag time between when a civilization is out from its roots and when it dies. Even so, by cutting ourselves off from a shared Judeo-Christian framework, we are starving ourselves. The pandemic didn't cause this, but it has worsened and exposed it.        G.K. Chesterton described something similar in "The Everlasting Man." Sometimes he argued, it's the solutions we invent that unmake us, not the crises we are attempting to endure.                                                                                 Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; When its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.  The widespread cultural breakdown we see around us cannot be explained by a mere loosening of morals, or the wrong political party being in power, a pandemic, or our response to it. What we are seeing is the catastrophic emptiness when life is built on the wrong foundation.   While our distractions keep us busy, Americans streamed a mind-blowing 15 million years' worth of digital content in 2021, according to analytics company Nielsen-They are ultimately failing to satisfy. The American dream has been written and re-written and altered but it remains out of reach. It's not clear what can hold us together anymore. A critical question for Christians is whether there is anything we can do about it. A critical answer to that question is to remember that we aren't the first followers of Christ to find ourselves in a society unmoored from morality and meaning.          If public behavior today is "wierd," our part is to reject the spirit of the age, embrace what is good and true, treat everyone as if they are made in the image of God, and speak boldly when we can. Of course that will make many think we are being wierd. So be it. That's the kind of "wierd" the world needs.

JOHN STONESTREET WITH KASEY LEANDER  - Breaking Point - Colson Center