R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 323

The Briefing 02-26-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Netherlands’ booming euthanasia business shocking display of  culture of death trajectory 

Dying Dutch: Euthanasia Spreads Across Europe, Newsweek (Winston Ross)

Euthanasia Comes to Canada, Weekly Standard (Wesley J. Smith)

2) Companies present employment as higher calling, revealing human aspiration for purpose

I Don’t Have a Job. I Have a Higher Calling., Wall Street Journal (Rachel Feintzeig)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 02-25-15

The Briefing

 

February 25, 2015

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

 

It’s Wednesday, February 25, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) ISIS recruits young ‘cubs’ in effort to create multi-generational jihad

Sometimes the photograph is even more powerful than the news story that is found behind. That’s the case in a recent report from NBC News about the efforts of the Islamic State, otherwise known as ISIS or ISIL, to recruit new soldiers. The reason the photograph is so effective, the reason it is so haunting, is because these new soldiers are about age 8 to age 12 and they are known as the ‘Cubs.’ The Islamic State has announced and is now bragging before the world that it is recruiting boys as young as eight or nine or 10, up to about age 12, to join the jihad. And these new soldiers they call Cubs serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, they are being indoctrinated ideologically into the murderous worldview of the Islamic State. On the other hand, some of them are even now being deployed in terms of decoys or, in some cases it is now suspected, as suicide bombers.

As the NBC report states,

“While their peers in the U.S. build campfires, ISIS’ diminutive devotees go from Quranic recitation drills to the front line of battle.”

One of the Iraqi security officials that spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity said,

“They teach them [speaking of these young boys] how to use AK-47s. They use dolls to teach them how to behead people, then they make them watch a beheading, and sometimes they force them to carry the heads in order to cast the fear away from their hearts.”

That’s a very difficult sentence to read, much less to come to terms with. But as Charlie Winter, a London-based expert on terrorism, said,

“It’s being done for the same reasons that Hitler had the Hitler Youth. That’s effectively what we’re seeing here — military training and ideological training.”

Now when Mr. Winter speaks of ideological training we, operating out of the Christian worldview, need to understand that this ideological training is also a moral training. This raises a very interesting question: how do you produce a jihadist? How do you produce someone who is willing to buy into the murderous worldview of the Islamic State? Well as has now become clear in many of the secular societies of Europe, you recruit jihadists by presenting to them a strong theological vision that is much stronger than the secular worldview that is offered as the alternative. But in terms much of the Muslim world it turns out that you recruit these youngsters for the jihad by indoctrinating them in a great moral shift, a great moral change that takes place in these children.

One of the things that become abundantly clear in this NBC report is that there is a great moral desensitization that takes place with these youngsters. They are being trained not to protect life, but to take life. They are being trained not to be gentle and kind, but to be absolutely murderous. They are being trained to be killers and their being desensitized to death even at extremely young ages. Winter told NBC News,

“There’s no term better suited to it than brainwashing. These children won’t have any point of reference other than jihadism so the ideology will be a lot more firm in their heads and a lot more difficult to dislodge.”

Now again, Christian should think about this very carefully. What this reinforces is the basic truth that what a child learns at these very early and formative stages of life will, to a tremendous degree, determined the worldview that child would have as an adult. If you’re going to build a multi-generational movement of jihad you’re going to have to reach out to the young and as your movement goes forward the young will have to be defined in younger and younger ages. An insider account of the military training and the ideological brainwashing these children says that the cycle of the learning is rather quick:

“Analysts estimate that the cubs typically graduate within a two-week to one-month time frame.”

This is a very intensive form of jihadist education. The insider said,

“Most of these kids don’t fight right away. They’ll start by accompanying older militants to the front lines to get ‘acclimated’ and only later engage in battle.

Still, whether they engage in battle today is somewhat irrelevant. They will be engaging in battle, they will be fighting in battle. It’s a matter of time.”

This figure also said, and I quote,

“In two, three, four years they’re going to be adults. By raising them up on this ideology and methodology, it becomes part of their everyday life. These kids are going to grow up, abide by and adhere to the ideology and carry out what ISIS want.”

The NBC report says,

“In videos, young boys clad in camouflage share lunch and later target practice. Chubby-cheeked kids flash ISIS’ one-fingered salute while clutching AK-47s which dwarf their small bodies. Many dot the periphery of beheading videos. Cub ‘graduation’ ceremonies feature boys of 10 or 12 fidgeting with ski masks, holding hands with other pint-sized jihadis who can’t be more than six or seven.”

From a Christian worldview there is so much to be troubling here but there is also something that is under the surface of the story. These jihadists are out for the long haul. One of the things that is abundantly clear in this report is that they intend to be about a multi-generational jihad against the West. A multi-generational jihad for the supremacy of the Islamic State and for the establishment of the Islamic caliphate they now claim – that is an Islamic authority under one supreme ruler. And make no mistake, they are looking at a very long strategy. That’s one of the most frightening aspects of this video. No doubt the most troubling aspect of this is the involvement of these children in the jihad itself and the fact that they are now appearing in the periphery of some of these horrifying videos released by the Islamic State. But the other thing becomes immediately clear is that they are looking at the future, they are seeking to raise up a new generation of jihadist who will be even more ardent, even more committed, even more murderous than the generation we now know and already fear.

So for Christian parents, as you put your own children to bed tonight and as you check on them and pray for them as they sleep, just remember that around the world there are some children who’ve been taken out of their homes and are being trained in jihad and they’re being told that the enemy is you.

2) Journalist celebrates Obama’s duplicity on same-sex marriage as help to the nation

Next, an update on a couple of stories that we’ve already discussed on The Briefing. Sometimes these updates are appropriate simply because the story continues to unfold. And when it comes to certain stories sometimes the best thoughts come a few days after the effect, a few days after the story has landed when people begin to step back and say, ‘now wait just a minute, what did this mean?’ For instance, in recent days we talked about the revelation made by David Axelrod, formally one of the major political consultants to Pres. Barack Obama, about how Pres. Obama had finessed (that’s a gentle word to use here) his position on same-sex marriage over his political career. Axelrod acknowledges and states explicitly what virtually everyone, especially on the conservative side, actually did believe. And that is that President Obama was for the legalization of same-sex marriage all along.

When he was running for the state Senate in the state of Illinois he’d indicated on the questionnaire he was for the legalization of same-sex marriage. When he ran for president in 2008 he said he was against it, stating that he was for something like civil unions but stating that he did not believe that what he called ‘sacred marriage’ could include anything other than a man and a woman. But when he ran for president in 2012 he was an ardent supporter of the legalization of same-sex marriage and even more recently he has called for the US Supreme Court to rule, at least by this coming spring, that same-sex marriage should be legal in all 50 states. So he has gone from being for same-sex marriage to being against it to being for it to being for it for everybody all at once.

Now just to remind you, in the immediate aftermath of the release of David Axelrod’s book in which he said ‘we knew where the President was all along’, he had basically said what was necessary in order to bring along the African-American religious leaders in terms of his campaign. Now with all that already said President Obama came out and said that his position wasn’t exactly as was there described. He said that David Axelrod had failed to make a distinction between his personal sentiments and his public position. But actually that was Axelrod’s point all along.

Now I mentioned that there’s an update on this because the aftermath has been particularly interesting, not on the right but on the left; not so much among conservatives, but among liberals. For instance, David Graham writing at the Atlantic pointed out that flip-flopping may not have been “strictly moral,” but he says it was politically effective. Now there’s just something for us to note. Something may not be, again the word was strictly moral, but it might be politically effective. Well just imagine if we were talking to a young child about that moral equation. Just imagine a child who is facing the issue when asked a direct question by a parent, do I answer what is strictly moral or do I answer what is politically expedient? I think most of us, both as children and parent, know how that goes.

But my point is simply that no parent is going to accept the argument that this truth is necessary for political expediency. That’s because one of the main responsibilities of parents is to teach children that truth matters and to make it stick. But David Graham’s point is not only that President Obama though while acting in a way that wasn’t strictly moral, but politically effective, he says it was actually good for the country. Because in his words, President Obama’s confusing of the issue actually allowed Americans to move along morally so that when the President ran not for election but reelection, he could champion the legalization of same-sex marriage knowing that millions of Americans were by now behind him. The implication of David Graham is that if the President had been honest in 2008 he might not only have cost himself some political chances of being elected, he might also have stunted the conversation on Americans who might not have been ready or a Presidential candidate to announce he was supportive of legalized same-sex marriage.

It’s an interesting argument. This is the moral shift from saying the President may have lied, but that’s no big deal because it worked, to now saying his lie helped the American people. Because even as most of the people in the opinion classes understood what the President meant rather than what the President said, the fact is that most Americans weren’t ready to go along with the argument yet. So David Graham says, in that sense, the President’s confusing of the issue actually help the American people. That’s a very interesting moral argument, and it tells us a great deal about why we are where we are on so many of these issues. Finally, one of the most important and honest lines in David Graham’s article is this,

“Sometimes lying does pay,”

Well perhaps from a political calculation that can be said to be true, but from a moral understanding that can never be true.

3) Christians cannot dodge socially difficult questions for sake of political expediency

Next, following up on the conversation about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on the question of evolution, we talked about that in recent days, because as some you will remember when Gov. Walker was recently in London he was asked about evolution and his response was that he was going to punt on the issue. This led a good many people, especially on the left, to say, ‘this man can’t be president because he refused to answer a straightforward question.’ But as David Harsanyi points out writing at the Federalist, liberals often don’t get asked these questions. It’s conservatives that get asked these questions concerning such things as evolution or creation, and then if they do punt on the question (and by the way, he should not have punted on the question) they are then lampooned as doing exactly that – punting, avoiding the question, operating out of political or intellectual cowardice.

But as Harsanyi points out, those on the left are often not asked the questions and when they are asked the questions and offer a very similar kind of response, they get a political pass. He reminds us that President Obama was once asked,

“Is a 20 week old unborn child a human being?”

The President’s response was that that question was,

“Above his pay grade,”

Harsanyi’s point is abundantly clear; every single one of us will face questions we don’t want to answer, every single one of us, regardless of our worldview, will at some point face a question that will put us in a position of social awkwardness to say the very least. But we as Christians understand that it is our responsibility to give an answer, an honest answer, and we hope a winsome and a capable answer when we are asked a direct question. It may be possible for a governor or a President or any number of candidates for whatever office to avoid answering such questions and to avoid the evitable fallout. But Christians cannot avoid the fallout, we cannot avoid the judgment, we cannot avoid the responsibility. When we are asked a crucial question we need to let are yea be yea and our nay be nay. We need to be very clear on these issues.  The fact that people on both the left and the right are sometimes unclear is no excuse for us to be similarly evasive.

Finally, again on these issues, Harsanyi in a different article published at NationalReview.com pointed out that when you’re looking at the President on the issue of same-sex marriage, you should compare it to how liberals, those on the cultural left, will be in absolute apoplexy, they would be in an absolute fit if the question were different and the pattern of answer were on a different question. For instance he says this, ‘what if a candidate, who claims to be pro-choice, won the presidency and then admitted he was actually pro-life and started appointing pro-life judges?’ That is an absolutely brilliant question. It’s the kind of question I can only wish had emerged in the immediate aftermath of the new story.

And that’s the reason I raise these issues today, some of these questions actually arise only after people are able to reflect upon the news, to reflect upon the happenings, to listen to a statement and say, ‘now wait just a minute, is that what he is that she actually said? If so, what does that mean? For Christians that is a good reminder of the fact that even as headlines come and go the issues really don’t come and go. The big crucial questions, the central question such as the dignity of human life and the definition of marriage, those questions will never ever go away.

4) Academy Award winners reveals growing distance between elites and movie goers

Another follow-up issue, yesterday’s edition of the New York Times had a headline in the Arts section; the headline was this, Moviegoers and Academy Move Further Apart. It’s a really interesting article by Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes. It’s in the aftermath of the Oscar ceremony last Sunday night and the big point being made by these two reporters is this: if you look at the awards (and again it takes a little time to think about this) that were actually handed out on Sunday night, they are overwhelmingly for movies virtually no one has seen or will ever see. The point of these reporters is that Hollywood and the American people may find each other mutually fascinating but when it comes to worldview and taste they are stridently and increasingly a part.

By the way, it take some time for these statistics to come down to us, but the viewership on ABC for the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night was down almost 15% from just the previous year. It was about 36.6 million, that was down 14.9 – that is almost 15% – from roughly 43,000,000 just the previous year. It was the lowest rated Oscar show since 2009. Now the people behind the program and especially the people buying the advertising, and some of the people within Hollywood who care about Hollywood are beginning to ask the question, ‘why would so many millions of Americans tune it out?’ And the answer given even by the New York Times is, it just may be that the American people have a very different judgment when it comes to films in the Academy Award. And, as they are also pointing out, the interminable program of the Award ceremony turns out to be less interesting to Americans as Hollywood makes it more bizarre year-by-year.

As Cieply and Barnes write,

“Following the best picture win on Sunday night by ‘Birdman’ — a brainy film seen by fewer than five million ticket buyers in North America — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences woke on Monday to soft television ratings for its Oscar telecast and fresh signs that its movie awards have become hopelessly detached from movie viewers.”

The people buying the tickets are operating out of a very different worldview than the people who were giving out the awards. The bigger problems say the Times,

“….as the results came in, were indications — visible amid a confusing tangle of awards that went in many different directions — that both the Academy and the echo chamber of Hollywood’s awards-system machinery have nearly broken their connection with the movies that many millions of people buy tickets to watch.”

That is a horribly convoluted sentence that just begs for an editor to try to save it, but nonetheless it does communicate a very essential point. It turns out that the Academy – and remember they named themselves the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – evidently has a vision of the film industry that the American people aren’t buying. Now that is not to say, in terms of moral judgment, that the American people are necessarily trying to go after more moral projects – that this has something about taste or morality. It might, as a matter fact, but what it really points out is the incredible gap between the artistic tastes of the elites, those who are in the film industry and those who give out the awards, and the actual entertainment tastes of the American people. Because the American people are buying tickets to movies the Academy absolutely ignored and the American people are ignoring the movies that won the big awards at the Academy Awards.

Another example was the film “Whiplash.” It won 3 Oscars, it has been seen by,

“…perhaps 1.4 million ticket buyers since its release more than four months ago.”

That is a statistical blip in terms of Hollywood. That means that, statistically speaking, a miniscule number of Americans actually saw the film. There are lessons here for all of us: there can be a tremendous gap between perception and reality, but it’s a very dangerous gap when you begin to believe that you’re reality must be real simply because you have a big awards ceremony and you give each other prizes.

But lest we just throw the motion picture Academy under the bus on this, let’s remember that evangelical Christians can do the very same thing. We can be just as self-congratulatory, we can be just as self-referential, and we can encounter and lock ourselves in our own echo chamber. Reality may be tough to take but reality is at the end of the day, reality. And being in an echo chamber is not healthy. That’s one of the reasons why evangelical Christians must be very careful that we do not merely read our own material; that we look outside ourselves and make sure we’re part of a larger conversation. That is a discipline we have to learn lest we become our own echo chamber.

The sad thing in a sinful world is not how hard it is to believe your own publicity, but how easy it is. How easy it turns out to be, and how important it is that we know it. This story, as it turns out, is not just about Hollywood.

 

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 the regular release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. We want your question in your voice. Call with your question to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058.

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 02-25-15

Podcast Transcript

1) ISIS recruits young ‘cubs’ in effort to create multi-generational jihad

ISIS Trains Child Soldiers at Camps for ‘Cubs of the Islamic State‘, NBC News (Cassandra Vinograd, Ghazi Balkiz and Ammar Cheikh Omar))

2) Journalist celebrates Obama’s duplicity on same-sex marriage as help to the nation

Yes, Obama Was Lying About Opposing Same-Sex Marriage, The Atlantic (David Graham)

3) Christians cannot dodge socially difficult questions for sake of political expediency

Here Are The ‘Science’ Questions Reporters Should Ask Politicians, The Federalist (David Harsanyi)

Obama: Good BS’er, Terrible Liar, National Review Online (David Harsanyi)

4) Academy Award winners reveals growing distance between elites and movie goers

Oscars Show Growing Gap Between Moviegoers and Academy, New York Times (Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes)

Transcript: The Briefing 02-24-15

The Briefing

 

February 24, 2015

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

 

It’s Tuesday, February 24, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Primacy of the ‘sovereign self’ causing global deterioration of the family

Once again Nicholas Eberstadt is out with a very important article that we need to consider and consider very carefully. It appeared over the weekend in the pages of the Wall Street Journal; the headline, The Global Flight From the Family. Nicholas Eberstadt has been quoted many times on this program, he is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and in this article he points out that the breakdown of the family that we’re now experiencing in the United States is not merely an American phenomenon, it is increasingly a worldwide phenomenon as well.

Eberstadt begins by drawing attention to a promotional poster for a film current in France,

“‘They’re getting divorced, and they’ll do anything NOT to get custody of the kids.”

He points to that promotional poster as an indication of just what’s happening, in terms of the breakdown of the family, worldwide. He says the posters are plastered all over Paris, he says the movie sounds like the quintessential French comedy, but its plot touches on a deep and serious reality and not one particular to France. He then continues,

“All around the world today, pre-existing family patterns are being upended by a revolutionary new force: the seemingly unstoppable quest for convenience by adults demanding ever-greater autonomy. We can think of this as another triumph of consumer sovereignty, which has at last brought rational choice and elective affinities into a bastion heretofore governed by traditions and duties—many of them onerous. Thanks to this revolution, it is perhaps easier than ever before to free oneself from the burdens that would otherwise be imposed by spouses, children, relatives or significant others with whom one shares a hearth.”

The strength of that paragraph is in the fact that it points to what many people have not yet recognized. The breakdown of the family structure is not just in terms of the relationship between a husband and a wife, not just the relationship between parents and children, but also the relationships between adult children and their parents, and the extended family pattern that has been central to human existence going all the way back to the beginnings of the human story.

Eberstadt notes that for human beings the beginning and the end of life are moments of particular vulnerability. No infant can take care of himself or herself and most of us recognize that as we live longer (and more of us live longer), more of us (as older people) will be dependent upon the young to take care of us at those stages of life as well. And that’s what Nicholas Eberstadt is pointing to: the enormous costs. Not just to individuals, but to the entire society when there’s a breakdown of kinship and a breakdown of the family structure such that at both the beginning and the end of life more people are now more vulnerable than they otherwise would have been. And it’s even more ominous as we look to the future because as Eberstadt notes the breakdown that we are witnessing now is retrospective; we’re looking at data from years past. When you look at the trends projected forward the situation grows far more concerning. Eberstadt writes,

“To evaluate the world-wide flight from the family, we can start in the U.S. Remarkably enough, we do not actually know the probabilities of getting married and staying married in America today, because the government doesn’t collect the information needed to make an estimate. We do know that both marriage and in situ parenting [that’s parenting in the home] are increasingly regarded as optional for child-rearing.”

And even if the government itself, through its Census Bureau, does not collect this kind of data there are other organizations (both governmental and otherwise) in the US that are trying to collect the kind of material that would help us to understand what’s going on. And the information coming in makes very clear that marriage is becoming increasingly marginalized. More adult Americans than in any recent point in American history are unmarried and are likely to be unmarried, and that more Americans than have ever been counted before are now living without both a mother and a father, and far more being born outside the institution of marriage.

But even if right now in America only 59% of American children are living with two parents in the home (and that means of course that roughly 41% are not) the picture is even bleaker elsewhere – especially in Europe. Eberstadt writes,

“Now consider Europe, where the revolution in the family has gained still more ground. European demographers even have an elegant name for the phenomenon: They call it the Second Demographic Transition (the First being the shift from high birth rates and death rates to low ones that began in Europe in the early industrial era and by now encompasses almost every society).”

So let’s just stop for a moment, this first demographic transition they say when couple started having fewer children, largely because the children they had were more likely to live into adulthood. That was the first demographic transition; that is dated into even the early decades of the 19 century, certainly by the beginning of the 20th century. Now as the 20th century came to a close and the 21st century begins, we have what these European demographers are calling the second demographic transition and this one is away from the family as a stable institution.

As Eberstadt writes, the second demographic transition means that long stable marriages are out, divorce or separation are in along with serial cohabitation and increasingly contingent liaisons – which is to say, even speaking of cohabitation is to overestimate the length or duration of some of these romantic attachments. The other thing Eberstadt points out is this,

“Not surprisingly, this new environment of perennially conditional, no-fault unions was also seen as ushering in an era of more or less permanent sub-replacement fertility.”

Now I’m going to leave Eberstadt’s article for just a moment ago to an editorial that appeared just days ago in the Financial Times. Let’s me just read to you one sentence,

“What the continent [speaking of the continent of Europe] lacks is a population problem. It may contain half a billion people, but could be the first where deaths outnumber births.”

So here you have an editorial in the Financial Times saying the last problem Europe has is that we have too many people. As a matter fact, Europe could become the first modern culture in which the death rate exceeds the birth rate. The breakdown of the family in Europe is now such that Eberstadt says in Belgium the odds of getting married and staying married are under one in five. In other words, the odd are now such that the likelihood that someone in Belgium will get married and staying married is less than 20% – we’re talking about a true unquestionable subversion of marriage as an institution, even as a cultural norm.

Before I leave Eberstadt’s article it’s important that he also recognizes that even though Asian societies have been slower to adopt to this idea of personal autonomy, they’ve been slower to adopt the revolutionary understandings that have led to the marginalization of marriage and the fracturing of the family. As he writes, these Asian cultures even supposedly steeped in a Confucian worldview are now tracking the West; they are now beginning to emulate the Western pattern in terms of the breakdown of the family. Eberstadt understands that worldview is at stake here. As he says, you can explain all of this basically by the fact that adults are claiming a right to their own personal convenience above all. And modern people are claiming personal autonomy as the right to determine their own lives, their own meaning, their own moral code, their own goal, their own romantic definitions, their own lives in every respect and family is giving way and marriage is giving way and parenthood is giving way. Even where marriage happens, it might not happen for long. Even where children are born, they might not be accepted as a lifelong responsibility, they may not even be accepted as a short-term responsibility to see them raised to adulthood.

And Eberstadt also understand that worldview matters as he relates to the question of what’s going on in Asia. He writes this,

“Formidable as the imperatives of Confucian familial tradition may be, they evidently can be overpowered by the more immediate attractions and pressures of modern life.”

Read that as the impact and the influence of the Western ideal of personal autonomy even in societies that had previously not recognized anything close to personal autonomy. The worldview issues are also affirmed when he writes,

“Our world-wide flight from family constitutes a significant international victory for self-actualization over self-sacrifice, and might even be said to mark a new chapter in humanity’s conscious pursuit of happiness.”

This is a conscious pursuit of happiness that is without husband and without wife, is without permanence and is without kin, is without family and is without children, is without parenthood and is ultimately without responsibility to anyone other than the sovereign self. If you want to understand a shift in worldview understand that movie poster in Paris which is advertising a movie based upon the premise that when divorce happens rather than fighting for the children they’re fighting for the right not to take them.

2) Losing the war for the family inevitably undermines US ‘War on Poverty’

One little footnote to this: in another section of the same newspaper, in the same edition, Nicholas Eberstadt shows up again. This time it is not by the fact that he’s writing article, but he is cited in the article. The article is actually by Arthur Herman and he’s writing about two histories of the presidential administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson. And he’s writing about the war on poverty and he includes this information,

“From 1959 to 1966 [that is before the war on poverty was declared], the number of Americans living below the poverty line had fallen to 14.7% from 22.4%”

In other words, from 1959, that’s the year I was born, the poverty rate in America was 22.4% by the federal estimation. Just seven years later in 1966, that’s before the War on Poverty, the poverty level had fallen to 14.7%.Where is it now after spending more than $20 trillion in the War on Poverty? And my point today is not to argue about any specific federal program, just to the fact that 20 years after the war on poverty was declared, the poverty rate in America is not lower than it was when the war was declared, it is higher, slightly higher. The estimate for the latest completed year, that’s where Eberstadt’s quoted, was about 2012 and according to the federal data then, the poverty level was then at 15%. That slightly higher than it was in 1966 when the war on poverty was declared.

Now the question is why would poverty have gone up rather than down given the fact that the federal government has expended $20 trillion in the war on poverty? Arthur Herman writes this,

“Family life suffered related changes, as Uncle Sam steadily replaced parents as a family’s principal breadwinner and the number of reasons to remain married—or get married—dwindled away. The Great Society and the War on Poverty helped set off an explosion of out-of-wedlock births. That is one reason why the poverty rate for children today is higher than before the mid-1960s—and why more than half of black children (about whom Johnson expressed so much concern) live with only their mother and why nearly half of those children live below the poverty line.”

Now I’ll be honest and tell you that that paragraph is one of the most depressing that I’ve read in a very long time. It tells us a great deal about the limitations of government. Again my point is not to argue about any specific federal program, it is simply to say this: no government, of any size, of any ambition, of any competence, is able to replace the family; no government can replace parents, no government can replace marriage. You can spend $20 trillion and still find yourself losing the war on poverty if before you lose that war you lose the war for the family. That much is now abundantly clear.

3) First year of same sex marriage in Illinois exposes conflicting absolute values of moral revolutionaries

Next, while we’re talking about the breakdown of the family, a really interesting article appeared yesterday in the Chicago Sun-Times. It’s a review of the last year in which same-sex marriage has been legal in the state of Illinois. According to the report more than 6,500 same-sex couples were married in Cook County (that’s the County that includes the city of Chicago) in the first year of marriage equality. The statistics are simply listed as bullet points, but one of them really caught my eye. Just listen to this:

“Same-sex spouses have been as young as 17 and as old as 93, the statement said.”

Now just to get to the bottom line here, I can understand how a 93-year-old could get legal permission to marry whether same-sex or otherwise in Cook County, Illinois, but how in the world are we now living in a situation in which at least one 17-year-old was legally married in a same-sex union in Cook County, Illinois in the last year.

From time to time one of the things we have to demonstrate about a false worldview is that it allows itself to have the phenomena of conflicting absolutes. That’s one of the things that is very important about the Christian biblical worldview, we believe in absolutes but we don’t believe in the possibility of those absolutes being in conflict with one another. But when you’re looking at the modern secular worldview there are conflicting absolutes and there’s no question about it. And it comes up in a situation like this.

Where are the child protection advocates crying out against the crime – or at least the abuse – of having a 17-year-old, according to their worldview, entered into a same-sex union by some kind of legal means in Cook County, Illinois in the year 2015? Most of those very same advocates point to some kind of marriage age such as that, even in a heterosexual union, as the evidence of some kind of social problem. But these are the very people who are claiming that same-sex marriage is a great step of social progress. And here comes the Sun-Times, just a report that in the first year of legal marriage (that is same-sex marriage) in the state of Illinois in Cook County there were those who were married, including at least one 17-year-old and one 93-year-old and therein lies a parable.

4) Sex-selective abortion ban debate reveals conflict between feminist and abortionist values

In its deadliest form, another one of these conflicting absolutes appears in an article from yesterday’s edition of the Guardian in London. The headline, A vote to criminalise gender-selective abortion will be a disaster for women and it’s written by Rebecca Schiller. Her point is that even as Great Britain right now is considering a law that would outlaw sex selection abortion in almost every case (that is a sex election for a male rather than a female). You now have feminist and abortion advocates in Great Britain saying it should not be a matter of the criminal law for a woman to seek even a sex selection abortion because the moment you begin to categorize some abortions as good and some abortions as bad, you end up discriminating against women.

That’s the logic that we now face from the pro-abortion argument and that’s the kind of logic that demonstrates this kind of horribly – in this case, fatally –conflicted absolute.  How can you have the logic, indeed the moral imperative, of feminism saying that every single female life is worthy of infinite respect and then have the other absolute that says every woman has a right to an abortion for any reason or no reason at any time – even if that reason is, we should find out, is to target a female in the womb for destruction, indeed for death.

Reading Rebecca Schiller’s article you come to understand exactly how some people are trying to hold both of those absolutes intention, but it will not work. She writes, and I quote,

“I believe that it is important to address the issues that lead to women being pressured to have abortions solely on the grounds of fetal gender. It is essential that we tackle the complex socio-cultural ideas that promote this gender bias urgently, and at their roots.”

In other words she says, what we need is more feminism to eradicate the problem rather than to actually try to eradicate the practice. About the pending law that proposes to criminalize sex selection abortion she says,

“At worst it is a strategic attempt to criminalise abortion,”

Once again, the issue of apportion here is a far greater moral imperative by the very statements by which is woman has written her article, than the life of an unborn child – even if that unborn child happens to be female. She says again,

“At worst it is a strategic attempt to criminalise abortion, promoting the faulty logic that women are not to be trusted to make decisions about their reproductive futures.”

There you have the trumping absolute. The absolute that says a woman has a right, an unfettered right, she must have an unquestioned right, to an abortion for any reason at any time for any reason or no reason at all –that trumps everything, including the value of the life within her womb, the status of the life within her womb, and the gender of the life within her womb.

In one of the most haunting passages I’ve read from any article like this in a very long time, she writes, and these are her precise words I quote,

“I do not want to live in a world where one sex is so undervalued that a woman feels forced into having an abortion if she is pregnant with a girl. Yet if societal pressures make that a reality, we need to work on those pressures while allowing that woman to exercise her right to choose if, when and how she has a baby safely.”

Which is to say, she’s arguing for an unfettered right, even under the circumstances of sex selection abortion for a woman to have a right to choose if, when, and how she has a baby safely, or if, when, and how she terminates the human life within her womb – even if the reason for that termination is nothing beyond the sex, that is the gender, of that child.

5) Error leading to arrest of jewelry thieves displays stupidity of sin

Finally, a moral note from the New York Times, the headline recently: Inside Man in Paris Jewelry Holdups Admits to His Role, and Stupidity. One of the things the Bible makes very clear, the book of Proverbs makes this explicit, is that criminal wrongdoing (sin itself, any kind of wrongdoing) turns out to be not only wrong, but inherently stupid. This article by Doreen Carvajal comes from Paris where Harry Winston Jewelry Store there was struck with clockwork precision not once but twice going back to 2008 and more recently. And as it turns out, it’s all traceable to one guard who worked for the very illustrious jeweler – a man who turned out to be the so-called inside man in the caper and eventually had to admit his role and has testified against his accomplices.

According to the report the 2008 robbery and one that even came before it in October 2007 involved more than 900 gems that were stolen, including emerald, diamonds, and a 31 carat solitaire ring that in itself just by itself was valued at more than $8 million. What’s the moral note that I bring about this story? It isn’t just that robbing jewelry stores is wrong, that arm robbery is a sin, I think we know that. The reality of this story is that sin turns out almost always to be stupid. And the more sophisticated the sinful caper, the more stupid it turns out human beings tend to be. Because as it turns out those who were involved in at least some of these capers (one of them particular) dressed up in outlandish costumes (they were men dressing up as women) and one of them carried an outrageously expensive bag. And, as you might expect a male criminal might do, he forgot and left the bag with his fingerprints on it when they left the scene of the crime.

You might say it’s less likely that a woman criminal would’ve left the purse with the incriminating fingerprints, but the man who dressed up as a woman in order to fool the security cameras didn’t remember to take the purse and left both the purse and his fingerprints and unsurprisingly even the French police found him. So the bottom line of this new story is not only does crime not pay and not only is sin deeply sinful, violating the law of God, and robbing God’s glory, as you might expect, sin also turns out to be stupid – incredibly stupid; leaving your purse with your fingerprints in the jewelry store stupid.

 

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 the regular release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. We just started to second season of that program. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Table of the Nations, the Tower of Babel, and the Marriage Supper of the Lamb: Part 1

The world around us is changing at a velocity unprecedented in human history. But we must realize that while the world seems to be changing almost regularly before our eyes, the task of the ministry remains absolutely the same. The founders of this school were convinced that Christian ministry should be modeled on the life and teaching of Jesus and his Apostles and later handed down to men such as Timothy, Paul’s protégé in ministry.

Increasingly, the world is recognizing that to be human is to live by the light of a story — a story that tells us about the past, explains the future, and situates us in the present. Yet from a Christian worldview we recognize that the stories promulgated by the world are not only inadequate as metanarratives but toxic to human flourishing. Ministers of the gospel also have a story to tell — the story of Scripture, the story of Jesus and his love. This is the story that leads to salvation and a story we must not get wrong.

A prominent question many worldviews and metanarratives are now wrestling with is the question of human diversity. Diversity is a fact that cannot be denied. The insularity of other cultures — which has always been partial — has now given way the phenomenon of globalization. It is hard to miss the fact that we are living in an age of increasing diversity; not just the world at large but even in our own nation and communities. In fact, some sociologists are now indicating that may soon be a majority-minority nation — a fact which is already a reality in some states. If our churches are truly going to represent the kingdom, if they are truly going to be gospel churches, then our churches are going to start to look more and more like our nation’s changing demographic map. Furthermore, our churches will rejoice in those changes.

As I indicated above, non-Christian worldviews are also wrestling with the issue of diversity and are providing woefully inadequate, even toxic explanations. Racism is of course one of those toxic approaches to the issue of diversity. Racism — a story that is not new and seems never to go away — suggests that human beings have permanent differences that must be evaluated along a spectrum of superiority and inferiority. Racism is one of the primal human sins and one of the most difficult to eradicate. It is the very antithesis of the gospel of Jesus Christ and everything that Christians should know, believe, teach, and live.

Another approach is the pluralistic cosmopolitan story which suggests that somehow humanity will arrive at the creation of a global community sharing a cosmopolitan ideal and a cosmopolitan citizenship that eradicates not only race and ethnicity but also citizenship and nation.

Another approach to the issue of diversity is that of radical individualism — a story that promotes the notion that we belong only to ourselves and are basically a people of one. Few people would admit that this is indeed their worldview. However, our individualism shows through in our lives even when it does not show up in our speech.

For Christians, the question is essentially the same as that asked of Jesus by a lawyer: “Who is my brother?” As a gospel people, our responsibility is to see the world, its headlines, and its heartaches through gospel eyes. To do so is to discover a counter-narrative to the stories the world is telling and the stories that are tearing the world apart. This counter-narrative is both hopeful and real. What we need is biblical theology in service to the gospel and a clear proclamation of the gospel as the key to our biblical theology.

In order to get there, I invite you to consider one of the most neglected passages in Scripture: Genesis 10. Here we find what is commonly referred to as the table of the nations.

1 These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood.

2 The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras.

3 The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah.

4 The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.

5 From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations.

6 The sons of Ham: Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan.

7 The sons of Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabteca. The sons of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan.

8 Cush fathered Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man.

9 He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord.”

10 The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.

11 From that land he went into Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and

12 Resen between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city.

13 Egypt fathered Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphtuhim,

14 Pathrusim, Casluhim (from whom the Philistines came),

15 Canaan fathered Sidon his firstborn and Heth,

16 and the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites,

17 the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites,

18 the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites. Afterward the clans of the Canaanites dispersed.

19 And the territory of the Canaanites extended from Sidon in the direction of Gerar as far as Gaza, and in the direction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha.

20 These are the sons of Ham, by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations.

21 To Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the elder brother of Japheth, children were born.

22 The sons of Shem: Elam, Asshur, Arpachshad, Lud, and

23 The sons of Aram: Uz, Hul, Gether, and Mash.

24 Arpachshad fathered Shelah; and Shelah fathered Eber.

25 To Eber were born two sons: the name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided, and his brother’s name was Joktan.

26 Joktan fathered Almodad, Sheleph, Hazarmaveth, Jerah,

27 Hadoram, Uzal, Diklah,

28 Obal, Abimael, Sheba,

29 Ophir, Havilah, and Jobab; all these were the sons of

30 The territory in which they lived extended from Mesha in the direction of Sephar to the hill country of the east.

31 These are the sons of Shem, by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations.

32 These are the clans of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, in their nations, and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.

One of the most important affirmations of biblical anthropology is that every single human being is created in the image of God. This means that there is a unity to the human race. We all bear the imago Dei. Even beyond that we share a common descent. We all spring from our first parents Adam and Eve. The biblical story only makes sense and we can only rightly understand the gospel if those for whom Christ died are all sons of Adam.

As we consider the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 we must remember that these nations are dispersing for a particular reason. That reason is provided in Genesis 11: The Tower of Babel. “Now the whole earth had one language and the same words” (Genesis 11:1). Not only do we have a shared ancestor in Adam but at one point we all shared the same language. Moses continues:

“And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar in Mesopotamia and settled there. And they said to one another, come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. And then they said come, let us build ourselves a city and tower with its top in the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men had built, and the Lord said ‘Behold, they are one people, and they all have one language. And this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will be impossible to them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language so that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth and they left off building the city, therefore it was called Babel, because the Lord confused the language of all the earth and from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:2-9).

Notice a peculiar repetition in the passage. Three times the word “come” appears in the text. In the first two instances “come” is spoken by the inhabitants of the city of Babel: “Come, let us make bricks,” “Come let us build a city.” They are calling one another to conspire and rebel against the Lord. Yet the Lord mocks their words when he says, “Come, let us go down, and see this thing which they have done.” Of course, the Lord didn’t just go down and see the thing that they had done, he went down and undid the thing that they had done.

What was the real problem with the Tower of Babel? Some have posited, and probably rightly so, that the Tower may have been part of an astrological cult. But that’s not the ultimate issue. Others have noted that the Tower represents human pride. It certainly does, but that’s not the ultimate issue either. What is the real issue? Look again at 11:4 “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top to the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” This statement is a direct defiance of the command of God in Genesis 1:28. God never commanded us to build a great city that would house all of humanity. We were told to fill the earth. What we find in the Tower of Babel is that those who were building this city did so lest they be dispersed. And yet God judges them by dispersing them while confusing their languages. Had these people been obedient and dispersed in obedience to Genesis 1:28 there is at least the possibility, that in that dispersion, every one still would have had the same language. But as it is the Table of Nations shows us that after the incident at Babel, the nations dispersed according to “their clans, their nations, and their languages.”

Let’s consider a few points about this passage. First we must note that here we find an explanation of ethnicity but significantly there is no mention, whatsoever, of skin color or physical appearance. Instead, race and ethnicity are considered a matter of shared family heritage, beliefs, and language. This is very foreign to our modern idea of race so often closely tied to one’s skin color and other physical attributes.

Second, we ought to notice how Genesis 10 ends: with the notation that there were 70 nations. As you can see, if you follow the way that these lines of decent are explained, these names alone don’t account for all of humanity as we know it today or where all of humanity lives.

People groups beyond this, of course, multiplied out of the dispersion. How many people groups? Well, according to the IMB, there are now at least 11,489 people groups in the world. So out of the 70 we read about in Genesis 10, there have developed 11,489. Of those, 6,832 are, at least by the best Christian reckoning, less than two percent Christian. And of those 11,489 people groups, 3,264 have no Christian witness.

The defiance of the mandate in Genesis 1 is what leads to the judgment in Genesis 10, and that leads to the dispersion. But we must remember something critical. The dispersion was not itself the judgment. The dispersion was God’s plan all along — remember Genesis 1:28. The judgment was that instead of being dispersed in communion, they were dispersed in confusion — a story that continues even into today.

Third, we should remind ourselves of the horrors of the interpretative tradition that arose from this text promulgating the so-called “Curse of Ham” interpretation. This interpretation, which said that the descendants of Ham were cursed with black skin, does violence to the text and slanders the character of God (furthermore, the text indicates that it is not even Ham who is cursed but Canaan).

While originating in the medieval world, this interpretation became very culturally significant when it was disastrously used to justify the slave trade. Of course the only real Curse of Ham was the cursed biblical interpretation and a horrifying distortion of Scripture that promoted the worst forms of racism imaginable.

The only rescue from heresies like the infamous curse of Ham is the truth of the Gospel and the authority of Scripture. Our common ancestry in Adam (and Noah) points to our common need for a Savior and, for believers in Christ, a common new humanity. But there is more to the story — there is the glory of God in our differences as well as in our more fundamental commonality. That glory, visible even now, points to an infinitely greater glory yet to come. We are headed for the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Next: Part 2

This is Part 1 of a two-part series based upon my Spring Convocation address at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “The Table of Nations, the Tower of Babel, and the Marriage Supper of the Lamb: Ethnic Diversity and the Radical Vision of the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” delivered Tuesday, February 3, 2015. http://www.albertmohler.com/2015/02/0...

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.

 

The Briefing 02-24-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Primacy of the ‘sovereign self’ causing global deterioration of the family

The Global Flight From the Family, Wall Street Journal (Nicholas Eberstadt)

Saving migrants’ lives should pose no dilemma for Europe, Financial Times

2) Losing the war for the family inevitably undermines US ‘War on Poverty’

All the Way With LBJ, Wall Street Journal (Arthur Herman)

3) First year of same sex marriage in Illinois exposes conflicting absolute values of moral revolutionaries

More than 6,500 Illinois same-sex marriage ceremonies in 2014, Chicago Sun Times

4) Sex-selective abortion ban debate reveals conflict between feminist and abortionist values

A vote to criminalise gender-selective abortion will be a disaster for women, The Guardian (Rebecca Schiller)

5) Error leading to arrest of jewelry thieves displays stupidity of sin

Inside Man in Paris Jewelry Holdups Admits to His Role, and Stupidity, New York Times (Doreen Carvajal)

Transcript: The Briefing 02-23-15

The Briefing

 

February 23, 2015

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

 

It’s Monday, February 23, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Oscars reveal extent of Hollywood influence through control of stories world tells

Well last night was the Oscars ceremony and I’m not going to be talking about any of the awards. I want to talk about what the Academy Awards night tells us about Hollywood and its influence in the United States and beyond. One of the most interesting things about the development of the Oscars ceremony and the massive national television audience that follows it – not to mention the entire cosmic swirl of social media that now emerges around this event – is the fact that it is all out of proportion to any kind of sanity when it comes to the actual meaning of the culture and the actual direction of the culture. And yet, once again, we have to have a second thought. Maybe it’s not so out of proportion as we might wish to think.

Last night there was inordinate attention to celebrity. On recent days we’ve talked about the development of micro-celebrity and now nano-celebrity. We’re looking at celebrities that are made, they are socially constructed, they are coiffed, they are airbrushed, and of course they are then paraded out in front of the audience. One of the interesting things about the Oscars ceremony is that we are now, by virtue of the rather unbelievable television coverage and the media attention, we are now taken into what’s before the comes before the what comes before the actual ceremony.

And what we’re looking at is the fact that Hollywood is throwing a giant celebration of itself. And by the way, its own self-aggrandizement comes down to the very name of the organization that holds the Oscars ceremony. It’s known as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – really? I mean arts and sciences have been traditionally a part of the university and college curriculum. Arts and sciences has been a serious intellectual investment and endeavor and now we’re talking about not something that is new – this was after all the 87th annual ceremony of the group that did name itself nearly 90 years ago – the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And as much as it’s easy to dismiss, I mean after all in the pre-publicity to the entire event there were actually major newspapers that were running articles on the slenderizing undergarments worn by some of the celebrities – female in particular – as they were to walk that carpet; all the way from the driveway into the theater where the Academy Awards was to be held.

Needless to say, we are now lightyears away from the relative humility of the Academy Awards in years past or at least decades ago. Whereas the Wall Street Journal recognized in an article on Friday, it’s almost impossible to believe an actor of the golden age of Hollywood like Jimmy Stewart having anything to do with the kind of artificial celebrity that was very much a part of the entire event last night. Given the attention one would think that what took place last night in Hollywood was at the very center of the universe, and of course it isn’t. Far more important is what happens in basically any home, in any congregation on the Lord’s Day. But in terms of the actual culture, the culture as it is consumed and as it is received by millions of Americans and then hundreds of millions beyond, the reality is that even as Hollywood is self-aggrandizing, it is in many ways the center of the culture production business – in particular Hollywood seems now to have control in the largest part of the stories that the world tells.

If we put that into perspective, it is a massive power – the power to tell the story. Those stories used to be told face-to-face around campfires and insight households, those stories used to be told in narrative form in the form of the printed book, in the form of novels and literature, the stories used to be told on dramatic stages going all the way back to ancient Greece, but those stories were told over and over again and they were seen by perhaps hundreds – eventually perhaps read by thousands. But Hollywood’s exports are now seen by millions, hundreds of millions. And we must not miss the point that if you have the power to tell the story, you have the power to shape the culture. And Hollywood believes it has that power right now, and at least a lot of what was on display last night was Hollywood bragging about the fact that it has that power.

It is the power to combine narrative and celebrity. You put those two things together in the multibillion-dollar business of Hollywood and you end up with a massively important center of cultural production. And it is not without a moral message. That’s one of the most interesting things we also see in the lead up to the Academy Awards. For instance, in the weekend edition of USA Today in the entertainment section was a headline story that reads, Pop-Culture Chips Away at the Trans Taboo it’s written by Maria Puente of USA Today and she’s telling us that Hollywood is now exercising its role to change the American mind on the issue of the transgender revolution. She says at this stage the transgender revolution is at something of a tipping point. She cites Michelle Hindley age 23, a transgender woman starring in her first feature film, who says,

“In a way all publicity is good publicity. Anyone who knows the history of this kind of moral revolution knows that’s one of the early stages – the stage at which all publicity is seen as good publicity. Just forcing the issue, forcing Americans to say the word is at least one portion of the victory, one step along the way.”

And the issue that I want us to focus on here is that Hollywood is intentionally becoming the major engine for not only telling the story, but for forcing the conversation. And that’s exactly why USA Today ran this headline article in the weekend edition. No coincidence that it came out the very weekend of the Academy Awards ceremony. Puente goes back to 1999 when Hillary Swank won an Oscar for the movie Boys Don’t Cry and she writes,

“The growing visibility of films and TV shows featuring transgender characters, actors, or both, has been having an impact.”

And of course that’s the point. That’s at least in part what Hollywood is celebrating in terms of its cultural power; what you saw on display last night. USA Today, that bills itself as the nation’s newspaper in terms of the popular sense, has been actually pointing to this for some time. USA Today a couple of years ago ran an article suggesting that when same-sex marriage is legalized coast-to-coast – something that USA Today predicted would happen, even two years ago – they said that Hollywood should serve as the honorary best man at the ceremony, since Hollywood bears an inordinate responsibility (either blame or credit depending on which side of the revolution you’re on) for forcing the revolution and fueling its velocity.

A final note on this, I want to cite an article that appeared on Salon.com by Edward Rubin. He’s writing about the fact that the 50 Shades movie has been incredibly popular, selling a good many millions of tickets even in the old so-called Bible Belt; and he exultant in this, he is very pleased with this. And as you think about the power of Hollywood just consider the moral revolution in terms of these sentences from his article. He writes that the old morality of higher purposes is being replaced by a new morality centered on human self-fulfillment. According to this rapidly advancing worldview, he says, and yes those are the very words he uses,

“…the purpose of sex is pleasure, and fulfilling sex is an important element of most people’s general life experience.”

The major point he’s making is that this idea of self-actualization or self-fulfillment is now the driving energy, the driving moral principle, of the Hollywood industry. And what I want us to note is this: the 50 Shades movie in and of itself shows the power of Hollywood to grant something of a moral permission to people who evidently are looking for moral permission from Hollywood.

And one of the most interesting things is how you trace the moral revolution looking at particular pictures you can identify – you could identify by name – saying that when that picture arrived it made a change in the culture; people bought tickets to see the movie, and they talked about the movie as if it’s a matter of art, but it’s of course far more than a matter art as art always is. Once the story is told and it gets inside the human heart the narrative as a power unto itself, and the telling of that story is an amazing power. And what we’re looking at in the current moral revolution would be unthinkable, it would be impossible, put bluntly, it just wouldn’t have happened – not without Hollywood. So if you were watching the Oscars last night and you saw that massive exercise in Hollywood self-congratulation just remembers so far as they are looking at it, they have a lot to congratulate themselves about.

2) Journalist recognizes inability of secularists to diagnose authenticity of ISIS theology

Next we’ve been talking a lot lately about the mismatch, the imbalance, between the secular worldview of the increasingly secular West and the very ardent theological worldview of a resurgent Islam. We’ve also been looking at a spate of articles indicating that there just might be something of a turn in the Western mind when it comes to understanding the theological nature of the challenge we now face. But you’re also seeing a reverberation going through the culture in which, amongst the elites, there’s an ongoing debate about whether or not they can actually deal with a theological challenge as a theological challenge; whether they can admit, at heart, that it’s actually theological.

Now if that sounds absolutely implausible just keep in mind the fact that there are many people who actually think themselves to operate in such a secular worldview that they do not have a toolkit, they don’t have any categories, for dealing with any kind of theological truth claim. And they don’t have any toolkit for understanding people who operate from a theological worldview. As we will see, that has to do with people who are far, far away, but it also to do with people who might be living right next door.

In the aftermath of that very important article I talked about last week by Graeme Wood that ran in the Atlantic, arguing that yes we should understand that the Islamic state is theological, as he says, it’s very Islamic. We also now have a response to Graeme Wood. It’s written by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig and it comes from the New Republic. She asked the question, Is ISIS Authentically Islamic? Ask Better Questions. Why? She says, if it comes to answering the question, is the Islamic state Islamic? She says, how would we, especially those in the secular press, be able to say?

When it comes to journalists and politicians, she says, whether of the left or the right, the reality is that most simply don’t have any kind of adequate theological framework for answering a question as inherently theological as the question of whether the Islamic state is actually Islamic. She writes about the kind of people who might be able to answer these questions, identifying them as religious studies scholars and theologians. But then about the question she writes,

“But these are not the kinds of questions that can be answered in the terms we rely on within the typical framework of public debate in our liberal democracy. Our public deliberation relies on the idea that ‘religion’ is a constant, stable category that can be established empirically, but is not sensitive to the internal logics of individual religions.”

Now that’s journalistic confusion for the fact that what she’s actually admitting here is that most politicians and journalist don’t know enough theology to be able to make a theological judgment. And so she warns both politicians and journalism, we had better not try to make that assessment.

She writes about Western culture, especially the Western elites, and she speaks of the influence of the enlightenment. She says,

“These Enlightenment ideas include the notion of a religious tolerance that confines certain beliefs and practices to a specifically religious sphere,”

By the way, that’s one branch of the Enlightenment we might say; that’s largely the French Enlightenment – that is not the more English speaking Enlightenment – the more conservative enlightenment that gave birth to the United States and our experiment in ordered liberty. But she doesn’t seem to acknowledge that. Instead, let me use these words again, she says that the Enlightenment ideas

“…include the notion of a religious tolerance that confines certain beliefs and practices to a specifically religious sphere,”

Now if you keep that in mind that will explain Frank Bruni’s article I cited some weeks ago in which he said that religious liberty should be confined to what happens in pews and homes and hearts. That’s that specifically religious fear. In other words, you’re free to have your religion, just keep it to yourself. But she goes on writing about these issues from the enlightenment saying it includes,

“…the idea that reason provides a stable, universally accessible guide to investigating all manner of problems.”

There you have the modern myth of universal reason. Now there is a strong biblical component of a universal understanding of reason, that God made us as rational categories, but when it comes to Western secular rationalism, that is hardly a universal worldview. She acknowledges, and this is what’s really important, the limitations of the modern secular worldview in understanding religion. In a really important sentence she writes,

“In the liberal formation, a lapsed Catholic who rarely makes it to Mass is as authentically ‘religious’ as the deeply observant Jew who never works on Shabbat. Which, for the purposes of our government, is a good thing.”

Really interesting there. Here you have a secular journalist writing for the New Republic saying that not only are most of the elites, especially in the secular spheres (politics and journalism seem to be her particular interest), incompetent to make theological judgment, she goes on to say that the entire worldview is premised upon a lack of judgment in matters of religion. Such that, and her sentence is actually brilliant, she says, to those who are steeped in this tradition a nonobservant Catholic is just as religious as an observant Jew.

Now if you take her sentence at face value – which we should, I think it’s an amazingly honest statement – you come to understand why so many of the Western elites, particularly in the most elite levels of the governmental bureaucracy in the world of journalism, can’t deal with theological issues. They simply have already decided that there are no theological issues with which to deal. Religion in their view is simply a cultural practice, it’s a cultural phenomenon and it’s something that can be understood merely by reason and something that should eventually be restricted to an entirely private sphere.

She gets right to her point when she says,

“…most of our public discussions of religion take place within this liberal framework, we lack a grammar and vocabulary for arguing about the content of religions in the public sphere. Because our presumptions about how to source religious authority are largely private and rarely interrogated in public (especially in interfaith contexts)…”

Now remember, by the way, we were quoting that Princeton professor that Graeme Wood cites, who said that the last people to understand the real theological issues are those who show up in so many interfaith circles. She seems really to understand her point when she writes,

“But most of our public discussions of religion take place within this liberal framework, we lack a grammar and vocabulary for arguing about the content of religions in the public sphere.”

So what she’s saying here, it’s a very important statement, is that these elites don’t know how to deal with the truth claims of various religious systems because having excluded issue of truth, they really don’t know what to do with truth claims.

Then finally, more or less surrendering to what she acknowledges is the problem, she says,

“A moment of high religious tension is probably not the best one in which to try to develop a public language for debating these truths.”

The final surrender comes in this line,

“And since we are neither equipped nor posed to develop such a language right now, the question of whether or not ISIS is authentically Muslim seems endlessly fraught and otiose.”

In other words, it’s useless publicly. But that just points to the problem. It’s not useless to the people who are driven by their worldview into the movement we know as the Islamic state and the larger movement of Islamic terrorism. It is simply untenable for the intellectual elites in the West to say we don’t understand what they’re about, we lack a grammar and vocabulary to understand what they’re about, so it really in the end won’t matter what they’re about. Oh, yes it will; as the headlines every day seem to show.

3) Digital migration of social interaction results in difficulty in developing close friends

Finally, last Wednesday saw a very important article appeared in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. It should the attention of us all, but in particular it should have the attention of parents. The headline is, Wanted: A Best Friend, it’s written by Sue Shellenberger and she writes this,

“Parents and psychologists are discussing a subtle concern: Children today face a lot of obstacles to having a best friend.”

This is a really interesting article. It tells us that many children, many children especially in the elementary and middle school and even high school years, now lack what most of us had during those years and that is a set of friends and even a best friend. A conversational friend that was known and looked back to, even in adulthood, as someone who was not only a friend, but a very close friend – an important part of our childhood, an important part of our adolescents, an important part of our growing up.

As Shellenbarger writes,

“Many forces are contributing, from the much-discussed rising screen time and less free neighborhood playtime to the growth of team sports and changes in how schools organize classes. Parents can help their children overcome the hurdles, researchers say, by helping them learn the nuances of finding and keeping close friends, and not by intervening in playground battles.”

In a very important paragraph she writes,

“Having a best friend has a bigger influence on children than shallower friendships, research shows. It buffers a child from stress, loneliness, teasing and abuse by peers. Children with best friends tend to be kinder and friendlier and have a better reputation on the playground. They also have less depression and anxiety through adolescence and beyond, research shows.”

Now one of the major insights in this article is the twofold development of problems that are keeping children from developing friendships. And they are documented in this article. The first is, as she says, the documentation of rising screen time. And it’s not just the time. One of the things the article documents is the migration of friendship from real-life face-to-face conversations and spending time together in space and time and history rather to a digital presence. Shellenbarger writes,

“While texting and social networking online can help maintain close friendships when children are apart, online connections also put pressure on children to have a larger number of shallow contacts.”

This is really interesting,

“A 2012 Stanford University study of 3,461 girls ages 8 to 12 found those who spent a lot of time multitasking online had fewer and poorer-quality friendships.”

The second documented issue is that of organized sports and other activities for so many children. The article cites Fred Frankel, the author of the book Friends Forever who writes that spending more time of extracurricular activities and sports is draining time from best friends too. In his words,

“Teams are overall a good thing, and a place to meet potential friends, but they don’t replace the benefits of a best friend. Many psychologists agree that having a best friend is one of the most significant social outcomes of childhood.”

When we think about the price that our children and adolescents pay for modernity, this is one of the prices we need very much to keep in mind. And I think it’s really good for all of us, especially those operating from the biblical worldview, to understand that friendship is not merely some kind of social convenience, it is a reminder that we are created in God’s image as relational creatures and we need the relationships that are rightly defined as friendships. One of the interesting lamentable aspects of all this is that many of the parents who had best friends as children are not noticing that their own children don’t have best friends. I guess I can remember the good old days when parents were worried about what friends their kids have, now there’s an even greater poverty of kids who simply don’t have friends and that is more than a tragedy .

 

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 last Saturday we released another in the installment of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. We also, for upcoming programs, want your question. 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.

 

Post-Protestantism’s Anxious Age: A Conversation with Joseph Bottum

The Briefing 02-23-15

1) Oscars reveal extent of Hollywood influence through control of stories world tells

An Oscar Moment Before the Selfie Age, Wall Street Journal (Bob Greene)

“50 Shades” of Confederate grey: Why the Christian right is losing power over Southern morality, Salon (Edward L. Rubin)

2) Journalist recognizes inability of secularists to diagnose authenticity of ISIS theology

Is ISIS Authentically Islamic? Ask Better Questions., New Republic (Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig)

3) Digital migration of social interaction results in difficulty in developing close friends

How to Find a Best Friend, Wall Street Journal (Sue Shellenbarger)

Genesis 11-22