The World and Everything in It: May 20, 2025

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

A new federal report points to a quiet retreat from devastating surgeries on children.

But for thousands, the damage is done.

MOSELY: I thought I had gotten a proper diagnosis and that I was going to be given a cure that was going to cure all of my distress and trauma.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also more insurers are paying for all that.

But what happens when a patient wants it reversed? Those same companies often disappear.

And later, teaching English in Spain’s public schools.

CORLEY: The behavior in the classrooms is, I don't know, it was just kind of a shock for me…

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, May 20th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

RIEHCARD: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR:  Ukraine peace talks » President Trump says Russia is ready to move ahead with negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.

That comes after the president spent more than two hours on the phone Monday with Vladimir Putin. Trump said he was trying to convince Putin to re-engage in negotiations … and he added that he thought the call went very well.

TRUMP: I thought there was a very good chance—like a 50-50 chance—that he would say, "I want to take the whole thing." I didn't know what he was gonna say. And then they have a different kind of a problem. But I believe he wants to stop.

The president also addressed an offer by Pope Leo the Fourteenth to host ceasefire talks…at the Vatican.

TRUMP: There's tremendous bitterness—anger. And I think maybe that could help some of that anger. So having it at the Vatican would be—in Rome—would be a very, I think it would be a great idea.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he also spoke with President Trump by phone yesterday.

ZELENSKYY: [Speaking Ukrainian]

He said he stressed that Ukraine will never agree to pull its troops out of its own sovereign territory.

The Take it Down Act » Also at the White House on Monday, President Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law.

The bill sets stricter penalties for distributing or exploiting another person’s image online in certain ways without their consent, such as pornographic images. Those include images created using AI or Photoshop.

The president signed it alongside his wife, Melania Trump, and had her sign it, too. She said the law is intended:

MELANIA: To ensure that every American, especially young people, can feel better protected from their image or identity being abused through non-consensual intimate imagery.

The first lady helped usher the measure through Congress.

She used her first public appearance since resuming the role of first lady to travel to Capitol Hill in March to lobby House lawmakers to pass the bill.

SCOTUS TPS ruling  » The Supreme Court has ruled almost unanimously that the Trump administration can strip legal protections from thousands of Venezuelan migrants while a larger legal battle plays out. WORLD’s Christina Grube has more.

CHRISTINA GRUBE: The 8-to-1 ruling on Monday pauses a lower court ruling. A judge had blocked the administration from lifting Temporary Protected Status—or TPS from 350,000 Venezuelans.

Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

That earlier decision kept the protections in place that had been set to expire last month.

The Biden administration granted TPS to Venezuelans due to unsafe conditions back home. But the Trump administration argues that the judge’s order usurped executive authority and that conditions have changed.

The decision does not mean that the migrants will automatically be deported. But it may leave them without legal status.

The case is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to roll back protections for immigrants from several countries also including Haiti and Nicaragua.

For WORLD, I’m Christina Grube.

White House on president’s health » Former President Joe Biden's recent cancer diagnosis has sparked concern about whether doctors at the White House missed the cancer during its early stages, and if so, could something else be missed affecting the current president?

But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters there are no concerns about President Trump or his health staff.

LEAVITT: We returned home from a very long and tiring trip last week. And on Saturday, where was the president? In the Oval Office working all day. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t quit. He’s in great health and he trusts his physicians.

82-year-old former president Biden is said to have an "aggressive" form of prostate cancer.

Investigation of NY Mexican ship crash » The Mexican navy tall ship that struck the Brooklyn Bridge had departed less than 5 minutes before its masts crashed into the historic span. That's according to a timeline laid out by investigators Monday.

Michael Graham with National Transportation Safety Board:

GRAHAM: This is the start of a long process. We will not be drawing any conclusions. We will not speculate. We also will not be determining the probable cause while we are on scene.

Graham also said there is no significant structural damage to the load-bearing elements of the bridge.

Meanwhile, many crew members have flown home from New York. The Mexican navy says seven officers and 172 cadets who were aboard the sailing ship arrived early Monday at the port of Veracruz, where Mexico’s naval school is located.

Two cadets were killed in Saturday's crash.

U.K. E.U. agreement » The U.K. and the European Union have reached new agreements on trade and security following a summit in London.

The meeting was the first formal discussion between the territories after the U.K. finalized its withdrawal from the union in 2020.

The deal grants EU fishing boats access to U.K. waters in exchange for reduced checks on British food and drink products traded to the bloc.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer praised the new deal.

STARMER: It gives us unprecedented access to the EU market, the best of any country outside of the EU or EFTA. All while sticking to the red lines in our manifesto about not rejoining the single market, the Customs Union and no return to freedom of movement.

Through the agreement, the U.K. defense industry will also be allowed to participate in the union’s new program to ramp up Europe’s defense system.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: HHS reviewed the medical literature and reports there’s no evidence that gender reassignment is helpful. Plus, insurance companies and double standards.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 20th of May.

This is WORLD Radio and we are so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up on The World and Everything in It: a warning about risky medicine for vulnerable kids.

A quick heads-up for parents: the next two stories deal with pretty sensitive topics. They may not be appropriate for your younger children. So there’s still a moment before we get underway.

REICHARD: This first piece has to do with a big report by the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s a 400-page review of medical interventions for children with gender dysphoria. The findings? In short, what many people expected.

Weak evidence to support it and serious risks from it.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy talked to one detransitioner who says what’s being offered should not be called treatment.

MARY MUNCY: Prisha Mosely knows exactly what started her gender dysphoria.

PRISHA MOSELY: When I was 14, I was sexually assaulted, and I became pregnant as a result of that, and miscarried.

She developed anorexia and joined an online group that encouraged her not to eat.

MOSELY: A bunch of trans identifying adults came in and explained to us that our distress was actually based on the fact that we were born in the wrong body.

Before this, her doctors had been telling her the truth about her body. She wasn’t fat. She should eat, and they refused to give her liposuction.

MOSELY: And when I went to my doctors, and the narrative had changed, and I was no longer saying that my life was bad because I was fat. It was bad because I was born in the whole wrong body. All of a sudden they were agreeing with me.

At 17, she started testosterone… and she felt better...for the first few months.

MOSELY: I got validation and affirmation from feeling stronger. I really did gain some muscle, and that made me feel safer.

But those feelings started to wear off.

MOSELY: And that's why I thought it was time to have my breasts removed.

So, shortly after her 18th birthday, she got a double mastectomy.

MOSELY: I thought that I was having a life-saving procedure that was going to prevent my suicide. And I was so suicidal, I mean, that I would have cut off my breast to live, and I did.

Mosely is not alone. Advocacy organization Stop the Harm found that between 2019 and 2023, almost 14,000 minors had interventions to change their sex characteristics… and almost 6,000 underwent reassignment surgery.

KURT MICELI: We know that the harms are significant just by having knowledge of what takes place

Kurt Miceli is the medical director for Do No Harm.

MICELI: We know that they're significant downsides in terms of bone mineral density. We also understand that there is infertility that results when one is taking puberty blockers and then adding cross sex hormones to that. There's sexual dysfunction that folks experience. There the cardiovascular effects that come with the hormones.

But he says that perspective isn’t published in the literature.

MICELI: The literature has tended to focus on on the notion of what benefits might exist.

But this month, the Health and Human Services Department, or HHS, published a literature review… saying the evidence is weak that gender-affirming interventions for minors are beneficial. It follows several other countries reversing their policies.

The HHS report is an “umbrella review”—meaning the authors compiled other reviews of the evidence and reviewed those.

MICELI: Systematic reviews are really a gold standard. And so I think in medicine, that's what we look for.

The HHS report found that many published studies promoting gender-affirming care are poorly done. Some featured small sample sizes, others lacked long-term analysis, and still others didn’t have a control group.

For example, the HHS reviewed one study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that claimed to prove gender affirming health care is safe and effective.

In that study, researchers asked 315 adolescents about their physical and mental health before starting treatment for gender dysphoria… then they followed up two years later.

Physically, the follow-up included biomarker tests but did not include information about growth or fertility.

On the mental health side, when they started the study, they were testing for 19 outcomes… but at the end of the two years, they only reported four—excluding the outcome of patients’ gender dysphoria, suicidality, and self-harm, among other things. Critically, two people committed suicide within a year of starting hormones.

The HHS found that due to these shortcomings, and others… the study didn’t have enough information to know whether medical intervention helped their subjects’ gender dysphoria… despite the study’s claims.

MICELI: I know oftentimes we defer to autonomy and to how people want to be self directed and such. But I think what has happened here is we've fallen very much into a almost consumeristic, child driven process.

Instead of life-altering procedures, the HHS report encourages doctors and parents to focus on psychotherapy if their child is struggling with gender dysphoria.

Prisha Mosely was 24 and starting to detransition before she truly realized what the interventions had done to her body.

MOSELY: I had given up on the idea of pregnancy.

As she started detransitioning, a doctor helped her even out her hormones. She also began dating a man in Michigan.

MOSELY: I started birth control because my doctor wanted me on estrogen and progesterone while we were waiting for bioidentical hormones, and within, like, I mean, weeks of starting the birth control, I got pregnant. It was shocking to me.

She was terrified. She would have to quit all of her psychiatric medications… and because she had transitioned so young, her hips were too small for her baby’s head. She would have to have a C-section.

MOSELY: I had to keep telling myself, like, okay, I there's for sure. Like, actually a baby inside of me. I actually do need this surgery for something real.

When her due date came, she yelled at the doctors not to touch her and couldn’t stop throwing up… even during surgery.

MOSELY: But when he was out and on me, you know. Everything changed, and it was only us in the room, and everything was perfect again

Mosely was not able to breastfeed her son. Now, she’s suing the doctors involved in her transition. Her case is the first to proceed to court.

She says the people who were supposed to help her when she was most vulnerable failed her… and now she and her son are living with that.

MOSELY: For a very, I mean, about a decade or more of my life, I was just looking for a savior, someone to save me. I really thought that I needed saving, and I was bad and I was broken, and I, yeah, I was looking for a savior.

Mosely says some painful experiences in the church were part of the trauma of her transition… but she says she has a personal relationship with God… and now, a nearly one-year-old son to share it with.

MOSELY: Detransition has brought so much healing and so much peace that I have such an abundance of love that another person was born out of my infertility.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It…the cost of detransitioning.

In the U.S., many insurance companies now cover cross-sex hormones and surgeries to alter sex characteristics. But when someone wants to reverse those procedures? Coverage gets murky.

Some companies don’t cover detransition. Others bury the process in red tape. And that has the attention of lawmakers.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Last week, Texas approved a bill requiring insurance companies to cover medical care for side effects and procedures related to detransition.

If Republican Governor Greg Abbott signs it, Texas would be the first state to make that law stick.

WORLD’s Juliana Chan Erikson has that story.

JULIANA CHAN ERIKSON: For Abel Garcia, getting insurance to pay for his breast implants was the easy part. Once doctors diagnosed him with gender dysphoria at age 18, they wrote prescriptions for estrogen supplements and breast implant surgery.

ABEL GARCIA: They got me as soon as they could to transition to get the implants. Did the recovery, everything went well, no issues, no complications.

But three months after the plastic surgery, Garcia came to a startling realization.

GARCIA: It all came crashing down like an avalanche one day, and I had to ask myself, What am I doing?

Garcia decided he wanted to get the implants removed… but he discovered that gender transition in the United States is a one-way street. Therapist after therapist continued to affirm his chosen gender identity, rather than his birth identity. And the insurance companies that said cross-sex hormones and surgeries were medically necessary told a different story about reversal treatments.

GARCIA: They replied back to me, saying that my request to detransition by getting the implants removed was considered medically not necessary.

WORLD reached out to Inland Empire Health Plan, Garcia’s insurance company, to ask about that policy. The provider said that due to privacy rules, they could not confirm Garcia’s membership, or the treatments he received.

Major health insurance providers generally cover gender-affirming procedures. But when it comes to reversals, they vary. Some will only grant them on a case by case basis.

Dr. Jared Ross is an emergency medicine physician in South Carolina and a senior fellow with the research group Do No Harm.

ROSS: You would never imagine having an anorexic girl go to a doctor and say, I'm fat. I need ozempic. I need gastric bypass, I need liposuction. The doctor would never say “Yes, of course, you're fat.”

He says insurance companies used to only cover breast implants for women who’ve lost their breasts to cancer or a traumatic injury.

ROSS: For someone to just say, oh, I want breast implants. Oh, no, I want them removed. Insurance doesn't really get involved in either side of that.

But cases like Garcia’s reveal an emerging trend. Most major insurance companies now cover breast implants in men diagnosed with gender dysphoria. And Ross says that’s a problem.

ROSS: We are cutting into the body to address a mental health issue…It's completely inappropriate and completely unethical.

Ross says doctors, patients and insurance companies have to grapple with the fact that most of these patients’ bodies will never truly return to normal when they change their minds.

ROSS: The human body is not a Lego set. We can't simply remove parts and put them back.

Adding to the confusion, doctors and insurance providers don’t have a billing code specifically for detransition procedures. For every doctor-patient interaction, there is a multi-digit code identifying it for insurance billing. There is a code for everything a doctor could ever encounter, from being struck by a duck to walking into a lamppost. But there isn’t a code for someone who wants to reverse a gender change procedure.

The American Medical Association develops and maintains these medical procedure codes. When WORLD asked the association why there aren’t codes for these patients, a representative said many patients get the same procedure but for different reasons. So there doesn’t need to be a distinction.

When Garcia appealed and got approval for surgeries to remove the implants and reconstruct his chest, the surgeon didn’t label that a reversal.

GARCIA: He mentioned it was gynecomastia.

That’s a condition when men have enlarged breasts. But that billing code hides the truth of what Garcia was experiencing, and some want to change that.

KIEFEL: We're not actually studying the people who've been harmed by this

Camille Kiefel is head of Detrans Help, a support group for detransitioners. She says if there was a medical billing code for detransition, Garcia and others would have an easier time getting approved for reversal procedures. It would also make it easier to figure out how many patients are asking for them.

KIEFEL: Part of it's going to be documentation, and then the other thing is just easily getting access to what we need.

Kiefel herself had a double mastectomy when she was 30, back when she considered herself non-binary. Now, she wants to go back to looking like a woman. She acknowledges that breast implants aren’t medically necessary, but says they’re important in other ways.

KIEFEL: It’s important for their self-esteem, for being able to go on and live their life, like start a family if they want to, be in relationships.

Abel Garcia has spent several years trying to fix what was broken. Along the way, he proposed to his girlfriend and is planning a wedding for next year.

GARCIA: I'm just working on trying to live my life, and do the best that I can to live as a man. And say I deserve some happiness after the insanity I’ve been going through the last couple of years.

Dr. Ross says the U.S. has a long way to go, not just to undo the damage, but also to prevent it from happening. He says Texas is heading in the right direction, by requiring insurance to cover reversal procedures and prohibiting minors from receiving them in the first place.

ROSS: There are minors there that were harmed, and there may be minors who were harmed out of state who go to Texas for for help, because they see Texas as as a beacon of light, as a state that has definitely led the path in trying to protect children from this.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Juliana Chan Erikson.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Forget the first pitch: Here’s a rivalry that started at the first step and the first stop—a human-powered sprint racing a 32-minute subway ride—across the Big Apple.

VICKY: Who makes it to the Mets game first?

That’s the question. Vicky Conroy versus Noah Cracknell racing across New York. Headed to Citi Field.

NOAH: Here we go!

Diversions, detours, delays, but one mile down …

So far, so good.

NOAH: First mile was like, 6:30.

Huffing and puffing a bit, but Noah still making excellent time. The two were pretty much neck and neck by mile 7.5, and nearing the finish line:

VICKY: We gotta go! We gotta go!

The subway pulled in as did the fleet-footed Noah did , both reaching Citi Field at the same time!

NOAH: I made it! Tie goes to the runner!

A true subway series.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 20th of May.

This is WORLD Radio and we are so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next: When “home away from home” feels more away than home.

For twenty years, Spain has welcomed native English speakers into its classrooms. Ten of thousands of Americans among them.

REICHARD: Teaching in Spain sounds like a dream for some, but the reality isn’t always easy. As WORLD Associate Correspondent Elisa Palumbo explains, culture shock and red tape can turn the dream into a test of resilience.

ELISABETH CORLEY: Okay, today, we are going to be doing a warm up: writing …

ELISA PALUMBO: In a classroom outside Seville, Spain, Elisabeth Corley, works to keep her 25 students focused on their writing warm up. The 7th graders, dressed in private school uniforms, sit on blue, plastic chairs, their desks arranged in groups of two. It might not look that different from the American classrooms Corley grew up in. But it is.

CORLEY: The behavior in the classrooms is, I don't know, it was just kind of a shock for me, just how I would say that the classroom in Spain in general is just noisier and more casual, like, there's not, it's not as formal.

Corley first experienced one of those classrooms on a year-long study abroad trip in college. She loved it. She wanted to come back. That’s when she decided to be a language assistant. The Spanish education system also calls them language auxiliaries.

CORLEY: I also met another auxiliary who was doing the auxiliaries de conversacion program through the government. So I met her, talked to her, because she worked at that school as an auxiliary.

Over 49,000 Americans have come to Spain as language and culture ambassadors since 2005. Spain’s Ministry of Education wanted to expose students to the culture and language of English-speaking countries. The answer? Get native English speakers into its language classes.

CORLEY: You help a lot of times, like in science classes, and you teach, help teach the curriculum in English, or help with pronunciation, with their English pronunciation. Also, if you're with the older kids, sometimes it's like technology or like PE … Yeah, usually science.

For more than 15 years, high school English teacher Cristina Muñoz has relied on language assistants in her classroom. She teaches in Cáceres, Spain.

CRISTINA MUÑOZ: I really appreciate having a native speaker in the classroom. And they give a very important cultural insight from their perspective, being young, being native.

Many language auxiliaries look forward to their new life in Spain, but the process of starting a life abroad can come with a lot of challenges. Language assistants don’t have much say over who they work with or what town they live in. They can make a request, but where they get placed can still be random. And that may still be the easiest step in moving abroad. Elisabeth Corley again:

CORLEY: I think, I think studying abroad, or living abroad, or any of that type of stuff is just romanticized in general. And people think you're on like, a year long vacation, and you're like, No, this is like, never. This is actually really difficult.

Corley had to find an apartment, open a bank account, and get a Spanish phone number. She had 90 days to finalize her visa process. Nearly everything had to be done in Spanish.

CORLEY: I had to renew every single year a student visa, and it always would like expire in the summer, so then you would have to do all the paperwork in the summer. But until that was sorted you weren’t supposed to leave the country.

She also had to navigate a new school system.

CORLEY: And like, here in Spain, students like, call you by your first name, or just say teacher. And it's just, it's just very like, okay, just to talk out of turn basically, or kind of be talking, like, quietly while the teacher’s talking.

But as that first school year came to an end, Elisabeth wanted more time in Spain. So she reapplied and came back … 7 more times.

CORLEY: I actually didn't think I would stay in Spain when I was applying for programs to be an auxiliary. I thought like okay, I'll probably do this for two, three years. . .

She says God has used the seemingly endless paperwork and visa renewals to teach her to trust Him. She got involved in a local church filled with people from Spain, the U.S. and Latin America. It provided stable relationships in uncertain times.

CORLEY: And then I kept thinking, like, I don't know, like I feel like my time here isn't done, so I'd stay. And every year was like a big like, what if?

It also helped that she met a nice Spaniard named Adrián at church. He kept wanting to have long conversations with her. Then he asked her out. They dated…and got married. European residency put the days of visa renewal behind her, but Corley now faces a different problem: she’s not sure where she belongs.

CORLEY: While I've been living here, I've gone through an identity crisis of now like I don't feel, I'll never be Spanish, of course not. But I also don't feel like, when I go back to the U.S., that I'm a U.S. citizen? Well, no, I feel like I'm a U.S. citizen, but I don't feel like I fit into the culture anymore. So I'm like, Okay, what am I?

Whenever she goes back to the U.S., she experiences reverse culture shock. Sometimes it’s the politeness of strangers at grocery stores. Sometimes it’s the American idea of putting one’s whole identity into work. But walking away from the career-driven culture of the U.S. has helped Corley find her true identity.

CORLEY: And so God has really through these years that I've been abroad, brought me closer to him and made me realize that that like my security is in him and not a country or my blood family or my church in the U.S. like no, no, it's in him.

Elisabeth and Adrián don’t plan to live in Spain forever. At some point, Lord-willing, they hope to live in the U.S. as well. For now they both teach in Seville. They’re content, but ready to serve wherever they end up next.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Elisa Palumbo in Seville and Cáceres, Spain.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, May 20th. Good morning! This isThe World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) is closing the doors on its global missions efforts. Nearly all its missionaries have been let go.

WORLD Opinions contributor Nathan Finn explains what led to this shift and why it matters.

NATHAN FINN: The stated reasons for this move include a drop in the missionary force over the past 15 years and the financial repercussions of ongoing membership decline…but this is hardly the whole story. The roots of its decline are ultimately theological, not financial.

In the 1920s and 1930s, American Protestants endured a number of denominational disputes that collectively came to be called the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. In each instance, theological liberals gradually gained control over denominational institutions and leading pulpits. They called for the redefinition of older ideas like Biblical inspiration, human sinfulness, the person and work of Christ, and salvation.

As modernists gained power, theological conservatives resisted and the conservative dissenters came to be called “fundamentalists” as they contended for the fundamentals of Biblical Christianity. They said the world didn’t need some revised version of the faith that tickled the ears. Rather, people still needed to hear that the Bible is an authoritative and truthful revelation from God, that all people are sinners, that Jesus is fully God and fully man, that He died for our sins and rose again on the third day, and that there is no salvation found outside of faith in Jesus.

The two major fronts in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy were theological seminaries and foreign mission agencies, and they were closely connected. Seminaries educate future pastors and missionaries, so they necessarily shape how emerging church leaders think about the Bible, human nature, the gospel, and the Great Commission. Liberal pastors educated in modernist seminaries increasingly preached a social gospel that minimized the reality of personal sin and the need for salvation. Liberal missionaries focused their efforts on education, medical services, and economic development, often to the exclusion of evangelism and church planting.

Modernists and their pragmatically minded “moderate” allies gained control of denominational institutions, especially Princeton Theological Seminary and the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions.

Theological conservatives challenged these changes. They established Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929. In 1933 they started the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. Both offered alternatives to the modernist denominational agencies. Ultimately, most conservatives left the denomination for new groups, most notably the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

The most important Presbyterian conservative of the time was New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen, who served for decades on the faculty of Princeton Seminary. Machen helped found Westminster Seminary, the Independent Board, and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Most importantly, he wrote the definitive interpretation of theological liberalism and the threat it poses to authentic Christianity.

In his 1923 book: Christianity and Liberalism Machen argued that modernism wasn’t an updated form of Christianity but was rather a different religion that rivalled Biblical Christianity. Theological liberals may use the same vocabulary as Christianity, but they are working from a different dictionary because of their rejection of Biblical inspiration and other fundamental doctrines. Liberalism doesn’t lead to the renewal of Christianity for the modern world but results in the rejection of authentic Christianity altogether. The end product of liberalism is unbelief.

History has proven Machen correct. In 1983, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America was one of the historically Reformed denominations that merged into what is now the Presbyterian Church (USA). In 1983, the PCUSA had over 3.1 million members. Today, membership is less than 1.1 million members. Several of its seminaries still have elite reputations, but all of them are liberal and declining. Churches continue to leave the denomination because of its progressive drift. None of this is a recipe for a robust commitment to Great Commission faithfulness.

The story of mainline Presbyterianism over the past 100 years is a cautionary tale. Theological liberalism is incompatible with authentic Christianity. When churches or denominations begin to adjust to the spirit of the age, Jude 3 says they inevitably deny the faith that was once and for all delivered to the saints.

I’m Nathan Finn.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow, with President Trump back from the Middle East with a portfolio of deals … we’ll look into what they say about his foreign-policy goals? We’ll talk about it on Washington Wednesday. And, how a surprising friendship between an author and a bookseller turned into something lasting. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

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: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” —Galatians 5:1

Go now in grace and peace.

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