R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 324

Transcript: The Briefing 01-29-15

The Briefing

 

January 29, 2015

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

 

It’s Thursday, January 29, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Opposition to sex-selective abortion ban absolute marginalization of baby for sake of choice

In the end when you look at the worldview clash over the question of the sanctity of human life there are really not a myriad of positions. There are really two positions; both of them at their essence are somewhat absolutist. To say somewhat absolutist is to point to the problem. They actually are absolutist in some sense, the somewhat comes as people try to find some middle ground where no middle ground actually, for long, exist.

Evidence of that comes from Birmingham, England and Pam Lowe, a professor at Aston University in that British city, has written an article entitled If Abortion Is A Choice Then Sex Selection Abortion Should Remain Legal. This is one of those issues that really presses the point; it really makes the case very clear. Because here we have a professor arguing that making sex selection abortions illegal implies – now get this straight – that at least some abortions might be wrong, even immoral.

Now here you have the absolutism of the pro-choice, the pro-abortion, position. It’s an absolutism that says the moment you say that any abortion might be wrong, evil, or perhaps even just ill advised, you’re actually trampling on what they claim is the moral absolute. And that is a woman’s unfettered right to an abortion, to control her own body – in their language – regardless of any other circumstance, including the fact that the life within her is a human life. Writing at the journal Science 2.0, Lowe writes,

“A campaign is underway in the United Kingdom to make it illegal to abort a child based on its gender.

Proponents say they are worried about women being coerced into terminating female fetuses and that action needs to be taken to stop discrimination against baby girls.

But this is a flawed argument. [She then writes] You cannot promote gender equality by enacting laws that place restrictions on women’s bodies. Banning sex-selective abortion opens up a world in which there is such thing as a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ reason for an abortion. What’s more, it implies coercion is a reproductive health issue rather than what it actually is – an act of domestic violence.”

Two big moral issues glare at us here. The first is the sanctity of human life, that’s the biggest issue. The Christian biblical worldview affirms that the Bible is very clear about the sanctity and dignity of every single human life, at every point of development, regardless of ability or disability. To those who argue that that is an absolutist position, we eventually have to respond with intellectual honesty: it is a biblical absolute.

Matters of life and death are treated directly and honestly in Scripture, but it is also very clear that you cannot deny what life is. You cannot deny that every single human being is a creature intentionally created by the creator for His glory and with an inherent dignity and sovereignty that exists solely because every single human being is a divine creation, and furthermore, every single human being is an image bearer, bearing the very image of God. So the first moral insight we need to think about from this story is that the absolute on the other side, that a woman should have an unfettered unquestioned right to an abortion under any circumstance for any reason or no reason, finally meets its absolute expression in an article in which a professor actually says that one should not oppose sex selection abortions.

Now notice by the way that there have been many who have been arguing that this really isn’t a problem, that sex selection abortions don’t exist; if they did exist of course they would be morally wrong. That’s not the argument she’s making at all. She making the argument that of course they exist, and the fact that they do exist should have nothing to do whatsoever with the morality of abortion – under any circumstance, even if the purpose of the abortion is for the elimination of the child simply because of its gender, and that is almost always because the gender is female.

Authorities on both sides of the issue basically now agree that the number of sex selection abortions in nations such as India and China now amount to over 100 million missing girls and women. So what we have here is something we really need to understand from a worldview perspective. We have the absolutist position, the abortion-rights position in its absolutist form and an obvious question that flows from this is just how many alternative positions can there be and one genuinely be pro-choice or pro-abortion? Because the argument that Pam Lowe is making here is that the moment you suggest that any abortion may be wrong, or even ill advised, what you have is a discrimination against women that is absolutely unacceptable.

The second moral issue we need to see from this particular essay is where she tries to shift to the issue very interestingly and in a somewhat of an original form. She’s arguing that the issue of sex selection abortion, which you’ll notice she does concede is an issue, she says isn’t really an issue of abortion at all; it’s a question of domestic violence. She writes at one point in her essay,

“Categorizing abortion by acceptable or unacceptable reasons needs to be avoided.”

She then writes,

“Women being coerced into terminating a pregnancy on the basis of the foetus’s sex is a serious issue. But we need to be clear that this is not a reproductive health issue, it is domestic violence.”

Well a real problem with that is that what we have is a shifting of the moral question in a very ill advice form, indeed an intellectually dishonest form. Why? Because as people on basically both sides of the issue acknowledge in much of Asia, this is not an issue of coercion. Indeed in many cases the women themselves are aborting the babies when they find out about the gender even without telling anyone else, including their husbands. Could the issue of sex selection abortion be a domestic violence issue? Of course it could and in many cases it probably is and it needs to be addressed that way.

But we cannot allow this moral shift, we can’t allow the issue, the paramount issue, of the dignity and sanctity of human life to be shifted away as if it’s not really the consideration here; of course it is. But what we have here is undeniable evidence of what happens when you buy into the pro-abortion argument. Eventually the baby’s existence as a moral agent has to be denied; the issue of the value of the baby’s life has to be sublimated, it has to be marginalized, it can’t be a part of the discussion. Because, as you can understand, if the issue of the baby does become a part of the discussion, you then can’t hold any kind of absolutist position in terms of the pro-choice argument and if you can’t, than that entire argument begins to filter away, it begins to break up. Because, and this is where Professor Lowe is actually right, she’s right that the moment you begin to accept the fact that some abortions may be wrong, you have to face the question, ‘would not all abortions then be wrong?’

2) US government tracking cars presents challenging interface between technology and morality

The intersection of the Christian worldview and issues of technology receives too little attention, especially by Christians who are living in such a highly technological age. The responsibility falls on us to try to think these things through in terms of a biblical worldview. That’s not always easy and technologies always bring new questions even as new technologies emerge. But how about this for a headline in Tuesday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Spies on Millions of Drivers, the subhead, ‘DEA Uses License-Plate Readers to Build Database for Federal, Local Authorities.’ Well that’s a headline that tells us that the United States is spying on millions of cars, but of course the United States government isn’t primarily concerned with cars but rather with those are driving them and riding in them. And what the patterns revealed in terms of this evidence tells them.

Frankly I don’t this story is getting the attention that it deserves. Devlin Barrett writes,

“The Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists, according to current and former officials and government documents.”

According to Barrett, the primary goal of the license plate tracking programs run by the DEA – that’s the Drug Enforcement Administration – is to seize cars, cash, and other assets to combat drug trafficking. However, it’s also being used to,

“…hunt for vehicles associated with numerous other potential crimes, from kidnappings to killings to rape suspects, say people familiar with the matter.”

Of course in the background of this is the war on terror and the fact that after 9/11 2001 the government has been collecting reams of information – millions and billions of bits of information – about ordinary Americans; not Americans who are necessarily under any suspicion at all. You see the clear implication of this article is that many, many cars are being tracked and all of this data is being collected. Not just about targeted cars but about cars in general; any car that may pass through an intersection that has one of these cameras. But the technological question and the moral questions here are absolutely huge because for instance there are complaints that the government shouldn’t be collecting this data. That the data should exist in the first place and that the government can’t be trusted with this kind of data.

Now let’s just back up a moment. A good case might be made that way. Indeed, when you’re looking at this kind of news report it’s hard not to draw conjuring of the prophecies of someone like George Orwell and his book 1984 or Aldous Huxley in his prophetic novel Brave New World. It is a scary world in which, quite frankly, people are being able to track the movement of cars by the license plates that are photographed simply by going through an intersection. But let’s track this the other way. What happens if you’re missing a child and that child just might have been kidnapped and there’s at least some evidence that could track authorities to identify a vehicle? It would be rather reassuring to know that there might be data coming in that would, in real-time, tell law enforcement officials where that car might be, where it might be headed. If you are missing a child, that might be a very reassuring fact.

The very same newspaper, that is the Wall Street Journal, pointed out in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris that one of the interesting dilemmas faced by Americans is that Americans don’t want the data collected but they want the data used. That’s a very interesting quandary. Americans say they don’t trust their government to collect all this data whether by tracking the mail or telephone or email or any number of other data means, but on the other hand they do what the government to be able to identify patterns that would lead to a terrorist attack and prevent that attack. In other words, we want as that old expression used to say, to have our cake and eat it too.

Civil libertarians are up at arms even as this data continues to be collected. And by the way, it’s not clear that any court is involved in any way in supervising or in authorizing this kind of data collection. And the government appears to be continuing to do it; something that was known to Congress, in terms of these kinds of cameras close to the American border with Mexico, but wasn’t so well known, at least were told, even by Congress, when it comes to the rest of the United States. Reports are – if these reports can be trusted – that the most camera rich environment on the planet is the city of London, where if you step outside a building or even inside a public area in a building, you’re likely to be on camera somewhere. One of the other top ranks cities in terms of this kind of surveillance was New York City – you’re not surprised.

And there’s another aspect of this a many people don’t think about. There is nothing to stop a private company from placing a camera somewhere to collect this very data. In other words, if you’re driving on the highway, on public streets, and you’re going through an intersection – or for that matter just passing a piece of property – there is no promise, and there probably shouldn’t be the expectation, that someone isn’t photographing the license plate and documenting it somewhere, storing that data for some kind of use.

Another one of the quandaries that is often noted in terms of the morality of this equation is that many of the people who complain about the government collecting this data – and by the way, I think this is a rather challenging kind of moral question – these are the very same people that routinely click off permission for people to store any number of data points about them, right down to exactly what they’re saying, what they’re buying, with whom they are relating, and even what they’re having for dinner. This is one of those issues that isn’t getting enough attention and it’s not getting enough discussion because we lack the moral vocabulary, even as Christians often, to wonder how we should talk about these things, how we should think about these things.

I’m reminded of a very influential French theologian of the last generation, Jacques Ellul, who wrote about what he called the technological imperative. And he wrote about it even before the digital age. He makes a very important Christian worldview point and that is this, when a new technology arrives it comes with a set of its own imperatives. First the issue is what may we use this technology for. The second question is, and it comes very quickly, why are you not using this technology, because the technology itself insist upon its own use. This is the technological imperative.

You ask, how does that work? Well just consider some of the questions now being faced by parents when it comes to their own children and cell phones and the ability to track their children. Some people will say, ‘You know it’s wrong to track teenagers. You shouldn’t be having them so much under your thumb that you would insist upon knowing where they are at any time.’ And then if anything happens to a teenager and you didn’t do that, people will save to you, ‘why weren’t you being responsible and tracking your teenager so that you knew at every single moment where that teenager might be?’ And of course from a Christian worldview perspective the question is, ‘why would anyone want to hide?’ And yet the other question is where does human dignity come into where our every movement, thought, click on screen, and dinner menu becomes a matter of someone’s use of data collection?

On some issues the Christian worldview says this is right and this is wrong, on other issues the Christian worldview reminds us there are excruciating questions we have to struggle with and think about – questions that are actually rather contextual in some cases and complex in any case. Should Christians use some technology? Must Christians not use some technologies? Are there technologies that it’s irresponsible not to use? Are there technologies that are wrong under all circumstances? Do we live in a world of continual moral negotiation with our new digital technologies? You bet we do.

The Wall Street Journal thought this story was important to put on the front page of the newspaper but what’s missing (and we can understand why it’s missing) is what we’re supposed to do with this. Because it appears even the Wall Street Journal isn’t exactly sure; nor is Congress. And for Christians these are questions we really need to think about and we need to think about them very intently. But there is not going to be an easy answer to this, nor a quick answer, and if there were, there would be a new technology around the corner with a new set of questions.

3) Generation of young shut-ins of Japan exposes need for rich community of the church

I want to shift, finally, to a different story that appeared also in Tuesday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, this one’s just heartbreaking – very sad. The headline, The Fight to Save Japan’s Generation of Shut-Ins. It’s by Shirley Wang writing from Fukuoka, Japan. You know when you think about the term ‘shut-ins’ I think back to my childhood when shut-ins were those who were almost always elderly; they were those who at some point, in terms of their aging, had reached the point that they couldn’t get out of their homes or their nursing homes. I can remember as a child and as a teenager going as part of youth choirs to visit shut-ins and that was considered an important part of church ministry for pastors and for Christian brothers and sisters.

We don’t will hear that term used so often, but you know the number of those who are shut-ins hasn’t grown smaller, it’s actually grown larger in this age of extended lifespans. But the really interesting thing about this article in the Wall Street Journal is that it is not about the aged, not about the aged at all. It’s about something that we’ve been reading about for some time, but not with this kind of intense focus. It’s about a generation known as the hikikomori, they are a generation of young Japanese teenagers and adults who have shut themselves in and are not even leaving their rooms – much less leaving their homes. There are an estimated 500,000 to 2,000,000 hikikomori in the nation of Japan. As Wang writes,

“When the Kimura family moved here from Tokyo, their middle school-aged daughter missed her old friends. Midway into her first year in high school, she stopped going. Between 14 and 19, she barely left the house, and for one year hardly left her room, interacting only with her parents.

Now 33 and recovered, Ms. Kimura says she was ‘hikikomori.’ That’s the name of a type of social withdrawal that can be so severe, people with it don’t leave their houses for years. It’s also what those who suffer from the condition are called.”

Now one of things that emerges from this story and the research behind it is that most of the hikikomori are actually not young girls, the vast majority are young men and teenage boys. As Shirley Wang says, the hikikomori have been a household word in Japan since the 1990s and many Japanese experts call it one of the biggest social and health problems plaguing the country. As Wang writes,

“Sufferers often are men in their 20s and 30s who would be in the workforce but instead are being supported largely by their parents. Government officials worry about who will take responsibility for long-term hikikomori when their parents retire or die.”

Cultural differences come to the fore here even in this report from Japan because some of the authorities in Japan point to differences between Western parenting styles and Asian parenting styles. Western parents, according to this report, are far more eager and effective at aiming their children to the outside world – they consider that an important part of parenting. Asian parents, in particular Japanese parents, according to this article, are not so pushy with their children when it comes to the outside world and they’re reluctant often to address the problem of the hikikomori even when one is living in their own home.

There are other cultural issues that come before; the Japanese educational system is extremely difficult for many young Japanese students, especially adolescents. The sectoring off of students for university on the one hand – a very small minority – and then for the workforce on the other, raises expectations for parents and children that many of them seem to be unable to endure. But as we were talking about technology in the last segment, technology plays a role here too because many, many of the hikikomori are actually either addicted to digital technology or they find greater satisfaction, or at least a refuge, from the outside world in the digital world.

So once again we face that issue of technology but we also face an issue that is very important to the Christian worldview, and that is that we were created at social creatures. We were created in the image of God; first of all so that we can have fellowship with the creator, but we were also created as social creatures – we are not meant to live alone. That’s not a conclusion to which we came, dependent upon sociological evidence, that’s the declaration of our creator in Genesis 2; at the very beginning of the human story. And that Christian affirmation of the fact that we were meant for community and meant for communion points to our responsibility that is really twofold, first of all to make certain that we are related in the way we should be related, and secondly to make certain that we relate in the way that we should relate. That’s one of the reasons why the church is so important in Christian theology, why ecclesiology is such a core doctrine, because our church life is a preparation for eternity in the communion for which we were created. What we should have in every single local church is a repository of the kingdom, a symbol of the kind of Christian community that should emerge from the gospel congregation. A gospel congregation that understands relatedness as brothers and sisters in Christ as a Christian gospel responsibility, not just something that should be a part of the program of the church but what should be the evidence of the gospel itself, lived out in the faithfulness of Christian believers.

In so many these new stories we confront the question is not so much what’s there but what’s not there. And when I read this article, heartbreaking as it is, it appears to me that what’s not there, in a very large sense for Christians, is the church. Where the church is present, this should be, if not nonexistent, than at least very rare and directly addressed. Not merely because we see the problem as sociological, though the Japanese are right, it certainly is, but because we see this problem as deeply theological and thus our responsibility.

So once again as read many headlines and then look beyond the headline to the news article, we need to read such things and analyze such issues not just with the question ‘what’s here?’ but ‘what’s missing?’ and for many Christians the first thing we should notice is what’s missing is the gospel, and what is also missing is the Church.

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 01-29-15

1) Opposition to sex-selective abortion absolute marginalization of baby for sake of choice

If Abortion Is A Choice Then Sex Selection Abortion Should Remain Legal, Science 2.0 (Pam Lowe)

2) US government tracking cars presents challenging interface between technology and morality

U.S. Spies on Millions of Drivers, Wall Street Journal (Devlin Barrett)

3) Generation of young shut-ins of Japan exposes need for rich community of the church

The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins, Wall Street Journal (Shirley S. Wang)

Transcript: The Briefing 01-28-15

The Briefing

 

January 28, 2015

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

 

It’s Wednesday, January 28, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Mormon church offers LGBT rights support in exchange for religious liberty protection

This morning’s edition of the Washington Post reports a story that is being widespread across the nation’s media and newspapers; the headline in the Post, Mormon Church Announces Support for Legal Protections for Gay People. Michelle Boorstein and Abby Ohlheiser report,

“After years of behind-the-scenes meetings between LGBT advocates and top Mormon leaders, church officials Tuesday announced for the first time general support for legislation to protect LGBT people in areas such as housing and employment – as long as accommodations are made to protect the freedom of religious people who oppose such measures.”

Almost immediately, even after yesterday, the LDS church had held a press conference making this announcement. And with the presence of some of his most high-profile leaders, people on both sides of this issue responded that the proposal appears to be rather strange; strange in construction and strange in timing. It’s an understandable kind of proposal coming at this point in America’s moral revolution. The understandable part is this: here you have a major religious body – in this case the group officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as Mormons, often shortened to the LDS church – what you have here is a major religious organization in America that is claiming it can support the movement for gay rights and for the civil rights of gays and lesbians, as is now commonly defined in terms of the moral revolution, so long as respect is given for religious liberty.

The lead paragraph in that article in this morning’s Washington Post gets right to the point when the reporters write that the church has announced general support for legislation to protect LGBT people in areas such as housing and employment, but the next words are especially crucial,

“– as long as accommodations are made to protect the freedom of religious people who oppose such measures.”

Now, once again, almost anyone who understands the scope and scale of today’s moral revolution will understand why such a proposal might be made. But if you’re looking at the landscape of America today this appears to be a proposal that comes rather too late to be genuinely helpful. And perhaps the response to the proposal yesterday helps to make that point more than anything else.

I’ve had the privilege of meeting with several top Mormon leaders; speaking at Brigham Young University and meeting with some of the very people involved in the public announcement yesterday. I was always treated with great dignity and respect, and I was given an opportunity for a very honest exchange of conviction. When I was meeting with these Mormon leaders I was able to affirm common concerns when it comes to both the protection of marriage and the protection of religious liberty. At the same time, as I made clear in both of my lectures at Brigham Young University, there is a great theological chasm between biblical Christianity and the LDS church. As I said in both of those lectures, I don’t believe we are going to heaven together, but I do believe we’re at risk of going to jail together. It’s that second concern in some sense that drove the announcement coming from the LDS church yesterday. But almost immediately it was clear that the leadership of the LGBT movement isn’t going to buy this kind of bargain.

As Fred Sainz, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign said,

“As a matter of policy, there’s no ‘there’ there. ‘The so-called religious exemption is the size of five Mack trucks.’”

He went on to say,

“It entirely neuters their proposal.”

In a way that is at least partially parallel to the situation in the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Francis the first, yesterday the LDS church made very clear there is no change in the basic doctrine of the church – a doctrine that identifies marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman and identifies all sexual activity outside of marriage as wrong and sinful. That is, again, the very position that the Roman Catholic Church now appears to be taking even as Pope Francis is declared to have a new openness to the issue; the church continues, officially to teach, in terms of its dogma, that same-sex relations are always and in every case intrinsically disordered and thus sin.

Even as that HRC spokesman said there’s no ‘there’ there, Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times this morning says, what the Mormon Church wants is freedom to discriminate. Now what I want us to note in this statement coming in the New York Times is the fact that the proposal that was made, apparently in good faith by the LDS leaders yesterday, is being rejected out of hand and what is being rejected is that there’s any credibility to their claim to support LGBT rights in any sense if they then claim a religious accommodation or exception. This is what Rosenthal had to write,

“The Mormon church is now willing, news accounts says, to support anti-discrimination legislation in the realms of housing and employment. In return, all the Mormons want are laws that ‘protect religious freedom.’

We already have that. It’s called the Bill of Rights. So what is the church really after?”

So what is the church really after? He goes on to say that the bottom line in the LDS press conference is,

“…what they want is legal permission to use their religion as an excuse to discriminate.”

What I want to note is just how far the moral revolutionaries have pushed this issue. Because what we’re looking at is the LDS church basically asking for what almost anyone in the gay-rights movement would have been ready to grant as recently as 2 to 3 years ago – certainly 5 to 10 years ago. What’s really ominous in Rosenthal’s column is where he writes, citing the Associated Press,

“Mormon leaders still want to hire and fire workers based not only on religious beliefs, but also on behavior standards known as honor codes that require gays and lesbians to remain celibate or marry someone of the opposite sex. The church [and again this is the Associated Press] also wants legal protections for religious objectors who work in government and health care, such as a physician who refuses to perform an abortion, or provide artificial insemination for a lesbian couple.”

What’s really ominous is what Andrew Rosenthal then writes; I quote his words directly,

“Substitute the word ‘black’ or ‘Jewish’ or ‘Catholic’ or, say, ‘Mormon’ for LGBT in these statements, and everyone would be outraged.”

So now you have Rosenthal drawing an absolute parallel and it’s a very ominous parallel. We also need to note that the Associated Press report that he cites points out, for instance, that there are those who have long been contending for conscience clauses for people such as physicians to allow them to exercise their conscience not to perform an abortion. The very clear implication, indeed is not an application it’s basically an outright statement in Rosenthal’s column, is that that is in a legitimate form of discrimination. And that’s where we see the collapse of the religious liberty that Rosenthal says is so well protected by the Bill of Rights.

Christians need to remember at this point that the Bill of Rights is a series of words; it is a matter of language, it is a matter of syntax and grammar. It does not have an army; it doesn’t come with its own method of enforcement. It is only as good as the society ready to protect it, and that means to protect every citizen when it comes to that Bill of Rights. What we are now witnessing is a radical acceleration of the movement to redefine religious liberty so that means almost nothing – or as Frank Bruni’s column said a couple weeks ago in the New York Times, ‘if it means something, it’s only in the pulpit, only in the home, and only in the heart. Not in the public square’

2) Gordon College fallout reveals shocking velocity of leftist history towards intolerance

No one has made this point more graphically in recent days than David French writing in the pages of National Review magazine; the title of his article is The Persecution of Gordon College. You’ll recall the fact that we’ve talked about this in weeks and months passed. Gordon College in suburban Boston, Massachusetts; it’s president simply signed a letter in his personal capacity in which he wrote to the President of the United States as President Obama was poised to issue his order on basically what is called ENDA, or the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. The President issued an Executive Order having to do with the federal government and vendors to the federal government and all of its parts.

Michael Lindsay, the President of Gordon College, wrote these words,

“We have great appreciation for your commitment to human dignity and justice, and we share those values with you. With respect to the proposed executive order, we agree that banning discrimination is a good thing. We believe that all persons are created in the divine image of the creator, and are worthy of respect and love, without exception. Even so, it still may not be possible for all sides to reach a consensus on every issue.”

Michael Lindsay’s letter, in which he was joined by many other institutional presidents, called upon the President to allow for a religious exemption in terms of these policies for colleges, universities, and others that would have genuine conscience issue when it comes to this kind of question of discrimination. The President’s Executive Order did not include that kind of clause.

This is where David French’s article is really important. French writes,

Indeed, the letter did not ask the President to halt the planned order. Instead, it merely asked for an exemption for religious institutions contracting with the federal government. An exemption that was actually [and this is what’s important] narrower in its impact than one Democrats had passed overwhelmingly through the Senate with the support of none other than Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts’ junior Senator, an undisputed champion of the left.”

How recently was that? Was it way back in 1825? No, it was back in 2013. Not exactly yet a vintage year.

French writes,

“In 2013 Warren voted for the Employment Nondiscrimination Act [that’s the ENDA legislation that the president tried to mirror], a proposed federal law that would ban sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in workplaces across the United States, encompassing tens of thousands more employers than President Obama’s planned Executive Order. Yet, ENDA contained a robust religious exemption, flatly exempting houses of worship and providing broad protections for religious employers who require employees to adhere to statements of religious orthodoxy.”

ENDA passed the Senate. It made no progress in the House, it passed the Senate in November 2013. That’s barely over a year ago. President Lindsay signed his letter eight months later. This is where what French writes is really important, as he writes,

“A lot can change in eight months. The arc of leftist social history moves quickly and it bends toward intolerance.”

So what we see are moves made against a college and its president and now a flat rejection of these exemptions – the kind of exemptions that the LDS leadership called for just yesterday – by the very people who voted for those exemptions a matter of just less than a year and a half ago. When we’re talking about the arc of history, when we’re talking about the speed of this moral revolution, Christians had better come to terms of the fact that this accelerated revolution is gaining velocity virtually day by day.

And finally as we leave the issue for today we need to know that Andrew Rosenthal’s response to the LDS statement yesterday was one that goes beyond even what the Mormon leaders were talking about when it comes to LGBT issues and religious liberty. He brings up the question of abortion by citing that Associated Press article, and immediately after he does so he rejects any such claim.

3) Shifting Middle East political scene exposes harsh reality of leaders worse than dictators

In recent days we have been talking about worldview and the governments that are the product of such worldviews. We’ve talked about the change in government that is taking place in such nations as Greece and Saudi Arabia and how to work backwards from those developments to the worldview that simply makes such regimes and governmental systems possible. But these developments also raise important issues, such as the one that Gerald Seib addresses in yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. His headline US Faces a New Mideast as Strongmen Fade. Gerald Seib’s a veteran observer of foreign affairs and he’s really onto something of worldview significance here. It gets to a big question; what is better? A strong man, an autocrat, a dictator on one hand or something else on the other?

As Gerald Seib makes clear, an honest, moral evaluation is ‘it depends on what the alternative just might be.’ He also points to the fact that the disorder that we’re now experiencing throughout the Middle East is in the aftermath of what had been very strong leadership by people who had been more often than not allies of the United States. And they had been strongmen – uniformly men – who had held power for a very long time, until recently.

For instance he cites King Hussein, ruler Jordan for 47 years. Muammar Gaddafi, the leader of Libya for 42 years. He was sometimes a friend of the United States, more times not. King Hassan, ruler of Morocco for 38 years, Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt for 30 years – one of America’s closest allies as also King Hussein of Jordan had become in his later decades. Hafez al-Assad, President of Syria for 29 years – it’s his son Basshar Assad who is now in power in Syria, very controversially so. And then finally Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq for 24 years until, of course, removed by military efforts of the United States of America and its allies.

Well you look at that list and Saddam Hussein at 24 years had the shortest term of any of these Middle Eastern leaders. The longest was King Hussein of 47 years. There’s currently still want in this alumni class who is ruling. That’s Kuwait’s 85-year-old ruler Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah. He is the latest in a line of family members, says Seib, but he’s also ill. He is indeed 85 years old, and he recently underwent surgery.

Seib then writes,

“Most of these long-lasting rulers were friends of the U.S. Some—Jordan’s King Hussein, for example—were relatively benign. Others—Hafez al Assad, Saddam Hussein—were both unsavory thugs and largely hostile to America.”

He then writes,

“But one thing they had in common is that they used their power and personal authority to quell unrest and the region’s tide of Islamic extremism.”

He also writes – there’s always an ‘on the other hand here,’

“What these rulers also did, though, was bottle up the growing political dissent and religious fervor in their lands, pushing those forces below ground, where they quietly built steam.”

Now this raises a genuinely interesting moral question. Of course, it’s also a pressing political question: what’s better? A dictator or something else? And the clear answer once again is, it depends on what that something else is. Right now, if something else is the Islamic State, most people would morally go back to a dictator who at least had some kind of basically benign rule. In other words, there’s a big difference between a strong man who no doubt puts a lot of people in jail and maybe does worse, and a group such as the Islamic State that is killing people by the thousands and beheading innocent hostages just in order to make a point.

But from a Christian biblical worldview analysis there’s no easy answer to this question. You can’t feel good about a dictator. You can’t feel good about a totalitarian rule no matter how basically benign it may be. But here’s the point: you can feel worse and rightly morally judge something to be worse that is the alternative to that totalitarianism.

This is not a new question. It was a question faced by the United States in the context of the Cold War, when one of most clear thinking political strategist was a woman by the name of Jean Kirkpatrick who later became the United States Ambassador to the United Nations under President Ronald Reagan. She wrote a book back during the Cold War entitled Dictatorships and Double Standards in which she said any honest government such as the United States must have an honest a double standard when it comes to dictators. There are the bad and there are the worse.

I know you hear me say this over and over again, but the only explanation for this kind of moral quandary is the fact that we live in a world that is fallen such that every government is in some sense . The question is which shows the devastation of the fall more graphically? Which government is more dangerous?

The kind of article offered yesterday by Gerald Seib destroys the utopian temptation, the temptation to believe that there could be out there somewhere the kind of utopian dream that would be a government free from the effects of sin. There is no such government. That’s why we have a divided government, the separation of powers by our Constitution. And that’s why when you do not have that and unite all power in a dictator you have a recipe for certain trouble. The big question of course in this very very sinful world is what could be worse than that, and the answer is evidently many things.

4) Marcus Borg, Jesus Seminary scholar, dies as ‘progressive Christian’

Finally an obituary that appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, it’s by Laurie Goodstein. Here’s the headline; Marcus Borg, liberal Christian scholar, dies at 72. As Goodstein reports,

“Marcus J. Borg, a scholar who popularized a liberal intellectual approach to Christianity with his lectures and books about Jesus as a historical figure, died on Wednesday … He was 72.”

She goes on to write,

“Professor Borg was among a group of scholars, known as the Jesus Seminar, who set off an uproar with its very public efforts to discern collectively which of Jesus’ acts and utterances could be confirmed as historically true, and which were probably myths.

His studies of the New Testament led him not toward atheism but toward a deep belief in the spiritual life and in Jesus as a teacher, healer and prophet. Professor Borg became, in essence, a leading evangelist of what is often called progressive Christianity.”

David Gibson, writing a similar obituary for Religion News Service wrote,

“Alongside scholars such as John Dominic Crossan, Borg was a leader in the Jesus Seminar, which brought a skeptical eye to the Scriptures and in particular to supernatural claims about Jesus’ miracles and his resurrection from the dead.

Like other scholars, Borg tended to view Jesus as a Jewish prophet and teacher who was a product of the religious ferment of first-century Judaism.”

And in a paragraph very similar to that of Laurie Goodstein in terms of the fact that Borg didn’t become an atheist, but a ‘progressive Christian’ to use their terminology, Gibson writes,

“But while Borg questioned the Bible, he never lost his passion for the spiritual life or his faith in God as “real and a mystery,” as he put it in his 2014 memoir, “Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most,” the last of more than 20 books he wrote.”

The obituary of  Marcus Borg does bring to mind the legacy of what was known as the Jesus Seminar. It was mentioned explicitly in that New York Times obituary the group was led by man by the name of Robert Funk, and it began as a group of very leftist biblical scholars who gathered together to take a basically anti-supernatural, or nonsupernatural look to the Scriptures and in particular to the New Testament. In their most infamous process they took the four Gospels and they took them apart, basically using – and no, I’m not making this up – four different colored marbles to vote on particular statements acts and claims about Jesus to determine whether or not in their view such statements and acts were actually historically accurate. They came to the conclusion that very little of the New Testament was historically true. In particular, very little of historical content of the four Gospels. They actually published their own version of a red letter New Testament in which, since the words of Jesus they accepted were in red, there was actually very little red in their red letter New Testament.

They used four different colored marbles to vote by putting their marbles out on the table as to whether or not a statement of Jesus was ‘almost assuredly true,’ or ‘maybe true,’ or ‘maybe not true’or ‘almost assuredly not true.’ But as they make clear their own process, they began with the assumption that the Bible is simply an artifact of history. They rejected any supernatural explanation, any claim of divine inspiration, and the began with the assumption that Jesus was merely a human prophet – a Jewish prophet of the first century. And here’s no surprise; the Jesus that they came up with in their process is the Jesus that they defined when they went into that process.

Which reminds me of a statement was made about the so-called Quest for the Historical Jesus. The statement was made by Albert Schweitzer when he said those historical Questers, those who are trying to use the merely historical process to supposedly recover the historical Jesus, were people who were in effect looking down deep in a well and seeing their own reflection, and then claiming that that definition was Jesus.

But the other interesting thing about that New York Times obituary is how it says the Marcus Borg didn’t become an atheist, he retained his belief in something even as he didn’t believe that Jesus Christ was the very son of God, and even as he explicitly denied that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead.

It may well be the Marcus Borg was in no sense an atheist, but he was also in no sense an Orthodox Christian. Anyone who rejects the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is not meeting the very clear statement of the apostle Paul in Romans 10 when he says that salvation comes to the one who confesses with the lips that Jesus Christ is Lord and believes in the heart that God has raised him from the dead. A point that Paul – we believe by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit made emphatically in first Corinthians chapter 15 as well. But here you have evidence of the redefinition of Christianity into what is called ‘progressive Christianity.’ And so I simply conclude where so often I’ve had to go, quoting Gresham Machen, that great Christian scholar of the 20th century who, in the beginning of that century, pointed out the when you’re looking at liberal Christianity and biblical Christianity are not looking to variants of one religion but two very different religions. And the same is true of biblical Christianity and what is now called  ‘progressive Christianity.’

 

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 01-28-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Mormon church offers LGBT rights support in exchange for religious liberty protection

Mormon church announces support for legal protections for gay people, Washington Post (Michelle Boorstein and Abby Ohlheiser)

Mormon Church Wants Freedom to Discriminate, New York Times (Andrew Rosenthal)

Mormon Leaders Call for Measures Protecting Gay Rights, Associated Press (Brady McCombs and Rachel Zoll)

2) Gordon College fallout reveals shocking velocity of leftist history towards intolerance

The Persecution of Gordon College, National Review (David French)

3) Shifting Middle East political scene exposes harsh reality of leaders worse than dictators

Generation of Long-Lasting Mideast Rulers Produced Stability—and a Mess, Wall Street Journal (Gerald Seib)

4) Marcus Borg, Jesus Seminary scholar, dies as ‘progressive Christian’

Marcus Borg, Liberal Scholar on Historical Jesus, Dies at 72, New York Times (Laurie Goodstein)

Marcus Borg, leading liberal theologian and historical Jesus expert, dies at 72, Religion News Service (David Gibson)

Transcript: The Briefing 01-27-15

The Briefing

 

January 27, 2015

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

 

It’s Tuesday, January 27, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Winners of Greek election present danger to European project, lesson in danger of debt

A political and cultural earthquake took place in Greece in recent days as the government there was swept out and a new government brought in. And the new government is going to be led by a far leftist party and its young leader who is now going to be the Prime Minister. It’s one of those electoral results that points to the fact that something has been building for some time. Just as in terms of a geological earthquake, pressures under the surface of the earth build up and then suddenly seem to erupt; politically much of the same kind of syndrome takes place when political pressures build up and then suddenly burst onto the scene in headlines that announce a drastic political change.

From a Christian worldview perspective there are a couple of big lessons here. The first one has to do with the fact that the European project is really in danger. We’ve been talking in recent weeks, recent days, even recent months, about the weakening of the European project as a civilization. We’ve been watching that over the process of the last couple of centuries; indeed the 20th century was a century of horrors that seem to call into question the very existence of Europe – two massive cataclysmic world wars that spread beyond Europe to the rest of the world, but certainly began there.

What we’ve seen in terms of the recent secularization of the European continent and what we’ve seen in terms of a deep identity crisis in Europe. That brings immediately to mind the fact that Europe as an identity, European as an adjective, all of this is now hugely called into question. And as we have repeatedly observed, it’s because the basic worldview that once united Europe in terms of a Christian civilization – not in terms of everyone being a believing Christian, but of everyone having Christianity’s the main reference point and operating out of a basically Christian worldview, in terms especially of moral understanding and the understanding of what it means to be human – that has been largely swept away in terms of the secularization of the worldview and the horrible events of the 20th century.

And that affirms, once again, that worldview explains politics. Nothing else can. The only thing that can eventually explain political behavior is the thinking that falls behind the vote. And the vote in Greece points to the need for some very clear understanding of the thinking that is taking place. What we have seen here is a political earthquake, the pressures have been building; one out of four Greek citizens of working age is without a job. Even as the European governments around Greece forced upon Greece an inordinate economic austerity, and even as there are huge questions as to whether Greece is even capable of pulling off that kind of fiscal discipline, the reality is that the economy of Greece shrunk by 20% even with those austerity measures in place.

To put the matter bluntly, even in the worst years of what was called the Great Depression in the 20th century in the United States, neither of those statistics pertained. We’re looking here at an economic construction and a level of unemployment that is virtually unprecedented in modern European history. And that’s a sociological experiment that’s doomed to fail.

But that gets to the second issue of worldview importance here and that is fiscal reality and economic responsibility. Greece got itself into this crisis by reckless behavior, by unbelievably reckless behavior. You’re talking about a country that has over $350 billion in external loans. You’re looking at a country whose economy has not produced even the ability to pay the interest on those loans for many years now. You’re looking at an economy that is based upon outsized pension promises and unbelievable levels of public employment. And you’re also looking at a country that defines employment in a way that wouldn’t fit the American society nor the rest of their European neighbors. Because when they’re talking about employment increase they are talking often about holding a job without any obvious responsibility. That has becoming notorious issue in terms of the public sector in Greece.

You know the Bible is very clear about the fact that you have to pay your bills. The Bible’s very clear about the kind of fiscal responsibility that comes with honoring investment, honoring thrift, honoring the payment of bills, honoring the avoidance of debt. We’re making a country here that has put itself into a position of radical economic dependency and they had depended upon the fact that their European neighbors would eventually either discount their debt or pay their bills in order to keep the European project going – especially the European common currency known as the euro.

Alexis Tsipras, the young man who is going to become the new prime minister and the Syriza party – the party that he heads – are going to be a real threat, not only in terms of the Greek future, they are going to be a real threat to the entire project of Europe. And it’s going to be a fascinating thing to watch.

By the way the new prime minister ran on the platform of calling upon Greeks debtors to forgive at least half of the, again, over $300 billion in debt that Greece has now amassed. Greece effectively put itself into a position of effective bankruptcy and then called upon its European neighbors for help and now it doesn’t want the terms of that help. And here’s the big lesson from a Christian worldview, debt is very dangerous; it’s dangerous not only for nations but it’s dangerous for individuals, it’s dangerous for families, it’s dangerous for institutions. You take on this kind of debt, a debt that you cannot pay, and eventually two horrifying things happen.

In the first place, you consign your own children – your own descendants – to paying off a debt that if you cannot pay, they almost surely cannot pay. And secondly, you put yourself in a position of dependence upon those to whom you owe money. You know I think most of us would like the deal that if we could just vote and say our debt has gone away, but voting doesn’t make the debt or the Greek crisis go away.

2) NYC mayor reneges on promise to allow churches to meet in schools

A sad development came from New York City over the weekend, but before I get to that development let me point to an article that appeared the week previous in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. That article is by Rob Moll, it is entitled Gathering the Faithful, No Church Required. He writes about an interesting statistic I hadn’t seen cited elsewhere. As he writes,

“Church construction in the U.S. has fallen 80% since 2002, now at its lowest level since record-keeping began in 1967, according to reporting in this newspaper. The $3.15 billion in spending on religious buildings is half the level of a decade ago. Several factors are contributing to the declines, including postrecession financial challenges—religious giving has never returned to its 2007 peak—and the waning of religious affiliation.”

Yet he says that might not be the big story because the big story just might be Christian churches that are not meeting in buildings they buy or buildings they build but rather in buildings they use, buildings they borrow, or buildings they rent. He writes about the phenomenon of church planting, especially among American evangelicals and points out that many of these church plants aren’t now in the church building business and they may never be in the building of church buildings business. They instead are looking at how to start churches in alternative kinds of facilities.

One of the clearest examples of this is one that he cites in his article. Rob Moll points to Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church that is started, according to this report, over 300 churches in 45 cities over the past 12 years. Cooperating, he says, with 34 church planting networks on five continents. Well those are a lot of numbers but the bottom line, the importance is very clear. We’re looking at a church planting generation and we’re looking at a church planting movement that isn’t concerned primarily with building buildings. And furthermore when you’re looking at America’s largest metropolitan areas, and especially the urban cores of our largest cities, you’re actually looking areas in which it is impractical for evangelical congregations ever to build or to own property. The costs are simply too astronomical. That’s where the alarming news in New York City comes in – just from the weekend.

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra reporting for Christianity Today on 23 January put out a story entitled, No Worship Services in Public Schools, New York Mayor Tells Supreme Court. The bottom line, Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York City, campaigned on the promise of letting churches rent school space; now, according to CT, he’s asking the Supreme Court to prohibit it. I want to make reference to an article by Emily Belz of World Magazine. It appeared back on September 30 of last year; the headline, NYC mayor reiterates promise to let churches keep meeting in schools. This was a big issue in the campaign that elected Bill de Blasio to office. As Emily Belz wrote,

“New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, as part of his campaign last year, received support from many pastors of largely minority churches in New York after he promised to undo the Bloomberg administration’s policy forbidding churches from using public school facilities for Sunday worship.  ”

You may be aware that it was his predecessor, now former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose administration ruled after there had been a court challenge that churches could not use New York City’s public school facilities for meeting places. You’ll also recall that that would mean that there will be hundreds of evangelical church plants that would have virtually nowhere to meet. Those congregations were given an immediate reprieve by a court order that said that the mayor’s decision would have to be put on hold until the issue could wind its way through the courts. And it is almost certainly headed eventually to the United States Supreme Court.

But the big story that came over the weekend from Christianity Today is that the mayor has reneged on his promise; he has effectively reversed his position and he did it without even the decency of any kind of warning. Just last April, according to CT, the mayor said,

“I stand by my belief that a faith organization playing by the same rules as any community non-profit deserves access,

But as they noted,

“…five months later, the policy was still in place, and the Bronx Household of Faith [that’s one of the congregations that was threatened with being displaced] petitioned the US Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court’s ruling that the city’s ban is constitutional.”

The press secretary to the mayor had told World Magazine at that time that,

“His position on this issue has not changed.”

Then Christianity reported over the weekend,

“This month, [the] de Blasio’s administration filed a legal brief in opposition to the Bronx Household of Faith’s petition, arguing in favor of the city’s policy. ‘[It] does not involve any government-imposed prohibition, restraint, or burden on religious exercise,’ the brief stated.”

Indeed the New York City Board of Education argued that prohibiting worship services is – amazingly enough – to use their term, “viewpoint neutral,” even though the main groups affected would be evangelical church plants; and even though those who brought the case challenging the constitutionality of churches using those facilities were explicitly arguing against the theological positions of those very churches.

So the big story is that the mayor of New York campaigned on the promise of protecting those churches and their rights to access these facilities and then, as it turned out, when the time came for the city to file its legal petitions with the court, it argued the opposite case. Effectively trying to oust those very churches it had asked for support.

Look back to that article I cited from the Wall Street Journal just days earlier and you come to understand the depth of the problem. You’re looking at evangelical churches that may effectively be told ‘you can’t meet in the public school facilities of New York City.’ And of course that will be decision that would reverberate throughout the United States. We’re looking here at a situation in which other groups can use those school facilities. Other groups can use them for their own assemblies, for their own meetings, and as is the case with so many other issues, the Supreme Court had at least ruled in the past – as in its Mergens decision on equal access – that if the public schools offer a forum for one group they cannot deny a forum to another based upon the content of their presentation or their beliefs.

We’ll see if the Supreme Court is going to uphold that principal in terms of this case. One thing is abundantly clear, the mayor of New York not only did not uphold that principal but he actually reversed himself, effectively telling these churches they weren’t welcomed after he welcomed their votes.

3) Boy Scouts compromise on homosexuality pleases no one, California forbids judges’ participation

On the same front of religious liberty; another big development. This one comes as something not of a shock but as a great disappointment. And the graphic nature of the decision handed down by the California Supreme Court just as the weekend began is another indication of the challenge we are going to face. Just last week the California Supreme Court, which is constitutionally charged with developing a code of ethics for judges in the state, ruled that those judges cannot participate, in any way, with the Boy Scouts of America because they are a discriminatory organization when it comes to sexual orientation.

Remember that when we looked at the decision made now couple of years ago by the Boy Scouts to change their position, we noted that it wouldn’t gain them the kind of cultural traction they were hoping for; it wouldn’t neutralize the critics. They changed their long-standing policy, even after they had won a case at the United States Supreme Court. They change their policy to allow for openly gay scouts but not for openly gay scout leaders. And that is led to the claim, now, by the state of California that they are discriminatory, even as they allow openly gay scouts. And now in a very clear sign of the closing of the American mind when it comes to the issue of sexual orientation or when it comes to even the definition of discrimination, the judges of the state of California are being told they can’t participate in an organization as venerable and well-respected as the Boy Scouts of America because now that organization, despite its change of policy, is on – well you’ve hear this before –the wrong side of history.

One of the articles of greatest concern on this issue that has appeared since the development of this decision is something that appeared in the Bay Area Reporter; as was reported on the weekend,

“The only remaining exception to the general rule is membership in a religious organization,”

That was stated by Fourth District Court of Appeal Justice Richard Fybel, chair of the Supreme Court’s advisory committee on the code of judicial ethics.

“One other exception – belonging to a military organization – was eliminated as well, because the U.S. armed forces no longer restrict military service based on sexual orientation.”

So you put all this together and there had been, until this weekend, three exceptions to the rule that California judges couldn’t belong to a discriminatory organization. The exceptions were when it came to the United States military, when it came to nonprofit organizations – especially the Boy Scouts of America – and when it came to religious organizations. If you heard me read that direct quote clearly what you heard is that they head of the commission said only one of those exceptions remains; and then he said religious organizations.

Now just remember until this development there have been three exceptions. But the very use the word exception really tells you something. That implies that there is something that is undeserved but nonetheless granted as an exception to a general rule because of some reason such as political pressure or public pressure. But now when it comes to the issue the Boy Scouts of America, judges are told you can’t participate and continue as a judge. When it comes to the American military, they are told you can now participate but only because the military changed its policy to join the moral revolution. The only exception that remains of the judge is the exception of religious organizations.

One immediate question comes, ‘for how long? For how long will that exception last?’ And we’re talking here about religious organizations – how long will that mean not only something that might be a religious institution or something to find merely as organization, how long will that be before the organization is your local church? How long will it be before the judges of California are told you can’t be a member of the church that officially teaches that homosexuality is a sin? How long will it be before they’re told you can’t belong to a church that doesn’t celebrate or recognize same-sex unions? How long will it be before you can’t be the Fire Chief of the city of Atlanta and belong to such a church and be known for such beliefs? Well we know the answer to that question don’t we?

As for California the question is still out. But the very use of the language involved here and the fact that they have now said no judge can participate as a volunteer in the Boy Scouts of America tells us how the moral revolution in America’s not only happening but happening at such a lightning pace. And just remember the word that is used here, the word is ‘exception.’ How long will the exception survive? To put the matter bluntly, that’s an exceptionally important question.

4) 70th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation reminder of tragedies world has allowed

Finally, today marks a very important historical observance. It is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp known simply by one of the most ominous names of humanity: Auschwitz. It was 70 years ago today that forces of the Soviet Union were the first to reach the camp. The Nazi murderers had largely fled, abandoning their inmates. But when the Soviet army arrived it found what Western authorities had denied could even have existed: the death camps on the scale of Auschwitz.

The scale is still almost impossible to believe, but believe we must. Over 7 million people were killed, the vast majority of them Jews. When it came to the death camps it was an official part of Nazi policy. It was begun by Adolf Hitler himself and it was eventually bureaucratized and rationalized by the entire machinery of the Nazi regime. The first camp at Auschwitz began in May 1940; the extermination of prisoners began in September 1941. The second death camp was built later, connected to the neighboring village of Birkenau and together these two camps led to the death of over 1 million people.

Most historians believe that at least 1.1 million prisoners died at Auschwitz, about 90% of them were Jewish and one of six Jews killed in the Holocaust died in the death camp of Auschwitz. Major international media pointed to the fact that even as some of the survivors will be gathering their numbers are almost surely going to be much smaller than they were 10 years ago; raising the question of how many can possibly attend 10 years from now. One of the things we have to face is that those who were alive to understand the Holocaust as it happened, those who are the survivors, they are dying as a generation and soon we will face the reality that this great moral horror of the 20 century will be a matter of memory but not for those who are able to remember it personally.

Andrzej Kacorzyk, who deputy director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, told the New York Times,

“This will be the last decade anniversary with a very visible presence of survivors,”

At the 60th anniversary 10 years ago there were 1,500 survivors, this year there are about 300 that are expected. As the New York Times reports,

“Most of them are in their 90s, and some are older than 100.”

The Holocaust of the millions, in particular the Holocaust against the Jews, raises the specter of the 20th century and the awful crime of anti-Semitism, and the awful reality, the most unspeakable reality, of the mass murder of millions of people by the Nazi regime. There were other genocides and other mass murders in the 20th century and there were other murderous regimes; most importantly we would note Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. But when it comes to the death camps of the Nazi regime they remain a singular memory in terms of human civilization, they remain a singular crime in terms of our moral history, they remain a singular symbol of the inhumanity of man and of the potential for deep murderous darkness that resides in a civilization that had claimed to be the most advanced and well educated civilization; the civilization of the highest culture on the earth at that time.

Even a secular society cannot fail to ponder the meaning of these things. That led to a very interesting article that appeared in the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Here is the headline, Grandson of Auschwitz Boss Is Trying to Remake Family Name. It’s an article about a very awkward attempt being made by Rainer Hoess, now age 49, to try to separate himself and his family name from the fact that it was his grandfather who was the head of the death camp at Auschwitz. His grandfather was the infamous Rudolf Hoess of the S.S. who was executed on those grounds for crimes against humanity in 1947.

The article about Rainer has points to his difficulty and the difficulty of other children and grandchildren of the Nazi leaders in Germany to distance themselves from the horrifying crimes of their fathers. And we are reminded of the biblical warnings from the Old Testament that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children and down to successive generations. There are some names that have become so infamous, it is virtually impossible to carry that name in a civilized society. At the top of the list of the 20 century is certainly the surname Hitler, but that’s not the only surname that has become almost unbearable. That includes surnames like Goebbels and surnames like Hoess; Hoess in particular as it is tied to Rudolf Hoess.

The articles is about the rather awkward attempt being made by this 49-year-old man to overcome a name he inherited from a grandfather known to be a criminal against the very idea of humanity, and the murderer not just of many but of over 1 million. Furthermore the event being held today at Auschwitz-Birkenau points to the fact that the world let this happen. And it also points to recent headlines indicating that the virus of anti-Semitism that many people in Western society thought had been extinguished at the end of World War II was anything but.

In terms of the observance taking place at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, there’s a very important issue, a very important truth for Christians to keep in mind as well. There are those who were gathered there believe that the most important issue is the verdict of history. All history does have a verdict and we should be thankful that it does. But the bigger issue of course, from a Christian biblical concern, is not the verdict of history but the verdict of God. And even those who escaped earthly justice and may think they have escaped the verdict of history will not escape that judgment, nor shall we.

 

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 01-27-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Winners of Greek election present danger to European project, lesson in danger of debt

Syriza Win in Greek Election Sets Up New Europe Clash, Wall Street Journal (Charles Forrelle, Nektaria Stamouli and Alkman Granitsas)

2) NYC mayor reneges on promise to allow churches to meet in schools

Gathering the Faithful, No Church Required, Wall Street Journal (Rob Moll)

No Worship Services in Public Schools, New York Mayor Tells Supreme Court, Christianity Today (Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra)

NYC mayor reiterates promise to let churches keep meeting in schools, World Magazine (Emily Belz)

3) Boy Scouts compromise on homosexuality pleases no one, California forbids judges’ participation

CA judges cut ties with the Boy Scouts of America due to LGBT issues, Bay Area Reporter

State high court’s vote affecting Scout affiliation stirs debate anew, Los Angeles Times (Thomas Curwen)

4) 70th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation reminder of tragedies world has allowed

For Auschwitz Museum, a Time of Great Change, New York Times (Rick Lyman)

, Wall Street Journal (Naftali Bendavid and Harriet Torry)

Transcript: The Briefing 01-26-15

The Briefing

 

January 26, 2015

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

 

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

1) Death of Saudi King Abdullah reveals vast worldview differences between nations

As the week came to an end, the Saudi Arabian nation went into a new monarchial generation. The news coming out of Saudi Arabia on Friday was this: King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud, who maintain stability in Saudi Arabia in the face of regional pressure from Islamist and democratic movements, died at about age 91. That came from an official court statement from Saudi Arabia, as was reported on the front page of Friday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. What makes that really interesting, of course, is the fact, well not only did you have a monarchial change in Saudi Arabia, but the dead king was identified as being about age 91.

A good many Americans probably wondered why a change in terms of the monarch in Saudi Arabia would have such interest in the United States. But for any number of reasons, most importantly history and secondarily oil, the fates of the United States and Saudi Arabia have been linked going back to the 1930s. And we have to go back to the 1930s for the beginning of this nation. The modern state of Saudi Arabia was born in the year 1932 between the two world wars and it was founded by the father of the deceased King – who is also the father of the new King. That would be Abdulaziz al Saud, born in 1902 died in 1953. He took the name ibn Saud when he established Saudi Arabia in terms of a struggle for the Arabian Peninsula against other warring tribes in the year 1932. He is one of those figures right out of a movie like Lawrence of Arabia. And he’s also a figure that had a massive influence, not only in his region of the world, but in ours as well – unbeknownst to many living Americans.

The reason ibn Saud and his sons have played such an outsized role on the world stage is because in 1937 American surveyors discovered the largest deposit of oil on the planet – at least as is known until today – in the sands of Saudi Arabia; changing the entire picture of the world when it came to its economic engine and changing the fate of the house of Saud, as the royal house is known. Unlike other dynasties in the same region, the house of Saud was immediately flush with cash and it has been ever since the 1930s when oil was discovered. Unlike the Hashemite rulers of Jordan, unlike rulers in terms of other nations in the area, it is the house of Saud that has ruled supreme when it comes, first of all, to economic influence, but secondly when it comes to the role of the nation in the religion of Islam.

The King of Saudi Arabia also has the title of the Custodian of the Two Mosques. And when it comes to the most important cities in the history of Islam and in the religion of Islam, both of them are under the direct custody – indeed under the dynastic rule – of the house of Saud. One of the reasons I want to give attention to this dynastic shift on The Briefing today is to remind all of us as Christians that we live in a world that is operating by very different worldviews, and one of the most graphic displays of a contrast in worldview is that between the governmental structure of Saudi Arabia and that of the United States – or for that matter, that of the Western world as a whole.

You probably remember enough from your history or civics classes to remember that Europe itself was once populated by warring tribes. At some point over a long period of centuries it was unified under monarchial autocrats, dictatorial and monarchial rulers, who claimed a dynastic role, who claim the divine right of kings and who claimed a family hereditary line in terms of their dynasty. The dynastic rule was passed from King to Prince and immediately upon the death of the king the Prince became King, thus the custom in the United Kingdom of the expression “The King is dead, long live the King.” Of course there have been Queens, as is now the case in terms of the monarch of the United Kingdom. But Queen Elizabeth II bears almost no political resemblance in terms of power and authority, or culture shaping power, to that of her namesake, Elizabeth I.

But when it comes to dynasties it is hard to come close to the dynasty of the house of Saud. Abdulaziz al Saud, again later known as Ibn Saud, had 22 wives. It is thought he had at least 45 sons, 36 of his sons lived to adulthood in order to have children of their own. The new King of Saudi Arabia, King Salman, is the next to the last of his sons. There is only one more and he has become the crown Prince. And these are not exactly young rulers. The new King, King Salman, is 79 years old. The new crown Prince, Prince Muqrin is 10 years younger, but that means he’s the sprightly age of 69. Now what makes that really interesting is that we’re looking at one of the most powerful nations on earth in terms of economic power, we’re looking at one of most influential and strategic places on earth, and we’re looking at one man and his many sons who have ruled from 1932 to the present. In other words, we are now looking at a crown Prince who is still the half-brother of the current and new King.

Well one of the things that should come immediately to mind is that it takes a certain worldview to uphold such a monarchy, it takes a certain worldview built into a population of millions to accept this kind of dynastic rule and simply to accept that it makes sense – that the son of a man who died in 1953 would still be king and that his half-brother would necessarily become the next king and be granted autocratic power. And when we’re talking about autocratic power we mean real autocratic power.

Writing about the story for the Los Angeles Times reporter Alexandra Zavis gets right to the point when she makes clear that the houses of Saud is held together not only by this dynastic control, but by the fusion of the dynasty and a very radical vision of Islam. In order to make this point she goes back not to 1932, she goes back to the year 1774, two years before the American Revolution when the House of Saud was first established and the first kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She writes,

“The anointment of the House of Saud more than three centuries ago came with a pledge to rule in tandem with the austere clerics of Wahhabi Islam whose puritanical theology has provided some of the underpinnings for extremist groups throughout the Middle East.”

This leads to a great quandary, a great puzzle in terms of the current world scene. The United States hardly has a closer ally than Saudi Arabia when it comes to matters military and strategic in the Middle East. And yet in terms of worldview it is hard to imagine two cultures that are more radically unlike one another than the culture of the United States and that of Saudi Arabia. And even as we are tied together by strategic interest and oil – not the oil itself is not a strategic interest – we are also divided by a worldview clash that is simply monumental. For most Americans if they came to understand the worldview of the nation of Saudi Arabia they would quickly understand that it would take centuries of historical rewind, in terms of Western culture, to come anywhere close. For that matter, even when you’re looking at the Western nation of absolute rule when it comes to Kings, there really is no absolute rule in the Western tradition quite like the absolute rule that is quite current in terms of the House of Saud. Perhaps the closest thing you could come outside the nation of Saudi Arabia in terms of something at least more Western will be the role of the Russian czars.

Alexandra Zavis writes,

“Wahhabi doctrine is so deeply entrenched in the desert kingdom that few believe that King Salman — an elderly brother of the late King Abdullah who took the throne this week — is likely to make many reforms.”

She goes on to report, and this is very important,

“The grand bargain forged in 1774 between Mohammed ibn al Saud, then a minor clan leader, and the cleric Mohammed Abdul Wahhab, provided the ideological justification for uniting the fractious tribes scattered across the Arabian Peninsula under the rule of the House of Saud.”

She goes on to write,

“As their empire expanded, so did the influence of the Wahhabi clerical establishment, which seeks to convert Muslims to their ‘purer’ form of Islam,”

“…billions of dollars from the country’s rich oil earnings have been spent on spreading Wahhabism around the world.”

Then we go back to the great quandary I mentioned earlier; how can a nation so strategically tied to the United States, politically and economically in many senses, be also a nation that is governed by a worldview that is so radically distinct? And how is it that this very same nation claims as the legitimacy of its own dynastic rule the very form of Islam that has been feeding Islamic terrorism that this kingdom has been fighting even for its own survival for the better part of the last five decades? That is indeed one of the great question marks of the modern era.

But at this point American Christians need to understand the quandaries only grow more complicated, the issues more developed and difficult. For instance, even as the king died on Friday – that is King Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz al Saud – the American government ordered the lowering of the American flag to half-mast in American installations. That’s really something; the death of the Saudi King responded to by the American White House with an order that the American flag be lowered to half-mast.

Even as Alexandra Zavis did a fantastic job in the Los Angeles Times pointing out the fusion of the House of Saud with Wahhabi Islam, similarly and unsurprisingly, Ross Douthat writing in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times got right to the issue when he spoke of Americans as “prisoners of the Saudi’s.” He writes with great moral insight and I quote,

“The Western response to the death of Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, king of Saudi Arabia and custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, followed two paths. Along one, various officials and luminaries offered the gestures … [you would] expect,”

But he says in terms of the other response,

“Anyone outside Western officialdom was free to tell the fuller truth: that Abdullah presided over one of the world’s most wicked nonpariah states, whose domestic policies are almost cartoonishly repressive and whose international influence has been strikingly malign. His dynasty is founded on gangsterish control over a precious natural resource, sustained by an unholy alliance with a most cruel interpretation of Islam and protected by the United States and its allies out of fear of worse alternatives if it fell.”

Here again we as Christians face the reality of trying to operate in a fallen world – a world that operates by so many worldviews and many of those worldviews in outright conflict. The conflict between the worldview of Wahhabi Islam and that of the modern secular West is almost impossible to calculate. The closer you look at the Saudi regime with its public beheadings, public floggings, and the fact that women can be arrested for even trying to drive, is hard to square that with the modern age – not to mention to square with American moral foreign-policy. But we are living in a dangerous world. We’re living in a world in which just as Ross Douthat said, America has been linked with the Saudi Arabian regime precisely because – he got exactly right – we’re far more afraid of what might come as the alternative.

We’re living in a strange world. And of course time and again we have to come back and say we are living in a fallen world. And one of the very difficult challenges we face not only as individuals, not only as corporations, not only as institutions, not only as churches and congregations, but more fundamentally, in this sense, as nations trying to survive in a world of other nations; trying to survive to uphold a worldview in a world of other worldviews, trying to uphold a democratic experiment when much of the world has never even attempted it and – as is symbolized by Saudi Arabia – has rejected the idea outright.

I go back to the fact that it takes a certain worldview to uphold this kind of dynastic claim. A worldview that really believes that somehow a family has been appointed as the natural leaders to be granted autocratic rule. You really do have to go a long way back in Western history to find that. But as we bring this to an end, at least in terms of this issue, let’s remember that our form of government also requires a worldview and that worldview also require some explanation and understanding of human rights, an understanding of human dignity, an understanding of the importance of the individual, and furthermore an understanding of the importance that the only government that has legitimacy is one that in some sense has received the consent of the governed.

So consider the worldview of Saudi Arabia and consider how the worldview of Wahhabi Islam is spreading – spreading quite quickly – into other parts of the world. And then look at the United States where we felt that our worldview was the net export in terms of worldview after our victory in the Second World War and the end of the Cold War – which we also counted as a victory. When it comes to these two worldviews, which will actually dominate for the rest of the 21st century? Well, time will tell.

2) France aims to reinforce secular values through education in effort to win worldview clash

Next, just because the timing is perfect I go to an article by Maïa de la Baume that appeared in the New York Times over the weekend. Here’s the headline, Paris Announces Plan to Promote Secular Values. It’s almost as if they weren’t reading the headlines about the worldview clash that we described. It’s almost as if they haven’t been reading the recent headlines, tragically enough, from their own country. De la Baume writes,

“Officials in France announced new measures on Thursday aimed at reinforcing secular values at French schools, after the terrorist attacks in and around Paris exposed serious cultural rifts between children in heavily immigrant communities and others in classrooms throughout the country.”

According to the report, teachers are to receive new training, students will be exposed more deeply to civics and morals lessons, and classroom activities would include the singing of the French national anthem. What brought about these new civics lessons and the spending of millions of dollars now approved by the French government for these civics lessons for secular values? It wasn’t so much the Charlie Hebdo attacks that took place, murderously so, just a matter of a couple weeks ago, it was the fact that in the aftermath of that massacre, any number of children in the French schools refused to observe the moment of silence the government had called; indicating that they sided with the terrorists, not with the victims.

I really do think this is a big story. As de la Baume as reports,

“French schools already have a secular code of conduct, but about 1,000 teachers and staff members would be trained on questions of ‘laïcité,’ [that is] France’s secular identity, codified under a century-old law on the separation of church and state.”

So now you have the French government, spending millions of dollars, to educate 1,000 teachers about how to make students more secular by singing the French national anthem and other civics activities in terms of the public schools in France; trying to persuade them of the superiority of a secular worldview as they look to the future and their own adulthood.

Now I have pointed to this issue before but this new story is just too graphic to be ignored; especially in light of the previous report about the passing of the Saudi King and the continuation of the House of Saud, and most especially the fusion of the government of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabi Islam. Now we have the French government, in the aftermath of this horrifying event, just two weeks ago announcing that in response to the fact that thousands of schoolchildren in its schools – presumably, according to this report, Muslim schoolchildren – refused to observe the moment of silence for the victims. The response is not a robust understanding of human dignity as grounded in anything like the biblical worldview, it’s not a counter narrative that holds to a deeper and more profound understanding of the grounding of human dignity, it is instead a reassertion of the French values of secularism.

One of the real issues the French government now confronts is that it doesn’t have a narrative that’s compelling. At least it doesn’t have a narrative that is, in any way, as compelling as that of radical Islam. Issues of principle aside, just by a pragmatic consideration, it is very hard to believe that spending millions of dollars to educate 1,000 teachers to make those children more secular has any chance of working. But it also is a reflection of something else. Once a society is committed itself to this kind of official secularism, it really has nowhere to go; nowhere to go but spending more money to try to teach more teachers how to convert more people who aren’t secular into being secular. It’s just hard to imagine that anything like this has any chance of working, not because they’re not spending enough money, but because they simply don’t have a more powerful story to tell.

3) South Korean soap operas threaten to subvert North Korean regime

Speaking of stories, the human being is a narrative creature. We live by stories, we live on a story – for that matter we are living out a story – and we love the stories of others. Whether good stories or bad stories, moral stories or immoral stories, stories have the power to capture the human imagination and just about everyone knows it, including the makers of soap operas, including the makers of soap operas in South Korea; and especially, as it turns out, including the totalitarian ruler of North Korea. There’s a big story here, it made the front page of Sunday’s edition of the New York Times. The headline, North Korea’s Forbidden Love? Smuggled, Illegal Soap Operas, it may not sound like an important story but I promise you, it is.

Choe Sang-Hun writes,

“As a math professor in North Korea, Jang Se-yul was among the nation’s relatively privileged classes; he got to sit in special seats in restaurants and on crowded trains, and more important in a country where many go hungry, was given priority for government food rations. Then he risked it all — for a soap opera from South Korea.

The temptation in this case was ‘Scent of a Man,’ an 18-episode drama about the forbidden love between an ex-convict and his stepsister. A graduate student [according to the report] had offered him the bundle of banned CDs smuggled into the North and, too curious to resist, Mr. Jang and five other professors huddled in one of their homes binge watching until dawn. They were careful to pull the curtains to escape the prying eyes of neighbors taught to turn in their fellow citizens for seditious activities. But they were caught anyway and demoted to manual labor at a power plant.”

For watching “Scent of a Man,” an 18 episode South Korean soap opera.  Choe Sang-Hun is writing about the fact that the North Korean dictator is living in fear of very bad South Korean soap operas. As the article states,

“The decidedly lowbrow dramas — with names like ‘Bad Housewife’ and ‘Red Bean Bread’ — have, in fact, become something of a cultural Trojan horse, sneaking visions of the bustling South into the tightly controlled, impoverished North alongside the usual sudsy fare of betrayals, bouts of ill-timed amnesia and, at least once, a love affair with an alien.”

But this is where this ridiculous story gets really serious. As the New York Times reports – remember this is the New York Times and this is the front page of yesterday’s paper – as the report indicates, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un has issued increasingly pointed warnings to his subjects about what he calls “the poisonous elements of capitalism” crossing China’s border with the North tempting even his communist elite, as the New York Times says,

“Defectors say there has been a severe crackdown on smugglers, and in the fall, South Korean intelligence reported hearing that Mr. Kim was so shaken by the spread of the soaps that he ordered the execution of 10 Workers’ Party officials accused of succumbing to the shows’ allure, according to lawmakers who had been briefed on the matter at a parliamentary hearing.”

Well now we end where we began; with the question what kind of worldview upholds a regime like this? What kind of worldview drives the most evil regime imaginable? And that’s really saying something in terms of the 21st century – perhaps we ought to say, so far.

And in the final analysis, what kind of regime is actually living in fear of soap operas coming from the South? We are defined, we might say, by what we fear. And if you fear your regime might fall because of soap operas, that really says it all. But it also reminds us as Christians that a story is never merely a story. There is always more than the storyline itself, and in this case, these soap operas have become cultural Trojan horses; bringing a vision of a very different life to the North when they see the life depicted in terms of the South. And furthermore, that reminds us of something that was really, really important in terms of the Cold War and continues to be important in the nations like China now. It’s not so much the American stories that are being told by our television exports that seem to have such a massive cultural influence, it is the fact, at least in China, that the stories can even be told.

The popularity of an American show like ‘House of Cards’ is not so much because they believe the stories but because they can hardly believe that an American government would allow such a story to be told and the fact that they are told is very revealing and perhaps more revealing than the stories themselves to the Chinese. It is also the case that when it came to the Soviet Union and to the nations under its control, it wasn’t just the American stories that got smuggled in that really began to crack that edifice, it was the advertisements. Because the advertisements themselves were telling stories, perhaps unintentionally, that caught the attention of those living in the repressive regimes behind the Iron Curtain. As one Soviet dissident put it, it said a great deal to people behind the Iron Curtain that American dogs appear to eat so well while so many millions on their side of the Iron Curtain were dying of hunger.

 

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 01-26-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Death of Saudi King Abdullah reveals vast worldview differences between nations

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Dies, Wall Street Journal (Ellen Knickmeyer and Ahemd Al Omran)

Blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes: Saudi Arabia’s often-brutal pact with its clerics, Los Angeles (Alexandra Zavis)

Prisoners of the Saudis, New York Times (Ross Douthat)

2) France aims to reinforce secular values through education in effort to win worldview clash

Paris Announces Plan to Promote Secular Values, New York Times (Maïa de la Baume)

3) South Korean soap operas threaten to subvert North Korean regime

North Korea’s Forbidden Love? Smuggled, Illegal Soap Operas, New York Times (Choe Sang-Hun)

Transcript: The Briefing 01-23-15

The Briefing

 

January 23, 2015

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

 

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

1) Congress drops abortion bill, providing lesson in pervasive sinfulness of humanity

An important lesson in the political world came late on Wednesday afternoon when it was announced that the United States House of Representatives would drop consideration of a bill that would have outlawed abortion after 20 weeks of gestation. The important lesson here has to do with the fact that Republicans won an overwhelming majority of House seats back in the election of November 2014. They were elected on the promise of and with the expectation of the fact that they would support pro-life legislation – including this very bill. And then, of all things, on the very eve of the 42nd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, the Republican leadership announced that cold feet had prevailed and that the bill would not be going forward.

As Ed O’Keefe of the Washington Post reported,

“House Republican leaders abruptly dropped plans late Wednesday to vote on an anti-abortion bill amid a revolt by female GOP lawmakers concerned that the legislation’s restrictive language would once again spoil the party’s chances of broadening its appeal to women and younger voters.”

A couple of first considerations here; when it comes to winning the votes of women, Republicans are already winning the votes of women when it comes to married women. There is no doubt when you look at the statistics, indeed after the 2012 and 2014 elections the Republican candidates have done very well among married women. Republican candidates are doing not so well among unmarried women – especially those women who have never married.

It’s a very interesting phenomenon. The most significant data of which I’m aware has to do with the aftermath of the Virginia gubernatorial election in 2012. The immediate aftermath of that election said that Republicans lost the women’s vote and that Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate, had gone down because he just didn’t get enough votes from women. But as it turned out, and later consideration of the data on both sides affirmed, it was not that Ken Cuccinelli didn’t get enough women’s votes, he didn’t get the votes of single women; married women voted overwhelmingly for him. One thing that indicates is the fact that one’s marital situation affects one’s worldview. You could turn that around; one’s worldview often affects one’s marital situation. They are however, just to use the words of statistics, highly correlated.

But getting back to what we learn from this political development, about the very nature of politics, is that the Republican Party elected on a pro-life platform, elected overwhelmingly in terms of the election this past November, is a party leadership that decided it wasn’t going to go forward with the most expected piece of pro-life legislation going back to the campaign itself. And of all things, once again, they made that decision even as thousands and thousands of pro-life Americans were gathering in Washington, DC for the annual March on Life and of course the commemoration of the infamous anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

But what makes this really interesting is not just the timing but what it tells us about politics. Politics is dirty business at is very best, it’s also necessary business. One of the things that biblical worldview helps us to understand is that in a fallen world every aspect is falling. That means our economic life is falling, that means every aspect of humanity in terms of education, commerce, culture, art, everything shows evidence of the fall. And that’s also true in politics. Perhaps it’s especially true in politics. Why? Because by its very nature the democratic political system – that is small ‘d’ – the republican system of government – that is small ‘r’ – if you’re in a republic that operates by a democratic process, there is inevitably a trade-off of goods; a trade-off of principles.

In a fallen world you certainly hope for the very best of those trade-offs; the very best of those compromises. But the evidence that came in on Wednesday afternoon is very sad. It’s sad indeed because it shows a lack of conviction on the part of the very people who promised conviction. It shows a lack of principle on the part of the very people who were elected to defend that principle.

Getting back to Ed O’Keefe’s report in the Washington Post, and I quote,

“The abortion bill pulled Wednesday night was strongly opposed by Democrats and women’s rights groups. But a similar version of the bill easily passed the GOP-controlled House in 2013 and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had vowed to bring it up for a vote.”

That just adds tragedy to the tragedy. You had the Senate poised to act on this bill if only the house sent it to them. And now you have the house leadership losing confidence in its own pro-life convictions out of fear of the political ramifications. Now you look at that and you say, that just might be relevant at least from a pragmatic perspective if this was a party headed into an election in coming days. But it isn’t heading into one; it’s heading out of one. And one that it won overwhelmingly on this very pledge and principle.

As Bill Chappell of National Public Radio reported yesterday, the house did approve a bill that would prohibit using federal money to pay for any abortion or for health benefits coverage that includes coverage of abortion. That bill passed by a vote of 242 to 179. It was called the ‘No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2015.’ Yes, no kidding, that’s the title of the bill. It stipulates and I quote,

“No funds authorized or appropriated by Federal law, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are authorized or appropriated by Federal law, shall be expended for any abortion.”

That becomes a very necessary bill. It’s a bill made necessary by some government action subsequent even to the so-called Hyde amendment that supposedly prevented any taxpayer money going to abortion. The federal bureaucracy has found some ways to try nonetheless to cover some abortion coverage both in the United States and, in complicated ways, on American military bases overseas, and in some foreign aid funding. But this bill is important as it is a small comfort over against the larger and more important bill that never saw the light of day and never hit the floor of the house.

Writing about this in the Atlantic monthly David A Graham wrote an article entitled, Yesterday the Republican Party’s Abortion Bind. He began by writing,

“Mario Cuomo, who was one of America’s most prominent pro-choice politicians, liked to say that one campaigned in poetry and governed in prose. The Republican Party came face to face with this reality Wednesday—and on the issue of abortion, no less.”

He then wrote,

“It’s one thing to campaign on stopping abortion—it has been a largely successful GOP plank since Roe v. Wade, and one that helped create a juggernaut connection between evangelical Christians and the Republican Party. (Yes, there have been occasional hiccups.) But it’s a different and more complicated matter to actually institute sweeping restrictions successfully.”

Well, I would simply respond that it is of course different and more complicated, but it still comes down to a matter of principle and a matter of conviction. If indeed they believed the principles on which they ran, if they genuinely held the convictions they declared to voters in November, we would not be having this discussion; the bill would have hit the floor of the house, we would’ve found out through the democratic process how indeed that bill would’ve fared. The fact that the bill was withdrawn before it ever met the House of Representatives for a vote is full indication of the fact that in a sinful world, the sinfulness of humanity shows up often first in politics; disappointingly so. And with this we should note in this case, with nothing less than life-and-death hanging in the balance.

2) ISIS hostage situation presents Japan with issue demanding the wisdom of God

Next, many people around the world saw the ominous headline; it came in the New York Times with this headline, Online Video Shows Japanese Hostages Threatened by ISIS. You probably by now know the story. The Islamic State has captured, or has claimed to capture, two Japanese citizens it claims it will execute unless the Japanese government contributes two hundred million dollars to its cause; indeed to its coffers.

As Martin Fackler and Alan Cowell reported,

“A video posted online Tuesday showing a masked militant threatening to kill two kneeling Japanese men has confronted Japan with the same sort of hostage nightmare already faced by the United States and other nations. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed to try to save the men, while also saying he would not give in to intimidation.”

The two reporters went on to say that the video was posted by extremists of the Islamic State,

“…showed the two Japanese men, identified as Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa, kneeling on a rocky hillside with the knife-wielding militant standing between them. The militant appeared to be reading a prepared statement, demanding that Tokyo pay a ransom of $200 million within 72 hours”

This leads to one of those excruciatingly difficult moral choices. Its more than a moral choice, it’s political, it’s economic, and it is also criminological; even as a crime is being promised or threatened, after a crime has already taken place in terms of the kidnapping of these two men. But more than anything else it’s irreducibly moral. And this presents the nation of Japan with an excruciatingly difficult decision; Does it pay the ransom and supposedly save these two men or does it refuse to pay, leading often to the execution of those the Islamic state has kidnapped?

From a Christian worldview perspective we have to recognize that a great deal is at stake here. And more than perhaps first meets the eye. Because from a simple viewpoint, looking at it superficially, all you would look at is the fact that it appears there’s an equation being offered here. On the one hand, the lives of two men, on the other, $200 million. Now given the Christian understanding of the dignity and humanity of the infinite value of human life – because it is indeed that which is given to us by an infinitely good and malevolent Creator who made every single human being in His image – we would be very quick to say, ‘look, in terms of the value of human life what’s $200 million for two lives?’ But it’s at that point that the realization of what we’re dealing with really comes.

American defense and security officials do not pay this kind of ransom. That’s the official position of the United States government. Why? Because as it turns out, paying this kind of ransom – here is the important moral lesson – actually incentivizes further kidnapping; it actually creates an enterprise, an economic incentive, for the kidnappings to take place. This is a major point of debate between the United States and some European nations including Italy and France. Those nations have paid ransoms and at least some of their citizens have been released. But the issue also points to the fact that even as some of their citizens have been released, every single one of their citizens now has an increased likelihood of being kidnapped. And there is a virtual kidnapping industry now – not only related to the Islamic state but is some other similar groups – when it comes to the citizens of those nations.

The moral stance of the United States is not that human life counts for less, but that paying people not to murder people is in the end a self-defeating moral proposal. Who is right in this? Are the French and the Italians right? Is America wrong? Or is America right? Are the French and the Italians wrong? That’s not a simple question to answer. This is one of those very difficult issues that points from the Christian worldview to the fact that in a fallen world there are some horrifyingly difficult questions to answer; horrifyingly difficult political, economic, moral questions. This is one of those questions.

One of the particular aspects of this news story is that the two citizens taken, kidnapped in this case, are Japanese citizens. Japan in the past has paid ransoms and there is a very real question now as to whether or not the fact that the Japanese have previously paid ransoms is why these two men are now being held by this group and their executions threatened if the ransom is not paid. So the current quandary that is faced by the Japanese government is, at least in part, as to whether or not they incentivized this new kidnapping. And furthermore, if they did pay this $200 million, it would actually lead to an expansion of the danger against every Japanese citizen who might be a target of being kidnapped by a group like the Islamic State.

In a world so affected by sin and its affects, the kinds of political decisions that are often demanded of political leaders and governments are not only excruciating, they’re almost impossible actually to know how to answer. Perhaps what comes to mind to Christians is 1 Kings 3, where King Solomon is presented with what seems to be an insoluble problem, and he responded, as you’ll recall, with an unusual and indeed legendary wisdom. It’s a humbling realization for Christians and others to recognize that in this world so affected by sin there are some dilemmas that seem to be virtually insoluble. That doesn’t mean a government doesn’t have to make a decision. It doesn’t mean that sometimes a parent doesn’t have to make a decision. It doesn’t mean that sometimes a leader isn’t forced into a situation where decision must be made. Perhaps the greatest example drawn from Solomon is the fact that what we need is wisdom; a wisdom not drawn from Solomon but as Solomon himself understood, a wisdom that can come only from God.

3) Hypocrisy of Davos forum evident in 1700 private jets used to discuss climate change

The World Economic Forum continues through the weekend in Davos, Switzerland and it does become something of a parable of our times; a parable of the elites doing their very best to act like elites. One of the things that was demonstrated in terms of even the onset of the World Economic Forum in Davos was the hypocrisy that is written into the very movement and the meeting. And it’s important sometimes to recognize that hypocrisy. But less the hypocrisy be expanded, let’s stipulate something upfront. Every single one of us is tempted to hypocrisy, and furthermore every single one of us at times falls into certain hypocrisy where we fall short of our own moral expectations. The worst form of hypocrisy is not the one you see in others, but the one you do not see in your selves. But sometimes it takes looking at hypocrisy writ large to understand just how close a danger it is.

How is this for headline? As Amelia Smith reports for Newsweek, 1,700 private jets descended on davos for the world economic forum, bringing members of the cultural, intellectual, political, and economic elites to a meeting where they would condemn using fossil fuels and such things as private jets. Whereas at least one media outlet suggested, that as many as 50 jets could’ve carried everyone coming to the meeting together along with their attendance. And even beyond that, just even a handful of jumbo jets could’ve covered the entire group. As it was 1,700 private jets descended on this small Swiss village; so many jets as a matter of fact that as Newsweek reported the Swiss Armed Forces opened up one of their military air bases for the very first time to try to accommodate the increase in jet traffic.

Even beyond the private jets this was a group that met to talk about the problem of income inequality; presumably believing that inequality is the problem. And yet they represent the top one percent, perhaps maybe the 1 to 2 to 3% of the top one percent of all the wealthiest people in the world. And as the event end this weekend there will be about as many private jets arriving to take people home as arrived to bring them there in the first place; taking them home from their very elite discussion about why people shouldn’t do what they just did.

4) Reading aloud to children decisive influence in child’s likelihood to read

Finally as we head into the weekend I want to share with you an article that appeared recently in the New York Times by Motoko Rich. The title is, Study Finds Reading to Children of All Ages Grooms Them to Read More on Their Own. This is actually what I would even call a sweet story because it tells us something that as families and as parents we certainly need to take to heart. It tells us what we already knew: that reading to our children is really important. But it backs up that argument with some very interesting statistics that might catch our attention.

First the bad news, Rich writes,

“Cue the hand-wringing about digital distraction: Fewer children are reading books frequently for fun, according to a new report released Thursday by Scholastic, the children’s book publisher.”

They are pointing back to a 2014 survey of children age 6 to 17; only 31% said they read a book for fun almost daily – down from 37% four years ago. So what is the good news? Well this article includes some very good news for parents and that is that parents often have a decisive role in whether or not children read. To put it more positively, when parents encourage their children to read, give their children time to read, model reading, and even more importantly, read aloud to their children, the children are far more likely also to read on their own and independently. As Motoko Rich writes,

“The finding about reading aloud to children long after toddlerhood may come as a surprise to some parents who read books to children at bedtime when they were very young but then tapered off.”

This article and the study behind it points to something really important and fundamentally interesting I would think to parents. And that is that children older than you would think both enjoy and benefit from being read to by parents. It turns out that when many parents stop reading aloud to their children it’s because they think their children can read on their own; because they can. But the fact that they can doesn’t mean that they will.

Furthermore, hearing a parent’s voice read a book aloud turns out to have an effect upon children that is just good in almost every way you can imagine it. And one of most interesting aspect of this study is one that many parents will find surprising – even older siblings will gather together to listen in when parents read to younger brothers and sisters. It turns out that we have a hunger to have things read to us. And there’s such an importance to story and hearing a parent’s voice reading a story that when it comes down to it you’ll even have older children, middle school children, who will be gathering together perhaps even a little surreptitiously to listen in as the parent is reading to a younger brother or sister. There’s something really sweet about that; something very affirming about the importance of parenthood and the relationship between parents and children. Some important about the reading of books and the fact that it is something passed down from one generation to the next. Something very important even about a mother or father’s voice reading a book aloud, modeling not only the capacity to read but the enjoyment of reading. Seducing in a very real sense children into the wonder of the word and the wonder of those words gathered between the covers of a book.

An interest comment that came from Maggie McGuire, she is the vice president at Scholastic, she said,

“A lot of parents assume that once kids begin to read independently, that now that is the best thing for them to do,”

It turns out evidently not, at least not on its own. It turns out that children want to hear a parent read aloud. From a biblical worldview perspective there is every bit of good news in that and every bit of affirmation of the importance, not only of the word, but more importantly the relationship between parents and children. Let that be an encouragement to us all; parents, grandparents, and furthermore those who one day maybe parents, reading aloud to our children, perhaps even our grandchildren really does matter. And it matters even to those you think could read on their own, because there is still something about your voice reading the book.

 

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.

Downton Abbey — What Are Americans Really Watching?

Americans by the millions are still tuning in to watch Downton Abbey — now in its fifth season — eager to enjoy the continuation of the saga of the Earl and Countess of Grantham and their household. According to press reports, 10.1 million Americans watched the first episode, apparently quite ready to be transported by drama into another place and time. This season, one looming issue is the arrival of a socialist government in London.

But, do Americans have any idea what they are really watching?

The millions of Americans who are now devoted Downton fans are drawn, no doubt, to the story and all of its twists and turns. They are captivated by the historical drama and the grandeur of Highclere, the real-life estate of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon and the setting for Downton Abbey. They are intrigued by the hierarchies of the noble house and its inhabitants, with the nobility upstairs and the servants downstairs. They are amazed by the lavishness of the estate, the period dress, and the class structure of the society. They enjoy the quality of the acting and the quaintness of the habits portrayed. They must appreciate the attention to historical detail, right down to the soaps used and the dishes served. Many are likely to be unrepentant Anglophiles ( I include myself amongst them) who enjoy the look into the history and drama of our English cousins.

The stories, captivatingly written by Julian Fellowes (also rightly known as Baron Fellowes of West Stafford), are quite enough to hold the attention of a vast American audience. Critics rightly suggest that some viewers watch for the storylines, and others, rather less interested in the soap opera character that also marks the series, watch for an escape into history. Whatever the reason, they keep watching.

And yet, most viewers are likely unaware of what they are actually seeing. They are not merely watching an historical drama, they are witnessing the passing of a world. And that larger story, inadequately portrayed within Downton Abbey, is a story that should not be missed. That story is part of our own story as well. It is the story of the modern age arriving with revolutionary force, and with effects that continue to shape our own world.

Downton Abbey is set in the early decades of the twentieth century. Though by season four King George V is on the throne, the era is still classically Edwardian. And the era associated with King Edward VII is the era of the great turn in British society. The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed a great transformation in England and within the British Empire. The stable hierarchies of Downton Abbey grew increasingly unstable. Britain, which had been overwhelmingly a rural nation until the last decade of the nineteenth century, became increasingly urban. A transformation in morals changed the very character of the nation, and underlying it all was a great surge of secularization that set the stage for the emergence of the radically secular nation that Britain has become.

Viewers should note the almost complete absence of Christianity from the storyline. The village vicar is an occasional presence, and church ceremonies have briefly been portrayed. But Christianity as a belief system and a living faith is absent—as is the institutional presence of the Church of England.

Political life is also largely absent, addressed mainly as it directly affects the Crawleys and their estate. This amounts to a second great omission. The epoch in which Downton Abbey is set was a time of tremendous political strife and upheaval in Britain. The Earl of Grantham would likely have been quite distressed by the rise of the Liberal Party’s David Lloyd George as Prime Minister. The right of women to vote was a recent development, and the political waters were roiled by high unemployment and a faltering British economy. The signs of the Empire’s disappearance were there for all to see, even if most among the elites did their best to deny the evidence. The great landed estates were draining their lordly title holders of precious capital, and the economic arrangements that allowed the nobility to live off of their estates would never return. That is why so many English lords looked for rich American women to marry. Some of these developments are addressed in the series, but not with the depth of concern that shook the British noble houses into crisis.

A great moral revolution was also in full sway. Birth control was increasingly available and openly discussed. In 1930, the Church of England would become the first major Christian church to endorse the use of contraceptives. Sexual morality was changing with a lessening of sanctions on premarital sex and adultery. Calls for liberalized divorce laws became more frequent. Many argued that the working class should have the same access to sexual liberty that the nobility seemed to allow themselves.

And yet, the secularization of the society was underneath it all. Christie Davies, author of The Strange Death of Moral Britain, gets right to the point: “Behind the strange death of moral Britain lies the strange death of Christian Britain. Even in 1900 the leaders of Christian Britain feared that such a decline might take place.”

Historians and theologians debate just how Christian the Britain of Queen Victoria really was, but the fact is that within the Church of England liberal theology was very much in control, with the Broad Church party setting the course. The literature of the late Victorian age and the age of Edward reveals ample evidence of what the poet Matthew Arnold would express in “Dover Beach.” In Arnold’s memorable words:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore;

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

As historian Jose Harris of the University of Oxford explains, “A more common response, however, was not outright loss of faith but dilution, adjustment, or diversification of religious belief into something that was often much more nuanced and nebulous than had been common in the early Victorian age.” He also described the age as one marked by “the increasing vagueness and indeterminacy of religious belief.”

Rates of churchgoing fell—and they would fall further in decades ahead. The unspeakable tragedy of World War I seemed to add impetus to the loss of faith and theological certainties. A great spiritual void appeared in Britain long before the signs of such secularization would appear on American shores. But we can now see that the early decades of the twentieth century, including the so-called “locust years” in Britain between the two world wars, were a crucial turning time within that society. Those years set the trajectory that produced the Britain of today.

There are countless lessons for American Christians to observe as we watch Downton Abbey. But we ought not to miss the larger story of which tales like Downton are only a part. The world that was passing away was not only a world of footmen, but also of faith. Britain would never be the same again, and that loss of faith and certitude would eventually become a tide that would sweep across every aspect of British culture.

Of course, Downton Abbey did not stay in Britain, and that is true of the larger story as well. That larger story records a great shift in worldview, not merely a social transformation. The consequences of that larger story far exceed the story of a great English house and its inhabitants. In that sense, Downton Abbey is a parable of sorts—a parable that can teach us a great deal.

 

This is an updated version of an essay first posted on Friday, January 10, 2014.

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

Christie Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (London: Transaction Publishers, 2004), p. xxiii.

Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870-1914, The Penguin Social History of Britain (London: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 171, 175.