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Transcript: The Briefing 05-26-15

The Briefing

 

May 26, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Tuesday, May 26, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Irish landslide for gay marriage shows breakdown of cultural shaping power of Catholicism

There have been several important headlines of the last several days; the most important comes from Ireland where the nation of Ireland became the very first on the planet to legalize same-sex marriage by vote. In this case by a vote of the people, by a referendum. As the Associated Press reported,

“Ireland’s citizens have voted in a landslide to legalize gay marriage,”

and what we’re looking at here is – as the Associated Press reported – “a stunningly lopsided result that illustrates what Catholic leaders and rights activists alike called a ‘social revolution.’”

Indeed it is, of course, a social revolution and behind that it is more fundamentally a worldview and a moral revolution. Looking at the way the Economist reported from London, as they said,

“The sizeable majority reflects a dramatic shift in public attitudes in Ireland, a socially conservative country where 84% of the population regard themselves as Catholic.”

Now one of the interesting aspects of all this is that there is a theological dynamic that simply has to be noted here. For instance, you have a distinction between Catholicism in Ireland and Catholicism in the United States. Irish Catholics have higher rates of attending church than do Catholics in United States by statistics, and one of the most interesting things about Ireland is how much lower the divorce rate there is among practicing Roman Catholics. The very heavy Catholic influence in Ireland has been a fundamental fact of its moral and social existence. So much so that Ireland decriminalized homosexuality only in 1993, and only under pressure of other European nations and the European Human Rights Court. Ireland still has very restrictive divorce laws and very restrictive abortion laws. And so in this case, the legalization of same-sex marriage is something of an outlier or – as at least some in Ireland are beginning to argue – it is an indicator of other votes yet to come. Of larger moral change that is taking place of which the legalization of same-sex marriage is only a leading indicator.

Well, time will tell on that, but right now there are some very interesting theological issues at stake. In the first place there is that distinction that marks Irish Catholicism from over against American Catholicism just in terms of the fact that American Catholic don’t go to churches much of the Irish, and at the same time American Catholics indicate a greater propensity to break with the teachings of their church on issues like divorce. But now it’s Roman Catholics in Ireland – one of the most traditionalist Roman Catholic cultures in the world – that has reversed the influence of the church in that area and its official opposition to same-sex marriage, voting in what is rightly described as a landslide last Friday to legalize same-sex marriage.

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said that when the most interesting aspects to him was the loss of the grip of the Roman Catholic Church not only on the nation of Ireland but in particular on the young. Before looking to Archbishop’s comments it will be important to note just how overwhelming the vote was: younger Irish citizens voted by the rate of 71% for the legalization of same-sex marriage. Speaking of those very young people the Archbishop said,

“I ask myself, most of these young people who voted yes are products of our Catholic school system for 12 years. I’m saying there’s a big challenge there to see how we get across the message of the church.”

Now let me just state the obvious here in terms of the lesson for evangelical Christians. By the time you hold a referendum like this and 71% of the young people, most of whom – the vast majority of whom, accorded the Archbishop – attended Roman Catholic schools then you have already lost. The challenge the Archbishop identified saying “there’s a big challenge there to see how we get across the message of the church,” the big lesson here is the failure of the church to get across that message at least in a convincing way. Now one of the most interesting and important things for evangelicals the ponder at this point is the question as to just what kind of argument these young people in Ireland had even as they were Catholics attending Catholic schools when it came to the institution of marriage as a biblical ideal, and also is it comes to same-sex marriage as a challenge to that ideal – a notion that according to the logic of Scripture is absolutely impossible, that is a same-sex marriage.

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland faced other major realities as well, including the fact that many of the church’s own priests and nuns broke with the official teaching of the church and with the instruction of their bishops, and publicly supported the legalization of same-sex marriage. Looking at this merely from the political and not from a theological perspective, the Economist of London said,

“The lesson political parties will draw from the referendum campaign is that young people will turn out to vote if an issue captures their interest.”

Well we can also say, looking at the same data, that one of the most important things we can face is that if young people do not have a strong moral and biblical – indeed, a theological – argument against the legalization of same-sex marriage, they’re almost assuredly going to be for it. Which is to state it otherwise, if they are not committed to a biblical notion of marriage because they believe that it is biblical and because they believe the Bible is the word of God, then we cannot expect that they will be able to resist the tidal pressure of the culture around us when it comes to redefining marriage. And we should note, not just on these terms.

Another very important theological dimension of this the story was made clear by Mark Silk, a columnist now for Religion News Service. He wrote,

“The stunning vote of the Irish to legalize same-sex marriage will be taken as one more indication… of the collapse of the Catholic Church in a country where it once bestrode the sod like a colossus.”

That’s poetic, but it’s also quite accurate. Silk went on to point out that even though Ireland is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic by the identification of its citizens, and even as it’s a country where a higher proportion of Catholics go to mass than in United States, even there every Irish political party, he says, supported the referendum. And the citizens of Ireland voted in favor by a 62-38 margin. He then asked the leading question: What gives? It’s his answer to his own question that is really important. He writes,

“What gives, in part, is that Catholicism, understood as a religious culture rather than as a set of official doctrines, is far more amenable to same-sex marriage than is generally thought. Unlike Protestantism, it never valorized the nuclear family as the church in miniature. Catholics have, by contrast, exercised their analogical imaginations in understanding nuns as married to Jesus and bishops to their dioceses. Priests are fathers; abbeys are governed by mother superiors; monks are brothers; nuns are sisters. In Catholicism, there have always been different kinds of holy families that love makes — and so, why not add one more? It’s no accident that Catholics in the U.S. — white, Hispanic, and otherwise — support same-sex marriage at the same rate as the Irish voted.”

There’s a lot of theological insight in Mark Silk’s article. It will be very interesting to see how Catholics respond to Silk’s proposals. But what’s really interesting at the most fundamental level here is not just the continuing distinction on so many issues between evangelicals and Roman Catholics, but rather the fact that here you have Mark Silk talking about Catholicism – let me just use his words,

“understood as a religious culture rather than as a set of official doctrines.”

Now that raises a very important issue. It is possible – indeed most of us know this almost firsthand –  it is possible for many Catholics to live in a Catholic culture that is not bound to Catholic moral teachings or to larger Catholic theological and doctrinal teachings at all. One of the most interesting aspects of Catholicism throughout the centuries is that it can and often does exist as what Mark Silk calls here a religious culture rather than as a set of official doctrines. Now, the culture shaping power of Catholicism is legendary. Just look at Ireland.

But the breakdown of that culture shaping authority is now also going to be legendary; just look at Ireland.

But there are two big issues here for evangelical Christians. The first is this: evangelicalism simply can’t exist not even sociologically as a religious culture rather than as a set of official documents. Evangelicalism is more than doctrines, but it can never be less than doctrines. And fundamentally, that’s not just unique to evangelicalism, but is specific to evangelicalism because of our claims to a continuing theological identity with the Reformation which by its very essence was an argument that Christianity cannot exist as a religious culture without not only a set of official doctrines, but the right set of official doctrines. The second thing to see from this is a point that I’ve made over and over again and one to which will return many times, no doubt. And that is this: what marks evangelical Christianity a part in terms of our understanding of marriage is the authority for coming to that determination. It is in essence a biblical authority. And that is what’s going to set evangelicals apart even from those who are especially more cultural Catholics when it comes to the issue of marriage. It is because culture can evolve. But the Scripture doesn’t change. There are so many lessons coming in from the Irish referendum – of course there is a lesson about the young. And if we do not start with the young people in our own homes and in our own churches, we can’t possibly hope to have any larger influence on the young people outside of our homes and outside of our churches. That affirms once again the importance of teaching our own children, teenagers, and young adults the faith once for all delivered to the saints on a biblical authority. And giving those young people arguments and reasons whereby they can defend their claim to Christian truth.

The other thing we have to understand is that if our definition of marriage and our understanding of what marriage is and must be is drawn from anything other than Scripture, and if we understand Scripture to be anything other than the word of God, then we will not hold to this definition of marriage for long. The secularization of the culture around us explains why the culture in the United States and in so much of northern Europe is following a predictable pattern, losing its grip on the biblical definition of marriage because long before that it lost its confidence in the authority of Scripture as the word of God.

Finally as we leave this particular story and we leave Ireland there’s another irony in all of this. You would think by the headlines that Ireland is joining the vast majority of nations in legalizing same-sex marriage. Actually it becomes the very first to do so by referendum, and even in Europe it joins only about a dozen other countries. If you look at the total number of countries on earth, and you consider how many of them of legalize same-sex marriage it is a very tiny minority. But even if these countries represent a very small minority of all the nations on earth, they are a very influential minority.

And that is a parallel situation to the cultural and intellectual elites in the United States. They are also a small minority of Americans. But they are completely outsized in terms of their influence, dominating in the media, in the news, in entertainment, in politics in academia. That culture shaping class has determined that the normalization of homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage simply must happen, and must happen fast. And they’re willing to use almost any form of coercion to make that happen.

2) Boy Scouts leaders urges capitulation to call for gay leaders to preserve national presence 

The most recent sign of this kind of capitulation came in a headline that also appeared over the weekend. As the New York Times reported “Scouts Head Calls for End to Ban on Gay Leaders.” Erik Eckholm reporting for the Times tells us the Robert M. Gates, the president of the Boy Scouts of America and former Secretary of Defense called to end the Boy Scouts’ blanket ban on gay adult leaders, warning the group’s executives that “we must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”

You’ll recall that up until 2013 the Boy Scouts of America did not allow for the involvement of openly homosexual boys or Scouting leaders. That changed in 2013 when the Boy Scouts of America at the national level rejected what the group acknowledged was the majority position expected by parents in the organization, and opened Boy Scouts to the involvement of gay Scouts. But they said they would not open Scouting to the involvement of gay leaders.

Now I pointed out at the time that that was not a sustainable, that was not a justifiable position. It was a halfway position that was on the way to exactly what Robert Gates called for last week. And Robert Gates had already indicated this because when he became head of the Boy Scouts of America, the former head of the CIA and the former Defense Secretary had said that he thought this compromise position was not sustainable, and that eventually the Boy Scouts would have to be open to the involvement of gay Scouting leaders. This is a really, really important story. And I say that as a former Boy Scout and one who is highly valued the Scouting program.

Over the course of the last couple of years we’ve had to return again and again to the Boy Scouts because they have put themselves in the headlines over this issue. Up until 2013 the Boy Scouts held to a principled membership criterion. They said that they had a moral objection to homosexuality involving Scouts or Scouting leaders. They also said in 2012 through their own spokespeople that the vast majority of the parents of Scouts expected them to maintain that policy. And yet just six months after announcing in 2012 that they would not review the policy, they reversed course and not only reviewed the policy but changed it. They changed it to that compromise position saying that they would allow for the active involvement of openly gay Scouts but not of openly gay Scouting leaders.

Even in the months immediately following that compromise the fractures were already apparent. Some Scouting organizations in California openly defied the ban on gay . And similarly just a matter of weeks ago Boy Scouts in New York announced that they had hired an openly gay young man to work as a counselor at a Scouting camp.

We need to pay particular he just how Robert Gates brain to this argument as he reported to the annual meeting of the Boy Scouts, this time meeting in Atlanta. He said (according to Eckholm) that,

“cascading events — including potential employment discrimination lawsuits and the impending Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, as well as mounting internal dissent over the exclusionary policy — had led him to conclude that the current rules “cannot be sustained.”

If the Boy Scouts don’t change on their own, he said the courts are likely to force them to do so, and “we must understand that this will probably happen sooner rather than later.”

Reading from the text of his statement that was released by the Boy Scouts of America, Gates said,

Nor can we ignore the social, political and juridicial changes taking place in our country – changes taking place at a pace over this past year no one anticipated.”

Well that can only be partly true because Robert Gates himself indicated that these changes were coming. He said, “We can expect more councils to openly challenge the current policy.” He’s speaking of the councils within the Boy Scouts of America, in other words of that internal dissent or mutiny in the ranks that the group is experienced over the last year. He said,

“We have the authority to revoke their charters, such an action would deny the lifelong benefits of Scouting to hundreds of thousands of boys and young men today and vastly more in the future. I will not take that path.”

Now what we need to note is that the former Secretary of Defense has set up a situation now as head of the Boy Scouts in which he will apparently capitulate to virtually anything in order to preserve the Boy Scouts of America as a national organization. He actually made that point over and over again. Later in his address he stated as his goal to preserve the Boy Scouts of America “now and forever.” He then stated, “I truly fear the any other alternative will be the end of us as a national movement.”

Well, evidently that is his now singular and solitary goal: to preserve the Boy Scouts of America as a national movement. And is a former Boy Scout I can simply point out the what’s going to change is what the Boy Scouts are and always have been, regardless of what continues under that name as a national movement.

In a very strange and seemingly inconsistent portion of his address Robert Gates said that religious organizations that sponsor about 70% of all local Scouting units should be able to continue to establish their own leadership criteria based upon what he referred to as their First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom. And yet what we’re looking at virtually every day is an undermining of that religious freedom. And what we’re also looking at is the abdication by the Boy Scouts of America of a principled membership criterion in which they will simply leave these religious organizations to fend for themselves. And even as Robert Gates indicated that the moves made by the Boy Scouts of America put them into different legal terrain in terms of challenges to their criteria especially when it comes to antidiscrimination law with employment, it’s really interesting that now Robert Gates wants to tell these religious organizations that they can continue to establish membership criteria that I don’t believe he really believes will be continued for any real duration.

Caught in the crossfire now will be any religious organization that intends to sponsor a Boy Scout unit and to define marriage and it sexual understanding for leaders – not just for Scouts – in any terms other than that the demanded by the prevailing culture. Robert Gates and so many others, including the editors of the New York Times, pointed out that the policy adopted in 2012 was an unsustainable compromise. And we simply have to point out now that the policy proposed by Robert Gates is also unsustainable and inherently contradictory. Anyone looking at the situation from the side of gay activists will understand that the Boy Scouts of America will accomplish very little if it states that it’s going to change its national policy while allowing 70% of the local Scout units to continue to discriminate along these lines. Gay rights activists are already indicating they will not be satisfied with that policy.

The looming issue for America – not just for the Boy Scouts of America – is whether or not any organization like the Boy Scouts can even continue to exist. Not just as a national movement, but even as an idea. In this age of rampant gender confusion even to call an organization the Boy Scouts of America invites all kinds of challenges even to the wording of the organization’s name. And it was for that reason that the Girl Scouts of America found themselves also in recent days in much controversy over similar issues. But I have to close of the final word of warning to Secretary Gates. He stated to his organization, “we must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.” Those a very interesting words. But if he is successful in allowing the participation of openly gay Scouting leaders in the Boy Scouts of America, it will be true that the Boy Scouts organization that he has left will be an organization that is as it is, not as he might want it to be.

What does it gain for an organization to preserve its stature as a national organization if it no longer has moral credibility in the views of Scouts, and the parents of those very Scouts.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boycecollege.com.

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 05-26-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Irish landslide for gay marriage shows breakdown of cultural shaping power of Catholicism

Ireland approves gay marriage, talks about a revolution, Associated Press (Shawn Pogatchnik)

Landslide, The Economist

Same-sex marriage: Catholic church needs reality check, says Dublin archbishop, The Guardian

Irish Catholicism supports same-sex marriage!, Religion News Service (Mark Silk)

2) Boy Scouts leaders urges capitulation to call for gay leaders to preserve national presence 

Boy Scouts’ President Calls for End to Ban on Gay Leaders, New York Times (Erik Eckholm)

National Annual Business Meeting Remarks, Boy Scouts of America (Robert Gates)

The Boy Scouts Fall Short, New York Times (Editorial Board)

Limping Between Two Opinions: The Moral Evacuation of the Boy Scouts of America, AlbertMohler.com (R. Albert Mohler)

Transcript: The Briefing 05-22-15

The Briefing

 

May 22, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Friday, May 22, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Pot edible fad presents nationwide challenge police, parents, and even children

Here’s a headline that appeared earlier this week in the New York Times, New Police Challenge: Finding Pot in Lollipops and Marshmallows. This is something to which every parent needs to pay close attention. Catherine Saint Louis reporting for the Times tells us that even in places like Alabama and Tennessee police are confiscating marijuana in the form of edibles – in particular in the form of candy. As Catherine Saint Louis writes,

“After nearly 20 years on the job, Jim Jeffries, the police chief in LaFollette, Tenn., has seen his share of marijuana seizures — dry green buds stashed in trunks or beneath seats, often double-bagged to smother the distinctive scent.

“But these days, Chief Jeffries is on the lookout for something unexpected: lollipops and marshmallows.

“Recently his officers pulled over a Chevy Blazer driven by a couple with three children in tow. Inside, the officers discovered 24 pounds of marijuana-laced cookies and small hard candies shaped like gingerbread men, plus a tub of pungent marijuana butter perfect for making more.”

She goes on to say,

“The bags of Kraft marshmallows looked innocent enough. But a meat injector was also found in the car. After searching the Internet, Chief Jeffries realized that the marshmallows probably had been infused with the marijuana butter and heat-sealed into their bags.”

“‘This is the first time that we have ever seen marijuana butter or any of this candy containing marijuana in the county; we hope it’s the last time.’”

Well Chief Jefferies, I fear not. And is not just Tennessee, we’re looking at a major moral change on the entire American landscape when it comes to the issue of marijuana. And, as has been predicted, it’s not just the expansion state-by-state, it is also the radical expansion of the problem of how marijuana is going to be delivered – and in this case we’re talking about marijuana coming in the form of marshmallows and lollipops. As Saint Louis writes and I quote,

“Pot edibles, as they are called, can be much easier to smuggle than marijuana buds: They may resemble candy or home-baked goodies, and often have no telltale smell. And few police officers are trained to think of gummy bears, mints or neon-colored drinks as potential dope.

Some experts worry that smuggled pot edibles will appeal to many consumers, particularly adolescents, who are ill prepared for the deceptively slow high. Impatient novices can easily eat too much too fast, suffering anxiety attacks and symptoms resembling psychosis. Already, young children have eaten laced sweets left within reach.”

Now I’ve had conversation with parents, for instance in Colorado, who have seen their children and teenagers come across marijuana laced edibles even in the homes of neighbors – potentially even extended family – and this is a very dangerous development. But of course from the biblical worldview it points to how sin can never be localized and limited as proponents of marijuana legalization try to argue that it can be; it simply can’t be. And now you have the New York Times writing about something that took place in Lafollette, Tennessee, where you have police officers who are now all the sudden discovering that gummy bears might not just be gummy bears.

Later in the article Saint Louis also points to the fact that those who are trying to push the marijuana business are having to find new ways of expanding product lines and the edibles are the main way to do that. And of course you have the edibles that are now so easily transportable and in many cases, as this article makes clear, are actually laced with extremely potent forms of marijuana. Jonathan Caulkins, co-author of “Marijuana Legalization,” has been studying this for years and said,

“In a world where THC [that’s the active ingredient people are looking for in marijuana] becomes inexpensive, you would like to differentiate your product from other people’s products in ways that allow you to maintain a higher profit margin,”

Well the obvious is also true, they offer opportunities for all kinds of bad things to happen. It’s really interesting that you have law enforcement saying, ‘we’re not ready for this, we’re not ready to have to differentiate between a gummy bear that is just a gummy bear and a gummy bear that is dope,’ and if that problem is hard enough for law enforcement, how hard will it be for a 13-year-old? This is one of the problems that is unleashed by the legalization of marijuana, and as we have noted, this change in the moral landscape doesn’t come isolated from all others – this is part of the great transformation of American morality right before our eyes.

2) Use of energy drinks, ADHD drugs for productivity reveal redefinition of ‘normal’ energy

Next, in some ways an even more interesting story; this one made the front page of the Times. It is by Hillary Stout and it’s entitled, Selling The Young On ‘Gaming Fuel,’ and what this reporters writing about is the fact that the makers and marketers of energy drinks have found a new buying population: teenagers – especially teenage boys – who are involved in heavy video gaming. Stout writes,

“Two popular video gamers in black T-shirts posed as snipers wielding real semi-automatic guns at an outdoor range, blasting orbs of fruit and cups of deep orange liquid in ultra slow motion. ‘Introducing Blood Orange,’ announced a video of the spectacle.

“In the days afterward, online followers from hardcore gamers to middle-schoolers on Xboxes ordered tubs of the stuff, the latest flavor of a powdered energy drink called G Fuel that is marketed as a secret sauce to enhance focus and endurance for virtual battles.”

One cherub-faced YouTuber, named Michael according to the Times said,

“Oh, this is gonna taste so good!”

Even as his unmade bunk bed was visible in the background. Stout goes on to report,

“G Fuel and a competitor called GungHo are a new incarnation of energy drink, growing in popularity while the energy drink industry as a whole has been under scrutiny because of deaths and hospitalizations linked to consumption of caffeine- and sugar-laden beverages. Traditional energy drink makers have also been playing to the growing gamer culture in some labels — Mountain Dew Game Fuel (with extra doses of caffeine) and Nintendo Power Up Energy Drink.”

As Stout explains,

“The industry is tapping into the rock-star allure and young online fan base of ‘professional e-athletes,’ analysts say, with sponsorships of gaming competitions and players. Gamma Labs, the company selling G Fuel, heavily promotes a Call of Duty clan including those would-be snipers in the video ad.”

Stout then says,

“While major energy drink makers – including Red Bull, Rockstar and Monster – voluntarily agreed to stop marketing to children under 12 because of the adverse health effects publicly associated with them, a congressional report released this year excoriated those companies and others for continuing to target teenagers, whose brains and bodies are not yet fully developed.”

The marketers of these drinks are directing them to adolescents, calling them “brain energy” and “natural Adderall.” Again, this should be of concern to parents but one of the questions I think any Christian reading this article would have is, where are the parents in so many of the lives of these children and teenagers? Because after all the article reports,

“Last year a 14-year-old in Norway collapsed and fell into a coma after reportedly drinking four liters of energy drinks during a 16-hour Call of Duty party…”

On the other hand, the article indicates that there are some parents out there who are at least somewhat engaged and concerned about their children. It turns out that one 14-year-old discovered after he had spent AU$100 buying one of these powdered energy drinks that he had it confiscated by his father. One 13-year-old boy writing to the company itself on Twitter said,

“I’m a big fan, just wondering if you could send me some gfuel cus my parents won’t let me get some. I watch all you vids. Reply??”

The New York Times says there was no reply. It’s really interesting that the sole focus of this article is on the physiological effects of these kinds of energy drinks. There’s virtually no attention whatsoever to the larger effects of the gaming culture itself, even as the article registers concern that this gamer culture is reaching deeper and deeper into adolescence at younger and younger ages.

One boy using these products said,

“It makes me more focused while playing Call of Duty and I definitely see improvement, and it gives me very natural energy,”

He didn’t catch the irony of calling it a ‘natural energy’ after he just attributed it to a drink. Ethan York, a high school junior in Lancaster, California, said that drinking some of these products helped him improve his home run average significantly on an MLB baseball videogame he plays. He also lamented that these drinks are too expensive for him to consume regularly. But he did say this and I quote,

“It really feels like you have genuine energy, like you’ve just had a 30-minute-to-an-hour nap,”

But of course he didn’t have a 30 minute to an hour nap; instead he got this out of a bottle. And it’s very telling that it is becoming more and more routine for teenagers to think that the energy they need comes from a bottle. And there also redefining what normal is. That’s what’s really interesting here, because we’re looking at a redefinition of what normal energy and normal focus would look like. And the occasion of this is the intensity of a videogame and the experience of playing.

But next before we consider this just an issue of teenagers, the New York Times has also reported that it is adults not at younger ages but at older ages who are now showing up more routinely misusing pills, especially ADHD drugs, not in order to videogame but rather just in terms of their professional lives. Alan Schwarz writing for the Times quotes Kimberly Dennis, the medical director of Timberline Knolls, a substance-abuse treatment facility outside Chicago, who said,

“You’d see addiction in students, but it was pretty rare to see it in an adult, [speaking of the misuse of these ADHD drugs]”

She then went on to say,

“We are definitely seeing more than one year ago, more than two years ago, especially in the age range of 25 to 45,”

Again, when we were talking about teenagers we talked about the redefinition of normal energy, a redefinition of normal focus. You also see this when it comes to adults. One of the women quoted in the story, in this case in her late 20s said,

“It is necessary — necessary for survival of the best and the smartest and highest-achieving people,”

So now you have a proposed redefinition of normal in the workplace. Professional normal is now going to be defined by normal on drugs. As Schwarz said,

“…many young workers insist that using the drugs to increase productivity is on the rise — and that these are drugs used not to get high, but hired.”

The biggest increase in the use of these ADHD medications is now among adults aged 26 to 34 – where it almost doubled just in terms of the last four year period. In a sense of how this is transforming some workplaces, one employee said,

“It’s like this at most of the companies I know with driven young people — there’s a certain expectation of performance and if you don’t meet it, and I’m not really worried how, someone else will.”

It should be of concern to all of us that here we have a redefinition of the normal human experience, whether for a teenager or for an adult, in something that is chemically altered. Whether recognized or not this raises some of the deepest worldview issues of our consideration, what does it mean to be human? And how do we maximize what God has given us as our human potential? Do we maximize it by the use of some kind of natural means or do we turn to an external means? Whether it’s the form of an energy drink, or in this case the misuse of ADHD medications? In any event we’re watching a redefinition of the baseline of normal human performance; driven on the one hand by video games and on the other hand by professional pressures.

3) Addiction to porn and video games present crisis of masculinity, says pschologist

But next when it comes to boys and young men in America, one leading psychologists – one of the most are influential psychologists of recent American history – is warning of the end of masculinity and of the fact the boys and young men now face a crisis of pornography and videogame use. This isn’t coming from a Christian authority; it is coming from a professor emeritus at Stanford University. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo was saying that boys risk becoming addicted to porn, video games, and Ritalin. Stuart Jeffries, who is reporting on his new book first published in Great Britain, says,

“In the UK today, a young person is more likely to have a television in their bedroom than a father in their house by the end of their childhood. And even if fathers are around, their sons don’t engage with them much: boys spend 44 hours in front of a TV, smartphone or computer screen for every half hour in conversation with their fathers.”

Zimbardo’s book is not available in print yet in the United States, but it is making waves all over Great Britain where it has been published and the research applies to both sides of the Atlantic in terms of a crisis of masculinity when it comes to boys, teenagers, and young men. We’re looking at a very ominous set of developments and it should tell us something that hear you’re looking at one of most eminent psychologist and a secular university who is saying we have a huge problem. And he documents that problem very well.

His new book is entitled, “Man (Dis)connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What It Means To Be Male.” He ask the basic question by the way, why do boys need fathers? And he answers that in a way that comes from a secular worldview but is embedded with a great deal of wisdom. He says that fathers offer children a different kind of love than mothers, and in his view, without the father’s influence especially on boys there is a very important missing element of expectation. He makes very clear that fathers have a set of expectations for boys that mothers in the main do not have. And that if you take that set of expectations out of the daily experience of boys in the household, then you face a crisis of masculinity and by any measure we’re already looking at the effects of this on both sides of the Atlantic.

Zimbardo and his co-author Nikita Coulombe argue that what’s happening in terms of the experience of boys simply isn’t happening with girls.

“They argue that, while girls are increasingly succeeding in the real world, boys are retreating into cyberspace, seeking online the security and validation they can’t get anywhere else.”

This is a truly devastating article.

“They are bored at school, increasingly have no father figures to motivate them, don’t have the skills to form real romantic relationships, feel entitled to have things done for them (usually by their parents) and seek to avoid a looming adulthood of debt, unfulfilling work and other irksome responsibilities. As a result, they disappear into their bedrooms where, he argues, they risk becoming addicted to porn, video games and Ritalin.”

In a very interesting turn Zimbardo ask why it’s boys who are retreating into this digital world rather more than girls. And according to the research, boys are more likely to retreat into cyberspace because as Zimbardo says,

“Boys have never been self-reflective. Boys are focused on doing and acting, girls are more focused on being and feeling. The new video-game world encourages doing and acting and not really thinking. Video games are not so attractive to girls.”

He also argues that the ready availability of so much pornography is simply distorting the lives of young men and boys because they are now bombarded with sexual stimulus without any narrative at all. There is no connection to a human being, there’s no requirement of romance, and there is no relationship. He argues about this toxic introduction, in his words, to human sexuality on the part of so many boys and he says,

“When you see 100,000 instances of it, it becomes the social norm.”

Zimbardo also warns that the entire world of pornography is going to be significantly changed with technological developments that are going to make it even more insidious in terms of its effect upon all its users, but in particular upon the young.

Reuters reporting on Zimbardo’s work says,

“For those who think online video games and porn are passive online activities that have no real consequences in the real world, take heed.”

Zimbardo argues that excessive solitary playing of video games and watching pornography is seriously damaging the social development of young men – that’s from the Reuters report. But Christians looking at this have to recognize it’s not possible that this is damaging only the social development of boys and young men – it is savagely affecting their moral development as well. So put all this together and consider the delay of marriage that is also marking the American scene and look at the fact that so many boys simply are not moving into adulthood and you can see a pattern.

Evidently this professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University has seen a pattern. Back in 2011 he gave a widely distributed TED talk on the subject, and now he has expanded it into a book. As I said, it has been published in Britain, not yet in the United States. But it should indeed tell us something that here you have a secular psychologist, one of the most recognized in modern America, saying that the problem is that these things are now rewiring the brains of boys and young men.

The best research on this from a Christian worldview perspective has been brought about by William Struthers, a professor at Wheaton College near Chicago, in his book “Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain.” I wrote about this back in 2010 at AlbertMohler.com and will put up the link to that article with today’s edition of The Briefing.

4) American culture now discouraging taking on adult responsibilities

Finally, just to note that some of these patterns are getting larger secular attention, writing in the Washington Post columnist George Will writes about, once again, the delay of males going into adulthood. He blames it on the larger culture but he also blames it on fact that this culture is increasingly honoring all the things that do not encourage young men to grow up and is discouraging the very things that would lead to adult responsibilities. He points out that many of the modern philosophies of child rearing do everything to try to protect children from actually growing up. He cites Mark Hemingway writing at The Federalist, who asked the question,

“You know what it’s called when kids make mistakes without adult supervision and have to wrestle with the resulting consequences? Growing up.”

He cites also David Pimentel of Ohio Northern University writing in the Utah Law Review who points out that even as right now children have never been safer, there are more regulators and bureaucrats and others who are trying to come around to say children have to be protected from growing up. In a section that should concern every parent George Will goes back to 1925 pointing out that the Supreme Court then affirmed the right of parents “to direct the upbringing and education of their children,” then he writes,

“Today, however, vague statutes that criminalize child ‘neglect’ or ‘endangerment’ undermine the social legitimacy of parental autonomy.”

He’s writing about one of the things that have now caught a lot of secular attention and that is so-called free range parenting, where parents are now finding themselves in trouble simply for letting kids play even in the front lawn or simply even just to walk to school. Will write that these new social expectations,

“ignore the reality that almost every decision a parent makes involves risks. Let your child ride a bike to school, or strap her into a car for the trip? Which child is more at risk, the sedentary one playing video games and risking obesity, or the one riding a bike?”

Finally, he quotes Penn State historian Gary Cross who says that adolescence is being redefined to extend well into the 20s and what he calls the clustering rights of passage into adulthood (marriage, childbearing, permanent employment), “has largely disappeared.” Cross writes that in 2011 almost a fifth of men between 25 and 34 still lived with their parents where many play video games – well there is that issue recurring again. So while we’re looking at the problem of teenagers and their video games and their energy drinks, George Will comes back to report that the average videogame player is a male, 30 years old. He warns that American males are now in the position of slouching in his words from adolescence to Social Security, skipping adulthood altogether.

Christian parents have to understand that it is one of our central responsibilities to help our children into and not away from the responsibilities of adulthood. Even as we are concerned about the effects of all these things on everyone’s children, our first responsibility is for our own.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boycecollege.com.

I hope you and your family have a wonderful Memorial Day and I’ll meet you again on Tuesday for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 05-22-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Pot edible fad presents nationwide challenge police, parents, and even children

New Challenge for Police: Finding Pot in Lollipops and Marshmallows, New York Times (Catherine Saint Louis)

2) Use of energy drinks, ADHD drugs for productivity reveal redefinition of ‘normal’ energy

Selling the Young on ‘Gaming Fuel’, New York Times (Hilary Stout)

Workers Seeking Productivity in a Pill Are Abusing A.D.H.D. Drugs, New York Times (Alan Schwarz)

3) Addiction to porn and video games present crisis of masculinity, says psychologist

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo: ‘Boys risk becoming addicted to porn, video games and Ritalin’, The Guardian (Stuart Jeffries)

Porn and video game addicts risk ‘masculinity crisis,’ says Stanford professor, Reuters (Robert Galbraith)

Hijacking the Brain — How Pornography Works, AlbertMohler.com (R. Albert Mohler)

4) American culture now discouraging taking on adult responsibilities

Punishing parents who deviate from the government-enforced norm, Washington Post (George Will)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 05-21-15

The Briefing

 

May 21, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Thursday, May 21, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Appeals Court second denial of Notre Dame case exposes perilous state of religious liberty 

Over the course of the last three or four years one of the issues that has been regularly in the headlines is the contraception mandate that is included in the Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare. And as you’ll recall this has become a major issue of controversy because the Obama administration has ruled, in terms of how the law is to be applied, that contraception has to be available in virtually every form to virtually every woman without regard for the religious convictions of the employer. And that went all the way to the Supreme Court, in particular it went to a famous case that is now known as the Hobby Lobby decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that closely held private corporations could not be required to compromise their religious convictions in offering this kind of insurance coverage that would include contraceptives that could include abortive fashions or contraception with an abortive fashion effect – it could bring about an abortion.

There is a scientific debate, there’s a public debate, over the potential abortifacient effects of some these contraceptive medications, but it is incontrovertible that the manufacturers of those contraceptives do include an abortifacient effect among the potential side effects of the use of the drugs. But even as the Hobby Lobby case for which we should be thankful was won at the Supreme Court, albeit by a narrow margin, the reality is that these issues are still very much in play.

On Tuesday the United States federal appeals court turned back a request by the University of Notre Dame that it be exempted from the contraception mandate when it comes the Obama Administration’s policy. This was the second time the seventh US circuit Court of Appeals had considered the case of Notre Dame and what’s really significant is that this appellate court heard the case again because it was instructed to do so by the United States Supreme Court.

Now let’s just look at the lay of the land here for a moment. The Supreme Court ruled in the Hobby Lobby decision that closely held private corporations could not be required to compromise the religious convictions on the issue of contraception. One would think, given the Constitution’s guarantee of religious liberty, that there would be even less question about a Catholic institution being required to compromise its Catholic beliefs on the issue of contraception. But the seventh US circuit Court of Appeals for the second time on Tuesday turned back the University of Notre Dame even as the Supreme Court had ordered that court to reconsider its previous decision. As I said, this sets up an almost assured appealed to the United States Supreme Court, but it also underlines again just how perilous our current situation with regard to religious liberty.

And one of the things to keep in mind here is that we’re not talking about some kind of lesser-known or peripheral Catholic institution, we’re talking about one of the central symbols of Roman Catholicism in the United States of America – the University of Notre Dame. You would think that if any Catholic institution would be in a strong position to press its religious liberty rights, it would be the University of Notre Dame. And yet for the second time it was turned back by United States Court of Appeals.

The majority opinion of the panel in this case was written by federal Judge Richard Posner. He’s been cited many times on The Briefing because again and again it seems that he finds himself at the center of these kinds of national controversies. In the opinion he wrote,

“Although Notre Dame is the final arbiter of its religious beliefs, it is for the courts to determine whether the law actually forces Notre Dame to act in a way that would violate those beliefs,”

That’s a very, very important sentence because here you have a United States federal judge at the appellate level saying that Notre Dame has the competence and the right to determine its own theological convictions but not the right to decide when those convictions are under assault or being compromised. That’s a very crucial argument; that’s an incredibly dangerous argument. But that argument explains why we find ourselves in this moment of peril.

At the center of the claim being made by the University of Notre Dame is that the so-called compromise offered by the Obama Administration isn’t much of a compromise at all because even as that compromise says that the religious institution cannot be required directly to fund this contraception coverage, it must send a letter that would then trigger the funding by its own insurer. In other words, it’s what amounts to a financial shell game and the University of Notre Dame says that violates our convictions – and we can understand why. In this situation you have many Roman Catholic institutions that are joined by evangelical institutions in pressing the same religious liberty cause and the same arguments.

Among the many massive shifts we are seeing reshape the American landscape, this remains one of the most concerning and one of the most urgent. Just in terms of the lifetime of most of us living, the issue of religious liberty the United States has gone from a public celebration of a liberty that has been enshrined in terms of the American tradition to an issue that finds itself in the headlines of newspapers in the media virtually every single day. And of course the great moral transformation that is reshaping the landscape explains why, because you can’t have this kind of moral revolution without reshaping the law and the judiciary. And you can’t have that without direct challenges to the liberties that were enshrined in the old moral order.

One of things that many Americans do not recognize is that religious liberty never can stand alone as an isolated liberty. And the liberties we cherish can never standalone without a moral structure that explains why those liberties exist and how they are to be guaranteed. The entire American constitutional order has emerged from a moral and cultural worldview that no longer exists for at least millions of Americans, and evidently for some American judges as well. That points to storm clouds on the American horizon; the very liberties that were enshrined at the beginning of the American experiment, those liberties are now very much at stake and very much at question as we look at the American future.

2) Retraction of gay marriage opinion study reveals need for firm foundation for truth

Next, one of the facets of our culture that Christians need to think about seriously is how we put trust in statistics and studies. And those also find their way into virtually every addition of the news and every day conversation – one way or the other. One basic reason for that is that Americans have a very native trust in numbers. When we don’t understand many abstract concepts at least the numbers we think are understandable, but that’s only true if the numbers are accurate. Many times, especially when it comes to so-called social science, we have all kinds of reports and surveys and other instruments that are thrown out without any adequate attention to whether or not the claims are credible. But even when it comes to research that is mathematically impeccable, there are still very credible questions about how the question is posed to the public, how a survey is put together. It’s not at all certain in some cases that the inferences or implications that are trumpeted in the media are actually in the numbers at all, and sometimes there’s an even deeper problem, and that emerged yesterday in the national press. But in order to get to this story I need to go back not just to yesterday but to last December.

Last December there were headlines all over the country and a great deal public conversation about a report that indicated that Americans would change their minds on the issue of something like the morality of homosexuality or the morality of same-sex marriage after even a brief conversation with the canvasser – that is someone going door-to-door. Now I did not speak about that report, I didn’t talk about it in public conversation, I didn’t report about it on The Briefing; I didn’t discuss this study because it just didn’t seem to make sense and now we know at least one of the reasons it didn’t make sense is because at least one of the researchers, whose name is on the report, says it evidently was made up – or at least he suspects that the research was invented.

As Fred Barbash reports for the Washington Post,

“A highly publicized and influential scholarly study about people’s views on same sex marriage has been disavowed by one of its co-authors, citing ‘irregularities’ in the data provided by his partner in the research. He is seeking a retraction of the study, published in the journal Science.”

Now let me just interject this: when you’re looking at scientific and academic credibility it’s hard to imagine a brand name better than the journal Science. It is in many ways one of the most respected journals in the American academic establishment. But now you have the co-author, indeed – let me state that again – the co-author of a study published in Science who is asking not merely that it be corrected, but entirely retracted because of his loss of confidence in the study itself.

As Barbash reports,

“The study purported to show the ease with which peoples’ minds can be changed on the subject of same-sex marriage after short conversations, particularly with gay advocates. It was described as being based on survey research conducted in California after voters passed Proposition 8, the referendum that banned same-sex marriage in the state and that has since been struck down by the courts .”

The co-author, who is Donald P. Green of Columbia University, acted on his own according to the Washington Post to request a retraction from Science in a memo dated May 19. And that was first reported on a website entitled Retraction Watch which the Post says closely follows scholarly publications for errors, retractions, and fraud. Professor Green who asked that the study be retracted said that he had had conversation with two University of California Berkeley graduate students who had attempt to their own research and,

“…brought to my attention a series of irregularities that called into question the integrity of the data we present.”

As Barbash also reports,

“The study attracted widespread attention in part because it seemed to fly in the face of conventional wisdom and scholarship about how people cling to their own points of view, sometimes regardless of what they read or hear to the contrary.”

That’s a very important issue because here you have the Washington Post saying this is why the story was newsworthy, it’s because it basically contradicted the previous research and conventional wisdom about how people hold or do not hold to moral positions, and that’s why this gained all those headlines. But it wouldn’t have gained the headlines if it hadn’t been published in the journal Science – and now you have the co-author of the study saying it should have never been published in the first place.

In his letter to the editors of Science Professor Green said,

“I am deeply embarrassed by this turn of events and apologize to the editors, reviewer, and readers of Science,”

So, what are we make of this? Well, in the first place it’s just an affirmation of the care with which we should approach any kind of claim coming from a survey or a research report or a poll. When we’re looking at this we have to understand that sometimes it all comes down to the credibility the numbers. But even more so comes down to the credibility of the researchers.

Secondly, Christians need to understand that we do not arrive at our moral positions by survey or poll instrument. Rather we understand they can be X-rays – moral X-rays of the sort – of a population. But we cannot believe in any sense that our moral positions, our moral convictions are to be drawn from public opinion. Rather we understand our sole authority for understanding what is right and wrong, what is true and false, how we are to understand these issues, is the authority of the word of God.

Finally we need to understand that in a fallen world things like this are going to happen. It turns out that in a fallen world (and here’s where there’s no surprise) even the academic discipline of science is not only driven by worldview, it is also distorted by sin.

We also have to put one other issue out before us, and that is there have to be some reason why the claim was made about this science. I think that one is pretty easy for us to understand. It will serve someone’s moral worldview and someone’s political cause to believe that the worldview of Americans on an issue so fundamental as sexuality can be changed by a mere conversation. Christians must understand as we look to this issue or any other that on an issue of this importance there is always the deeper level of worldview. Always. For all people. And that includes the scientists and the people they supposedly interview.

3) Influence of childhood hometown on likelihood of marriage evidences import of social norms 

Next, the New York Times is reporting on another piece of research, and what makes this one interesting is that it basically of firms and expands upon previous research – that’s something of scientific importance. David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy report that the hometown in which a child grows up affects the chances of marriage later in life. The authors say,

“The place where you grow up doesn’t affect only your future income… It also affects your odds of marrying, a large new data set shows.”

They write,

“The most striking geographical pattern on marriage, as with so many other issues today, is the partisan divide. Spending childhood nearly anywhere in blue America — especially liberal bastions like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington — makes people about 10 percentage points less likely to marry relative to the rest of the country. And no place encourages marriage quite like the conservative Mountain West, especially the heavily Mormon areas of Utah, southern Idaho and parts of Colorado.”

Here you have a team of Harvard economists studying so-called upward mobility, housing, and tax policy. They’re not simply observations about correlation – that’s another very important issue in looking at scientific study. This study goes on to argue for causation, and that’s what makes it really interesting. Correlation, we need always to keep this in mind, merely indicates that there is a certain pattern to the data. There is no attempt to argue why the pattern is distributed as it is. Causation is the attempt to argue why the pattern exists and how the pattern came to be. And that’s what makes this study even more interesting than if it had merely pointed to correlation. What would the correlation prove? Well the correlation would say if you’re in a red state, you’re far more likely to get married than if you’re in a blue state. Causation argues there must be a reason behind that, and these scientist actually think they know the reason.

Christians looking at this study – even at this point – would say this must have something to do if not everything to do with worldview. And of course, that’s right. The causation being argued in this study is that children who grow up around married people, seeing marriage as an expectation, are far more likely themselves to be married. And not just by the cutoff age of this study, age 26, because they went back later and even age 30 the same pattern tended to prevail.

It turns out to the place that has the greatest suppression of marriage is Washington, D.C.,  but as they say,

“But the New York area stands out even more. If we boiled down the list to only the country’s 50 largest counties, the top five in discouraging marriage would all be in the New York area.”

David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy then goes on to ask the question,

“How can the researchers think they’re capturing a causal effect here — in which a child who moves to New York actually becomes less likely to marry? Because they have studied more than five million people who moved as children during the 1980s and 1990s. Those who moved to New York, among other places, were indeed less likely to marry than otherwise similar people who grew up elsewhere. And the younger that children were when they moved to New York, the less likely they were to marry.”

It turns out that if you’re trying to project where people are more likely to be married state-by-state just look at that state’s presidential vote. As this study indicates, it turns out there’s a great deal of predictability just in terms of the relationship between presidential vote and eventual marriage pattern. A couple of other insights in the study one of them is that those who grow up in small and medium-sized towns are more likely to get married and those who live in huge metropolitan areas. That’s because metropolitan areas turn out to be magnets of the unmarried, especially the young unmarried. And as the study indicates in a city like New York, the young unmarried are more likely there to stay unmarried than in other parts of the country. Looking at the data by the way, there is a negative likelihood of getting married of approximately 10 points or 12 points in a place like Manhattan. In most Manhattan it’s 12. There is a positive indication of more likely to get married in places like Provo Utah. Now, you look at that, it’s 20 points so if you look at the American demography in the great moral landscape that means you have a differential of 32 percentage points in terms of the likelihood of getting married. And that is absolutely massive.

To put the matter bluntly we should be surprised that children grow up to expect marriage when they are surrounded by people who expect marriage. And conversely we shouldn’t expect people to see marriage as the expectation if it’s not the expectation of the people around whom they grow up.

Of course, Christians understand that there’s a deeper issue here and that’s the worldview at stake with marriage. Marriage isn’t abstracted from the rest of life it is one of the most crucial issues in terms of worldview. Inevitably it’s so, no matter how you define marriage.

4) Death of Happy Rockefeller reminder of how far society has shifted

Finally in terms of the great change in the American moral landscape, sometimes it shows up unexpectedly as it does yesterday in the New York Times in an obituary for Happy Rockefeller who died at age 88. That is the widow of the former Gov. of New York and the former vice president of the United States, Nelson Rockefeller.

How does her obituary demonstrate the great moral change in America? Well, as Robert McFadden reported,

“Happy Rockefeller, the socialite whose 1963 marriage to Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, soon after both had been divorced, raised a political storm in a more genteel time and may have cost him the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, died on Tuesday at her home in Tarrytown, N.Y. She was 88.”

And again, this demonstration of moral change is found in an obituary. It’s measurable in one woman’s life. As McFadden writes,

“In an era when marital infidelity and divorce were toxic for presidential candidates, many Americans were shocked when Margaretta Fitler Murphy, called Happy, and Mr. Rockefeller, who was nearly 18 years older than she, married on May 4, 1963. He was in the second of his four terms as governor and a leading contender for the presidency at the time”

having run strongly in 1960.

McFadden then says,

“As the couple left for a honeymoon in Venezuela, exposés retailed gossip of their extramarital affair and detailed their out-of-state divorces — Mr. Rockefeller’s in 1962 from Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller, his wife of 31 years and the mother of his five children; Mrs. Murphy’s “

from a man to whom she had been married, and to whom she surrendered custody of their four children five weeks before marrying New York’s governor.

This became one of the most sensational moral issues of the early 1960s, and as the New York Times indicated, it almost surely cost Nelson Rockefeller the Republican nomination for the office of President of the United States. Nelson Rockefeller was a Republican; he was a liberal Republican back in the early 1960s and he eventually did become Vice President of the United States when he was nominated to that office by then-President Gerald Ford and confirmed by the United States Senate (the first time that has ever happened in American history). But going back to the early 1960s Republican leaders were scandalized, as was the nation, by the fact that the governor and his second wife had both abandoned their children in order to marry one another after sensational divorces.

Indicative of the mainstream culture response of the time was Sen. Prescott S. Bush of Connecticut, who said,

“Have we come to the point where a governor can desert his wife and children, and persuade a young woman to abandon her four children and husband? Have we come to the point where one of the two great parties will confer its greatest honor on such a one? I venture to hope not.”

Of course, Sen. Bush was the father of Pres. George H.W. Bush, and the grandfather of Pres. George W. Bush. And that was a mainstream Republican response to marital infidelity and the breakup of a family with children going back to the 1960s. But we also need to note it was a Republican who was elected as the first and to this point only divorced man to be President of the United States. That was Ronald Reagan in 1980.

As McFadden writes,

“A year after Mr. Rockefeller died, in 1979, Ronald Reagan became the only divorced man elected to the presidency. His 1949 divorce from the actress Jane Wyman was not a major campaign issue in 1980, largely because it had occurred three decades earlier and because divorce, in a nation where it had become commonplace, no longer seemed a serious blemish on a candidate’s character.”

What the Times didn’t even point out was that as governor of California, it was Ronald Reagan who it signed into law one of the most liberal no-fault divorce laws in American history. As we’ve often discussed, the revolution taking place in marriage with the development of so-called same-sex marriage would not have been possible without previous redefinitions of marriage especially in the development of no-fault divorce. Here in the life of one woman, Happy Rockefeller, who died this week at age 88, you have the story in one lifetime. We can only now look to our children and perhaps our grandchildren and understand just how much they are likely to see in terms of transformation of their moral landscape in their times.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boycecollege.com. We’re taking questions for Ask Anything: Weekend Edition released. Call us with your question, in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058.

 

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 05-21-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Appeals Court second denial of Notre Dame case exposes perilous state of religious liberty 

Appeals Court Denies Notre Dame’s Challenge to Health Law’s Contraception Mandate, Wall Street Journal (Louise Radnofsky and Brent Kendall)

Notre Dame birth-control protest denied again, SCOTUSblog (Lyle Denniston)

2) Retraction of gay marriage opinion study reveals need for firm foundation for truth

Co-author disavows highly publicized study on public opinion and same-sex marriage, Washington Post (Fred Barbash)

Study on softening same-sex marriage attitudes retracted over ‘fake data’, The Guardian, (Lauren Gambino)

3) Influence of childhood hometown on likelihood of marriage evidences import of social norms 

How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage, New York Times (David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy)

4) Death of Happy Rockefeller reminder of how far society has shifted

Happy Rockefeller, 88, Dies; Marriage to Governor Scandalized Voters, New York Times (Robert D. McFadden)

Transcript: The Briefing 05-20-15

The Briefing

 

May 20, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Wednesday, May 20, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Same-sex marriage legalization will reconfigure political, cultural landscape

A series of recent articles points to the deep worldview implications of so many of the headlines now surrounding us. And one of the most urgent of those headlines, recurring it seems almost every day in every newspaper and at every turn, is the expected Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. Linda Greenhouse writing a very important article for the New York Times asked what might be the obvious question: What Comes on the Morning after the Same-Sex Marriage Decision? She writes,

“Let’s assume, as I do, that the Supreme Court finds a constitutional right to same-sex marriage when it decides Obergefell v. Hodges sometime next month. What happens next?”

Now she asked the right question, that’s the essential question for us to think about even before the Supreme Court acts. What will happen next? Now there’s one issue in terms of how we understand the media that also comes into play here; Linda Greenhouse is not masking in any way her support for the legalization of same-sex marriage – that becomes very, very clear. She goes on to ask the question nonetheless, what will happen on the day after or the morning after? She says,

“It may be a morning-after landscape of more confusion than clarity, with some rain falling on the victory parades.”

In particular she identifies what she sees as a problem, the problem of conservative Christians. She says the conservative Christians,

“…claiming victimization by the onrushing tide of marriage equality, [conservative Christians] aren’t like to be deterred in their quest for the right to withhold goods and services from same-sex couples.”

Now one of the most interesting things is why she turns there, why she turns to that particular issue rather than to the issue that actually came up before the Supreme Court in oral arguments. And that issue is the direct collision between same-sex marriage and religious liberty, not just when it comes to those who may be involved in offering goods or public accommodations, but rather religious institutions that are deeply situated in the religious convictions of their sponsoring bodies. That’s a very interesting question, and it tells you how the secular media is focusing on this question.

She also points to a reordered political landscape on the other side of the Supreme Court decision. And interestingly, and with some perception, her main issue is what’s going to happen on the Republican side. Now that’s because there’s no question about what is going to happen on the Democratic side, the Democratic Party and both of the declared candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination are avid and ardent supporters of same-sex marriage. The question is what’s going to happen on the Republican side after the Supreme Court rules? Now again, Linda Greenhouse is assuming, as many are assuming, that the Supreme Court will find a constitutional right to same-sex marriage and thus legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states. She says that what’s going to happen on the Republican side is that you’re going to find Republican presidential candidates who are going to try, in her words, to find something to say that will alienate neither the base of the Republican Party nor the growing majority that supports a right to same-sex marriage.

One of the most interesting dimensions of this article is how clearly Linda Greenhouse comes out publicly in support of same-sex marriage – as if that’s just the default moral position. And she’s probably right if that is the default moral position of the likely readers of the New York Times – certainly of its staff and its editorial board; that’s been made abundantly clear. But it’s also interesting that you have people here on the secular left who are asking big questions about what’s going to happen the day after the Supreme Court rules, what’s going to happen on the other side of this great legal divide, this anticipated judicial decision. She’s right to see a reordered political landscape on the other side, and there’s no doubt that this is going to create an entirely new landscape for Republican presidential candidates. And that’s just symbolic of the fact it’s going to create a new landscape for virtually all Americans – especially for those Americans who believe that marriage must be the union of a man and a woman. Now Americans who hold to a traditional understanding of marriage are going to be set off as a minority who are now opposed by a decision of the United States Supreme Court.

It’s very difficult to overestimate the kind of cultural momentum that will come with that kind of decision. Here you have a secular reporter for the New York Times trying to figure out exactly what it’s going to look like on the other side. The interesting thing she does understand is that Christians who are rooted in biblical conviction can’t change that convictions simply because the Supreme Court has redefine marriage, that’s a crucial insight. It’s also very interesting that she assumes that even as conservative Christians who are committed to a biblical authority aren’t going to be able to change their position, and thus turn on a dime, she expects there will be political candidates who, twisting themselves like pretzels to use her metaphor, will find some way to land in a new position and in relatively short order.

Greenhouse offers her own advice – this is very telling in itself –

“If Republicans understand their own options and interests, they will accept a same-sex marriage ruling as a gift, and find something else to talk about.”

Now once again, here you have the advice that will be given by the secular left to anyone in American public life. If the Supreme Court rules, as they expect the court to rule, then just get over it and change the subject and don’t talk about this anymore. But the final revealing aspect of this very interesting article is where Linda Greenhouse cites Michelangelo Signorile, as she says,

“a well-known gay radio host and blogger, warns against what he calls ‘victory blindness,’”

She then writes,

“…he defines [this] as falling prey to ‘a kind of bedtime story that tells us we’ve reached the promised land.’ Getting beyond ‘mere tolerance’ and winning ‘full equality’ is likely to remain an elusive goal,”

Now why is it so interesting that she cites Michelangelo Signorile? It’s not just because he’s a very prominent gay activist, it is because – even though she doesn’t acknowledge it – Signorile is rather well known for making the argument that same-sex marriage is a way to destroy marriage rather than merely to force the redefinition of it. Signorile sees marriage itself as a repressive institution that needs to be overcome.

In an article he wrote years ago entitled I do, I do, I do, he argued that the gay-rights movement should seize upon the issue of marriage not because marriage itself is really the issue, but because it is a way of destroying heterosexual privilege. So when in her article she cites Signorile warning fellow activists about what he calls victory blindness and pushing on to what he says full equality, well we need to remember what he has himself defined as the ultimate end game, the ultimate goal. That’s not acknowledged in Linda Greenhouse’s article and that, quite obviously, tells us something.

2) Success of gay marriage compared against abortion aggravates abortionists

Next, one of the interesting aspects of our current media culture is that that culture keeps bringing up the issue of same-sex marriage and the related issue of abortion over and over and over again. That is simply a demonstrated and documented fact which leads to some very interesting questioning, such as: what in the word was Robert Putnam speaking about at Georgetown University last week when he suggested that it’s conservative Christians who keep talking about same-sex marriage and abortion? Now to that issue we should simply plead guilty because of the importance of those issues there’s no way we can remain silent about them.

But as you’ll note on The Briefing I’m generally citing a development in the secular media and these developments take place not just by the week, not just by the day, but almost by the minute. And the issues are related; they are not the same issue, but they are related and sometimes it’s really illuminating to see how they are related on the other side of the great moral divide. In order to gain some insight in that other side there is probably no better source than The Nation; that’s one of the most left-wing magazines in America tied for many, many decades to the radical left in terms of American politics.  Katha Pollitt, a very well-known abortion activist, has written an article in a recent issue of The Nation in which she’s trying to explain to the left why in her words marriage trumps abortion.

She’s looking at an interesting phenomena and it’s interesting to us too. Why is it that America has experienced a radical moral revolution on the definition of marriage, but on terms of the abortion issue America is becoming more conservative by almost every measure? More Americans are now pro-life than are pro-choice, and more Americans are now more pro-life even then they were in the past. Katha Pollitt is a very well-known activist for abortion and she is very concerned that America is, in her view, moving in the wrong direction on abortion and moving in the right direction on the question of marriage, and she wants to know why one is happening and not the other.

She actually offers some insightful argument, she says in the first place,

“Marriage equality is about love, romance, commitment, settling down, starting a family. People love love!”

But she says that abortion is not such a winning issue; it doesn’t provide the same kind of picture that those who are advocating for same-sex marriage are able to show the public. She says,

“Reproductive rights, by contrast, is about sex—sexual freedom, the opposite of marriage—in all its messy, …glory. It replaces the image of women as chaste, self-sacrificing mothers dependent on men with that of women as independent, sexual, and maybe not so self-sacrificing.”

She clearly operates from a very interesting worldview, but her analysis does tell us something. And we should recognize that there is actually some crucial insight here. I won’t go through all of her arguments but the most revealing is one you simply need to hear. She says and I quote,

“In marriage equality, there is no loser. But many, including some who call themselves pro-choice, feel that abortion creates a loser: the embryo or fetus. You have to value women a lot to side with the pregnant woman, with all her inevitable complexities and flaws, over the pure potentiality of the future baby.”

Well in response to that paragraph I simply have to say, so close and yet so far. She’s so close to understanding something really, really important here and that is that there is – to state the obvious – a loser in abortion. She considers the unborn child to be of no significance whatsoever and so she’s actually dying that there is any loss in abortion, that this is exactly why the secular left is losing the abortion argument when they make it this way. It is because you can’t have the ultrasound image of an unborn child taped up on the refrigerator door so that all the siblings can see it and show it around to coworkers and then argue that someone else’s unborn child at the same point of development is not an unborn baby – of course it is.

But the language found in that paragraph, though chilling, is one we need to hear. When she refers to the contrast between a pregnant woman on the one hand and then she says “the pure potentiality of the future baby,” you see again she is so close and yet so far. The reason they’re losing this argument is because no one actually looks at that unborn child and sees just pure potentiality – no, what they’re seeing is demonstrated reality, actuality, not just in the future but right now. She does ask a very important question, and one that Christians should think about very seriously: why is the moral momentum on same-sex marriage so different than the moral momentum on abortion? That’s a good question. We would certainly not agree with Katha Pollitt on her answer, her answer nonetheless is very revealing. We do agree with her that she asked an important question.

3) Fertility medicine without a moral worldview induces moral confusion over ‘excess’ embryos

A similar point arises out of an article that was published in recent days at the Washington Post; it’s by Ellen McCarthy and it’s entitled, Fertility Medicine Brings Babies And Tough Decisions. America, as we’ve often discussed, has become the Wild Wild West of advanced reproductive technologies with very few rules – if any in most cases – having to do with the access to reproductive technologies, even at the expense of human dignity. It’s very important that even the Washington Post recognizes this with a major article. It goes to a couple who had created an extra embryo – now remember Katha Pollitt’s term about the pure potentiality of the future baby? Remember that when the Washington Post reports on this embryo as “a potential child.” Actually, over and over again in this article the frozen embryo is referred to as a potential child. Now once again the Christian worldview tells us that it is not merely a potential child, this is a child. It’s a child in a very early stage of development, but it is a human being made in God’s image. It is fully deserving of the protection and the recognition of the sanctity of its life.

McCarthy then reports that this couple is,

“…among thousands of couples and individuals in the United States grappling with difficult choices regarding their stored genetic material. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that more than 600,000 frozen embryos are stored nationwide, in addition to countless more cryo-preserved eggs and sperm.”

Now let that just sink in for a moment. There are over 600,000 frozen human embryos in the United States for which there is no intended purpose. The Post cites Eric Widra who is medical director the Shady Grove Fertility Center who stated the obvious,

“Having embryos in limbo is a huge problem for our field,”

He went on to say,

“Parents are apprehensive or conflicted and don’t know what to do.”

The Post goes on to report,

“Most couples never consider the fate of excess embryos when they start down the path of fertility medicine. Especially for childless pairs longing to conceive, ‘addressing that is not on the list of priorities, many of them take a ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’ approach.’”

This article demands our attention because the chilling language that is included within it doesn’t appear to be so chilling to at least those who are saying it. Now let me just skip to that part of the story; we read about these excess human embryos and one couple. They were offered options for their so-called excess embryos; the options were to implant them, to offer them for donation to another couple, to pay the hefty annual storage fee, or have them destroyed. The wife said,

“And we did not like those options at all,”

The Post says that would’ve preferred to donate the embryos to science, but there wasn’t availability for that kind of donation at the time. Ultimately, hear the words I want us to hear,

“The couple decided to have the embryos destroyed, as neither felt a strong emotional attachment to them.”

Now as we encounter the headlines every day we come across things that are concerning and some things that are deeply chilling. This is one of those most chilling comments I’ve seen in a very long time. Here you have a couple who has decided to destroy their own embryos, let me read the words again: “as neither felt a strong emotional attachment to them.” So now we see the dignity of human life being minimized and subverted by the fact that here you have a couple that doesn’t feel a strong emotional bond to their own embryos. Well what we’re looking at here is a deep and insidious moral confusion. And yet it is the kind of moral confusion that becomes inevitable when all of these medical technologies arrive without a moral worldview capable of instructing about their use.

One woman described her own decision basically to destroy her own embryos by saying that she brought the vials home “burned some incense, held them and cry,” She said,

“I could’ve had the lab dispose of them, but this felt better to me, for whatever it’s worth.”

Well just imagine her own question: for whatever it’s worth? The human embryos here were destroyed. In this case they were destroyed along with the burning of incense and some tears, but they were destroyed in an intentional act.

Christians need to be very, very careful when it comes to these advanced reproductive technologies and this much is abundantly clear: the Christian worldview would demand that if these assisted reproductive technologies are used and if any embryos are created as a part of these technologies, every single one of the must be transferred to the mother – every single one of them – and this should take place only within the context of marriage. While we’re thinking about the deep moral confusions of our day, indeed the worldview crisis of our day, it’s hard to come up with anything in recent headlines that is quite so demonstrably horrifying at this. In terms of the worldview crisis of our age it is hard to come up with any more graphic example than this article recently published in the Washington Post, and in the picture of these embryos being destroyed –  wantonly destroyed – simply because no one feels – feels – a strong emotional attachment to them.

4) Pro-life politician not so pro-life in his personal life, revealing importance of consistency in life and practice

But finally an article that hits a little closer to home that appeared in this week New York Magazine – again this is coming from the secular left – the headline: Pro-Lifers Change Their Minds When Abortion Gets Personals. It is by Alex Ronan and it’s the article we might avoid but must not avoid because it’s not about the pro-choice side, it’s about the pro-life side. And it’s demonstrating that when it comes to pro-lifers some aren’t nearly as pro-life as they would have us to think.

Ronan points to a controversy emerging from Tennessee where Representative Scott DesJarlais is officially against abortion and recently voted for a restriction on abortion, but has been in the press because he and his wife have had abortions and he at one point had a mistress who he had pressured – according to press reports – to have an abortion. This has been running in much of the secular news. According to New York Magazine when the controversy over the mistress and the abortion emerged in his reelection campaign he said that his mistress wasn’t actually pregnant when he was recorded, indeed he recorded himself, pressuring her to get an abortion for a pregnancy he says didn’t exist. Nonetheless, the controversy does exist.

In his divorce trial, as New York Magazine says,

“[It was] demonstrated that DesJarlais had also supported his ex-wife’s decision to get two abortions before their marriage. He called the first a ‘therapeutic’ abortion because she was on Lupron at the time, which can cause birth defects …. Of the second abortion, he said the couple was struggling and that the abortion was a ‘mutual decision.’”

Why am I raising this article? It is because of the conclusion in New York Magazine. The whole point of this article, written by the secular left for the secular left, is one we desperately and urgently need to hear and that is that many pro-lifers actually aren’t so pro-life when it comes to their own situations. And the final quote in this article is from Jon Pennington who had done a PhD dissertation on the pro-life movement and it is a matter of judgment that we need to hear his final words. He said this,

“Most pro-life women oppose abortion with four exceptions: rape, incest, the life of the mother, and me.”

Now let me just state up front I don’t think at all that is indicative of most pro-lifers, and certainly not of most pro-life women, but it is indicated by the fact that hypocrisy is always crouching at our door. It is always possible to be pro-life in theory but not in practice and that’s the really horrifying thing that we have to face squarely in terms of this article that appeared yesterday in New York Magazine.

The deceitfulness of sin explains why sinners are always looking for an exception to the rule and that exception comes down to that short word that ended that quote: me. But it is not enough to be pro-life in theory, we have to be absolutely consistently urgently pro-life in practice, and that pro-life ethic becomes most crucial and most important when that pro-life issues, as this article says, gets personal. That’s when the worldview most matters.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boycecollege.com. We’re taking questions for Ask Anything: Weekend Edition released. Call us with your question, in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058.

 

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 05-20-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Same-sex marriage legalization will reconfigure political, cultural landscape

The Morning After the Same-Sex Marriage Decision, New York Times (Linda Greenhouse)

2) Success of gay marriage compared against abortion aggravates abortionists

There’s a Reason Gay Marriage Is Winning, While Abortion Rights Are Losing, The Nation (Katha Pollitt)

3) Fertility medicine without a moral worldview induces moral confusion over ‘excess’ embryos

Fertility medicine brings babies — and tough decisions, Washington Post (Ellen McCarthy)

4) Pro-life politician not so pro-life in his personal life, revealing importance of consistency in life and practice

Pro-Lifers Change Their Minds When Abortion Gets Personal, New York Magazine (Alex Ronan)

Transcript: The Briefing 05-19-15

The Briefing

 

May 19, 2015

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

 

It’s Tuesday, May 19, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Irish same sex marriage referendum shows division between radical Catholics and evangelicals

The nation of Ireland is poised to be the first nation on earth to put the question of same-sex marriage up for a national referendum, and the vote is coming on Friday. And make no mistake, it’s going to be a big vote; not only about the future of marriage in Ireland, but about the future of Ireland. And there are some huge issues involved in this story. As Fintan O’Toole reports for the New York Times yesterday, what we’re looking at is aligned to be added to the Irish Constitution that would read simply and I quote,\

“Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.”

Now when you’re looking at changes in the law or changes in a Constitution, the economy of words will really matter. In this case, a good deal is being made of just how short that sentence turns out to be. And it’s very interesting that here you have just a few words put in a series that will totally revolutionize marriage in the nation of Ireland by national referendum – that is of course if a majority of voters approved the measure. That is at least somewhat in question.

The nation of Ireland has been known as rather socially traditional when it comes to many issues for the better part of its history. Even until 1993 homosexual acts were criminal acts and it took an action of a European court to reverse that. You’re looking at a nation that has been dominated in terms of its tradition by the moral teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. And what we’re looking at here is only possible because of the rather radical rupture in terms of the spiritual dimension of Ireland that is taking place; the evidence of that is this vote on Friday. In any previous generation it would’ve been inconceivable.

Henry McDonald, writing from Dublin for The Guardian, which is a liberal London newspaper, has given the most interesting attention to this dimension of the story. As he writes,

“Tens of thousands of Christian immigrants who have become Irish citizens are being mobilised across the Republic to vote down a historic move to legalise gay marriage in Ireland this week.”

The next words are particularly interesting,

“While liberal Roman Catholic priests and nuns are defying their bishops to urge a yes vote on Friday, religious leaders in the evangelical Christian community are now placing their congregations on the frontline of the battle to persuade Ireland to say no.”

So this could be one of the most interesting dimensions of this turn in Ireland. It could turn out that the opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Ireland is indeed theological, but not coming from the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, but rather from an influx of immigrants who are overwhelmingly evangelical and thus biblical in terms of their opposition. This is a very interesting development.

By the way, this has exposed all kinds of tensions within Ireland. This article in The Guardian makes very clear that there are many in Ireland who believes that the influx of these conservative immigrants is a problem rather than a blessing. And of course the influx of evangelicals, well that’s something very telling in terms of Ireland and its national history.

The Guardian goes on to report that,

“The Irish Republic is the first country in the world to hold a referendum to decide on whether or not the state should allow gay marriage. If passed, the right of gay couples to marry will be incorporated into the Republic’s constitution.”

Then they describe the two corners in terms of this opposition, this controversy. They say in the yes corner are radical Catholic clergy such as Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, identified as a lifelong anti-poverty campaigner who backed to gay marriage just last week. On the no side, in that corner according to The Guardian, more than 30 born again Christian pastors originally from Africa and representing dozens of churches – they are urging their congregations to help defeat marriage equality.

So here you have a very liberal and secular newspaper in London looking at this emerging and developing story in Ireland saying, here you have Roman Catholic Church that is fast liberalizing on this issue with very prominent nuns and others who are breaking from the authority of their church and publicly supporting same-sex marriage. And then you have these who are coming from Africa – interesting how that is reported in this story – who are importing not only their evangelical Christianity, but their opposition to same-sex marriage; or as they would prefer to say it, their understanding from the authority of Scripture that marriage is and can only be the union of a man and a woman.

The Guardian tells us that organizers of what’s called an evangelical alliance for a no vote on the question of same-sex marriage believe that the votes of up to 200,000 African and Eastern European immigrants, many of them conservative Christians and some of them Muslims, could help swing the vote in favor of no on the Friday. As The Guardian says,

“Across the key battleground of Dublin, evangelical and Pentecostal pastors are actively encouraging their congregations to vote no.”

While there are certainly some Catholics who are opposing same-sex marriage in Ireland, there are some very well-known Catholics who are supporting it. I mentioned Sister Stan, as according to the paper she is affectionately known, she has been an anti-poverty campaigner, and she has now become a campaigner for same-sex marriage. In speaking of her position publicly she said and I quote,

“I have thought a lot about this. I am going to vote yes in recognition of the gay community as full members of society. They should have an entitlement to marry. It is a civil right and a human right.”

Well the issue to face most directly here is that you have a nun in the Roman Catholic Church who is directly advocating a position that is at odds with the official teaching of her own church, and even the instruction of the Catholic bishops there in Ireland. Recognizing just how symbolic same-sex marriage in Ireland would be, Fintan O’Toole, again writing in the New York Times yesterday, says that the legalization of same-sex marriage there may now consolidate he says same-sex marriage as the new normal in the developed world. He calls this evidence of how profoundly attitudes have changed. Griff Witte writing in the Washington Post makes a very similar assessment when it comes to this kind of moral change and the symbolism of Ireland when he writes,

“That such a momentous event in the gay rights struggle could happen here, of all places, reflects the breathtaking social change that has swept Ireland in recent years —”

Now what he calls a breathtaking social change is pointing to an even deeper worldview change, a deeper theological and ideological change, within the Irish people. In Fintan O’Toole’s article that appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, a woman by the name of Rita O’Connor is cited there in Dublin. She says and I quote,

“I’m just going to vote for gay people because I have nothing against them,”

She was speaking inside a Roman Catholic Cathedral, and she says,

I can’t understand why anybody is against it.”

O’Toole says she dismissed the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition saying,

“…it’s a stupid carry-on”

O’Toole points to this change within the thinking of so many Catholic people in Ireland and he says that change,

“…owes something to Pope Francis’s more conciliatory tone on homosexuality,”

Now that raises a very different issue. This Pope has sown confusion within the Roman Catholic Church over the issue of homosexuality and I would simply argue that you should draw a line between that confusion and the change you see taking place even within the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. And for evangelical Christians there are some very important lessons there to be observed.

But when it comes that change, or that perception of change, within the Roman Catholic Church, last Friday Timothy Egan, writing another opinion piece for the New York Times, described how Francis is transforming the Roman Catholic Church to what he calls the art of joy. He then writes this,

“Francis’s predecessor, while a cardinal, once signed a letter saying homosexuality was ‘an objective disorder.’”

Now that paragraph is supposed to contrast the current Pope of the Roman Catholic Church with his predecessor, the retired Pope Benedict the 16th. And in order to make his point Egan goes back not to this Pope but to the previous Pope, but before he was Pope, when he was merely a cardinal when he wrote a letter in which he said that homosexuality was an objective disorder. In the context of this column you would think that was some kind of radical statement made by a Pope even before he was a Pope way back somewhere in terms of a Catholic legacy left behind. But let me read to you from the current official catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, fully affirmed not only by Pope Benedict the 16th but by Pope Francis as well. The current catechism, still everywhere in force of the Roman Catholic Church says this,

“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

That’s not from a letter someone dug up from a previous Pope even before he was Pope – that is the current catechism affirmed by this Pope. But you would know that by reading the New York Times. But as a matter fact you might not know it evidently if you’re a Roman Catholic in Dublin Ireland, which is why a good many Irish Roman Catholic Church are expected to vote for the legalization of same-sex marriage there in Ireland on Friday and why the focal point of opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage turns out to be evangelicals – who after all have moved to Ireland largely from Africa. Once again, we see the global South very clear on the issue of marriage while the secularizing north is very confused.

2) Protestant church distinctives affirmed by political disasters made by Vatican

Next, it’s also important for us to think about the fact that the evangelical church, evangelical Christianity does not have a foreign-policy. We understand there are scriptural principles of righteousness and justice and fairness and peace that should drive our concern for foreign-policy, but the Southern Baptist Convention doesn’t have a foreign-policy. The national Association of Evangelicals doesn’t have a foreign-policy. American Protestant and Evangelical denominations don’t have foreign-policy. But the Roman Catholic Church has a foreign-policy. Largely because so many nations recognize the Vatican not only as the theological seat of the Roman Catholic Church, but as a sovereign state. Evangelicals have historically and rightly identified this as a major problem – one that is not sustainable. And there are two recent developments that point out why it is so problematic that the Vatican is recognized as a state with a foreign-policy.

In the first place, there was a very well-publicized visit to the Vatican of the Pres. of Cuba, Raul Castro. And according to all the international press, Raul Castro and the Pope had a very good visit. Indeed Raul Castro was quoted as saying,

“I read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries, and if the pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the church, and I’m not joking,”

Well let’s just talk about the fact that as the Wall Street Journal points out, to call Raul Castro President is an absolute fiction. He was the only name on the ballot. That was about his Democratic as you could find in the nation of North Korea, and yet he was received in the Vatican as if he were the duly elected president of Cuba – which he certainly is not. Furthermore, the Castro brothers led a revolution in Cuba that was not only officially Marxist but officially atheist and they have led a regime that has cracked down on Christians and has violated religious liberty at virtually every conceivable turn. The big question for the Vatican is: how in the world is it good news that the Roman Catholic Church is becoming the kind of church that Raul Castro would want to be a member of?

The second development took place also in recent days when the Vatican state announced that it was moving towards the recognition of the Palestinian state as an autonomous state. Not especially from the vantage point of Israel, this is a very problematic development and even many American Catholics are scratching their heads to wonder what in the world is the point the Vatican’s trying to make by recognizing what calls itself the Palestinian state as an autonomous state. It simply doesn’t meet even the United Nations requirements of what a state must be, at least says that definition has been applied at any time in the past. Furthermore, the current head of the Palestinian state, Mahmoud Abbas, wrote his doctoral dissertation basically denying the reality of the Holocaust. This is one of those disasters that simply shouldn’t happen, but it is set up to happen when the Roman Catholic Church claims that the Vatican is not only the seat of its church government, but the seat of a national state as well. With that national state comes a foreign-policy and with that foreign-policy comes no shortage of trouble.

Evangelical Christians looking at these headlines in controversies are sometimes, at least in the present and especially perhaps in the United States, unaware or unmindful of the very deep theological reasons why evangelicals do not recognize the hierarchical authority of the Roman Catholic Church, in particular do not recognize the papacy and do not recognize the Vatican state as a state. The evangelical opposition to all of these is deeply rooted in the Reformation itself, and in the solas of the Reformation – that after all are not merely evangelical distinctive, but are the very heart of the evangelical understanding of Christianity, of the gospel, of biblical authority, and of the doctrine of justification – which is our salvation.

We should be very thankful that we have lived long enough to get over some of the very lamentable prejudice that was merely prejudice that separated Protestant evangelicals and Roman Catholics, but even as that prejudice and that animus has happily been removed, the theological issues that divide us have not gone away. The developments now in Ireland show that even in Ireland there are many Catholics who aren’t so Catholic after all. The real danger for evangelicals, even here in the United States, maybe especially here in the United States, is that many of those evangelicals aren’t so evangelical after all.

3) Luxembourg Prime Minister becomes first European leader to marry same sex partner

Finally, on this issue one of the story also from the New York Times also related to many of the same issues; Aurelien Breeden reports for the Times,

“The prime minister of Luxembourg on Friday wed his partner of several years in the first same-sex marriage of a European Union leader.”

The first head of government of a European union country has now been wed in a same-sex marriage ceremony. In this case it is Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, who married Gauthier Destenay, a Belgian architect,

“…less than a year after lawmakers in Luxembourg overwhelmingly legalized same-sex marriage, a sign of shifting attitudes in the predominantly Roman Catholic duchy.”

Now it is predominantly Roman Catholic – 87% of those in Luxembourg are Roman Catholics. You’ll remember the Luxembourg is a little duchy that does border Belgium and France and Germany and evidently it’s also very much a part of the secularization that has been taking place in those countries and throughout northern Europe. And the evidence of that in this case is abundantly clear there in the photographs and all over the world of the first head of government of a European Union nation to wed a partner of the same-sex.

4) Justice Ginsberg presiding at same sex wedding affirms view of gay marriage as constitutional

But wait just a minute, let’s then shift to the United States of America where a very interesting story developed yesterday, also reported by the New York Times,

“The groom and groom strolled down the aisle to the mellow strains of ‘Mr. Sandman.’”

Notice the following words,

“Wearing her black robe with her signature white lace collar, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presided over the marriage on Sunday afternoon of Michael Kahn, the longtime artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, and Charles Mitchem, who works at an architecture firm in New York.”

So we’re not talking about Luxembourg, we’re not talking about Ireland, we’re talking about the United States of America – we’re talking about New York, and we’re talking about a justice of the Supreme Court presiding at a same-sex marriage ceremony – not her first – even as the Supreme Court is known to be dealing with the case that will involve the question of the legalization of same-sex marriage. She did so between the oral arguments held back in April and the eventual decision to be handed down we expect in June. One would think this to be a very unusual development to say the very least and it was the justice herself who indicated that she knows evidently just how unusual this was.

“But the most glittering moment for the crowd came during the ceremony. With a sly look and special emphasis on the word ‘Constitution,’ Justice Ginsburg said that she was pronouncing the two men married by the powers vested in her by the Constitution of the United States.”

Now let’s just ask the question: what if one of the well-known conservative members of the United States Supreme Court, expected perhaps to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage, were somehow in their own sly way to try to give their own indication of how they have already decided the case even before the Supreme Court rules? Where would the New York Times editorial board be about that? But in this case the sly look was given by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, expected to be a very safe vote for same-sex marriage. And you’ll note that before the Supreme Court has ruled she, according to this news article, with a sly look and a special emphasis on the word Constitution, declared that she was pronouncing the two men married by the powers vested in her by the Constitution of the United States. Actually we should note, if they are married – and they were married in New York – they would be married under the laws of New York State, not under the laws of the federal government.

If this were published in any newspaper other than the New York Times we might disregarded it as something that would belong more in terms of the checkout lane in the grocery store, but this is the New York Times and thus I refer you to the continuation of the article:

“No one was sure if she was emphasizing her own beliefs or giving a hint to the outcome of the case the Supreme Court is considering whether to decide if same-sex marriage is constitutional.

“But the guests began applauding loudly, delighted either way. Justice Ginsburg, who has officiated at same-sex weddings in the past, also seemed delighted, either by their reaction or, perhaps, by the news that she will be played in a movie by Natalie Portman (who, in a strange casting segue, will play Jackie Kennedy Onassis in another film).”

The article concludes,

“Taking off her robe to reveal a glamorous jacket with a cream satin leaf motif, Justice Ginsburg reigned as belle of the same-sex ball.

“And the music, being the food of love, played on.”

Now I just ask you to be reminded, this was not on a tabloid in the grocery checkout line; this comes from no less than the New York Times yesterday. The world as we know it is changing right before our eyes, our responsibility as Christians is at least to understand what’s happening as we see it happen.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boycecollege.com. We’re taking questions for Ask Anything: Weekend Edition released. Call us with your question, in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058.

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 05-19-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Irish same sex marriage referendum shows division between radical Catholics and evangelicals

Ireland’s Marriage Equality Moment, New York Times (Fintan O’Toole)

‘New Irish’ Christians mobilise to vote no to gay marriage, The Guardian (Henry McDonald)

Ireland could be first nation to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote, Washington Post (Griff Witte)

Pope Francis and the Art of Joy, New York Times (Timothy Egan)

2) Protestant church distinctives affirmed by political disasters made by Vatican

Castro: Pope Francis so impressive I might return to church, Washington Post (AP)

Vatican Officially Recognizes State Of Palestine, NPR (Krishnadev Calamur)

3) Luxembourg Prime Minister becomes first European leader to marry same sex partner

Luxembourg Premier Is First E.U. Leader to Marry Same-Sex Partner, New York Times (Aurelien Breeden)

4) Justice Ginsberg presiding at same sex wedding affirms view of gay marriage as constitutional

Presiding at Same-Sex Wedding, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Emphasizes the Word ‘Constitution’, New York Times (Maureen Dowd)