Scott White

Jesus follower and blessed as husband, father, father-in-law, Pops to Judah & Roz, Executive Pastor @ Redemption Church and MSU Bulldog

[Scott White @scottwhite421]

👇

[Heiden Ratner @HeidenRatner]

https://t.co/xTO2YUaapM

[Trevin Wax @TrevinWax]

You don't have to keep giving the benefit of the doubt to critics who never give anyone the benefit of the doubt.

[Art Rainer @ArtRainer]

Powerful. This interview is worth watching.

[Brent Beshore @BrentBeshore]

"Why does it take a diagnosis, a crisis, a detonation, before we let God do the work He’s been wanting to do all along? What if we started handing them over now, while we’re healthy, while there’s still time to live in the freedom that’s on the other side?"

[Scott White @scottwhite421]

@deaninserra 😂

[Scott White @scottwhite421]

@ArtRainer Awesome!!! ❤️

[Sola Media @solamediaorg]

Ben Sasse:

"One of the weird lines @timkellernyc used to say is, 'I hate this, but I would never want to go back to the prayer life I had before pancreatic cancer,' which I thought sounded pretty weird. . .But then I felt, what a blessing that I'm saying, 'Lord, come quickly, Maranatha. Thank you for all of the different things that I used to cling to that right now seem really, really trivial because they're actually really trivial.'"

@BenSasse

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

A young detransitioner, Fox Varian, has won $2 million damages in a medical malpractice lawsuit, in which she sued the psychologist and surgeon who approved her for a double mastectomy, aged 16. Varian's mother testified that she'd been against the surgery, but was pressured into agreeing because she'd been told that unless her daughter transitioned she was likely to commit suicide.

As the floodgates open, and more and more detransitioners sue the clinicians who subjected them to an unregulated medical experiment, gender identity activists will almost certainly continue to ignore any evidence that fails to support their preferred narrative. They'll keep insisting that hardly any transitioned people regret their irreversible procedures, that gender clinicians know exactly what they're doing, that surgeries, cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are of proven benefit and that minors who're denied these treatments will to kill themselves. All of this is a lie.

Speaking at the WPATH conference in 2021, British endocrinology consultant Leighton Seal admitted 'we are doing procedures here where we don’t have outcome data.' A woman from Utah said she felt gender clinicians like her were making it up as they went along: 'Because I feel like we’re all just winging it, you know? And which is okay, you’re winging it too. But maybe we can just, like, wing it together.' (https://t.co/dW4xXKUzOY)

This will go down in history as one of the worst medical scandals of all time. Adults inside and outside the medical profession sold troubled young people like Varian the idea that all of their complex trauma would be resolved by removing healthy body parts.

As more and more detransitioners arrive in court, the public will learn the full extent of the harm done to kids in the name of an ideology. Clinicians performing these 'treatments' will go down in history as barbarous activists who betrayed a sacred oath: to do no harm. But we should never forget how many people outside the medical profession urged these young people on, gleefully assuring them that anyone advising caution was an evil bigot. There are people in elitist professions like publishing and academia, not to mention politicians and celebrities with young fan bases, who did all they could to champion the idea of gender identity, and kept pushing it even as the evidence of harm mounted. They're just as culpable as the clinicians. Too lazy to think more deeply than the fashionable mantras that got them social media likes, too arrogant to look at evidence from anyone outside their political bubble, they've slurred whistleblowers and attacked anyone with valid questions. In doing so, they've created a cultural climate without which this appalling tragedy could not have taken place.

Never forget, because only by learning the lesson can we stop this happening again.

https://t.co/6Z9rV8wI00

[Scott White @scottwhite421]

@BenSasse 🙏

[Scott White @scottwhite421]

@deaninserra 😂 I agree @deaninserra but be very very very very soft next time your with us at Redemption 🙄

[Malcolm Yarnell @MusingsOnChrist]

The Sufficiency and Authority of divinely-inspired Scripture must be differentiated from the insufficient authority of human interpreters. Those interpreters who cloak their highly disputed doctrines with the sufficiency of Scripture should not presume upon divine authority.

[Randy Alcorn @randyalcorn]

Giving brings great happiness, and our happy God rejoices when our hearts celebrate. Too many believers never experience the overwhelming grace of God, which is the lightning that produces in our lives the thunder of giving, and a joy unlike any other. https://t.co/tEjTAOKQ2Z

[Randy Alcorn @randyalcorn]

We will never regret a single thing we did in this life for Jesus. “Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord …the Lord will give you an inheritance as your reward, and that the Master you are serving is Christ” (Colossians 3:23-24, NLT).

[Scott White @scottwhite421]

Have always admired and now praying for @BenSasse and his family. Come Jesus come!

[Ben Sasse @BenSasse]

Friends-

This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.

Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.

I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.” Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.

Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer. This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad. I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak). This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. (Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.) I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints.

There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.

Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.

A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears.

Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet.

Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective:
“When we've been there 10,000 years…We've no less days to sing God's praise.”

I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.

But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9).

With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices,
Ben — and the Sasses

[Tanner Allen @Tanner_Allen10]

You can tell a lot about a person when they are going through hell

When they are down and out

When they are navigating through the valley

And they still choose to lift others up.

[Andrew T. Walker @AndrewTWalker]

Keeping the Soul of Conservatism

If you call yourself a political conservative, as I do—and for which I make no apology—it’s time for a family conversation about who belongs in our coalition and what moral boundaries still exist.

Conservatism in America is facing a moral test. Recent events—a POLITICO exposé of grotesque vulgarities in a Young Republicans chat and Tucker Carlson’s unserious interview with the antisemite Nick Fuentes—reveal a movement flirting with rot under the banner of “winning.”

Fuentes is a vile figure—morally repugnant and undeserving of respect or influence. One might argue that subjecting his views to public scrutiny could helpfully diminish his appeal. Fair enough, if genuine journalism were taking place. But Carlson’s interview wasn’t a scrutiny; it was a puff piece. Evil men, when given a platform, should be exposed and repudiated. That didn’t happen here.

I’m not suggesting we avoid hard conversations or police who talks to whom. When ideas are truly interrogated, public debate is a good thing. But pretending that racism or antisemitism deserve to be “heard out” does not signal open-mindedness or empathy toward the dissident Right. It signals moral decay.

At the heart of this debate lies a political tactic. Some on the Right insist conservatives always lose because we’re not united like the Left. We impose purity tests, they say, while progressives form a single power bloc. Hence the rallying cry: “No Enemies to the Right” (NETTR).

The slogan traces to the political theology of Carl Schmitt, who reduced politics to a friend–enemy distinction. Schmitt saw politics as the act of identifying those who threaten one’s way of life and rallying with those who share a common foe.

Today, “No Enemies to the Right” captures a mood: if we really want to win, stop clearing our throats and stop policing our side. It’s war, after all—and in wartime, niceties must yield to victory.

That mindset is a mistake. It’s incompatible with the Bible’s moral realism and corrosive to the conservative soul. I also do not think it is a sound political strategy. The NETTR principle will only serve to sully the conservative conscience and divide the coalition by perpetually re-negotiating the boundaries of who is in and who is out. Imitating the Left’s willingness to invite radicals into its coalition partly explains why progressivism is suffering historic levels of unpopularity—deranged extremists were let in, and the entire place became an asylum of far-Left mania.

Conservatives must care about the moral and intellectual character of our coalition. We do not care because we crave the Left’s approval—chasing liberal plaudits is a fool’s errand—nor because we enjoy tone-policing. We care because the health of our movement depends on the moral quality of those who represent it. Conservatism, at its best, rests on two pillars: truth and virtue. Truth gives order its compass. Virtue gives self-government its guardians. A people fit for liberty must also be a people of character.

The Left, by contrast, often drifts on unmoored foundations—its compass fixed to the winds of desire and power. That is what makes the Left the Left. However, conservatives cannot—and must not—mirror that posture. A movement that embraces “by any means necessary” may win a battle but will lose its soul. Such tactics define progressivism; they must never define conservatism.

The trouble with No Enemies to the Right is that it lacks a limiting principle. Once adopted, nothing is off the table—neither in who we include nor in what we justify. Imagine a group of neo-Nazis who also favor “liberty” for pedophilic behavior joining the crusade to “crush the Left.” By NETTR’s logic, they’re part of the team. Their depravity would not be excused—but it wouldn’t be excluded either.

What follows is predictable: without moral limits, the race to prove who’s most “based” devolves into a purity spiral of ever-deepening vileness. This is the opposite of Christian ethics, which rejects unprincipled pragmatism in favor of principled outcomes—even when those outcomes are difficult (Matt. 16:24; Rom. 3:8). What’s more, moral revolutions eventually eat their own, as well. No one is ever safe in a political context where the parameters for faithful allegiance are constantly shifting. But thank God that Scripture is our North Star, not the shifting winds of fallen man.

Maybe that makes Christianity look “weak” or “unaware of what time it is.” But neither Jesus nor Paul was woke, nor were they Third Way squishes. Jesus was the Son of God and perfect. Paul’s writings were done under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

An unwillingness to confront this darkness—where one standard applies to “us” and another to “them”—is biblical partiality (Deut. 1:17; Prov. 24:23; Jas. 2:9). The friend–enemy frame is foreign to Christian ethics, which refuses theological revisionism for political ends. For those who sneer that critics of NETTR “don’t know what time it is,” remember this: it is never time to sever Christian ethics from political life.

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. We don’t always need to publicly denounce every misstep or person. Private, relational correction is proper. But we must be vigilant about who’s on the team. There must be a moral line somewhere. We cannot police the behavior of every member of our coalition, but we must uphold moral expectations and ensure that certain ideas are unacceptable. Anything less and we’ve become the moral revolutionaries we believed ourselves incapable of.

This is where the “Christian” in Christian conservative takes priority. Before we are Christian conservatives, we must be conservative Christians. We take Scripture seriously—so seriously that we see it as the inerrant, authoritative, all-sufficient guide for everything, including the morality that governs our political life.

On a day like Reformation Day, we remember that Scripture’s authority is seamless. It doesn’t bow to worldly categories of gender, race, class, or party. It speaks over them all. Sola Scriptura means precisely this: Scripture alone is supreme. Not our identities, not our experiences, not our political loyalties. God’s Word judges all human words—and never the other way around.

When we let cultural identity or political tribe dictate our theology—when we decide what to affirm or avoid based on allegiance—we’ve already abandoned Sola Scriptura. We have enthroned culture and politics where Christ should reign.

When we excuse moral compromise to gain or keep political power, we commit two errors: we dishonor the authority of Scripture, and we patronize our neighbors. Respecting our neighbors means treating them as moral agents capable of truth, not fragile egos to appease—especially the “disaffected” men of the online Right. I, too, want to see this segment healed. But as Jesus warned in Mark 8:36: What does it profit a movement to gain the Groypers and forfeit its soul?

True respect means treating people as capable of correction and reason, not coddling them through theological compromise. The Bible’s authority is not partial. It is total, seamless, and sovereign—over our categories, sensitivities, and political identities alike.

To be a conservative Christian once meant opposing abortion, defending marriage, and upholding the moral law. The new litmus test, disturbingly, is increasingly whether one welcomes the most rancid viewpoints as legitimate stakeholders within the movement. That redefinition of conservatism—and of Christianity—lowers the conscience to the gutter.

And yet, at least the conversation is happening. That’s good. It’s healthy to see the Right practice moral introspection within its own ranks.

Now, if only the Left, center-Left, and self-styled moderates calling for our accountability and moral reckoning on the Right would hold themselves to the same standard.

Which, of course, they won’t.

The Left remains an existential threat—but so does a Right that abandons its moral guardrails. Together, they’ll burn civilization down in a blaze of mutually assured destruction.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

This shift in attitudes shown below isn't because of increased intolerance, but of an increase in understanding, and trans activists themselves bear the greatest responsibility for the change.

Five years ago, a lot of medical bodies (and trans activist organisations, lobby groups and virtue-signalling celebrities) were united in telling us that puberty blockers were completely reversible and harmless. As more and more evidence accrues showing actual and potential harm, public opinion, unlike trans activism, has shifted in line with the data.

Five years ago, the sophisticated, fashionable line was that sex difference didn't really matter in sport. Trans activists demanded that the women's category be destroyed to accommodate men who claim to be female, but the public wasn't willing to pretend they couldn't see the injustice right in front of their faces.

Five years ago, trans activists and professional lanyard- wearers were chiding us all to use preferred pronouns, because that was kind. Now the public see convicted rapists described as 'she' and 'her' by news outlets and are rightly enraged that journalists are feeding us ideological fiction instead of facts.

Five years ago, a lot of people, especially older ones, were under the impression that trans-identified men had all had full sex reassignment surgery and were sexually orientated towards other men. They didn't know that cross-dressing straight men were now asserting the right to enter all women's reserved spaces. They didn't know how few trans women have had 'bottom surgery.' They know now.

Trans activists are to blame for the hounding and persecution of non-believers, which has spilled into British courts. Women have had to fight all over again for rights they thought they'd have forever. The Cass Review brought shame on all who lobbied to continue a broadly unresearched and unevidenced medical experiment on minors. Trust in institutions, in academia, the media and the medical profession has been severely undermined. Politicians have beclowned themselves, willing to parrot self-contradictory slogans and outright absurdities rather than defend truth and freedom of speech.

The stark change in attitudes over the past five years is the direct consequence of the way trans activists set out to 'educate' us all. Giddy with the power they'd been handed by people in authority, they've tried to impose a quasi-religious, elitist, minority belief upon the whole of society. They can't complain (although, of course, they will) that the public has decided it doesn't want to buy what they're selling.

[Randy Alcorn @randyalcorn]

“There is nothing that more tends to strengthen the faith of the young believer than to hear the veteran Christian, covered with scars from the battle, testifying that the service of his Master is a happy service…and his reward everlasting joy.” – Charles Spurgeon

[Paul David Tripp @PaulTripp]

Two things that kill evangelism:

Consumerist Christianity and Casual Christianity.

[Randy Alcorn @randyalcorn]

Sometimes it seems we would rather see loved ones go to Hell than be seen as pushy by insisting on telling them the truth about the only way to Heaven. But God calls us to be truth tellers in the name of love. https://t.co/ZJBU7vi31m