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

Transcript: The Briefing 02-04-15

The Briefing

 

February 4, 2015

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

 

It’s Wednesday, February 4, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Islamic State execution of Jordanian hostage reveals moral asymmetry in fight against evil

The very idea of terror is to create an act that is so horrifying, so barbaric, and so repulsive, that people will decide to make political change because of the very nature of the terroristic threat. One of the realities we now face in terms of the current reality of terrorism is that certain terrorist groups have so escalated the barbarism that it’s almost impossible to imagine just what might come next.

The latest example of this came yesterday when the nation of Jordan responded to the apparent execution of one of its captured pilots by the Islamic State. In this case, it was an execution by being burned alive. The act itself is simply so repulsive, so horrifying, that it’s hard to imagine that even a group like the Islamic State could come up with something more evil to follow this evil. But even as intelligence agencies are trying to do their very best to verify and validify the video that was released by the Islamic State, the reality is almost everyone worldwide is assuming this is all too real. And that includes the nation of Jordan.

One of the defense agency spokespersons for the Jordanian government, Col. Mamdouh al Ameri, said,

“The revenge will be as big as the calamity that has hit Jordan,”

But that raises a different issue in terms of the moral issue of terrorism. The nations that are affected by this kind of terrorism, in this case the nation of Jordan, that nation cannot, in terms of its own morality, respond in kind. It simply can’t respond with an identical act in order to answer this act of evil. A government spokesman said that the Jordanian government would deliver “a strong earthshaking and decisive response” but no one knows exactly what that might be.

One of the things that became very clear in the first decade of the 20th century is what some defense analyst in the United States called asymmetrical warfare. Asymmetrical warfare is the distinction between a state that is a government on the one hand, and a terrorist organization, without a state, on the other. There of courses is an asymmetry of legitimacy and asymmetry of authority, but there is also an asymmetry of morality.

From a Christian worldview perspective one of the hardest things to imagine is how indeed the civilized world, as we know it, can respond to such an uncivilized act. Even as we say that we know that’s a euphemism; it’s an understatement. And we’re becoming more and more accustomed to this kind of understatement. One came yesterday from US President Barack Obama who said of those who committed this almost unspeakable act “whatever ideology they’re operating off of, it’s bankrupt.”

One of the things we’ve been noting is this President and his administration’s reluctance to deal with the actuality of this kind of terror in terms of the evil – the necessary moral judgment of evil that can only be the appropriate response. The President did speak of the video as revealing “viciousness and barbarity,” of the Islamic State militants. But he doesn’t even refer to them as the Islamic State, preferring most of the time to refer to them as ISIS – by their acronym. But the bigger problem here is the use of the language of moral bankruptcy. Moral bankruptcy is simply not an adequate moral judgment on the kind of worldview that would lead to the video that was released by the Islamic State yesterday.

There’s something woefully inadequate about that moral judgment, and not only inadequate, there’s something morally dangerous about that kind of moral understatement. Because if we don’t call things by their proper name, we are really in big trouble as a civilization – because the refusal to call things by their proper name sets up a moral change in the culture, a moral restatement of the calculus. It becomes something different simply because we are reluctant to state what it is. We have seen that in terms as we have said, of the euphemism when it comes to many sins – whether it’s adultery or abortion.

But one of the most frightening aspects of this particular story is what we’re noticing as, not only the defining of terrorism down and the defining of evil in terms of something else, but the fact that there is a desensitization that simply creaks into this equation. As more and more casualties of these terrorist groups pileup, there is almost an involuntary loss of the sensitivity to every one of these acts, to every one of these videos, to every one of these deaths – and yet we know that’s morally wrong. But we’re living in a world that right now is giving us information overload when it comes to atrocities. And what you have is an escalation in terms of the terroristic atrocities to the point that terrorist group such as the Islamic State are having to come up with newer and more barbarous forms of barbarism; newer and even more evil forms of evil.

Which reminds me of what the apostle Paul speaks of in Romans 1 when in his catalog of the ills – the sins of humanity – in his catalog of what human sinfulness looks like, he describes human beings as inventors of evil things. Tragically, horrifyingly enough, that wasn’t just true of those alive when Paul wrote that letter to the Romans, it’s all too evident in the news that broke from the nation of Jordan just yesterday.

2) UK authorizes three parent embryo fertilization, neglects ethical challenges of research 

Next, a major story coming out of United Kingdom when it comes to bioethics, that is the ethics of life. As The Guardian their reports,

“[The House of Commons has now] …voted in favour of making Britain the first country in the world to permit IVF babies to be created using biological material from three different people to help prevent serious genetic diseases.”

That according to Rowena Mason and Hannah Devlin writing for The Guardian. As they report,

“In a historic [vote], the House of Commons voted by 382 to 128 – a majority of 254 – to allow mitochondrial donation through a controversial amendment to the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. They approved the regulation in spite of some critics warning it was a step towards creating ‘three-parent’ designer babies.”

Now you’ll notice something very interesting in that paragraph. It says that the House of Commons approved the regulation, again I quote,

“…in spite of some critics warning it was a step toward creating three parent designer babies.”

What we need to note is that’s not just something being said by critics, that is actually something being acknowledged by the proponents of this legislation, because by any genetic measure this does create babies which will have three genetic parents.

The measure was backed by Britain’s Tory government – one of the things for us to remember of course is that anything that is backed by the government by a binding vote has to pass in House of Commons simply because you only gain the government authority there by having majority in the House of Commons – so when you have the British Prime Minister putting forth legislation it’s legislation that virtually can’t lose. And in this case, the government’s legislation did pass – and historically so yesterday.

There is an issue here when it comes to these mitochondrial diseases. Mitochondria include genetic information that is usually found in the cell wall and that becomes very important in in vitro fertilization. The possibility that arises that one could take the cell wall from one woman and the genetic material inside the cell from another woman when one is involved in the process of in vitro fertilization. There is no doubt that these mitochondrial diseases are real and it would aid human flourishing if these diseases were to be eradicated. The real problem when it comes to so many of these issues is the question of whether or not the actual technology or the mechanism being proposed brings bigger moral problems than the problem it is seeking to solve.

One of the big lessons from the action in the United Kingdom yesterday is that the House of Commons seems to have confused the issue, even in terms of what actually is being dealt with in the legislation. Some conservative members of the House of Commons are very clear to say this is not just a step toward genetic manipulation; this is by its very definition genetic manipulation. There is no other moral category for it. Furthermore, there is the reality that this would be a child that will be born with three genetic parents – two in the main, providing most of the genetic information, but the donor of the new mitochondrial information would also be a genetic donor and would also be in that sense a genetic parent.

And what is also not recognized by many in looking at this proposal is that this change in the genetic information would not only be passed on to the child that is the product of in vitro fertilization, but to every child born to that child and to every descendent thereafter. This would create something new in terms of human experience – not new in the last 10 years, not new in the last generation, but new in terms of humanity. And that would be a human being whose genetic information is drawn not from two but from more than two human individuals – otherwise, previously in human experience, known as parents.

American Christians looking at this need to recognize something further. There’s a very interesting news aspect of this story because almost universally the story is being reported as the United Kingdom – that is Britain – becoming the very first nation to authorize or to legalize this kind of technology. And it is, so far as one can tell, it’s the very first country to authorize it. But one of the things we need to note is that just because one country has made something legal doesn’t mean that it’s actually illegal elsewhere.

In the United States of America most American Christians are unaware of the fact that there are virtually no laws what so ever limiting any kind of genetic experimentation. There’s not a law in terms of any kind of binding legislation against even something like human cloning. That’s why in much of Europe the United States is known as not only the home of the Wild Wild West, but as itself, the Wild Wild West of genetic technologies and human reproductive technologies. So in United States right now there is no law against what was just made legal by the British government in the United Kingdom. That doesn’t mean however that Americans can be involved in this technology, not so much because of legislation, but because of the bureaucratic power of group such as the Food and Drug Administration, which at this point has to approve any kind of medical treatment of this sort. But one of the things we need to note is that there are no inherent limitations on the kind of experimentation that might take place in America laboratories, at least by legislation.

The United Kingdom has something that the United States doesn’t have and that is a human embryology of fertilization authority: an official legal agency, in effect, a government agency dealing with these kinds of questions. In the United States there isn’t even at this point a moral consensus to have such an authority. And one of the big problems that would then be faced is if we did have the moral consensus to create such an authority, there wouldn’t be – there isn’t at least to this point – a moral consensus about the kinds of decisions that kind of authority would make.

Back during administration of George W. Bush as President of the United States, a presidential commission was authorized and it served trying to answer these questions. But that commission was virtually overlooked and neglected by Congress. And what we have in the United States Congress right now is a lack of consensus, not only what comes to matters economic and political, but biomedical as well; even issues of life and death. Just consider the issue of abortion. A society that doesn’t have common mind on the eve of abortion is going be hard-pressed to come up with anything like a common mind when it comes to something as complicated as mitochondrial DNA.

3) Conservative and liberal definitions of right and wrong shows moral influence of worldview

While we’re thinking about the importance of worldview, a couple stories appeared simultaneously in the New York Times over the weekend in the Sunday edition of that paper. One was entitled, The Myth of the Harmless Wrong. It’s by Kurt Gray, who was an assistant professor of psychology at the University North Carolina Chapel Hill. He’s arguing that there really is the myth of the so-called victimless crime. Now it’s a very complicated article to try and get down to the simplicity of the article. He’s arguing that both liberals and conservatives actually follow the same kind of logical reasoning. He refers to it as dyadic completion – which is to say it’s a moral equation in which you have an act on the one hand and its perceived victim on the other. The act only takes on moral meaning – whether you are a liberal or conservative according to the scholar – if there is a victim to the act; if there is indeed a victim to what might be called the crime or the wrong.

One of the interesting points made by Prof. Gray is that if you’re talking about a moral equation, harm really is a very important category. Because when you’re pointing out why something is wrong, the moral reflexes is to say it’s wrong because these people are harmed by the action; this person is harmed by what you propose to do. And of course in terms of most moral issues, that works pretty well because we can point immediately from the act to the harm.

There are several really fascinating things in this article by Prof. Gray that appeared again in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. As he writes,

“Victims — like beauty — are often in the eye of the beholder. In a series of recent studies published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, we found that all our participants, liberals and conservatives alike, genuinely perceived victims in acts that they considered to be immoral. Even ostensibly ‘victimless’ behaviors like necrophilia were seen to involve injured parties.”

That’s when Professor Gray says that both liberals and conservatives are involved in this dyadic completion. He says whether liberal or conservative, people understand immorality through a universal template – a dyad of perpetrator and victim.

Now given the fact that Professor Gray is writing in the New York Times, he knows he’s writing primarily to the left. That’s very explicit in his article. He says to those on the political and the moral left, ‘look, when conservatives talk about same-sex marriage or something like pornography, and they talk about victims, it is because they really believe those victims exist’ and on the other hand he says when liberals also talk about acts they considered to be wrong, they usually speak in terms of the same kind of victims. And it’s just a different sort of moral conclusion, he says, reached by the very same form of reasoning – this dyadic completion.

So why are we talking about it today on The Briefing? It’s because this Professor really does get to something of vital importance. He writes this,

“Liberals and conservatives may disagree on specific issues, but fundamentally they have the same moral mind. Both demonstrate dyadic completion. Conservatives may see immorality and harm in homosexuality and gun control, and liberals may see immorality and harm in religion in schools and genetically modified foods.”

So it really is interesting that here you have a writer, an academic, writing in the New York Times in the op-ed piece that appeared in Sunday, suggesting that worldview matters hugely. The liberal and conservative worldviews may have a similar structure but there’s a different input and there’s a different output, simply because of that worldview itself. When it comes to moral issues, he says, ‘Look, both Liberals and Conservatives believe that the things that they believe are wrong have very real victim,’ and here is he is clearly writing to the left saying, ‘look, when people on the right say that they believe these things cause harm, they really believe they do cause harm.’

And when it comes to an issue like same-sex marriage, the redefinition of marriage itself, one of the very key insights in this article is that when those who defend a traditional understanding of marriage – that is the understanding of marriage that has pertained through human history for over two millennia, that definition of marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman – there is an understanding of a harm that will come to society and the members of society by that redefinition of marriage. And that gets to this issue; that harm is not something you can always draw a direct line from in terms of ‘a’ to ‘b.’ You can’t simply point to a future individual and say that individual is going to suffer this measurable harm. It is the point that in society at large this will lead to an entire array of cultural restructurings of the breakdown of the family, of the fracturing of relationships, of the confusions of gender that can only lead to harm.

And that’s where, at least in part, liberals ought to recognize some of their own reasoning when it comes to other structural issues of injustice or economic morality. Because they too aren’t able to point directly to individual harm but what they say will be the necessary harm of such a policy. But what we see here is what is affirmed again and again, in terms of the importance of thinking through a consistently Christian worldview, because that worldview is going to determine how you define moral acts, how you understand what morality is, how you would define harm and what will cause that harm.

4) Judges more conservative than lawyers, study a commendation of democratic separation of powers

Add to that that other article that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times; it is entitled Why Judges Tilt to the Right. Your first question may be, ‘They do?’ Well, as it turns out, what’s being discussed here is the contrast between the worldview of lawyers and the worldview of judges. And in terms of empirical research, it turns out that lawyers are significantly, as a group, to the left – that is more liberal of those who serve as judges. And that leads to an interesting question; that question is: why?

The article is by Adam Liptak, veteran legal reporter for the New York Times, and he points out something that most of us probably knew ahead of time and that is that the legal profession tilts left; tilts hugely left. Citing a significant recent study, Liptak writes,

“Every subgroup of practicing lawyers examined by the study was more liberal than the general population. Public defenders and government lawyers generally were particularly liberal, as were women and the graduates of top law schools. But prosecutors and law firm partners were pretty liberal, too.”

And then when it comes law professors, even more liberal. As he writes,

“Law professors, too, are quite likely to lean left, a finding that matched those in earlier studies. Indeed, when Professor Posner and a colleague, Adam S. Chilton, tried to assess whether the liberal tilt of the legal academy affected its scholarship, they had a hard time finding law professors at the top 14 law schools who had contributed more to Republican candidates than to Democratic ones.”

This gets back to two other stories that have alarmed us of late; one was one that appeared about in October of last year indicating that on a recent college campus they had tried to measure the effect of pornography on young men by measuring against young men who hadn’t been exposed to pornography – only the study failed because they couldn’t find any. And then another study from the Pacific Northwest came out saying that they were trying to measure among elderly women the effect of marijuana use and they had a hard time finding elderly women in one community who hadn’t – at least at some point in their lives – smoked marijuana.

The study that Adam Liptak cites here has been replicated over and over again, especially in the four last presidential cycles where when it comes to Ivy League faculties as a whole – indeed when it comes to the largest 25 universities in America as a whole – when you look at the contributions made politically by faculty members, they not only tilt left – that is to say they tilt Democratic – they tilt overwhelmingly in that direction. So much so that one is hard-pressed in some departments to find a single individual who made a contribution to a Republican candidate.

And what we’re looking at here is a very clear financial and traceable indication of the kind of ideological bias that Adam Liptak is talking about. But he’s talking about the difference between lawyers and judges which gets to the point: why would judges be more conservative than lawyers? His answer is, because lawyers don’t always get to choose the judges. That’s an important insight. In much of Europe lawyers do choose the judges. It’s not a political process, the government in terms of elected representatives has very little to do with naming judges in some countries. But in the United States it’s different and was intended to be that way by the framers of the Constitution.

Eric Posner – whose father is a very famous federal judge himself – points out that this could be seen as a flaw in the system. But as Professor Posner told Adam Liptak, an equally powerful case could be made for viewing courts as politicized if they failed to reflect the ideology of people generally. He said,

“On this view we should congratulate rather than condemn Republicans for bringing much-needed ideological balance to the judiciary.”

One thing to look at here is the impact, as we’ve discussed over and over again, of the educational environment upon those who are produced by that educational institution. That’s why it’s so important to recognize that the worldview that gets inculcated on the college and University campus inevitably, eventually rules the culture. And when it comes to law schools, as this evidence indicates, they’re often even to the left of the rest of the University campus.

So when we think about the courts as they are today – indeed I think millions of Americans no doubt will be shocked by the headline of this story suggesting the judges tilt to the right – the comparison is with two different issues. Number one: where the court would be if the lawyers chose them. And secondly: where the courts now are when it comes to much of Europe. And it shows once again the wisdom of the framers of the United States Constitution with the separation of powers and their trust in elected representatives. When it comes to the highest and most responsible lawyers, lawyers who will sit on the federal courts and lawyers who will set ultimately on Supreme Court of the United States, they didn’t leave the people out. By their elected representatives, the people have a voice. And so the story, which perhaps more than anything else in recent times, affirms just why that decision was so wise and why even today it’s so important.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the resumption of the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. The first new edition will come out in the new series on February 14. Call with your question, in your voice, to 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 tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 02-04-15

1) Islamic State execution of Jordanian hostage reveals moral asymmetry in fight against evil

Islamic State video purports to show Jordanian pilot burnt alive, Reuters (Staff)

Obama decries hateful ideology after Jordanian pilot’s death, Washington Post (AP)

2) UK authorizes three parent embryo fertilization, neglects ethical challenges of research 

MPs vote in favour of ‘three-person embryo’ law, The Guardian (Rowena Mason and Hannah Devlin)

How a baby can have three parents, The Economist

3) Conservative and liberal definitions of right and wrong shows moral influence of worldview

The Myth of the Harmless Wrong, New York Times (Kurt Gray)

4) Judges more conservative than lawyers, study a commendation of democratic separation of powers

Why Judges Tilt to the Right, New York Times (Adam Liptak)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 02-03-15

The Briefing

 

February 3, 2015

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

 

It’s Tuesday, February 3, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Obama budget proposal reveals worldview and philosophy of government

President Obama yesterday presented a budget. As Julie Hirschfield Davis of the New York Times reports, it is more a utopian vision than a pragmatic blueprint – and that’s really saying something considering that’s coming from the New York Times. As Davis explains,

“It proposes a politically improbable reshaping of the tax code and generous new social spending initiatives that would shift resources from the wealthy to the middle class.”

Actually, those last words are something of a questionable statement. But certainly that’s the point that President Obama was seeking to make in terms of releasing his budget. His budget was a $4 trillion blockbuster, and indeed it does bust the budget.

Every Christian couple knows that when setting a family budget you’re making a very important worldview statement. You really find out what you believe when you make your spending priorities. Sometimes, in all honesty, you see it in retrospect when you see where your money has gone. There you have a revelation of your actual priorities, the priorities that reveal something of an economic x-ray of your own worldview priorities as well.

The same thing is true of the national government; its philosophy of governing shows forth in its budget, its priorities are very clear in what is budgeted. The vast majority of the United States budget is not discretionary at all. For the better part of the last half of the 20th century and now into the 21st century, most of the budget is established by mandated payments on the national debt and even more importantly, payments for various entitlement programs.

The actual discretionary portion of the budget is very small and that’s exactly what President Obama seems to be very frustrated by. He is seeking to overcome what he called “mindless austerity” in terms of the kinds of budget caps that have been placed by Congress in recent years, and he’s called for a rather significant increase in spending. And even as the New York Times said, it is indeed “more utopian vision than pragmatic blueprint.”

Again, taking the example to the family, sometimes a proposed budget is a way of starting a discussion, maybe even prompting an argument, and that’s exactly true in the political context of Congress. President Obama is clearly intending to start an argument and it’s an argument he really doesn’t have with Congress as much as, like many other Presidents, the President is actually starting an argument that he hopes will win the hearts and minds of the American people.

It is very interesting that he used this expression of “mindless austerity” in terms of previous budget caps just days after the Greek people elected a far left government precisely in opposition to financial austerity. But let’s look at that phrase for just a moment: “mindless austerity.” In terms of the American budget, not to mention the Greece, but in terms of the US government’s budget, what does that ‘mindless austerity’ mean? It means slowing down our failure to pay the obligations of the future. In other words that ‘mindless austerity’ is nowhere close, regardless of what either party claims, to meaning that the United States government is spending only what it takes in. That hasn’t been true for a very long time. We are shifting a massive debt to our own children and grandchildren. The real question, regardless of which party is making the argument, is exactly how much of that debt is to be increased, handed off to our children and grandchildren?

A couple of footnotes in terms of this particular story – there is a wide bipartisan appeal to shifting the corporate tax code in some way; modifying it. The essential issue in the corporate tax code is that there is an enormous incentive right now to American corporations keeping their cash offshore – outside the United States – so that it is not taxed at the levels of the United States in terms of corporate taxation. Now what we’re looking at is a world situation in which even if governments may keep corporations captive, they can’t keep capital captive. The capital will flow to where there is least resistance and greatest opportunity for profit. And that’s the real danger to the United States in terms of our corporate tax code.

That very high rate of corporate taxation is now leading to many corporations keeping the money offshore. President Obama is threatening, or promising – proposing you might say – a massive one-time corporate tax. And yet it’s almost surely dead on arrival in Congress and there is a good chance that President Obama’s really counting on that – which is another part of the lesson to be learned here. Sometimes the argument is to be overheard rather than heard. Sometimes, when you’re looking at something like this, it really isn’t an effort on the part of President Obama to get a budget through Congress. Sometimes it’s an effort to make a political statement, and in this case – once again, it’s very telling that even the New York Times knows that – this is a utopian statement rather than a very serious presidential budgetary proposal.

But the other footnote here is also important. In terms of this kind of political dynamic, it often really doesn’t matter all that much what the President says or what, in response, congressional leaders might say. What matters in the greatest sense is what happens behind closed doors. And in those closed door discussions there’s likely to be a very long process of working out what eventually might be expected to be a proposal that will meet with some kind of agreement by the White House and Republican leaders in both houses of Congress.

But make no mistake, even as there is politics going down here on both sides, the reality is there is a worldview issue being hammered out here as well – just like for our family budget or a church budget, the budget of the United States reflects its priorities and also reflects its understanding of the future and its commitment to – or lack of commitment to – any kind of financial responsibility. Perhaps more pressing it also indicates whether we’re willing to pay our bills or to shift those cost to our children and grandchildren. It’s been the shifting to future generations that’s been the practice of recent years, and if that pattern holds, it is really setting up our children and our descendants beyond for a financial disaster.

2) Father of the Pill, who enabled division between sex and procreation, dies

From time to time I’ve remarked that some of the most important articles that appear in newspapers are not new stories but obituaries. One of the obituaries that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times is this: Carl Djerassi, 91, a Creator of the Birth Control Pill, Dies. Many people reading these obituaries, especially in a newspaper of record such as the New York Times, are not familiar with the fact that these obituaries are largely written in advance – they have to be. It would be virtually impossible in just a quick matter of days to accumulate the amount of information and reflection that is necessary for this kind of obituary. Instead what you have are vaults, effectively, of obituaries that are written in advance and then finished when the occasion arises. And that tells you something, it tells you that an obituary of this size, published in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, indicates that long before Dr. Dejerassi died the editors of the Times had decided his would be a death worth noting.

Robert D. McFadden writing for the Times tells us,

“Carl Djerassi, an eminent chemist who 63 years ago synthesized a hormone that changed the world by creating the key ingredient for the oral contraceptive known as ‘the Pill,’ died on Friday at his home in San Francisco. He was 91.”

Dr. Djerassi, as McFadden reports,

“…arrived in America as World War II engulfed Europe, [he was] a 16-year-old Austrian Jewish refugee who, with his mother, lost their last $20 to a swindling New York cabdriver. He [later] wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt [the First Lady of the United States], asking for assistance, and obtained a college scholarship.

As McFadden says,

“It was a little help that made a big difference.”

We have observed, as necessary, from time to time the fact that it was the development of the oral contraceptive known as the Pill that became the technological catalyst for the sexual revolution. You couldn’t have that revolution without that little pill. And as McFadden writes about Dr. Djerassi, he obtained a patent on the very first antihistamine but he’s more famous for the fact that his work on the science of birth control is, as McFadden says,

“…helped engender enormous controversies and social changes, altering sexual and reproductive practices, family economics and the working lives of millions of women around the world.”

Now by any honest estimation it is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of the Pill. Not so much medically and technologically as morally and in terms of social change.

In another interesting twist on how the Pill as we know it, the oral contraceptive came to be, is the fact that there have been people who been hoping for such a pill for a very long time and yet as is so often the case, it wasn’t a search for the Pill that led to the Pill – rather it was a search for fertility drugs that eventually led to the opposite effect; it was the search for fertility drug, an interest in what was believed to be a fertility drug, that led to the oral contraceptive.

As McFadden writes,

“Scientists had long known that high levels of estrogen and progesterone inhibited ovulation. But synthesizing them from animal or plant extracts had proved expensive and ineffective for use as oral contraceptives.”

He goes on to write,

“The synthesis by Dr. Djerassi and his colleagues, Dr. George Rosenkranz and the student, Luis E. Miramontes, was economical and effective for oral use. All three names went on the patent.”

Then he writes,

“At first, the team deemed it a breakthrough for fertility, not birth control. While its significance as a pregnancy inhibitor was soon recognized, five years of trials were needed to demonstrate its relative safety and effectiveness. Even then, drug companies were reluctant to market the Pill, fearing boycotts of their products by religious groups and others opposed to birth control.”

One other footnote in terms of how the oral contraceptive came to be so much a part of American culture: when it was first released for medical use it was authorized for use and prescription only for married women – claimed to be intended only for married women. And when the decision was handed down by the Supreme Court the decision known as Griswold in the 1960s, striking down any law against availability for the oral contraceptive, it struck down only those laws restricting availability of the Pill to married women. It took a subsequent Supreme Court decision sometime later to include all women in terms of its sweeping judgment.

The obituary of Dr. Carl Djerassi gets to the point of just how transformative the Pill was in terms of the moral equation when McFadden writes,

“Use of the Pill spread rapidly, producing vast economic and social effects. It gave women unprecedented control over fertility, separating sex from procreation. It let couples plan pregnancies and regulate family size, and women plan educations and careers. It also generated debates over promiscuity and the morality of birth control.”

Now that’s a very revealing statement. It’s a really accurate statement. The New York Times deserves credit for getting the point of the obituary of Dr. Carl Djerassi as it relates to the history of the Pill and its effect. You’ll notice a couple of expressions in this obituary that are not commonly acknowledged by the secular press or for that matter the secular culture. One thing is, and to cite the exact words again, it separated sex from procreation. That is exactly the point. That separation had not actually been effective for humanity from the very origins of humanity and Adam and Eve in the Garden all the way down to the 1960s. Which raises another point that should be emphatically clear in this obituary – we’re talking about a fairly recent moral revolution. We’re talking about a moral revolution that is younger than I am. And even as that benchmark loses its cogency year-by-year, the reality is we’re talking about something that is barely a half a century old and yet people alive today, thinking of the Pill as just a part of the sociological furniture around us, failed to understand that this massive revolutionary transformation is – at least in most cases – younger than their grandparents, if not their parents.

So once again an obituary tells us something of our own times, the passing of Dr. Carl Djerassi last Friday and his obituary that appeared over the weekend in the New York Times tells us that a moral transformation, a revolution that has been underway for some time, was tremendously accelerated by this technological advance. A technological advance that was first considered to be a boost to fertility, not to the avoidance of children, but as the article says, did separate for the first time in human history effectively, sex from procreation. And as for the impact of that, it is impossible to calculate.

3) Houston woman’s ‘self-marriage’ reveals irrationality of society without definition of marriage

Milestones of the moral revolution seem to be occurring at rapid speed and frankly all around us – even in some unexpected places, in some unexpected ways. Here’s a headline that first appears to be something like clickbait on a comedy website; the headline, Houston woman marries herself in elaborate ceremony. But this isn’t a comedy website, it’s the Houston Chronicle; the newspaper of record of Houston, Texas. Reporter Craig Hlavaty reports in the January 26 edition of that paper,

“A woman who vowed that she would marry herself if she didn’t find love by the time she turned 40, actually married herself earlier this month in a lavish ceremony here in Houston, according to reports.”

Now, one of the first things we need to say in response to that sentence is: once again, just because someone calls something marriage doesn’t make it marriage – in particular what we would think would be the universally ludicrous idea of marrying oneself. But as much as this story, at least in terms of his headline, might appear to be something marginal that we could ignore the actual content of the article says it’s probably not.

Houston Chronicle reports,

“Yasmin Eleby married herself at the Houston Museum of African American Culture on January 3 in a lavish ceremony with10 bridesmaids in attendance, plus family and other guests on hand to celebrate the event.”

So we have a massive pseudo-wedding in which a woman is marrying herself. The actual expectation of this woman in terms of what that is supposed to mean is never made clear anywhere in the article, which once again, appeared in Houston Chronicle. The newspaper considered this story newsworthy, otherwise it wouldn’t have sent a reporter and it wouldn’t have reported it. But the newspaper itself seems to lack any understanding of exactly what to do with this story.

I think the most important paragraph is probably this:

“According to John Guess Jr., the CEO of the complex [that is the Houston Museum of African American Culture], the event was very much in line with the forward thinking normally found at the HMAAC, which welcomes and invites people of all sexual orientations to enjoy and rent the facility. The surrounding community, Guess Jr. says, has fully embraced the HMAAC.”

What in the world does that mean? Again, this is a major American newspaper putting its own reputation on the line by running this as a serious new story – which it intends it to be. And horrifyingly enough, apparently it is.

So when you think about the moral revolution and exactly where it’s headed, just keep in mind the CEO of this Museum in Houston that says that this woman marrying herself in this elaborate ceremony on the grounds of this institution  “is very much in line with the forward thinking normally found that the institution” and then consider what in the world it would mean for him to say that it’s a demonstration of the fact that the museum “welcomes and invites people of all sexual orientations to enjoy and rent the facility.” Does this now represent some new sexual orientation? If so, what would it be? It’s certainly not named in the article.

My purpose in raising this article is certainly not to be salacious and it’s not frankly just to point at this woman and the very odd spectacle of her marrying herself, at least in her own mind, it’s not just to point to this as an indication of the cultural confusion around us, it is to point to something that’s even far deeper. Here you have a situation in which no one present seems to have thought there was necessarily anything wrong with what was going on. As a matter of fact, from the woman and her family members, to those who served as her bridesmaids, to the director of the facility, they seem to think that this is just the next thing to celebrate.

What this really demonstrates is that once a society is lost a stable definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, there is nothing that becomes incomprehensible. There is nothing that then appears to be irrational. There’s nothing that won’t be, at some point, on the list of the next thing to be celebrated in terms of a forward thinking institution – such as this director claims that his Museum in Houston certainly is: forward thinking, so forward thinking as to embrace this because they embrace all sexual orientations. Whatever we might ask this supposedly sexual orientation is.

And just to put this in context, imagine that you had heard about this story two or three years ago. If you can imagine back that long in moral terms. You probably would’ve thought that such an article would’ve appeared on a tabloid or something that was openly satirical – not to be taken as real. But in this case, you know it’s real, you know it has the ring of truth – not just because it appeared in Houston Chronicle, but because it absolutely makes sense given the trajectory of our times.

4) Impact of  24/7 economy on family structures cannot be ignored

Finally when it comes to the massive changes experienced by the family, most of them devastating at least in part in recent years, it’s important to recognize that there are legitimate arguments brought by both the left and the right in terms of what has happened to the family and why. One of the strongest arguments made by conservatives is that eventually, culture determines the shape of the family. A series of personal disciplines and moral choices eventually creates the reality of the family. One of the very cogent arguments made by the left is that you cannot take economics out of the picture. That vast economic disruption inevitably affects the family.

One of the most important issues for America’s future is establishing a conversation that allows both of these arguments to be made in a rational context in which the arguments can be made and in which these issues can be debated with the family, with strengthening the family, as a common concern. One of the arguments made by the left is that the disruption of a market economy has led to damages to the family that involve the fact that marriage has largely been marginalized by its lack of economic importance in this period of economic transformation. And furthermore, that the family’s been weekend by an economy that threatens to pull parents away from children and eventually, all family members apart from each other.

Anyone really concerned about the family and children has to look seriously at those arguments as well. All you have to do is look at an article that appeared in the weekend edition of the Financial Times from London to understand that there is an argument to be made; that there are certain economic forces in this society that really are tearing the family apart. In the businesslike section of the weekend edition of the Financial Times, there is a headline: Night at the Nursery that Stays Open. It is by Emma Jacobs and it’s about a childcare facility in London that offers 24 hour childcare. It shows as the picture for the article 3 rather adorable preschoolers who are brushing their teeth before being put to bed – but not at home with their parents, but rather in a day care facility in London.

As Jacob writes,

“It is 6.30pm on Friday night. As millions down their proverbial tools, don their glad rags or slump in front of the television, in a Victorian house in Catford, southeast London, they are gearing up to work. Here, amid the brightly coloured building blocks and finger paints, Maria Quiroga, the manager of Baytree House nursery, is shepherding a trio of three-year-olds into the bathroom to brush their teeth. Upstairs, toddler-sized beds are made, story books chosen.”

She goes on to write,

“These children have been dropped off by their night-working parents. The nursery offers 24-hour childcare, seven days a week, in response to shifting working patterns. While standard childcare hours tend to be 7am to 7pm, or more typically, 8am to 6pm, this nursery wants to accommodate parents’ hours by taking children at 6am and allowing pickups as late as midnight. In a few cases, as with the children being cajoled into bed tonight, they sleep overnight on the premises.”

Now in terms of the picture here we know in our hearts it’s not good. This isn’t the way it should be. We really do know that these children belong at home with their parents. We can be thankful that at least right now they have a warm bed and a safe place. But we know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.

Quite honestly we’ve all come to depend upon that 24/7 economy and for one thing there is good many seminary students able to find employment at odd hours precisely because of that economy and employers willing to hire them for those late-night shifts. Perhaps we ought to remember that sometimes when we order something in the middle the night, just taking for granted that 24/7 economy, we should reflect at least on the fact it does come with real costs.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. We’re glad to announce the resumption of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition, the first new edition will come out February 14, that’s a Saturday morning. Remember to call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. I’m looking forward to resuming the program of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition.

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 tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Table of the Nations, The Tower of Babel, and the Marriage Supper of the Lamb: Ethnic Diversity and the Radical Vision of the Gospel of Jesus Christ

The Briefing 02-03-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Obama budget proposal reveals worldview and philosophy of government

 In Budget, Obama’s Unfettered Case for Spreading the Wealth, New York Times (Julie Hirschfield Davis)

2) Father of the Pill, who enabled division between sex and procreation, dies

Carl Djerassi, 91, a Creator of the Birth Control Pill, Dies, New York Times (Robert D. McFadden)

3) Houston woman’s ‘self-marriage’ reveals irrationality of society without definition of marriage

Houston woman marries herself in elaborate ceremony, Houston Chronicle (Craig Hlavaty)

4) Impact of  24/7 economy on family structures cannot be ignored

Night at the London nursery that does not close, Financial Times (Emma Jacobs)

Transcript: The Briefing 02-02-15

The Briefing

 

February 2, 2015

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

 

It’s Monday, February 2, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) CUNY revocation of gender-specific prefixes signals extent of gender revolution’s impact on language

Even as we are made in the image of God, God created us as linguistic creatures; we are creatures who communicate and words are central to that communication. That is made very clear in Scripture itself as our Creator addresses us as His human creatures, the only creatures made in His image with words. Therefore words take an unusual importance in the Christian worldview. That’s why Christian theology, Christian doctrine, the entire universe of truth as revealed in Scripture, comes down to a pattern of words. Even as the apostle Paul would write to Timothy, one of his responsibilities was to maintain a pattern of sound words and that is a responsibility that continues even now in the Christian church.

When we observe a change in language we’re observing something more than linguistics, we’re watching a massive change in the way human beings think of themselves and think of the issues they are describing with words and think of the truth they are seeking to articulate – or the truth they are seeking to deny.

That’s why Christians should pay particular attention to a story that emerged last week and got far too little attention. As the Wall Street Journal’s Mike Vilensky reports,

“‘Mr.,’ ‘Mrs.’ and ‘Ms.’ are being shown the door at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.”

As the Journal reports,

“In a new policy that has sparked debate among academics, school staffers have been advised to refrain from using gendered salutations in correspondence with students—and instead use a student’s full name, according to an internal memo sent out earlier this month.

The directive [according to the Journal,] pertains specifically to administrators’ written interactions with students and prospective students,”

That [is] according to Tanya Domi, a school spokeswoman for the City University of New York. But the memo says the policy should be,

“…interpreted as broadly as possible”

And it was sent to all faculty at the Graduate Center.

Juliette Blevins, linguistic professor, said,

“My interpretation was that I was being asked to adhere to this policy, as were the other professors who received the letter,”

She had good reason for that assumption. The College Fix, that received an actual copy of the memo, demonstrates why this professors concern is very well-founded. Here’s the explicit language of the memo itself,

“Effective Spring 2015, the (graduate center’s) policy is to eliminate the use of gendered salutations and references in correspondence to students, prospective students, and third parties,”

That came from Louise Lennihan, serving as interim provost of the graduate center.

“Accordingly, Mr. and Ms. should be omitted from salutations.”

Again the provost instructed all members of the staff to interpret the new policy “as broadly as possible,” also stating that it applies to,

“All types of correspondence, such as: all parts of any letter including address and salutation, mailing labels, bills or invoices, and any other forms or reports,”

Again, the memo from the Provost instructs the staff, including professors, to avoid using ‘Mr.,’ ‘Mrs.,’ ‘Ms.,’ or any gendered pronoun, and instead to refer to students always by both their first and last names. If you asked the question ‘why?’ the interim provost answers the question, saying that it is part of the schools,

“ongoing effort to ensure a respectful, welcoming and gender-inclusive learning environment…and to accommodate properly the diverse population of current and prospective students.”

The spokeswoman for the school also said that the schools was,

“working within a regulatory framework to comply with Title IX legal principles,”

That’s referring to the Title IX Federal Statute the bands gender discrimination, sex discrimination, and other forms of discrimination in all educational settings that receive any government support.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal was unable to find any other major school – indeed any other school at all – in the New York tri-state area that followed a similar kind of policy. As the Journal reports,

“Calls to several prominent universities in the New York tri-state area revealed that none had heard of—or had themselves instituted—such a directive.”

So much for work being mandated by Title IX. What it is being mandated by, so to speak, is the current realm of political correctness and the fact that the gender revolution has destroyed our ability to use some of the most familiar words in the English language. And they’re not just familiar words, they are very important words; important especially in terms of the moral nature of human beings and human social institutions – most importantly, the institution of marriage.

This moral revolution is already changing the way we speak, or are expected to speak. Words as fundamental as male and female, boy and girl, words as fundamental as marriage, are being redefined before our very eyes. Redefined in the space not only of a century but redefined in the space of far less than a generation, indeed at this point, even less than a decade.

Just days ago we reported that the governor of Virginia was doing his best to get the state law changed so that the words husband and wife would be removed from all legal documents in that state. Instead it would simply be spouse and spouse – or in other jurisdictions, partner and partner. So we’re now entering that brave new world in which words such as ‘mother and father’ or ‘mom and dad’ are simply becoming too confused or perhaps even too controversial to use in almost any public setting. Words such as boy and girl, words such as man and woman, are now being largely so confused in the larger culture that now to use them is considered a form of discrimination in one sort or another; sometimes described in very harrowing terms.

Every revolution does seem to come with a change in language. In the Communist Revolution people were informed that they should address one another not as mother and father, brother and sister, nor as Mr. and Mrs. but simply in all cases, regardless of age or gender or marital status or anything else, simply as ‘Comrade.’ Another ideological revolution, the French Revolution, instead suggested that every single person – indeed it was more than a suggestion, it was a mandate – should be known simply as ‘Citizen.’ But in both of those revolutions, not only political and economic revolutions but of course moral revolutions as well, the change in language was an effort to reduce every single human being to the same thing; to make issues of gender identity, of age difference, of marital status, to make all of these things absolutely irrelevant.

In the French Revolution part of it was to get rid of any kind of noblesse oblige, any kind of noble status. But in the aftermath of the French Revolution, a secular revolution that sought explicitly to put human dignity on a secular foundation, what instead happened was what was known as ‘the Terror’ that left Napoleon in its wake. So let’s watch this particular revolution very carefully and just remember it didn’t stop with marriage, it didn’t stop with man and woman, it won’t stop with Mr. and Mrs. or even with Ms.

2) “Second wave” political correctness causing increasing tension even within political left

Meanwhile, the very same week a very important article appeared in New York Magazine. It was written by liberal author Jonathan Chait and the title was Not a Very PC Thing to Say. It’s about political correctness and Jonathan Chait writing an article that, as other observers have said, is actually more right than wrong – even as he’s writing about the resurgence of political correctness, what he calls a second wave of political correctness. And yet what basically has his attention – and this is very important to note – is not any form of political correctness used against moral and political conservatives, but rather against political liberals; and he counts himself as one.

As Jonathan Chait writes,

“After political correctness burst onto the academic scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it went into a long remission. Now it has returned. Some of its expressions have a familiar tint, like the protesting of even mildly controversial speakers on college campuses.”

He then writes about the growing number of campuses that are adopting so-called trigger warnings. He describes these as warnings to texts that may upset students. And he says the movement of the new political correctness is also coming back in a campaign to eradicate what are called micro-aggressions – or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. He then writes, and I quote,

“These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses”

Chait then writes,

“Trigger warnings aren’t much help in actually overcoming trauma — an analysis by the Institute of Medicine has found that the best approach is controlled exposure to it, and experts say avoidance can reinforce suffering. Indeed, one professor at a prestigious university told me that, just in the last few years, she has noticed a dramatic upsurge in her students’ sensitivity toward even the mildest social or ideological slights; she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma — or, more consequentially, violating her school’s new sexual-harassment policy — merely by carrying out the traditional academic work of intellectual exploration.”

The professor say,

“This is an environment of fear, believe it or not. [She went on to say] Every other day I say to my friends, ‘How did we get back to 1991?’”

Chait is also absolutely right when he says it would be mistake to categorize today’s PC culture as only an academic phenomenon. He writes that this new PC wave is permeating the entire culture, even reaching popular culture through the elites. He then goes on to define it as an,

“…attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate”

Interestingly Jonathan Chait tries to draw a distinction between liberalism and the left. That’s not a false distinction, it’s just growing very confusing when in the United States liberals are acting like leftists, and increasingly so. As he explains, leftists are traditionally Marxist; they are committed to a Marxist philosophy and worldview. And Marxism, historically, and right down to the present in its pure form, doesn’t allow for any validity to dissenting worldviews, to any kind of dissenting opinion. They’re simply to be eradicated. Classical liberalism, says Chait, is quite different. It is supposed to be about the freedom of expression and he considers himself not a leftist but a liberal. The problem is other liberals are trending leftist.

National ReviewMagazine has quite accurately pointed out that Jonathan Chait really isn’t concerned about political correctness being used against any conservative arguments. As a matter fact, he’s been using them for years. But it is at least a form of honesty, some form of progress in terms of the culture, if Jonathan Chait realizes that this new wave of political correctness is going to shut down even more speech.

Another reason Chait’s essay is so important is because of the historical review he offers of the first wave of political correctness that he said died in the nearly 90s, and the second wave that is in full steam now. Why did that first face of PC die? Jonathan Chait argues it was probably due to the election of William Jefferson Clinton as president of the United States. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, he was elected after running against the kind of political correctness that was giving such a bad name to the political left – especially to the academic left.

Bill Clinton’s effort to at least partly mitigate some of the liberalism of the Democratic Party’s academic left – the left that was also left over in terms of the leadership of the party from the early 1970s – Bill Clinton was at least partly successful, but only temporarily so. That explained why he was elected as president in 1992 perceived as something of a corrective to that academic left. But it also explains, as Jonathan Chait also helps us to understand, why another Clinton campaign for president might run into a very significant headwind in terms of this new movement of political correctness.

If the death of the first wave is, as he argues, the election of Bill Clinton, the second wave is going to make it very difficult for Hillary Clinton to avoid citing either with or against this new wave of PC. And as Jonathan Chait seems to indicate, it looks like it’s going to be very hard indeed for her to repudiate what her husband did in 1992. It’s far more likely that she will run on it rather than against it.

That raises an article that appeared yesterday as an opinion piece in the New York Times by Ross Douthat. He writes about Our Loud, Proud Left and he writes suggesting that a good many of us are going to be interested spectators in the war in the Democratic Party over these very issues. Douthat makes the very interesting argument that the spent economic energy of the left – as he said, the left would be filled with economic passion but is finding a very difficult time figuring out how to pay for its plans – he says that that kind of energy is now being directed into this form of cultural aggression, in the form of the new PC wave.

One particular paragraph in Douthat’s article demands our attention. He writes,

“I suspect that a lot of the ambition (or aggression, depending on your point of view) from the campus left right now reflects the experience of watching the same-sex marriage debate play out. Whether on issues, like transgender rights, that extend from gay rights, or on older debates over rape and chauvinism, there’s a renewed sense that what happens in relatively cloistered environments can have wide ripples, and that taking firm control of a cultural narrative can matter much more than anything that goes on in Washington.”

Of course many of us watching these developments with concern might well wonder if the academic left isn’t basically right about that fundamental assumption – that their ideas don’t remain cloistered for all, and that, like on the issue the sexual revolution, if they really can’t foment a revolution of ideas on the college campus, it’s unlikely to stay there. As a matter fact it’s hard for us to argue against that very fundamental assumption – that what happens on the American college and University campuses long-term far more important than what happens in Washington, regardless of which party is in control.

The reason for that is clear. On the American College and University campus, that’s where the issue of worldview is being hammered out. That’s where young people are developing the ideas that are likely to last for a lifetime. And if you win the battle there – the ideological, the worldview battle –you win battles that are far more consequential than anything that can take place in politics. Furthermore, you win a worldview conflict that will eventually be reflected in the politics. If you win the hearts and minds, you will eventually win the legislature.

And you put all this together in terms of the change of nomenclature at City University of New York and Jonathan Chait’s essay in New York Magazine and we come to understand that the fast changing cultural terrain that we as Christians now face is going to be a cultural debate that will in large part be hammered out without us.

3) Life of Winston Churchill presents tremendous example of gift of common grace

Finally last Friday I noted that that day marked the 50th anniversary of the state and private funerals for Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, by any measure, one of most dominant figures of the 20th century. Churchill was born on November 30, 1874; he died on January 24 of 1965. His state funeral was held on January 30 of that year, 50 years ago Friday. It was a largest state funeral in Western history. It drew representatives of 112 nations and it is now remembered, on both sides of the Atlantic, as one of the seminal transitional moments in the history the Western world – especially in the 20th century.

Churchill’s life was lived out in the canvas of a changing world. He was born in the reign of Queen Victoria and his life was bookmarked by another Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, whom he served as Prime Minister. In one way or another he served three Kings as well as one Queen. And the Queen during whose reign he was born was a defining mark in terms of the worldview of Winston Churchill. He was born a Victorian; he died in the last half of the 20th century. In between was a vast cataclysmic change in the way that Westerners lived, especially in the history of the nation of England.

And if anything, Winston Churchill was English, British, and he was of course also half American. His mother Jennie Jerome was an American before marrying the man who would become Winston Churchill’s father: Randolph Churchill. Churchill’s illustrious ancestor was the first famous Churchill – that is John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough – famous for his massive military victories on the continent. But as the first son born to the second son of the then Duke of Marlborough, Churchill was unsurprisingly born in the splendor of one of Britain’s most fabulous palace: Blenheim Palace.

But he had spectacularly unhappy childhood. His mother was very remote; he described her as a distant star, and his father was even more remote, even in many ways, at least emotionally, abusive. His father and Churchill’s teachers believed that Churchill the boys would amount to nothing as a man. But of course history demonstrates otherwise, as the history of the late 19th and 20th centuries simply can’t be written without reference to Winston Churchill. And as a matter of fact, as the man who became prime minister not once but twice, he is recognized in Great Britain and was recognized even during his lifetime, as the man most singularly responsible for that nation’s victory over Nazi Germany and its failure to capitulate to the Germans even in the early years of the Nazi aggression. The man who stuttered and stammered as a child became one of the most famous orators of the English language. As he himself said, he was not a lion but it was his responsibility, indeed his privilege, to become the roar for England.

One of the things that history will record about Winston Churchill is that in those political years known as his wilderness years when he was out of office, he was the one who most clearly understood the Nazi threat. And he understood it precisely because he knew it was a battle of ideas and when it came to the Nazis deeply evil ideas. And he understood that a nation could be organized, at least in terms of its leadership, around those ideas and could voice them upon its people.

When I was 13 years old I was assigned the task to write an essay on an historical person and for some reason I just immediately decided I would write a Winston Churchill. In retrospect I’m not even sure exactly why. But I’ll admit that that experience of writing the essay as a 13-year-old made Winston Churchill for me from then until now an enduring character of fascination. And from the Christian worldview Winston Churchill raises a host of issues. For the one thing, he demonstrates the fact that the great man theory of history isn’t really dead because even the people who tried to dismiss the singular role of individuals in terms of world history are hard-pressed when you look at the middle years of the 20th century to explain why horrors happened without reference to someone like Adolf Hitler, and why eventually liberty prevailed without reference to people like Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But even though Roosevelt led the larger and greater nation, especially in terms of the years after the war, it was Churchill that had the outsized personality on the world stage. Churchill was a man of many faults and a man of even greater qualities. He was a man who was often wrong, but far more often right. And he was a man who lived long enough to see his own understanding of Nazi Germany not only vindicated but eventually represented by victory – something that was all too uncertain when he became prime minister in the very depth of the Nazi crisis. Churchill’s life does demonstrate that individuals can make a decisive difference on the world scene. The great man theory of history may not be adequate to explain history but history cannot be explained without it.

But as a Christian theologian, there is another aspect of Winston Churchill that is also raised and that is, how did someone with his worldview emerge and how did someone with his worldview lead in terms especially of those central years of crisis in the 20th century? He understood, prior to almost any other, the real danger of Nazi-ism. He also understood, prior to almost everyone else, the real danger of the totalitarian challenge of communism – especially of Soviet communism. It was his speech given just after the war when he was unceremoniously removed from office by the British people, a speech he gave in Fulton, Missouri at Westminster College in which he described that Iron Curtain that was descending upon so many nations in Europe. And that says Churchill was not only prophetic, he was also – as William Manchester, one of his most insightful biographer says – a Manichaean; seeing so many issues in terms of right and wrong and good and evil when others are trying to finesse the moral issues involved. Churchill was not about finesse.

But Winston Churchill also raises another issue for Christians and that is this: how can there be figures of such heroism on the world stage who – as in the case of Winston Churchill – was actually not conventional Christian believers. In truth Winston Churchill operated out of a Christian worldview, it was the worldview he inherited and it was the worldview he embraced. But he offered very little evidence of any traditional Christian identity; even as he was, of course, a member of the Church of England. But for Christians this also reminds us of God’s gift of common grace whereby people we can’t explain theologically we can admire historically. But it also means for Christians, when we define greatness there is a limitation to secular greatness and that’s another thing Christians must always keep in mind.

 

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. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 02-02-15

Podcast Transcript

1) CUNY revocation of gender-specific prefixes signals extent of gender revolution’s impact on language

CUNY: Don’t Address Students as ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’, Wall Street Journal (Mike Vilensky)

University Bans Use of ‘Mrs.’ and ‘Ms.’ in All Correspondence, The College Fix (Alexandra Zimmern)

2) “Second wave” political correctness causing increasing tension even within political left

Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say, New York Magazine (Jonathan Chait)

Liberals Seek PC Exemption, National Review (Kevin D. Williamson)

Our Loud, Proud Left, New York Times (Ross Douthat)

3) Life of Winston Churchill presents tremendous example of gift of common grace

 

From the Pulpit to the Culture

Transcript: The Briefing 01-30-15

The Briefing

 

January 30, 2015

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

 

It’s Friday, January 30, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Legal win for Trinity Western Law school dodges choice between religious and erotic liberty

A major victory was won this week by Trinity Western University in Canada. As Toronto’s Globe and Mail reported yesterday,

“Trinity Western University has scored a victory in Nova Scotia, where a Supreme Court judge has ruled that the province’s law society does not have the authority to deny accrediting graduates from its proposed law school.”

The law school is actually in British Columbia but it was the law society there in Nova Scotia that had ruled that it would not accept graduates from that University because of Universities’ moral principle that “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman” is not accepted.

In the ruling that was handed down on Wednesday of this week, Supreme Court Justice Jamie Campbell said that the Nova Scotia Barrister’ Society actually doesn’t even have the authority to require the school to change its policy. In the words of his opinion,

“It could not pass a regulation requiring TWU to change its community covenant any more than it could pass a regulation purporting to dictate what professors should be granted tenure at [any other school of law] or what fees should be charged by the University of Toronto Law School, or the admissions policies of McGill [University],”

In his opinion the Supreme Court Justice also wrote,

“The legislation, quite sensibly, does not contain any mechanism for recognition or enforcement of NSBS regulations purporting to control how university law grads operate because it was never intended that they would be subject to its control.”

He also wrote this, very important words,

“Unless tolerance engages the incomprehensible, the contemptible or the detestable, it is nothing much more than indifference. It isn’t a line. It’s a process. And it’s one that invites and almost requires a level of discomfort.”

Coming from a secular law court in an increasingly secularized society, that is especially when you’re looking at the nation of Canada, that’s a very important paragraph. It’s important though for a couple of reasons. For one thing it tells us that those who uphold a traditional definition of marriage may well be holding ideas that in the view of the larger society around us, especially its elites, are – to use the words of the Supreme Court Justice – detestable, contemptible, or incomprehensible.

So from a Christian worldview perspective the first thing we need to recognize is that the worldview chasm that separates those committed to biblical Christianity and those committed to the new sexual revolution, that chasm is so deep that from one side to the other it is almost incomprehensible. And the views across that divide are increasingly seen as detestable or contemptible. We’re not talking about the possibility of much middle ground here.

The background of this story is of course that Trinity Western University is one the very few evangelical institutions of higher education in the nation of Canada. And it is the only of those universities to offer an accredited law school – the only Christian worldview based law school in the entire nation of Canada. That’s why this particular law school has been the focus of so much attention—that’s why it’s actually the focus of so much opposition. Because [of] the largely secular society in Canada – and remember that Canada here mirrors the secularization of Europe more than it does the pattern of the United States – the Canadian law societies have generally responded with abject horror to the idea that there might be a single law school in that nation that would be based on a Christian worldview; and that regardless of its intellectual achievement will be considered contemptible and detestable because it dares to hold students to a code that actually matches the biblical expectation, the biblical understanding of marriage, the restriction of sexual activity to marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman.

American evangelicals, for that matter American Christians, watching this from afar – and it’s not too far; let’s keep in mind, we are only talking about British Columbia, not far across America’s northern border with Washington state – we’re looking at a story that could well be unfolding here in the 50 states of the USA. We’re looking at a story that is now threatened, at least in terms of some academic institutions; just think as we talked earlier this week about the challenge now being faced by Gordon College in suburban Boston, Massachusetts.

In one of the most important sections of the decision handed down by Justice Campbell are included these words,

“People have the right to attend a private religious university that imposes a religiously based code of conduct,”

He went on to write,

“Requiring a person to give up that right in order to get his or her professional education is an infringement of religious freedom,”

That is an exceptionally important series of words. That’s a very important statement, it’s also rather unexpected. And one of the biggest questions now being faced is whether this is the kind of decision that’s going to stand not only the test of time, but the test of other challenges that might come from within the very same nation, within Canada. Because the law society has indicated that even as it is reviewing its options going forward, it isn’t going to happily comply with the Supreme Court Justice’s opinion.

But there are other aspects to that we should also note. I mention there were two huge insights coming from the Justice’s opinion. The first is that we find ourselves as a moral minority. What sociologist call a cognitive minority in the larger secular American culture – increasingly so; especially as that culture is defined by the elites. The second thing we need to understand is that religious liberty here wasn’t defended as staunchly as we might have hoped, as staunchly as mighty have been possible in the United States where at least we claim to stand behind the words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. There is no exactly equivalent language in terms of the Canadian Constitution.

But this leads to a third aspect of this good news from Canada and that is as attorney Barry Bussey pointed out, the decision isn’t really about whether LGBT equality rights are more or less important than the religious freedoms of evangelical Christians, as the attorney wrote, it’s not a value judgment in that sense at all; it is first about whether the law society had the authority to do what it did. Now that’s a very important point. Sometimes important cases are won or lost on what is basically a technicality. But when you’re talking about technicalities remember the laws is a technical object. The law answers and asks certain questions. And when judges cite the law, it is a very technical argument that often prevails.

In this case what people on both sides might’ve been looking for was either a ringing vindication of religious liberty or a ringing vindication of the rights of those who are defined by sexual orientation in terms of Canadian law. What might have been expected from either side in this debate was that there would be some careful adjudication of the relative balance of those liberties – the liberties I’ve written about recently as being a contest between religious liberty and a newly defined liberty we might call erotic liberty. But that’s not exactly what happened here. Instead, this court decided that the law society – again it was the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society ­– actually didn’t have the authority to make such a ruling in the first place. It didn’t actually say that the ruling was wrong or that the ruling was right, or than in any other legislative context the decision might’ve been right or might’ve been wrong. They simply said the law society had no right to make the policy whatsoever and thus the policy decision was null and void.

Lastly, even though this is good news it’s not comprehensive good news because we still don’t know exactly about the future of the law school at Trinity Western University. As CBC news, that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News, reported,

“Last month, the British Columbia government revoked its support for the law school, saying the university can’t enroll students in the program because of the ‘uncertainty’ over approval by the B.C. Law Society.”

Meanwhile the University said that it will also take legal action against other law societies that, like the law society in Nova Scotia, ruled against their graduates being recognized. According to the CBC that would include the Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario, meanwhile law societies in Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Labrador and Nunavut, have decided to accept Trinity Western graduates.

Every time a decision like this comes along there is the temptation to say this one’s a clear win, that one’s a clear loss, but as is so often the case when you look at the actual decision handed down by the courts it’s not so easy. What’s really required here is to look closely at what’s being said. What’s being said is that in the view of the larger view of the cultural elites, when you look at an institution that is solely based in and committed to fundamental Christian morality, you’re looking at institution that is now so distant from the worldview of the elites that it can be described in terms like incomprehensible, detestable, and contemptible.

But coming from Canada, coming for Nova Scotia, it’s at least very good news that a Supreme Court justice in a decision handed down this week in the year 2015 included the words,

“People have the right to attend a private religious university that imposes a religiously based code of conduct,”

And then to continue,

“Requiring a person to give up that right in order to get his or her professional education is an infringement of religious freedom,”

Of course it is and it should have been recognized. And at least in this case, to some extent, it was.

2) White House shift on Taliban terminology review danger of misleading euphemisms

Next, while we’re talking about legal decisions or even a casual conversation, Christians understand that words matter. Even as being made in the image of God includes, at least in part, that we are linguistic creatures; we are able to form words, to say words, to write words, and understand words, indeed to be addressed by a divinely revealed word. We also understand that language matters in ways that are deeply revealing, deeply revealing in moral terms. After all, as many have pointed out, one of the things we have to note is the substitution in terms of moral language for a euphemism. As has been pointed out during the 20th century for instance, you can trace a moral revolution in the language that is used to describe the same thing. Something for instance that was first called ‘adultery’ then became known as an ‘affair’ and then later simply ‘extramarital sex.’

What we’re talking about here is the fact that sin is often rationalized by the process of using a euphemism, by euphemizing it. If we call it something else we can sometimes even trick ourselves into thinking it is something else. Of course we’re not just talking about sexual sins, this can be done with the sin of pride or the sin of gluttony or any other sin – frankly it can be done with almost any aspect of human living. But when it comes to defining evil that’s where euphemisms become most dangerous and most revealing and that’s where we better pay the most attention.

That’s why an article that appeared in yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal is urgent from the Christian worldview even though most of the people who might be first immediately concerned with the article will be foreign-policy experts and politicians. Here’s the headline, White House Labels Taliban and Armed Insurgency Not Terrorists, it’s by Byron Tau, again writing yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. As Tau writes,

“The White House is drawing a sharp distinction between Afghanistan’s Taliban and the Islamic State — describing the Taliban as an ‘armed insurgency.’”

When the White House spokesman was asked yesterday about a plan by the nation of Jordan to swap a would-be suicide bomber for a Jordanian pilot being held by Islamic state militants, the White House reiterated the long-standing policy, says Tau, of the United States to refuse negotiations with terrorists. Eric Schultz, White House spokesman, said yesterday,

“Our policy is that we don’t pay ransom, that we don’t give concessions to terrorist organizations,”

He went on to say,

“This is a longstanding policy that predates this administration and it’s also one that we communicated to our friends and allies across the world,”

Well that’s one of those statements that means less than first meets the eye because the whole point of the Wall Street Journal article – and the whole point of world attention now to the White House spokesman’s statement – is not so much the statement which was indeed communicated – that the United States does not negotiate nor pay ransom to terrorist – but the fact that it all comes down to how the White House defines a group as a terrorist organization or, as the White House spokesman revealed yesterday when referencing the Taliban, merely an “armed insurgency.”

Now as I said, this gets to be very interesting because last year the White House was involved in a prisoner swap with the Taliban in Afghanistan – you’ll remember that that included US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The White House spokesman said yesterday, we do not negotiate with terrorist organizations nor pay ransom to terrorist organizations, but the Taliban isn’t a terrorist organization. The problem is the United States government still says that it is. As a matter fact, even as the US does not list the Taliban on the foreign terrorist organization list run by the State Department, it does list the Taliban as a terrorist organization on its separate “specially designated global terrorism list.” It has done so since 2002. And the National Counterterrorism Center – remember, that’s also the same government otherwise known as the United States government – also lists the Taliban  presence in Afghanistan on a map of global terrorism.

Furthermore, and horrifyingly, let me just remind you that it was the Taliban in Pakistan that murdered 145 people, including mostly young teenage students most of them boys involved in a private high school in the nation of Pakistan just before Christmas of last year. It was universally recognized as one of the worst acts of terrorism in the year 2014. But the White House now says the Taliban isn’t the terrorist group; if it were a terrorist group we couldn’t negotiate with them. Since we are negotiating with them, they must not be a terrorist group.

Now my point in this case is not to suggest that the Obama administration is doing something new when it comes to national politics, national defense, and foreign relations. We can almost be assured that there has been a bipartisan tradition of this kind of labeling and relabeling largely due to the fact that every administration is having to be rather nimble in terms of dealing with a lot of these issues. But there is a deep question of principle here and that deep question of principle is a lot deeper than a partisan question. Is indeed the United States violating our own sense of morality by a selective identification of some groups as terrorist and others as not when they are engaged in the very same horrifying behaviors?

But here we simply return where we began, with the process of euphemization and a classic example. We began with adultery that’s now considered by many just an extramarital affair or a fling, and then we compare that to the statement made by the White House spokesman yesterday when he said when it comes to the Taliban, they’re not actually a terrorist group – merely “an armed insurgency.” Let me point out the obvious moral lesson, if you were killed by an armed insurgency or a terrorist organization it doesn’t matter what someone calls it, it matters what is done; it matters what they do and what they believe and who they are.

And one of the principles of the Christian worldview, regardless of its partisan application, is that we ought to call things what they are. We have to call things by their real name. And that’s especially true for Christians the closer we get to the question of evil; we dare not call evil anything other than what it is.

3) Stunning viewership of Super Bowl represent human desire for spectacle

It seems almost superfluous to suggest to Americans that they should remember that Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday and of course Americans are going be watching that game by the tens of millions – perhaps even over 100 million in the United States watching that game. It is a major cultural development and sad to say, it will get a great deal more attention it’s likely, in terms of our society, on the Lord’s Day than what will actually take place in thousands of evangelical churches where there will actually be far more people attending the worship of the one true and living God on Sunday morning than there will be even watching that game on Sunday afternoon.

The National Football League is going to be looking to this game, at least in part, as a way to overcome a series of moral catastrophes that were largely self-inflicted by the league this year. And yet one of the things we need to watch from a Christian worldview perspective is what the game itself represents. It tells us that human beings, social creatures that we are, are inherently drawn to a spectacle.

Postmodern philosophers have tried to argue largely based in the worldview of Marxism that these spectacles are often used by the powers that be in order to entrance and distract a society that otherwise would be rebelling against those very powers that be. There’s a sense in which the ancient Roman emperors understood this when they opened the Coliseum and said to what people really wanted was, in the words famous to the Roman Empire, “bread and circuses,” – probably an emphasis on circuses. But human nature wasn’t changed during the Roman Empire and it hasn’t changed until now. We are still a society that is drawn to spectacles; we as a species tend to want to go to see what a crowd is looking at, what must be happening, and what we must be seeing in order to know.

The Olympian, a newspaper in Washington state, points out that the evolution of the Super Bowl is itself an indication of the growth of a spectacle. The very first Super Bowl was held in 1967, the ticket sold for $12; 62,000 people attended and about a third of the stadium was empty. The idea for the Super Bowl goes back to Pete Roselle, then head of the NFL, and he thought he had a good idea and in terms of the idea growing to be something really big, he evidently did have an idea that would only grow.

Even as the tickets back at the first Super Bowl cost $12, as Craig Hill and Darrin Beene report for The Olympian, you are hardly going to be able to buy a snack from a concession for that amount in the year 2015. The tickets are now selling at the website Stubhub for about $3,455 – that’s if indeed you are able to get one. Super Bowl XLIX is expected to be the biggest spectacle yet. Parking passes for Super Bowl XLIX are now expected to sell for about $85 – again, if you can find one. Super Bowl XLIX is going to be held in the region of Phoenix, Arizona and it is going to feature the Seattle Seahawks versus the New England Patriots and that’s about what I know about Super Bowl XLIX in terms of the actual sport.

In terms of sports commentary you can find better elsewhere, for that matter you can probably find better anywhere. But my point in bringing up Super Bowl XLIX is to point out, to Christians in particular, that we are a creature drawn to spectacle and perhaps we need to think about the fact that we are known by our spectacles. By their spectacles we might say, using that old adage, we shall know them. There is certainly something in moral terms to be said for the progress whereby we’ve gone from the Coliseum in ancient Rome – which was a matter of life and death, often in the most brutally grotesque terms and often with Christians being the martyrs there on the very floor of the amphitheater – to where we’re now looking at very heavily padded professional athletes who are also very well-paid, laying in a contest that isn’t for life and death and is for something else; included in that something else is a lot of money and no short amount of secular glory.

But one other issue also demands our attention and that is that like so many spectacles, this is a battle for the eyes. Advertisements on the Super Bowl – that’s 30 seconds of air time – are going to sell for $4.5 million. $4.5 million for 30 seconds of an opportunity – just maybe – to capture your eyes for a few moments. Here again there’s nothing inherently great or horrible about that, just very revealing. It tells us that there is a battle for our eyes going on all the time. Not always so blatant and graphic as this, but in this case the battle for our eyes, especially in consumer terms, is considered so valuable that people are going to pay just for the airtime $4.5 million for 30 seconds.

Of course the battle for our eyes goes far beyond the issue of a consumer economy. It touches every aspect of our lives – everything we see, all of our intake. And we need to keep that in mind. There is a battle for our eyes, a battle for the eyes of our children, a battle for the eyes of our soul. The easiest way to be a victim of that battle is not to know there is a battle in the first place.

4) 50th Anniversary of Churchill’s funeral reminder of historic significance of the man

Finally, 50 years ago today Britain observed the state funeral for Sir Winston Spencer Churchill. It’s hard for me to imagine that I was then a five-year-old boy when one of the greatest men of the modern age died and when Britain responded with the state funeral that became the largest state funeral, in terms of attendance, of any in the history of the world.  Those who know me best – in fact those who know me much at all – know that I have a tremendous interest in Winston Churchill and have ever since I was a 13-year-old when assigned to write a paper on a great person from history.

I really don’t have any idea why as a 13-year-old I immediately reported that I would write on Winston Churchill, but write I did. And he has been an influence, something of an historic role model, and of course also a conversation partner of sorts, ever since I was that 13-year-old writing that history paper. But of course to raise Winston Churchill is to raise a couple of questions. One is, is there any validity to the great man theory of history. The second is how should Christians evaluate secular leaders – someone of the scale of Winston Churchill? But I’m out of time for today, so I’ll have to talk about that next week on The Briefing. I’ll meet you then.

 

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

The Briefing 01-30-15

1) Legal win for Trinity Western Law school dodges choice between religious and erotic liberty

Nova Scotia’s top court upholds Trinity Western accreditation, The Globe and Mail (Andrea Woo)

Trinity Western law students OK to practise in Nova Scotia, CBC News (Blair Rhodes)

2) White House shift on Taliban terminology review danger of misleading euphemisms

White House Labels Taliban ‘Armed Insurgency,’ Not Terrorists, Wall Street Journal (Byron Tau)

3) Stunning viewership of Super Bowl represent human desire for spectacle

Super Bowl’s evolution “stunning to everybody”, The Olympian (Craig Hill and Darrin Beene)

5 Ways This Year’s Super Bowl Ads Will Be Like No Other, TIME (Brad Tuttle)

4) 50th Anniversary of Churchill’s funeral reminder of historic significance of the man

Winston Churchill, Wikipedia