R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 325
January 23, 2015
The Briefing 01-23-15
1) Congress drops abortion bill, providing lesson in pervasive sinfulness of humanity
Abortion bill dropped amid concerns of female GOP lawmakers, Washington Post (Ed O’Keefe)
House Approves Bill That Would Bar Federal Funding For Abortions, NPR (Bill Chappell)
The Republican Party’s Abortion Bind, The Atlantic (David A. Graham)
2) ISIS hostage situation presents Japan with issue demanding the wisdom of God
Hostage Crisis Challenges Pacifist Japanese Public, New York Times (Martin Fackler and Alan Cowell)
3) Hypocrisy of Davos forum evident in 1700 private jets used to discuss climate change
1,700 Private Jets Descend on Davos For World Economic Forum, Newsweek (Amelia Smith)
4) Reading aloud to children decisive influence in child’s likelihood to read
Study Finds Reading to Children of All Ages Grooms Them to Read More on Their Own, New York Times (Motoko Rich)
January 22, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 01-19-15
It’s Monday, January 19, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Supreme Court takes up same-sex marriage cases in political climate friendly to the issue
The announcement came at 3:30 on Friday afternoon. The United States Supreme Court straightforwardly announced that it will take up several cases on the issue of same-sex marriage. And as virtually every major media outlet announced almost immediately, this sets the stage for a groundbreaking, history-shaping decision.
We have been looking at this on the horizon for some time. What’s now expected is a decision on same-sex marriage tantamount to the decision on abortion the Court handed down in 1973, infamously the Roe v. Wade decision. But as Adam Liptak of the New York Times reported the story,
“The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether all 50 states must allow gay and lesbian couples to marry, positioning it to resolve one of the great civil rights questions in a generation before its current term ends in June.”
That’s just the way the major media and the elite culture want us to understand this issue and in particular this looming court decision, as the latest, the next, most likely the inevitable decision in a long line of civil rights decisions that they now identify as the great movement of history – the right side of history.
Just about everyone who was an informed observer of these issues understood that the decision was likely and that it had to come – in all likelihood – before the end of the month of January, setting up oral arguments in April and then an eventual decision to be handed down most likely in the very last hours of the month of June of this year.
2015 is going to be remembered for many things, but now we already know that 2015 is going to be a big year when it comes to the Supreme Court. It’s a big year when it comes to the Supreme Court and a looming challenge to the Affordable Care Act popularly known as Obamacare that’s likely to set the stage for a huge political and judicial controversy.
But the issue of same-sex marriage is going to have much longer lasting consequences as will the Court’s decision on this issue. When the Court punted on the issue back in November, it appeared to be trying to duck the issue. But all that changed after the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision sustaining several states, including the states of Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky in terms of their constitutional amendments or legislation against same-sex marriage.
That set up a situation in which there are now conflicting U.S. Courts of Appeals, and that leads to a situation that the Supreme Court almost always answers finally on its own authority. And that’s what changed. That’s what set the stage for this decision and the announcement of the court case that was handed down on Friday afternoon. But as you might expect, this is a very complicated story and the press was scrambling on Friday and Saturday – even yesterday – to figure out exactly what the Court might be doing or might be preparing to do.
Reading the tea leaves when it comes to the Supreme Court is a tenuous and almost assuredly frustrating matter, but in this case there are some breadcrumbs to follow, for example in the Windsor decision handed down by the Court in the year 2013, striking down the federal government’s Defense of Marriage Act. In his dissent, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia pointed specifically to this case – even though it didn’t exist yet – saying that when it came all that was necessary was for the other shoe to drop.
Other breadcrumbs were left by the Court in the way it announced its decision to take up these cases on Friday. The Court actually rephrased the question as presented to it by the lower courts, and that’s a very interesting issue. It doesn’t happen all that often, and when it happens, it happens for a reason. Now, the Court announced that it will be holding two and a half hours of oral arguments on these cases, and it announced two different questions.
The first question to have 90 minutes of oral arguments and the second exactly an hour. The first question to get 90 minutes of oral arguments is – as you will see – the more important question,
“Does the 14th amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?”
That’s the fundamental issue. If the answer to that question is yes, it’s going to make the next 60 minutes of oral arguments largely unnecessary and moot. But the Court’s going to go ahead and have 60 minutes on the second question,
“Does the 14th amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?”
So as you can see if the answer to the first question is yes, there won’t even be any relevance to the second question. But the fact that they’re taking up the two questions doesn’t necessarily indicate that there’s not a lot of momentum going towards answering yes for the first question, explaining why so many observers of the Court find it fascinating that the Court rephrased the question.
Liptak writes in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times,
“The Justices do not ordinarily tinker with the wording of those questions, but on Friday something unusual happened. In agreeing to hear for same-sex marriage cases, the Court framed for itself the issues it would address.”
He then wrote,
“Lawyers and scholars scrutinize the Court’s order with the anxious intensity of hypochondriacs attending their symptoms. Some saw an attempt by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to elicit a ruling that would stop short of establishing a nationwide constitutional right to same-sex marriage.”
That tells you something of what’s going on here. Indeed, observers of the Court on both sides of this question are trying to read every word that comes from the Court with the intensity of hypochondriacs attending to their symptoms and their medical charts.
As Liptak indicates, people on both sides – that is to say lawyers on both sides of this issue – tried to see whether the reframing of the words had something to do with indicating the direction of the Court’s intent. But one thing was very interesting. The Court rephrased the question to ask about the obligations of states. That in many ways indicates once again that the answer to the first question is likely to be yes. But as some observers have already noted, it does at least leave the room for a more narrow ruling to that effect.
Dale Carpenter writing for the Washington Post said,
“It looks like we will have a decision on same-sex marriage by the end of June.”
He says that many believe the outcome will very likely be the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage.
He says,
“I also think that outcome is now likely, but I want to amplify,” he says, “how the Court decides to reach that decision is also important. He then offered what he called a “pre-decision guide to a post-decision world.” He went on to explain that any way you look at it, a decision mandating all 50 states to recognize and to solemnize same-sex marriage is a huge history-bending decision.
But he’s exactly right on the point that it really matters how the Court reaches that conclusion because no court case exists as a vacuum. Every court case is attached to almost every other court precedent. Not only that, it leads to the interpretations that are made by lower courts who take their bearings from the U.S. Supreme Court. Carpenter says there are several routes to a decision for same-sex marriage.
The first he says is what’s called “sexual orientation discrimination.” He says the Supreme Court could clear up any remaining doubt by squarely holding that classifications based on sexual orientation are subject to a heightened or close or searching or intermediate scrutiny. That’s legal language, but it has to do with exactly what the Court will say – and I think Carpenter’s right on this – that the states must do when considering sexual orientation cases, not only when it comes to same-sex marriage or anything else.
If indeed the Court were to decide that sexual orientation is a suspect category, that would have effects far beyond the question of marriage, as if by the way, the legalization of same-sex marriage will stop in terms of its effects with marriage. In terms of religious liberty, that might be the most problematic argument, the most problematic route for the court to take in terms of the legalization of same-sex marriage. Carpenter says the second argument might be animus. He says the Court could hold that the exclusion of gay couples from marriage rests on animus. Now that’s exactly again what Antonine Scalia said Justice Anthony Kennedy was arguing in his majority decision in the Windsor Case in 2013, but also in the Lawrence case striking down all state sodomy laws in the year 2003. Carpenter says animus analysis is very contextual and does not pronounce broad legal principles that commit the Court to future results, and that’s part of its appeal. If the Court rewrote the question so that it could rule narrowly this might be one way of getting to a rather narrow ruling, but it’s also a way that was predicted in exact language by Antonine Scalia over a decade ago.
Third, he said the Court to get there by a rational basis argument. He says the Court could hold that there is no rational basis for excluding same-sex couples for marriage. If the Court does that, it will be explicitly addressing the winning argument at the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals. Remember, that’s the court decision by Judge Sutton that upheld state’s rights to regulate marriage and to limit marriage to the union of a man and a woman. Judge Sutton said, in a brilliantly argued decision, that indeed the states did have a rational basis for limiting marriage to the union of a man and a woman. If the Supreme Court says there is no rational basis, that could lead to a broader decision that could have effects immediately far beyond the issue just of same-sex marriage.
But what’s really interesting is when Carpenter gets to the fourth argument, the fourth route by which the Court might get there. This is a fundamental right argument. What makes this really interesting is that this is exactly what the proponents and advocates of the normalization and legalization of homosexuality and same-sex marriage have been arguing from the get-go. There is a fundamental right to marriage that is held by not only men and women, but men and men and women and women. But what’s really interesting, and Carpenters onto something here, now those who are arguing for same-sex marriage may shift their argument but they would do so because this would be a very narrow ruling, or at least could be a very narrow ruling having to do at least in terms of the Court’s thinking and decision only with the institution of marriage. This could avoid a host of other issues, at least in the very short term, but the Supreme Court in deciding to take up this issue can’t be concerned just with short-term effects. The justices know that they are making history, that they are deciding history.
That also gets to a very interesting issue here. The Court dodged the question in October. It fundamentally dodged the question in the year 2013. Why did it take it up now? That shows that the issue really isn’t just legal or judicial; it is not just constitutional. The Court is highly political. The Court now knows that public opinion has shifted, and as public opinion has shifted, as the culture has moved in a progressively more liberal and progressive direction on this issue, the Court evidently now finds the liberty to take this up. Now, there is no way that the justices of the Supreme Court, being human beings, could be completely objective, completely apolitical. But any claim that the judiciary is apolitical, nonpolitical in its essence, is put to lie by the very fact that the Court pondered on this question October. It has taken this question up now because it evidently believes it can, at least enough justices decided that the time is politically, not just constitutionally, right for the Court to take of this question that they made the announcement that came at 3:30 on Friday.
The real surprise here, of course, is that it surprised no one. Christians must understand that as much as we are interested in the constitutional and legal issues, we are far more interested in the worldview issues at stake, and beyond that we’re far more interested in the effects of the redefinition of marriage on the culture at large, and specifically on our neighbors. It’s because of love of neighbor. After all, Jesus said that was the second commandment in the Law. It is love of neighbor that leads us to believe that the redefinition of marriage will have damaging effects, not just on the culture at large, but on the lives of specific individuals including those who will celebrate the decision, including those who enter into same-sex unions that we’ll call marriage, and including millions of people whose lives will be fundamentally changed by the redefinition of marriage. And of course, the religious liberty implications are simply massive.
2) Virginia Governor McAuliffe moves to define marriage without reference to a husband or wife
The vast change in the entire moral landscape of the culture that will be represented by the legalization of same-sex marriage was made very clear by the Governor of Virginia in recent days. Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced that it will be his intention to change the way marriage is defined in the Commonwealth of Virginia so as to avoid the state using the words “husband” and “wife.” As the Washington Times reported on Friday, the Governor asked the Virginia legislature on Monday of last week to remove all references to “husbands” and “wives” from state law books and replace them with the gender-neutral and politically correct word “spouse.” As the editors of the Washington Times wrote,
“Mr. McAuliffe argues that changing nouns will create jobs in Virginia, ‘It does send a signal to the entire Commonwealth, to the nation, and the globe that Virginia is welcome to the members of the LGBT community.’”
Well, indeed, it might send that signal, but just consider the far more important signal it sends. We now have an entire range of vocabulary, words that have been necessary to human society and human culture in various languages for as long as human beings have lived together. We’re talking about words like “mom” and “dad.” We’re talking about words like “husband” and “wife.” We’re talking about words that are now going to be replaced with “spouse” but “spouse” is not a replacement for “husband”; is not a replacement for “wife” any more than mere “parent” is a replacement for “mom” or replacement for “dad.” What we’re looking at here is a vast moral revolution, and its variants thing to note even the New York Times on Saturday recognized there is no precedent in terms of American history for a moral or legal revolution of this velocity. I would expand that to say there is actually, in terms of a review of history, no precedent far beyond the United States and beyond our own times. We’re entering into uncharted territory, and Christians understand armed with the biblical worldview we’re entering into very dangerous territory. It is dangerous for human happiness, for human flourishing, and for the most important institution of human society.
3) Pope sees limit to free expression for sake of freedom from being offended
Occasionally, it is important to look at the Roman Catholic Church and a look at the effects of the Pope, in this case, Pope Francis the First. Every once in a while, he seems to get on an airplane and say something that gets the world’s attention. He did so in recent days, as he was on a plane in terms of his trip to South East Asia. As the Associated Press reports,
“Pope Francis began his visit to Asia’s largest Catholic nation Thursday by wading straight into a debate about rights and responsibilities now raging in one of Europe’s largest Catholic nations. Referring to the Paris attacks, Francis said there are limits to freedom of expression, especially when it insults or ridicule someone’s faith.”
The article is written by Nicole Winfield and Teresa Cerejano. It is really interesting because the Pope did indeed wade in the controversy. Furthermore, the Pope’s statements, even though made by the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, deserve evangelical attention because they point to an issue that we really have to think about very carefully. When it comes to free expression, how exactly do we draw boundary lines. I would assert that we can’t draw them where the Pope drew them. Here is the honest paragraph from the Associated Press article, and it’s matched by an equally odd paragraph in just about every other major media article on the Pope’s statement because the Pope’s statement was itself odd. Consider the Associated Press paragraph,
“Francis defended freedom of speech as a fundamental right, and even a duty to speak out for the common good. But he said there were limits to free speech, especially when confronting another equally fundamental human right, the freedom of religion.”
Well, this is a real problem. First of all, when you talk about something as a fundamental right, you can’t follow that just a few seconds later withdrawing a boundary on that fundamental right. Now, when it comes to free speech, Americans understand free-speech as other guarantees in our Constitution to be not granted by the Constitution, but respected by the Constitution. Furthermore, even in American history, there are cases that are very indicative of the fact that freedom of speech can’t have absolutely no limits at all. The question is, even in a nation that famously and very zealously guards freedom of speech in the United States, what might those limits be? One Supreme Court Justice once said, “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.” But actually, it’s hard to know whether or not, constitutionally speaking in the United States, you could or you couldn’t. What makes the Pope statements particularly controversial is, of course, the timing. What should be controversial is the content, the argument the Pope made. The Pope said that freedom of speech is a fundamental right, but he said that there must be limits on it when it comes to the conflict with another fundamental right – religious liberty. But then what he described, in terms of the problem, isn’t actually a matter of religious liberty but a matter of religious offense.
The Pope said, “You can’t speak in a derogatory fashion of someone else’s religion.”
Let’s think about this from an evangelical Christian perspective. Should we speak derisively, arrogantly, caustically? Should we speak in a way that makes fun of someone else’s religion or is intended intentionally to create harm or hurt feelings? The answer to that is of course “no.” But that’s not a matter of religious liberty. That’s a matter of the fact that evangelical Christians understand that our responsibility is a gospel responsibility. We are seeking to win people to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and ridiculing their religion, in terms of derisive speech or cartoons are caricatures or something that is intended to offend, that’s not a way to be a winsome witness for the Lord Jesus Christ. But what if any conflicting truth claim argument is considered to be a matter of offensive to someone of another religion? In that case there will be no intentional effort to offend, but let’s face it, when you’re talking about your deepest convictions, when two people get into a deeply convictional conversation, it’s never merely theoretical or theological. It’s always intensely personal. That’s what makes a conviction a conviction.
As I said in my book, The Conviction to Lead, a conviction is a belief, but it’s a belief that holds us, not merely a belief that we hold. It is so central to our worldview into our entire understanding of truth that it’s indispensable. The problem with the fact that the Pope invoked religious freedom in this case is that religious freedom certainly does not mean the freedom from the risk of being offended. Evangelicals have to remind themselves of that because there are times when evangelicals seek to avoid being offended rather than to understand that when we’re talking about matters of deep convictional consequence someone is going to be offended. Here we come again to a crucial difference between Christianity, at least Christianity that’s biblically defined, and the common, ordinary, on the street version of Islam that shows itself in many of America’s closest allies, a version of Islam that says very clearly that is the responsibility of every Muslim to protect the honor of Mohammed, the honor of the Quran, the larger honor of the Islamic religion.
As we discussed on The Briefing last week, some of America’s closest allies are involved in spending millions and millions of dollars to defend the honor of Islam, not only in their own nations where they are willing to go to extremes like flogging someone in Saudi Arabia who offended the religious establishment, but also in other nations as well. Charlie Hebdo was not infamous among Christians in America, at least it was hardly known even until the murderous attacks that recently took place. The reason for that is that Christians can absorb that kind of ridicule. It doesn’t matter that the new atheists in the English-speaking world and elsewhere have been hurling their worst at biblical Christianity for years now, and they are preceded by a long list of other skeptics and those who were in previous generations called “infidels.” The Christians have understood that our faith in its truth claims is to be shared, it is to be proclaimed, it is to be projected, it is indeed to be defended, in terms of rational biblical argument. It is to be defended in terms of the rights of Christians to share the gospel in terms of religious liberty. The Christian right, as well as the right of every other American citizen, to free religious expression, but that’s a fundamentally different approach that the Pope took in the statement that he made on the airplane last week when he invoked religious liberty in conflict with freedom of expression. It was precisely the wrong understanding of religious liberty. Let me state again, religious liberty does not mean the right not to be offended.
4) Potential 2016 presidential nominees display narrow pedigree of US politics
Finally, as the 2016 presidential race begins to take shape, a brilliant article, or at least a brilliant paragraph, appeared from Dana Milbank, columnist of the Washington Post in yesterday’s edition. Here’s the paragraph. I’ll just let it speak for itself.
“The likely slate of candidates will include the son of a governor and a presidential candidate, the son of a congressman and a presidential candidate, the wife of a President, and the brother of a President, son of a President and grandson of a senator. Nearly two and a half centuries after rebelling against the monarchy, our presidential contest has all the freshness of the House of Lords, even the British royals have done a better job of bringing in new blood. Kate, the future queen, was a commoner.”
So maybe America doesn’t have a royal family. Maybe it has royal families. Americans are going to be deciding over the next several months in both parties, whether that makes a difference when they think about electing their President.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information that I have cited Albert Mohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to BTS.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing
Transcript: The Briefing 01-22-15
The Briefing
January 22, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Thursday, January 22, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Anniversary of Roe v Wade reminder abortion still urgent issue of Christian responsibility
Today comes around as yet another anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. It was handed down on January 22 of that year – 42 years ago today. Since then approximately 57,000,000 American babies have been aborted in the womb. And since then it’s almost as if an entire world has changed.
In the 42 year since Roe v. Wade we’ve seen the world change in so many different ways. We’ve seen modernity progress. We’ve seeing issues of human rights debated. New context and new challenges have presented ominous threats – new threats – to human dignity and the sanctity of human life. But on this anniversary we come back again and again to the fact that it is abortion, more than any other single issue, that demonstrates just how much of the biblical life ethic has been lost in modern secular societies. Seen in that light, the last 42 years of been years have been years of incalculable loss; the loss of so many unborn children. The loss of so many different boundary lines when it comes to human dignity.
But we also need to note something to the contrary, the past 42 years have also seen the fact that the abortion issue has not gone away. In fact it has not only not gone away, it has resolutely remained on the American mind and in the American conscience. And one of the things we need to note is that actual progress has been made; some ground has been gain. More Americans believe that abortion is wrong in the year 2015 than said so in the year 1973. Far more evangelical Christians are aware of the issue of the sanctity of human life and the threats to human life presented by a disposable society than was true in 1973. Back in 1973 there were a good many Roman Catholic activists on the lines against abortion, but in the year 2015 evangelicals have now for decades been also on the front lines of the fight for the dignity and sanctity of every single human life at every point of development.
And one of the things we need to note, to note with appreciation, is not just that some ground has been gained in the culture but ground has been gained in the church as well. One of the things in retrospect we need to note is that evangelical churches were woefully unprepared to deal with this issue when it arose and exploded on the national scene with the Roe decision in 1973. At that point it’s clear most evangelical pastors had never actually spoken to the issue. Far too many evangelicals had been drinking deeply from the wells of human autonomy and had basically accepted abortion as yet the latest innovation in terms of America’s moral development.
Before criticizing the culture – that’s important as well – we need to first recognize that the church was at fault. That evangelical churches, evangelical pastors, were simply asleep at the switch – and sinfully so – when the issue of abortion was catapulted in the national prominence. Far too many evangelicals believe that it was someone else’s problem, that it was an issue that had no place in the pulpit, and that somehow it could be avoided lest there be the discussion of awkward issues or controversial questions from the pulpit.
These days that seems like a rather pathetic and hopeless naïveté and yet it was very common in the early 1970s, it was common in 1972; it was certainly common when the decision was handed down in 1973. Nothing immediately appeared to change, but there was an awakening in the evangelical conscience. Progressive and yet noticeable, it happened because there were some very brave prophets of human dignity who made very clear biblical arguments in the vacuum of so much evangelical silence. There were those who were willing to put their reputations on the line and to make the comfortable uncomfortable by raising issues that were of urgent biblical concern.
Over the past 40 years and more, evangelical Christians have learned to talk about a Christian worldview and the importance of worldview thinking; largely because of the catalyst of the issue of abortion and the sanctity of human life. More than any other single issue, this has awakened evangelicals to the fact that there are millions of people around us who do not believe what we believe and whose worldviews are shaped by very different fundamental assumptions. And furthermore, we’ve come to understand that those assumptions can mean the difference between life and death.
The Roe v. Wade decision did not emerge from a cultural vacuum. It emerged in an age in which not only the sexual revolution had made such progress in 1960s, but more fundamentally issues of human autonomy. The claim that every single human being is – more than anything else – an autonomous being capable and responsible for nearly unfettered choice became popular not only in the secular culture, but it had made very invasive inroads into evangelical thinking as well. Furthermore, a very dangerous and insidious form of moral pragmatism had emerged also in some evangelical circles. With some prominent figures – including some evangelical preachers – saying quite openly that in some sense, abortion just might be the lesser of other evils.
Finally while we are searching the evangelical conscience on this issue we need to recognize that racism also played a part. One of the reasons why many Americans – including no doubt many American evangelicals – at least subconsciously did not find such offense when the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down was because they believed, and had good reason to believe by the statistics, that the abortions that were likely to be carried out were the abortions of someone else’s children. The eugenic roots of the abortion movement – that is the roots of that movement in the ideology as Margaret Sanger, founder of what would eventually become Planned Parenthood taught, ‘more children from the fit and less from the unfit’ – those eugenic roots are very clearly at the very base of the momentum towards abortion in an elite culture. You put all that together and there is an enormous sense of evangelical culpability on the issue of abortion when we look back over the 42 years since Roe v. Wade.
As a matter of intellectual and theological integrity, I have to note that the Southern Baptist Convention in the years prior to Roe v. Wade had actually passed at least one resolution that seem to offer some explicit support for the legalization of abortion in some form. I say that with enormous shame. That is one of the issues that led to what was called the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention. And in that resurgent there is no doubt that the issue of abortion played a very important part in helping people to understand just what was at stake, not only in terms of the sanctity of human life but the interpretation and the authority of Scripture.
Over the course of the past 42 years we’ve come to a deeper understanding of exactly what was happening in the Roe v. Wade decision. We know, for example, by the very journals of the Justice who wrote the majority opinion, Harry Blackmun, that the majority of the court was actually determined to find some way to legalize abortion. The legal argument actually came subsequent to that ambition. That becomes abundantly clear. The artificial argument that was put forth in this majority opinion, dividing human pregnancy into three different trimesters, was actually something invented simply to find some way to argue for a woman so-called right to choose when it comes to abortion.
Much ground has been gained in the church, and for that we must be exceedingly thankful. And the realization of how we got here should make us also considerably humble. But when we think about the culture there’s also reason for hope because some ground has been gained. As we have often discussed, the fact is that the images that are presented on American refrigerators, images of unborn children through ultrasound, those have become conscience changers in terms of the issue of the sanctity of human life. It has become far more difficult now to deny the personhood of that unborn child.
There have also been significant medical and scientific developments. There has been the acknowledgment of the existence of fetal pain and the so-called age of viability. The point of viability for the unborn child has been significantly reduced to younger ages. That’s why right now Congress has a bill before it to consider making abortion far more difficult to obtain after the 20th week of gestation.
Of course from a Christian biblical worldview perspective an abortion at 20 weeks is actually no more tragic and no more sinful than one at two weeks, but the issue is that ground has been gained. The argument, at least in some circles and to some extent, has been won. There is recognition among more Americans now than in 1973 that abortion is to be avoided whenever possible. And the number of Americans who identify as pro-life for the first time in recent years has been greater in statistical terms than those who identify themselves otherwise.
Even as ground has been gained there is much more ground still that is contested and our job is hardly over. Evangelicals have been in the front lines of developing ministries to women who are expecting children, women who otherwise might obtain abortions. Evangelicals have also been on the front lines of developing ministries that affirm and facilitate adoption; the adoption of children who also might have been aborted – but beyond that, the understanding that there are millions and millions of children who desperately need parents.
The evangelical conscience cannot be limited to the issue of abortion, but it cannot avoid the issue of abortion. Indeed a closer biblical consideration of the issue of abortion and the sanctity of human life points to the fact that it is one of those preeminent issues that simply, not only cannot be avoided, but must be embraced as a major issue of the evangelical conscience and furthermore as a major issue of evangelical responsibility.
Even as we celebrate the fact that some ground has been gained we understand that the challenge before us is absolutely tremendous and that nothing less than a bold evangelical witness is necessary; and not only verbal witness, not only the witness of communication, but also the witness of action – the witness of putting righteous deeds to accompany righteous words. And ultimately of course the evangelical conscience does not begin and end with the sanctity of human life but rather with the fact that the sanctity of human life is directly tied to the fact that a loving and sovereign benevolent creator has created every single one of us, at every single point of development, in his image and that is the reason why every single human life is precious.
But that points to another fundamental evangelical responsibility, and that is to develop a comprehensive biblical theology, a theology that is taught from the pulpits and taught by parents; a biblical theology that becomes the sum and substance of evangelical faith, a biblical theology that explains our obedience to the great commission and also our obedience to the Bible’s message of life. So on this 42nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade there is sad news, undeniable sad news, heartbreaking sad news; the death of over 57 million unborn children since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. But there is other news too; the reminder of our responsibility, the glad responsibility to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and the message of life to a society that more than ever before desperately needs that message.
2) ‘Free-range’ parenting furor displays common grace of society concerned for welfare of children
Next one of the most important Christian theological categories is that of common grace something that is neglected by many evangelical believers. Remember that Jesus himself said that God causes the rain to fall upon both the just and the unjust. There is common grace that is extended to many people who will never come to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Common grace explains why the restraint of law means that people do not do all the evil things they might otherwise do. Common grace means that the law that is written into the human heart by our creator is indeed a sign of God’s grace; He loves us enough to restrain us, even by that power we call conscience. Common grace is also seen in weather; the sun shining on crops and the crops bringing forth their fruit. Common grace is also seen in the fact that almost everywhere you find children, you find parents. And where you find parents and children, you find a bond that can only be described as love.
Evidence of this kind of common grace comes in a recent series of articles to appear in major newspapers including most especially, the Washington Post. And it’s a really interesting story on now what is called ‘free-range parenting.’ I know no better way to tell the story than the way that reporters Donna St. George and Brigid Schulte tell it for the Washington Post. As they write,
“Two days after the story of their children’s unsupervised walk home from a park became the latest flash point in an ongoing cultural debate about what constitutes responsible parenting, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were still explaining their ‘old-fashioned’ methods of child-rearing.
They eat dinner with their children. They enforce bedtimes, restrict screen times and assign chores. They go to synagogue. More controversially, they let their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter venture out together to walk or play without adults.”
Danielle Meitiv said,
“How have we gotten so crazy that what was just a normal childhood a generation ago is considered radical?”
Well you surely heard about free-range chicken, now we’re talking about free-range children; it really is an interesting controversy.
As the post reports,
“The idea of free-range kids has been around since 2008, when New York journalist Lenore Skenazy set off a firestorm with a piece titled ‘Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone’”
It then developed into a huge controversy that is between the extremes of “helicopter parents” on the one hand – you recognize those from our cultural conversation – and “free-range parents” with their free-range children on the other side. The Post cites that author, also pointing out,
“In the past, children stayed out for hours, slept in backyard tents and wandered their neighborhoods. [Skenazy said] These are things we all did on our own, and now we don’t let our children do, and there is no real or rational reason except we’re fearful,”
Actually almost every major media source, including the Washington Post, has verified that point. For instance here’s one paragraph from the Post story,
“Federal statistics show that the violent crime rate has fallen dramatically from its peak in 1991 and is about what it was in the late 1960s but lower than in the early 1970s, when many more mothers were at home and children roamed freer.”
In a similar article Petula Dvorak, also in the Washington Post, says
“It’s a different world today, you say? Why, yes, it is. Since 1993, the number of children younger than 14 who are murdered is down by 36 percent. Among children ages 14 to 17, murders are down 60 percent. Fewer than 1 percent of missing children are abducted by strangers or even slight acquaintances, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.”
The Post then says,
“It only seems scarier because we know so much more. From across the nation, stories of missing children are delivered to the palms of our hands every day. In the old days, it seemed so much safer because the tragic stories were largely restricted to hometown papers and local newscasts.”
There’s really something of importance for Christians to note here. One is the controversy about free-range kids; the other thing is to note the very important clarification that’s coming in these major media outlets, and that is that even as parents are more fearful than ever before, the crime rates – undeniable in terms of the numbers – indicate that children are far less likely now to suffer from this kind of violence from a stranger than they were even in the 1960s or 70s. And furthermore the risk of any child actually being assaulted or abducted by someone who isn’t known to them, almost as a family member in most cases, is extremely remote. Horrifyingly enough there are such cases, but you know the reality is these articles are pointing – even in secular context – to the fact that many of us actually operate more out of fear than out of the facts. And when it comes to children there is no doubt that many of our own children are being shielded from the normal experiences of childhood because we’re simply afraid to let them out of our site.
As you might expect, when it comes to this Jewish couple and their children in Washington, DC it wasn’t long before they were brought up on charges. And here’s something else that’s kind of good news and bad news. It turns out that when you track the story down, they let their 10-year-old and their six-year-old walk home from a park, a woman – who doesn’t know the family – saw the children walking alone and was alarmed and called the police. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well in most cases you would say that is probably a good thing; it’s actually a good thing that a neighbor cared enough to do something when she was alarmed such as calling the authorities. On the other hand, it’s at that point that just about everything got out of hand because once the police were called they then had to investigate the case. And they turned it over to a government agency that seems to think that its job is to make certain that children are never alone under any circumstance.
Another reassuring thing, the Washington Post, one of the most liberal newspapers in America, is pushing back on this idea with not just one but a couple of articles in which they are pushing back on this age of anxiety and even on this government kind of intrusion. They are also noticing the fact that there’s good news and bad news here. We do have neighbors who are intrusive to call the police but they also care enough to call the police. We’re looking at police who are probably just pretty much doing their job, even as are looking at a government agency that seems to believe that it knows better than parents when it comes to whether or not children can walk home safely from a park.
And from a Christian worldview perspective, and especially for Christian parents, there comes another article; seemingly out of the blue, disconnected to those two articles in the Washington Post. This is an article that appeared in the January 20 edition of the New York Times; it’s about a similar issue. It’s by Jane E. Brody in the personal health column and its title, Giving Children Roots and Wings. You won’t be surprised; this article is about free-range kids. But it’s not just about little kids 10-year-olds and six-year-old, it’s about college students who raised this way can’t solve problems on their own.
Her article cites Peter Gray, a research psychologist at Boston College who’s written a book entitled “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life,” No kidding – that’s one title. In an interview with the New York Times Dr. Gray said,
“If children are not allowed to take routine risks, they’ll be less likely to be able to handle real risks when they do occur.
Case in point: His college’s counseling office has seen a doubling in the rate of emergency calls in the last five years, ‘mainly for problems kids used to solve on their own,’ like being called a bad name by a roommate or finding a mouse in the room. ‘Students are prepared academically, but they’re not prepared to deal with day-to-day life, which comes from a lack of opportunity to deal with ordinary problems. Over the past 60 years [says Dr. Gray], there’s been a huge change, well documented by social scientists, in the hours a day children play outdoors — less than half as much as parents did at their children’s ages,’”
This is one of those story for which there is no black or white answer from a Christian biblical worldview. As I’ve said, it’s testimony to common grace how happy we should be that so many people care about the welfare of children; including so many parents, even parents who otherwise don’t agree on much, do agree that the welfare of children in this case is to be of paramount importance. But when it comes raising children it turns out there is no absolute biblical commandment when it comes to free-range children, yes or no.
I do know this; Dr. Gray is onto something when he says that kids who simply haven’t had the normal experiences of childhood and have never had to learn responsibility are incapable of making normal decisions and handling normal issues when they arrive on the college campus.
I’m not exactly sure what to do with the new cultural notion of free-range children, but I do know this, there’s good news in the fact that parents are thinking about their kids in this way and it is probably good reason to look at some of the little ones in your house right now and say, ‘it’s time to go outside.’
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 01-22-15
1) Anniversary of Roe v Wade reminder abortion still urgent issue of Christian responsibility
Roe v. Wade – Case Brief Summary, Lawnix
Roe v. Wade, Wikipedia
2) ‘Free-range’ parenting furor displays common grace of society concerned for welfare of children
Montgomery County neglect inquiry shines spotlight on ‘free-range’ parenting, Washington Post (Donna St. George and Brigid Schulte)
Why are we criminalizing childhood independence?, Washington Post (Petula Dvorak)
Parenting Advice From ‘America’s Worst Mom’, New York Times (Jane E. Brody)
January 21, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 01-21-14
The Briefing
January 20, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Wednesday, January 21, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Supreme court decision on beards for inmates significant defense of religious liberty
Religious liberty for one means religious liberty for all; if rightly understood. And the Supreme Court got that point right yesterday when in a decision handed down unanimously by the court the court ruled that an inmate in a state prison had a right, as a Muslim, to grow a half inch beard.
The background of this is the fact that beards are very important to Muslim men. Not only is it a matter of cultural custom but also because it is a sign of obedience – it is a sign of masculinity, a sign of what it means to be a faithful Muslim man. If you travel in the Muslim world or if you’re in neighborhoods where you see young Muslims you’ll notice that young Muslim men and teenage boys are doing their very best to grow a beard as quickly as they can in order to be recognized by their community as being upright and faithful.
As Richard Wolf of USA Today reports,
“A Supreme Court that has extended the reach of religion into public life in recent years ruled Tuesday that spirituality can overcome even prison security concerns.”
I actually have a problem with that lead sentence; my problem was with the first words. The words are that the Supreme Court has extended the reach of religion into the public life. That’s not at all evident. It certainly wouldn’t be an uncontroversial statement. It’s an arguable point to be sure. But in the next part of the sentence he did get to the case and its importance. The court certainly did not say that the states do not have legitimate security concerns and also concerns about contraband when it comes to prisons. They did say that a regulation that prisoners were not able to grow a beard of a half inch length was an unreasonable refusal to accommodate religious conviction. As Richard Wolf reports,
“The court came down decisively on the side of a Muslim prisoner whose beard had been deemed potentially dangerous by the Arkansas Department of Correction. Growing a beard, the justices said, was a Muslim man’s religious right.”
The decision was unanimous. The majority opinion was written by Justice Samuel Alito and it includes a couple of pretty interesting statements. The Justice wrote,
“Hair on the head is a more plausible place to hide contraband than a half-inch beard, and the same is true of an inmate’s clothing and shoes. Nevertheless, the department does not require inmates to go about bald, barefoot or naked.”
Alito also wrote,
“We readily agree that (the state) has a compelling interest in staunching the flow of contraband into and within its facilities, but the argument that this interest would be seriously compromised by allowing an inmate to grow a half-inch beard is hard to take seriously.”
The Justices also rejected the argument put forth by the State that if a prisoner was allowed to grow a beard and then shave that beard, that very prisoner might be unrecognizable.
One other important note about this case, there was a concurring decision – that means that another Justice agreed with the result but wanted to write his or her own opinion in order to make it a matter of history. In this case it was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She issued, according to USA Today, a one paragraph concurrence to point out what she deemed the difference between this inmates beard,
“…and the more intrusive health insurance exemption sought and won by Hobby Lobby and other businesses”
She wrote and I quote,
“Unlike the exemption this court approved (in Hobby Lobby), accommodating petitioner’s religious belief in this case would not detrimentally affect others who do not share petitioner’s belief,”
So even though this decision was unanimous, it points out that the way the Justices got there was not unanimous. And in terms of their larger conception and understanding of religious liberty, there is no unanimity. That also demonstrates just how tenuous religious liberty may be as we look to the future and continuing challenges to one of our most cherished liberties – a liberty Christians understand that is not granted to us by our government but respected by our government because it was granted to us by our creator.
2) Pending same sex marriage decision may give political cover, not moral cover, to politicians
Monday’s edition of the New York Times had a very important front-page article entitled, Marriage Case Offers G.O.P. Political Cover. It’s important because from a worldview perspective it is very important that Christians understand that in a political context, moral issues can quickly get confused, over written, and sometimes outright transformed.
Jeremy Peters and Jonathan Martin write,
“The news Friday that the Supreme Court will rule on same-sex marriage brought elation from gays and lesbians who are hopeful the justices will grant them the constitutional protections they have long sought.
But another group also saw a possible reason to celebrate if the court does indeed rule that way: Republicans.”
Now repeatedly, thus far, on The Briefing I have pointed this out. The purpose of a political party long-term is to be in office and to stay in office and to maximize political standing. When it comes to an issue like same-sex marriage, when we’re in the midst of a moral revolution, any political party – every political party – is going to be making a judgment as to how that issue must be factored into its future. And when it comes to the Republican Party there will be no shortage of Republicans who will be very glad for the Supreme Court to take the heat on the issue of same-sex marriage one way or the other. Even though virtually everyone expects the Supreme Court one way or another, to one extent or another, to approve the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states, there are a good many Republicans who will argue against the issue but will find political cover from the Supreme Court.
Though there are some Republicans – and others we should point out – who are very brave in speaking to this issue in defense of marriage, the fact is that there are already those who are scurrying behind the announcement that was made last Friday in order to say, ‘we don’t need to deal with these issues because the Supreme Court is now going to render its decision.’
As the New York Times writes, if the Supreme Court does render that kind of decision coming in the spring it could be,
“…a decision that has the benefit of largely neutralizing a debate that a majority of Americans believe Republicans are on the wrong side of — and well ahead of the party’s 2016 presidential primaries.”
That’s an interesting little reading of the situation and it’s one that is not uncontested. But this much is clear, by the time the Republican primary season rolls around, this issue is almost assuredly going to be decided. And to add some credibility to the point that is made by the New York Times, there are a good number of people regardless of their partisan identification who have already decided to say, “it’s been settled let’s move on.”
The reporters then write,
“When the Supreme Court said it would take up the question, the reticence to wade into the debate was evident. In most corners of the party — and, notably, from those who are likely to seek the Republican presidential nomination — there was silence late last week. The desire to calibrate unremarkable and inoffensive responses shows how the debate over same-sex marriage significantly departs from other major constitutional questions on social issues like abortion and why, unlike abortion, it may not endure as an issue.”
Well at this point I want to suggest that the issue of abortion appeared to be going away in 1973 but of course it was not. And that’s because it is a deeply convictional issue and those who are deeply convictional people are not going to say this is simply going to go away because of a Supreme Court decision. The reason the pro-life movement has continued, even grown and intensified, is because there has been a growing – not a lessening – understanding of the fact that every single human being is made in God’s image and every life is precious at every point of development.
That has been bolstered by the arrival of technology such as the ultrasound, such that it is now routinely that people see their little brothers and little sisters taped as an ultrasound image on the refrigerator. That has made it much more difficult to argue that that isn’t a person; it isn’t the human being, that that life isn’t worthy of preservation. I would predict at this point that the terrain on the issue of marriage is likely to be actually very similar to that of abortion. There will be those who will almost immediately cry – as they did in 1973 – ‘the issue is settled, let’s move on.’
But even as the evidence will continue to grow about the importance of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and even as the kind of statistics are almost surely – and I say broken heartedly – going to be adding up about the breakdown of the family, my guess is there will be a renewed understanding of the importance of defending marriage as marriage. It will be like the pro-life cause, an issue oppressing back against the larger culture. And we know that in advance, but it is interesting to have the New York Times suggesting that when it comes to the partisan politics involved, you can count not only on the Democrats championing this development, you can also find Republicans finding a way to say, ‘let’s move on.’
To their credit, the reporters also indicate there are some Republicans – including some likely presidential candidates in 2016 – who aren’t suggesting this route; they are not making this argument. Indeed there are those who will be arguing for the restriction of marriage to the union of a man and a woman. The interesting thing will be how they make that argument on the other side of a likely Supreme Court case to be handed down by the end of June of this year. To go back to the headline in this case it may be that a Supreme Court decision, as expected, will give Republicans – and for that matter others – political cover, but that does not mean it will give them moral cover and that’s what Christians must keep foremost in mind.
3) Confusion over evangelical identity shown in report of growing support for same sex marriage
That leads us to an even more important story; TIME magazine’s current issue includes an article by Elizabeth Dias entitled A Change of Heart inside the Evangelical War over Gay Marriage. After opening her article with a view to development at EastLake Community Church in the Seattle area, Dias then writes,
“EastLake’s pivot [that is a pivot towards the acceptance of same-sex marriage] is a signal that change is coming to one of the last redoubts of opposition to gay marriage in America. Mainline Protestant denominations, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians, routinely ordain gay ministers and marry gay couples. Methodist ministers are breaking rank to celebrate gay weddings. The overall public has favored gay marriage for three years.”
But, she writes,
“[E]vangelical churches and their congregations typically remain opposed, though that opposition is weakening”
So it is one thing to talk about opposition to same-sex marriage weakening among Republicans, it’s a very different thing to have a change of scene to TIME magazine where the issue, according to Elizabeth Dias, is a battle over the issue of gay marriage when it comes to American evangelicals.
Elizabeth Dias goes to one of the most familiar issues in terms of this terrain and that is the age of various cohorts of evangelicals. As she reports, the older cohort of evangelical – the baby boomers and older – are overwhelmingly opposed to same-sex marriage. Whereas if you look at evangelicals – and remember that’s in terms of surveys and poll taking those who are identified as evangelicals – when you look at those who are identified as evangelicals aged 34 and younger, there is an overwhelming level of support for same-sex marriage. The cultural and moral revolution we’ve been experiencing certainly explains that generational contrast.
The report cites two young men who are activists on the issue; one is Brandon Robertson who is the head of a group known as Evangelicals for Marriage Equality, also cited in the article is Matthew Vines, author of the book “God and the Gay Christian.” Elizabeth Dias points to their efforts and to the meetings that they have held and will be holding in the future in evangelical circles, suggesting that this is a sign of what she describes as a looming civil war within evangelicalism. She also cites Gene Robinson; you’ll remember he was the first openly gay Bishop of the Episcopal Church elected back in 2003. He said that the situation in evangelicalism now reminds him of “my own Episcopal Church 30 years ago.”
She also cites Pastor Danny Cortez of New Heart Community Church outside Los Angeles; a church that declared itself a third way congregation and it was later disclosed, a church who’s pastor had actually officiated at same-sex ceremony. She points to that church acknowledging that it was disfellowshipped by the Southern Baptist Convention because of its Congregational decision. She also writes,
“Religious-minded colleges are particularly cross-pressured–by definition, they are intended to nurture a new generation in an ancient biblical heritage. Illinois’s Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater, does not recognize alumni gay marriages, but this fall it hired a celibate lesbian to work in its chaplain’s office.”
Before she ends her article Elizabeth Dias considers a great deal of the evangelical landscape, but as is the case with almost any reporter, she’s looking for what she finds and she finds what she’s looking for. To her credit she does recognize that it appears that the vast majority of American evangelicals are not joining the revolution to normalize and legalize same-sex marriage. But there can be no doubt that she’s also onto something when she points to the great generational contrast in terms of at least how pollsters are reporting evangelical views on the issue of homosexuality, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage.
And furthermore, it points to the great challenge that we as evangelicals have to deliver, not only a position paper when it comes to the issue of same-sex marriage – or more fundamentally marriage – but we actually have to bolster this with very systemic comprehensive biblical arguments. And we also have to bolster that with a very clear affirmation of consistency in our own lives and in our own marriages; even as they point that are teaching is based right out a Holy Scripture.
The bottom line of Elizabeth Dias’s article is that evangelicals who do hold to that biblical conviction that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and can only be that, are going to be bucking the cultural tide not only in terms of the larger secular culture but in many ways, pressing back against enormous pressure that’s going to be exerted by those who claim an evangelical identity. But there’s another very important issue that come shining through her article, it all comes down to how you define evangelical. If you define evangelical by those who define themselves as evangelical, you’ll find evangelicals who believe something, anything, and nothing. But if you define evangelicalism, as I believe you must, by adherence to and faithfulness to very clear doctrinal principles and convictions, then this is really a confusing article from the very conception.
Elizabeth Dias seems to understand this when she writes,
“The roots of the conflict are deeply theological. Evangelical faith prizes the Bible’s authority, and that has meant a core commitment to biblical inerrancy–the belief that the words of the Bible are without error. Genesis Chapter 1 says God created male and female for one another, and the Apostle Paul calls homosexuality a sin, inerrantists say [by the way, it’s not just inerrantists who say that, but inerrantists certainly do say that], and for groups like the Southern Baptist Convention and its 50,000 churches nationwide, that is the biblical trump card.”
By the way, it isn’t, I would argue, the biblical trump card – it’s simply that the Bible trumps every other argument or assertion.
I appreciate the fact that Elizabeth Dias quotes Russell Moore, President of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to say,
“We believe even stranger things than that, [when it comes to the definition of marriage], we believe a previously dead man is going to arrive in the sky on a horse.”
This important article to appear in TIME magazine is a signal, it’s a signal not only of a big question about the future of evangelicalism, it is furthermore and more importantly, a huge signal about the question mark about Christian faithfulness in this generation; faithfulness that by any estimation is going to be costly. And even as the issue of evangelical definition has been controversial in the past, it’s going to grow only more controversial. Because when it comes to an issue like same-sex marriage and the authority of Scripture, there is no way to argue that we can simply redefined evangelical to accommodate what are clearly non-evangelical beliefs.
Before leaving the article, there are a couple of other very important things to note. One of them is this, as I have argued repeatedly and in the response that I, along with other colleagues, offered to Matthew Vines’ book “God and the Gay Christian”, the issue of the interpretation of Scripture, or the revision of the interpretation of Scripture, to allow for the normalization of homosexuality flows in terms of patterns of thought upon the same kind of interpretive techniques that are required in order to relatives the teachings of Scripture on the issue of gender; on what it means to be a man and a woman and of the issues of men and women in the church.
Elizabeth Dias writes,
“And there is another, just as fundamental, obstacle. So far no Christian tradition has been able to embrace the LGBT community without first changing its views about women.”
I appreciate that sentence, it affirm something that I have been arguing for years on this program and elsewhere. There is no way that a church can get to the normalization of homosexuality, in terms of what will be required with relativizing Scripture, before doing that first on the issue of gender. But there’s another argument attached to this that Elizabeth Dias doesn’t reference at all and that is that the churches that have gone so far as to relativize the Bible’s understanding of gender in order to meet the feminist revolution, they have very few defenses not to join the new revolution as well.
Oh, and that final observation about this article; it tells us that TIME magazine felt that the article was important. And Elizabeth Dias gets right to the point; it’s important in terms of the view of the editors of TIME magazine because when it comes to this moral revolution, there are now very few outliers, very few circles of resistance, to the normalization of homosexuality. And for reasons that the editors and this reporter evidently found interesting, one of those very last readouts, in terms of the language used by the reporter, is that of evangelical Christianity. Chalk this up at as one more article in the major mainstream media to announce to us all the revolution that we face and the challenges that are inevitable.
4) Digital age presents massive challenge to all who wish to educate rising generation
Finally, as a note about the cultural change we are all experiencing and how it affects the young – our own children and teenagers – consider an article that appeared about schools and teaching in the Washington Post Sunday’s edition. It’s by David Osborne and it is about a school in St. Paul, Minnesota where the teachers have a great deal to say about what happens in the school. But one of the teachers in this article makes a truly interesting statement about the challenge of teaching in a digital age; not only a digital age, but in what we might call the postmodern confusion of American childhood and adolescence.
She writes about the challenge with these words,
“We’re competing against Xbox 360, and over-scheduled days with soccer practices and very dynamic lives,”
This teacher, Kartal Jaquette, runs the Denver Green School. She says,
“Are you almost as interesting as a video game? Are you getting almost as much attention as a soccer coach might? Is it as much fun? Because if not, they’re going to tune you out.”
And when she speaks about ‘they,’ she is speaking about our children and teenagers. If you’re not as exciting as an Xbox 360, if you’re not getting the kind of attention that a soccer coach demands, if you’re teaching and influence doesn’t appear to add up to fun, then she says, they’re going to tune you out.
Of course one lesson we need to draw from this is that we need to help our children to pay attention and understand the importance of things when they’re not as exciting as an Xbox 360, when they don’t have the commanding attention of a soccer coach, and when they can’t be defined exactly as fun – even as we help them to understand learning as fun. But this article really isn’t just about the challenges faced by teachers; it’s about the challenges faced by parent. And not only parents but pastors. This is the challenge we all face, we might as well face it squarely.
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 01-21-15
1) Supreme court decision on beards for inmates significant defense of religious liberty
Supreme Court upholds religious rights of prisoners, USA Today (Richard Wolf)
2) Pending same sex marriage decision may give political cover, not moral cover, to politicians
Gay Marriage Case Offers G.O.P. Political Cover, New York Times (Jeremy W. Peters and Jonathan Martin)
3) Confusion over evangelical identity shown in report of growing support for same sex marriage
Inside the Evangelical Fight Over Gay Marriage, TIME (Elizabeth Dias)
4) Digital age presents massive challenge to all who wish to educate rising generation
To improve schools, let teachers run them, Washington Post (David Osborne)
January 20, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 01-20-15
The Briefing
January 20, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Tuesday, January 20, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) President’s State of the Union valuable learning opportunity for families
Today the most important political event is likely to be the President of the United States delivering what is known as the State of the Union address. There’s actually a constitutional requirement that the President annually report to Congress on the state of the union. But the Constitution was never clear that it had to be in the form of an address delivered by the President in person. And furthermore, this hasn’t always even been the case; President Thomas Jefferson delivered his State of the Union report in writing to Congress – he did not appear in person.
But then came big developments and those developments have to do with retail politics and the politics of theater. First came radio, and after radio came television, and ever since the state of the union address has been an invaluable part of America’s political furniture. No White House would let a state of the union address go without maximizing its potential to the fullest. In terms of recent Presidents perhaps no one was more invested in the State of the Union addresses than President Ronald Reagan; who turned every one of his State of the Union addresses into a moment of rather high political theatre. And of course, as a former actor, Pres. Reagan knew how to make the most of a theatrical moment.
Presidents who followed him tried to do the same; including Pres. Bill Clinton and most recently Pres. Barack Obama. But when Pres. Obama gets up tonight at the dais of the House of Representatives, he will not be saying much –at least in so far as we know that he’s not already said. And that’s because the White House, in terms of the 2015 State of the Union address, has tried a rather unorthodox way of setting up the President’s goals and points.
Over the last couple of weeks the White House and the President have been announcing what he’s going to talk about in his address. It is, as I said, a rather innovative approach to the State of the Union. But in theater-speak, the President runs the risk of stepping on his own lines; having nothing basically of surprise to say and thus most political observers are estimating that very low ratings will be the count tonight when it comes to Americans watching the President live.
I want to suggest however that informed Christians, intelligent Christians, seeking to understand the times would do very well to watch the State of the Union address – and if possible to do so with children; it is an excellent opportunity to have a live civics lesson right in the family room.
A couple of things to think about while you’re watching the State of the Union address. First is the pageantry. American civil government constitutionally is still barely over 200 years old and yet the American Constitution is the longest surviving written Constitution of any government in human history. And the American constitutional way of government comes with a separation of powers that is made very clear by the fact – and notice this tonight as you’re watching – the President of the United States will appear before Congress in the chamber of the House of Representatives as a guest. He will be invited to address a joint session of Congress with the House and the Senate seating together. Of course you’ll understand they’re meeting in the House chamber because the Senate chamber, as it is limited to 100 members, is actually too small for a joint session.
So as you’ll be looking at the very familiar settings of the chamber of the United States House of Representatives in the capital, you’ll notice that the President is going to be standing there, standing there as a guest representing the separation of powers. And you’ll also note that there is a formality to the occasion that is newsworthy of American attention. As the president is announced by the doorkeeper of the house, and then as he makes his way down the aisle, as he greets people from both parties, making his way to the dais. Non-constitutional features, that is they’re not unconstitutional, they’re just not mandated in any way by the Constitution, include the fact that the President will have the First Lady in attendance in the balcony and – Pres. Reagan again pioneered this – very specific guests will be invited to have very high visibility sitting with the First Lady.
In terms of what the President is expected to talk about tonight, there are three points that the White House has been pretty clear about. One is the need for increased revenue. That will mean higher taxes from someone and the White House has been indicating that means from some of the most wealthy members of society; including an expanded tax on capital gains. Secondly the President is expected to talk about the promise of a middle-class tax cut – of course that has to be paid for by someone else, and it’s going be very interesting to see exactly how the math adds up in terms of the President’s presentation.
But the third issue is likely also to get a lot of attention and that is the President suggesting that the first two years of college at a community college to be considered as normal, if not normative, for American young people as high school graduation. Thus he’s calling for a free two-year period at an American community college.
This is likely to be very controversial, and as much of higher education is one of the best commodities America offers, it’s not clear that this has a very certain political future. That’s because of the fact that even if you really want to help the most disadvantaged people reach the pinnacle of college education, it’s not at all clear that this is the way to get there. Furthermore it would require not only vast billions of dollars in spending by the federal government but also by the states. Since the states are already hard-pressed – almost every single one of the 50 states – when it comes to meeting their own budget obligations of the present, it’s going to be pretty hard to see how the President’s proposal is going to get any immediate traction.
It will however start a national debate; that is the power of the Presidency above all – to control, at least in terms of initiatives, a lot of what the country will be talking about. And there will be talk back – that’s another thing to notice – this is not a constitutional issue, this is a modern media policy. There will be an official Republican response. If the President is a Republican, there is an official Democratic response. And in this case the Republican response is going to be given by Senator Joni Ernst; the Senator newly elected from the state of Iowa.
So my encouragement to Christian families tonight is get a copy of the U.S. Constitution and help your children to understand the relevant sections and what it means. Help them to understand the worldview behind the separation of powers. Help them to understand that when the President of the United States is speaking there in the House of Representatives, it really is important that he’s speaking as an invited guest – not as an emperor. Help them to understand the drama of politics and why that really does matter and yet how it can matter for a very short time; and help them to understand the actual policies being proposed. In terms not only of the President’s statements but also of the Republican response. And then think about what it would mean to have an intelligent conversation about these things with your own children. That may be in contrast to a rather unintelligent conversation in much of the rest of the country.
2) Plans for Davos retreat for wealthy upended by world events, again
Something else is going to be happening tonight and it is the opening of the world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland and most likely you’re not going to be there and neither am I. That’s because this most illustrative of executive retreats is likely to attract only the top one percent of the 1% as it is the rich and the famous gathering together to discuss the world’s problems and how they can cure them.
Davos, Switzerland was made famous in Thomas Mann’s novel from the 19th century, The Magic Mountain but it’s famous now because of its magic ethos – and that is the attraction of powerful people and very wealthy people to gather together to discuss how together they can solve the world’s problems. Of course even as USA Today deserves very important credit for a news story, indeed a trio of new stories, run on the issue recently, USA Today points out that even as the group is meeting in Davos, Switzerland that the most elite of the elite, world headline tend to end up in the meeting virtually every single year.
It was expected that this year the big topic was going to be Ebola, then the big topic was going to be currency fluctuation, and now the big topic is likely to be the terrorist attacks in Paris. David Callaway of USA Today writes,
“More than 2,500 of the world’s great, good, and well, lucky, will descend on the snowy resort town …with the usual future of the world at stake.”
He also writes about the political leaders who will be there with the rich and famous. He writes,
“As the 40 or so global leaders sweep through town from event to event with their security details, the money brigade will huddle for coffee or [wine] in the private dining rooms and suites of Davos’ faded five-star hotels. Alive in gilded glory once more they hum, if only for a week, their elite status long since eclipsed by nearby St. Moritz.”
The big celebrity talk of Davos upfront is Bono’s likely nonappearance because he still recovering from a bicycle accident. The grand old men of Davos right now are Bill Gates and Eric Schmitt from America’s hyper digital elite. Callaway writes,
“If tradition holds, a major news event will occur midweek to swing attention from the official proceedings, and stranding leaders in icy captivity with a global media seeking comment. A Brazilian currency crisis such as last year. Or maybe a new Russian aggression. A market meltdown perhaps.”
It could be just about anything including a very controversial looming election in the nation of Greece. Callaway concludes,
“It’s 2015′s coming out party for the 1 percent. On top of the world, though in less control than ever.”
This comes out as international media were reporting over last weekend that the top 1%, and furthermore not only within the 1% the very highest percentage of the 1%, may soon own more than half of the world’s wealth; which is to say that one percent may soon own more than the 99% put together.
From a worldview perspective that is a haunting reality in terms of that kind of income inequality. But it doesn’t actually point just to the future as much is it points back towards the past – a rather futile past. Those who care for democratic values have to be very concerned about the weakening if not the disappearance of the middle class in many nations including a threatened middle-class in the United States. However, that’s not the concern of the elite in Davos, these are the people who rail against climate change and fly to this meeting on their Gulfstream 5’s. These are the people complaining about income inequality but they’re the people at the very top of the 1%. So they will meet in Davos for a few days to talk about the world’s problems and then, back to biblical parables, they’ll go back to building bigger barns.
3) Shock of elites over success of ‘American Sniper’ confirms deep worldview divide
Meanwhile on talking about the elite and the separation in worldview of not only the global but the American elite, some people in the heartland, this is a complex situation but one thing is abundantly clear, when it comes to the products of Hollywood and the stories Hollywood tells, the people on the two coasts and the people amongst the cultural elites are greatly separated from the people in the main who are buying the tickets and going to the theaters. The greatest example of that is the surprise – at least the surprise to Hollywood – of the blockbuster weekend experienced by the movie “American Sniper”.
Just over the weekend it was expected to sell about $105.2 million in tickets in North America – that’s over a four-day holiday weekend; that is blockbuster status and more. This is a film that may, in terms of its eventual international income, exceed now $1 billion in ticket sales or product sales. That’s massive. Brooks Barnes of the New York Times reports,
“Hollywood is prone to superlatives, but this one is truly jaw dropping: ‘American Sniper,’ which arrived in wide release on Friday, is expected to sell about $105.2 million in tickets in North America over the four-day holiday weekend.”
Barnes went on to write,
“While America’s coastal intelligentsia busied itself with chatter over little-seen art dramas like ‘Boyhood’ and ‘Birdman,’ everyday Americans showed up en masse for a patriotic, pro-family picture that played more like a summer superhero blockbuster than an R-rated war drama with six Oscar nominations.”
The movie started out in a very small release at the end of 2014 and it got very tepid reviews from Hollywood insiders. There was no expectation the movie would be this kind of a blockbuster. It’s directed by Clint Eastwood who is actually the second director chosen for the project. This is actually the movie version of the book by Chris Kyle, an American sniper who served in Iraq for several tours and was considered to have been one of most deadly snipers in American history. I have not seen the movie but several critics on both sides of the controversy suggest that Eastwood does a fairly good job of telling the story in terms of its nuance; it is gray area and not just black and white.
There is no doubt that the form of warfare that was faced by American forces in cities in Iraq was different than anything that had been seen, at least in decades. And the use of snipers on both sides was something that was simply a feature of the warfare in the cities of Iraq from the very beginning. And furthermore, in much of the Middle East and other parts of the world, it still is. According to his own book and the portrayal in the movie Chris Kyle was a pretty complex figure just in of himself. Indeed many of the opponents of the movie have been releasing things that he said that were downright difficult to take.
But on the other hand, millions of people went to see the movie because of the patriotism that it demonstrates of the military context that it portrays. And of the fact that Chris Kyle is demonstrated as having a very basic faith in God, as reflected in the fact that he carried his Bible with him onto the battlefield and very clearly struggled with some of the moral quandaries of the war in which he found himself such an important combatant. I raise the issue in particular today while we are talking about the elites meeting in Davos just to show how difficult it is to speak about the divide between the worldview of the cultural elites and the remainder of America. That flyover country between the two coasts, well they’re the folks who turned out for this movie by the millions. And the New York Times recognized that.
Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution at Warner Bros which released “American sniper” said and I quote,
“Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico — all absolutely massive, [discussing the ticket sales]”
The difference in worldview is not one that is always analyzed in a sophisticated way, but it often is apparent in the crudest form. For instance, Michael Moore, the director very famous as a part of the American left, put out a tweet on the weekend the movie was released that included the words,
“We were taught snipers were cowards. Snipers aren’t heroes and invaders are worse.”
About five hours later Michael Moore tweeted,
“But if you’re on the roof of your home defending it from invaders who come 7K miles, you’re not a sniper, you are brave, you are a neighbor”
Oddly enough later Michael Moore said he was shocked that anyone drew a connection between his tweets and the “American Sniper” movie. I haven’t seen the movie and I’m in no position to offer a review of it, but what I can see is the media’s shock that the movie was a blockbuster success; and furthermore, not only the shock of many in Hollywood, but the actual disappointment.
New York Times theater critic Pauline Kale famously said back in the 1960s that Richard Nixon couldn’t have been elected President because no one she knew voted for him. We can all very easily live in our own bubble and that bubble can become an echo chamber of those with whom we agree. It is very telling that Hollywood itself is expressing shock that one of its products is actually selling in the heartland. I think you can count on the fact that “American Sniper” is not going to be showing in those posh hotel suites in Davos, Switzerland tonight.
4) Rise of new ‘artistic’ pornography magazines exemplifies sin’s ability to repackage itself
Finally, we’re talking about the culture and its products. Another article from the New York Times also should have our attention, this one appeared in yesterday’s edition; the headline, As Old Pornographic Magazines Ebb, Newer Entries to Genre Tilt Artistic. Well, buckle your seatbelts. It turns out that the old mainstays of adult male pornography – that is Penthouse and Playboy – have been doing very poorly in terms of their print runs. As Ravi Somaiya writes,
“Pornography used to mean Playboy or Penthouse or another of the hundreds of glossy magazines kept on high shelves and purchased furtively.
In the not too distant past, Playboy and Penthouse each sold five million or more copies a month, and were so much a part of the culture that in 1986 a federal judge ruled that denying blind people a Braille version of Playboy violated their First Amendment rights.”
But Somaiya then writes,
“But traditional pornographic magazines have been hit hard, falling victim to boundless quantities of nudity online and rapidly declining print sales. Last summer, Larry Flynt, the founder of Hustler, acknowledged that the print version of his magazine was not going to be around much longer.”
So here’s the lesson from a Christian worldview. Sin finds a way to repackage and remarket itself and in terms of pornography, the new marketing angle is, ‘it’s not photography, it is art.’ The problem is that’s not a new argument at all. That’s exactly the argument that Hugh Hefner made, as historians have carefully noted, back in the late 1950s and in the 1960s when he tried to argue that his pornographic magazine playboy was actually for highbrow gentlemen. Somaiya writes,
“Though they remain focused on the naked body, these relatively new magazines are seeking to move sex in print periodicals from under the mattress up onto the coffee table. In stark contrast to online pornography, with much of it free, these niche publications sell for a premium — often more than $20 — to thousands of people, or tens of thousands, rather than millions.”
The magazine goes into some complex detail about exactly the approach undertaken by these magazines; I’m going to spare you those details. But it’s enough to make very clear that there is, as the scripture says, nothing new under the sun when it comes to human sinfulness and human deviousness; maybe even human self-deception. Because in this case you have people who seem to be saying with a straight face that this is really about art, not about sex; it’s not about pornography. On the other hand they then try to sell their product as exactly what it is; that is a pornographic product. The fundamental reality is that if they do not have an adequate amount of sex in their periodical, it’s not going to sell because in contrary to all the claims made in the 1960s about playboy, people aren’t buying it for the articles.
This report in the New York Times comes out as scientists and others are releasing new reams of data demonstrating the damaging effects of photography on American culture, on American marriages, on American young people – especially young men – and on the culture as a whole. But in terms of our own society in a fallen world, we’re looking at even new and repackaged ways to sell what amounts to nothing more than the distortion of sexuality through pornography.
Ravi Somaiya seems to understand this. He he writes about a bookstore in the West Village in Manhattan and its manager. He writes,
“Now, instead of stealth buyers seeking only nudity, Mr. Imran said, the store gets unapologetic browsers of magazines like Adult and Treats, a similar publication based in Los Angeles. Mr. Imran said he believed that his customers bought these titles not for the naked women, but for their artistic sensibility.”
Then, however, he ended his statement with this, that also ends the article,
“’Mostly,’ he said, pointing toward a stack of the newer kind of magazines, ‘they buy these ones for the photography.’”
The obvious retort to that is, ‘obviously.’ It is important for us to understand from a biblical worldview that sin often represents itself in a new guise. It may repackage itself. One of the things to watch in the language is how sin repackages itself by euphemism; its first of all considered adultery, than it’s an extramarital affair, then it’s simply extramarital sex.
When it comes to pornography since the 1960s and 70s, America has witnessed a continuing process of what the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called defining deviancy down. But it certainly appears the somewhere along the way someone’s going to be honest about why these magazines are selling and even the man who said his customers buy them for their artistic sensibility said they tend to buy the magazines, he says, for the photography.
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 01-20-15
1) President’s State of the Union valuable learning opportunity for families
State of the Union 2015: Will there be any surprises?, Politico (Kendall Breitman)
Do we even need a State of the Union address anymore?, Washington Post (Philip Bump)
2) Plans for Davos retreat for wealthy upended by world events, again
Davos, summit conference for the 1%, USA Today (David Callaway)
Davos arrives as world on verge of nervous breakdown, USA Today (Kim Hjelmgaard)
5 things to know about World Economic Forum in Davos, USA Today (Donna Leinwand Leger)
New Oxfam report says half of global wealth held by the 1%, The Guardian (Larry Elliott)
3) Shock of elites over success of ‘American Sniper’ confirms deep worldview divide
‘Sniper’ Rules Weekend Box Office, New York Times (Brooks Barnes)
Seth Rogen, Michael Moore ignite ‘Sniper’ debate, USA Today (Kelly Lawler)
4) Rise of new ‘artistic’ pornography magazines exemplifies sin’s ability to repackage itself
As Playboy and Penthouse Fade, Newer Magazines Tilt Artistic, New York Times (Ravi Somaiya)
January 19, 2015
The Briefing 01-19-15
1) Supreme Court takes up same-sex marriage cases in political climate friendly to the issue
Supreme Court to Decide Marriage Rights for Gay Couples Nationwide, New York Times (Adam Liptak)
Taking Up Gay Marriage, but on Its Own Terms, New York Times (Adam Liptak)
A pre-decision guide to a post-decision world of gay marriage, Washington Post (Dale Carpenter)
2) Virginia Governor McAuliffe moves to define marriage without reference to a husband or wife
Putting spice in marriage, Washington Times (Editorial Board)
3) Pope sees limit to free expression for sake of freedom from being offended
Pope Francis sees limits to free speech, Associated Press (Nicole Winfield and Teresa Cerojano)
4) Potential 2016 presidential nominees display narrow pedigree of US politics
No freshness in our 2016 presidential contest, Washington Post (Dana Milbank)
January 16, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 01-16-15
The Briefing
January 16, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Friday, January 16, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Duke reverses course on Muslim call to prayer plan following controversy
Today was to have been the first day of a new practice at Duke University but in a sudden and unexpected reversal, yesterday the University announced that it would not be featuring a weekly Friday afternoon call to prayer by Muslims. A call to prayer that was to have been issued from the universities chapel bell tower; a call to worship that was to have been – in the words of a university press release – moderately amplified throughout the campus.
As Jonathan Drew reports for the Associated Press, and I quote,
“Days after announcing that a Muslim call to prayer would echo from its historic chapel tower, Duke University changed course,”
It did indeed change course and in short order. After all, the practice was to have begun this very afternoon. But as Jonathan Drew reports,
“Instead, Muslims will gather for their call to prayer in a grassy area near the 210-foot gothic tower before heading into a room in Duke Chapel for their weekly prayer service. [As he notes,] The university had previously said a moderately amplified call to prayer would be read by members of the Muslim Students Association from the tower for about three minutes each Friday.”
But as the report indicates,
“Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations, said it would [now] be up to the students if they want to use some sort of amplification.”
Schoenfeld also said,
“There was considerable traffic and conversation and even a little bit of confusion, both within the campus and certainly outside…The purposes and goals and even the facts had been so mischaracterized as to turn it into a divisive situation, not a unifying situation.”
Well, credit goes to Duke University for reversing course on this very unwise decision. As I noted yesterday on The Briefing the real issue here is that Muslim students were given a religious accommodation that clearly wasn’t available to other students – including evangelical Christians. It was clear that a great deal of outside controversy had influenced the decision of the University administrators. But there also must be the question of exactly how the faculty and the larger community in Duke had also responding. Internal news reports are rather sparse when it comes to that kind of reportage.
But there’s another very important thing to note here. As I said yesterday, Duke University has become something of a symbol of the secularization of the American University. Secularization leaves that vacuum that something’s going to fill. And as we noted so many times on The Briefing, in much of the world that vacuum is being filled by a resurgent Islam. But what we also need to note is that that kind of secularism is an unstable project. It’s hard even for administrators committed to this kind of secularization to know exactly what they should do. After all, they’re looking at a campus that has basically marginalized theology from much of the last several decades. How does it handle a resurgent theology now? How does it handle the religious pluralism that it has not only come to accept, but openly celebrates?
I’m sure the story isn’t over and I’m also sure that international headlines in recent days have made this announcement from Duke University particularly ill-timed. It may not go away forever, but I’ll give the administrators at Duke University this much, they saw disaster staring them in the face and at least they did something about it.
2) Cannabis cooking, major investments reveal elite efforts to mainstream marijuana
Next, there are some really interesting and deeply revealing developments on the issue of marijuana. First came a news story during the Christmas holidays that made the front pages of the New York Times. The headline was an attention getter, Pot Pie, Redefined? Chefs Start to Experiment With Cannabis. The article is by Kim Severson. As she reports,
“…cooking with cannabis [or marijuana] is emerging as a legitimate and very lucrative culinary pursuit.”
She goes on to say,
“In Colorado, which has issued more than 160 edible marijuana licenses, skilled line cooks are leaving respected restaurants to take more lucrative jobs infusing cannabis into food and drinks. In Washington, one of four states that allow recreational marijuana sales, a large cannabis bakery dedicated to affluent customers with good palates will soon open in Seattle.”
It’s a really interesting story and the most interesting part of the story is the bottom line. It turns out that cannabis doesn’t taste good – it’s very hard to work it into the kind of elite edibles that these kind of headline grabbing chefs are accustomed to trying to cook. In other words, there trying to come up with some way to make cannabis go elite and mainstream even though it becomes the very first kind of culinary commodity that chefs are actually trying to mask rather than to accentuate; which indicates of course it’s really about the hallucinogenic effect, it’s not about the culinary value.
Severson gets to this. She writes,
“Major New York publishing houses and noted cookbook authors are pondering marijuana projects, and chefs on both coasts and in food-forward countries like Denmark have been staging underground meals with modern twists like compressed watermelon, smoked cheese and marijuana-oil vinaigrette.”
The article cites Ken Albala, Director of the Food Studies Program at the University of the Pacific in San Francisco, who said,
“It really won’t be long until it becomes part of haute cuisine and part of respectable culinary culture, instead of just an illegal doobie in the backyard,”
Now recall the fact that on The Briefing a few weeks ago I cited a very important investigative report done by USA Today that indicated that in states like Colorado which have recently legalized so-called recreational marijuana, the state government agencies are not even competent to keep up with basic safety concerns when it comes to edibles, contaminants and molds, anything that might be found in these edible substances. But this isn’t doing much to slow down those who are trying their very best to mainstream marijuana in the culture.
But as this news article makes very clear, this project faces two big obstacles:
“First, it’s hard to control how high people get when they eat marijuana. And second, [this one is really important to note] it really doesn’t taste that good.”
That’s a rather amazing admission. It turns out that marijuana really doesn’t taste good at all and that’s presenting a real challenge to the chefs who are trying to legitimize and normalize marijuana in the culture.
Ruth Reichl who was the former editor of Gourmet magazine, also a former food critic for the New York Times said,
“I am sure someone is going to grow some that is actually delicious and we’ll all learn about it,”
Adam Gomolin said,
“Cuisine is a product of people who cook and the ideologies they bring into the kitchen and what they are able to do with the instruments they have on hand,”
Gomolin is a lawyer; he’s also an amateur chef. He’s identified in the paper as one who helped found the crowd-funded publishing company Inkshares. That’s important because his company is planning to publish a cookbook known as “Herb: Mastering the Art of Cooking with Cannabis,” a project the paper says that has attracted the cookbook author Michael Ruhlman. Ruhlman, a well-known cookbook author, said that cannabis cooking will only become mainstream “when you can give it to someone and not make them a complete idiot.” Evidently that’s something of a challenge.
Interestingly Severson tells us that this new supposedly mainstream cookbook is actually a second edition of what was previously known as “The Stoner’s Cookbook” and that’s a website, by the way, that has more than 5 million page views a month. That site’s chief executive Matt Gray predicts that legal marijuana will be worth $10.2 billion in five years. He suggests that edible marijuana could be about 40 percent of that total.
One of the greatest values of this article is that it makes very clear that people aren’t eating marijuana for the taste – far from it. The chefs are finding the taste of marijuana to be a major stumbling block, a major obstacle, in terms of their cookbook. Severson says that cooking with marijuana require something like the skill of the scientist to draw and to control the substances such as THC – that’s the hallucinogenic in marijuana – as she said, which alters one’s mood and physical sensations. In her words, to get a consistent controllable affect marijuana’s best heated and combined with fats like butter, olive oil, or cream. But it can also work she says, albeit less must effectively, as a seasoning. That’s a really interesting twist though isn’t it? Because it will be the first seasoning added to food not to make food taste better – which it won’t, it will make it taste worse according to this article – but it’s all about the effects, at least that’s the honest admission this article.
One chef cited in the article Grant Achatz, who is a Chicago chef, who “made his reputation with experimental cooking” said,
“From my very limited experience with edibles, the flavor is pretty awful,”
One of the other issues that is honestly addressed in this article is the health consequence; the difficulty of knowing how much marijuana to put into an edible and, furthermore, controlling how much anyone may eat of that particular substance. The value of that article is just in the sheer weirdness of the fact the chefs are trying to legitimize and normalize marijuana even though they’re facing a very significant hurdle in that the having overcome its taste. In other words, this really isn’t about taste at all, which you would think is a very odd situation for prestigious chefs to find themselves in, much less to put themselves in.
Continuing on the marijuana issue, the Wall Street Journal reported in its weekend edition last weekend that Colorado is finding that the supposed tax windfall for marijuana isn’t adding up as its supporters had predicted it would – big surprise there. The article by Dan Frosch also includes this statement,
“Several Colorado doctors recently reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that local hospitals had seen an uptick in patients who became sick from ingesting too much marijuana, particularly children.”
Note carefully those last two words, “particularly children.” Here’s another interesting paragraph from the story,
“In some ways, however, marijuana has been woven into everyday life in Colorado, as more than 200 highly regulated retail businesses sell their wares around the state. State lawmakers and economists say pot is indeed contributing to Colorado’s economy, spurring tourism and the conversion of blighted warehouses into marijuana grow-houses. ”
An interesting statistic emerges from the story: 50% of all the marijuana sold in the city of Denver is estimated to be sold to tourists from outside the state. That figure skyrockets to 90% in the state’s resort areas – demonstrating the fact that as many neighboring states had feared, Colorado’s becoming a magnet for marijuana tourism.
On Tuesday of this week the New York Times had another important story on the issue of marijuana; the headline from the business page, Ethical Questions of Investing in Pot. Andrew Ross Sorkin reports,
“Last week, the venture capital firm run by Peter Thiel — a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, SpaceX and Spotify — invested millions of dollars in a marijuana company. The investment, in a firm called Privateer Holdings — which owns Leafly, an online database of marijuana information, and the cannabis brand Marley Natural, named after Bob Marley — was heralded as a watershed moment for the fledgling cannabis industry, accompanied by positive headlines like the one in The Los Angeles Times: ‘Venture capital firm gives marijuana industry a shot of credibility.’ In Silicon Valley, the deal was greeted as the latest disruptive change-the-world investment.”
Bur Sorkin goes on to say,
“But the injection of venture capital money into the cannabis industry will put pressure on some emerging fault lines.”
Now the so-called fault lines that Sorkin is talking about have to do with matters both legal and moral; legal in the sense that many of the financial transactions normal to business are actually forbidden to the marijuana industry by federal law. Second, just to point to another very important issue, federal law prohibits the possession or the use of marijuana – flat, period. How in the world can major investors put their money into something the federal government considers a crime even in terms of mere possession?
The moral aspects are also very important and interesting in this story because as it turns out many, especially on the left, pushing for a very clear model of social issues investing aren’t sure what to do with an issue like marijuana after they’ve been going after the tobacco industry for so long. It’s a convoluted issue, it’s not simple. Nothing in terms of this kind of complex capitalism is. But Sorkin’s onto something when he points out that a major venture-capital firm putting big time millions of dollars into marijuana is a very clear signal, a clear signal not only legally and morally but culturally. Perhaps in the end that’s even more important.
One of the interesting aspects of these stories put together is that it is clear that are elite culture leaders are doing their very best to grant legitimacy to marijuana. They’re doing their very best to make marijuana culturally cool. And amongst the elites, it certainly already is. But there’s a huge news story here when a major venture-capital firm puts this kind of capital into a marijuana industry. And it is of course similarly big news when you have culinary experts trying their very best to come up with attractive edibles even as they admit that marijuana simply doesn’t have a good taste – indeed it has a taste that they have to mask or try to overcome.
3) States’ lawsuit against Colorado exposes national moral and legal conflict over marijuana
Before leaving the issue of marijuana it’s important to look to a development that has to do with Colorado and its neighbors. As Jack Healy reported for the New York Times,
“Two heartland states filed the first major court challenge to marijuana legalization on Thursday, saying that Colorado’s growing array of state-regulated recreational marijuana shops was piping marijuana into neighboring states and should be shut down.”
As Healy reports,
“The lawsuit was brought by attorneys general in Nebraska and Oklahoma, and asks the United States Supreme Court to strike down key parts of a 2012 voter-approved measure that legalized marijuana in Colorado for adult use and created a new system of stores, taxes and regulations surrounding retail marijuana.”
Now as it turns out, marijuana is not only illegal under federal law but it’s illegal in the states neighboring Colorado. And these states in particular, Nebraska and Oklahoma, have decided simply to sue because Colorado has “created a dangerous gap in the federal drug control system.”
The suit filed by the two Attorneys General states,
“Marijuana flows from this gap into neighboring states, draining their treasuries, and placing stress on their criminal justice systems.”
As Healy also reports,
“The lawsuit, which was brought by Nebraska’s attorney general, Jon Bruning, and Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt [who I should note is a member of the Board of Trustees of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary], accused Colorado officials of participating in a ‘scheme’ that cultivates, packages and distributes marijuana in direct violation of controlled-substances laws while ‘ignoring every objective embodied in the federal drug control regulation.’”
The importance of this news story points to the fact that this lawsuit by the two attorneys general points to the fact that we have a great legal and moral conflict in this nation on the issue of marijuana. We have some states – most particularly here in the state of Colorado – that has legalized what the federal government criminalizes. Furthermore this new story points to another dilemma, as it turns out what happens in Colorado doesn’t stay in Colorado. The legalization and normalization of marijuana is one of the great moral revolutionary changes of our time; parallel only to the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Recent sociological analyses have demonstrated that these two issues have expanded and progressed with the velocity rather unprecedented in terms of moral change. Of the two there’s no doubt that the issue of the redefinition of marriage is the more important. At the same time the issue of marijuana is decidedly not unimportant. And more than anything else, it is incredibly revealing – as these new stories have made abundantly clear.
Finally, as we often note, every once in a while a news story comes across that really demonstrates the contours of the age and the direction of the culture. Julie Turkewitz reporting, once again, for the New York Times wrote an article recently entitled, After a Spa Day, Looking Years Younger (O.K., They’re Only 7). Turkewitz begins her storytelling about a girl who was experiencing a day at the spa with her closest friends: manicures, hairdos, makeup and some gossip. She then goes on to say,
“The spa industry has begun to target children in a big way, going way beyond mother-daughter manicures. Adult spas are adding separate menus of services for girls, usually ages 4 to 14. In most major cities, there are now dedicated day spas for children, offering a range of massages, facials and other treatments for girls (and sometimes boys) too young to have had their first pimple.”
Paige, the girl who is cited in the article said,
“I feel like the best princess in the world,”
She celebrated her seventh birthday at Sweet and Sassy; identified in the article as,
“…a national chain of spas that boasts that its cosmetologists are specially trained to work with children.”
After the beauty treatments, Turkewitz says,
“Paige and her guests walked down a red carpet and disappeared into a hot pink limousine, which took the squealing children on a spin around the parking lot. One 6-year-old guest documented the revelry in a series of selfies.
Now let’s just pause for a moment to realize what this news article that made the front page of the New York Times is telling us. It is telling us that we’ve become a culture in which a good number of people evidently think it makes sense to take a four-year-old or a seven-year-old girl for a day at the spa. There are some really spectacular quotes in this article. One woman when Lynne McNees, identified as the president of the spa’s association said,
“It’s very similar to taking little kids to the dentist. Let’s get them early, and get those really good habits.”
And what are those really good habits? Turkewitz reports,
“These sanctuaries of luxury proudly pamper their charges, wrapping them in custom-size robes, suggesting oil rubs for heels worn rough by barefoot play, and lifting clients onto massage tables when they are too small to do it themselves. On the high end, the ‘kids’ treatments’ menu at the Beverly Wilshire spa in Beverly Hills, Calif., charges $50 for a 15-minute ‘princess facial,’”
Frankly I have to side with the child psychologists identified as Madeline Levine who called the child’s spa, “the worst idea ever.”
More wisdom on the issue came from a sociologist identified as Christine Carter, the author of the book “Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents.” She said,
“What are we coming to? Spas for our children?”
According to Turkewitz this sociologist cautioned parents against sending their offspring to places where they are told – and this isn’t a joke,
“We’re going to treat you like a Kardashian.”
I want to credit Julie Turkewitz of the New York Times for some really brilliant writing in this piece. When she concludes the article she takes us to a place where two girls, very young, are experiencing just the kind of spa services and massages she describes in the article. Then we read,
“Nearby, Ken and Jen Brown raved about the manicure given to their toddler, Faith, 3, as a birthday treat. As Faith scooted her diapered rear out of her seat, Mr. Brown, 41, explained that they had arranged for her to take a ride in the spa’s limousine.
And after that?
‘Well,’ he said somewhat sheepishly, ‘we want to get her potty trained.’”
That’s the way Turkewitz ended her article. And I think I’ll let that statement now speak for itself.
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.
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