The World and Everything in It - June 23, 2022

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

Investigators from around the world are currently in Ukraine documenting suspected war crimes. What’s being done to hold Russia accountable?

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: We’ll find out just ahead.

Also today, the Supreme Court has once again affirmed the Constitutional right of religious organizations to participate in public benefit programs. We’ll hear what sets this decision apart from its predecessors.

Plus, the Wimbledon tennis championship starts next week. WORLD’s Jenny Rough visits a local tennis club to introduce us to playing the sport on grass.

And commentator Cal Thomas on taking the wrong road.

BROWN: It’s Thursday, June 23rd. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

BUTLER: And I’m Paul Butler. Good morning!

BROWN: Now the news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Powell testifies on Fed efforts to curb inflation » Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve is working to reassure the public and lawmakers worried about rising prices.

POWELL: At the Fed, we understand the hardship that high inflation is causing. We are strongly, strongly committed to restoring price stability.

Powell heard there on Capitol Hill face to face with members of the Senate Banking Committee.

He fielded tough questions from members of both parties. Democrats worried the Fed might be raising rates too much, too quickly at the risk of triggering a recession. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said raising rates won’t bring the needed price relief.

WARREN: Rate hikes won’t make Vladimir Putin turn his tanks around and leave Ukraine.

But several Republicans charged that the Fed has moved too slowly to protect the overall health of the economy and must now speed up its rate hikes. Republican Senator Tom Tillis...

TILLIS: The Fed has largely boxed itself in to a menu of purely reactive policy measures.

But Powell said the Fed is working hard to thread the needle, raising rates just enough to curb inflation. And he added “I don't think we need to provoke a recession.”

Afghanistan quake » Rescuers are digging through piles of rock and crumbled concrete in Afghanistan, hoping to find more survivors. That after the deadliest earthquake to hit the country in two decades struck a mountainous region in the country’s east.

Shelly Thakral is spokeswoman for the World Food Program in Afghanistan. She described the scene this way:

THAKRAL: Some of the pictures that have been coming in of just you know broken buildings and probably people buried under rubble and so what we're imagining is that a lot of homes have been destroyed.

The 5.9 magnitude quake killed at least a thousand people and 1,500 more are injured. And those numbers are expected to rise.

Helicopters have been airlifting the wounded out of villages as landslides dumped tons of earth and rock onto many roads, making them impassable.

Many international aid groups left the country after the Taliban seized power last year. But following the quake, the Taliban’s Deputy Minister for Disaster Management made a public appeal for global relief.

Louisiana governor signs abortion bill » Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a pro-life bill into law Wednesday. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports.

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: The new law will protect almost all unborn lives in the state. The only exceptions are for cases in which doctors don’t expect the baby to survive.

Although Edwards, a Democrat, signed the bill, he does not fully support it. He said, “I am pro-life and have never hidden from that fact,” but he added that he also wanted exceptions in cases of rape or incest.

He also objected to the law imposing a fine and jail time on both the abortionist and any mother receiving an illegal abortion.

But Edwards said had he not signed the bill, lawmakers would have overridden his veto.

The law’s legal survival likely hinges on the U.S. Supreme Court reversing Roe v. Wade.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Biden calls on Congress for gas tax holiday » President Biden on Wednesday called on Congress to suspend the national gas tax for three months.

BIDEN: I fully understand that a gas tax holiday alone is not going to fix the problems. But it will provide families some immediate relief, and a little bit of breathing room, as we continue working to bring down prices for the long haul.

Suspending the 18-cent-per-gallon gas tax could temporarily bring prices down a bit. Regular unleaded is still hovering around $5 per gallon.

It remains to be seen whether Congress will heed the president’s call. Some lawmakers from his own party are expressing reservations as gas tax revenue pays for highway and road work.

And Republicans, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, say if the president really wants to provide price relief…

McCONNELL: Stop waging a holy war against American fossil fuels and stop applauding the pain that working families are feeling as part of some grand left wing transition.

Biden also called on states to suspend their gas taxes. Some states already have or are planning to do so—including Georgia, New York, and Maryland.

Federal wildfire firefighters combatting staffing shortage » Firefighters working for Uncle Sam are getting a big pay raise as the government tries to keep them from quitting. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher reports.

JOSH SCHUMACHER, REPORTER: The National Interagency Fire Center mobilizes fire crews across the country to support local departments battling major blazes.

But many of its workers have been quitting for better pay at municipal departments.

Last year, the agency was unable to respond to roughly 1,900 requests because it simply didn’t have enough firefighters to send.

Just two years earlier, it only turned away 92 requests.

To put out the staffing fire, the government is boosting federal firefighters’ pay by 50 percent or $20,000, whichever is less.

The agency will pay for those raises with money from the recently passed infrastructure bill.

Last year, President Biden signed an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal firefighters to $15 an hour.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

I'm Kent Covington. Coming up: What’s being done to hold Russia accountable for war crimes in Ukraine?

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday the 23rd of June, 2022.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler.

First up: war crimes. Russia has been waging war against Ukraine for nearly four months now. Reports of Russian troops deliberately targeting, torturing, and killing civilians has generated international outrage.

Now, investigators from more than a dozen countries are in Ukraine documenting these cases. That’s happening even as fierce fighting continues in the eastern part of the country.

BROWN: But will international courts be able to hold Russia’s leaders accountable for these crimes? WORLD’s Jill Nelson reports.

JILL NELSON, REPORTER: When Russian troops invaded the Ukrainian village of Bilka on March 2nd, local residents tried to stay out of sight. Ludmyla Savchenko and her husband Mykola herded their six foster kids into the cellar as more than 200 Russian armored vehicles rolled into town.

Savchenko describes through a translator what happened next.

LUDMYLA: They were hiding in the cellar all the time and her phone died and her husband took her phone out to charge the battery and he said it would take just five minutes.

But her husband never returned. And the situation in her village was too dangerous to go out looking for him.

LUDMYLA: She could not see where he was or get any reports because local sheriffs told her not to go anywhere because there were mines all around the village and he told her to wait until the troops would be driven out of the village.

Seventeen days later, local forces found her husband, dead, face down in a pit and hastily covered with weeds.

Local police concluded that 45-year-old Mykola was brutally tortured and killed, a war crime according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, or ICC.

Rachel Kerr is a law professor at King’s College London and co-director of the War Crimes Research Group. She says the definition of a war crime is anything that violates international humanitarian law.

KERR: Things like unlawful killing, the big one, unlawful targeting, targeting civilians, targeting civilian infrastructure, deliberate targeting, that is, rape, sexual assault, torture, and then things like destruction of cultural heritage.

Ukraine’s chief prosecutor estimates 15,000 Ukrainians have been victims of war crimes since the Russian assault began in late February.

In March, the Russian air force bombed a maternity hospital. And in early April, Ukrainian forces freed the area around the capital and discovered mass graves and hundreds of suspected war crimes.

The ICC sent a 42-member team to Kyiv in May to begin formal investigations. It’s the largest team the ICC has ever deployed. And more than a dozen countries have launched their own investigations.

Kerr says this is a historic moment for law and politics.

KERR: So what's really significant here is that because of the extent of protest and disapproval of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the extent to which a section, a large section of the international community have come together to condemn that, it’s also meant that those states are now also providing concrete support to the ICC and practical support, financial support, in order to be able to carry out those investigations.

The Rome Statute of the ICC has 123 signing members, but Ukraine is not one of them. Neither is the United States or Russia.

But Kerr says Ukraine filed a note of jurisdiction with the ICC in 2014 over concerns about Russian war crimes during the first invasion.

KERR: So they do already, the ICC does have jurisdiction over Ukraine, which means it also has jurisdiction over Russian soldiers, obviously over Ukrainian soldiers, but also over Russian soldiers in Ukraine, even though Russia isn't a signatory.

But that doesn’t mean the Kremlin will cooperate. That’s why Ukraine has already begun its own war crimes trials. Ukrainian investigators have identified 600 Russian suspects and launched 80 prosecutions. Courts last month sentenced two Russian soldiers to 11 years in prison for shelling civilian areas. And Ukraine’s first war crimes trial resulted in a life sentence for another Russian soldier.

But according to President Joe Biden, the blame begins with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

BIDEN: He is a war criminal. But we have to gather the information, we have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue the fight, and we have to get all the details so this can be an actual - have a war crime trial. This guy is brutal.

Holding Russia’s leaders accountable will prove difficult for the ICC. But Kerr says there is a small measure of hope.

KERR: You could envisage a scenario, I think, where if you could see Putin being toppled somehow by people around him, which is a big if, that it would then be quite convenient to ship him off to the Hague to stand trial. And in which case, that's why I think it's not entirely out of the question, although at the moment the prospect looks fairly unlikely.

Connecting the dots to Russia’s leaders could take years, if it happens at all. That’s why teams of forensic experts from France, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and 14 other countries aren’t wasting any time.

Ludmyla Savchenko is hoping one of those teams will reach out and catalog the details of her husband's death.

She recently returned to her village in the Sumy Oblast where she was able to give her husband a proper burial and memorial service.

She has a hard road ahead. Russian forces are renewing their mortar attacks in her region.

And she’s now a single parent to all six of her foster kids, who range in age from four to 11. She says it’s been a difficult journey for children who have already experienced loss.

LUDMYLA: The children are still waiting for him to come home.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jill Nelson.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: A big win for religious exercise handed down this week from the US Supreme Court.

The state of Maine is a rural state with many sparsely populated areas. That means a sparse tax base, and that means some school districts can’t afford to operate a high school.

The state’s promise of free education for all led to a program in which rural students could choose to attend a neighboring public school or private school and receive the money to pay for it.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: But about 40 years ago, the state excluded faith-based schools from this tuition-assistance program.

One family decided to fight back. In 2018, David and Amy Carson sued the state and argued the policy discriminated against religion. And now they’ve won their case at the US Supreme Court by a vote of 6-3.

BUTLER: Someone who’s been fighting for fairness in the state of Maine for the last 25 years is Nicole Stelle Garnet. She’s a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame. She also directs the Religious Liberty Clinic there. And she filed one of the many amicus briefs in this case. WORLD’s Mary Reichard caught up with her after Tuesday’s decision to get her reaction.

MARY REICHARD: Nicole, let’s get right to the opinion. Summarize what it says?

NICOLE STELLE GARNET: So the court reiterated a principle that it had already made clear in prior opinions, which is that the government if it chooses to make a public benefit available to private entities, private organizations, private individuals, it cannot exclude them because they are religious.

REICHARD: And on what grounds?

GARNET: So the First Amendment prohibits discrimination against religious entities, and it requires Government neutrality toward them. So this program has been challenged many, many times, including by myself. And the court finally said that the exclusion of religious schools from the options available to kids participating in this program violated the Free Exercise Clause.

REICHARD: The opinion builds upon prior Supreme Court precedent: one is a case from 2002 called Zelman that held a state could let children participating in a private school choice program spend public funds at religious schools.

GARNET: So Zelman established the principle that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment does not require states to discriminate against religious schools. But it left open the question whether states could if they wish to discriminate against religious schools to by removing them from school choice programs. So after Zelman, a whole bunch of states adopt school choice programs almost that universally allow religious schools to participate. Except for Maine and Vermont. And they used to include religious schools, but they had excluded religious schools before Zelman, thinking that they had to. But even after it's clear, they don't have to, they still keep stubbornly saying, no, we just should be permitted to be more secular than the Constitution requires.

REICHARD: And a case called Locke v Davey in 2004 upheld the state of Ohio’s scholarship program that excluded public funds if they’d be used for a theology degree.

GARNET: The Court upheld the law, in a strange opinion that says the state had an interest in preventing the funding of education of ministers. So that's sort of in the background. But in a series of cases over the last five years, they've sort of chipped away at that. The first case was a case called Trinity Lutheran. It was a Missouri case. Missouri had a program that provided tires, recycled tires for playgrounds, and they excluded a Lutheran preschool on the grounds that the school was religious. The court invalidates that saying, this is a discrimination against religious entities. If you're going to make this available to secular preschools, you have to make it available to religious preschools.

Then two years ago in a school choice case called Espinoza versus Montana, the state of Montana had invalidated a school choice program. Supreme Court reiterates the holding in Trinity Lutheran and says, look, you don't have to have school choice. But if you're going to have school choice, you cannot discriminate against religious schools, nor can you rely on the fact that your program includes religious schools as grounds for invalidating it that is unconstitutional. So those these cases lead up to Carson on Monday. In many ways, Carson is simply an application of those holdings.

REICHARD: There were three dissenters. What did they have to say?

GARNET: Their main argument, I think, is simply that the First Amendment allows states to have some they use the term “play in the joints,” that if a state wishes to have a higher level of secularism or further separate church and state fund does refuse to fun thing, religious things, if it doesn't want to that ought to be permissible. Justice Breyer seems to be very concerned that funding religious entities will cause strife. He's very big into this idea that funding religious programming will cause division in our culture, division in our society. There's no evidence that funding religious schools has ever caused strife. I know, at least since the 19th century. I mean, they're 31 states with private school choice programs except for Maine and Vermont. All of them include religious schools, and as far as I know, there has been no religious strife as a result.

REICHARD: Very good. Final question here for you, Nicole. What's this opinion mean for all of us, not just people living in Maine?

GARNET: Well, I guess I would say, the first thing to keep in mind is some of the commenters on this opinion, including the dissenters act like it's, it's just sort of this amazing, groundbreaking, dangerous, you know, new development that all of a sudden the government must treat religious organizations fairly. There's no new legal ground broken in this case. So it's an important reiteration of an important principle, which is that religious believers and religious institutions are equally entitled to the equal benefits of citizenship and fair treatment by their government.

So the immediate impact is in the state of Maine and Vermont, you can't exclude religious schools from your school choice program. I think over time, though, it will have a bigger impact for a couple of reasons. The first is when legislators debate an expansion of parental choice, often state legislatures and later state courts try to rely on state constitutions to block them. These are so called Blaine amendments, state establishment clauses. And Carson sort of takes that argument off the table in most states. So. So that's good news. It paves the way for a further expansion of parental choice and education, giving parents more options, and including the options of attending religious schools.

And then I think it's important to keep in mind that this case, the principle issue in the Carson case extends beyond the parental choice context to other contexts. And I would be willing to bet there are hundreds, if not 1000s, of laws on the books in the states and in the Federal Register, that say religious, social service provider ‘X’ can participate, can get public funds, but not if they behave religiously. So you may have a Headstart program, you can participate in Headstart, but not if you're a religious Headstart provider; you can be a homeless shelter, but not and get money, but not if your homeless shelter has religious programming. This this holding applies to those restrictions too. So I do think there'll be a lot more litigation going forward and I suspect the bulk of it will be outside of the education context.

REICHARD: Nicole Garnett is a law professor at Notre Dame Law School and a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Nicole, thanks so much.

BUTLER: That’s Nicholle Stelle Garnett speaking with WORLD’s Mary Reichard. We’ll provide a link in today’s transcript to Mary’s earlier coverage of the oral arguments.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: British author Bella Jay Dark landed in the Guiness Book of World Records with her new book called The Lost Cat.

The children’s book, which she also illustrated herself tells the story of Snowy, a kitten who gets lost. The book delivers a powerful and positive safety message to young readers.

Speaking with British TV station 5-News, the author herself read the opening line of the book.

DARK: Snowy lives at home with her mom in a land called Cat Land.

As you can tell, Ms. Dark is a budding young author. Very young. She’s five years old.

She is the youngest female published author on the planet, according to Guinness. To be recognized in the record book, she had to sell at least a thousand copies of The Lost Cat, which she did.

Guinness representative Chelsie Syme said she looks forward to Bella’s future releases, adding, “Watch out for The Lost Cat 2.”

It’s The World and Everything in It.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Thursday, June 23rd. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Paul Butler.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: tennis. Wimbledon starts on Monday—it’s the oldest tennis tournament in the world.

AUDIO: [Roger Federer v. Rafael Nadal rally, Wimbledon 2008]

BUTLER: The annual championship takes place in London, England, on outdoor grass tennis courts. The sport was originally known as lawn tennis. Grass courts are still common in the United Kingdom. But in the United States, they’re hard to find. WORLD’s Jenny Rough reports.

AUDIO: [BIRDS CHIRPING IN THE TREES AT THE INTERNATIONAL TENNIS HALL OF FAME]

JENNY ROUGH, REPORTER: The International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, draws crowds not only for its museum, tournaments, and tributes to tennis greats. But because of a rare feature: 13 grass tennis courts.

JESSICA: We play several times a week.

A group of ladies, warming up before a game, say the grass courts have a unique appeal, different from clay or hard-court surfaces.

JESSICA: It’s amazing. We look forward to it out of all the surfaces. … Grass is simply magnificent.

CAROL: It’s a game where you have to hit the ball out of the air, because if you let it bounce—

JESSICA: It dies. It dies.

LINDA: The ball is low to the ground, so you have to sort of get up to the net as fast as you can and just try to take it out of the air.

Bill Mountford is the director of tennis here and says people come from all over to experience it.

BILL MOUNTFORD: We are open to the public. So anybody can come in off the street and if they want to try to play. You can come and experience the wonders of getting to play on grass and being here.

Historians debate the origins of the sport. But it’s believed lawn tennis dates to 12th century Europe where players batted a ball back and forth with their hands. That evolved to a paddle, and finally to a strung racquet. Today’s tennis racquets are light and easy to maneuver—meaning anyone can learn the game. Mountford works with players as young as 4 to as old as 90. Lawn tennis started as a social game, almost like a friendly conversation among friends. Even though it’s evolved into a competition, Mountford says it’s an ideal family sport. He often plays with his wife and two teenage kids.

MOUNTFORD: The four of us are a lot of times on the court together. So it really is a neat thing. And the other thing is, players at different levels, you can rally back and forth, even if you’re not competing and playing for money or blood. So it’s one of those really neat quirks of our sport that men can play with women, women can play with men, children can play with seniors, and everything in between.

The object of the game is simple.

MOUNTFORD: You have to hit the ball over the net inside the lines one more time than your opponent.

At the Rhode Island center, groundsman Jon Bengston keeps the courts in immaculate condition. He starts his day around 6:30 in the morning and spends the first three hours getting them prepped and ready for players, who begin arriving at 10 a.m.

JOHN BENGSTON: Something gets done to the courts physically every day.

He paints the courts twice a week. Mows and rolls the courts four times a week. The go-to grass these days is a mix of rye grass and Kentucky bluegrass.

BENGSTON: We mow at 5/16th of an inch. So we’re pretty tight.

Similar to a tee box on a golf course. He collects clippings. Deals with fungus. Weeds, like clover and dandelion. And critters.

BENGSTON: Our biggest thing is rabbits. So we have a lot of rabbits here. They eat the grass. They leave their droppings after eating the grass.

Tennis director Bill Mountford explains how grass courts create a different type of play.

BILL: Traditionally at Wimbledon, the courts used to be lightning fast, huge advantage to those who can, who could serve well, who could move forward in volley. It would favor the attacking players.

The ball bounce would barely rise above a player’s socks. It would skid and stay low. Listen to the difference. Here’s a ball bouncing on hard court.

AUDIO: [Ball bouncing on hard court]

Versus grass:

AUDIO: [Ball bouncing on grass court]

If you watch old footage:

MOUNTFORD: The bounces were just shocking. You’d hit a serve and the ball would just kind of dribble away from the best players in the world. So if you didn’t get to that ball quickly … then you were really in trouble.

On the opposite of that spectrum? Clay.

BILL: The slow clay, especially red clay courts, would favor the players who could stay out there, play further from behind the baseline, just out-rally players, because the clay would hold the ball up. It would sit. So it was very hard to get the player so far out of position that you could hit a winner.

And in the middle of those two? Hard courts.

BILL: But the hard courts, the footing is a lot more certain than it is on either grass or clay. So it's much easier to plant and change direction. On clay, you have to slide and then regain your balance. And on grass it is definitely a little bit less certain of your footing.

Today, grass courts are firmer. That allows the rallies to last longer. What does it feel like to play on a grass court? I had to find out. So I took a lesson with Coach Phil.

JENNY ROUGH: So what are we going to do in the lesson today?

COACH PHIL: Well, first we’re going to get acclimated to the bounce. We’re going to let you kind of get used to that. Going to the bounce instead of waiting for the ball. And then we’ll do a bit of everything…

Lots of sprinting.

COACH PHIL: You’re working twice as hard on grass. It’s like your feet almost get sucked into the court, you know?

And squatting.

COACH PHIL: You have to bend down every time really low. A lot of leg work. If you don’t move, you’re not going to get to the ball.

With grass courts, it can be hard to see the baseline. I hit into a sea of green and try my best to gauge if the ball’s in or out. Coach Phil says grass courts do tend to result in bad line calls and a lot of disputes on the court.

A little more instruction—

COACH PHIL: Think about one of your strategies is to hit the ball soft. And short.

—and lesson over.

AUDIO: [Dumping practice balls in cart]

Super fun.

COACH PHIL: So if you ever have the opportunity to get out there, you should put in on your bucket list. Get on a grass court.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough, in Newport, Rhode Island.

AUDIO: [Tennis rally on Centre Court, Wimbledon 2008]

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, June 23rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Here’s commentator Cal Thomas.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: Inflation, high gas and food prices, a falling stock market, corrosive politics and a looming recession are all causes for concern—even alarm. But two recent Gallup polls reveal an erosion of foundational principles that is even more troubling.

According to Gallup, 50 percent of those surveyed believe the state of “moral values” in America is “poor.” Thirty-seven percent say they are only “fair.” The trend is not headed in the right direction as 78 percent think they are getting worse.

One doesn’t have to look far to see the reason for this pessimistic outlook. Consider what is being taught (and not taught) in many public schools and universities. In addition, the media—social, broadcast, cable and entertainment—mostly focus on the tawdry. It’s “news” that Emma Thompson is doing a nude scene in a film because she wants us to love our bodies. It’s news that Kim Kardashian wore a dress once worn by Marilyn Monroe when she sang “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy in 1962. Don’t even get me started on the fascination the media have with Harry and Meghan.

Things once considered wrong and immoral are now paraded as the opposite—and woe to those corporations, institutions and individuals that claim otherwise.

Need more examples? We could never list them all, but these few will do: mass shootings in schools and everywhere else. Speaker Nancy Pelosi appearing on “Ru Paul’s Drag Race” and remarking: “This is what America is all about.” Drag queen story hours at elementary schools. The widespread promotion of so-called “gender identity and fluidity”—Facebook’s list of gender categories now totals 58. Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed a “Menstrual Cycle Dignity” bill that requires thousands of new tampon dispensers be placed in boy’s bathrooms. A Washington, D.C. elementary school gave Pre-K through third-grade children a lesson on “anti-racism” that asked them to identify racist members of their family.

Moral decline—along with massive debt—has contributed to the collapse of great nations in the past. If a foundation is defective, any house built on it will experience distress. What makes us think we can escape the judgment of history and avoid a similar fate? A house and its foundation must be maintained. A car must be serviced. A body must be taken care of. So must America.

The second Gallup poll found belief in the existence of God has reached a new low. Eighty-one percent of those surveyed said they believe in God, but the number is down six points from a consistent 87 percent that held that belief between 2013 and 2017.

The two polls should be seen as related. When society creates a vacuum, pressure builds from the outside to fill it. If growing numbers of people don’t believe in God, they have to believe in something. Without a power to restrain humankind from our lower nature, anything goes. Is this where we want to be and is this the direction in which we wish to be headed?

I once heard the late evangelist Rev. Billy Graham say America was not at a crossroads, but had traveled down the wrong road and needed to come back to the crossroads and take the right road. But what if we can no longer agree on the right road and where the wrong road is leading us?

I’m Cal Thomas.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Tomorrow: Culture Friday.

And we’ll review the new biopic about the life of Elvis Presley.

Plus, WORLD’s Emily Whitten with a few pro-life book suggestions.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Paul Butler.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says: Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

Go now in grace and peace.

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