R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 321

The Briefing 02-17-15

1) Furor over Scott Walker evolution dodge reveals clash of worldviews in modern America

Scott Walker decides to (sort of) weigh in on evolution after all, Washington Post (Matea Gold)

Conservatives face bad-faith question of faith, Baltimore Sun (Jonah Goldberg)

Republicans shouldn’t dodge the evolution question, Dallas Morning News (Ramesh Ponnuru)

Don’t Ask Scott Walker About Evolution, Slate (Jamelle Bouie)

Conservative Politicians Abroad Seem More Accepting of Evolution, New York Times (Mark Oppenheimer)

Self Help in Modern America: A Conversation with Historian Steven Watts

The Briefing 02-16-15

1) Copenhagen attacks horrifyingly parallel Paris attack as European terrorism threat grows

Terror Attacks by a Native Son Rock Denmark, New York Times (Andrew Higgins and Melissa Eddy)

Copenhagen shootings: Why Denmark was steeled for terror attack, BBC News (Malcolm Brabant)

Islamic State Video Shows Beheadings of Egyptian Christians in Libya, New York Times (David D. Kirkpatrick and Rukmini Callimachi)

ISIS Attacks Iraqi Base Used by U.S. Trainers, Wall Street Journal (Julian E. Barnes)

2) Fallout from President’s Prayer Breakfast remarks reveals divide in understanding of faiths

The President at the Prayer Breakfast, AlbertMohler.com

Folly of good vs. bad religions, USA Today (Stephen Prothero)

3) Scandal leading to Oregon governor’s resignation exposes moral priorities of America

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber quits amid criminal probe, USA Today (Hannah Hoffman)

John Kitzhaber, Cylvia Hayes face mounting exposure to criminal charges as investigations expand, The Oregonian (Les Zaitz)

Meet Kate Brown, Politico (Jonathan Topaz)

 

 

Ask Anything: Weekend Edition 02-14-15

1) Is the doctrine of baptismal regeneration a gospel issue?

2) What is the difference between Sheol and Hell in the Bible?

3) Should Christians watch 50 Shades of Grey in order to engage with the culture?

 

 

 

Transcript: The Briefing 02-13-15

The Briefing

 

February 13, 2015

 

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

 

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

1) Obama’s official evolution on same sex marriage reveals velocity of nation’s shift 

One of the most important political memoirs of recent history came out this week; that’s David Axelrod’s book “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.” Axelrod was a major political advisor to now President Barack Obama, and he was so even when Barack Obama was deciding on whether or not to run for the United States Senate. David Axelrod was very important for the so-called political messaging of Obama’s campaigns, not only for the United States Senate but of course in two runs for the United States presidency – elections that Barack Obama won.

These days, in terms of the American political scene, we often need to understand there can be a difference between the message and the messenger. And sometimes the messenger changes the message. That has been a particular issue with President Barack Obama and the issue of same-sex marriage, and that’s because if you go back to 1996 when he was a candidate for the state Senate in Illinois, he indicated his support for the legalization of same-sex marriage. Later, when he was running for president in 2008, he was not for same-sex marriage; he said, referring to what he called sacred marriage, that it should be restricted to a man and a woman. And then when he ran for President in 2012 for reelection, he came right out and said that his position – which he previously said had been evolving –had evolved to his full support for the legalization of same-sex marriage. In recent months he’s gone to the point of suggesting that the Supreme Court should rule that same-sex marriage should be legal nationwide; coast-to-coast, in all 50 states.

This kind of political evolution is not unprecedented, but it’s particularly notable on the issue of same-sex marriage when it comes to President Obama. And no one has made this clearer than David Axelrod – after all, he was in charge of President Obama’s messaging – in this memoir, again the title is “Believer.” Here’s what he writes, and I’m reading directly from pages 446 and 447 of the book,

“Gay marriage was a particularly nagging issue. For as long as we had been working together, Obama had felt a tug between his personal views and the politics of gay marriage. As a candidate for the state senate in 1996 from liberal Hyde Park, he signed a questionnaire promising his support for legalization. I had no doubt that this was his heartfelt belief. ‘I just don’t feel my marriage is somehow threatened by the gay couple next door,’ he told me. Yet he also knew his view was way out in front of the public’s.”

Axelrod continues,

“Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union.’ Having prided himself [says Axelrod] on forthrightness, though, Obama never felt comfortable with his compromise and, no doubt, compromised position. He routinely stumbled over the question when it came up in debates or interviews.”

I have to skip the language in the next line, and then Axelrod writes,

“By 2010 he had told reporters that his position was ‘evolving,’ and in 2011 the administration announced that it would no longer fight in court to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act, a controversial Clinton-era law absolving federal and state governments of their obligation to recognize gay marriages sanctioned in states where they were legal. Yet if Obama’s views were ‘evolving’ publicly, they were fully evolved behind closed doors. The president was champing at the bit to announce his support for the right of gay and lesbian couples to wed — and having watched him struggle with this issue for years, I was ready, too.”

He cites President Obama as saying to his campaign manager Jim Messina,

“I just want you guys to know that if a smart reporter asks me how I would vote on this if I were still in the state legislature, I’m going to tell the truth. I would vote yes.”

Now that predates when the President actually did announce his support for same-sex marriage; and Axelrod makes clear that timing was due in part to the fact that VP Joe Biden had rather jumpstarted the discussion when he appeared on Meet the Press early in the 2012 campaign and announced in his words,

“I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction– beyond that.”

Now, one of the sad facts of politics in a sinful world is that lies happen; which is to say politicians tell lies. And the handlers of politician tell other lies, and if it’s not outright a lie, sometimes it’s a significant discount off of the truth. But that’s not to absolve any politician on any issue; it’s not to absolve anyone from the responsibility that is made clear in Scripture of telling the truth. But my main point in bringing this issue to light is to point to President Obama self-described evolution on this issue as a signal of just where we are and even recently have been in this culture.

What we’re looking at here is the fact that President Obama made his announcement after, considerably after, he felt it was politically safe to do so. And what Axelrod makes very clear is that when he stated in public that he was opposed to same-sex marriage, even when he said that in 2008, it wasn’t what he personally believed.

Now there are a couple of really important issues we need to look at here. One of them is the fact that President Obama, in response to the controversy that came out after David Axelrod’s book was published earlier this week, came out and said that Axelrod’s account wasn’t exactly right. In an interview given to the website BuzzFeed, he said,

“Well, you know, I think David is mixing up my personal feelings with my position on the issue.”

He went on to say,

“I always felt that same-sex couples should be able to enjoy the same rights, legally, as anybody else, and so it was frustrating to me not to, I think, be able to square that with what were a whole bunch of religious sensitivities out there. So my thinking at the time was that civil unions — which I always supported — was a sufficient way of squaring the circle. That, OK, we won’t call it ‘marriage,’ we’ll call it ‘civil unions,’ same-sex couples will have the same rights as anybody else, but the word ‘marriage’ with its religious connotations historically would be preserved for marriages between men and women.”

Well what we really need to look at there, and the President went on to speak of the issue of same-sex marriage and his support for it in the interview, is the fact that when the President says Axelrod didn’t get the story exactly right, the story he tells is quite basically what Axelrod said. Remember Axelrod’s actual words, he wrote

“Gay marriage was a particularly nagging issue. For as long as we had been working together, Obama had felt a tug between his personal views and the politics of gay marriage”

Then in his response to Axelrod, President Obama said,

“Well, you know, I think David is mixing up my personal feelings with my position on the issue.”

So the President basically said what Axelrod said was exactly true: my personal view is that same-sex couples should have the very same rights, the President was saying, as opposite sex couples, historically defined as marriage. But the nomenclature issue is where President Obama has hung his reputation, at least in terms of any consistent message on the issue. He says he was always for civil unions, but that when he was running for President 2008 he wasn’t yet for same-sex marriage.

But to BuzzFeed’s credit, they went back to 1996 when, as a candidate for the Illinois state Senate, Barack Obama did indicate his support for same-sex marriage. And in his response to BuzzFeed raising that issue, President Obama said this week,

“Well, yeah. The old questionnaire, you know, is an example of struggling with what was a real issue at the time, which is how do you make sure that people’s rights are enjoyed and these religious sensitivities were taken into account?”

That’s an explanation the quite frankly I can’t even decipher. But it does appear to be almost exactly what Axelrod wrote in his book when he said,

“Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me [again this is Axelrod writing], and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union.’”

Perhaps the most crucial section of Axelrod’s book is where he says,

“Yet if Obama’s views were ‘evolving’ publicly, they were fully evolved behind closed doors.”

This tells us several things. It tells us, first of all, that when President Obama was running for the state Senate from a very liberal district in Hyde Park – that is centered in the area around the University of Chicago – when he was running for that office back in 1996, it was perfectly politically plausible to support same-sex marriage; when he ran for the United States Senate just shortly thereafter, not so much. When he ran for president in 2008, it probably would’ve been a political killer for him to have endorsed same-sex marriage. When he ran for President in 2012, well, as many journals have noted, he did so with at least some sense that there was very little political risk to affirming in 2012 what he denied in 2008, which he had affirmed in 1996.

Secondly, from a moral perspective, a very important question was asked by Paul Waldman writing in the Washington Post. His question? How bad was Obama’s 2008 deception on same-sex marriage? He quotes the character George Costanza, famous of the “Seinfeld” program who said,

“It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

And then Waldman ask,

“But is it a lie if no one else believes it?”

That’s what he says is the real issue here. He says that no one covering President Obama in 2008 believed that he wasn’t for same-sex marriage, and furthermore, there were a lot of winks offered in the campaign to that effect. But in terms of the moral revolution what’s really instructive about Waldman’s article are these lines,

“By 2008, everyone seemed to understand that the position all the major Democratic candidates were taking was a temporary way-station on the path to an eventual embrace of full marriage equality. Nobody really believed that was where the party and its representatives were going to stay. Half of Democrats supported marriage equality in 2008 — up from 40 percent in 2004 — but the public as a whole was not there yet. Support for civil unions was a position that was acceptable both to the party base, who knew it was only a matter of time before their leaders ‘evolved,’ and to the general public, which was undergoing its own evolution.”

Waldman then asks,

“Was all that a spectacle of political cowardice? Absolutely. But it’s hard to say that anyone in either party had many illusions about where it would end up.”

Now on that account, Waldman is absolutely right. Going back to 2008, especially since we had in hand that 1996 questionnaire, nobody really believed that President Obama meant that he wasn’t for same-sex marriage in terms of his personal belief. Then when he ran for President in 2012 a great deal had changed. And of course we’re looking at the span of four years, that’s biggest issue here; to look at a moral revolution that isn’t measured in centuries or decades, but in four years – the same for years between Pres. Obama’s election and his reelection. So one issue here is simply the ethics of truth telling and President Obama finds himself in an especially uneasy position on this because he affirmed in 1996 what he denied in 2008, later said he was evolving on, only to affirm again in 2012.

But the big issue here is simply what it tells us about the evolution of the larger society. What Waldman writes about when he says the evolution of the politicians, it has to be tracked along with the evolution of the general population. This is a moral revolution, once again, that is happening faster than any other that can be documented in human history. The span of time between 2008 and 2012 was just four years, but in moral terms, those should be measured in light years.

2) 50 Shades movie exposes same sinful root of pornography in slightly different form

Well tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day in America, but it also mark something else and that is the release in cinemas of the film “50 Shades of Gray” – the first in a series of films threatened, I won’t say promised, in terms of the films based upon the stories in the 50 Shades series of best-selling books. Even though some cinemas may be showing the film early, it is scheduled to be released on Valentine’s Day and of course not by accident. But the reason I’m bringing up this development today is not so much to talk about the film, which doesn’t deserve that much of our attention, but to the fact that there seems to be an ongoing conversation among many in America as to whether or not this is a film that should be seen – even by Christians – and whether or not it is actually pornography. And this leads us to have to think not only about modern cinema, but about the New Testament and its clear teachings on what is now called pornography.

Given the nature and audience of this program I’m not going to go into any detail at all about the “50 Shades” series, it should suffice to say that it’s not only explicitly sexual and pornographic in terms of its storyline, it also has become something even identified in the secular world as a gateway into what had almost universally been considered sexual perversions in years past. The movie narrowly escaped an NC-17 rating and by some very skillful editing, it was brought down to an R rating – by the way, that’s a commercial decision, if it had been rated NC-17 it’s box office income would’ve been cut significantly – but the reality we’re looking at a film here that is likely to attract millions of Americans as viewers, and of course they know exactly what they’re going to see.

One of the things that is interesting in this is the fact that when we’re looking at the “50 Shades” series, we’re looking at something that has exposed the fact that there is a real problem of female oriented pornography. Even though male pornography is overwhelmingly visual, female pornography – as revealed in the massive sales of the “50 Shades” series – is often narrative in form. In one form it can be found in rather explicit romance novels, but as we’ve seen in the “50 Shades” phenomenon, there is a real market for explicit narrative that is story-based pornography. Which isn’t so much driven by images but by the storyline; and that has revealed the fact that a good number of women also struggle with the temptation of pornography. In many cases, if not most cases, the differences between men and women mean that the struggle with pornography – gender by gender – is actually different, but the sinful root of it is exactly the same.

Just about everyone, including those who are secular observers looking at this phenomena, understand that it is pornography. A.O. Scott reviewing the movie for the New York Times points out that it is pornography. He describes the movie as pornography, even if he says, and I quote,

“Okay, it’s a terrible movie”

But he’s not speaking there in moral terms, he speaking in the terms of cinema criticism, of the evaluation of the film as a film, not as a moral statement. One of the other important issues to face in terms of this movie is the fact that what we’re looking at here is, in its film product, a combination of pornography that is addressed to both men and women. For the overwhelmingly female audience of the “50 Shades” books there is a storyline, but for the males who are expected also to see the movie, sometimes in the company of females, it is the images – for after all, film is a visual product – that will be driving the interest and they hope the box office sales.

So from a biblical or theological perspective what we’re looking at here is the putting together of two very volatile and dangerous, downright sinful and evil, impulses. We’re looking at the basic impulse between male pornography – very visual – and female pornography – very narrative – put together in a film that is released, by no coincidence, on Valentine’s Day.

There should be no debate among Christians as to whether or not this is pornographic.  And for us it’s not a legal description. You may recall the grave confusion that has been faced and frankly produced by many courts trying to define photography. The late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, ‘I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it,’ that’s not particularly helpful from a legal perspective. But that kind of logic is what open the floodgates to an absolute deluge of pornography and other obscene materials over the last several decades. And of course you add to that the digital revolution, and we’re looking at the fact that pornography is almost ubiquitous – found almost everywhere, just a click away. And what we’re looking at is the reality that there is also ambient pornography, such that even modern-day advertising that you see in shopping malls, in store windows, in magazines, and for that matter even in billboards that can be seen along the highway, is involving images that would’ve been considered explicitly pornographic just a generation or two ago.

But as I say for Christians, there should be no question about seeing this movie or reading the books, there should be no question as to whether or not this is pornography. And for that, we need to turn to a biblical definition, not a legal definition; because if the laws confused, the Scripture is not. The Greek word from which we get the very term pornography is porneia, and what it means is an illegitimate sexual interest, an illegitimate incitement to lust, an illegitimate sexual message that could be – according to the Scripture, because the Scripture would include both – either something that is verbal or something that is visual. So far as the New Testament is concerned, it wouldn’t matter. Porneia means it is a reference to sex that is outside God’s purpose, it’s outside God’s plan, it violates God’s law, and robs God of His glory. That means any reference to sexuality that would lead to any way a thought or interest outside of marriage, outside of marriage as the union of the man and a woman, outside of marriage as that monogamous union, inside which and inside which alone the gift of sex is to be enjoyed.

Now what we’re looking at in terms of pornography, well we’re looking at the fact that the courts have had grave difficulty coming to a conclusion and have basically demonstrated that they are either unwilling or incompetent to keep any flood of pornography outside of the culture. But what we’re looking at in the church is often a confusion for which the church is far more culpable than any court, because if the law may be confusing about how to define photography, the Bible isn’t. Put bluntly, if something creates in any of us a sexual thought that is not fully in keeping with God’s plan for sexuality, than it is – by biblical definition – pornography; and thus it is, by biblical definition, sin. About that there is no lack of clarity in Scripture. So while the cinema is trying to sell you “50 Shades of Gray” and the courts are offering 50 shades of the truth, the Bible offers one very clear message about God’s purpose for sex and sexuality, and the Bible’s definition of sin.

And if not troubled enough, or at least of troubled as you ought to be by this, consider this release that came out yesterday from the Dallas Morning News, 50 shades of inappropriate: Middle-school kids given naughty puzzle. It turns out that in one Pennsylvania eighth grade classroom, students were given a puzzle that had to do with the storyline explicitly of this movie. You can trust me that I can’t read you much more of this story even as it was found in mainstream media. But my point in raising it is this, pornography set loose in the culture will not remain in the cinema, it will not remain to those who supposedly are limited to entry in the cinema by that are r-rating, it very quickly gets to the entire culture and make no mistake, it gets to the young.

One parent cited in this article said,

“I asked my son who passed it out and he said the teacher passed it out. I don’t think [said this parent] this is what they should be doing in the eighth grade level.”

The problem is that’s not what anyone should be doing at any age level, but make no mistake; it will make its way to the entire culture. And make no mistake, it will make its way to the young.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember that tomorrow brings the first installment in the new season of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition, you can find it at albertmohler.com or if you’re a subscriber it should be in your feed. And in terms of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition, remember that we want you to call with your question in your voice for future programs. Call us 877-505-2058, that’s 877-505-2058.

 

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

 

I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

The Briefing 02-13-15

1) Obama’s official evolution on same sex marriage reveals velocity of nation’s shift 

Full Transcript Of BuzzFeed News’ Interview With President Barack Obama, Buzzfeed (Ben Smith)

How bad was Obama’s 2008 deception on same-sex marriage?, Washington Post (Paul Waldman)

2) 50 Shades movie exposes same sinful root of pornography in slightly different form

Review: In ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Movie, Sex Is a Knotty Business, New York Times (A.O. Scott)

50 shades of inappropriate: Middle-school kids given naughty puzzle, Dallas Morning News (Amanda Wilkins)

Fifty Shades of Shame — The Evolution of Pornography

The release of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, timed for Valentine’s Day, is a more important and lamentable event than many Christians may realize. What the movie represents is nothing less than the evolution of pornography in an age increasingly distant from a biblical vision of sexuality and human dignity.

One of the hallmarks of the Christian worldview is an affirmation of the unity of the transcendentals — the good, the beautiful, and the true. Christianity affirms — and demands — that the good, the beautiful, and the true are actually one, unified in their source. The source of what is good, beautiful, and true is none other than God himself, who alone is infinitely good, beautiful, and true. Our very knowledge of beauty, goodness, and truth are due to God’s gifts of revelation and creation. He defines the good, the true, and the beautiful by his being, and they are unified in him.

This means that Christians believe the radical truth that nothing good can be ugly, that nothing untrue can be beautiful, and that everything beautiful and true is also good.

To attempt a separation of the good, the true, and the beautiful is, by Christian understanding, both impossible and self-defeating. Furthermore, the attempt to separate them is sinful — an act of defiance.

For this reason the Christian worldview insists that the face of a child with Down syndrome is infinitely more beautiful than an airbrushed model on the cover of a fashion magazine. The model may be pretty, but every human being is beautiful, simply by virtue of being made in the image of God. That grounding of human dignity points to the fact of our creation by a loving and merciful God, who made us in his image, and revealed this truth in our very existence and in our capacity to know him. He revealed this truth explicitly in Holy Scripture, and this means that every single human being, at every stage of development, possesses full human dignity.

The corruption of the gift of sex is, more than often realized, an assault upon that human dignity that is the Creator’s gift. The attempt to declare beauty at the expense of goodness and truth is at the heart of the problem of pornography. Now, we live in a society fast losing even a sense of shame about its pornographic obsessions.

The explosive sales of the Fifty Shades book series alerted many Christians to the fact of female-oriented pornography. While far more attention had been devoted to the visual nature of most male-oriented pornography, the Fifty Shades phenomenon underlined the public mainstreaming of pornography that would find a primary audience among women — narrative pornography in book form.

While many had noted the attraction of so-called “romance novels” to many women, the arrival of the Fifty Shades series announced that the culture at large was ready to shift to what can only be described as explicitly pornographic. Furthermore, the plot line of the series, now quite well known in the larger society, is devoted to forms of sexuality that had historically been defined as perverse and abusive.

The lost sense of shame is not only documented in the unprecedented sales of the series in book form, but also by the mainstream celebration of the movie.

A culture that is determined to reduce all sexual morality to the issue of adult consent is now ready to eat popcorn while watching the corruption of the gift of sex and, in effect, granting approval to the vision of sexuality that is the film’s very essence.

This next stage in the evolution of pornography combines, in an unprecedented way, male-oriented visual pornography with female-oriented narrative pornography. The movie is being marketed on Valentine’s Day as an adventure for couples — something offered to both men and women.

That something is a lie. The late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke of our tendency to “define deviancy down.” That is one of the marks of our age. The Fifty Shades movie will not be legally defined as obscenity or pornography. In our age, almost nothing is. But biblically speaking, there can be no question about the fact that the Fifty Shades phenomenon is explicitly pornographic — defined in the New Testament by the Greek word porneia — which refers directly to any illicit sexual impulse or act. Pornography, whatever its form, is intended to produce that wrongful sexual impulse.

Going to see Fifty Shades of Grey, or reading the book series, is an exercise in pornographic intent and effect. It is also an act of defiance against the goodness of the gift of sex as granted to humanity by God. Furthermore, the series is an assault upon the dignity of every human being.

The loss of shame in modern society is championed as a sign of cultural progress in many circles and as a step forward in mental health by many therapists. More than anything else, however, it points to the depth of the confusion that inevitably accompanies the corruption of God’s gifts.

Christianity celebrates the unity of the good, the beautiful, and the true in God himself. In obedience, we must seek to unify the true and the beautiful and the good in our hearts and minds — and in our bodies.

Words from the Book of Common Prayer‘s service of Holy Matrimony will serve us well here. Christians know that the good, the true, and the beautiful are always and evermore united. What God has joined together, let no one tear asunder.

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/albertmohler.

 

For more information on Southern Seminary, visit SBTS.edu and for more information on Boyce College, visit BoyceCollege.com.

Transcript: The Briefing 02-12-15

The Briefing

 

February 12, 2015

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

 

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

1) Brian Williams and Jon Stewart stories reveal danger of blurred line between entertainment and news

For some time now it has become increasingly apparent that Americans are having great difficulty separating the worlds of entertainment and the news. And, at least in part, that’s due to the fact that there has been an intentional blurring of the lines between the news (defined as, supposedly, reporting the facts) and entertainment, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with any kind of factual claim. And what we’re looking at in terms of the last 48 hours is a very ironic and historical convergence of two events that points to this very quandary.

In the first place we have the spectacle of Brian Williams. Since 2004 the anchor of the NBC nightly news, who was voluntarily withdrawing himself from that post after accusations had been made that he had inflated claims made from an event in Iraq in 2003. And then, NBC News reported yesterday that he had been suspended for six months without pay. Deborah Turness, the president of NBC News, said,

“This was wrong and completely inappropriate for someone in Brian’s position,”

She was speaking of the fact that over time he had changed a story, rooted in an experience while covering the Iraq war, of being in a helicopter behind one that was eventually shot down to actually being shot down on that helicopter. Now NBC News says that as Brian Williams has admitted to the so-called conflation of these memories, he arrived himself of the necessary credibility to be the anchor of the NBC Nightly News. As reporters Emily Steel and Ravi Somaiya reported for the New York Times, Williams’s departure,

“…culminated a rapid and startling fall [from grace]”

They described that at age 55 he was head of the highest rated evening news show, the winner of top industry accolades, a coveted speaker at dinners and panels, and a frequent celebrity guest on entertainment shows.

Now as I began, one of the major problems that we’re now facing in America is an inability to discern between what is packaged as entertainment and what should be received as a news account. Now in terms of recent American history, this has become a great deal more difficult. But what many in the media have failed to acknowledge is that it’s not just the intentional blurring of the lines, it’s the fact that the lines were actually blurred quite a long time ago and no one was admitting it.

Embedded in that New York Times article about Brian Williams was the statement that he was “a frequent celebrity guest on entertainment shows,” and this particular incident points to the fact that when Brian Williams made the untrue claims about having been on that helicopter that was shot down in Iraq, he did not make those claims on what was packaged as a news show, but rather he made those claims on a late-night entertainment program – in this case, the “David Letterman Show.” The statement from NBC News indicated that he had also made misleading claims on his NBC Nightly News program, but the central claim that led to his fault was made on an entertainment program where NBC executives, according to many reports, had encouraged him to go in order to boost his profile, in order to boost ratings for the NBC Nightly News.

Now as one who was a child during the 1960s remembering the reports of anchors like Huntley and Brinkley on the one hand and Walter Cronkite on the other, at least there was, at that age, an understanding that television news was following in the example of Edward R Murrow, who trained an early generation of television journalist and anchors in the task of journalism that had previously been honed on the radio and in print media, especially in newspapers. But what’s been going on in terms of television news has born little resemblance to that for a very long time. One of the saddest aspects of the fall of Brian Williams – now again suspended for six months without pay by NBC news – is the fact that NBC News and the other nightly news programs have basically been packaged as entertainment for a very long time. And that’s true almost universally of everything that is now sold as news. And the reason for that should be very apparent: these shows have no commercial value whatsoever if they are not supported by advertisers, and the advertisers know that Americans are far more interested in being entertained than being informed.

For sometime now study after study has demonstrated what virtually every intelligent person has known, and that is that the media leans significantly to the left – that is, as a professional class – and for that reason you can look back even to the 1960s and 1970s with a huge brand names of the network nightly news programs and understand that they did lean rather left. But they were also held, not only in principle but generally in practice, to a set of journalistic expectations in a culture of journalistic ethics that is far removed from the reality, not only of the nightly news programs on the networks these days but from the cable news networks and virtually everything that is packaged as news in terms, especially, in the television medium.

And the reason for that is, well once again, television is a battle for the eyes and the battle for the eyes has to do with the battle for commercials and advertisers; and those advertisers are going to put their money where the eyes go. And it tells us something of a very deep worldview importance about Americans, that the vast majority of Americans have eyes that are more likely to go to entertainment than to news – and even more chillingly, have increasingly failed to understand the radical distinction between the two.

As to what comes next for Brian Williams and NBC Nightly News, that is unclear. But, as almost everyone in terms of an honest analysis has made abundantly evident, it probably has more to do with what the commercial decisions made by NBC seem to be mandated by the time. And that’s why someone like Mark Feldstein, a broadcast journalism professor at University of Maryland, told the Times,

“I don’t know how he can ever read the news with a straight face, or how the public will respond if he does. Maybe they’re hoping that with a six-month cooling-off period, he’s got a loyal fan base.”

But let me just point out something, that very statement coming from a professor of journalism points to the problem. If he has a fan base, the very use of those two words means it’s really not so much about the news as it is about entertainment.

And something that hasn’t been noted so often, at least yet in terms of the coverage and analysis of this sad even, is the fact that starting back in the 1960s – in particular – in starting with someone like Walter Cronkite, there was the practice that grew increasingly expected that journalists would put themselves into the story. And so even during the 1960s and in the early 1970s, one of the big issues was the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite reporting from places such as Vietnam, where he became himself involved in the story. Cronkite successor on the CBS news, Dan Rather, became even more famous for doing the very same thing, for inserting himself over and over again into the story. So when Brian Williams of NBC did the same back in 2003, in the early years of the Iraq war, he was basically following a precedent that had been set before. And furthermore, he was following an expectation that the news media had begun to feed.

Now on the one hand, the story of Brian Williams reminds us of the basic Christian biblical worldview understanding of the importance and priority of truth, of not telling that which is untrue and presenting it as if it is true. Brian Williams, in this sense, has become a parable of what happens when one tells a story that turns out not to have been true. And what is really chilling about this particular incident is that there were those who made the claim, almost immediately after Brian Williams made those reports back in 2003, that he wasn’t rightly describing what had happened in terms of the historical incident.

But as I said, in the last 48 hours we’ve seen the convergence of two stories and the second story has nothing to do directly with Brian Williams, but rather with Jon Stewart. As Dave Itzkoff reported for the New York Times, John Stuart, the comedian who turned Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” into a sharp edged nightly commentary on the news, the people behind it and the media reporting and sometimes misreporting it, said on Tuesday that he would step down from the program after more than 16 years as its anchor.

What makes this really important is where I mentioned at the beginning of the program that there has been an intentional blurring of the lines between entertainment and the news. And if there are two stellar examples of that kind of intentional blurring of the lines, those examples would be the “Stephen Colbert Report” and its parent Comedy Central program, “The Daily Show,” which has been hosted for the last several years by Jon Stewart; he became host in the year 1999.

Not even if the words “fan base” in the report on Brian Williams points to one problem, the other problem is indicated by the fact we’re talking about news programs that appear on something that is at least honest enough to name itself Comedy Central. And in terms of John Stuart, the reality is, he was a standup comic before he became the host of what was presented as a news program. Now to give Comedy Central at least some credit, at the inception of these programs they were apparently rather clear that they were not intended to be understood to be actual news programs – but rather Comedy programs that were made to look like news programs.

But in one of the most telling developments in recent American history, large numbers of Americans – numbered by the millions, especially younger Americans – not only did consider these comedy programs as news, but poll after poll and recent research have indicated that a large number of college students and young adults actually got most of their so-called news input from these Comedy Central programs –either The Colbert Report or The Daily News.

An alarming headline that affirms this was found in the analysis of John Stewart’s announcement. This was found in article by Jason Zinoman that appeared in the critics notebook column of the New York Times; the headline itself points to the problem, A Late-Night Host Seamlessly Mixing Analysis, Politics and Humor. Well let’s just note for one thing the impossibility of seamlessly mixing analysis, politics, and humor. You may indeed succeed in mixing these things, but the net result is not going to be seamless – especially if you consider truth to be important. As Zinoman writes,

“’The Daily Show’ didn’t just offer insightful, cutting analysis, clever parody and often hard-hitting interviews with major newsmakers. For an entire generation, it became the news, except this report could withstand the disruption of the Internet far better than the old media. If anything, the web only made “The Daily Show,” with its short segments, more essential. Every time a political scandal exploded or a candidate made headlines or a cable fight went viral, the first thought for many viewers was: I can’t wait to see what Jon Stewart will say about this.”

Now let’s again look carefully at that paragraph because even as the headline of the article is about seamlessly mixing analysis, politics, and humor, you’ll note the fact that Zinoman points to the reality that major newsmakers felt the need to appear on the program in what was presented at least largely as a serious appearance, with serious political arguments which came from a very serious man – that is Jon Stewart – in terms of having a very clear agenda. And that agenda, make no mistake, was coming from the political left, something that he never denied. As a matter fact, something he made absolutely explicit in terms of both his analysis and his comedy – if indeed, you could ever separate the two.

As Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe indicated, John Stuart,

“…shaped cultural attitudes of a generation,”

Pointing to this vast change in our society, and in the way many people think, especially younger Americans, Aucoin wrote,

“Whenever Stewart departs the show he has hosted since 1999, it will leave a major vacuum. What Walter Cronkite was to an earlier generation — an utterly trusted voice — Stewart has been to millennials.”

But then Aucoin gets right to the point when he follows that sentence with this:

“The key difference, of course, was that Stewart was schooled not in journalism but in comedy, and he was a purveyor, as he often reminded us, of ‘fake news.’”

One of the major developments of the so-called postmodern age was the fact that many people denied that truth actually existed, that there is any objectivity to truth – rather, everything is mere subjectivity. One of the developments that happened during the 1990s in the rise of postmodernism was the package of trying to undermine all serious truth claims – suggesting that all news must be in, the end, fake news and that honest would be found in simply packaging something as entertainment and understanding that nothing else is actually possible. But of course, human life in any rational sense, in any sense that is true to the Christian worldview, believes that reality is knowable and furthermore, that the truth does matter and that facts are something that exists not merely because of our subjective awareness, but because they exist outside of our own knowledge of them.

Even back during the 1990s there were those who were saying we were already living in a post-truth era – that’s scary enough. But the developments of the last 48 hours point to the fact that for millions of Americans there’s no longer even a sense of loss in a post-truth era, but there is also at least a bit of encouragement in these new stories and it comes down to this: even some writing about Jon Stewart have to admit that what he was presenting was fake news; that’s an achievement of a sort in these days, that open admission. And furthermore, the fact that NBC at least was shamed into removing Brian Williams for at least six months without pay says, that at least NBC News was in the position where they had to make a value judgment as to whether the truth mattered and with the kind of public pressure mounting as it was, they had to say truth matters, and they had to at least take some action that indicated that they actually believed it.

But to wrap this up, whoever follows Jon Stewart, and whatever happens in terms of Brian Williams in the future of the NBC Nightly News, this much is clear: we are not serving the cause of truth if we fail to understand that what is packaged as news in so many cases is actually entertainment. And we also do not serve the cause of truth if we are satisfied with entertainment rather than with understanding the truth. There is a place for entertainment and there’s a place for news, but the world is increasingly dangerous the more we can’t distinguish between the two.

2) Rising depressing, secularism of college freshmen reveals social cost of increasing isolation

Next, every year a major study is done on the freshmen arriving on America’s college and university campuses. The study is known as the American Freshman; it’s undertaken by a research group at UCLA and it was released on February 5. As Rachel Rosenbaum reports for USA Today,

“This year’s college freshmen are less concerned with their religious identity and more concerned about their future job prospects.

The survey suggested that college freshmen are increasingly distancing themselves from religion. Nearly 28% of those surveyed did not identify with a religion, a number that has increased by 12% since 1971.”

Similarly, Melissa Korn of the Wall Street Journal reports,

“Young adults who entered college for the first time last fall as full-time students are distancing themselves from the church—and the mosque, synagogue and meeting house, for that matter. Almost 28% of respondents said they had no religious preference,”

Now I reported that already but consider the next line in her report,

“…compared with 24.6% last year and 17.5% a decade earlier.”

What’s really interesting in that is that in one year, just 12 months, there was an increase from 24.6% to 28% of those college freshmen who said they had no religious identity what so ever. We’ve been watching the velocity of the secularization trend taking place in the larger American society and we’ve noted that is disproportionate – it’s not happening in all places and in all ages at the same time, it’s not happening in the same way, at the same pace. American’s more distant from the college or university campuses do not show the same rates of this kind of secularizing worldview. But the closer you get to a college or university campus, and the younger you get in the population, the more urban or metropolitan the environment, the more secular the trend very quickly becomes evident.

There is some other really interesting insights on this report of college and University freshman in America. As Alan Schwarz for the New York Times reports, the survey of more than 150,000 students found that 9.5% of respondents had frequently felt depressed – to use the very words of the survey –during the past year. That’s a very significant rise over just 6.1% who reported this five years ago. As he said, those who felt overwhelmed by school work and other commitments rose to 34.6% from 27.1%.

And there is another aspect of the report that came from the Chronicle of Higher Education, I quote,

“Whether they had helicopter parents or got accustomed to interacting with their peers on smartphones, today’s college freshmen report changing social habits. A few decades ago, they socialized a lot, with 38 percent spending 16 hours or more a week as high-school seniors hanging out with friends. This year only 18 percent said the same.”

Many people are pointing to the fact that there is a decrease in socialization and an increase in depression and there is almost assuredly at least some tie between those two factors. The migration of social interaction among younger Americans from face-to-face interpersonal interaction to interaction on social media has come at a significant discount to the quality of those relationships; as indicated by these very same freshmen arriving just this past fall on America’s college and university campuses.

Those who care about young people should certainly care about those developments. It tells us that we as human beings made in the image of God are made for relationships, not merely in the digital world but in real life face-to-face. We are made for communion, first of all with our creator and we are also made for community with one another – with our fellow human beings. And that’s why the breakdown of the family, the breakdown of marriage and the breakdown even of social interaction among young people, comes with an enormous personal and social cost; and it also affects worldview.

Many of the researchers looking at this mountain of data indicate that it’s hard to believe that these trends aren’t closely related – one to the other – and that what we don’t have is a building sense of generational momentum that is at least in part being fueled by the fact that they have less social interaction, they have higher rates of depression, they are more commonly now to feel overwhelmed by their schoolwork, and they have more anxiety than previous generations – at least and how they describe themselves.

But those operating from a Christian worldview also have to go back to that basic secularization, that factor that also tells us that at least correlated with the higher rates of depression and the lower rates of social engagement are also lower rates of religious identification. Now for the vast majority of these students given the composition of American culture, this means a far less likely response of their involvement – in some way – in a Christian church with some Christian identity.

And so Christians operating out of a biblical worldview know that this too cannot be separated from that; even when you have young people who are raised in Christian homes or in the context of a Christian congregation, even when they have not yet made their own profession of faith, they demonstrate – even as measured by secular psychologist and sociologist – a higher level of many such things as self-esteem and the socialization skills that come by that kind of church involvement. Now, clearly as Christian parents and Christian leaders we’re not satisfied with that, but it is an indication of what is lost when the Christian worldview is lost. And it’s more a lost than anywhere else on the American college and University campus.

But finally one of the most incredible testimonials to this came not from some middle-age researcher but rather from one of those students on a college campus. In this case it’s columnist Scott Greenberg, who is a student at Yale writing for the Yale Daily News. In a very insightful way he writes,

“Some of the most interesting survey data had to do with incoming freshmen’s religious identities.”

He cites the data and then he says,

“The secularization of college students in America has seemed a foregone conclusion for some time, yet it represents a momentous shift for our university and society at large that we have not yet come to grips with. I submit that even the best of our secular institutions have not yet been able to replicate what religion used to provide to its followers.”

Mr. Greenberg writes the what’s missing in terms of the college experience and in terms of the worldview on most of those campuses is any kind of binding moral commitment that as he said, in a very interesting and largely accurate historical review, used to come from a religious worldview. And of course in the West that meant overwhelmingly a Christian worldview. The absence of that worldview, says this college student, has led to a moral vacuum on campus. He writes,

“This is not simply a criticism of Yale; the problem of how to encourage moral self-improvement after the decline of religion is a problem that our entire society will have to grapple with. There is obviously such a thing as morality without religion, yet secular society lacks the structure, the rituals and the authorities to push members to be their best selves. Violence, lying, cheating and greed remain rampant in our society, and few institutions have stepped up to help people to be better.”

A lot of wisdom in this article, but the one thing missing is this: the understanding that there is no binding authority to a religion that has lost any claim to truth.

Mr. Greenberg has seen what many others far older have not seen, but what we all need to see is the fact that there is no possible binding authority to religion if the truth claims of that religion are denied, subverted, undermined, and marginalized. And in terms of historical review, that happen on the college campus before the other trends that Mr. Greenberg so accurately describes. But if nothing else, sadly enough, this data comes along to tell us that what we thought was happening really is on the American college campus and among the young. Here we have it in matters of absolutely straightforward reporting. And to those who operate out of a biblical worldview, to say the very least, there is nothing remotely entertaining or comedic about this.

 

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 information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com.

 

Remember that on Saturday we will bring forth the first new installment of the new season of Ask Anything Weekend Edition. We’d love to have your question as well. Just call us at 877-505-2058. Call with your questions in your voice. That’s 877-505-2058.

 

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 02-12-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Brian Williams and Jon Stewart stories reveal danger of blurred line between entertainment and news

 Brian Williams Suspended From NBC for 6 Months Without Pay, New York Times (Emily Steel and Ravi Somaiya)

Jon Stewart Will Leave ‘The Daily Show’ on a Career High Note, New York Times (Dave Itzkoff)

A Late-Night Host Seamlessly Mixing Analysis, Politics and Humor, New York Times (Jason Zinoman)

Jon Stewart shaped cultural attitudes of a generation, Boston Globe (Dan Aucoin)

2) Rising depressing, secularism of college freshmen reveals social cost of increasing isolation

Annual survey makes big statements about freshman students, USA Today (Rachel Rosenbaum)

College Freshmen Are Leaning Away From Religion, Wall Street Journal (Melissa Korn)

More College Freshmen Report Having Felt Depressed, New York Times (Alan Schwarz)

College Freshmen Seek Financial Security Amid Emotional Insecurity, Chronicle of Higher Education (Dan Berrett and Eric Hoover)

Filling religion’s void, Yale Daily News (Scott Greenberg)

Transcript: The Briefing 02-11-15

The Briefing

 

February 11, 2015

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

 

It’s Wednesday, February 11, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Disastrous economic inequality due to marriage inequality, economists realize 

Many politicians and others these days want to talk about inequality but few actually want to talk about what causes it. There is a growing realization however, and we should be happy about this, that at the center of the issue of inequality is the issue of the family and at the center of the family is the question of marriage.

Sunday’s edition of the New York Times was very instructive in this regard. Andrew L Yarrow wrote an article entitled Falling Marriage Rates Reveal Economic Fault Lines. Now from a moral perspective this just might get the equation backwards, but at least in terms of getting to the moral issue there really is something of huge importance to this article. As Yarrow writes,

“The percentage of married households in the United States has fallen to a historic low.”

And even as that has happened, rate of what are measured as economic inequality have risen considerably. And as people are looking at the convergence of the marriage line and the economic lines what they are noting is that people who are married, who have children only within marriage, and who get married and staying married, are far more likely to be economically advantaged than to be disadvantaged. As Yarrow writes,

“Census data cited in a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center show that the number of married households fell to 50.5 percent in 2012 from a high of about 72 percent in 1960.”

He goes on to explain,

“Among the less well educated, the number of married households has fallen even more. A 2011 study by Pew found that although 64 percent of college-educated Americans were married, fewer than 48 percent of those with some college or less were married. In 1960, the report found, the two groups were about equally likely to be married.”

So here’s the bottom line in terms of this research: there is a huge marriage gap in America today and it parallels almost exactly the economic gaps as well. Where you find the lowest marriage rates among adults, where you find the largest percentage of children born outside the institution of marriage, where you find more children being raised without two parents in the home, that’s where you find the greater likelihood of poverty.

Now again, from a Christian worldview perspective there is no great surprise here. This is exactly what we would expect because the biblical worldview affirms that when God gives us his plan and purpose for human flourishing then that flourishing is going to be found only within that plan. And very central to that plan for humanity is the institution of marriage, and the reality of the family, and the understanding of the fact that children are advantaged – that’s an understatement – by being raised by a mother and a father who are married to one another and in the same household in terms of residents. Yarrow points to what is increasingly being recognized, even among the secular left, as the importance of marriage to the situation of the economy. As he writes,

“A 2012 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the median 65-to-69-year-old married household had almost 10 times as much in savings as the typical single-person household”

Now that’s just massive. Frankly, that this is a statistic that I had not seen before. Let me just go back over it for a moment. If you find people in America who are 65 to 69 and who are married and have stayed married, they are likely to have in the bank, or in terms of their savings, 10 times as much as persons in the same age cohort who are not married.

Now once again, from a Christian worldview perspective there should be no surprise here; even as we understand that economic trends are always, at least partly, pointing to a deeper moral reality. Even Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, pointed out that when you’re looking at matters of economics you’re always looking at issues that were moral before they were material – that is to say they were moral questions before they were economic questions. In his own way, even Karl Marx came to understand that even as he came to opposite conclusions to Adam Smith about the way that an economy should be arranged to lead to the greatest human flourishing.

Yarrow also cites another 2014 study that indicated that marital status is almost on par with education in predicting economic success in the future. Well if that doesn’t surprise you, you need to recognize it apparently does surprise some who believe that marriage, at least in the past they have believed, wasn’t all that important. Yarrow also cites research that has come from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics in which researchers concluded that if married households today equal the number seen in 1980s – so we’re talking just 35 years ago – if Americans were married now at the rate they were just in 1980,

“…the growth in median income of families with children would be 44 percent higher.”

Now one of the things that we need to note here is that this has the attention of economists in a way that it has not had before – the issue of marriage; because when you’re talking about a 44% increase in median income you’re talking about the kind of economic increase that would be explainable by no other factor known to economists.

Another interesting authority cited in the article is Jonathan Rauch, he’s a fellow at the Brookings Institution, he’s also leader of a movement known as the Marriage Opportunity Council. He said, and I quote,

“Marriage is thriving among people with four-year college diplomas, but the further down you go on the educational and economic totem pole, the worse it’s doing.”

He went on to say,

“There’s a growing danger that marriage, with all its advantages for stability, income and child well-being, will look like a gated community for the baccalaureate class, with ever-shrinking working-class participation. We’re not there yet, but that’s the trajectory we’re on.”

Now what makes that statement particularly interesting is that Jonathan Rauch has also been one of the major spokesmen for the legalization of same-sex marriage. And that leads to what might well be the most important paragraph in Yarrow’s article; it reads like this, and I quote,

“In a nation that places a high value on personal freedom, it could be tempting to wave away these concerns. [Let me just interject here, that means the concerns raised by all these researchers and economist and people who are concerned about the low rate of marriage.]The decision to go it alone can be every bit as fulfilling and life-affirming as the decision to enter into a marriage. Nevertheless, other data are signaling that for a number of Americans, not marrying carries with it a risk of falling behind economically.”

But the other really interesting thing in terms of this paragraph is what it reveals about what Yarrow says as he affirms that kind of liberty because he comes right out and says that even as all of this data about marital issues related to economics should not be dismissed, it also shouldn’t come as any kind of moral imperative. Well, there you have it. There’s the quandary of the modern age. We see a big problem, we understand at least partly what’s causing the problem, we can identify it and at least be honest about the statistics, but indicating that they should change our behavior – well that’s a step too far.

End even more explicit form of that same argument was found in recent days in an article that appeared in The Economist, that’s one of most influential British periodicals. The title is Love, Tax and Wedlock; the high marriage rates of the 1950s, says the economist, are not coming back. But here you have a similar interpretation of the data, a very similar affirmation of the fact, that a lower rate of marriage and an increased number of people who are cohabitating or who are not getting married at all or having children outside the institution of marriage, that all these things are developing and now being very clear as major impacts on the economy; and not just on economy writ large, but more importantly, on the economy of individuals and families and single parents with children.

As is almost always the case, articles in The Economist appear without a reporter or author’s name but whoever this writer is, he or she gets right to the issue when pointing out the centrality of marriage and the institution of the family to economic success, but then also acknowledging that there’s a raging debate about exactly how that should be understood. In terms of worldview there are two different camps – they are often defined as the structuralist versus the culturalist. The structuralist are those who believe that structural forms of injustice in the society have actually forced people into a situation in which marriage is a low priority and often a low availability. The structuralists say this isn’t a moral issue, this is a structural issue in the economy. The culturalists on the other hand say the way out of this is to change the moral culture.

One of the most interesting things coming out of this is that there is increased common ground among the structuralist and the culturalist – at least among some of them. Now from a Christian worldview perspective our default is the culturalist argument because that’s where the Scripture starts. Problems such as those addressed in these articles indicate prior moral issues before they become economic issues. But it is important to note that in a fallen world the structural issues also take on an importance; therefore those who are the culturalist who say that the issues are moral before they are structural, we also need to recognize that in a world that is affected by sin, the structures of this world are also affected by that sin. That’s why even as we understand that the moral issues cannot be dismissed, and actually have to be confronted as prior questions, we do understand that there are structural shapes of injustice, structural patterns of injustice, that indeed show up in the very same statistics.

But my main point in discussing this article from The Economist is to say, that like the New York Times piece by Andrew Yarrow, there’s an acknowledgment of the fact that the breakup of marriage and the lowering of marriage rates has led to disaster economically – not only in terms of the larger culture, but in terms of countless millions of lives. Furthermore, as the society is increasingly talking about inequality there is at least a great gain of intellectual honesty of the fact that you really can’t talk about economic inequality without talking about what causes it.

But they also both make the point, each in their own way, that there’s no going back morally speaking. Neither one of these authors is willing to say what we need is a return to marriage as the expectation. And furthermore The Economist go so far to say as the lower rates of moral disapproval for having children out of wedlock have marked modern society, that’s to be welcomed rather the lamented. So here you have The Economist tracking, in very honest ways, the very dangerous and very damaging effects of the marginalization of marriage; and they’re also saying ‘hey, but there’s no going back.’ Remember that subtitle of the article; the high marriage rates of the 1950s are not coming back? Well in response, we need to say to one of the reasons they apparently are not coming back is that the very people who are noticing the fall in marriage rates and all the effects these have brought are not coming back to say we’re willing to make the moral changes that would bring marriage back.

2) CO bill permitting religious requirements in college groups voted down as discriminatory 

Next, a very instructive story comes out of Denver where, according to Joey Bunch of the Denver Post, a bill in the Colorado legislature that would have allowed religious clubs on the states college campuses to set rules on faith for the leaders of those groups, died in a party line vote in a House committee on Monday. According to Bunch, Representative Kevin Priola, a Republican of Henderson who sponsored the bill, said the bill is about allowing religious groups to elect members of their faith as leaders without risking a discrimination claim. But those on the other side of the issue said it was about “skirting a 1999 Supreme Court decision in Christian Legal Society versus Martinez which stated a Christian organization recognized by a public University must accept non-Christians and gays as members.”

Well let me just backtrack for moment to say that sentence is actually wrong. As lamentable as the Supreme Court’s decision back in 1999 in the case Christian Legal Society versus Martinez was, the Supreme Court majority did not rule that state universities must adopt this policy – only that when a certain institution connected with the state system in California did adopted it, it was not acting unconstitutionally in doing so. That’s a huge difference in argument. If the Supreme Court had ruled back in 1999, as the Denver Post here says the court did, then the policy in California would now be the policy in all 50 states. But that’s not what the court did. There is a vast difference in the court saying that a law is not unconstitutional and in saying the law now must apply in all 50 states, in all public universities.

Representative Priola, in explaining why he brought the legislation, said,

“It is only natural that a religious group would want its leaders to agree with its sincerely held religious beliefs,”

Now that’s just the kind of common sense that I’m absolutely confident the founders and framers of the U.S. Constitution would well have understood and openly meant to affirm by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But you have opponents who successfully killed the bill, and again it was a party line vote – Republicans on one side, Democrats on the other – representatives Rhonda Fields and Dominic Marino said,

“…the bill was an attempt to discriminate by using religion, specifically against lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender students, from leadership, if not membership.”

Well, they’re not wrong. This is an issue in which a religious group – in this case, a Christian group – should have the right to maintain leadership standards that are consistent with its own doctrine and with its own understanding of biblical morality. As we have seen, these issues have arisen in private institution such as Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and in public institutions now including the entire California State University system – that’s the nation’s largest single system of public universities.

And this is where you see the vast worldview chasm that now marks the American landscape. Roderick Hager is president of a group known as the St. Joseph Campus Ministry at the Colorado School of Mines; he said,

“Redefining the leadership would redefine the faith that we all share as Roman Catholics in a Roman Catholic group,”

That’s an argument that evangelicals can immediately identify as the same argument we would make in terms of a group such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, or for that matter, a Baptist Student Union. A student speaking on the other side was identified as Andrew Englund, a student at the University of Colorado at Denver. According to the Post he said,

“…religious groups are welcome to form among students, [but note the next part of his argument] but they should not be allowed to discriminate and still be a campus affiliate.”

Now let’s just point out that other groups on campus are clearly allowed to discriminate. This is a unique isolation of religious groups – Christian groups in particular are at the forefront of this – who are now being not allowed to operate according to their own principles. Andrew Englund said,

“The bill seeks to limit leadership opportunities available to some of my friends through school-sponsored programs by funding clubs that discriminate against them,”

Well to state the obvious that became very clear in these court cases. If you have an ecology club, it is likely that the leaders will be limited to those who approve the ecological worldview of the club. You could go right down in terms of political clubs and clubs on any range of ideological issues. And to show the ultimate hypocrisy in all of this, the most openly discriminatory groups on campus are fraternities and sororities which were explicitly excluded from the nondiscrimination policy adopted for instance by Vanderbilt University.

The issue isn’t really nondiscrimination, if that were the issue then the university would’ve applied it to all groups. No, this is a specific targeting of those groups that operate on the basis of a theological or doctrinal principle. That’s really the only principle that is excluded by these policies. And that really has to tell us something.

3) Increasingly fleeting nature of celebrity reveals artificial significance of approval of man

Finally, another really interesting article in recent days in the New York Times; here’s the headline, Spot the Celebrity. It’s the subhead that’s really, really important; listen to this: the nano famous enjoy no staying power but they do enjoy their time in the limelight, however short that might be. Alex Williams writes that in our digital age we’ve gone from micro-celebrity to nano celebrity. People are instant celebrities but they’re not celebrities for long.

Alex Williams begins his article these words;

“Perhaps you remember Jeremy Meeks, the handsome felon turned Internet sensation.”

Last June the photograph of the 30-year-old who became famous for his supposedly handsome mug shot,

“ricocheted around the web, from the Facebook page of the police department in Stockton, Calif., to a Twitter hashtag #FelonCrushFriday to, soon after, stories on “The Colbert Report” and “Good Morning America.” Mr. Meeks [remember he was famous for his mug shot upon being arrested] signed with an agent who was quoted in The Daily News saying that he could earn up to $100,000 a month for modeling and other gigs.”

Now listen carefully to the article;

“So where is Mr. Meeks today? He remains incarcerated. That agent, Gina Rodriguez, no longer represents him. And the Twittering class has moved on.”

So there you have a definition or at least an example of the new phenomenon of ‘nano celebrity.’ As Williams writes,

“As the medium gets smaller, so does the fame. Enter nanofame, the one-hit-wonder, famous-for-an-eye-blink Internet netherworld occupied by the likes of Mr. Meeks [he then lists others, and then writes]… They join an ever-growing number of self-made “stars”… who sprout from social-media ecosystems like Vine and Snapchat, with their snippets not much longer than the average sneeze.”

I want you to hear a quotation that comes from James Bennett – he’s a professor of media arts at Royal Holloway, the University of London. He’s the editor – and I’m not making this up – of an academic Journal known as Celebrity Studies Journal. He said,

“Celebrity is shrinking to increasingly small circles,” he went on to say ““The democratizing of media production tools, once only in the hands of major studios or media conglomerates, has revealed ordinary people to be willing participants in the fame game.”

This is where those who operate out of a biblical worldview have to respond with the fact that celebrity is not new. And the quest, or the hunger for celebrity is certainly not new. We’ve noted the rise of the celebrity with every new technological or media advantage. Every time there’s a new form of media and operates as a platform for a new forum of celebrity. And as Daniel Boorstin, the late Librarian of Congress pointed out very perceptively, what makes a celebrity a celebrity is being famous for being famous. One of the most important moral insights about celebrity is that it is not necessarily tied in any way to anything that could be described as an achievement, and certainly not to anything that could be described as a moral evaluation. As a matter fact in America celebrity has been increasingly, not decreasingly, tied to what is recognized as scandalous and salacious behavior, not to upright and moral behavior. It turns out that the way to celebrity these days is not to behave the way to be a celebrity these days is to be a phenomenon of misbehavior. Or at least be found a someone who might be able to interest fellow humanity for at least a matter of a few seconds.

And as for the new technology of the digital age in social media, this transformation has come pretty quickly it was just back in 2008 that New York Magazine defined what it called the micro-fame game. But micro-fame now seems be measured in light years compared to nano-fame.

Furthermore observers who been watching the transformations of celebrity in modern American life point out that the way celebrity must be fed these days is almost insatiable. The only way you can remain famous in terms of this modern sense is to be continually the subject of someone else’s fascination. And though someone elses are measured by not just the hundreds or thousands, but the millions. And in order to do that in modern America one has to have an entire fame production machine surrounding the individual in order to keep up this kind of energy in the digital age. That’s why were you find a celebrity class in America today you find them surrounded not only by the paparazzi and their publicity advisers but an entire army of social media advisers as well.

One of the things Christians must keep in mind is that not only is fame fleeting, but it is also artificial. It becomes something of an intoxicating drug. And furthermore, we find ourselves in the position of being openly invited to admire what should not be admired and to find interest in what should not interest us all for the sake of being able to talk about the latest celebrity, perhaps even measured by this new development; nano-celebrity.

But finally other thing Christians must keep in mind, and this is especially true for those who work with young people –  even more importantly and urgently for parents – fame and celebrity in this age can be downright dangerous. Just ask the parents of some teenagers who become their own nano-celebrities. This has exposed them not only to the attention the comes the celebrity but also to the dangers that can come with celebrity. Even ancient pagans understood that fame is fleeting. They just didn’t have the experience of knowing that that fleeting fame could one day be measured in nano-celebrity.

 

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 information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com.

 

Remember that this Saturday brings the first installment of the next season of Ask Anything Weekend Edition. We’d love to have your question. Just call us with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058.

 

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.