R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 313

Children of the Day

“Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” [1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 ESV]

To affirm the church is to affirm the Trinity. The church is a sign of the redemptive reciprocity of the Father and the Son, as the Father gives a redeemed people to the Son and as the Son will one day present the church without spot or blemish to the Father. The church exists by the power of the Holy Spirit and in the power of the Holy Spirit. These facts and these facts alone explain why the church has come to be, why the church has survived to this day, and why the church will be preserved throughout eternity to the glory of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

To affirm the church is to affirm the gospel of Jesus Christ, for without that gospel there would be no good news, no message of salvation, no redemption of sinners, and thus no redeemed people of God. Every true church is a gospel church and without the gospel there is no church. The church has received from Christ the commission to make the gospel known to all people, everywhere, with the confidence that whoever hears the gospel and believes will be saved.

To affirm the church is to affirm the authority of the Holy Scriptures as the Word of God. As Martin Luther rightly noted, the church is where the Word of God is rightly preached. Where the Word is not rightly preached, there is no church, plain and simple. Where the church is found, the Word of God is honored, preached, taught, cherished, obeyed, and believed.

To affirm the church is to affirm the ministry. God has given ministers to his church in order that the redeemed people of God may be fed, taught, counseled, instructed, edified, encouraged, corrected, and led. The Christian ministry was not an organizational invention of the early church, but the gift of God. The New Testament reveals that God calls ministers for his church and gifts them according to his call.

As Charles Bridges put the matter perfectly, “The Great Head of the Church has ordained three grand repositories of his truth. In the Scriptures he has preserved it by his Providence against all hostile attacks. In the hearts of Christians he has maintained it by the Almighty energy of his Spirit—even under every outward token of general apostasy. And in the Christian Ministry he has deposited ‘the treasure in earthen vessels’ for the edification and enriching of the Church in successive ages.”

With a vast array of graduating ministers before our eyes, I want to amplify this affirmation of the church and the special calling of its ministers by turning to 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11. This great text points us to the coming Day of the Lord — that great day of God’s perfect judgment that was known already in the Old Testament and is further explained in the New Testament. Today, I want to look from this text to three great truths that will frame the calling, the ministry, and the future faithfulness of Christ’s church, and, especially, of these who will serve as pastors, missionaries, church planters, and other workers in God’s vineyard.

 

Identity

The first of these great truths is identity. Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are identified in this text as children of light, children of the day. We are not, says Paul, children of the night or children of darkness. It is hard to imagine a more basic or primary biblical metaphor than the contrast of light and darkness. In the beginning, God said “Let there be light,” and there was light. Jesus identified himself as the Light of the world, and he also described his disciples as lights in the world. The Psalmist declared, “The Lord is my light, and my salvation” [Psalm 27:1].

The Word of God is a light unto our paths. The promise of the Messiah was to a people who dwelled in deep darkness. On them would shine a great light. To be saved by the power of Christ is to be “called out of darkness into his marvelous light” [1 Peter 2:9] and to be delivered from the “domain of darkness” and transferred “to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” [Colossians 1:13] God is light, and in him is no darkness at all [1 John 1:5].

In this text, Christians are described as “children of light, children of the day.” The contrast of the children of light and day with the children of darkness and night is as clear as any we might imagine. We are children of light, children of the day, precisely because in Christ we are safe on that great Day of the Lord. We are his, and he is ours. We are children of light because he is the Light of the world, and we remain in the world as lights for his glory — children of the day.

Much is expected of the children of the day. We are to be sober, ready, alert, aware, and, most of all, awake. Sloth and complacency and drunkenness mark the children of the night, the children of darkness. In this sense, we are not to sleep, at least not as others do.

The Christian minister, above all, must be awake and sober minded and serious — alert to the imperatives of gospel ministry and the needs of Christ’s people. Those who teach will be held to a stricter judgment, reminds the Apostle James. The children of the day must be served by ministers of the light, who are faithful undershepherds of the flock of God.

The calling of the Christian ministry is a call that comes to a child of the day to serve the children of the day. We cannot call ourselves, gift ourselves, transform ourselves, or even keep ourselves. But we are children of the day by God’s grace and for God’s glory, and we are called to serve the children of the day by the light of Christ. Our identity is clear — to belong to Christ is to be children of the day, so let us minister as children of the day.

 

Destiny

Here is the greatest news a human being can ever hear: “For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” The children of the day are destined for glory, for salvation, for adoption, and for the eternal redeeming promises of God.

The great dividing line in humanity is not merely between the children of light and the children of darkness, but between those destined for wrath and those destined for salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. Whoever believes in Christ will be saved, and this salvation is not our work, but the gift of God. The entire plan of salvation is the outworking of the eternal purposes of God, as Paul described in Romans 8:28-30: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

We are told in no uncertain terms that the only alternative to our destiny of salvation through Christ is to be destined for wrath. This should lead to the unceasing gratitude of the church throughout eternity, but it must also lead to the most eager preaching, teaching, and taking of the gospel to the nations and to all people everywhere.

Ministers of Christ’s church serve in the knowledge that we are serving those who are destined for salvation in Christ and that Christ’s church is not, thanks be to God, destined for wrath. We minister, knowing that our destiny, and the destiny of all those who are in Christ, is secured by God, and not by ourselves. Thus, nothing the world can do can thwart our ministry in an eternal perspective. The church is safe in the purposes of God, destined for salvation, and thus we preach.

 

Urgency

Back in my teenage years, a staple of youth ministry was the showing of the film, “A Thief in the Night.” Quite honestly, it remains one of the most sobering messages I have ever heard or seen. And yet, the real message of this text is not less sobering than the film, but much more so. Paul reminds the Thessalonian Christians of what they already know, and show themselves confidently to know, and that is that the day of the Lord, that great day of judgment, will come as a thief in the night.

Look at verses 2-4: “For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief.”

There is a biblical urgency to the Christian ministry. Jesus reminded his disciples with these words: “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work” [John 9:4]. While the world declares peace and security, sudden destruction will come — even like labor pains come upon a woman in childbirth.

The children of the day know the eschatological urgency that comes from knowing that the day of the Lord is coming, that the time is short, and that this age will end. This does not mean that we give ourselves to passivity in the light of Christ’s coming, but rather that we be found deployed and faithful when he comes. If this is true for all the children of the day, it is certainly most consciously true of those who are called as ministers for the children of the day. The times and the seasons cry out the urgency of our calling — most of all, the urgency of the preaching of the gospel.

A commencement day comes with a flood of reflection and the splendor of hope. The Spring 2015 graduating class of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is gathered here in space and time for one great moment. Right before our eyes, they are about to be flung to the four corners of the earth, sent into the churches and into the nations. On this sparkling day and on this historic lawn we see them in their graduating gowns and regalia. We rightly feel that they are ours, but they are not ours to keep.

Graduates, you have no earthly idea how loved you are and how many hopes are invested in you. The hopes and prayers of a host of Christ’s people go before you, with you, and after you. Go serve the children of the day, and minister so that Christ’s glory will be more evident in his church. Take the gospel to the nations and look together with all God’s people to that great marriage supper of the Lamb.

Take your place in line and fulfill your ministry with eyes wide open, knowing your destiny in Christ. Go into the world of darkness as brave children of the day.

This is the commencement address delivered by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, at the school’s 215th commencement ceremony, Thursday, May 14, 2015. The entire ceremony may be viewed live at www.sbts.edu/live

 

 

Transcript: The Briefing 05-13-15

The Briefing

 

May 13, 2015

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

 

It’s Wednesday, May 13, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Warp speed of American secularization evidenced in declining religious landscape

The secularization of America is one of the great facts of our time and it doesn’t come out of a vacuum because long before America began showing the explicit signs of the secularization we now see it was already evident in much of Europe – especially in northern Europe. The historical trajectory goes back to the enlightenment of the 17th century and then gains speed as you go forward – especially in the 20th century. By the time you got to the 18th and 19th century a very thin slice of the intellectual elites were showing already that they were being secularized, that they were exchanging the Christian worldview for a secular worldview. But it took the last half of the 20th century for this to gain much speed in the general population; first looking at Europe and then also at North America.

When secularization first began to appear it was largely a phenomenon of the elites. And those who showed the earliest evidence of this secularization amongst the elites, they didn’t just become nonbelievers, they became in general atheist or skeptics or agnostics. Now we have new evidence coming from the Pew Research Center that what’s happening in the United States is a very different phenomena and it’s happening very fast. We are watching millions of Americans shift from some religious affiliation to no religious affiliation – and the numbers are very stark. They are gaining headlines all over the world with the release of this study yesterday by the Pew Research Center.

For instance, perhaps one of the factoids that has led to the greatest conversation is the fact that according to this massive pew study the number of non-aligned, that is nonaffiliated – religiously speaking in America – now exceeds the number of American Roman Catholics. That’s a rather stunning development. For the better part of the last century Catholics have numbered about 25% of the American population. And even as those numbers are not falling in terms of the absolute count, they are falling behind in terms of the growth of the American population.

So if religious groups don’t gain new converts, given the fact that America’s gaining new citizens, eventually they become a smaller proportion of the total population. That’s happening across the board when it comes to American religion. It happened very quickly within American Judaism with of vast majority of American Jews identifying no longer with the theistic truth claims of Judaism, but rather with Judaism as a cultural identity. Then it also happened in mainline Protestantism where vast numbers of members of what had been the most establish churches and denominations in America began also to be highly secularized; first turning to a very liberal version of Christian theology, and eventually themselves or their children and grandchildren simply departing those churches and denominations altogether.

It is happening now in other sectors of the American population. Nate Cohn writing for the New York Times tells us,

“The Christian share of adults in the United States has declined sharply since 2007, affecting nearly all major Christian traditions and denominations, and crossing age, race and region,”

Then again citing the Pew Research Center,

“Seventy-one percent of American adults were Christian in 2014,”

Now that is clearly a majority, but it’s a much smaller majority than what was true just a matter of a few years before 2014.  There is an absolute decline in numbers here of about 5 million but there’s a larger decline when it comes to percentage – a fall of about 8% since 2007. Alan Cooperman, the director of religious research at the Pew Research Center, the lead editor of this report, said,

“The decline is taking place in every region of the country, including the Bible Belt,”

Cohen then goes on to explain,

“The decline has been propelled in part by generational change, as relatively non-Christian millennials reach adulthood and gradually replace the oldest and most Christian adults. But it is also because many former Christians, of all ages, have joined the rapidly growing ranks of the religiously unaffiliated or ‘nones’: a broad category including atheists, agnostics and those who adhere to ‘nothing in particular.’”

In terms of this study, the biggest insight is the pace, or the velocity, of the change. Tamara Audi writing for yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal cites Greg Smith, one of the lead researchers for the project, as saying that the trends have “been underway for some time,” He himself went on to observe,

“I am struck by the pace at which that group [the religiously unaffiliated] continues to grow.”

According to the study, the share of Americans who are unaffiliated by their own self designation has risen to 22.8% from 16.1% – that’s from just 2007 to 2014. In terms of a massive social change this is something like warp speed, we’re talking about the kind of change that has generally only been experienced in a time of severe cultural crisis such as in various turning points in human history famine or war or poverty or plague. We’re talking about something that is explainable only by other rapid changes taking place in our society and as you’re looking at the great moral revolution, so many things happening around us, those developments only makes sense in light of this development.

One of the most important things to look at here is generational change and we will be taking a look at that in coming days. This massive study demands a lot of our attention and it tells us a great deal about the massive shift in worldview taking place around us. But in looking at this generational change one of the most interesting things is how successful – this is good news – how successful evangelical Christians have been in retaining millennials as over against virtually every other group – most importantly mainline Protestants and even Roman Catholics.

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra writing for Christianity Today points out that one of the insights from this study is that evangelical Christians convert many of their kids and then retain many of their kids. Pew found what it calls a remarkable degree of churn in the larger American religious landscape, but says Zylstra, evangelicals are the major exception to the national pattern of Christian decline. Evangelical Christians were the only major Christian group in the entire study that gained more members than evangelical Christians lost through religious switching. That again is a very important issue.

Now evangelical Christians could find some false confidence in this because even as we look at the fact that were doing remarkably well in retaining our own young people, as compared of virtually every other religious group in America, the reality is we’re not doing all that well when it comes to understanding that were losing at least an enormous percentage of our own young people. And one of the things the becomes clear as we look at this research is what we talked about all the time: how much theology matters, because the central truth is that it matters whether or not young people gain an active and eager convictional self -identity with the truth claims of the religious organization. That’s what’s clear; whether you’re looking at Judaism or mainline Protestantism or evangelical Christianity or Catholicism. And as it turns out, the less theology you have or the less theology you share and transfer, the less frequently it turns out the younger generation stays around.

So there’s a very clear message for us here about doctrine and theology, about the gospel and conversion – it’s not enough that evangelical young people come at some point to identify with the gospel of Christ and even with evangelical Christianity. If they do not come to an open intellectual embrace, a heartfelt embrace, of Christian truth, they are not going to continue to identify as the Christians their parents at some point think them to be.

One of the interesting facts that comes out of this study is the fact that 60% of those who identify as evangelicals were raised as evangelicals, 14% were raised his mainline Protestants, 13% as Catholics, 7% as the unaffiliated, 3% as black Protestants, and 2% as other non-Christian faith. So one of the things that it also tells us is that evangelical Christians, though more successful in retaining our own and that converting others than the other groups that are documented here, we honestly are not reaching as many of those outside our own evangelical circles as we might think we are. Let me just point to that last number – only 2% of those who currently identify as evangelical Christians in this study were in any non-Christian faith before they identify as evangelical Christians.

Finally, as I said, we will be looking at other facets of this study in days ahead. It is worthy of that kind of attention; it so effective in helping to explain the world around us. But finally, in terms of covering of this issue today, I want to point to what might be called a new Pauline Kael moment. Pauline Kael was the theater critic of the New York Times. In 1972, after Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide, Pauline Kael was famously quoted as saying, ‘it couldn’t have happened,’ because no one she knew had voted for Richard Nixon. There are questions as to whether she actually said that, although it’s been authoritatively traced to her, but she did say in her own newspaper just a matter of days after the election,

“I live in a rather special world. I know only one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know, they are outside my kin, but sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them,”

Now the reality of that Pauline Kael quote is that it doesn’t tell us anything about America, it tells us a lot about Pauline Kael. It tells us that even when Richard Nixon won 49 states, losing only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, she knew either no one or at least just one person who had voted for Richard Nixon. Which tells us what kind of world Pauline Kael lived in. And thus that quote has been famous ever sense because it points to the increasing secularization, the political isolation of those in the intellectual elites, including Pauline Kael.

But a similar moment came yesterday, in the aftermath of the release of the pew report, when Byron Tau, who is the White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal, tweeted:

“From anecdotal experience, the number of people my age that I know who are Christians is close to zero,”

Now just step back for a moment and realize what was there communicated. Here you have a major young figure in the intellectual elite of America; after all he is the White House reporter, or at least a White House reporter, for the Wall Street Journal, one of the nation’s most influential newspapers. And he writes, in all honesty and candor, that so far as his own experiences concerned, let me repeat the words,

“…the number of people my age that I know who are Christians is close to zero,”

As I said, this is something of a new Pauline Kael moment because that statement made by Pauline Kael in the aftermath of the Nixon reelection is rather echoed in the statement made by a White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal. But I don’t raise the young man’s statement in order to criticize him for making it. Rather I simply want to point out that in all honesty, apparently he doesn’t know any Christians, or at least he doesn’t know anyone who identifies as a Christian, who identifies as a Christian to any extent at least that Byron Tao would know that that individual is a Christian. That tells us again what Pauline Kael statement has told us about the New York Times, those who have these kinds of jobs tend to be rather isolated from the rest of the country. That’s made clear even in the pew report.

But this also tells us something else, here you have a young man in one of the most privileged media positions in America who is honestly just reflecting upon this report saying, ‘I don’t know anyone my age who is a Christian,’ in his words,

“…the number of people my age that I know who are Christians is close to zero,”

Without any doubt, that makes a certain statement of reflection upon Byron Tao. Without a doubt it also makes a certain statement about Christians.

2) Calls for full coverage of contraception evidence of pervasive nature of moral revolution

Next, two articles that appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times tells a great deal about the revolution taking place around us, about the worldview significance of the headlines that just pop up in the newspapers. In the first place, in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, page A12, you find the headline: White House Warns Insurers about Surcharges and Gaps for Contraception. This has been widely reported in the media, the New York Times tells us along with others, that the White House has been issuing directives to insurance companies – this has to do with authority granted under the ObamaCare legislation – telling these insurance companies that they have to cover all forms of contraception without any kind of copayment required from anyone that has the coverage.

As Robert Pear reports for the New York Times,

“The Obama administration on Monday put health insurance companies on notice that they must cover all forms of female contraception, including the patch and intrauterine devices, without imposing co-payments or other charges.”

This comes after group such as the National Women’s Law Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation; it issued reports indicating that there had been gaps in the coverage from several of the insurance companies. One of the most important sections in this article by Robert Pear includes these words and I quote,

“The new guidance also makes clear that insurers should cover preventive services for transgender people when a doctor finds that the services are medically appropriate.”

That gets into the whole transgender revolution and it tells us here that you can expect this moral revolution, on the issue of gender and sexuality, to be translated – this article also makes clear – into an insurance revolution. Another sign that the Christian worldview affirms, and that is if you make a moral change, it inevitably realigns the entire society. So people who were thinking about the transgender issue probably aren’t first thinking about how this will impact insurance coverage, but now you have the Obama Administration saying not only must insurers cover all forms of female contraception without any copayment, but also these insurers should cover transgender or sex reassignment surgery when advised that such surgery is medically appropriate by a physician.

Now we enter into a whole new terrain in terms of insurance coverage, we enter into a whole new conversation about what medically appropriate means, we enter into a whole new conversation about the economic effects not only on those who are seeking this kind of surgery, but for the rest of the insurance pool paying for it. We now look at the fact that the Christian worldview reminds us that we live in a social whole, we live in a situation in which worldview always works its way out. And we operate from a biblical understanding that as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. The biblical worldview starts out with a very clear understanding that if you change the most basic framework of thinking, you’re eventually go to change everything. You are going to change law; you’re going to change social custom.

Yesterday we looked on The Briefing at the fact that people are trying to come up with Mx as a way of replacing Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. and Miss simply because in the transgender revolution, in a denial of what’s being called the binary separation of human beings into male and female, we got an absolute confusion about how to even to address one another. Every portion of the society will be changed. What happens in the school room is going to be changed. What gets published in the textbooks is going to change. How children’s books are published, what kinds of pictures appear in them, that is going to change. And the rules of insurance coverage, that’s going to change too. The entire economy will eventually be changed as well. The biblical worldview affirms what Christians must understand. If you change the way a society thinks morally, eventually you will change everything about that society.

3) Gov. Cuomo attempts to strengthen thin sexual morality of consent on campuses

The second article also appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, this time on page A18, the headline: Cuomo Taking Aim at Campus Sexual Assaults, Calls for a Stricter Law. In this case the Cuomo is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and as Elizabeth Harris reports for the Times,

“[The] Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, appearing at a Manhattan college with Representative Nancy Pelosi, on Monday called for the passage of ‘the toughest law in the nation’ on campus sexual assault, a message aimed at state lawmakers who have expressed some reservations about his proposals.

Harris goes on to tell us that the Gov.’s proposed policies, which are already in place in New York’s public colleges, would require the states private colleges to adopt so-called affirmative consent policies as the standard of student behavior. As Harris says,

“…putting the burden on an accused student to show that the other person had agreed to the sexual activity, rather than making accusers prove that they had said no; silence or lack of resistance would not be considered consent.”

Now the point we’ve made over and over again on The Briefing is that when you deny, when you try to eradicate, a Christian morality based on Scripture when it comes to sex, you’re going to replace it with some morality and this is the sole insufficient, the very thin morality that is left as all a secular society can eventually muster. And that is a morality of sexual consent.

But you’ll notice how this consent has to be renegotiated and redefined all the time. There is something absolutely ludicrous and heartbreakingly tragic about a law that says sexual morality just comes down to consent and that consent now has to be affirmative consent where both parties have to somehow affirmatively consents to a specific act or no consent is given. There is no definition you may note about what that might represent, there is no legal definition yet of what affirmative consent might require. And whether or not the governor gets the law he calls the strictest in the nation, what is abundantly clear is this: it won’t settle the issue, it will not resolve the problem – it can’t.

Oh, and by the way, there are some other incredible moral insights in this article. Let me just read to you this paragraph,

“Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has also proposed that students reporting sexual assaults must not be punished if they were violating a campus policy on drinking or drugs, with the goal of removing the fear that by coming forward, those reporting might be reprimanded, administration officials say.”

So, now students coming forward – and the only morality here is consent – now they are going to be forgiven any alcohol or drug offenses that might have been combined with the incidents simply because that might prevent someone from coming forward. Once again, we just see the confused morality when you have the absence of a coherent biblical ethic.

Just a couple of other quick insights, at least some legislators are complaining about the language of the bill because it defines the two people, the first person as victim and the second as accused. But as some legislators a pointed out, just using common sense, if one is identified as a victim, it is then impossible to say that there is merely an accusation. If one is the victim, then evidently something happened. This is a problem that has already shown up in the media and now you have at least some legislators, undoubtedly some of them attorney, saying these words simply don’t work when put together.

On the other hand, the last insight from this article comes in these words,

“In a statement after the speech, Mr. Cuomo said, ‘As a father of two college-aged girls, with a third on the way next year, this isn’t just an important issue for the state, it’s a personal issue for me as it is for many parents who every fall say goodbye to their children with an expectation that their schools are doing everything they can to keep them safe.’”

Now I close by speaking not only as an observer of the governor’s statements but also as a father. Does any father actually think, in any honest way, that the adoption of these policies will make daughters safe? Safe from what? Presumably so-called safe sex? What we’re looking at here is the meltdown of morality once a Christian biblical ethic is abandoned and denied. Once that biblical ethic is displaced something is going to take its place and this is very sad evidence of evidently the best a secular society can do in trying to come up with some replacement.

 

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. Remember we are taking questions for Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Just call 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 05-13-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Warp speed of American secularization evidenced in declining religious landscape

America’s Changing Religious Landscape, Pew Research Center (Staff)

Big Drop in Share of Americans Calling Themselves Christian, New York Times (Nate Cohn)

Americans Unaffiliated With Any Religion Outrank Catholics, Study Says, Wall Street Journal (Tamara Audi)

Pew: Evangelicals Stay Strong as Christianity Crumbles in America, Christianity Today (Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra)

2) Calls for full coverage of contraception evidence of pervasive nature of moral revolution

White House Warns Insurers About Surcharges and Gaps for Contraception, New York Times (Robert Pear)

3) Gov. Cuomo attempts to strengthen thin sexual morality of consent on campuses

Cuomo, Taking Aim at Campus Sexual Assaults, Calls for a Stricter Law, New York Times (Elizabeth A. Harris)

Transcript: The Briefing 05-12-15

The Briefing

 

May 12, 2015

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

 

It’s Tuesday, May 12, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) In opposition to abortion restrictions concept of ‘baby’ disappears

Late last week on The Briefing I discussed an article that appeared at the New York Times. The article had to do with scientific and medical studies indicating that the age of viability for an unborn human baby had been pushed back in terms of effective medical treatment. Most interestingly we found out that the age of viability, which is the age in which a baby can live outside the womb, had passed backwards in terms of medical progress from about 30 weeks to 26 weeks to 24 weeks. And the big news last week was that studies indicated that at least a good number of babies at 22 weeks of gestation could live outside the womb if they had the appropriate medical treatment.

And the central importance of the article, other than the health of these babies, was the fact that they were referred to in the article as babies. We’re talking about a front-page story in the New York Times. Interestingly, the headline of that story was: Preterm Babies Can Be Viable at Earlier Birth; the subhead of the article was “a study could affect the abortion debate.” I came back to the fact that our nouns reveal us, especially when we’re talking about the inhabitants of the womb. And the big thing, in terms of this article, is that time and again the inhabitant of the human womb was referred to as a baby over and over and over again. As if of course, and this is the highly revealing issue, that we would refer to that inhabitants of the womb as a baby – because after all that’s what it is. And especially it’s a baby when you’re talking about medical treatments that would allow the baby to live even outside the womb. And were talking about an article that again and again and again referred to the unborn human being as a baby, and appropriately.

But there was one paragraph in that article last week that referred to the baby as merely a fetus. I quote from the article again,

“The Supreme Court has said that states must allow abortion if a fetus is not viable outside the womb, and changing that standard could therefore raise questions about when abortion is legal.”

In that paragraph the babies referred to as a fetus, elsewhere the baby is a baby. I raise that article because of the central issue that the biblical worldview affirms that every unborn child is indeed not only a baby but a full-fledged human being deserving of human dignity, understood to possess the sanctity of human life simply because God has said let there be life. And we talked about the dignity and sanctity of life extending to every human being at every point of development all along the continuum of life. But that now is a very revealing issue and it’s especially revealing when just a few days later that very same newspaper, the New York Times, on Sunday ran an important article that has the headline, With Flurry of Bills, Republican Legislators Make Abortions Harder to Get.

The article that appeared on Sunday is by Frances Robles, and she’s writing about the fact that an increasing numbers states are passing an increasing number of rules and laws restricting access to abortion. That’s clearly something that the New York Times finds to be bad news. In her article she writes about 37 new rules adopted in 11 states that, in her words, are

“…part of a strategy accelerated by abortion opponents in 2011, when provisions restricting abortion access began sweeping state legislatures. More than 200 such laws have passed in the last four years, with Louisiana, Mississippi, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas leading the charge,”

One of the first things we should note is that the abortion issue in America is hardly settled. The fact that after you have Roe V Wade a generation ago you now have 200 new laws put into place in multiple states restricting abortion indicates that the American people are not settled on abortion on demand. That’s a very clear issue. Now keep that in mind when we’re being told that on the issue of same-sex marriage we have to get – you’ve heard this argument – on the right side of history. Well if you go back to 1973 a good many pro-lifers are being told they had to change their position in order to be on the right side of history. Well guess what, history didn’t end up where the pro-abortion movement thought it would.

But once again I bring up this article that was published just a few days after that other article because of the noun that is employed here – the noun that used over and over again is not baby, it is fetus. We’re talking about a human being at the very same point of development, we’re talking about a human being that is defined in one article in the same newspaper as a baby one day and as merely a fetus the next. It comes up first when we’re told that one state is requiring a woman who might be seeking an abortion to receive information “about fetal development.”

It’s clear that from the worldview of the New York Times it’s a very bad thing that abortion would be restricted in any way, but the really revealing thing is how the baby is defined in this article. We’re not only told about fetal development and the unborn child is not only therefore merely a fetus, but in the saddest paragraph in this article I read:

“Several states targeted the clinics themselves by instituting costly ways to dispose of fetal remains and requiring doctors to have admitting privileges,”

Not just consider what we’re being told here, here we have a complaint that is embedded in a news article that some of the restrictions placed by some states on abortion include restrictions on the disposal of what is described here merely as “fetal remains.”

Now in the article publishes just last Thursday on the fact that there are some babies at 22 weeks of gestation who are surviving, it refers to the babies who survive as babies, but it also refers to the babies that do not survive as babies. It is not then explained that somehow there will be the challenge of disposing with fetal remains, rather there was an open acknowledgment that we are talking about babies. But the baby disappears in the article that appeared on Sunday. Now all we have is a fetus demonstrating fetal development and abortion clinics dealing with the disposal of fetal remains.

As I said last week, our language reveals our worldview. I can only wonder how the editors and reporters of the New York Times, looking at these two articles that appeared just a few days apart in their own newspaper, can explain straightforwardly why a baby is translated into merely a fetus. And why the unborn child that was celebrated as living at 22 weeks of gestation in one article is then translated into nothing but fetal remains just a few days later? The culture of death, including the abortion industrial complex, tries to move forward on euphemisms of language. But as is demonstrated in these two articles put together, that effort breaks down in terms of their own usage of the nouns. This much should be abundantly clear, if a baby is ever a baby, it’s always a baby, and never under any circumstances anything less.

2) Gender neutral title proposed presents impossibility of honorific titles in such a society 

Next, from Great Britain the Telegraph indicates that in the latest transformation of our language we have a new prefix, neither for males or females, but for both and neither. That is the prefix Mx – rather than Mr. or Mrs. or Miss or Mrs. – Mx, or pronounced, at least in some suggestions, ‘Mux.’ But ‘Mix’ appears to be the prevailing pronunciation.

The article that appears in the Telegraph is by Olivia Goldhill and she writes that the prefix Mx has become,

“…the honorific of choice for those who don’t want their title to define them as male or female,”

As Goldhill writes,

“Half a century ago, the word ‘Ms’ made us question why a woman’s title should signal her marital status. Today, a growing number of people are asking why honorifics should reflect gender at all. So, what’s it like to be known as Mx?”

Goldhill goes on to identify one person sourced in the article who is “non-binary,” which according to the article,

“…means they doesn’t recognize themselves as male or female, but part of a third, neutral gender. (Instead of using the pronouns ‘he’ or ‘she’, the word ‘they’ is a common gender-neutral alternative.) The word ‘Mx’ was first suggested in the late-1970s as a feminist word for those who didn’t want their gender to be revealed in their title, and there are many men and women who use Mx for similar reasons today.”

I’ll simply inject, I haven’t seen it until now as it appears in the Telegraph. But the article goes on to say,

“However, the title has also become popular among those who identify as non-binary – though there are no official figures, non-binary people make up around 0.4% of the population, according to a Equality and Human Rights Commission survey of 10,000 people in the UK.”

Hold on for a footnote on that issue. We’re looking here at one of those very revealing transitions in the language, it is not at all clear to me that Mx is going to become a substitute in terms of widespread acceptance for Ms. or for Mrs. or for Miss. or for Mr., but it is clear that in this sexually and gender confused age there are people trying to find a language that will somehow replace the language that is rooted in human nature, rooted in human identity, and rooted in that so-called binary system of male and female. But there’s another issue to raise here and that’s why in the world we would have these honorific titles at all. In the Soviet Union they were all eliminated by force of law, everyone was reduced to Conrad. How long will it be before you don’t have to be Mrs. Smith or Ms. Smith or Mr. Smith or even Mx Smith, but simply Smith?

One of the things that will simply evaporate in terms of this sexual and moral revolution is the very idea of courtesy titles at all because they are going to become impossible to anticipate and impossible to use. And furthermore, given the explicit logic of the transgender movement anyone can decide to use any one of these pronouns or to demand the use of them and then change it any point in any different context – that’s absolute insanity of course, but that’s why of course we have articles like this suggesting that the way out of it is to change Ms., Miss., Mr., and Mrs. simply to Mx. But one of the essential points to make is, if you can’t use Mr. and Mrs. or Ms. or Miss, you really don’t need Mx either, and only a very mixed up society would come up with something so confusing as this.

3) Amazon removal of gender specific toy categories will not pass muster with children

And speaking of that moral revolution and the gender confusion that follows in its wake, the Telegraph is also reporting along with other major international media that Amazon has decided to remove the category of boys and girls from its sales category of toys. Radhika Sanghani reporting for the Telegraph tells us,

“Amazon appears to have taken a stand against sexism by reportedly removing its ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ toy categories.

The global retailer has updated its option list on the ‘toys’ page so that customers can no longer search by gender,”

Sanghani reports

“The news comes as campaigners have been drawing attention to so-called sexist toys such as Fisher-Price learning sets where girls are offered a purse complete with lipstick while boys are offered a toolset. Some retailers, according to the reporter, have consciously responded, such as Mattel which “created an entrepreneur Barbie complete with her own LinkedIn page.”

Andrew Griffin reporting the same story for the Independent in London said,

“Backlash against gendered toys has grown in recent years, with campaigners saying that there is nothing about girls that should make them any more welcome to play with Barbies than cars. Both retailers and manufacturers have responded, offering gender-neutral toys or changing their gender-specific ones so that they can be more empowering.”

Well there is so much to look at here; one is the fact that it is simply impossible to defy human nature to this extent. Among the most resistant to the gender-neutral approach being suggested here are young children, just watch them. They understand the crucial distinction between girls and boys and the vast majority of them understand that it does break down over toy categories whether parents or marketers or retailers intended to do so or not. By the way, I can only wonder how many of these entrepreneur Barbies Mattel’s going to sell. But the very fact that they still understand that Barbie is for girls who must, in their view, be empowered by entrepreneur Barbie tells you that they understand regardless of what they’re saying that they still expect girls to buy Barbies and not boys.

Oh, and by the way the Telegraph tells us that there are still many pages embedded in Amazon that divide toys between girls and boys and it’s estimated that it will take a very long time for the website to be able to turn all of its pages in terms of toys into a gender neutral format, but that’s just a pointer to an even more basic issue. It’s going to take longer than that to convince boys and girls that is no inherent difference between boys and girls – even when it comes to the toys they choose to play with.

4) Reality TV industrial complex creates redefinition of celebrity and reality

Up to this point on The Briefing I have carefully and strategically refrained from uttering the name Kardashians, but now comes today. And the reason is that a major article on the Kardashian’s appeared in the New York Times magazine, not in terms of an entertainment tabloid, but rather in one of the most elite publishing formats of the country. And the point being made in this article entitled Mother of Invention about Kris Jenner or Kris Kardashian Jenner, is the fact that this family has created a whole new definition of celebrity and the fact that it is, in the words of the New York Times magazine, metastasizing to the rest of the culture.

It is one of the signs of an imminent cultural collapse that I utter the word Kardashian, but I do so because this New York Times magazine article really does have a very important point and it’s not necessarily the point the article intends to make. Taffy Brodesser-Akner writing about Kris Jenner says and quoting her,

“‘I don’t think we’re going to be digging for dirt,’ she told the crowd, and they chuckled in agreement. ‘I think that that is going to come find us.’”

The New York Times magazine goes on to say,

“There are still people who dismiss Kris Jenner, 59, and her family — Kourtney, Kim and Khloé Kardashian, all in their 30s; her son, Rob Kardashian, 28; and Kendall and Kylie Jenner, 19 and 17 — as ‘famous for being famous,’ a silly reality-show family creating a contrived spectacle. But we have reached the point at which the Jenners and the Kardashians are not famous for being famous: They are famous for the industry that they’ve created, the Kardashian/Jenner megacomplex, which has not just invaded the culture but metastasized into it, with the family members emerging as legitimate businesspeople and Kris the mother-leader of them all.”

I’m not going to give much more attention to the article, nor to the family, but the important thing in this article is how this idea of celebrity has been spreading throughout the culture and how many people seem to be deluded into believing that they are watching some kind of reality when they’re watching a reality TV show. Because as this article in the New York Times magazine makes very clear, this is a family that is by no means normal and the reality is by no means real. And furthermore, by the time you read this article you come to understand that the kind of family that would be demonstrated in reality TV is the kind of family that would allow themselves to be filmed for so-called reality TV. And the people who would watch and enjoy reality TV are evidently the kind of people who would watch and enjoy so-called reality TV.

The New York Times is concerned with the redefinition of celebrity, that’s not a minor issue when you consider what it reveals about the culture. But from a biblical worldview perspective the bigger issue is the redefinition of reality because the Bible prizes reality – authenticity, human identity, and human dignity, the very things this family is, in its own controversial and highly documented way, forfeiting and giving away and subverting in their reality TV celebrity industrial complex.

5) Sexuality statistics used by media often unreliable due to nature of subject matter

But after uttering the name of the family I didn’t think I would ever name I then go on to an article that appeared over the weekend by Tim Harford known as the undercover economist for the Financial Times, one of the world’s most authoritative financial newspapers published in London. The headline of this article is, The Problem with Sexed-Up Statistics and what we have here is extremely revealing. Tim Harford writing as an economist wants his readers for the Financial Times to understand that they should have very little confidence in most of the statistics that are brought forth in the media and in popular culture about human sexual behavior.

He quotes with approval a new work by statistician David Spiegelhalter in which he basically takes apart many of these polls that are widely reported on human sexuality. In terms of the moral revolution, many of the revolutionaries claim to have science and statistics on their side and they pointed to things such as the work of Alfred Kinsey back in the 1950s as evidence of why sexual morality had to change. But we now know several things, including the fact that Alfred Kinsey was involved in very immoral research in terms of what he was actually doing. And furthermore we know that his research to produce those statistics, well we now know the statistics were absolutely fundamentally untrustworthy.

Explaining this Tim Harford writes and I quote,

“Kinsey was on the lookout for interesting sexual case histories and so sent his researchers to prisons and to bars famous for being gay meeting places. He may well have captured a broader range of sexual behaviour as a result but at the cost of a representative sample.”

Well, that if anything, is a profound understatement. Since these reported statistics are so often thrown out in terms of those who are arguing for the sexual revolution, it’s important that here we find an economist and a statistician saying, ‘now, wait just a minute. There are huge problems with these numbers.’ But one of the most important issues of analysis from this article goes right back to the New York Times article on the Kardashian’s – there I said again. It turns out that sexual surveys tend to be weighted towards the response of those who will fill out sexual surveys and that in itself is the problem.

The vast majority of people in the United States are never asked these questions, it’s not a representative sample, most of these most famous or infamous studies are not based in terms of a widespread statistical sample, they are unrepresentative and yet there being presented as evidence for the moral revolution. You’ll not that when I mentioned a footnote just a few stories back that when it comes to some of the issues of gender identity the very article he cited said there are no official statistics and then it went on to cite an unofficial statistic which we are supposed to take at face value.

Tim Harford goes to some of the most influential the sexual surveys and says,

“…the underlying research was politically groundbreaking we cannot have too much confidence that these numbers are correct,”

But when you’re trying to force and to feed a sexual revolution you can’t worry about whether the numbers are correct, you make statistical claims and you simply put them out in public. And, as we now know in retrospect of the sexual revolution over the last several decades, these numbers did lead many people to believe that sexual morality is changing and must change. And so just in terms of keeping the argument honest, it’s very important to cite this article that comes from across the Atlantic in the Financial Times, telling us in essence that the kind of people who fill out the information on sexual surveys are the kinds of people who will fill out the information on sexual surveys. Keep that in mind the next time someone throws one of the statistics out in public. Just because someone reduces a moral equation to numbers doesn’t mean that the numbers are correct. In my experience that’s true at least four out of five 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. Remember we are taking questions for Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call 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 05-12-15

Podcast Transcript

1) In opposition to abortion restrictions concept of ‘baby’ disappears

Premature Babies May Survive at 22 Weeks if Treated, Study Finds, New York Times (Pam Belluck)

State Legislatures Put Up Flurry of Roadblocks to Abortion, New York Times (Frances Robles)

2) Gender neutral title proposed presents impossibility of honorific titles in such a society 

What’s it like to be a Mx?, Telegraph (Olivia Goldhill)

3) Amazon removal of gender specific toy categories will not pass muster with children

Amazon appears to remove its ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ toy categories, The Telegraph (Radhika Sanghani)

Amazon drops gendered listings for toys, customers can no longer search for items for ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, The Independent (Andrew Griffin)

4) Reality TV industrial complex creates redefinition of celebrity and reality

Where Would the Kardashians Be Without Kris Jenner?, New York Magazine (Taffy Brodesser-Akner)

5) Sexuality statistics used by media often unreliable due to nature of subject matter

The problem with sexed-up statistics, Financial Times (Tim Harford)

Transcript: The Briefing 05-08-15

The Briefing

 

May 8, 2015

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

 

It’s Friday, May 8, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Anniversary of V-E Day should not be neglected as opportunity to thank veterans of WWII

Those alive then will remember now where they were and what they were doing when they heard that the war in Europe had come to an end – that war known as World War II. It was 70 years ago today that VE Day was first declared. It was declared first on the other side of the Atlantic where crowds gathered before Buckingham Palace in order to celebrate the end of what would be known as the bloodiest war of human history – at least thus far. In London King George invited then Prime Minister Winston Churchill, for the first time a nonmember of the Royal family, onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the end of the war. Churchill himself had been so instrumental to that war and to the defeat of the Nazi regime.

In the United States iconic pictures and immediately come to mind from Washington, DC and especially from New York City, when VE Day was declared here and that again was May 8, 1945; 70 years ago today. From the perspective of 70 years it’s very important that we put this war into its historical context and is important we do so knowing that the number of people alive during that war, and especially the number of people who were fighting in uniform in that war, is decreasing day by day.

The distance of 70 years requires us to go back and recognize the fact that World War II was the bloodiest war that humanity had ever yet seen. And it stands in history almost as an unparalleled example of human evil when it comes to the demonstration of human warfare. When you look at VE Day 70 years ago and you think back to what it meant then, it met the end of sustained years of warfare that had drained virtually every major European nation and much of the United States as well.

The death toll of World War II is simply staggering and the fact that the death toll is estimated to be between 60 and 80 million people by the time you put the war together, the fact that that estimate includes the difference of about 20 million people simply defies and staggers our moral imagination. About 60 million people were directly killed at one point or another by the warfare itself in both the European and the Pacific theaters. The other 20 million casualties are generally explained by the fact that there were so many millions of people who were eventually starved by the war and died by privations that came as a direct consequence of the military action in World War II.

Now taken by the standard of the world’s population in 1939 that 60 million represented 3% of the total population of the world; you add the other 20 million and that comes at almost 5%. That means we’re looking at a war, taken in total that amounted to casualties that would mean five out of every 100 persons alive when the war began.

The end of World War II in the European theater actually came as we dated on May 7, that’s when Karl Dönitz – then the Reich’s President – surviving as the leader of the Nazi regime signed the instrument of total capitulation and total surrender. But it wasn’t until the 8 of May that the allied powers officially received that surrender and declared victory in the European theater of World War II. What they were declaring was the end of the Nazi regime. Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun had committed suicide on the 30 of April and that came in the breakdown of the Nazi regime as Russian forces were entering the city of Berlin and as the allies, including the Americans and the British, were closing in from the West.

Those who were alive 70 years ago will tell you that the end of World War II in the European theater was one of the happiest moments of their lives. It meant that many people, who were then alive wearing uniforms, would live to see another day and would survive the war. And yet we need to remember that vast numbers of Allied servicemen actually were transferred into the other theater of war that lasted for an additional matter of months.

There is one surviving President of the United States who was a World War II veteran and that is George H.W. Bush – now over 90 years of age. And President Bush had signed on by doing what many American men did at the time, they signed on lying about their age. George H.W. Bush was too young to join the Air Force and yet he did – eventually becoming a war hero in the Pacific theater. That means that it has been since 1993 that a President of the United States was a veteran of the Second World War. That places us generationally a far, far distance from that major world conflict at the center the 20th century.

Keep this in mind, the youngest soldiers – at least by regulation, who could have been serving in the American uniform in the European theater in the year 1945 – were then 17 years old, which would mean that today they are at least 87 years old. That means with every passing day and every passing week we lose an opportunity to pay a debt of gratitude to a generation that defeated the Nazi regime and did so officially 70 years ago today.

2) NSA phone collecting ruled illegal as court weighs moral goods of liberty and privacy

Next, one of the issues that have become abundantly clear is how war has changed in the period from 70 years ago until today. We now fight a war that is at least in part a digital conflict. That was made abundantly clear yesterday when a federal appeals court in New York ruled that a National Security Agency program, that was once secret and became exposed in the so-called WikiLeaks scandal, is illegal because it systematically collects the phone records of Americans and does so without asking permission. This is one of those very interesting stories, it’s very revealing. In this case you have a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit there in New York that issued a 97 page ruling that says the federal government has no right under the United States Constitution to collect that data. That’s a very important legal argument. It’s also one that is likely, at least in terms of where the United States now stands, to lead to a significant weakening of our ability to predict terrorist strikes.

And it comes just days after many Americans are asking why the United States government and our extensive national security apparatus didn’t prevent an attack that took place in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas that was ended only in a shootout with law enforcement officials. One of things that became abundantly clear in the aftermath of that incident just days ago is that the FBI and the national security agencies had been watching at least one of these gunmen and had been doing so for some time. But even armed with that knowledge they had lost track of him.

Now, national security officials are saying that it will be increasingly difficult – and that seems to be an understatement – to collect the data that at least many of those agencies say they must have in order to prevent at least some terrorist attacks on American soil. From the Christian worldview this leads to some really big questions. The Christian worldview does prize privacy and liberty. We understand that whenever there is a totalitarian force or whenever there is government coercion or collection of that data, it comes at the expense of individual security, of identity confidentiality, and of some extent liberty. But we live in a fallen world in which there is no such thing as absolute liberty. We live in a fallen world in which there is always a contest of moral goods. But if we were able to ask most Americans I would conjecture, not just this three-judge panel in New York City, how they would strike the balance between their own individual confidentiality and an increased need for national security – including their own security – my guess is you end up in a very different place than the editorial board of the New York Times or even this three-judge panel sitting in New York City.

The really interesting development in all of this is that even as the United States and even as the US Congress is considering how to define the legal boundaries of this kind of data collection, in France there is a very rapid movement in precisely the opposite direction. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks there in Paris, the French government is moving towards an aggressive and open declaration that it intends to collect vast amounts of information from its citizens without asking their permission in any sense. And the French are doing so simply because the French government was caught embarrassed that it had not been able to prevent that attacked. The French people are saying the government should have been able to follow these terrorist and to prevent that attack, and the French government is saying in order to do that it is going to have to radically increase the amount of information it is collecting.

This means that in the United States we are going to have a very robust debate. And one of the interesting things to watch is how that debate is likely to fall out other than the traditional Democratic and Republican, liberal and conservative divides because when it comes to issues such as the balance between individual security and national security, there is no easy fallout along ideological lines.

But the Christian worldview reminds us that we do have enemies, even as we look back 70 years to the defeat of the Nazi regime in World War II we recognize that we do have enemies even now and they have declared that they intend to do us damage. The trade-offs Americans are willing to make when it comes to individual confidentiality over against national security, it’s not yet clear where the American people might be on that but it is clear we’re not going to be able to avoid the issues. But from the Christian biblical worldview it just affirms all over again that in the fallen world you have a contest of moral goods. You cannot have absolute confidentiality and absolute security in a fallen world – not when someone intends to do harm and someone says we ought to be able to know that.

3) British elections present surprising success for Conservative Party

Next, even as the polls closed at 10 o’clock last night London time, in terms of the British election, it looks like the Tory party – the Conservative party – is actually doing much better than had been expected even in the days just before the election. Exit polling reported by the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, indicates that the Tory party is likely to claim 316 seats – that places it just 10 seats short of a majority able to form a government. It appears that a surge that had been reported for the Labour Party in the days prior to the election did not actually happen. We will be watching over the weekend as results are finalized and as a new British government begins to come into sight. But we will also be watching, knowing that what happens in the British elections often times is an indication of what will happen next in American elections as well.

4) Survival of increasingly premature babies underlines fact all fetuses are babies

Next, a really important headline story appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, the headline: Preterm Babies Can Be Viable at Early Birth. Pam Belluck reporting for the New York Times acknowledges even in the subhead of the article, “a study could affect the abortion debate.” Of course it could, and of course it should. Why? because one of the most interesting things about this article is the fact that there are now medical findings that some babies at 22 to 23 weeks of gestation can indeed thrive if they receive immediate and successful medical intervention.

Belluck reports,

“A small number of very premature babies are surviving earlier outside the womb than doctors once thought possible, a new study has documented, raising questions about how aggressively they should be treated and posing implications for the debate about abortion.”

As we said, of course it does. The next paragraph,

“The study, of thousands of premature births, found that a tiny minority of babies born at 22 weeks who were medically treated survived with few health problems, although the vast majority died or suffered serious health issues. Leading medical groups had already been discussing whether to lower the consensus on the age of viability, now cited by most medical experts as 24 weeks.”

This is one of those very encouraging articles that tells us that medical progress is being made when it comes to very young babies. The so-called age of viability is being pushed back, it had been about 30 weeks, then it went down to about 26 weeks, now medically defined at about 24 weeks – and we’re now being told the good news that there are some infants being born at even 22 weeks who, when receiving the right kind of medical treatment, are able to thrive and have very few long-term medical complications.

Even as the study documents that right now it’s a minority of those very premature babies, at every stage it was a minority. It was a minority at 30 weeks, then it was a minority at 26 weeks, then at 24 weeks, and now even at 22 weeks as is documented here. What’s the first major Christian worldview insight from this article? It is the noun – the word being used of these babies, in the front page of this article in the New York Times – is babies.

That is a very revealing issue because this is the same secular culture and the same newspaper that repeatedly refers to babies, if they might be aborted, not as babies but as fetuses; and at the very same stage of development or even later in gestation. There we see the great moral revelation in a noun. Is that inhabitants of the womb merely a fetus or a baby? If it indeed is going to survive and thrive after 22 weeks of gestation, it is clearly a baby. But the Christian worldview reminds us that means at every single point it was always a baby – it could be nothing other than a baby. If it survives, it is a surviving baby; if it did not survive, it would be a baby that did not survive – not merely a fetus.

The article in the New York Times mentions, even in the subhead, “this is a study that could affect the abortion debate,” but the actual article doesn’t really get into the details of how the newspaper thinks that debate might be modified by this finding. The simple fact is this: if on the front page of your newspaper you’re talking about a 22 week old baby in the womb and you’re using the word baby, you’ve already revealed that you know that the inhabitant of the womb is indeed a baby. If these inhabitants of the womb are babies than every single inhabitant of the womb is a baby.

5) Researchers ponder whether advantage of loving parents is unjust in equal society

Finally, a study that affirms the importance of the family in an altogether unexpected direction. In the United States ABC as a network refers to the American Broadcasting Corporation, but in Australia ABC refers to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. And it is the Australian ABC that featured in recent days an interview by its own Joe Gelonesi with a philosopher of the University of Warwick in Great Britain – that philosopher, Adam Swift. The headline of the article, based on the interview, raises a question. Here’s the question: Is Having a Loving Family and Unfair Advantage?

It turns out that in the world of modern moral theory, the family is controversial for reasons you might not have recognized. It also turns out that Swift of England has co-authored a book with Prof. Harry Brickhouse of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the title of that book is “Family Values: The Ethics Of Parent-Child Relationships” published by Princeton University press. That work sets the backdrop for the interview that appeared in Australia.

And that interview certainly demands our attention because Professor Swift in the interview says that the family is inherently unjust, it leads to unjust outcomes, because as it turns out – follow this argument very closely – children who are raised by loving parents have significant advantages over children who are not. It’s a really investing argument, it is an obvious argument. But what isn’t so obvious is that this is now a matter of moral debate, in academic circles at least, where the question is being raised, if a child being raised in a loving family has an unjust advantage over a child who is not?

Now that advantage is very well documented. This ABC news story goes at it very clearly. That advantage comes down to the fact that a child being raised by loving parents has the advantages of security, has the advantages of being talked to by parents. One of the things we looked at recently is studies demonstrating that children who receive a flood of words from two parents are at a significant educational advantage over children who do not.

The other thing that becomes apparent is that even reading books to children can be an unfair advantage according to current moral theory. According to professor Swift if one is committed to egalitarian, then one obvious answer might be to abolish the family – something he credits going back, correctly, all the way to Plato in his utopia who suggested that children should be taken away from parents so that some parents could not unjustly advantage their own children over others.

In one really interesting part of this research they compare the fact that some parents are able to buy elite private schooling for their children and yet they point out that over time it is actually a greater advantage to children to be read to by their parents as children than even to be sent to elite private schools. Professor Swift said and I quote,

“The evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t—the difference in their life chances—is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,”

That’s a fascinating finding in and of itself. The really interesting thing about the ABC interview with Prof. Adam Swift is that Swift method actually doesn’t want to abolish the family and he doesn’t want to end parenthood. But he is an egalitarian by his own political philosophy, and thus he laments the unjust outcome differential between children who have loving parents and children who do not. He’s actually trying to quantify that. He and Brickhouse in their study published by Princeton University press try to quantify the advantage – economically speaking – that children raised by loving parents have over those who do not in order the government may try to meet that shortfall. Of course anyone looking at the equation recognizes that no government could possibly make up for the absence of loving parents.

Here again we see a conflict of moral goods because these two authors are committed to two principles of justice. The first they say is the egalitarian challenge that, as they say, focuses on the distribution of goods and opportunities between children born into different families. They then describe what they call as the distribution of freedom and authority between parents, children, and the state. In their words liberals think it valuable that individuals be free to make an act on their own judgments about how they are to live their lives. Justifying authority requires an account of how anybody can have the right to decide for others and that includes parents making major decisions for their children.

In the introduction to their book the authors write,

“As egalitarian liberals we take both challenges seriously. Our egalitarianism leads us to condemn the inequalities that arise between children born into different families. Our liberalism makes us worry about the rights that parents and children have over their own lives and with respect to each other and about the proper limits of state authority with regard to both parents and children. The two challenges intersect.”

And as the book also makes clear these two commitments not only intersect, they sometimes directly collide.

And of all things it turns out, as this interview with ABC Australia makes clear, sometimes they collide over the simple issue of a bedtime story. It is unjust that some children are loved by their parents and are read bedtime stories when others are not. It is unjust that these children have an advantage over the children who do not receive bedtime stories. What isn’t stated in this article is the absolute obvious and that is that no government is going to tuck a child in bed at night and no government is going to read a child a bedtime story.

To the credit of these two academics, even as they ask the question, if the family is unjust, they come to the conclusion that anything else would be even more unjust. And they refer to the fact that the eclipse of the family would lead to what they describe as a dystopian future – a very dark and dangerous future.

Christians operating out of a biblical worldview, looking at this controversy, need to recognize that it is the oddest affirmation of God’s glory as revealed in the institution of the family and in the relationship between parents and children. And it also affirms that in a fallen world we should limit the fact that any child is not tucked in safely at night and any child does not have loving parents, we should even lament the fact that there are children who go to bed without a bedtime story. So as you tuck in your own children in bed at night and as you read them a bedtime story, recognize you are doing something that by some moral calculations is unjust or leads to an unjust result as measured with other children. But as you know, you’re doing the right thing. You are profoundly doing the right thing. So read your children a bedtime story and pray with them as you tuck them in at night. And pray for all those children who do not have loving care to do the same with them tonight.

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 on Monday for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 05-08-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Anniversary of V-E Day should not be neglected as opportunity to thank veterans of WWII

V-E Day, 70 years later, and memories abound in France, USA Today (Bill Hinchberger)

2) NSA phone collecting ruled illegal as court weighs moral goods of liberty and privacy

N.S.A. Phone Data Collection Is Illegal, Appeals Court Rules, New York Times (Charlies Savage and Jonathan Weisman)

3) British elections present surprising success for Conservative Party

Election 2015: Exit poll puts Tories close to majority, BBC

4) Survival of increasingly premature babies underlines fact all fetuses are babies

Premature Babies May Survive at 22 Weeks if Treated, Study Finds, New York Times (Pam Belluck)

5) Researchers ponder whether advantage of loving parents is unjust in equal society

Is having a loving family an unfair advantage?, ABC National Radio (Joe Gelonesi)

“Whoever Would Save His Life Will Lose It” — A Charge for Graduates

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” Mark 8:34-38 ESV

The things we choose to surround us often define us. We choose to put before our eyes those objects that are meaningful to us, even if they strike others as odd. My library is filled with many objects that visitors find reassuring, no doubt. But other objects might give visitors pause.

There are several large ship models in my library–all but one from the great age of sail. The one exception is a long scale model of Titanic. That beautiful ship is a parable before my eyes. Titanic stands alone as a symbol of human pride and arrogance; the unsinkable ship sinking on the morning of April 15, 1912 with a loss of 1,500 lives. This very weekend marks the one hundredth anniversary of the sinking of another great ship, the Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, with a loss of almost 1,200 lives, including an unprecedented number of children and infants. Titanic struck an infamous iceberg, but the Lusitania was sunk by a ruthless torpedo.

What both ships have in common is the fact that in the first class sections of these liners some of the wealthiest people on the planet went aboard with some of their finest objects — dazzling jewels and even fine art. Those who died took their wealth only as far as the ocean bottom. Some were dancing on the deck just shortly before disaster struck.

All this may seem to be a rather depressing introduction to a charge for graduates of Boyce College. This is a momentous day and a day of genuine joy. Why bring up Titanic and the Lusitania?

Well, because Jesus did. Not exactly, of course. But in Mark 8:34-38 we read our Lord’s warning that those who would save their life will lose it. Those who look for full satisfaction in this life will never gain it. Those who demand their best life now will forfeit life with Christ.

As a matter of fact, what Jesus said was this:

For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

In the larger context, Jesus had issued a call to discipleship — “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Jesus is not looking for mere believers, though belief is the first command. Christ has called for those who believe in him to serve him and follow him and obey him — even to take up our own cross as his disciples. The servant, Christ also told us, is not greater than his master.

I was recently looking at a book of commencement speeches. They were mostly unremarkable, but the general tone was that college graduates were told to seize the day and believe in themselves. Well, go seize the day and believe in yourselves. Get a good job and a lot of stuff and smell the roses and develop be happy attitudes. Where does that get you?

Make a fortune and waste it wantonly. Make a name for yourselves and get your name listed at your favorite charity. Bloom where you are planted. What does that gain you?

This really is a great day, and we all feel the promise of it. The promise is genuine. We are marking a major achievement here — one so valuable that people have sacrificed a great deal to make this possible. Professors and teachers have dedicated their lives to this calling — the high calling of Christian scholarship. The graduates before us today have completed major programs of demanding scholarship and have earned the degrees awarded today and the diplomas that will soon hang on walls. Hours upon hours of reading, study, teaching, writing, and learning are represented today by academic gowns and engraved diplomas and honest smiles.

A college degree is no small thing. Today, it is a major dividing line in the economy. The graduates who cross this stage and receive these degrees are not receiving trophies given out without regard to achievement and distinction. Boyce College represents the finest traditions of Christian scholarship, teaching, and learning.

None of these graduates arrives at this moment alone. Parents, grandparents, congregations, and a host of others stand behind the achievement recognized today. But, even if these graduates have not produced themselves, they have produced hard academic labor, and they will cross the stage alone.

Of course, they also mark this day as the object of our prayers and love and expectations. They embody so many of our hopes and we feel their day of commencement as if it were our own.

Graduates, enjoy this day to the fullest, but enjoy it with those who helped bring you to this day. Accept hugs and give hugs as tangible expressions of what cannot be put into words. Look at your fellow graduates and realize that you will never again sit together in this life as you sit together now.

But, this is not just any college, and this cannot be just any charge. This is a school committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to the faith once for all delivered to the saints. This is a college founded in the name of Christ in service to the church for which Christ died. This cannot be just any charge, for this is not just any college on just any commencement day.

Jesus called the crowd and his disciples to himself, and then called for them to follow him. The logic of Christian discipleship is unlike any other logic you will ever hear. He who would save his life will lose it, whoever loses his life for the sake of Christ and his gospel will save it. If anyone is ashamed of Christ and of his words in this generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

That is a lot different than bloom where you are planted. Christ has issued a call to put everything on the line for the sake of following him, and to follow him with the logic of discipleship, not the logic of this world. Seen in light of that logic, this day does not look smaller, but larger, precisely because it now appears in the calendar of God’s sovereign purpose.

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life?”

Those questions can be asked–and answered–only in light of the gospel, only in the light of Christ.

Graduates of Boyce College, follow Christ with all your heart for the length of your days. Lose your life to save it. Take up your cross in the name of the One who died on a cross for you. Use the education you have earned for the glory of God and for the sake of the church and for the furtherance of the gospel. You go with our hopes, with our prayers, in our hearts. Be not ashamed of Christ, and he will be unashamed of you. Live every day in anticipation of the coming of the Son of Man in the glory of his Father and with the holy angels.

As Christ himself has reminded us all — What do you have to lose? For the sake of Christ, count it all gain . . . count it all joy.

A Charge to Graduates delivered by R. Albert Mohler, Jr. to the graduating class of Boyce College, May 8, 2015 in Alumni Chapel at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

A special note: This graduating class includes Christopher Albert Mohler, the first son or daughter of a president of Southern Seminary to graduate from this institution. Mary and I are very proud, and for the first time in our many years here, we gladly stand as parents of a graduate. Congratulations, Christopher.

Transcript: The Briefing 05-07-15

The Briefing

 

May 7, 2015

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

 

It’s Thursday, May 7, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) British elections reflect decline of clear British cultural identity

As we said earlier this week about the United States, a major election is not only a worldview contest when it comes to the candidates, it is also very revealing of the worldview of the electric. Keep that in mind when you remember that today is Election Day not in the United States but in the United Kingdom, in Britain. And the election there has vast stakes when it comes to the future of that nation. It also may play a role in indicating the future of politics in this country as well.

That’s because at least in recent decades there has been an interesting parallel between political developments on that side of the Atlantic and this side. The parallels have to do with the fact that for example in the late 1970s Margaret Thatcher came to powers as the Prime Minister of Great Britain, indicating a conservative revolution. That was later to sweep Pres. Ronald Reagan into office in a landslide election in the United States in 1980.

The parallelism between Reagan and Thatcher was matched at least in part with a parallelism that overlapped between American Pres. Bill Clinton and the British Prime Minister then, Tony Blair. And then of course you have the election coming up today in Great Britain and the big question is whether or not the conservative government headed by Prime Minister David Cameron will remain in office.

One of the things that Christians must keep in mind is that the structure and system of government of a people indicates, in terms of the long view, the worldview that has produced that society. That is to say the political system reflects the values and the worldview of the society it would represent. And when it comes to a Democratic system of government that is especially the case, and in United Kingdom we have a parliamentary system of government.

Let’s look at the differences between the election taking place today in the United Kingdom and the election that will take place in 2016 in the United States of America. What is the basic difference between a parliamentary system of government and the system of government here in the United States headed by a president in terms of the chief executive? One of the things to keep in mind is the fact that the British Prime Minister is the head of government, not the head of state. The head of state in the United Kingdom is the Queen, or the reigning monarch of the time. Britain is a constitutional monarchy, the government serves in the name of the monarch and the government is elected by the people. But the parliamentary system of government is very different than what we know here. The head of state is not the head of government, the head of government is not directly elected by the British people.

The British people, when they go to the polls today, will make a single and very significant electoral vote. They will elect their own Member of Parliament. The United Kingdom is divided into 650 parliamentary districts and in every one of those districts the local voters will vote for their Member of Parliament. They will not vote for Prime Minister, they will vote effectively for their own Member of Parliament and for the party that winning candidate will represent.

And then we go to the Parliament itself, remember that there are 650 elected Members of Parliament, they are, virtually every one of them, identified with one of the political parties. The political party that is able to put together 326 seats will eventually form the government. The government is constitutionally formed when the individual who heads the party that is able to assemble at least 326 seats is asked by the monarch to establish the government in the monarch’s name.

Here in the United States the president is directly elected by the people, almost. Actually, the people of the United States here do vote for the president, but they’re actually voting for the electors who will eventually constitute the Electoral College who will elect the president. But in almost every case that means that when voters go into the polling place here in the United States and they vote for a candidate for president, the one who assembles the most votes will eventually be elected by the Electoral College and become president of the United States. But in United Kingdom it is very different with a parliamentary system of government. There, today, when voters go into the voting booth they are going to be voting only for Members of Parliament.

And that leads to a different point, the actual Prime Minister is the individual backed by the coalition or the party that comes up with at least 326 votes – and that can change between elections. So, parties can change Prime Minister because the dominant party can elect a new head of that party who would, if the party is in power, become the new prime minister. If that sounds complicated, it’s because it is. Driven by our own political expectations Americans are likely to wake up on Friday or even to go to bed on Thursday night wondering who was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, when that’s actually not the logical question. The logical question is: which party is gaining dominance? And when it comes to that magic number 326, if not one of the parties has 326 seats, what kind of coalition has to be put together in order to form a government?

That’s where the Christian, especially in the United States, watching the election in Great Britain needs to pay very close attention because even as in our own election we understand that we have two major political parties: the Democrats and the Republicans. And even though there many issues that do not divide them by a chasm of significance, there are many issues that do. Those include moral issues, they include foreign-policy issues, and they include issues related to the economy. But when it comes to Great Britain the difference is separating the parties, especially in recent years, have been even more acute.

The current British government is headed by Prime Minister David Cameron; he heads the conservative party – popularly known in Great Britain as the Tories. But that party did not gain 326 seats in the last election, so it had to enter into a coalition with the Liberal Democrat party. On the other hand you have a second major party in the United Kingdom and that is the Labour Party. The Labour Party has been, at least in terms of its dominant history, a socialist party. That was changed somewhat under the leadership of Tony Blair, and yet after Tony Blair’s departure from the scene that party has swerved even more to the left.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the conservative side, to the Tory party, David Cameron has not been a leader who has followed the pattern of previous conservative Prime Minister’s including Margaret Thatcher. Even though he has put forth what has been called austerity budgets, he has not been a small government leader of his party. And on social issues he has swerved that party, the so-called conservative party, rather wildly to the left as well.

The five major parties on the British ballot tomorrow include the conservatives, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats who had joined with the conservatives to form a coalition government five years ago, the Scottish national party, and the United Kingdom independence party. That’s especially important because as you look to the election today the conservative party has 302 seats – remember it takes 326 to form a government. It is expected that that number will fall to about 276. The Liberal Democrats, with whom the Tories are in power, they are expected to be decimated in today’s election. They currently have 56 seats, that is expected by polling to be reduced to three. The Labour Party, the more liberal party, currently has 256 seats – that’s expected to rise to 272. If you’re doing the math, that means that no party is expected to gain anywhere near enough seats to form a government. So whichever government is eventually formed will be the coalition of parties that most quickly comes up to 326 seats.

It is even more complicated when the party that is expected to gain the most in terms of the election today, that is the Scottish national party, is a party that will take those seats not from the conservatives but rather from the Labour Party and the Labour Party said that it will not form a government with the Scottish national party. Which means that the United Kingdom may have more or less the same kind of government it has now – a government that is headed by the current British Prime Minister David Cameron. But then again, all that can fall apart if the numbers are even slightly off.

From a Christian worldview perspective here’s the big thing we need to note, what we’re witnessing right now is the decline of the United Kingdom, the decline of Britain, made very clear in the fact that Britain no longer knows who it is as a nation. This particular election, and the fact that neither the two major parties is expected come even close to being able form of government, demonstrates a deep social, cultural, and spiritual weakness at the very heart of Britain. After all, just consider the fact that the party that is expected relatively to gain the most in today’s election is a party that represents Scotland wanting to leave the entire nation.

The election today has a great deal to do with the relative place of the United Kingdom in Europe and elsewhere in the world. And as the Financial Times reported just a few days ago, the big concern in the United States is that one of our closest allies – the United Kingdom – is simply falling out of a major player role on the world scene. The headline in the Financial Times was, United States Decries Britain’s Waning Global Influence. The same thing was made clear by columnist Michael Wolff writing in USA Today when he said that the American indifference, generally true about the election taking place today in England, is understandable. He then said,

“Almost every possible election outcome will make Britain less relevant to the United States and less significant in the world. It really is an-end-of- Britain-as-we-know-it sort of moment”

The really concerning thing for us in the United States is that the relative weakness and the decline of one of our closest allies is not good news for the United States. The so-called special relationship that has existed between the United States and Britain ever since the Second World War is now threatened by the fact that Britain seems no longer to know what Britain is, who they are as a nation. And as the influence of Britain is receding on the world scene, that leaves the United States without one of our key allies. And the weakness that is going to be demonstrated in the election today is a weakness that will register in capitals all over the world.

The Christian worldview significance of the election taking place today has to do with the parliamentary system of government as well in Great Britain. One of the strengths of a parliamentary system of government, contrasted with our own, is that the government in power, in accordance with a parliamentary system of government, can’t lose a vote. That means that the government in power has a great deal of forward momentum in terms of accomplishing its own policies. But when you look at the weakness of the parliamentary system, one the most immediate things we see is that when you have the weakness of Britain right now, the kind of coalition, the bargaining that is going to have to take place between the parties to come up with 326 votes, it will almost surely weaken the government and it will weaken the nation. That’s a warning to us.

Both the American constitutional system and the British parliamentary system are deeply rooted in the Christian worldview. Two different applications of what it means to recognize the inherent rights of citizens to determine the shape of their own government. But as we look at the relative strengths and weaknesses of their system versus ours, today is likely to be a significant civics lesson for voters in the United States and for Christians in the United States.

Our constitutional system of government with the division of powers and into three branches in checks and balances, checking the power of each, it has its weaknesses. But as contrasted with the British parliamentary system and the British election taking place today, my guess is that the very few Americans would trade our Constitution for there’s.

As Christians understand , every election is a test of worldview and when it comes to voters in Great Britain the election choice they may face is for a member of Parliament, but the election will actually reveal a great deal more. The election will reveal the worldview of the British people. What do they actually believe, even when it comes to the question: what do they believe about Britain?

2) Secularists note gap between liberal and conservative voters reflects gap in moral values

Next, when it comes to the interaction between worldview and politics it is hard to come up with an article that’s more insightful and important than one that appeared recently at Bloomberg News. The author of the article is Cass Sunstein, who is a law professor at Harvard University. And Sunstein is also the director of the Harvard Law School’s program on behavioral economics and public policy. The most important thing I can do is simply quote from how he begins his article because he’s explicitly talking about worldview and politics. He writes,

“What separates conservatives from liberals? In the past decade, the most illuminating answers to this question have come from Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychologist whose research bears directly on the emerging 2016 presidential campaign — even if his answers might not be quite right.”

Sunstein goes on to write,

“Haidt’s basic finding is simple. Throughout history, human beings have operated under five sets of moral commitments: (1) avoidance of harm, (2) fairness, (3) loyalty, (4) authority and  (5) sanctity. Conservatives recognize all five, but liberals recognize only the first two.”

Now if you’re thinking about the importance of a worldview understanding of politics, how could there be anything more important than this? Even if both Haidt and Sunstein are way off in their analysis here, this much is important: they are recognizing that the worldview of an individual directly relates to the electoral decisions made in the polling booth. And as they are now looking, from a secular and rather liberal perspective on how people make these decisions, their understanding is that there are five different issues that conservatives tend to think about when they make their electoral vote. But when it comes to liberals – I’m not saying this, they’re saying this – there are really only two.

Let me quote again from Sunstein’s article. He writes,

“Conservatives and liberals agree on the importance of avoiding harm. If someone assaults someone else, people of every political stripe object. The two sides also agree on the importance of fairness. People who cheat one another, or break promises, meet with bipartisan disapproval — even if people often disagree over what fairness requires.”

Sunstein then writes,

“According to Haidt’s research, what separates conservatives from liberals is that they also care a great deal about loyalty, authority and sanctity. Suppose that people have betrayed their family, or that they have acted disrespectfully toward their parents or their bosses, or that they have engaged in a disgusting act. Conservatives are far more likely than liberals to feel moral outrage.”

What we have here is an extremely revealing analysis. And as I said, the source is not inconsequential to the importance of the article. We’re talking here about a law professor at Harvard University who says, if you want to look at why moral conservatives and moral liberals think differently and vote differently, they are separated, as we have said, by an increasing gulf when it comes especially to moral values. One of the most important things about this article is that both Jonathan Haidt and Cass Sunstein understand that those moral issues are real.

But the most fascinating part of the analysis here is that liberals operate on the basis of two moral criteria and conservatives generally on the basis of five. Liberals and conservatives are agreed on the importance of avoiding harm and the importance of fairness even if sometimes they define these issues differently – that’s important. But the most important aspect is where Haidt and Sunstein now tell us that when it comes to conservatives not only are there the moral criteria of avoiding harm and fairness, but also loyalty and authority and sanctity.

Now let’s look at those three words. Let’s look at the fact that these two political theorists are saying that when it comes to conservatives, moral conservatives, these three issues pertain, they serve as criteria for decision-making, whereas they do not among moral liberals. That is a very interesting analysis because let’s look at those three issues more clearly. First of all, loyalty. This would include, but isn’t limited to what we might call tradition – that is loyalty to a moral tradition that has held a certain moral understandings throughout time. Generally speaking, even if you listen to today’s controversies, there are those on the left who say that what we need to do is to break from tradition in what they would call a progressive arc of moral development, whereas conservatives are saying in that tradition is a moral wisdom we dare not abandon.

The second word here is authority. And that’s really, really revealing, and that’s where time and again we come back on The Briefing to discuss the fact that the issue of biblical authority in particular is the most crucial issue among moral conservatives when it comes to such a thing as the redefinition of marriage or the establishment of sexual morality. The authority here is almost, in every case, explicitly a theological authority. And now we are being told that authority doesn’t even factor as a major issue when liberals are doing their political and moral decision-making.

The third issue that conservatives think about, but liberals don’t according to this analysis, is the issue of sanctity. And just hearing that word sanctity refers by its very essence to holiness. There are certain issues – certain realities – that we believe are sacred simply because we believe there is a god who is established that they should be and that they are good. For instance, the meaning of every single human life – and this includes the issue of abortion or other issues in biomedical ethics – that the sanctity of every human life is established not merely by the fact that it is human, but that every single human life is the creation of a divine creator who has declared that life is his gift.

When it comes to the issues that separate Americans, whether in electoral contest or a public controversy, Jonathan Haidt, according to Sunstein, makes the claim that a cross partisan lines people often fail to understand one another because a moral concern that strongly motivates one group may be obscure or unintelligible to another. Now the point being made by these authors is that when you look at liberals looking at conservatives, liberals are often dumbfounded as to why moral conservatives believe what they believe – and that is generally because liberals aren’t basing their own moral and political analysis on some of the criteria that are most important to conservatives.

Cass Sunstein doesn’t buy all of Jonathan Haidt’s analysis at face value; nonetheless he says he has amassed a mountain of evidence to make the basic structure of his argument very sound. He then writes,

“There’s a big lesson here for those who aspire to public office, including the White House: If they neglect the values of loyalty, authority, and sanctity, they’re not going to speak to the moral commitments of a large segment of the American electorate.”

Now as Christians operating out of a biblical worldview look at this analysis we should be the least surprised people on earth. We should understand that those three words that are so important by this secular analysis of moral conservatism, the words loyalty and authority and sanctity, those are indispensable words to our moral vocabulary. Not only that but when we look to the first two criteria, the criteria conservatives and liberals supposedly share – that is the avoidance of harm and fairness – moral conservatives, Christians in particular, have to understand that we understand those first two issues actually in light of the next three: loyalty and authority and sanctity.

As I said, it is hard to imagine an analysis of moral decision-making and of American politics that is more significant from the perspective of worldview development than this. And what makes it even more important is that it appeared from two secular thinkers operating from a secular worldview, asking the question: what really divides people? And their answer: it is worldview. That’s not the word they use, but that’s exactly the point that they are making.

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 continue to take questions for Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call 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 05-07-15

Podcast Transcript

1) British elections reflect decline of clear British cultural identity

British Parliamentary Elections 2015, New York Times (Steven Erlanger, Katrin Bennhold, Stephen Castle and Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura)

White House no longer sees anything special in UK relations, Financial Times (Geoff Dyer)

Why Britain’s election is such a big deal, USA Today (Michael Wolff)

2) Secularists note gap between liberal and conservative voters reflects gap in moral values

What Conservatives Care About, Bloomberg BusinessWeek (Cass Sunstein)