Biola UniversityThis week, Sean and guest co-host Rick Langer discuss:
- A growing trend of men becoming single dads by choice sparks discussion on meaning, technology, and the impact on children when family design is redefined.
- New research shows American millennials and Gen Z are dying at 2.6 times the rate of peers in other wealthy nations—raising questions about loneliness, disordered loves, and deeper spiritual needs.
- Costco’s decision not to sell the abortion pill is examined—what it reveals about business choices, public health concerns, and the cultural effort to normalize abortion.
- Listener questions: whether AI can teach critical thinking, how to disagree with grace, and how parents can wisely navigate kids’ involvement in theater and performance.
Episode Transcript
Sean McDowell: [upbeat music] More men are choosing to be single dads. We've heard of single mother by choice, but now we have single father by choice. American Gen Z-ers and millennials are dying at 2.6 times the rate of other rich nations. What's going on? And what should we make of Costco Wholesale's decision not to sell the abortion pill in any of its pharmacies? These are the stories we'll discuss today, and we will also address some of your questions. I'm your host, Sean McDowell, and filling in for Scott Rae, back is Rick Langer. This is the Think Biblically weekly cultural update, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Rick, we're gonna dive right in, but first off, thanks for coming back.
Rick Langer: Hey, so glad to be back with you, Sean. It's wonderful to, check in again here.
Sean McDowell: Yeah, I'm super intrigued with your take on these stories. So this first one is from The Atlantic, and the title is "The Growing Cohort of Single Dads by Choice." Now, this article walks through about a man who started in his 40s, who chose to be a single dad, and at 49 became a parent. Now he's living in North Carolina with a seven-year-old son and a daughter who's almost two. The population, it seems, is growing of dads who are intentionally choosing to be fathers, and they're not married. They cite a University of Cambridge psychologist in this article that says, "Before the millennium, the turn of the millennium, single dads by [chuckles] choice were virtually unheard of." This is a new phenomena, arguably so. Now, some fi- family planning, professionals in this article were... Make the claim that the coronavirus kinda ki- tipped this off in particular, so we've seen this trend growing since the turn of the millennium, but the coronavirus made people say, "All right, what's most invaluable in life?" And there's growing men saying, "I wanna be a dad." this article says, "The more single dads you see around you, the more likely you might be to become a single dad yourself, and the more likely you might then be to inspire someone else's choice." So there's a little momentum growing with this, when more and more people are finding it okay, and in some ways, adopting it. Now, it seems to be that there's far more gay men choosing to do this than straight men, the article talks about, which is a very interesting phenomenon. [inhales] you know, there's one suggestion in this that, when we get down to, and I want your thoughts on, they said th- it's like, "Perhaps pressure on women to become mothers has loosened, and allowing more women to choose to remain child-free, now some men are undergoing the opposite revelation." Now we're having this cultural shift, where they realize some of the qualities associated with parenting, such as care and tenderness, need to not be so relentlessly feminized, and that they want to be dads. Okay? And many... What, what runs through this article, Rick, that's interesting, is that fatherhood is so tied to meaning and purpose. That's the decision that seems to be driving it. Now, this blew me away. There's this organization called Men Having Babies, that kind of promotes and helps these men [chuckles] which is... You know, in some ways, it implies there's such a thing as a man, so I can celebrate it on that angle. But they said it can cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars to do this. What's your take on this trend? Did this surprise you? What do you make of it?
Rick Langer: Well, there's no question it surprised me. I had heard nothing about it until you sent me a copy of this article.
Sean McDowell: Oh, wow!
Rick Langer: I didn't realize that there was this sort of a trend. There's parts of it's kind of an interesting mix of f- of, feelings I have about it. There's a part of me that appreciates the fact that men care about family and find families to be meaningful.
Sean McDowell: I agree.
Rick Langer: I think that's a huge issue. Probably with one of these next articles, we'll talk a little bit more about what I think is a bit of a crisis of meaninglessness- ... We have as a culture. But I think this is a good thing, when you think of where men have often found meaning in life, by being success, by being, you know, rich, powerful, whatever these sorts of things are. There's something more, I think, ennobling, [chuckles] something more- ... Encouraging, about people saying, "Wow, this would be an extremely meaningful thing, and my w- life would feel somewhat incomplete without it." so that part I find encouraging. The part of me that is discouraged by this is probably significantly more- significantly larger than the part that's encouraged. And that is, it indicates, first of all, just a breakdown of basic romantic connection, basic connecting males and females within a culture in a long-term, family-oriented relationship that you and me would probably call by this crazy term marriage. But nowadays, we want marriage to mean sort of anything, not only who cares which gender, but how many people are involved in the marriage. Likewise with families, what counts as a family can be anything. So we've kind of reshuffled all of these things, and the weird thing is, we think that we can take a word like family- ... Completely change what it refers to- ... And have no impact on whether or not it's meaningful. [chuckles] And the thing I think we're finding is random versions of family don't really work. People want this sense of, "This is my child." This is all the things that are, you know, traditionally just been part of kind of what I would call a-... Normal human culture, by that I don't even mean normative, just kind of statistical norms.
Sean McDowell: Yeah.
Rick Langer: This is just what cultures have been. And I feel like we have dismantled that, and now we're kind of paying the price with a sense, in this particular article, of meaninglessness, and we find people questing for meaning again. But unfortunately, it's been split apart from also uniting male and female. We're gonna do this on ourselves. It's kind of one more manifestation of modern individualism. It's also a classic thing that we do, we solve a problem with our humanity w- by our technology. So we're failing to do and be what human beings are meant to do and be, and we say, "Oh, we have a technological solution now. A single man can have his own child as a baby by having a surrogate, spending $200,000," and all these other things that are bizarrely complicated. It, it is a technological feat that this can happen. You have sperm donation, you have surrogacy, you have a legal structure you have to create to sustain it. I mean, it's crazy what we have to do to meet this need that historically people have just met naturally. So that's, that's the part that troubles me.
Sean McDowell: Yeah, you know, it's interesting you said we have a need, and we fix it with technology, but we don't often think about the unintended consequences of technology and the breakdown of the family. So the unintended consequences of the technology of the pill leads towards increased sexual activity and played a role in making marriage no longer viewed as being permanent, and also no longer tied to procreation. We've severed that, and that technology played a role in it. So part of the question is, well, what's gonna happen now? I mean, growing up in my era, we heard over and over again about fatherlessness and the wounds of fatherlessness. Well, what about the wounds of motherlessness? What will those look like? How will that play out? I don't even think we know, but it's like we're gonna perform this experiment on all these kids because these people want to be dads so deeply. And by the way, I love that when people are looking for meaning, they're looking for meaning in family. I wanna stand up and go, "Amen."
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Sean McDowell: I love when people are looking for meaning, and they're saying, "I wanna find meaning in being a dad." It gives me goosebumps 'cause I find more meaning in my [chuckles] relationship, of course, with God and my family and being a dad than anything. But what's driving this are the desires of these dads saying, "You know what? My life feels meaningless. Coronavirus rocked me. I just wanna be a dad." They're not starting this question by saying, "Well, what's actually best for the kids? What do kids need?" Like so much of what's tied broadly to the sexual revolution, it's the preferences of adults. It's the desires of adults, and kids pay the price. Part of me, I... You know, some of these guys who wanna be single dads, being a single dad, gay or straight, has nothing to do with whether you are a good dad. [chuckles] I mean, those things-
Rick Langer: Yeah
Sean McDowell: ... Are irrelevant, right?
Rick Langer: Yep.
Sean McDowell: But kids deserve a mom, and kids deserve a dad, and I think to do this is selfish, and to intentionally bring a child into the world through things like IVF and surrogacy and other kinds of technology you referred to, and it's the kids who are gonna pay the price. Now, this is different than a single dad saying, "You know what? I wanna adopt a kid who's gonna be in a foster care situation." That's a kind of rescue and a way of helping a kid, giving them a better situation, and saying, "I'm gonna spend a few hundred thousand dollars to get the child that I want to give my life meaning." Well, what happens when that kid doesn't give you the meaning that you think this kid is going to deliver, right? Like, I mean, I just-
Rick Langer: Yeah
Sean McDowell: ... I could go on and on about this. I know being a parent brings meaning into me, but I do it out of a sense of obedience and duty and sharing this with my wife and just the amazing part of being a dad, but it wasn't driven by this existential need for meaning why I had kids. [chuckles] That's not where it came from. It was just the goodness and beauty of it. So I wonder, these kids growing up without moms, or one of these kids growing up with so much pressure on them to satisfy this middle-age crisis that many of these men are having, my heart just goes out to these kids. And I have to say, I think it's wrong, and I think more people should speak up. And I think of the whole Murphy Brown thing with Dan Quayle being ripped on single mothers. What was that, 25 years ago? I can't even do the math. Maybe 30 years ago.
Rick Langer: It was, yeah, 35 probably. Yeah.
Sean McDowell: Okay, 35 years ago. Now, people look back, and they're like, "Oh, yeah, maybe Dan Quayle was right." I hate to say it, but in 30 or 35 years, we're gonna have people going, "You intentionally brought me into the world and denied me a mother?" Man, that brings tears to my eyes because God's design for marriage is good, and it's for the flourishing of society. So I could keep preaching, but anything [chuckles] else you wanna add to this, Rick? [chuckles]
Rick Langer: No, I think you've, you've hit it out. The, the one thing I would wanna say is that there's a weird irony of how this pairs with abortion kinds of issues, where children seem disposable- ... And here, children are worth $200,000 of my, [chuckles] of my money and all of this, and I'm like, we have a very strange attitude towards babies and children in our culture- ... That's-... Paradoxical doesn't even capture how weird our attitude has become, towards these things. And so it's something that to me always strikes me when you see these things happening kind of side by side in your cultural moment.
Sean McDowell: You know, one other thing jumped out about this article. It says, quote, "Whereas the gay men she's worked with," the lady that's working with these people going through the process, men to have babies, "generally haven't planned to give up on dating at all, the straight men tend to view it a little bit differently."
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Sean McDowell: So you're bringing a child into the world as a dad. Not, it's not like there's a broken family, and then you're trying to remarry and date. Like, that brings challenges to a family within itself and can be navigated well and better in some circumstances than other. You're intentionally bringing this child into the world without a mother, while you're a man dating other men? How on earth do we think this is best for kids? So I think of my friend Katie Faust, who has a whole campaign, Them Before Us, and just says, "We need to shift our entire paradigm and not ask what's best for us. 'Well, I wanna have a kid, and I wanna date a guy, too. This is what I want. It's my life.'" No, what's best for this kid? I think we'd approach this very differently, and as you and I know, it's always God's best and His design for marriage that helps us flourish. All right, what ties these two stories together, I think you're right, Rick, is this sense of meaninglessness in our culture. But this is the first time, I think, on the Weekly Cultural Update we've pulled an article from Slate.
Rick Langer: [chuckles]
Sean McDowell: But I follow a lot of right-leaning and left-leaning publications, and the title really caught my attention. It said, "American Millennials Are Dying at an Alarming Rate." Now, the article describes about 3 million Americans die every year. Compared with other rich countries, we die at an alarmingly higher rate. One quarter of those deaths wouldn't have occurred if America were only as deadly as its peers of other rich nations. So the metric here is not where we live, population size, it's finances and resources and money.
Rick Langer: Mm-hmm.
Sean McDowell: So this study was based on an analysis of death rates in 22 countries from 1980 through 2023. Now, we're gonna get to Millennials' and Gen Z's ears, but I kinda thought they were gonna say: "Well, everything went off the rails with the COVID pandemic." But they actually say what surprised them is from today's post-pandemic vantage point, the American health disadvantage doesn't look like a pandemic story at all. That exacerbated, that was a blip, a significant blip, of course, but that's not the root of it. So the way in numbers they said... Here's another way to put this. In 2023, there were about 700,000 missing Americans, those who died in 2023 but would be alive if they had lived somewhere else. I mean, that's just in 2023, they say. Now, of course, there's a debate about the cause of this, and we can get into this. I mean, they talk about gun laws and driving safety and our healthcare system. I mean, there's all these theories that are thrown together. Now, what they say is by 2023, American adults' chance of dying was 70% higher than it would've been had life-saving trends of the early 2000s continued. So the US has not always been this way. If we go back to the early 2000s, we didn't see that trend. But in the past two decades or so, this trend has continued, and it leaves them, this is Millennials, 2.6 times as likely to die as early adults in other rich countries. Now, what's also crazy about this, Rick, is they said, "The fact that death rates have remained high across so many kinds of deaths, from car collisions to fatalities, from circulatory diseases and diabetes, hints at a more encompassing and systemic problem." Now, I think they're right about that. They basically end by saying, "We don't have a clue what's going on." [chuckles]
Rick Langer: [chuckles]
Sean McDowell: What's your take on this?
Rick Langer: Yeah, so this is article number two that, I was like, "I had no idea-
Sean McDowell: [chuckles]
Rick Langer: ... Until I saw this." And by the way, I looked at it coming from Slate, and I thought, "Man, I wanna check who these authors are," and I realized, "Oh, these are the people who actually wrote the article in JAMA." So the Journal of American Medical Association- ... Published this in May, and, you know, this was picked up later, but, these are the folks who did it, so this is a good article for-
Sean McDowell: Yeah
Rick Langer: ... Reflecting on this.
Sean McDowell: And JAMA is the Journal of the American Medical Association you're referring to.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Sean McDowell: Yep.
Rick Langer: Yes.
Sean McDowell: Okay, keep going.
Rick Langer: And, and so the thing that... When I looked at this, I was shocked, just as you said, two-thirds higher, 70% higher than other countries for our, Millennial and Gen Z population, 25 to 42, or 44 to 25, whatever it was.
Rick Langer: And I look at this, and I'm going, "You know," particularly 'cause of that last thing you mentioned about how this is true over kind of almost every facet of the ways you can die, [chuckles] you know?
Sean McDowell: Yeah.
Rick Langer: You know, it could be cancer, it could be car accidents, it could be suicide, it could be gun death. You know, whatever it is, it just is, like, a prevailing excess of this. And on balance, I look at this, and I go, "You know, I think this, we're, we're talking about this because it's from the Journal of the American Medical Association, as if it is a public health problem." I look at this, and my feeling is that much of this is related to social iz- isolation, loneliness- ... Hopelessness, meaninglessness, like we just talked about. These are things that have nothing to do with public health-... Per se, you wouldn't think about them being- ... That connected to that. But as a matter of fact, these things are hugely important for flourishing human beings. And Jonathan Haidt, you guys, I'm sure you guys have talked about him.
Sean McDowell: Yeah, we have.
Rick Langer: Anxious generation, these kind of things, and the turning point for him was around, you know, 2010, a little bit later, but when he began talking about the rise of, you know, cell phone usage among people who are kind of in this generation, a lot of it was because of isolation and social dysfunction. They became alienated from others. They had, you know, kind of this sense of competition. They had-- dozens of things seemed to be going wrong sociologically for people, and I think that's probably the thing that is worse for us, is we have kind of a dysfunctional social culture right now. And, yeah, we can't find meaning, we can't find healthy relationships. I think those two things are clearly tied together. We are kind of hyper-isolated, and all of these things make for bad life outcomes. I remember reading a statistic a while ago about loneliness, and I believe the effect of loneliness on health issues, physical health issues, is pretty comparable to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
Sean McDowell: Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that.
Rick Langer: So you're looking at a thing that you're going, "Oh, that is..." I mean, with cigarette smoking, we just assume this is a fact that's really bad. Even if you do it, you know it's bad for your health. But individualism is married to loneliness and isolationism and all these sorts of things, and I'm going, "This is terrible for us," and Americans do, that kind of thing in spades compared to most other cultures. There's just no question that we are excessively individualistic. As a side effect of that, we're lonely and we're isolated, and then we have a toxic way of communicating, mediated by social media and things like that, as opposed to face-to-face relationships. So I think all these things really put us in this kind of a crisis, but I have to admit, I'm kinda like the authors of the article, where I'm like, "I can't say that I know that, but I am deeply suspicious that this is more of a sociological and psychological problem than it is a physiological and medical problem."
Sean McDowell: That's really fair. I appreciate you not getting out ahead of your skis and pretending to have the solution to all this.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Sean McDowell: Not, not that I thought you would, but it's amazing that these authors at the end are like, "We really only have theories. We don't know what's going on." Two things jump out to me is this: it said in 2023, there are about 700,000 missing Americans, 700,000, who would be alive if they had lived somewhere else, another rich nation. So it hit me that we're having two simultaneous problems. Number one, we're not having enough babies, the birth dearth we've heard about. In around 2007, 2008, we shifted to 1.7 kids per couple or per woman, and the replacement rate's usually about 2.1. Now it's down to 1.6. Countries like Australia are 1.5, I just saw yesterday. So we're not having enough babies, and we're dying off in our older generations at an unbalanced rate. I'll be totally honest, when I read this, Rick, I just got sad. I'm like, "I love America." [chuckles] Like, I'm patriotic. I wouldn't wanna be born and live anywhere else in the world, and I know other people feel that way, which is fine. And I read this, I'm like: Man, America is kind of dying. It's dying physically, and I think that's an expression of something deeper that's going on. And what I wrote down, obviously before I heard your comments, was Luke 2:52, where it says, "Jesus grew in wisdom, stature, favor with God, and favor with man." When there's some unhealthy problem, we have to diagnose it correctly. Well, if the problem is purely physical, then we need Maha to correct our foods, [chuckles] you know, and whatever they're gonna do with vaccines. Like, we have to fix those if the problem is purely physical. Like in Luke 2:52, Jesus grew in wisdom, obviously favor with God, stature physically, favor with God spiritually, and favor with man relationally. We are holistic beings.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Sean McDowell: And if one is out of kilter... Like I tell students oftentimes, I'm like: If you're depressed, it might be that you're just not getting enough sleep. [chuckles] You gotta get some rest. It might be your diet, but there also could be a deeper spiritual root, meaninglessness and hopelessness, that's driving it. So I think there are important physical issues at play. The kinds of food we eat, not helping; the amount of food we eat, too much. There are some conditions that we can fix from a governmental level, but I do find it interesting in places like the UK, they now have a minister of loneliness, because broken relationships affect us, like you said, equivalent to two packs of cigarettes a day. It's like there's this recognition that there's deeper issues going on, and we have to fix it. So my sense, and I also don't wanna get out over my skis, is that there's kind of a holistic things that are at play here, but at root, a lot of it, what would drive so many different factors of death, I think it's broken relationships. I think there's a loss of meaning. I think there's a deeper spiritual hunger that people may not even realize, that if we don't at least address that-... We will never really address more largely what's going on. So why are people not having babies? A lot of that is a worldview shift about what's important and what matters, although there are some economic things at play that affect people having babies as well. So I think it's holistic, but I agree with you, at the root, there's gotta be something spiritual and a loss of meaning going on that's driving this. Agree or disagree with my take on that?
Rick Langer: Yeah, I very much agree, and a pr- a probably thing I would add to that is, eh, so this is, this isn't Rick, this is Augustine, okay? So this is... I'm, uh-
Sean McDowell: Oh, man. All right [laughing]
Rick Langer: Talk about non-unique ideas, I'm just saying that one of the- one of Augustine's great insights, I think, in general, it was the importance of our loves, not necessarily our belie- if you had to rank order them, uh-
Sean McDowell: Sure
Rick Langer: ... What we love is more important than beliefs, per se. And then the key issue with this, with discipleship, then realize, oh, a well-formed human being or a well-formed Christian is one who loves the right thing in the right measure. And it's the second part of that that I think becomes so problematic, 'cause we rarely love terrible things. There's probably terrible people who do.
Sean McDowell: Right.
Rick Langer: But in general, we love things that are actually good, but the problem is that we don't love them in the right rank ordering. So we love the lesser goods more highly and the higher goods more lowly, and I think this is true of things in America, where we love material goods and wealth and things like that extremely highly. We value relational goods much less, and we value oftentimes our relationship with God even less than that. And so we have profoundly disordered loves, and the weird thing about our culture... Maybe it isn't weird, 'cause I think Paul hints at this in Philippians chapter 3, but the weird thing about our culture is we seem to celebrate our disordered loves. We are proud of the fact, of the place of sexuality or power or love in our lives, and we are proud of dismissing other things. And for me, this reminds me of, like I say, Philippians 3, where Go- where Paul talks about these other people whose God is their belly, and they glory in their shame. They are- ... Glorying in things that should either bring them shame or should be of much lesser value, and that's the way they're living, and it's like, that's not how human beings are meant to live. And side effects of that are not only social, but as we see here, physical. Uh-
Sean McDowell: I'm reading articles and studying culture all the time, trying to keep our listeners informed, and I try to connect some dots. I don't wanna overstate it again, but there's been a lot of conversation about a yearning interest in spiritual things. Justin Brierley kinda kicked this off, I think-
Rick Langer: Yeah
Sean McDowell: ... In 2023 with his book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. And we've seen- I just saw a study that Bible reading is up and stu- you know, young people in the UK, out of the US, young men are going to church at a higher rate than they did 10 years ago. So in some ways, it seems like, and I say this with some hesitancy, that Americans are dying off, they're losing hope, but there's also a renewed interest and at least openness in spiritual things. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing the two of these happen at the same time. Now, that doesn't mean people are necessarily coming to church. I think we're seeing an explosion in psychedelics. People are turning to that. I think psychedelics are gonna become the new marijuana in the sense of how normalized and legalized they probably become within, I don't know, five or 10 years or something like that. UFOs with a spiritual sense.
Rick Langer: [chuckles]
Sean McDowell: The occultic, practices are increasing. So we as a church just have to be aware of the brokenness of society around us and make sure we see this as an opportunity, but not just spiritual, mental responses, but at the root of this is a loss of meaning, a loss of relationships. There's physical effects as well, which expands the call of the Church to effectively minister to people today in light of what we're seeing, not just with older generations, but with Millennials and with Gen Z. So I wish it wasn't coming in this way, but I think it's offer- opportunity for the Church to just lean in and love people and care for people holistically in light of the kinda crisis we maybe find ourselves in.
Rick Langer: Yeah, I... So I agree absolutely on that. That was mo- one of my other thoughts in reading this, I thought, "Wow, this is an opportunity for the Church," because if you wanna find a place where you might find hope, if you wanna find a place where you might find relationship with others, if you wanna find a place where you might find relationship with God, honestly, the church is the first place to go, right? I mean, even I think for non-Christian perception, those would be a lot of things they would assume that you would find there. And, I, my encouragement to the Church is think carefully about what it is that might be bringing people back. Because right now, I spend a lot of time talking to people in churches with the Winsome Conviction Project.
Sean McDowell: Yeah.
Rick Langer: And usually, if I show up there and we're doing the presentations, because of conflicts within the Church that are born of polarization, anger, it's like people read the fruit of the Spirit and the fruit of the flesh, and they get 'em inverted, and they think that wrath and anger and slander and calling people out and, you know, that kinda rage things, are somehow the mark of Christian conviction. [chuckles] And things like gentleness, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control are the marks of wishy-washy, mushy people who don't really have any Christian conviction.... And I just wanna say, what, however problematic that is, you know, from the front standpoint of your own vision for your discipleship and spiritual formation, the other thing it is really toxic at this particular moment, especially in terms of kind of, chopping off at the knees one of our great opportunities for effective evangelism and outreach to our culture. Because at the exact time we're extending people loving, gracious community, welcoming community, places of forgiveness and reconciliation, we're, we're drifting... It, it's easy for us to drift in the opposite direction with kind of polarized anger kinds of issues that have penetrated the pew every bit as much as it has the public square. That's du- kind of doubly sad to me. It, it's intrinsically sad- ... Relative to church life, but it's doubly sad because it kind of hurts us in terms of our outreach and evangelism.
Sean McDowell: Amen, brother. Good, good stuff. Now, we have one of the questions coming to at the end where we can pivot back to what that looks like. But for folks, these first two stories were kind of macro stories, [chuckles] trends we've seen developing over the past couple decades about Americans dying, about this cohort of single dads. This is kind of a particular bottom-up story. And I'm curious, 'cause I know you've done some work in ethics, so I'm really curious your take on this one, Rick. But this came out in The Christian Post. So we've had The Atlantic, Slate, and The Christian Post this week. Talk about a variety of publications. [chuckles]
Rick Langer: We, we are covering the field, man.
Sean McDowell: We're trying, man. We're doing it. And the title was, "A Courageous Move: Advocates Hail Costco Wholesale, Costco's decision not to sell abortion pill at pharmacies." Now, the article says, "Christian conservative groups and pro-life organizations are celebrating after Costco Wholesale announced it will not sell the abortion pill mifepristone in any of its pharmacy stores in the United States, citing, quote, 'a lack of demand.'" Go down in the article, and a spokesman for Costco said, "Our position at this time not to sell mifepristone, which has not changed, is based on the lack of demand from our members and other patients, who we understand generally have the drug dispensed by their medical providers." if you go down, somebody weighing in on this points out that, "The abortion pill has been used on unsuspecting women by predatory men, making it possible that lawsuits could be filed against businesses who sell the abortion pill. One more reason Costco's decision is wise." So there's a legal angle to this that's being brought in as well. At the very end, they just, they point out that in 2000, this is 25 years ago, "the US Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone and misoprostol," apologize if I mispronounced that, "to terminate a pregnancy within 10 weeks of gestation." So mifepristone blocks the hormone progestin, and then the second drug comes in and basically finishes the process. Did this surprise you? What's your take on Costco's decision to do this?
Rick Langer: Well, I get... Had a couple of reactions here. One is, [chuckles] part of it was how people talked about it. I think in the article, had this phrase of, "Costco's courageous decision to-"
Sean McDowell: Yeah
Rick Langer: ... "uh, not sell the abortion pill." I'm like, well, they said there were, there wasn't much of a demand, and they hadn't been selling it already-
Sean McDowell: [chuckles]
Rick Langer: ... And I'm kinda like: Wow, we have really lowered the bar for moral courage here, haven't we?
Sean McDowell: Mm-hmm.
Rick Langer: Because really, it seems like they are making a pragmatic decision- ... Or in some ways, a pragmatic non-decision, right? They didn't stop selling it-
Sean McDowell: That's a good way to think about it
Rick Langer: ... They just had never done it. And, [chuckles] I can't-- There's a great phrase in the article that someone, This was from, Lila Rose, who said that, "Costco's where shoppers go to buy in bulk, not buy death in a bottle." And I would say this, I think about this with mifepristone, and I'm like, yeah, I buy ibuprofen at Costco because I like- I'm 60-plus years old, 68 years old, and I do a lot of running, and bulk ibuprofen sounds like a great idea to me.
Sean McDowell: [chuckles]
Rick Langer: So yeah, I go to Costco, but the last place I think about going to buy a single treatment kind of a thing like that is a Costco. I mean, who needs a bulk of it? It's a one-off kind of a thing. So it, I'm not moved so much by how potent our advocacy has been or anything else. I don't, I don't know how to read that part of it. That said, I'm happy to join everybody in joining celebrating the fact that Costco isn't doing this. And because of FDA regulations, things like that have tried to... I hate to say this, it isn't just sort of normalizing abortion, but almost trivializing it in the sense of, "Oh, this is the kind of thing you should be able to buy mail order, from a mail-order pharmacy. This is a thing that doesn't require face-to-face contact with a physician." there was a bunch of limitations that originally came with the abortion pill that have been lifted by the FDA, and it seems to me, part of a general process of wanting to make sure that we send a message to our culture that abortion is sort of no problem. It's kind of like... I mean, back to my ibuprofen thing, it's sort of like-
Sean McDowell: Yeah
Rick Langer: ... You know, there is a prescription version of ibuprofen that you have to get from a doctor, but it really isn't a big deal, and I don't really mind if they sell that, as mail order, 'cause the bottom line is that's the same as taking three ibuprofens, which is what I often take anyhow, so what's the big deal, you know? So that sort of a process is what they have done, the, what I, like I say, trivializing the significance of the moral significance of it. I feel like that is what has been going on. Now, it was interesting in this article, I can't remember how much of this, I did a little reading around this article-... About the side effects of mifepristone, well, the combination, the full abortion pill, and the FDA quotes on the label the, a 0.5% complication rate from, taking this, the pill, which is obviously part of the justification for saying we can-
Sean McDowell: Yeah
Rick Langer: ... Do this with, without, you know, doctor face-to-face conversations and doing it mail order. Well, you begin to look into this, and the, you know, study that was done, two- so two different studies, and the one that they are citing to come up with a figure of 10%, complications was something that was done with insurance reporting for complications that came from, so it's very large numbers of people. I think that would not normally be the thing that you would wanna call a good medical peer review, controlled medical study. 'Cause basically you're relying on a bunch of reports, self-reports that go to an insurance company, maybe mediated through a doctor, but it's kinda hard to get good data out of that. But the thing that was amazing to me was the numbers of complications and how profound they were. So basically, 4.7% of people who took this ended up going to the emergency room. So that's almost 5% of people. I'm going, "Oh, at that point, that's a pretty objective marker, right?" You can't just say, "Hey, the person was feeling bad, and so they went to the doctor, and so they had a complication." This is, they went to an emergency room. You have 3.3% hemorrhages, so you're having a large number of pretty significant things that would make me think the FDA would be highly motivated to say, "Well, wait a minute, this isn't... We might not take this drug off the market, but we would definitely wanna be very careful about how it was prescribed and how it was tracked and to make sure people were aware of, you know, the fact that one in 20 people end up, who end up taking this, end up going to the emergency room afterwards." That's a pretty big number. If my Tylenol did that to me, I would not be buying it over the counter-
Sean McDowell: [laughing]
Rick Langer: ... Or at Costco.
Sean McDowell: For sure.
Rick Langer: So I worry about what this says about our culture, back to the thing about wanting to normalize and trivialize, and if you have any counter input, we don't wanna hear it. And this is the thing that was striking in this article. It mentioned that, I think it was in 2016 or sometime like that, the FDA said, "We we no longer want reporting of complications from the abortion pill-
Sean McDowell: Amazing
Rick Langer: ... Only deaths." So if the only side effect you care about is my death, I would like to point out, there's a few other things I care about, and if you ever watch TV and you see somebody advertising an arthritis drug, and they have 30 seconds worth of noting all of the side effects that you might happen, I think most of our culture does care about side effects short of death. But suddenly on this one, we don't even wanna track anything that isn't associated with, the woman dying. Of course, they don't care about the fetus dying or the-
Sean McDowell: Yeah, that's right
Rick Langer: ... The baby dying.
Sean McDowell: That's right.
Rick Langer: That's the irony, of course, of that. But the point is, they're tracking the s- the side effect, which I understand that difference, but I was struck by that and very concerned about it.
Sean McDowell: I'm glad you brought in this study. This is the one from the Ethics and Public Policy Center from 2025, and they inter- they studied data from insurance claim databases that included over 865,727 instances of prescribed mifepristone abortions, 2017 to 2023. You're right, not peer-reviewed, but they pointed out 10 to 11% of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging. So these numbers have been challenged, but my goodness, if you're gonna put p- less than 0.5% on clinical trials, this data significantly challenges that. If we're doing medical care here, they are strongly erring on one side to justify, I think, the legalization of this drug. You'd think we'd err on the side of being incredibly cautious and careful in getting the data out there. That hasn't been done, tells me something else is going on.
Rick Langer: Yeah, I agree. These are these things... I don't think it's uncommon to get these kind of discrepancies between two different approaches to doing a study. One is a database sort of study, which by the way, it's not in- there's nothing illegitimate about that. It just is a-
Sean McDowell: Sure
Rick Langer: ... Different-
Sean McDowell: That's right
Rick Langer: ... Track of doing the study.
Sean McDowell: That's right.
Rick Langer: But when you see a tenfold difference in your numbers, at that point, you're saying, "Okay, we're missing something here."
Sean McDowell: [chuckles]
Rick Langer: "We need to go back to the table." And the irony in the middle of that kind of data point is when the FDA say, "By the way, we don't want you to report side effects." So how in the world do you do a good study if you don't want those things reported to the agency?
Sean McDowell: That's a good point. Now, a couple things jump out to me. One of the reasons I wanted to get your thoughts on this is because we've now shifted to most abortions being done through the pill, and this is the overturning of Roe versus Wade, the lockdown on, you know, a couple dozen states about this. So we're seeing some of the legal issues being played out right now about traveling to another state, about shipping the abortion drug across states, the abortion pill, and so it's significant to have a company like Costco, as big as they are, whether behind the scenes there was some moral issue driving it or not-
Rick Langer: Yeah
Sean McDowell: ... The public narrative is it was a business decision. You know, I wonder if we're gonna see similar things play out, like it was Hobby Lobby's courage, and of course, the Green family are Christians, to refuse the contraception mandate and go to court and fight against that. Sometimes you need businesses or people that are powerful to push back to get a certain kind of, change, and so I appreciate that Costco did this. It also shows that-... The power of speaking up to businesses and making the concerns of Christians known. I'm not a huge boycott guy. I would- you know, that's a whole 'nother conversation, but we're talking about an abortion drug that ends the life of human beings, and Costco serves a lot of Christians. I think it's very fair and wise to write a letter and say, "Hey, we go to your store. We are profoundly concerned about this, and we don't want you to do such a thing." It's not a threat, it's just a realization of how much this matters. And so this tells me this is important for Christians to speak up at times and make their desires known. That's really important. Last comment on this-
Rick Langer: Sure
Sean McDowell: ... Is about you made- you mentioned earlier about the perceived normality of things like Costco carrying this drug. One concern is just the accessibility to lead towards a woman choosing to do this, ending the life of the unborn. The other is just walking down an aisle and, like you said, going, "Oh, there's Tylenol. Oh, there's mifepristone."
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Sean McDowell: It normalizes it in people's minds, and it's like the law is a teacher. Well, so is a pharmacy [chuckles] in a sense, in a public place like Costco. So just as we see more and more men choosing to be single fathers, and pretty soon we'll probably see this more and more in the media, it normalizes it in our minds and slowly changes our thinking over time. So I think for that reason, given what's at stake with this, I'm glad these Christians have spoken up, and Costco, regardless of what it was motivated by-
Rick Langer: [laughing]
Sean McDowell: ... Chose not to have the pill. So we'll be tracking this-
Rick Langer: Yeah
Sean McDowell: ... For people watching, kind of what happens as we move into a post, further post-Roe era, when, most abortions are now being done by the pill. All right, Rick, let's shift to some questions here. We've got three. This first one is from a retired teacher who's continually learning new things. Basically, describes how she spent the last few years on the practical applications of AI in personal and corporate learning. And she said, "One thing that I've learned is that AI can teach critical thinking skills. So instead of worrying about AI, we should instead use it for formal instruction in critical thinking. So since AI is already embedded in our world, we should figure out how to use it in productive ways." By- this is, by the way, this is from a he, not from a she. What do you think about using AI in constructive and educational ways like this? What do you think, Rick?
Rick Langer: I'm leery of the wisdom of that. So I think one of the things we don't think well about, ironically, is what-
Sean McDowell: [chuckles]
Rick Langer: ... Human thinking is like. And human thinking is a very social process. Even, you know, our thoughts are formulated in human languages. Well, where in the world do we learn those? Well, we learn them socially. We, we learn from other people. What counts as, you know, well, good, warranted reason, things like that, these are things that are best negotiated, are, well, are built into our social structures. And another, well, huge power in the relational part of our, of our epistemology, of our, you know, thinking about what we know, which I don't know is good, but just kind of reporting the psychological facts of human cognitive structures, we very much use this as a way to bond with other people and things like that. We like that sense of agreement and all those things. So our epistemology is not just born of abstract fact and, logical reasoning. I... You know, you and I both have a long background in philosophy, and-
Sean McDowell: Sure
Rick Langer: ... Part of that program is taking, I remember taking logic classes in my PhD that are pretty painfully detailed.
Sean McDowell: I agree. Me too.
Rick Langer: And the idea that's all there is to good, sound human thinking, I think is a little bit dangerous. I think there's not-- there's less than that. There's... But there is more than that, and so the more you push this into the AI realm, the more you de-socialize, you de-contextualize our knowing from the broader context- ... Of your cultural life. And that, to me, is a little... It makes me a little queasy. It also makes our knowing more formulaic and less personal, and by that I don't mean, when I say personal, I don't mean individual, I mean knowing is a thing that persons do.
Sean McDowell: Yeah, I gotcha.
Rick Langer: The internet knows nothing. Persons are the place where knowing happens. So what in the world does AI know? Well, AI knows what it has gleaned from what's been dumped into a data bank by a bunch of persons-
Sean McDowell: Yeah
Rick Langer: ... Which is where knowing really takes place. So this is one of those things that-
Sean McDowell: It technically doesn't know anything, [laughing] right?
Rick Langer: Yeah, exactly.
Sean McDowell: Technically. [chuckles]
Rick Langer: But it- but that said, you can use... When you're talking about using AI-
Sean McDowell: Right
Rick Langer: ... It's a little bit like saying, "Okay, look, you can have AI in any kind of computer program or things of that nature," say, "Okay, this was sound reasoning. This is unsound reasoning." It can, it can be fairly sophisticated in doing that, so I kind of get what people are saying with that, but I'm queasy. Back to- we talked a lot about this today, of how when you normalize these kinds of things, you affect what people think about when they think about, in this case, thinking-
Sean McDowell: That's right
Rick Langer: ... And knowing and critical reasoning.
Sean McDowell: Good, good stuff. I think as a whole, we make one and two mistakes with this. One is just to resist it and go, "I'm not jumping on the AI train. It's bad. It's terrible. Let's not use it." My answer is, "I'm sorry, number one, the cat is out of the bag."
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Sean McDowell: "It's never going back in."
Rick Langer: No, can't.
Sean McDowell: "But second, it's also an incredible tool, and I think we should use it."... The other mistake is to say, "Well, let's just dive in full on, headlong, and use AI uncritically." Now, I don't think this teacher's necessarily saying that, but I think the enthusiasm expressed here makes me go, "Whoa, we need to be more careful here, and not just jump into it and use it for critical thinking when we've already seen a loss of critical thinking in our culture before AI came." So let's be really discerning and wise. So let's use it, but use it wisely. All right, this question is actually perfect. It's addressed to me, but your work at the Winsome Convictions project, I'm eager for you to weigh in. This person says, "Love the podcast. Look forward to it." Thank you. In July, Rick, as you know, we take the weekly cultural update off, and we use some bonuses from my YouTube channel. And she said, "What I learned from the discussion is just how to listen well and disagree in a polite, non-argumentative way, with a clear presentation of views. You push back, but do so politely." Thank you, by the way. "I'd love to learn how you do it, but I'm [chuckles] not sure that is possible. I'm learning through listening to Think Biblically on issues, but sometimes taking that further and expressing my thinking can be hard. What suggestions do you have for learning to communicate the right way?" Well, I would say a few things. First off, that YouTube channel, I'm really trying to just mentor and model for people how to do this. I'm not gonna pretend I always do it right, but I'm trying to [chuckles] model for people. So we're gonna put those bonuses here, but there's a lot more conversations like that. I learn by watching people. There's a lot of people who I think- ... Do this really well, and I just do- I learn a ton by watching them. People like Greg Koukl, I've learned about as much from him from anybody, the way he navigates conversations graciously. So he's a resource, so that's number one. Number two, sometimes it just takes practice. Just start where you're at, and try to take baby steps, so to speak, forwards. Maybe start with somebody who's not intimidating, and have a conversation there, and then try it with somebody else. It's like cooking. I don't really know how to cook, but if I did, I'd just have to try some things, and have some bad [chuckles] recipes, and learn along the way. Having spiritual conversations and dialogues with people is a skill you learn by doing it, and practicing, and getting better. I still think about it a lot. I still wanna be a better interviewer. I still wanna be better at these conversations. In fact, I had one yesterday, and replayed it in my mind, and was like, "Oh, I should have said this." [chuckles] So you never arrive and get there, practice. The final thing I would say is I actually wrote a book with your colleague and my colleague, Tim Muehlhoff. He works with you at Winsome Convictions Project. He has shaped my thinking on graciously interacting with people probably more than anybody, and he came to me and said, "Let's write a book." So we wrote a book together called End the Stalemate, and it's all about how to do this. So Tim is a PhD communication scholar, and he goes, "Sean, I feel like you're a practitioner. What if we bring together what the communication research shows, some of your tips, and write a book?" So if you're listening to this, I won't mention your name, 'cause it's, anonymous, but if you wanna grow further, you might enjoy End the Stalemate. That's exactly why I wrote it, to help people engage in the way that you describe. Rick, what would you add or change from that response?
Rick Langer: So number one, I wouldn't change anything. [chuckles] I'd probably take my little highlighter out and say the issue of learning by watching and seeing others do it, I think, is nothing like worked examples of this, and so I very much value people. Tim Keller was another person that, to me, was a master of-
Sean McDowell: He was wonderful at that
Rick Langer: ... Having that kind of, uh-
Sean McDowell: I agree
Rick Langer: ... Engagement. Pr- so one quick tip, I talk about this with people a lot, is, cultivating the skill of successfully achieving disagreement. We usually think achieving disagreement is not a problem. "We disagree all the time," and I'm like, "Uh, actually, not so much," 'cause here's the deal: I can't disagree unless I understand what you say, all right? Because then I can't disagree if I've gotten wrong what you say, or I don't understand, or whatever. So the first trick is I gotta make sure I understand the other person. One of the great ways to do that is just tell a person and be genuinely curious. "I wanna know what you think." Let them talk, and then say, "Okay, I wanna make sure I've got this right. Let me play this back to you."
Sean McDowell: Great.
Rick Langer: And here's my rule of thumb: You have not achieved disagreement with a person until you can play back to them what they believe about this issue, and have them nod their head and say, "Yes, that's what I think, and that's how I feel."
Sean McDowell: Nice.
Rick Langer: So cultivating that discipline is a great place to start, and you don't have to give any good arguments on your own. And by the way, once you have actually been able to do that for a person, it's amazing how commonly they say, "Well, what do you think?" And you get an invitation to share back-
Sean McDowell: That's right
Rick Langer: ... And this becomes a great foundation for conversation. So that'd be my quick thought.
Sean McDowell: And that's what Tim Muehlhoff calls the principle of reciprocity. If I give you a gift, you kind of feel [chuckles] obligated to give me a gift back, and I give you the gift of listening well, you feel the obligation to listen well back. So good stuff, Rick. All right, this last one, this person listened to our recent episode on navigating sports culture but says, "What advice do you have for somebody who's navigating kids in kind of drama and theater?" You've had at least one kid go through this. Any one or two principles that jump out for parents, just the pressure and stress that can come with performing?
Rick Langer: Yeah, I... And I think the, this person kind of worded this way in the question. Actually, I think there's a lot of parallels to sports. Anything where you can make the team or not make the team-
Sean McDowell: Yep
Rick Langer: ... You can succeed or fail.
Sean McDowell: Yep.
Rick Langer: We have done so many things now where, you know, everybody gets the trophy. Well, there's still things where that doesn't happen.... So wherever this is happening, it could be the academic team, or the academic college bowl kind of team, it could be, sports teams, it could be theater, it could be the drum line. Whatever it is, all of these areas, I think, have a very parallel, track in terms of saying-
Sean McDowell: That's right
Rick Langer: ... The kid puts himself out there, and if they make it's a wonderful feeling. If they don't, it's a terrible feeling. And for you as a parent, the first thing I'd say is, man, you're walking with them through that process.
Sean McDowell: That's right.
Rick Langer: And they need to be supported, but I'm kind of a fan of people sometimes kind of putting that out there and having the hard experiences, 'cause- ... You know, it does shape you. I think it's good for us, not bad for us.
Sean McDowell: I agree.
Rick Langer: And I do feel there's certain things about theater in our culture, some of the things about theater, dance, Hollywood, all these things, is associated with a bunch of problematic behaviors from a Christian standpoint. You know, sexuality issues, generally ethical norms and things like that you feel queasy about. You know, people get exploited there. We've seen this, everything from, you know, sexual abuse of children on through the #MeToo movement and all these things, and I'm going, "Yeah, be aware it's a dangerous environment," and so you do wanna be careful with that. And I would avoid pushing kids into it, but I would also avoid forcing kids away from it, because you send these weird messages. It becomes mystified, and they're like, "Oh," they become-
Sean McDowell: That's right
Rick Langer: ... Drawn back to it. So yeah, this is one of those challenging areas of parenting that giving, you know, absolute right and wrong recommendations, it's hard. But I really do think supporting them, 'cause this is a difficult thing when you get thumbs down, you lose your audition, whatever.
Sean McDowell: I think there's more crossover than difference, like you said. You know, one of the things my parents did with us that I just try to do with my own kids, is they would praise us if we did well in a sport. They'd praise our effort and our success, but not closely as much as they praised and valued us just because we were their kids.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Sean McDowell: My dad would say, "I would love you if you never played basketball again. I'd love you if you flunked out of school." Like, not that it made those things okay, but emphasizing, "My value for you and your worth n- comes not from your success and efforts." But also, you know, sharing stories of failure. I just had an interview, I haven't posted it yet, Rick, but some will recognize the name Todd McFarlane. He's, describes himself as totally an atheist, no spiritual interest at all. He was the co-creator of Venom, the character Spawn, huge artist of Spider-Man, big in the comic world. And, we went back and forth. At one point, he looked me right in the eyes, he said, "I will never believe in God," which was just so interesting. But in wanting to be a comic artist, he spent one or two years, every single month, sending in drawings and getting rejected time after time after time.
Rick Langer: Yeah.
Sean McDowell: That's what it took. So failures are not permanent. It's a part of the process. So just sharing stories with people, like, this is a part of it. It humbles us, it motivates us. It's okay. Next, next, and there's grace for you. A ton more could be said, but Rick, always enjoy your insights. It's fun to have you back. Thanks for filling in today.
Rick Langer: Hey, thanks so much for having me on. It was really great to be able to join you.
Sean McDowell: We'll have you back again soon. Friends, this has been an episode of the Think Biblically podcast, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. We've got master's degrees in person and online, apologetics, spiritual formation, Bible, philosophy. We would love to have you join us. Rick, you may have seen this, but the numbers are up big time for Talbot this year in terms of students and units. We are really on the move, which is exciting. [upbeat music] to submit comments or ask questions, please email us at thinkbiblically@biola.edu. And I personally ask you to just pause and give us a rating on your podcast app, even if it's just five honest words or sentences. [chuckles] Every single rating and a star or a thumbs up helps us tremendously. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you Tuesday when our next episode, our normal episode, drops. In the meantime, remember to think biblically about everything. [upbeat music]
