R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 326

The Briefing 01-16-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Duke reverses course on Muslim call to prayer plan following controversy

Duke Cancels Plan for Muslim Call to Prayer From Tower, Associated Press (Jonathan Drew)

2) Cannabis cooking, major investments reveal elite efforts to mainstream marijuana

Pot Pie, Redefined? Chefs Start to Experiment With Cannabis, New York Times (Kim Severson)

In Colorado, Legal Pot Fails to Meet Predictions of Supporters, Critics, Wall Street Journal (Dan Frosch)

Ethical Questions of Investing in Pot, New York Times (Andrew Ross Sorkin)

3) States’ lawsuit against Colorado exposes national moral and legal conflict over marijuana

Nebraska and Oklahoma Sue Colorado Over Marijuana Law, New York Times (Jack Healy)

4) Success of spas targeting young children, parents troubling sign of the times

After a Spa Day, Looking Years Younger (O.K., They’re Only 7), New York Times (Julie Turkewitz)

Transcript: The Briefing 01-15-15

The Briefing

 

January 15, 2015

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

 

It’s Thursday, January 15, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Muslim call to prayer at Duke reveals vacuum of secularism must always give way

There’s going to be a new sound heard every Friday at Duke University. As Duke Today, the campus newspaper reports,

“Members of the Duke Muslim Students Association will chant a weekly call-to-prayer from the Duke Chapel bell tower beginning Friday, Jan. 16 [or tomorrow]. The chant, called the ‘adhan,’ announces the start of the group’s jummah prayer service, which takes place in the chapel basement each Friday at 1 p.m. The service [according to the campus newspaper] is open to the public.”

Responding to the announcement Adeel Zeb, identified as the Muslim chaplain at Duke, said,

“The adhan is the call to prayer that brings Muslims back to their purpose in life, which is to worship God and serves as a reminder to serve our brothers and sisters in humanity. The collective Muslim community is truly grateful and excited about Duke’s intentionality toward religious and cultural diversity.”

In the Huffington Post a woman identified as Christy Lohr Sapp, the Chapel’s Associate Dean for Religious Life, she told the campus newspaper,

“This opportunity represents a larger commitment to religious pluralism that is at the heart of Duke’s mission. It connects the university to national trends in religious accommodation.”

There is so much to consider here but the most important statement cited in the media thus far is the one from Christy Lohr Sapp. Recall her first statement,

“This opportunity represents a larger commitment to religious pluralism that is at the heart of Duke’s mission.”

Well one thing’s for certain, that wasn’t the mission for which Duke University was established. Its roots go back to an earlier institution known as Trinity College but due to a huge multimillion dollar benefaction made by the Duke family of North Carolina in the early 20th century, the name of the institution was changed to Duke University and Duke has become one of the most illustrious private universities in America – indeed one the most respected academic institutions in the world.

What’s especially noteworthy from a Christian consideration however is that Duke University itself represents the radical secularization of institutions that were established on a clear Christian foundation; not just a foundation of Christian attitude but a very clear commitment to Christian truth. Duke University, though many contemporary students would surely be shocked to find out, was established as a Methodist institution – actually under Methodist control.

But as historians of higher education in America have noted – some celebrating, some lamenting – the middle decades of the 20th century saw a great secularization of so many of these church established institutions. Vanderbilt University, Syracuse University, the University of South Carolina joined Duke University as Methodist institutions that were radically secularized during this period. But the secularization that took place in the middle portion of the 20th century was followed by an era of even more radical secularization. It’s very interesting to note that that middle period of secularization was largely aided and abetted by church leaders who basically conceded the battle and ceded power over the institution to self-perpetuating boards of trustees and then more than anything else, to a basically self-perpetuating faculty.

No one traced this more accurately than James Tunstead Burtchaell, then of the University of Notre Dame, in his 1998 book entitled The Dying of the Light. The subtitle: the disengagement of colleges and universities from their Christian churches. In his most interesting example, Burtchaell went into great detail about the secularization of another Methodist institution, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Last year you will remember Vanderbilt was in a great deal of controversy – indeed it was not only in 2014 but reaching back to 2012 and 2013 – when University announced that all student groups recognized by the University must have not only an all-comers policy, that is any student could join, but had to make leadership open to any student regardless of any theological or doctrinal conviction or any sexual or other moral issue. In other words, you had groups such as InterVarsity Christian fellowship effectively kicked off the Vanderbilt University campus because, of all things, they believe that a Christian institution should have Christian leaders – at least committed to a basic core of Christian truth.

Burtchaell traced what he called the disengagement of historic institutions from the Christian churches. And Vanderbilt was simply one of his examples. Duke University was also mentioned in a study. Duke itself forms its own parable about secularization in the 20th century and now and the 21st. But as we have so often noted, secularism is something like a vacuum. It simply doesn’t stand. We’ve noted in recent days how even the French Prime Minister has stated that France must remain committed to its core values including secularism. But if anything has been demonstrated, not only in recent days but in recent decades in Europe, it is that secularism simply isn’t enough glue to hold a society together.

Furthermore, secularism and inevitably gives way to some form of resurgent theology. In Europe the great issue is a resurgent Islam and that’s what makes the announcement that comes from Duke University so puzzling in terms of the contemporary environment. But then again, maybe it’s not so puzzling after all. Once again, secularization creates a vacuum that’s going to be filled by something.

But there is a parable here, perhaps even multiple parables. We have an institution that was established as a Christian institution, specifically Methodist. As Burtchaell notes, the secularization, the disengagement of these institutions from their churches, first began with the commitment that the institutions would not be sectarian – that is, committed to any specific denomination. Quite shortly that commitment to non-sectarianism became a commitment to a non-Christian identity. Or we could put the progression this way, first the institution declares that it will be nonsectarian but generically Christian, but quite quickly that generic Christian identity becomes either thin or an embarrassment or both. And thus you have a spokesperson for Duke University’s Chapel saying that what Duke is now committed to is an interfaith pluralism.

But the second portion of Christy Lohr Sapp’s statement is also very important where she said, and again I quote,

“It connects the university to national trends in religious accommodation.”

That ‘it’ in that sentence refers to the University’s decision to allow a Muslim call to prayer from the University’s Chapel bell tower every Friday afternoon. But is that possibly even true? Is there indeed a national trend toward religious accommodation? Well let’s just remember the fact that there isn’t any trend towards evangelical accommodation at a university like Vanderbilt and furthermore, we’ve been watching the marginalization of historic Orthodox Christianity from University system and University campus one after another.

Recall also last year the California state University system making the same kind of announcement for all of its campuses that was made previously by Vanderbilt University. So what is this new trend that is cited by the Chapel’s associate Dean for religious life in terms of national trends and religious accommodation? In this case it is a specifically Muslim accommodation. And just consider what’s actually going to be taking place here. The announcement from Duke Today tells us that every Friday afternoon there will be a public moderately amplified Muslim culture prayer from the Duke University Chapel bell tower.

Now just put this into a contrast; would there be any possibility whatsoever that the University would allow an evangelical call to prayer? Perhaps reading a biblical prayer or a historic Christian prayer with moderate amplification? Of course not. Can you imagine the response of Duke University’s faculty if some Orthodox Christian prayer were to be amplified by a public sound throughout the campus, every week on a specific afternoon? It’s frankly unthinkable. Duke University, by the way, in terms of its accommodation is also noted for the fact that it removed the company Chick-fil-A from its campus because of that company’s president’s statements in support of the biblical view of marriage.

But here’s the bottom line of this very sad parable. Beginning tomorrow afternoon there will be a Muslim call to prayer ringing across the campus of Duke University from its historic chapel bell tower moderately amplified. Just imagine what the founders of Trinity College or Duke University would’ve thought of that. There’s the parable in miniature. You have a university that has gone from being explicitly committed orthodox Christianity, explicitly under the control and governance of the Methodist Church, to an institution that is pervasively secular – after being generically Christian. But now the public sound moderately amplified being heard every Friday afternoon at Duke University is a Muslim call to prayer. It’s frankly hard to exaggerate the meaning of this parable.

2) Rise of value of “meaningfulness”  secular substitute for spiritual dimension of life

But wait a minute; let’s talk about meaning for just a moment. And the occasion for talking about meaning is a very important opinion piece written by David Brooks in the New York Times published on January the sixth; the title of his column, The Problem with Meaning. Brooks writes about the fact that in modern post-Christian America there’s a great deal of attention to an individual’s quest for meaning. He cites John Gardner from a statement made a few years ago in which he said,

“Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you. … You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.”

But as David Brooks says approvingly, his colleague April Lawson nails it when she says that meaning has become the stand-in concept for everything the soul yearns for and seeks. Brooks then wrote,

“It is one of the few phrases acceptable in modern parlance to describe a fundamentally spiritual need.”

But then he comes back to ask, what do we actually mean when we use the word ‘meaning’? Well it could mean, he says, that life is supposed to be about more than mere material possessions. So good so far. Second he says it might mean that life is more satisfying as a meaningful life that as a merely happy life. He goes on to say,

“In this way, meaning is an uplifting state of consciousness. It’s what you feel when you’re serving things beyond self.”

Again, so good so far, but what David Brooks points to is the fact that this is a constructed reality. It isn’t based in any objective fact, it’s, as John Gardner himself said, how we put our life together in terms of what we consider meaningfulness.

David Brooks is exactly right to suggest that what we’re looking at here is a secular substitute for what is basically a very spiritual dimension. And I appreciate the fact that he notes that. David Brooks goes on to suggest that the problem with meaningfulness is that it isn’t tied to anything objective – it isn’t even tide actually to a larger culture or larger society. He says this,

“Meaningfulness tries to replace structures, standards and disciplines with self-regarding emotion. The ultimate authority of meaningful is the warm tingling we get when we feel significant and meaningful. Meaningfulness tries to replace moral systems with the emotional corona that surrounds acts of charity.”

He then says bluntly,

“It’s a paltry substitute. Because meaningfulness is built solely on an emotion, it is contentless and irreducible. Because it is built solely on emotion, it’s subjective and relativistic. You get meaning one way. I get meaning another way. Who is any of us to judge another’s emotion?”

He then concludes,

“The philosophy of meaningfulness emerges in a culture in which there is no common moral vocabulary or framework. It emerges amid radical pluralism, when people don’t want to judge each other. Meaningfulness emerges when the fundamental question is, do we feel good?

Real moral systems are based on a balance of intellectual rigor and aroused moral sentiments. Meaningfulness is pure and self-regarding feeling, the NutraSweet of the inner life.”

Well, David Brooks is really onto something when he suggests that meaningfulness is superficial. It’s evanescent. It’s indeed merely emotionalism in another disguised form. He’s wrong when he suggests that morality is simply a mix of intellectual vigor and aroused sentiment – it’s of course about a great deal more than that. It’s about one word that is missing from the discussion in terms of David Brooks’ column and that is truth.

Meaning, we need to note, is simply no substitute for truth. It’s no substitute for reality. Oddly enough we’re now hearing even in evangelical circles the transference of meaningfulness for truth. For instance someone will speak a worship experience saying that it was meaningful. In saying so an evangelical can mean something, say something, or say nothing at all; because in the larger secular context the word meaning is explicitly separated from any claim to truth. But a worship service, in the Christian understanding, according to the biblical worldview, should only actually be meaningful if it’s based in truth – if the truth is declared and the truth is affirmed. If what took place in the service of worship was the declaration of truth, the preaching of truth, the open embrace of truth, the confession of truth, and a very clear statement of obedience to truth.

I really appreciate how David Brooks refers to meaningfulness as what he calls the ‘NutraSweet of the inner life,’ we can certainly understand how that term becomes not only apt but extremely relevant. Sadly however David Brooks just doesn’t take his argument far enough. It’s not enough to see meaningfulness as a very slim substitute, we have to go on and answer the question: a substitute for what? And the answer to that is abundantly clear – it’s a substitute for truth.

3) Genetic screening for pregnant women creating dangerous Brave New World for human dignity

Finally, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Bonnie Rochman is entitled Pregnant Women Face a Confusing Array of Genetic Tests. This article ought to have our attention. Rochman writes,

“Women expecting a baby or planning a pregnancy are being pitched a fast-growing array of tests to check if they are carriers for hundreds of mostly rare genetic diseases.”

She goes on to say,

“Such genetic testing, called carrier screening, has long been targeted mainly at people of certain ethnic groups such as Ashkenazi Jews, who are at higher risk for some conditions such as Tay-Sachs disease. Now, companies that offer carrier screening are promoting the idea that testing everyone for many diseases is a more effective way to reduce the number of babies born with serious disorders, including cystic fibrosis, a life-limiting lung condition, and Canavan disease, a fatal neurological disorder.”

We need to look really carefully at that statement. You’ll notice it’s not about reducing the disorders, it’s about reducing the number of babies born with these disorders and that’s the real problem here. Two key paragraphs in Rochman’s article make the ethical issue abundantly clear – even though it’s basically buried deep within the article. She writes,

“Most carrier screening is performed on pregnant women or in infertility clinics. Testing companies are trying to encourage people to get screened before getting pregnant. A spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade association representing health insurers, said women who plan to get pregnant typically are covered for carrier screening.”

Then comes the bombshell paragraph,

“If a disease is detected after conception, the choices are to have the baby or end the pregnancy. If both parents are found to be carriers for a disease before they conceive, they have more options. They could get pregnant as usual but do early prenatal testing to see if the fetus has the disorder. Or they could opt for preimplantation genetic diagnosis. PGD, as it is known, tests individual embryos during in vitro fertilization for the presence of a particular disease. Only healthy embryos are implanted.”

So here we see the ethical problem looming large. Women, couples indeed, are being encouraged to have these tests done – very pervasive genetic tests. But the aim of the testing is not to do anything about the disease; in fact these diseases often can’t be cured. But instead it is to reduce the number of babies born with the disease. Now just keep in mind the fact that the number of babies born with Down syndrome has been radically reduced, so much so that some obstetricians are saying that they now rarely see a baby born with Down syndrome. The genetic odds of Down syndrome have not been reduced – no effective way of treating Down syndrome in the womb before birth has yet been discovered. So what’s happening is that these babies who were discovered to be the carriers of the Down syndrome gene are being aborted in the womb.

Similar efforts are not being undertaken for other disease that can be genetically marked and that’s explicitly what we find in Rochman’s article. She explains, rather chillingly and rather straightforwardly, that couples who have this kind of testing done after conception have the option of either having the baby she says or aborting the baby and thus avoiding the birth. Furthermore, the ethical complexities when it comes to in vitro fertilization are also made clear when this form of preimplantation genetic diagnosis is used to sort out the embryos in order merely to implant the embryos that meet genetic qualifications – the others are simply destroyed, at least in time.

Christians operating out of a Christian worldview and committed to the sanctity of every single human life at every point of development should not discount all of this genetic testing. After all parents should, if available, find out if the two parents (the mother and the father) are both carriers of certain genetic diseases. That information would guide them in terms of whether or not to seek to become pregnant, but the issue in terms of actually reaching the point of in vitro fertilization – not to mention the conception of a child – changes the moral context absolutely. We’re no longer then talking about a decision as to whether or not to have a child, we’re talking about a fact that a child has been can conceived.

Christians committed to a biblical worldview that affirms the sanctity and dignity of every single human life can’t begin to sort out either embryos or infants in terms of who deserves to live and who deserves to die. In its own way what we now have in terms of the wild wild West of reproductive technology here in the United States, we now have technology and other issues coming together to suggest that we need to set some minimum standards for acceptability of a fetus or of an embryo. If the fetus or embryos simply doesn’t meet those basic standards of acceptability, than discard them – either the fetus or the embryo. We’re also looking at the fact that a profit motive comes into play here with health insurers often wanting these test to be done and the babies not to be born if they’re going to become basically huge cost centers for the insurer.

In America, sad to say, we’re not only looking at the wild wild west of reproductive technologies, we’re looking at a very dangerous brave new world when it comes to human dignity.

 

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 01-15-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Muslim call to prayer at Duke reveals vacuum of secularism must always give way

Muslim Students at Duke to Begin Weekly Call-to-Prayer, Duke Today (James Todd)

Duke Chapel to Allow Muslim Call to Prayer, Huffington Post (Cavan Sieczkowski)

2) Rise of value of “meaningfulness”  secular substitute for spiritual dimension of life

The Problem With Meaning, New York Times (David Brooks)

3) Genetic screening for pregnant women creating dangerous Brave New World for human dignity

New Genetic Tests for Women Who Are Expecting, Wall Street Journal (Bonnie Rochman)

Transcript: The Briefing 01-14-15

The Briefing

 

January 14, 2015

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

 

It’s Wednesday, January 14, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) NYT Editorial board declares new rules; belief alone is evidence enough for disqualification

We’ve been following the case and the controversy concerning the firing of Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran. Not unexpectedly, yesterday’s edition of the New York Times features an editorial by the editorial board entitled God, Gays and the Fire Department. In this particular piece the editors of the New York Times make abundantly clear that they do not accept any version of religious liberty that would protect Chief Cochran or even relate to his case. As they wrote,

“Until last week, Kelvin Cochran was the chief of the Atlanta fire department, where he oversaw a work force of more than 1,000 firefighters and staff.”

They went on to describe Chief Cochran by saying he was

“…a veteran firefighter, is also a deeply religious man, and he was eager to bring his Christian faith into the daily functioning of his department — or, as he put it in a book he authored in 2013 [the book you will note that got him fired], to ‘cultivate its culture to the glory of God.’”

But then the editors went on to criticize Chief Cochran’s views explaining,

“…as the book revealed, his religious beliefs also include virulent anti-gay views.”

In terms of the firing the editor say that Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed

“…did the right thing and dismissed Mr. Cochran for what he called poor judgment: specifically [says the editors], for failing to get approval for the book’s publication, for commenting publicly on his suspension after being told not to, and for exposing the city to possible discrimination lawsuits.”

That’s a convoluted paragraph but the bottom line is the editors do not agree with Chief Cochran’s views and they don’t believe that his views ever should have been made public. If they were made public the argument is very clear, the editors believe he should’ve been fired, as he was.

They go on to say,

“Cue up the outraged claims that Mr. Cochran’s rights to free speech and religious freedom have been violated — an assertion that is as wrong as it was predictable.”

The Chief did say that he was fired,

“…for no reason other than my Christian faith.”

But then the editors write that

“…he and his sudden coterie of supporters have it backward. This case is not about free speech or religious freedom. It is, [quoting the Mayor] … about ‘making sure that we have an environment in government where everyone, no matter who they love, can come to work from 8 to 5:30 and do their job and then go home without fear of being discriminated against.’”

Now one of the most amazing parts of this editorial is that the editorial board actually seems to affirm that the Chief is never to have been believed or to have been documented as acting in any discriminatory way toward any employee. The editors then write this stunning sentence,

“It should not matter that the investigation found no evidence that Mr. Cochran had mistreated gays or lesbians. His position as a high-level public servant makes his remarks especially problematic, and requires that he be held to a different standard.”

The editors make the very predictable parallel argument that the Chief’s position is tantamount to racism. Then they end with this paragraph, and I quote,

“The First Amendment already protects religious freedom. Nobody can tell Mr. Cochran what he can or cannot believe. If he wants to work as a public official, however, he may not foist his religious views on other city employees who have the right to a boss who does not speak of them as second-class citizens.”

Now let’s be very clear, Chief Cochran did speak of those who engage in same-sex activities as those who are sinners but as his book also made clear, and as the Chief has made clear in his public statements, he believes that all of us are sinners. He does believe in the Bible’s condemnation of same-sex acts as being sinful but when you have the editors respond in this way, they are clearly sending the signal that anyone who aspires to serve in public service better keep these kinds of convictions to themselves. Indeed if they are ever discovered to hold these convictions then they’re out the door – as was Mr. Cochran.

Remember that their words are explicit, ‘If he wants to work as a public official however he may not foist his religious views on other city employees.’ Now let’s just hold on for a moment, how supposedly did the Chief foist his views on others? According to the public data on this case he gave about three copies of the book to three different city employees he believed to be Christians.

That isn’t exactly foisting his beliefs upon others. The insinuation of the article, though the editors don’t make it clear, is that just holding these positions and publishing them in any public venue is a form of “foisting beliefs upon others.” But remember also that the editors concluded their editorial by saying that other city employees “have the right to a boss who does not speak of them as second-class citizens.”

To state the obvious, Chief Cochran never spoke in those terms. He did speak of those who engage in same-sex activities based upon scriptural teaching, writing as a Christian to fellow Christians, as being deeply wrong. He affirmed what the Bible says. These, he made clear, are his Christian convictions. But let’s keep in mind the most stunning sentence in this editorial in which the editors of the New York Times declare, and I quote again,

“It should not matter that the investigation found no evidence that Mr. Cochran had mistreated gays or lesbians.”

It shouldn’t matter? It shouldn’t matter that the investigation found no evidence at all that Mr. Cochran had mistreated gays or lesbians? No, the editors make clear, the beliefs are sufficient for the Chief to be fired and they celebrate his firing.

So according to the new rules as espoused by the editorial board of the New York Times, you don’t have to discriminate, you don’t have to be involved in any act of discrimination against anyone – simply holding to these beliefs in any public way is evidence enough for disqualification.

This raises, finally, another very interesting question. What if the chief had never published this book? What if it had never gone in the print and it had never been distributed to anyone? What if the Fire Chief – now the former Fire Chief – was simply discovered to be a member of a Christian congregation that teaches, preaches, and believes such things? Would that not, according to the clear logic of this editorial, mean that just on that basis alone the Chief should also have been fired? That’s the question that should have our attention as this editorial appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times. Just how much of historic Christianity, especially in terms of its moral teaching concerning sexuality, must someone disbelieve in order to be qualified according to this new standard for public service or public influence? You don’t have to have a very vivid imagination to see right where this logic leads.

2) Arizona sign ordinance case before Supreme Court significant religious liberty issue

Many evangelical Christians are unaware that some of the major fronts in religious liberty in this country come down to such things as sign ordinances and zoning laws. This becomes particularly interesting when on Monday before the United States Supreme Court, one of the sign ordinances – one specifically directed at churches – came before the justices. As Mark Sherman of the Associated Press reports,

“A small church in a Phoenix suburb appeared likely Monday to win its Supreme Court dispute over a local ordinance that puts limits on roadside signs that direct people to Sunday services.”

Sherman goes on to say,

“Liberal and conservative justices alike expressed misgivings with the Gilbert, Arizona, sign ordinance because it places more restrictions on the churches’ temporary signs than those erected by political candidates, real estate agents and others.”

The church that brought the dispute is the Good News Community Church in Gilbert, Arizona. Its pastor, Clyde Reed, and the church sued over the ordinance of the city that limits signs to 6 square feet. According to the ordinance they must be placed in public areas no more than 12 hours before an event and removed within an hour of its end. The problem is the law is specifically addressed to religious congregations. It was later extended to some other nonprofits but it specifically excludes other signs such as real estate signs and, most importantly, political signs that can be up virtually without limit – or at least according to this law, for many months.

The legal argument employed by the church and its attorneys is that the city is engaged in content specific discrimination; their privileging one form of content – in this case political content and commercial content – over any kind of religious content. Churches in particular were the only institutions targeted by the law originally, even as the law was later expanded in a very minor way to include other nonprofits and their meetings.

The most interesting coverage of the Supreme Court deliberations was found by Adam Liptak of the New York Times, a veteran reporter of the nation’s highest court. He describes the facts of the case in these words,

“Political signs, concerning candidates and elections, are permitted to be as large as 32 square feet, are allowed to stay in place for months, and are generally unlimited in number. Ideological signs, about issues more generally, are not permitted to be larger than 20 square feet, are allowed to stay in place indefinitely and are unlimited in number.

But signs [he writes] announcing church services and similar events are limited to six square feet, may be displayed only just before and after an event, and must be limited to four per property.”

The coverage in the New York Times includes some pretty stunning dialogue from the High Court’s oral arguments. As Liptak reports that several justices seem to find the distinction of the city of absurd.

“So they could put up a quote-unquote ideological sign that says, ‘Come to our service on Sunday morning,’ but no arrow, and then they put up another sign that says, ‘This is the arrow’?” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked. ‘Or maybe they put up on the first sign: ‘Come to our service on Sunday morning. We can’t tell you now where it will be because the town won’t let us, but you drive by here tomorrow morning at a certain time, you will see an arrow.’ ”

Liptak then reports,

“Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who is not a First Amendment firebrand, asked Mr. Savrin [the attorney for the city] whether he really meant to say that ideological messages were fine unless they were accompanied by directions like ‘three blocks right and two blocks left.’

‘That’s what this argument is about?’ Justice Breyer asked.

‘That is what it comes down to.’ [Said the attorney]

‘Well, my goodness,’ Justice Breyer said. ‘It does sound as if the town is being a little unreasonable, doesn’t it?’”

Justice Elena Kagan, who as a law professor had written about the difficulty of governments in establishing any kind of content-based discrimination, she argued that in most cases this would have to be ruled wrong. When she heard the attorney for the city make his argument she said,

“O.K., so that is a content-based rationale. And, you know, on one theory, you lose regardless of what the standard of review is.”

The good news is that almost every observer of the court’s deliberations on Monday believes that the church is going to win its case – of course that’s never actually clear until the decision is handed down. But the truly frightening thing in this case is that the case got to the Supreme Court or that it had to because the church lost two previous rounds in the federal district court and in the US circuit Court of Appeals.

As I said in beginning of this particular issue, many Christians – evangelicals in particular – are unaware of the fact that some of the most pressing religious liberty issues aren’t those that make the headlines, they are indeed those that are on the docket of local zoning commissions and city commissions counties and others involved in this kind of sign ordinance. Here to Christians must be very, very alert and aware of the fact that efforts to limit religious speech don’t just arrive on the college campus or on the editorial pages of our major newspapers; they can arrive right at City Hall or right before the zoning commission.

3) Unprecedented Boko Haram attacks largely unnoticed by Western world

From time to time we need to take notice of what the world notices and what the world doesn’t – particularly here in the West and particularly in the media; but not only the media, also in terms of public opinion. The world has been rightly outraged, or at least much of the world – the Western world in particular – about the horrendous attacks that took place last week in Paris. Something upwards of 16 people died in those attacks; victims of Islamic extremism, of Islamic terrorism. But what the world failed to notice with any kind of equal or proportional basis was the fact that Boko Haram, a radical Islamic group in Africa, killed approximately 2,000 – that’s right, 2,000 – people in Nigeria and neighboring nations. Two thousand.

Now what we notice here is that the world took a little account of those deaths in Africa. They did make headlines in terms of news stories, mostly within the front sections of the newspapers, but they hardly made the front pages. They haven’t resulted in massive political declarations and they certainly haven’t resulted in mass demonstrations on the streets of Western cities. But the news coming out of Africa, the news about these attacks by Boko Haram, are almost unprecedented in terms of scale – that has been noted by many in the Western media. But that scale seems to be missing when it comes to the attention of the Western world and Christians must be very aware of that. We need to be turning our attention to Africa where Islamic terrorism is now taking victims, not by the tens or the dozens – not even by the hundreds – but now by the thousands in a single week.

We also need to note an important article that appeared in the New York Times by Adam Nossiter. As he writes,

“A girl perhaps no more than 10 years old detonated powerful explosives concealed under her veil at a crowded northern Nigeria market on Saturday [that is Saturday of last week], killing as many as 20 people and wounding many more.

The blast [he says] inflicted devastating damage on shoppers at the Monday Market in [the Nigerian city], the shopping hub in a city that is at the heart of the Boko Haram insurgency.”

Nossiter then writes,

“The explosion, witnessed by dozens of people, represented a new tactic in the Islamists’ campaign with their decision to use perhaps their youngest-ever suicide bomber.”

One hospital official said,

“It’s a little girl. The body is beyond recognition, but from the face you can see it’s a young person. A young pretty girl.”

Some portions of the article are virtually too graphic for me to recite, but you certainly can understand what we’re talking about when it comes down to Islamist using a 10-year-old girl, hiding a bomb underneath her veil – by the way the reporters indicate she may not even have known she was carrying a bomb – only to have the bomb detonated, destroying her and killing 20 others. We’re looking at a level of evil and depravity that is almost inconceivable: terrorists using a 10-year-old girl as the carrier of a bomb.

In this case we really can’t say that she was a suicide bomber because it is unclear that she even knew she was carrying the bomb. No, the homicide was on the part of those who sent her into the market carrying the bomb. Just imagine a 10-year-old girl and imagine the situation. Imagine the horror that we’re facing in terms of this new development. But we have to step back and ask the question, what conceivable worldview would justify and animate this kind of horrible ambition; much less the actual plot and the execution of it? What worldview could justify sending a girl into a market in order to carry a bomb that would kill not only herself but many others? What kind of murderous worldview could make this kind of act even conceivable, much less actual?

One of the things we need to face is that the people who did this were operating out of their own rationality. They were not acting in a way that did not fit their own rational worldview. It is a twisted, deeply evil, worldview. But that’s exactly what Christians need to pay attention to here. We’re looking at the fact that some worldviews are inherently murderous – toxic. So destructive of human dignity and human life that we would see a 10-year-old girl sent as a bomber. What worldview would send this girl into the marketplace not only as a bomber but as a bomb?

4) Persecution of Christians continues to increase around the globe

Finally, we need to take note of the plight of Christians in some places in the world. Headlines yesterday indicated that the group known as the Islamic State has taken at least 21 Egyptian Christians hostage in Libya and that they have announced that to the world media. Meanwhile, Gerald Seib writing in yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal points to the plight of Christians elsewhere in the world. As he writes,

“At the same time, Christians are being widely persecuted simply for being Christians, and not just in land controlled by Islamic State fanatics. Open Doors, an organization that aids persecuted Christians, says 2014 brought ‘the highest level of global persecution of Christians in the modern era,’ but [the group] warns that this year could be worse.”

Seib then writes,

“More than 70% of Iraq’s Christians have fled since 2003, Open Doors estimates. More than 700,000 Christians have left Syria since the civil war there began in 2011. Africa has become equally hostile terrain for Christians. In North Korea, an estimated 70,000 Christians are in prison because of their faith.”

Looking at the actual report from Open Doors, a very interesting pattern emerges. Of the top 10 nations identified as being hostile to Christianity, nine of them have majority Muslim populations – nine. The 10th is at the very top of the list and it’s North Korea. You put those 10 together and add to them about 40 other nations identify as being hostile to Christianity and you can understand what some fellow believers in the world are now facing. Not as a hypothetical threat, not as a threat to religious liberty that ends up on the editorial pages of the paper, or even arguments before the Supreme Court, millions of fellow believers – millions of those who claim the name of Jesus Christ – are now being persecuted merely because they are Christians. And as this report makes clear, the pattern reveals that it is no accident. It is often downright dangerous, if not deadly, to be a Christian in many of the nations in the world that have a majority Muslim population.

We are told over and over again by our political leaders that we are not at war with Islam. But these kinds of reports – and let me remind you this was published in yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal – make very clear that there is a pattern that is undeniable and the math adds up. The numbers of persecuted Christians, the lands where Christians are virtually being evacuated, the lands where it can be a capital offense merely to confess the name of Jesus Christ as Lord, these lands are increasing not decreasing and the level of danger faced by Christians is likewise increasing, not decreasing.

 

A final word of correction, on yesterday’s edition of The Briefing I discussed the charges against a suffragan Episcopal bishop for having been involved in a car accident while driving under the influence and leaving the scene of the accident, an accident in which a cyclist was killed. In my discussion I said that the Bishop was Bishop of a diocese in Massachusetts; that was an error. She is the suffragan Bishop of a diocese in Maryland.

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’m speaking to you from West Palm Beach, Florida and I’ll meet you tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 01-14-15

Transcript: The Briefing 01-13-15

The Briefing

 

January 13, 2015

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

 

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

1) Paris killings sparks awareness of poor status of free speech in mainstream Islam

In the aftermath of the horrifying killings last week in Paris, the world has responded – at least in terms of the Western elites – with a very ineffectual response; failing to come to terms in the main with the challenge of Islamic terrorism. But there at least has now begun a very interesting conversation. A part of that conversation spilled over into the pages of USA Today yesterday when a column by Robert C. Blitt made abundantly clear the fact that what the West is facing is not just an argument that is coming from Islamic extremists but from some very central Islamic sources – including close American allies.

 

As he writes,

 

“Many have taken false comfort in blaming the cold-blooded attack of Charlie Hebdo on the fanatical action of a small minority of Muslims. But attributing the horror perpetrated in Paris to a band of Salafist radicals alone betrays a willful blindness to a longstanding campaign by broad-based Islamic groups to silence those they consider”

 

Blitt is an attorney; he has been a very prominent advisor to the United States Commission on International Religious Liberty. He writes, and I quote,

 

“The Islamic State and al-Qaeda are by no means the most powerful purveyors of the destructive idea that Islam demands unqualified protection against perceived insult. In the aftermath of the Paris attack, reputable Muslim groups around the world have denounced the violence, but important bodies such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the Arab League, as well as many of the individual states comprising these groups, must bear responsibility for nurturing an environment that breeds violence in the name of defending Islam.”

 

Blitt goes on to make his case in a very convincing fashion – indeed it’s not only convincing, it’s downright chilling. He tells us that the OIC includes member states that range from US allies, including Jordan, to adversaries including the nation of Iran. The group describes itself, he says, as the world’s largest international body coming in second only to the United Nations. It calls itself the collective voice of the Muslim world and as he says, it has enshrined in its own charter the central goal of eliminating what it calls “defamation of Islam.”

 

Now keep in mind that this group includes the nation of Jordan, one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East as one of its members. Add to this a very important news article that also appeared in yesterday’s edition of USA Today, it’s by reporter Kim Hjelmgaard. The article cites several Muslims in Paris to the effect that even though they regret the attacks that took place in their city by members of their own faith – for example he cites Nicole Lefrans, age 55, identified as the caretaker of one of the grim concrete apartment buildings that dominate one of these Muslim neighborhoods in Paris, who said,

 

“They shouldn’t have done it, and I never ran into them, but this whole episode has really disturbed me. I fear for what comes next for France.”

 

That’s not so troubling, but then consider the next statement. It’s by a man identified only as Aber, an unemployed Muslim in Paris who didn’t want his last name to identify him, who told USA Today,

 

“I disagree with what the Kouachi brothers did, and with their ideas. But I also feel that freedom of speech can’t justify everything and I was hurt when Charlie Hebdo published drawings of the prophet Mohammed.”

 

The use of the term regret in the first statement is hardly a strong moral statement, and in the second statement cited by the reporter what we really have is, as I’ve said, giving on the one hand and taking back on the other. We need also to note that Western elites, including political leaders, have added to this kind of confusion – a very deep moral confusion as well as a theological confusion.

 

At the head of this list must be placed Pres. Barack Obama. As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, speaking to the United Nations in 2012 President Obama said,

 

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,”

 

Speaking of slander against the prophet actually aids those who are making the argument that the prophet’s honor must be defended. And it gives at least some credence to those who make the argument coming from the Islamic world that the prophet’s honor has been slandered. We also need to note that some of America’s very closest allies – not only Jordan but the nation of Saudi Arabia – also see as one of their state responsibilities the punishing of anyone who, in the eyes of that state or Muslim authorities, has slandered Mohammed.

 

Ben Hubbard reports for the New York Times on January 10 that a prominent Saudi blogger known as Raif Badawi has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and to 1,000 lashes with the cane for, as the New York Times reports,

 

“Starting a website that featured content critical of the country’s religious establishment”

 

According to the New York Times report the floggings are to be administered with the cane over a period of months at 50 strokes at a time – that’s 20 different public floggings at 50 lashes a time for the public crime of blasphemy or for offending the nation’s religious leadership.

 

A couple of other quick notices before we leave this issue entirely, one of them comes in an article published yesterday at the Federalist by Larry O’Connor. It asked the question, “Why Does the Mainstream Media call Mohammed ‘The Prophet’?” As he says,

 

“When the media calls Muhammad a ‘prophet’ they are imparting to him a title that is not based in fact but is a matter of faith. To call Muhammad a ‘prophet,’ don’t you have to believe he was divinely inspired? It is arguable that Muhammad’s status as a prophet is not an objective fact. And the media is supposed to deal in facts, whenever possible”

 

Larry O’Connor doesn’t argue that Western media authorities are trying to do something to further the Islamic cause. He points instead to some laziness and more than that, political correctness, that puts Islam in a different category than Judaism or Christianity. He makes a very compelling point that news media analyst don’t seem to feel any responsibility to say Jesus the Savior or Jesus the Messiah or, for that matter, Moses the prophet. But when it comes to Mohammed, they bend to Islamic conventions, speaking of Mohammed as the prophet.

 

But as an example of this kind of political correctness taken to extreme, almost unbelievable links, Terrence McCoy recently reported for the Washington Post and I quote,

 

“For months, publishing giant HarperCollins has been selling an atlas it says was ‘developed specifically for schools in the Middle East.’ It trumpets the work as providing students an ‘in-depth coverage of the region and its issues.’ Its stated goals include helping kids understand [what the publisher called] the ‘relationship between the social and physical environment, the region’s challenges [and] its socio-economic development.”

 

But Terrence McCoy says,

 

“But there’s one problem: Israel is missing”

 

As he writes,

 

“There’s Syria. There’s Jordan. There’s Gaza. But no mention of Israel.”

 

When the situation was exposed in the United States, HarperCollins backtracked. They put out a statement that said,

 

“HarperCollins regrets the omission of the name Israel from their Collins Middle East Atlas,” HarperCollins UK said on its Facebook page. ‘This product has now been removed from sale in all territories and all remaining stock will be pulped. HarperCollins sincerely apologizes for this omission and for any offense it caused.’”

 

But as you might expect there is more to the story. As the Washington Post reports, Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of HarperCollins that specializes in maps, told the newspaper The Tablet that it would’ve been,

 

“…‘unacceptable’ to include Israel in atlases intended for the Middle East. They had deleted Israel to satisfy ‘local preferences.’”

 

Those local preferences in the Arab world are that Israel doesn’t exist and so HarperCollins put out an atlas in which Israel didn’t exist. To the credit of the publisher they have withdrawn the Atlas; to its discredit, they withdrew it only after they published it.

2) Controversies involving Episcopal leaders affirms liberalism and Christianity two rival religions

Shifting back to the United States and to the denominational scene, a couple of recent articles have demonstrated the death of the chasm that separates evangelical Christianity from more liberal Protestant denominations – in particular the Episcopal Church. One news story that appeared in the January 10 edition of the New York Times had this headline, The Bishop, the Cyclist and a Death on the Road. The reporter Jennifer Steinhauer tells about an Episcopal Bishop from Massachusetts who killed a man riding a bicycle while she was driving drunk according to police authorities and then fled the scene – only later to return. But the story is a great deal more convoluted than that for it turns out that the Episcopal diocese in Massachusetts elected her as a suffragan bishop, that is a second bishop in command, after it was known that she had previously been convicted of drunk driving – egregiously so.

 

This has led to some speculation, even in liberal Episcopalian circles, that the election of this female Bishop came because the diocese was in a rush to elect a woman as bishop. As Steinhauer tells the story,

 

“Two days after Christmas, Thomas Palermo took advantage of a rare moment of free time to do what he loved most: ride his bike up a busy road popular with cyclists for its challenging hill and wide bike lanes, the afternoon sun warming his face. About the same time, the police say, an Episcopal bishop got into her car, her blood-alcohol level far above the legal limit, and drove toward him.”

 

Not long after, Mr. Palermo, age 41, the father of two young children,

 

“…lay dying in the street, killed, the police say, by the drunken, texting bishop with a history of driving while intoxicated who left the scene, returning only after nearly half an hour.”

 

The state attorney in Maryland, a woman identified as Marilyn Mosby had filed charges against the Bishop. As Steinhauer reports,

 

“Ms. Mosby said Bishop Cook, 58, elected last year to the No. 2 position in the diocese despite having pleaded guilty to driving under the influence in 2010, was found to have a 0.22 blood-alcohol level when brought to the police station after she returned to the crash site. The legal limit in Maryland is 0.08.”

 

There are so many convoluted issues connected to this very tragic story but the bottom line is that it points to that great chasm that separates evangelical Christianity from liberal Protestantism. Now let’s be clear, evangelical Christians have their own share of moral scandals and moral tragedy. But the moral code is different and that moral code’s difference is made abundantly clear when it becomes evident that this Bishop was elected even after – indeed shortly after – a conviction in 2010 for drunk driving. The diocese said in its own way that it was trying to give this Bishop a second chance.

 

But a second story related to the same denomination drives the point home even more clearly. Sarah Pulliam Bailey reports for Religion News Service,

 

“The dean of a flagship Episcopal seminary will step down after a stormy tenure, conflicts with faculty and larger debates over the future of theological education.

 

The Very Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale announced her decision not to continue as dean and president of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., when her contract expires at the end of June. Ragsdale is the second-ever female chief and the first lesbian to become leader of an Episcopal seminary.”

 

The story is very complex, it turns out that this president had lost a vote of confidence in the faculty and eventually her leadership seems to have been undermined by very persistent financial challenges. But as the Washington-based group the Institute on Religion and Democracy pointed out, what is really scandalous in the situation is that this president didn’t lose her job because of her very prominent homosexual advocacy, nor her very open and ardent advocacy for abortion. Indeed she didn’t lose her job because of those things; she probably got her job because of those causes. She eventually lost her job because of financial issues and that was the bottom line.

 

As Bailey reports,

 

“Ragsdale has been outspoken in her support of abortion rights, earning the title of ‘the high priestess of abortion’ from critics. She has served on the board of NARAL Pro-Choice America and as past chair of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.”

 

Her theology of universalism was also abundantly clear in the article when Ragsdale is quoted as saying,

 

“The occasional Jew or Buddhist at EDS does not compromise our mission, it enriches it. [She said,] I don’t subscribe to the ‘we should all be one’ mentality. Our traditions are each unique and got us where we are.”

 

My point in bringing attention to these two news articles is not particularly to dwell upon the Episcopal Church but instead to make the point that was graphically made, very accurately made, in the early decades of the 20th century by Presbyterian theologian and Bible scholar, J. Gresham Machen when Machen pointed out in his book, Christianity and Liberalism, that when you’re dealing with orthodox Christianity and Protestant Liberalism we are not dealing with two variants of the same religion. As Machen correctly said, ‘judged by orthodox Christianity, we’re actually looking in this case at two rival religions,’ and these headlines – not to mention the stories behind them – make that point all too evident.

3) Call for increased homeschooling regulation reveals  its importance as counter-revolutionary force

There have been so many important news articles in recent days, some of these sidelined by urgencies such as the massacre in Paris. But we need to go back and look at an article that appeared in the Monday, January 5 edition of the New York Times. The front page story is headlined Home Schooling: More Pupils, Less Regulation. Motoko Rich is reporting for the New York Times, reporting from the state of Pennsylvania in particular, indicating that even as the Pennsylvania legislature had loosened regulations on homeschoolers and even as the number of homeschooling families is growing, there is increased pressure from the left and from educational regulators to demand that homeschoolers be required to come under some form of state regulation. Especially, as Rich notes, since much of the nation is now moving towards some form of commonality through the common core standards; themselves we note, quite controversial.

 

Motoko Rich reports,

 

“According to the most recent federal statistics available, the number of school-age children who were home-schooled in the United States was close to 1.8 million in 2011-12, up from 1.5 million five years earlier. According to federal data, the highest concentration of home-schooling families are in the South and West, although precise figures are difficult to collect because many states, including Connecticut, Oklahoma and Texas, do not require families to register with either a school district or the state education agency.”

 

In a key section of the article Motoko Rich writes,

 

“Home-schooling families point out that studies show their children perform better on academic tests than children in public school — although it can be difficult to draw conclusions from such studies as researchers depend on voluntary participation. Many home-schooled children go on to succeed in college and beyond.”

 

She then writes,

 

“Academics who have studied home-schoolers said families and students should be required to meet some minimum criteria. Prof. Robert Kunzman of Indiana University’s School of Education advocates annual or biennial basic literacy and numeracy tests. ‘That will allow us to identify what is probably a pretty small subset of home-school families that are not being well served by it,’”

 

‘Well served’ in his view. One of the major points made by the homeschooling parents in this article is that they know their children best. One of the other points made by the parents and homeschool defenders is that if anything those who are running the schools, especially the public schools, are in no position to tell Christian parents, and of course not all homeschoolers are Christians, what they should teach their children and what constitutes an adequate curriculum. We can only imagine what this kind of state regulation would imply. How would parents be judged as to whether or not they are adequate teachers for their children? What would it mean for state regulators to decide what an adequate curriculum is? Not only in terms of educational standards, but of that curricular content – that’s not an extraneous issue.

 

One of the issues raised in this article is the teaching of intelligent design or creationism. One of the things we need to recognize is that the homeschooling movement in America has been one of the most important achievements of the last half of the 20th century. Homeschooling didn’t begin then, of course, some the most important court victories defending the right of parents to make educational choices for their children go back to important court decisions won by Amish families in the early part of the 20th century. But homeschooling in America really began to take off in the 1970s. One of the interesting historical things to note is that homeschooling, in terms of the recent phenomena, didn’t begin on the conservative right – it began, at least in organized form, on the secular left; in particular on the countercultural left where liberal parents back in the 1960s and 70s didn’t want their children as they said, submitted to a corporate education that was controlled by the government. That concern came from the left and those parents on the left depended on those very same court decisions that were won by the Amish and others in the 20th century.

 

But of course conservative Christians have become the most numerous homeschoolers, and for understandable reasons. And what we’re looking at now is the fact that homeschooling is one the most important counterrevolutionary forces in American society today. Counterrevolutionary in the sense that it allows Christian parents making this decision for their own families and their own children to push back against some of the trends of the predominant secular educational establishment; the very establishment that wants to regulate homeschooling and wants to gain more control, more regulation, more oversight, over homeschooling families.

 

This is likely to be an ongoing controversy in issue. It’s not by accident this article appeared on the front page of an edition of the New York Times. Whether you’re a homeschooling family or not this should be on the front lines of your concern as well.

4) Rising trend of eating alone displays shift to absolute individualism in America

Finally, an article that tells us a great deal about changes in our culture that may be rather subtle. This is the kind of article that doesn’t scream a headline that is likely to make it into much of the mainstream media in terms of talk show conversation. But it is the kind of article that should have Christian attention and it is an article that got the attention of the Wall Street Journal.

 

In a recent edition of that paper, columnist Bob Greene wrote, and I quote,

 

“Among the most significant societal surveys released during the past year was one commissioned by the consumer-research firm NPD Group. Americans, according to the survey, now eat more than half of their meals alone. Table talk can be pretty scant when you’re the only person at the table.”

 

Table fellowship is of course a very important issue in both the Old and New Testament. A part of what we understand to be the normal human life is the engagement of table fellowship in terms of eating with our families, with our loved ones, or with friends and acquaintances. Jesus got into trouble with the Pharisees of course because he extended table fellowship to public sinners, tax collectors, and the like. But what we have in this article, and in the societal study behind it, is an indication that we are now experiencing something of a sociological regression. We’ve moved from an age of expressive individualism to an age of absolute individualism – right down to the fact, and I still find this a stunning statistic, that more than half of meals that are eaten by Americans are eaten alone.

 

One of the saddest development behind this is the loss of the family dinner meal, of the family sitting down to dinner together – or at least one meal a day together – in which there can be what Bob Greene calls, convivial conversation; the kind of conversation that is absolutely essential to the relationships, not only among parents, mom and dad, but between parents and their children. Something absolutely precious, even vital, is lost when half of all meals – no, this article says more than half – of all the meals eaten by Americans are now eaten alone. Dining alone become something of a parable of our times and make no mistake it’s a parable of loss. Bob Greene writes about the fact that even though many people are eating alone, they’re eating with their smart phone. But the smart phone is not a replacement for human relationships and it’s a very sad thing that an article like this appears with that as the background fact. The fact, that is, that Americans are replacing having meals with a human being with having a meal with their smart phone. As I said, this is a parable, it’s a parable of loss.

 

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’m speaking to you from West Palm Beach, Florida and I’ll meet you tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 01-13-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Paris killings sparks awareness of poor status of free speech in mainstream Islam

Defending Islam from free speech, USA Today (Robert C. Blitt)

Terror attack sparks fears among French Muslims, USA Today (Kim Hjelmgaard)

Obama, Biden Absent From Paris Solidarity March, Wall Street Journal (Carol E. Lee)

Saudis Begin Public Caning to Punish a Blogger, New York Times (Ben Hubbard)

Why Does The Mainstream Media Call Muhammad ‘The Prophet’?, The Federalist (Larry O’Connor)

HarperCollins omits Israel from maps for Mideast schools, citing ‘local preferences’, Washington Post (Terrence McCoy)

2) Controversies involving Episcopal leaders affirms liberalism and Christianity two rival religions

The Bishop, the Cyclist and a Death on the Road, New York Times (Jennifer Steinhauer)

Controversial Episcopal seminary dean Katherine Hancock Ragsdale to step down, Religion News Service (Sarah Pulliam Bailey)

3) Call for increased homeschooling regulation reveals  its importance as counter-revolutionary force

Home Schooling: More Pupils, Less Regulation, New York Times (Motoko Rich)

4) Rising trend of eating alone displays shift to absolute individualism in America

Dining Solo in the Age of the Smartphone, Wall Street Journal (Bob Greene)

Transcript: The Briefing 01-12-15

The Briefing

 

January 12, 2015

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

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

1) Coverage of Atlanta Fire Chief reveals erotic liberty now more fundamental than religious

At the end of last week we discussed the firing of Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran. This came after the Chief had published a book in which he articulated his Christian convictions concerning homosexuality – a small book with a very small circulation that got this Fire Chief into very big trouble. The news article I cited as the primary source was from the New York Times; last Wednesday’s edition. Then, just some five days later in yesterday’s edition of the paper there appeared an opinion column by Frank Bruni entitled, Your God and My Dignity. In his article Bruni argues that religious liberty is all fine and good so long as it is restricted to “Pews, homes, and hearts,” in other words, far from public consequence.

 

Remember that the firing of Kevin Cochran as the Fire Chief in Atlanta came after the city’s Mayor Kasim Reed determined that the Chief could not effectively manage the department after he had written a book in which he cited Scripture in defining homosexuality as a sin. Remember that last week in explaining the firing, the Mayor said that the Chiefs personal religious convictions were not the issue – to use his language, personal religious beliefs are not the issue – but as I’ve said, the Mayor’s words don’t form a coherent argument because later he said,

 

“Despite my respect for Chief Cochran’s service, I believe his actions and decision-making undermine his ability to effectively manage a large, diverse work force.”

 

He then stated,

 

“Every single employee under the fire chief’s command deserves the certainty that he or she is a valued member of the team and that fairness and respect guide employment decisions.”

 

The clear implication, furthermore not just the implication, the clear statement of the Mayor’s words, is that in publishing the book the Fire Chief had effectively not kept his personal opinions to his personal self. When his Christian convictions became public the convictions themselves became a claim of discrimination – plain and simple.

 

As I discussed last Friday, this is another example of what happens when erotic liberty triumphs over religious liberty. Liberties don’t exist in a vacuum. In any historical context certain liberties collide with other liberties and what we’re witnessing now is a direct and unavoidable collision between religious liberty and what is rightly defined as erotic liberty – a liberty claimed on the basis of sexual identity or sexual activity. Religious liberty, you’ll remember, is officially recognized in the Bill of Rights, indeed in the very First Amendment. And the framers of the American order, after all, didn’t claim to have established this right but to have respected it and to have stated the intention of the nation – a commitment to respect it as well.

 

Erotic liberty is new on the scene but we need to recognize it is central to the moral project of modernity; a project that asserts erotic liberty, which the framers never imagined, as an even more fundamental liberty than freedom of religion. The logic of erotic liberties has worked its way from the academic world and law schools into popular culture, entertainment, Hollywood, public policy, and Supreme Court decisions.

 

In one classic example Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy famously wrote of human dignity in terms of,

 

“Ones concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”

 

And the justice has explicitly tied that to erotic liberty in a series of decisions and opinions. Chief Cochran wrote a book, as a Christian and for his fellow Christians. According to the New York Times article, he gave a copy of the book to three city employees who had not asked for it. In response, he was fired by the city’s mayor. Then yesterday came the opinion piece I referenced, a piece written by Frank Bruni, a well-known openly gay columnist of the New York Times whose articles often appear in the Sunday review section of that paper. His article was entitled, Your God and My Dignity and he made his sexual orientation a central feature of his argument. His argument is the claims of religious liberty for conservative Christians are absurd – that’s his very word. He complains about,

 

“…religious people getting a pass that isn’t warranted,”

 

He also suggests that claims of religious liberty are being used as what he calls:

 

“…a fig leaf for intolerance,”

 

The legalization of same-sex marriage he says can’t and won’t infringe upon religious liberty because such laws,

 

“…do not pertain to religious services or what happens in a church, temple or mosque;”

 

He also assures us that no clergy member or minister will be compelled to preside over a gay wedding ceremony. As I argued in an article published this morning at AlbertMohler.com entitled Religious Liberty vs. Erotic Liberty — Religious Liberty is Losing, the really chilling part of this statement is the restriction of religious liberty to “religious services or what happens in a church temple or mosque;”

 

This is, we need to note, becoming more and more common. Major political and legal figure speak more and more of what they call “freedom of worship” as a replacement for religious liberty. But freedom of worship isn’t religious liberty. Religious liberty certainly includes freedom of worship, but it is by no means limited to it. It doesn’t stop there.

 

Furthermore, when the proponents of same-sex marriage and the new sexual revolution promised even to respect what goes on in the church, temple, or mosque, they evidently can’t keep their argument straight. In this very same column – again it appeared yesterday in the New York Times, Frank Bruni complains that religious congregations are given too much liberty to define their own ministry. He laments that quote,

 

“And churches have been allowed to adopt broad, questionable interpretations of a ‘ministerial exception’ to anti-discrimination laws that allow them to hire and fire clergy as they wish.”

 

That’s nothing less than breathtaking. The front lines of the battle for religious liberty will be at the door of your congregation very soon if this column is any indication – and of course it is.

 

While promising to respect freedom of worship, Bruni openly implies that congregations should not have the right to hire and fire ministers or clergy on the basis of their sexual orientation or beliefs. What kind of liberty is that? It’s no liberty at all. The argument spells the end of religious liberty in any meaningful sense. What about the rights of religious schools to hire, admit, and house on the basis of Christian moral judgment? If Bruni complains about churches, about congregations, having the right to hire and fire clergy as they wish, we can only imagine what he would want to see mandated in terms of religious schools, colleges, universities and institutions.

 

The headline over the print edition of Frank Bruni’s column is Your God and My Dignity. The use the term dignity in this way is explained even this morning in an important article by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus. His title is The Mission Creep of Dignity. In this article released just this morning Regnerus contrast the traditional view of human dignity rooted in the belief that every human being is made in God’s image and affirmed by natural law theorist, he calls this dignity 1.0. As Regnerus explains, this view of human dignity is defined as a person’s,

 

“Inherent worth of immeasurable value that is deserving of certain morally appropriate responses.”

 

He also explains,

 

“Understood in this way, dignity is an inalienable value. It’s a reality. Human dignity does not become real when you start to believe in it. It remains real even when neglected or violated. It may be discerned differently across eras, but it’s not arbitrary, to be socially constructed in unique ways by collective will or vote.”

 

Now it’s important to recognize that what Mark Regnerus calls Dignity 1.0 is exactly the understanding of human dignity that is central to the Christian tradition; that is drawn directly from Scripture. And it is also the understanding of human dignity upon which the very rights espoused in the articles of our Constitution are also predicated. It’s that understanding of human dignity; a human dignity that exists merely because we are human beings. But what we’re witnessing now is the ascendancy of what can only be called Dignity 2.0 – that’s Regnerus’s term. As he describes,

 

“To be sure, Dignity 2.0 exhibits some similarities with its predecessor. Each has to do with inherent worth. Each implies the reality of the good. Each understands that rights flow from dignity. But Dignity 2.0 entrusts individuals to determine their own standards.”

 

He directly applies that to the contemporary moral revolution about marriage. Professor Regnerus writes,

 

“Witness, as an example, what is happening to marriage in the West, where the power elite has aligned behind Dignity 2.0 and its novel conclusions about the nature and structure of a timeless institution. The basis for Dignity 2.0 in the West does not rest on external standards, on traditional restraints such as kinship, neighborhood, religion, or nation, which are all stable sources of the self. Rather, it is based upon the dis-integrated, shifting ‘me,’ subject to renegotiation, reinvention, and reconstruction, reinforced by expansive conditions and regulations. It’s exhausting—though profitable to attorneys. And Facebook. [As he argues,]… there are rival forms of dignity, and the version you employ matters a great deal.”

 

Indeed there are now rival visions of human dignity – that why it’s important to reference this when the title of Frank Bruni’s article was Your God and My Dignity.

 

So we have two rival visions of human dignity and we also have two conflicting liberties – two competing liberties: religious liberty and the newly invented erotic liberty. And in this conflict over liberties, erotic liberty is triumphing over religious liberty again and again. Don’t miss the final words of Frank Bruni’s column,

 

“And I support the right of people to believe what they do and say what they wish — in their pews, homes and hearts. But outside of those places? You must put up with me, just as I put up with you.”

 

You’ll notice that he restricts religious liberty to, again, what we believe in our pews homes and hearts. No public conversation, no public consequence. Well he want to replace freedom of worship for religious liberty, he doesn’t even actually hold fast to that argument as he complains about those churches having a right to hire and fire clergy on the basis of their own theological convictions.

 

Chief Kelvin Cochran of Atlanta, or that is former Chief, knows exactly what Frank Bruni means. Do you? If not, you soon will. Given the direction of this argument and the velocity of its development, very, very soon all of us will know.

2) As vestiges of Christianity leave Europe, secularism no match for assertive theology of Islam

Yesterday the streets of Paris were filled in a statement of massive solidarity in that nation. The crowd was anticipated to be larger than any recent on Paris streets. French military and intelligence authorities continued to gather information along with allies, including the United States and Britain, and it appears increasingly likely that the assailants in the murderous attack in Paris were connected with Al Qaeda – in particular with Al Qaeda in Yemen formally known as Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula. Intelligence authorities in France also alerted the nation to the danger of the awakening of so-called terrorist sleeper cells in the nation and the French government indicated that it is now the highest point of alert in the nation’s recent history.

 

As the New York Times reported yesterday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls had declared war with radical Islam after the harrowing sieges that led to the deaths of three gunmen and four hostages just the day before. The French Prime Minister said,

 

“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,”

 

The Prime Minister said this in language that is starkly clearer than that offered by the nations President François Hollande. The Prime Minister, declaring that the nation of France is at war with militant Islam, went far further than most other Western leaders have yet gone in been very clear about the nature of the conflict and the deadly challenge.

 

But in another portion of that very same address the Prime Minister said,

 

“There needs to be a firm message about the values of the republic and of secularism. Tomorrow, France and the French can be proud. Everyone must come tomorrow.”

 

He was speaking of the march that took place yesterday. The most interesting portion of the Prime Minister statement, at least in that regard, is his use of the phrase “the values of the Republic and of secularism.” The French government has been committed to secularism for a very long time. Many Americans forget that the French Revolution, a reckless historical experiment that ended in massive tragedy, was explicitly secularist. So much so that the new regime replaced the statue of the Madonna in the Notre Dame Cathedral with a statue that was called “God is reason,” a more-than-symbolic action. It was intended by the revolutionaries to be very clear about the fact that they were breaking with the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church. But of course they were also referencing the larger Christian tradition. Continuing that tradition, at least in part, the current French government is also assertively secular. Secular in a way that many other governments decidedly are not – including the governments of its closest allies, including in their own way: Germany, United Kingdom, and United States.

 

But what exactly is secularism against the threat of a militant Islam? One of the things we must see over and over again is that nature abhors a vacuum and so do societies. For that matter, as the Christian tradition is understood, so does the human heart – it abhors a vacuum. Just as that vacuum in nature will be replaced with something, so will the vacuum in a human society or a human heart. There is no way that secularism is a stable project. That’s the basic problem right now, not only in France, but in the larger world – especially the world of Europe and North America – that is secularizing very quickly. Secularism is just no match for an assertive theology. And in this case, the assertive theology of Islam is far more potent than the secularism that it now opposes.

 

Coverage in the international press from the Washington Post and the Times of London to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal has indicated that the French are losing control of young Muslims who are drawn to this very assertive theology and are repelled – if not repulsed – by the secularism of the French Republic. Now once again we need to note that in this case the French are just more assertively secular than much of the rest of Europe and North America; but were looking at a very similar kind of development at least in portions of Canada.

 

This brings to mind a very important front-page article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in its January 3 and 4 editions of 2015; the headline, Europe’s Empty Churches Go on Sale. The article is by Naftali Bendavid and it is headlined in Arnhem, Netherlands where as it turns out, a major historic Christian church building has been turned into a skateboard park. As Bendavid explains it is now known as the Arnhem skate hall. He explains,

 

“…an uneasy reincarnation of the Church of St. Joseph, which once rang with the prayers of nearly 1,000 worshipers.”

 

Bendavid continues,

 

“It is one of hundreds of churches, closed or threatened by plunging membership, that pose a question for communities, and even governments, across Western Europe: What to do with once-holy, now-empty buildings that increasingly mark the countryside from Britain to Denmark?”

 

It’s a very interesting question and of course Bendavid backs this up with some very interesting data. He says,

 

“The closing of Europe’s churches reflects the rapid weakening of the faith in Europe [that is the Christian faith], a phenomenon that is painful to both worshipers and others who see religion as a unifying factor in a disparate society.”

 

That is a very interesting statement, by the way, and it is one that is increasingly seen. In the aftermath of this project of secularization and in the wake of the ideology of secularism, there are a good many people who have been committed to the secularization project who are now beginning to count the cost; they’re beginning to miss at least the unifying factor of religion even if they no longer believe in any of its doctrinal elements. To that an Orthodox Christian believer simply retorts that without the doctrine you can’t have a vital faith. You can’t have the faith as any kind of a unifying factor, not for long. The collapse of cultural Christianity in United States is now a glaring example and one we’re witnessing right before our eyes.

 

The Wall Street Journal article is datelined from the Netherlands precisely because according to the paper, that nation is now facing the most imminent collapse of church structures and of church attendance – at least in terms of this crisis. Bendavid writes,

 

“It is in the Netherlands where the trend appears to be most advanced. [In his words,] The country’s Roman Catholic leaders estimate that two-thirds of their 1,600 churches will be out of commission in a decade, and 700 of Holland’s Protestant churches are expected to close within four years.”

 

One spokeswoman said and I quote,

 

“The numbers are so huge that the whole society will be confronted with it,”

She went on to say,

 

“Everyone will be confronted with big empty buildings in their neighborhoods.”

 

Just from a Christian perspective, from a Christian worldview perspective, imagine what these buildings are actually saying. Not saying by their presence but saying especially by their emptiness. Their presence does state this some form of historic representation of Christianity was certainly a vital part of those societies, those nations, those communities, at least in times past. But what their emptiness says now is that secularization is having a massive effect. And that massive effect is seen in the fact that church attendance in some these nations is falling off so precipitously that some major churches and denominations are now looking at the fact that they’ll be closing – now note that article – a majority of their congregations over the next decade.

 

What about the United States? Bendavid writes,

 

“The U.S. has avoided a similar wave of church closings for now, because American Christians remain more religiously observant than Europeans. But religious researchers say the declining number of American churchgoers suggests the country could face the same problem in coming years.”

 

Again, from an evangelical perspective the problem with that assessment is the definition of those American Christians as more religiously observant. Well there’s a sense in which that is an encouraging statement. Religiously observant could imply a vital commitment to Christian faith – a vital belief in Christian doctrine, a vital commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It could, however, represent something else. It could represent the lingering influence of cultural Christianity and of course it’s false gospel of moralism that says one ought to go to church whatever one may believe.

 

Vital biblical Christianity is based not just on what one ought to do in going to church but what one ought to believe – indeed must believe – in order to be a Christian on the basis of those truths, not merely intellectually assented but personally believed. The next issue is obedience to Jesus Christ, faith produces that obedience. And that obedience is what should translate into church activity and church attendance. Merely being observant is not nearly enough. Those multiplying empty church buildings in the Netherlands and elsewhere provide ample evidence of the fact that being merely religiously observant turns very quickly into being nonobservant after all.

3) Court of Appeals does not allow morality to be factor in building permits of strip clubs

Finally rightly filed under the category, you needed a study for that? The Palm Beach Post of West Palm Beach, Florida reported, again yesterday,

 

“The closer a person is to a sexually oriented business in Palm Beach County, the more likely he or she is to be the victim of crime according to the data compiled by a trio of doctoral degree holding researchers. It shows [says the paper] the reverse was also true. The farther a person is from a sexually oriented business, the less likely he or she is to be victimized”

 

Yes, that very paragraph made its way onto the front page of yesterday’s edition of the Palm Beach Post – as if it’s news, as if we should be surprised, as if it took a study undertaken by “a trio of doctoral degree holding researchers.” We can be thankful, I guess, that this has been documented but did anyone actually need a study to tell us that the closer one gets to this kind of business the more likely one is to be victimized? And, as the paper correctly says, the converse is also true. The farther one gets away from this kind of business, the less likely one is to be victimized and a whole host of crimes.

 

The point here should certainly be moral, but it’s actually reduced to a matter of mathematics. And as the paper says, that’s mandated by decision of the 11th Circuit US Court of Appeals that ruled that a municipality’s reasons for refusing to grant a permit to what’s described as an adult entertainment business couldn’t be, as the paper says, discretionary. “They must instead be mathematical.” The paper’s article by Wayne Washington says,

 

“Palm Beach counties code on where adult entertainment businesses can be located is mathematical. No permit for such a business will be granted unless the strip club is not within 2,000 feet of another strip club, not within 1,000 feet of a church or place of worship, not within 1,000 feet of an educational institution, and not within 500 feet of either a residential zoning district or a public park”

 

In other words says the US Court of Appeals, morality can’t factor into the decision-making of a community. That’s the kind of society we’ve become – you do the math.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. There you’ll find my article published this morning, Religious Liberty vs. Erotic Liberty — Religious Liberty is Losing. 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’m speaking to you from West Palm Beach, Florida and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

Transcript: The Briefing 01-12-14

The Briefing

 

January 12, 2015

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

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

1) Coverage of Atlanta Fire Chief reveals erotic liberty now more fundamental than religious

At the end of last week we discussed the firing of Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran. This came after the Chief had published a book in which he articulated his Christian convictions concerning homosexuality – a small book with a very small circulation that got this Fire Chief into very big trouble. The news article I cited as the primary source was from the New York Times; last Wednesday’s edition. Then, just some five days later in yesterday’s edition of the paper there appeared an opinion column by Frank Bruni entitled, Your God and My Dignity. In his article Bruni argues that religious liberty is all fine and good so long as it is restricted to “Pews, homes, and hearts,” in other words, far from public consequence.

 

Remember that the firing of Kevin Cochran as the Fire Chief in Atlanta came after the city’s Mayor Kasim Reed determined that the Chief could not effectively manage the department after he had written a book in which he cited Scripture in defining homosexuality as a sin. Remember that last week in explaining the firing, the Mayor said that the Chiefs personal religious convictions were not the issue – to use his language, personal religious beliefs are not the issue – but as I’ve said, the Mayor’s words don’t form a coherent argument because later he said,

 

“Despite my respect for Chief Cochran’s service, I believe his actions and decision-making undermine his ability to effectively manage a large, diverse work force.”

 

He then stated,

 

“Every single employee under the fire chief’s command deserves the certainty that he or she is a valued member of the team and that fairness and respect guide employment decisions.”

 

The clear implication, furthermore not just the implication, the clear statement of the Mayor’s words, is that in publishing the book the Fire Chief had effectively not kept his personal opinions to his personal self. When his Christian convictions became public the convictions themselves became a claim of discrimination – plain and simple.

 

As I discussed last Friday, this is another example of what happens when erotic liberty triumphs over religious liberty. Liberties don’t exist in a vacuum. In any historical context certain liberties collide with other liberties and what we’re witnessing now is a direct and unavoidable collision between religious liberty and what is rightly defined as erotic liberty – a liberty claimed on the basis of sexual identity or sexual activity. Religious liberty, you’ll remember, is officially recognized in the Bill of Rights, indeed in the very First Amendment. And the framers of the American order, after all, didn’t claim to have established this right but to have respected it and to have stated the intention of the nation – a commitment to respect it as well.

 

Erotic liberty is new on the scene but we need to recognize it is central to the moral project of modernity; a project that asserts erotic liberty, which the framers never imagined, as an even more fundamental liberty than freedom of religion. The logic of erotic liberties has worked its way from the academic world and law schools into popular culture, entertainment, Hollywood, public policy, and Supreme Court decisions.

 

In one classic example Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy famously wrote of human dignity in terms of,

 

“Ones concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”

 

And the justice has explicitly tied that to erotic liberty in a series of decisions and opinions. Chief Cochran wrote a book, as a Christian and for his fellow Christians. According to the New York Times article, he gave a copy of the book to three city employees who had not asked for it. In response, he was fired by the city’s mayor. Then yesterday came the opinion piece I referenced, a piece written by Frank Bruni, a well-known openly gay columnist of the New York Times whose articles often appear in the Sunday review section of that paper. His article was entitled, Your God and My Dignity and he made his sexual orientation a central feature of his argument. His argument is the claims of religious liberty for conservative Christians are absurd – that’s his very word. He complains about,

 

“…religious people getting a pass that isn’t warranted,”

 

He also suggests that claims of religious liberty are being used as what he calls:

 

“…a fig leaf for intolerance,”

 

The legalization of same-sex marriage he says can’t and won’t infringe upon religious liberty because such laws,

 

“…do not pertain to religious services or what happens in a church, temple or mosque;”

 

He also assures us that no clergy member or minister will be compelled to preside over a gay wedding ceremony. As I argued in an article published this morning at AlbertMohler.com entitled Religious Liberty vs. Erotic Liberty — Religious Liberty is Losing, the really chilling part of this statement is the restriction of religious liberty to “religious services or what happens in a church temple or mosque;”

 

This is, we need to note, becoming more and more common. Major political and legal figure speak more and more of what they call “freedom of worship” as a replacement for religious liberty. But freedom of worship isn’t religious liberty. Religious liberty certainly includes freedom of worship, but it is by no means limited to it. It doesn’t stop there.

 

Furthermore, when the proponents of same-sex marriage and the new sexual revolution promised even to respect what goes on in the church, temple, or mosque, they evidently can’t keep their argument straight. In this very same column – again it appeared yesterday in the New York Times, Frank Bruni complains that religious congregations are given too much liberty to define their own ministry. He laments that quote,

 

“And churches have been allowed to adopt broad, questionable interpretations of a ‘ministerial exception’ to anti-discrimination laws that allow them to hire and fire clergy as they wish.”

 

That’s nothing less than breathtaking. The front lines of the battle for religious liberty will be at the door of your congregation very soon if this column is any indication – and of course it is.

 

While promising to respect freedom of worship, Bruni openly implies that congregations should not have the right to hire and fire ministers or clergy on the basis of their sexual orientation or beliefs. What kind of liberty is that? It’s no liberty at all. The argument spells the end of religious liberty in any meaningful sense. What about the rights of religious schools to hire, admit, and house on the basis of Christian moral judgment? If Bruni complains about churches, about congregations, having the right to hire and fire clergy as they wish, we can only imagine what he would want to see mandated in terms of religious schools, colleges, universities and institutions.

 

The headline over the print edition of Frank Bruni’s column is Your God and My Dignity. The use the term dignity in this way is explained even this morning in an important article by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus. His title is The Mission Creep of Dignity. In this article released just this morning Regnerus contrast the traditional view of human dignity rooted in the belief that every human being is made in God’s image and affirmed by natural law theorist, he calls this dignity 1.0. As Regnerus explains, this view of human dignity is defined as a person’s,

 

“Inherent worth of immeasurable value that is deserving of certain morally appropriate responses.”

 

He also explains,

 

“Understood in this way, dignity is an inalienable value. It’s a reality. Human dignity does not become real when you start to believe in it. It remains real even when neglected or violated. It may be discerned differently across eras, but it’s not arbitrary, to be socially constructed in unique ways by collective will or vote.”

 

Now it’s important to recognize that what Mark Regnerus calls Dignity 1.0 is exactly the understanding of human dignity that is central to the Christian tradition; that is drawn directly from Scripture. And it is also the understanding of human dignity upon which the very rights espoused in the articles of our Constitution are also predicated. It’s that understanding of human dignity; a human dignity that exists merely because we are human beings. But what we’re witnessing now is the ascendancy of what can only be called Dignity 2.0 – that’s Regnerus’s term. As he describes,

 

“To be sure, Dignity 2.0 exhibits some similarities with its predecessor. Each has to do with inherent worth. Each implies the reality of the good. Each understands that rights flow from dignity. But Dignity 2.0 entrusts individuals to determine their own standards.”

 

He directly applies that to the contemporary moral revolution about marriage. Professor Regnerus writes,

 

“Witness, as an example, what is happening to marriage in the West, where the power elite has aligned behind Dignity 2.0 and its novel conclusions about the nature and structure of a timeless institution. The basis for Dignity 2.0 in the West does not rest on external standards, on traditional restraints such as kinship, neighborhood, religion, or nation, which are all stable sources of the self. Rather, it is based upon the dis-integrated, shifting ‘me,’ subject to renegotiation, reinvention, and reconstruction, reinforced by expansive conditions and regulations. It’s exhausting—though profitable to attorneys. And Facebook. [As he argues,]… there are rival forms of dignity, and the version you employ matters a great deal.”

 

Indeed there are now rival visions of human dignity – that why it’s important to reference this when the title of Frank Bruni’s article was Your God and My Dignity.

 

So we have two rival visions of human dignity and we also have two conflicting liberties – two competing liberties: religious liberty and the newly invented erotic liberty. And in this conflict over liberties, erotic liberty is triumphing over religious liberty again and again. Don’t miss the final words of Frank Bruni’s column,

 

“And I support the right of people to believe what they do and say what they wish — in their pews, homes and hearts. But outside of those places? You must put up with me, just as I put up with you.”

 

You’ll notice that he restricts religious liberty to, again, what we believe in our pews homes and hearts. No public conversation, no public consequence. Well he want to replace freedom of worship for religious liberty, he doesn’t even actually hold fast to that argument as he complains about those churches having a right to hire and fire clergy on the basis of their own theological convictions.

 

Chief Kelvin Cochran of Atlanta, or that is former Chief, knows exactly what Frank Bruni means. Do you? If not, you soon will. Given the direction of this argument and the velocity of its development, very, very soon all of us will know.

2) As vestiges of Christianity leave Europe, secularism no match for assertive theology of Islam

Yesterday the streets of Paris were filled in a statement of massive solidarity in that nation. The crowd was anticipated to be larger than any recent on Paris streets. French military and intelligence authorities continued to gather information along with allies, including the United States and Britain, and it appears increasingly likely that the assailants in the murderous attack in Paris were connected with Al Qaeda – in particular with Al Qaeda in Yemen formally known as Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula. Intelligence authorities in France also alerted the nation to the danger of the awakening of so-called terrorist sleeper cells in the nation and the French government indicated that it is now the highest point of alert in the nation’s recent history.

 

As the New York Times reported yesterday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls had declared war with radical Islam after the harrowing sieges that led to the deaths of three gunmen and four hostages just the day before. The French Prime Minister said,

 

“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,”

 

The Prime Minister said this in language that is starkly clearer than that offered by the nations President François Hollande. The Prime Minister, declaring that the nation of France is at war with militant Islam, went far further than most other Western leaders have yet gone in been very clear about the nature of the conflict and the deadly challenge.

 

But in another portion of that very same address the Prime Minister said,

 

“There needs to be a firm message about the values of the republic and of secularism. Tomorrow, France and the French can be proud. Everyone must come tomorrow.”

 

He was speaking of the march that took place yesterday. The most interesting portion of the Prime Minister statement, at least in that regard, is his use of the phrase “the values of the Republic and of secularism.” The French government has been committed to secularism for a very long time. Many Americans forget that the French Revolution, a reckless historical experiment that ended in massive tragedy, was explicitly secularist. So much so that the new regime replaced the statue of the Madonna in the Notre Dame Cathedral with a statue that was called “God is reason,” a more-than-symbolic action. It was intended by the revolutionaries to be very clear about the fact that they were breaking with the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church. But of course they were also referencing the larger Christian tradition. Continuing that tradition, at least in part, the current French government is also assertively secular. Secular in a way that many other governments decidedly are not – including the governments of its closest allies, including in their own way: Germany, United Kingdom, and United States.

 

But what exactly is secularism against the threat of a militant Islam? One of the things we must see over and over again is that nature abhors a vacuum and so do societies. For that matter, as the Christian tradition is understood, so does the human heart – it abhors a vacuum. Just as that vacuum in nature will be replaced with something, so will the vacuum in a human society or a human heart. There is no way that secularism is a stable project. That’s the basic problem right now, not only in France, but in the larger world – especially the world of Europe and North America – that is secularizing very quickly. Secularism is just no match for an assertive theology. And in this case, the assertive theology of Islam is far more potent than the secularism that it now opposes.

 

Coverage in the international press from the Washington Post and the Times of London to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal has indicated that the French are losing control of young Muslims who are drawn to this very assertive theology and are repelled – if not repulsed – by the secularism of the French Republic. Now once again we need to note that in this case the French are just more assertively secular than much of the rest of Europe and North America; but were looking at a very similar kind of development at least in portions of Canada.

 

This brings to mind a very important front-page article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in its January 3 and 4 editions of 2015; the headline, Europe’s Empty Churches Go on Sale. The article is by Naftali Bendavid and it is headlined in Arnhem, Netherlands where as it turns out, a major historic Christian church building has been turned into a skateboard park. As Bendavid explains it is now known as the Arnhem skate hall. He explains,

 

“…an uneasy reincarnation of the Church of St. Joseph, which once rang with the prayers of nearly 1,000 worshipers.”

 

Bendavid continues,

 

“It is one of hundreds of churches, closed or threatened by plunging membership, that pose a question for communities, and even governments, across Western Europe: What to do with once-holy, now-empty buildings that increasingly mark the countryside from Britain to Denmark?”

 

It’s a very interesting question and of course Bendavid backs this up with some very interesting data. He says,

 

“The closing of Europe’s churches reflects the rapid weakening of the faith in Europe [that is the Christian faith], a phenomenon that is painful to both worshipers and others who see religion as a unifying factor in a disparate society.”

 

That is a very interesting statement, by the way, and it is one that is increasingly seen. In the aftermath of this project of secularization and in the wake of the ideology of secularism, there are a good many people who have been committed to the secularization project who are now beginning to count the cost; they’re beginning to miss at least the unifying factor of religion even if they no longer believe in any of its doctrinal elements. To that an Orthodox Christian believer simply retorts that without the doctrine you can’t have a vital faith. You can’t have the faith as any kind of a unifying factor, not for long. The collapse of cultural Christianity in United States is now a glaring example and one we’re witnessing right before our eyes.

 

The Wall Street Journal article is datelined from the Netherlands precisely because according to the paper, that nation is now facing the most imminent collapse of church structures and of church attendance – at least in terms of this crisis. Bendavid writes,

 

“It is in the Netherlands where the trend appears to be most advanced. [In his words,] The country’s Roman Catholic leaders estimate that two-thirds of their 1,600 churches will be out of commission in a decade, and 700 of Holland’s Protestant churches are expected to close within four years.”

 

One spokeswoman said and I quote,

 

“The numbers are so huge that the whole society will be confronted with it,”

She went on to say,

 

“Everyone will be confronted with big empty buildings in their neighborhoods.”

 

Just from a Christian perspective, from a Christian worldview perspective, imagine what these buildings are actually saying. Not saying by their presence but saying especially by their emptiness. Their presence does state this some form of historic representation of Christianity was certainly a vital part of those societies, those nations, those communities, at least in times past. But what their emptiness says now is that secularization is having a massive effect. And that massive effect is seen in the fact that church attendance in some these nations is falling off so precipitously that some major churches and denominations are now looking at the fact that they’ll be closing – now note that article – a majority of their congregations over the next decade.

 

What about the United States? Bendavid writes,

 

“The U.S. has avoided a similar wave of church closings for now, because American Christians remain more religiously observant than Europeans. But religious researchers say the declining number of American churchgoers suggests the country could face the same problem in coming years.”

 

Again, from an evangelical perspective the problem with that assessment is the definition of those American Christians as more religiously observant. Well there’s a sense in which that is an encouraging statement. Religiously observant could imply a vital commitment to Christian faith – a vital belief in Christian doctrine, a vital commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It could, however, represent something else. It could represent the lingering influence of cultural Christianity and of course it’s false gospel of moralism that says one ought to go to church whatever one may believe.

 

Vital biblical Christianity is based not just on what one ought to do in going to church but what one ought to believe – indeed must believe – in order to be a Christian on the basis of those truths, not merely intellectually assented but personally believed. The next issue is obedience to Jesus Christ, faith produces that obedience. And that obedience is what should translate into church activity and church attendance. Merely being observant is not nearly enough. Those multiplying empty church buildings in the Netherlands and elsewhere provide ample evidence of the fact that being merely religiously observant turns very quickly into being nonobservant after all.

3) Court of Appeals does not allow morality to be factor in building permits of strip clubs

Finally rightly filed under the category, you needed a study for that? The Palm Beach Post of West Palm Beach, Florida reported, again yesterday,

 

“The closer a person is to a sexually oriented business in Palm Beach County, the more likely he or she is to be the victim of crime according to the data compiled by a trio of doctoral degree holding researchers. It shows [says the paper] the reverse was also true. The farther a person is from a sexually oriented business, the less likely he or she is to be victimized”

 

Yes, that very paragraph made its way onto the front page of yesterday’s edition of the Palm Beach Post – as if it’s news, as if we should be surprised, as if it took a study undertaken by “a trio of doctoral degree holding researchers.” We can be thankful, I guess, that this has been documented but did anyone actually need a study to tell us that the closer one gets to this kind of business the more likely one is to be victimized? And, as the paper correctly says, the converse is also true. The farther one gets away from this kind of business, the less likely one is to be victimized and a whole host of crimes.

 

The point here should certainly be moral, but it’s actually reduced to a matter of mathematics. And as the paper says, that’s mandated by decision of the 11th Circuit US Court of Appeals that ruled that a municipality’s reasons for refusing to grant a permit to what’s described as an adult entertainment business couldn’t be, as the paper says, discretionary. “They must instead be mathematical.” The paper’s article by Wayne Washington says,

 

“Palm Beach counties code on where adult entertainment businesses can be located is mathematical. No permit for such a business will be granted unless the strip club is not within 2,000 feet of another strip club, not within 1,000 feet of a church or place of worship, not within 1,000 feet of an educational institution, and not within 500 feet of either a residential zoning district or a public park”

 

In other words says the US Court of Appeals, morality can’t factor into the decision-making of a community. That’s the kind of society we’ve become – you do the math.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. There you’ll find my article published this morning, Religious Liberty vs. Erotic Liberty — Religious Liberty is Losing. 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’m speaking to you from West Palm Beach, Florida and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 01-12-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Coverage of Atlanta Fire Chief reveals erotic liberty now more fundamental than religious

Your God and My Dignity, New York Times (Frank Bruni)

Atlanta Ousts Fire Chief Who Has Antigay Views, New York Times (Richard Fausset)

Religious Liberty vs. Erotic Liberty — Religious Liberty is Losing, AlbertMohler.com

The Mission Creep of Dignity, Public Discourse (Mark Regnerus)

2) As vestiges of Christianity leave Europe, secularism no match for assertive theology of Islam

French Premier Declares ‘War’ on Radical Islam as Paris Girds for Rally, New York Times (Dan Bilefsky and Maïa de la Baume)

Europe’s Empty Churches Go on Sale, Wall Street Journal (Naftali Bendavid)

3) Court of Appeals does not allow morality to be factor in building permits of strip clubs

Strip clubs linked to crime, but ban them? The law’s on their side, Palm Beach Post (Wayne Washington)