R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 327
February 3, 2015
The Briefing 02-03-15
1) Obama budget proposal reveals worldview and philosophy of government
In Budget, Obama’s Unfettered Case for Spreading the Wealth, New York Times (Julie Hirschfield Davis)
2) Father of the Pill, who enabled division between sex and procreation, dies
Carl Djerassi, 91, a Creator of the Birth Control Pill, Dies, New York Times (Robert D. McFadden)
3) Houston woman’s ‘self-marriage’ reveals irrationality of society without definition of marriage
Houston woman marries herself in elaborate ceremony, Houston Chronicle (Craig Hlavaty)
4) Impact of 24/7 economy on family structures cannot be ignored
Night at the London nursery that does not close, Financial Times (Emma Jacobs)
February 2, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 02-02-15
The Briefing
February 2, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Monday, February 2, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) CUNY revocation of gender-specific prefixes signals extent of gender revolution’s impact on language
Even as we are made in the image of God, God created us as linguistic creatures; we are creatures who communicate and words are central to that communication. That is made very clear in Scripture itself as our Creator addresses us as His human creatures, the only creatures made in His image with words. Therefore words take an unusual importance in the Christian worldview. That’s why Christian theology, Christian doctrine, the entire universe of truth as revealed in Scripture, comes down to a pattern of words. Even as the apostle Paul would write to Timothy, one of his responsibilities was to maintain a pattern of sound words and that is a responsibility that continues even now in the Christian church.
When we observe a change in language we’re observing something more than linguistics, we’re watching a massive change in the way human beings think of themselves and think of the issues they are describing with words and think of the truth they are seeking to articulate – or the truth they are seeking to deny.
That’s why Christians should pay particular attention to a story that emerged last week and got far too little attention. As the Wall Street Journal’s Mike Vilensky reports,
“‘Mr.,’ ‘Mrs.’ and ‘Ms.’ are being shown the door at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.”
As the Journal reports,
“In a new policy that has sparked debate among academics, school staffers have been advised to refrain from using gendered salutations in correspondence with students—and instead use a student’s full name, according to an internal memo sent out earlier this month.
The directive [according to the Journal,] pertains specifically to administrators’ written interactions with students and prospective students,”
That [is] according to Tanya Domi, a school spokeswoman for the City University of New York. But the memo says the policy should be,
“…interpreted as broadly as possible”
And it was sent to all faculty at the Graduate Center.
Juliette Blevins, linguistic professor, said,
“My interpretation was that I was being asked to adhere to this policy, as were the other professors who received the letter,”
She had good reason for that assumption. The College Fix, that received an actual copy of the memo, demonstrates why this professors concern is very well-founded. Here’s the explicit language of the memo itself,
“Effective Spring 2015, the (graduate center’s) policy is to eliminate the use of gendered salutations and references in correspondence to students, prospective students, and third parties,”
That came from Louise Lennihan, serving as interim provost of the graduate center.
“Accordingly, Mr. and Ms. should be omitted from salutations.”
Again the provost instructed all members of the staff to interpret the new policy “as broadly as possible,” also stating that it applies to,
“All types of correspondence, such as: all parts of any letter including address and salutation, mailing labels, bills or invoices, and any other forms or reports,”
Again, the memo from the Provost instructs the staff, including professors, to avoid using ‘Mr.,’ ‘Mrs.,’ ‘Ms.,’ or any gendered pronoun, and instead to refer to students always by both their first and last names. If you asked the question ‘why?’ the interim provost answers the question, saying that it is part of the schools,
“ongoing effort to ensure a respectful, welcoming and gender-inclusive learning environment…and to accommodate properly the diverse population of current and prospective students.”
The spokeswoman for the school also said that the schools was,
“working within a regulatory framework to comply with Title IX legal principles,”
That’s referring to the Title IX Federal Statute the bands gender discrimination, sex discrimination, and other forms of discrimination in all educational settings that receive any government support.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal was unable to find any other major school – indeed any other school at all – in the New York tri-state area that followed a similar kind of policy. As the Journal reports,
“Calls to several prominent universities in the New York tri-state area revealed that none had heard of—or had themselves instituted—such a directive.”
So much for work being mandated by Title IX. What it is being mandated by, so to speak, is the current realm of political correctness and the fact that the gender revolution has destroyed our ability to use some of the most familiar words in the English language. And they’re not just familiar words, they are very important words; important especially in terms of the moral nature of human beings and human social institutions – most importantly, the institution of marriage.
This moral revolution is already changing the way we speak, or are expected to speak. Words as fundamental as male and female, boy and girl, words as fundamental as marriage, are being redefined before our very eyes. Redefined in the space not only of a century but redefined in the space of far less than a generation, indeed at this point, even less than a decade.
Just days ago we reported that the governor of Virginia was doing his best to get the state law changed so that the words husband and wife would be removed from all legal documents in that state. Instead it would simply be spouse and spouse – or in other jurisdictions, partner and partner. So we’re now entering that brave new world in which words such as ‘mother and father’ or ‘mom and dad’ are simply becoming too confused or perhaps even too controversial to use in almost any public setting. Words such as boy and girl, words such as man and woman, are now being largely so confused in the larger culture that now to use them is considered a form of discrimination in one sort or another; sometimes described in very harrowing terms.
Every revolution does seem to come with a change in language. In the Communist Revolution people were informed that they should address one another not as mother and father, brother and sister, nor as Mr. and Mrs. but simply in all cases, regardless of age or gender or marital status or anything else, simply as ‘Comrade.’ Another ideological revolution, the French Revolution, instead suggested that every single person – indeed it was more than a suggestion, it was a mandate – should be known simply as ‘Citizen.’ But in both of those revolutions, not only political and economic revolutions but of course moral revolutions as well, the change in language was an effort to reduce every single human being to the same thing; to make issues of gender identity, of age difference, of marital status, to make all of these things absolutely irrelevant.
In the French Revolution part of it was to get rid of any kind of noblesse oblige, any kind of noble status. But in the aftermath of the French Revolution, a secular revolution that sought explicitly to put human dignity on a secular foundation, what instead happened was what was known as ‘the Terror’ that left Napoleon in its wake. So let’s watch this particular revolution very carefully and just remember it didn’t stop with marriage, it didn’t stop with man and woman, it won’t stop with Mr. and Mrs. or even with Ms.
2) “Second wave” political correctness causing increasing tension even within political left
Meanwhile, the very same week a very important article appeared in New York Magazine. It was written by liberal author Jonathan Chait and the title was Not a Very PC Thing to Say. It’s about political correctness and Jonathan Chait writing an article that, as other observers have said, is actually more right than wrong – even as he’s writing about the resurgence of political correctness, what he calls a second wave of political correctness. And yet what basically has his attention – and this is very important to note – is not any form of political correctness used against moral and political conservatives, but rather against political liberals; and he counts himself as one.
As Jonathan Chait writes,
“After political correctness burst onto the academic scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it went into a long remission. Now it has returned. Some of its expressions have a familiar tint, like the protesting of even mildly controversial speakers on college campuses.”
He then writes about the growing number of campuses that are adopting so-called trigger warnings. He describes these as warnings to texts that may upset students. And he says the movement of the new political correctness is also coming back in a campaign to eradicate what are called micro-aggressions – or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. He then writes, and I quote,
“These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses”
Chait then writes,
“Trigger warnings aren’t much help in actually overcoming trauma — an analysis by the Institute of Medicine has found that the best approach is controlled exposure to it, and experts say avoidance can reinforce suffering. Indeed, one professor at a prestigious university told me that, just in the last few years, she has noticed a dramatic upsurge in her students’ sensitivity toward even the mildest social or ideological slights; she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma — or, more consequentially, violating her school’s new sexual-harassment policy — merely by carrying out the traditional academic work of intellectual exploration.”
The professor say,
“This is an environment of fear, believe it or not. [She went on to say] Every other day I say to my friends, ‘How did we get back to 1991?’”
Chait is also absolutely right when he says it would be mistake to categorize today’s PC culture as only an academic phenomenon. He writes that this new PC wave is permeating the entire culture, even reaching popular culture through the elites. He then goes on to define it as an,
“…attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate”
Interestingly Jonathan Chait tries to draw a distinction between liberalism and the left. That’s not a false distinction, it’s just growing very confusing when in the United States liberals are acting like leftists, and increasingly so. As he explains, leftists are traditionally Marxist; they are committed to a Marxist philosophy and worldview. And Marxism, historically, and right down to the present in its pure form, doesn’t allow for any validity to dissenting worldviews, to any kind of dissenting opinion. They’re simply to be eradicated. Classical liberalism, says Chait, is quite different. It is supposed to be about the freedom of expression and he considers himself not a leftist but a liberal. The problem is other liberals are trending leftist.
National ReviewMagazine has quite accurately pointed out that Jonathan Chait really isn’t concerned about political correctness being used against any conservative arguments. As a matter fact, he’s been using them for years. But it is at least a form of honesty, some form of progress in terms of the culture, if Jonathan Chait realizes that this new wave of political correctness is going to shut down even more speech.
Another reason Chait’s essay is so important is because of the historical review he offers of the first wave of political correctness that he said died in the nearly 90s, and the second wave that is in full steam now. Why did that first face of PC die? Jonathan Chait argues it was probably due to the election of William Jefferson Clinton as president of the United States. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, he was elected after running against the kind of political correctness that was giving such a bad name to the political left – especially to the academic left.
Bill Clinton’s effort to at least partly mitigate some of the liberalism of the Democratic Party’s academic left – the left that was also left over in terms of the leadership of the party from the early 1970s – Bill Clinton was at least partly successful, but only temporarily so. That explained why he was elected as president in 1992 perceived as something of a corrective to that academic left. But it also explains, as Jonathan Chait also helps us to understand, why another Clinton campaign for president might run into a very significant headwind in terms of this new movement of political correctness.
If the death of the first wave is, as he argues, the election of Bill Clinton, the second wave is going to make it very difficult for Hillary Clinton to avoid citing either with or against this new wave of PC. And as Jonathan Chait seems to indicate, it looks like it’s going to be very hard indeed for her to repudiate what her husband did in 1992. It’s far more likely that she will run on it rather than against it.
That raises an article that appeared yesterday as an opinion piece in the New York Times by Ross Douthat. He writes about Our Loud, Proud Left and he writes suggesting that a good many of us are going to be interested spectators in the war in the Democratic Party over these very issues. Douthat makes the very interesting argument that the spent economic energy of the left – as he said, the left would be filled with economic passion but is finding a very difficult time figuring out how to pay for its plans – he says that that kind of energy is now being directed into this form of cultural aggression, in the form of the new PC wave.
One particular paragraph in Douthat’s article demands our attention. He writes,
“I suspect that a lot of the ambition (or aggression, depending on your point of view) from the campus left right now reflects the experience of watching the same-sex marriage debate play out. Whether on issues, like transgender rights, that extend from gay rights, or on older debates over rape and chauvinism, there’s a renewed sense that what happens in relatively cloistered environments can have wide ripples, and that taking firm control of a cultural narrative can matter much more than anything that goes on in Washington.”
Of course many of us watching these developments with concern might well wonder if the academic left isn’t basically right about that fundamental assumption – that their ideas don’t remain cloistered for all, and that, like on the issue the sexual revolution, if they really can’t foment a revolution of ideas on the college campus, it’s unlikely to stay there. As a matter fact it’s hard for us to argue against that very fundamental assumption – that what happens on the American college and University campuses long-term far more important than what happens in Washington, regardless of which party is in control.
The reason for that is clear. On the American College and University campus, that’s where the issue of worldview is being hammered out. That’s where young people are developing the ideas that are likely to last for a lifetime. And if you win the battle there – the ideological, the worldview battle –you win battles that are far more consequential than anything that can take place in politics. Furthermore, you win a worldview conflict that will eventually be reflected in the politics. If you win the hearts and minds, you will eventually win the legislature.
And you put all this together in terms of the change of nomenclature at City University of New York and Jonathan Chait’s essay in New York Magazine and we come to understand that the fast changing cultural terrain that we as Christians now face is going to be a cultural debate that will in large part be hammered out without us.
3) Life of Winston Churchill presents tremendous example of gift of common grace
Finally last Friday I noted that that day marked the 50th anniversary of the state and private funerals for Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, by any measure, one of most dominant figures of the 20th century. Churchill was born on November 30, 1874; he died on January 24 of 1965. His state funeral was held on January 30 of that year, 50 years ago Friday. It was a largest state funeral in Western history. It drew representatives of 112 nations and it is now remembered, on both sides of the Atlantic, as one of the seminal transitional moments in the history the Western world – especially in the 20th century.
Churchill’s life was lived out in the canvas of a changing world. He was born in the reign of Queen Victoria and his life was bookmarked by another Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, whom he served as Prime Minister. In one way or another he served three Kings as well as one Queen. And the Queen during whose reign he was born was a defining mark in terms of the worldview of Winston Churchill. He was born a Victorian; he died in the last half of the 20th century. In between was a vast cataclysmic change in the way that Westerners lived, especially in the history of the nation of England.
And if anything, Winston Churchill was English, British, and he was of course also half American. His mother Jennie Jerome was an American before marrying the man who would become Winston Churchill’s father: Randolph Churchill. Churchill’s illustrious ancestor was the first famous Churchill – that is John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough – famous for his massive military victories on the continent. But as the first son born to the second son of the then Duke of Marlborough, Churchill was unsurprisingly born in the splendor of one of Britain’s most fabulous palace: Blenheim Palace.
But he had spectacularly unhappy childhood. His mother was very remote; he described her as a distant star, and his father was even more remote, even in many ways, at least emotionally, abusive. His father and Churchill’s teachers believed that Churchill the boys would amount to nothing as a man. But of course history demonstrates otherwise, as the history of the late 19th and 20th centuries simply can’t be written without reference to Winston Churchill. And as a matter of fact, as the man who became prime minister not once but twice, he is recognized in Great Britain and was recognized even during his lifetime, as the man most singularly responsible for that nation’s victory over Nazi Germany and its failure to capitulate to the Germans even in the early years of the Nazi aggression. The man who stuttered and stammered as a child became one of the most famous orators of the English language. As he himself said, he was not a lion but it was his responsibility, indeed his privilege, to become the roar for England.
One of the things that history will record about Winston Churchill is that in those political years known as his wilderness years when he was out of office, he was the one who most clearly understood the Nazi threat. And he understood it precisely because he knew it was a battle of ideas and when it came to the Nazis deeply evil ideas. And he understood that a nation could be organized, at least in terms of its leadership, around those ideas and could voice them upon its people.
When I was 13 years old I was assigned the task to write an essay on an historical person and for some reason I just immediately decided I would write a Winston Churchill. In retrospect I’m not even sure exactly why. But I’ll admit that that experience of writing the essay as a 13-year-old made Winston Churchill for me from then until now an enduring character of fascination. And from the Christian worldview Winston Churchill raises a host of issues. For the one thing, he demonstrates the fact that the great man theory of history isn’t really dead because even the people who tried to dismiss the singular role of individuals in terms of world history are hard-pressed when you look at the middle years of the 20th century to explain why horrors happened without reference to someone like Adolf Hitler, and why eventually liberty prevailed without reference to people like Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But even though Roosevelt led the larger and greater nation, especially in terms of the years after the war, it was Churchill that had the outsized personality on the world stage. Churchill was a man of many faults and a man of even greater qualities. He was a man who was often wrong, but far more often right. And he was a man who lived long enough to see his own understanding of Nazi Germany not only vindicated but eventually represented by victory – something that was all too uncertain when he became prime minister in the very depth of the Nazi crisis. Churchill’s life does demonstrate that individuals can make a decisive difference on the world scene. The great man theory of history may not be adequate to explain history but history cannot be explained without it.
But as a Christian theologian, there is another aspect of Winston Churchill that is also raised and that is, how did someone with his worldview emerge and how did someone with his worldview lead in terms especially of those central years of crisis in the 20th century? He understood, prior to almost any other, the real danger of Nazi-ism. He also understood, prior to almost everyone else, the real danger of the totalitarian challenge of communism – especially of Soviet communism. It was his speech given just after the war when he was unceremoniously removed from office by the British people, a speech he gave in Fulton, Missouri at Westminster College in which he described that Iron Curtain that was descending upon so many nations in Europe. And that says Churchill was not only prophetic, he was also – as William Manchester, one of his most insightful biographer says – a Manichaean; seeing so many issues in terms of right and wrong and good and evil when others are trying to finesse the moral issues involved. Churchill was not about finesse.
But Winston Churchill also raises another issue for Christians and that is this: how can there be figures of such heroism on the world stage who – as in the case of Winston Churchill – was actually not conventional Christian believers. In truth Winston Churchill operated out of a Christian worldview, it was the worldview he inherited and it was the worldview he embraced. But he offered very little evidence of any traditional Christian identity; even as he was, of course, a member of the Church of England. But for Christians this also reminds us of God’s gift of common grace whereby people we can’t explain theologically we can admire historically. But it also means for Christians, when we define greatness there is a limitation to secular greatness and that’s another thing Christians must always keep in mind.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
The Briefing 02-02-15
1) CUNY revocation of gender-specific prefixes signals extent of gender revolution’s impact on language
CUNY: Don’t Address Students as ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’, Wall Street Journal (Mike Vilensky)
University Bans Use of ‘Mrs.’ and ‘Ms.’ in All Correspondence, The College Fix (Alexandra Zimmern)
2) “Second wave” political correctness causing increasing tension even within political left
Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say, New York Magazine (Jonathan Chait)
Liberals Seek PC Exemption, National Review (Kevin D. Williamson)
Our Loud, Proud Left, New York Times (Ross Douthat)
3) Life of Winston Churchill presents tremendous example of gift of common grace
January 30, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 01-30-15
The Briefing
January 30, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Friday, January 30, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Legal win for Trinity Western Law school dodges choice between religious and erotic liberty
A major victory was won this week by Trinity Western University in Canada. As Toronto’s Globe and Mail reported yesterday,
“Trinity Western University has scored a victory in Nova Scotia, where a Supreme Court judge has ruled that the province’s law society does not have the authority to deny accrediting graduates from its proposed law school.”
The law school is actually in British Columbia but it was the law society there in Nova Scotia that had ruled that it would not accept graduates from that University because of Universities’ moral principle that “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman” is not accepted.
In the ruling that was handed down on Wednesday of this week, Supreme Court Justice Jamie Campbell said that the Nova Scotia Barrister’ Society actually doesn’t even have the authority to require the school to change its policy. In the words of his opinion,
“It could not pass a regulation requiring TWU to change its community covenant any more than it could pass a regulation purporting to dictate what professors should be granted tenure at [any other school of law] or what fees should be charged by the University of Toronto Law School, or the admissions policies of McGill [University],”
In his opinion the Supreme Court Justice also wrote,
“The legislation, quite sensibly, does not contain any mechanism for recognition or enforcement of NSBS regulations purporting to control how university law grads operate because it was never intended that they would be subject to its control.”
He also wrote this, very important words,
“Unless tolerance engages the incomprehensible, the contemptible or the detestable, it is nothing much more than indifference. It isn’t a line. It’s a process. And it’s one that invites and almost requires a level of discomfort.”
Coming from a secular law court in an increasingly secularized society, that is especially when you’re looking at the nation of Canada, that’s a very important paragraph. It’s important though for a couple of reasons. For one thing it tells us that those who uphold a traditional definition of marriage may well be holding ideas that in the view of the larger society around us, especially its elites, are – to use the words of the Supreme Court Justice – detestable, contemptible, or incomprehensible.
So from a Christian worldview perspective the first thing we need to recognize is that the worldview chasm that separates those committed to biblical Christianity and those committed to the new sexual revolution, that chasm is so deep that from one side to the other it is almost incomprehensible. And the views across that divide are increasingly seen as detestable or contemptible. We’re not talking about the possibility of much middle ground here.
The background of this story is of course that Trinity Western University is one the very few evangelical institutions of higher education in the nation of Canada. And it is the only of those universities to offer an accredited law school – the only Christian worldview based law school in the entire nation of Canada. That’s why this particular law school has been the focus of so much attention—that’s why it’s actually the focus of so much opposition. Because [of] the largely secular society in Canada – and remember that Canada here mirrors the secularization of Europe more than it does the pattern of the United States – the Canadian law societies have generally responded with abject horror to the idea that there might be a single law school in that nation that would be based on a Christian worldview; and that regardless of its intellectual achievement will be considered contemptible and detestable because it dares to hold students to a code that actually matches the biblical expectation, the biblical understanding of marriage, the restriction of sexual activity to marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman.
American evangelicals, for that matter American Christians, watching this from afar – and it’s not too far; let’s keep in mind, we are only talking about British Columbia, not far across America’s northern border with Washington state – we’re looking at a story that could well be unfolding here in the 50 states of the USA. We’re looking at a story that is now threatened, at least in terms of some academic institutions; just think as we talked earlier this week about the challenge now being faced by Gordon College in suburban Boston, Massachusetts.
In one of the most important sections of the decision handed down by Justice Campbell are included these words,
“People have the right to attend a private religious university that imposes a religiously based code of conduct,”
He went on to write,
“Requiring a person to give up that right in order to get his or her professional education is an infringement of religious freedom,”
That is an exceptionally important series of words. That’s a very important statement, it’s also rather unexpected. And one of the biggest questions now being faced is whether this is the kind of decision that’s going to stand not only the test of time, but the test of other challenges that might come from within the very same nation, within Canada. Because the law society has indicated that even as it is reviewing its options going forward, it isn’t going to happily comply with the Supreme Court Justice’s opinion.
But there are other aspects to that we should also note. I mention there were two huge insights coming from the Justice’s opinion. The first is that we find ourselves as a moral minority. What sociologist call a cognitive minority in the larger secular American culture – increasingly so; especially as that culture is defined by the elites. The second thing we need to understand is that religious liberty here wasn’t defended as staunchly as we might have hoped, as staunchly as mighty have been possible in the United States where at least we claim to stand behind the words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. There is no exactly equivalent language in terms of the Canadian Constitution.
But this leads to a third aspect of this good news from Canada and that is as attorney Barry Bussey pointed out, the decision isn’t really about whether LGBT equality rights are more or less important than the religious freedoms of evangelical Christians, as the attorney wrote, it’s not a value judgment in that sense at all; it is first about whether the law society had the authority to do what it did. Now that’s a very important point. Sometimes important cases are won or lost on what is basically a technicality. But when you’re talking about technicalities remember the laws is a technical object. The law answers and asks certain questions. And when judges cite the law, it is a very technical argument that often prevails.
In this case what people on both sides might’ve been looking for was either a ringing vindication of religious liberty or a ringing vindication of the rights of those who are defined by sexual orientation in terms of Canadian law. What might have been expected from either side in this debate was that there would be some careful adjudication of the relative balance of those liberties – the liberties I’ve written about recently as being a contest between religious liberty and a newly defined liberty we might call erotic liberty. But that’s not exactly what happened here. Instead, this court decided that the law society – again it was the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society – actually didn’t have the authority to make such a ruling in the first place. It didn’t actually say that the ruling was wrong or that the ruling was right, or than in any other legislative context the decision might’ve been right or might’ve been wrong. They simply said the law society had no right to make the policy whatsoever and thus the policy decision was null and void.
Lastly, even though this is good news it’s not comprehensive good news because we still don’t know exactly about the future of the law school at Trinity Western University. As CBC news, that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News, reported,
“Last month, the British Columbia government revoked its support for the law school, saying the university can’t enroll students in the program because of the ‘uncertainty’ over approval by the B.C. Law Society.”
Meanwhile the University said that it will also take legal action against other law societies that, like the law society in Nova Scotia, ruled against their graduates being recognized. According to the CBC that would include the Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario, meanwhile law societies in Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Labrador and Nunavut, have decided to accept Trinity Western graduates.
Every time a decision like this comes along there is the temptation to say this one’s a clear win, that one’s a clear loss, but as is so often the case when you look at the actual decision handed down by the courts it’s not so easy. What’s really required here is to look closely at what’s being said. What’s being said is that in the view of the larger view of the cultural elites, when you look at an institution that is solely based in and committed to fundamental Christian morality, you’re looking at institution that is now so distant from the worldview of the elites that it can be described in terms like incomprehensible, detestable, and contemptible.
But coming from Canada, coming for Nova Scotia, it’s at least very good news that a Supreme Court justice in a decision handed down this week in the year 2015 included the words,
“People have the right to attend a private religious university that imposes a religiously based code of conduct,”
And then to continue,
“Requiring a person to give up that right in order to get his or her professional education is an infringement of religious freedom,”
Of course it is and it should have been recognized. And at least in this case, to some extent, it was.
2) White House shift on Taliban terminology review danger of misleading euphemisms
Next, while we’re talking about legal decisions or even a casual conversation, Christians understand that words matter. Even as being made in the image of God includes, at least in part, that we are linguistic creatures; we are able to form words, to say words, to write words, and understand words, indeed to be addressed by a divinely revealed word. We also understand that language matters in ways that are deeply revealing, deeply revealing in moral terms. After all, as many have pointed out, one of the things we have to note is the substitution in terms of moral language for a euphemism. As has been pointed out during the 20th century for instance, you can trace a moral revolution in the language that is used to describe the same thing. Something for instance that was first called ‘adultery’ then became known as an ‘affair’ and then later simply ‘extramarital sex.’
What we’re talking about here is the fact that sin is often rationalized by the process of using a euphemism, by euphemizing it. If we call it something else we can sometimes even trick ourselves into thinking it is something else. Of course we’re not just talking about sexual sins, this can be done with the sin of pride or the sin of gluttony or any other sin – frankly it can be done with almost any aspect of human living. But when it comes to defining evil that’s where euphemisms become most dangerous and most revealing and that’s where we better pay the most attention.
That’s why an article that appeared in yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal is urgent from the Christian worldview even though most of the people who might be first immediately concerned with the article will be foreign-policy experts and politicians. Here’s the headline, White House Labels Taliban and Armed Insurgency Not Terrorists, it’s by Byron Tau, again writing yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. As Tau writes,
“The White House is drawing a sharp distinction between Afghanistan’s Taliban and the Islamic State — describing the Taliban as an ‘armed insurgency.’”
When the White House spokesman was asked yesterday about a plan by the nation of Jordan to swap a would-be suicide bomber for a Jordanian pilot being held by Islamic state militants, the White House reiterated the long-standing policy, says Tau, of the United States to refuse negotiations with terrorists. Eric Schultz, White House spokesman, said yesterday,
“Our policy is that we don’t pay ransom, that we don’t give concessions to terrorist organizations,”
He went on to say,
“This is a longstanding policy that predates this administration and it’s also one that we communicated to our friends and allies across the world,”
Well that’s one of those statements that means less than first meets the eye because the whole point of the Wall Street Journal article – and the whole point of world attention now to the White House spokesman’s statement – is not so much the statement which was indeed communicated – that the United States does not negotiate nor pay ransom to terrorist – but the fact that it all comes down to how the White House defines a group as a terrorist organization or, as the White House spokesman revealed yesterday when referencing the Taliban, merely an “armed insurgency.”
Now as I said, this gets to be very interesting because last year the White House was involved in a prisoner swap with the Taliban in Afghanistan – you’ll remember that that included US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The White House spokesman said yesterday, we do not negotiate with terrorist organizations nor pay ransom to terrorist organizations, but the Taliban isn’t a terrorist organization. The problem is the United States government still says that it is. As a matter fact, even as the US does not list the Taliban on the foreign terrorist organization list run by the State Department, it does list the Taliban as a terrorist organization on its separate “specially designated global terrorism list.” It has done so since 2002. And the National Counterterrorism Center – remember, that’s also the same government otherwise known as the United States government – also lists the Taliban presence in Afghanistan on a map of global terrorism.
Furthermore, and horrifyingly, let me just remind you that it was the Taliban in Pakistan that murdered 145 people, including mostly young teenage students most of them boys involved in a private high school in the nation of Pakistan just before Christmas of last year. It was universally recognized as one of the worst acts of terrorism in the year 2014. But the White House now says the Taliban isn’t the terrorist group; if it were a terrorist group we couldn’t negotiate with them. Since we are negotiating with them, they must not be a terrorist group.
Now my point in this case is not to suggest that the Obama administration is doing something new when it comes to national politics, national defense, and foreign relations. We can almost be assured that there has been a bipartisan tradition of this kind of labeling and relabeling largely due to the fact that every administration is having to be rather nimble in terms of dealing with a lot of these issues. But there is a deep question of principle here and that deep question of principle is a lot deeper than a partisan question. Is indeed the United States violating our own sense of morality by a selective identification of some groups as terrorist and others as not when they are engaged in the very same horrifying behaviors?
But here we simply return where we began, with the process of euphemization and a classic example. We began with adultery that’s now considered by many just an extramarital affair or a fling, and then we compare that to the statement made by the White House spokesman yesterday when he said when it comes to the Taliban, they’re not actually a terrorist group – merely “an armed insurgency.” Let me point out the obvious moral lesson, if you were killed by an armed insurgency or a terrorist organization it doesn’t matter what someone calls it, it matters what is done; it matters what they do and what they believe and who they are.
And one of the principles of the Christian worldview, regardless of its partisan application, is that we ought to call things what they are. We have to call things by their real name. And that’s especially true for Christians the closer we get to the question of evil; we dare not call evil anything other than what it is.
3) Stunning viewership of Super Bowl represent human desire for spectacle
It seems almost superfluous to suggest to Americans that they should remember that Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday and of course Americans are going be watching that game by the tens of millions – perhaps even over 100 million in the United States watching that game. It is a major cultural development and sad to say, it will get a great deal more attention it’s likely, in terms of our society, on the Lord’s Day than what will actually take place in thousands of evangelical churches where there will actually be far more people attending the worship of the one true and living God on Sunday morning than there will be even watching that game on Sunday afternoon.
The National Football League is going to be looking to this game, at least in part, as a way to overcome a series of moral catastrophes that were largely self-inflicted by the league this year. And yet one of the things we need to watch from a Christian worldview perspective is what the game itself represents. It tells us that human beings, social creatures that we are, are inherently drawn to a spectacle.
Postmodern philosophers have tried to argue largely based in the worldview of Marxism that these spectacles are often used by the powers that be in order to entrance and distract a society that otherwise would be rebelling against those very powers that be. There’s a sense in which the ancient Roman emperors understood this when they opened the Coliseum and said to what people really wanted was, in the words famous to the Roman Empire, “bread and circuses,” – probably an emphasis on circuses. But human nature wasn’t changed during the Roman Empire and it hasn’t changed until now. We are still a society that is drawn to spectacles; we as a species tend to want to go to see what a crowd is looking at, what must be happening, and what we must be seeing in order to know.
The Olympian, a newspaper in Washington state, points out that the evolution of the Super Bowl is itself an indication of the growth of a spectacle. The very first Super Bowl was held in 1967, the ticket sold for $12; 62,000 people attended and about a third of the stadium was empty. The idea for the Super Bowl goes back to Pete Roselle, then head of the NFL, and he thought he had a good idea and in terms of the idea growing to be something really big, he evidently did have an idea that would only grow.
Even as the tickets back at the first Super Bowl cost $12, as Craig Hill and Darrin Beene report for The Olympian, you are hardly going to be able to buy a snack from a concession for that amount in the year 2015. The tickets are now selling at the website Stubhub for about $3,455 – that’s if indeed you are able to get one. Super Bowl XLIX is expected to be the biggest spectacle yet. Parking passes for Super Bowl XLIX are now expected to sell for about $85 – again, if you can find one. Super Bowl XLIX is going to be held in the region of Phoenix, Arizona and it is going to feature the Seattle Seahawks versus the New England Patriots and that’s about what I know about Super Bowl XLIX in terms of the actual sport.
In terms of sports commentary you can find better elsewhere, for that matter you can probably find better anywhere. But my point in bringing up Super Bowl XLIX is to point out, to Christians in particular, that we are a creature drawn to spectacle and perhaps we need to think about the fact that we are known by our spectacles. By their spectacles we might say, using that old adage, we shall know them. There is certainly something in moral terms to be said for the progress whereby we’ve gone from the Coliseum in ancient Rome – which was a matter of life and death, often in the most brutally grotesque terms and often with Christians being the martyrs there on the very floor of the amphitheater – to where we’re now looking at very heavily padded professional athletes who are also very well-paid, laying in a contest that isn’t for life and death and is for something else; included in that something else is a lot of money and no short amount of secular glory.
But one other issue also demands our attention and that is that like so many spectacles, this is a battle for the eyes. Advertisements on the Super Bowl – that’s 30 seconds of air time – are going to sell for $4.5 million. $4.5 million for 30 seconds of an opportunity – just maybe – to capture your eyes for a few moments. Here again there’s nothing inherently great or horrible about that, just very revealing. It tells us that there is a battle for our eyes going on all the time. Not always so blatant and graphic as this, but in this case the battle for our eyes, especially in consumer terms, is considered so valuable that people are going to pay just for the airtime $4.5 million for 30 seconds.
Of course the battle for our eyes goes far beyond the issue of a consumer economy. It touches every aspect of our lives – everything we see, all of our intake. And we need to keep that in mind. There is a battle for our eyes, a battle for the eyes of our children, a battle for the eyes of our soul. The easiest way to be a victim of that battle is not to know there is a battle in the first place.
4) 50th Anniversary of Churchill’s funeral reminder of historic significance of the man
Finally, 50 years ago today Britain observed the state funeral for Sir Winston Spencer Churchill. It’s hard for me to imagine that I was then a five-year-old boy when one of the greatest men of the modern age died and when Britain responded with the state funeral that became the largest state funeral, in terms of attendance, of any in the history of the world. Those who know me best – in fact those who know me much at all – know that I have a tremendous interest in Winston Churchill and have ever since I was a 13-year-old when assigned to write a paper on a great person from history.
I really don’t have any idea why as a 13-year-old I immediately reported that I would write on Winston Churchill, but write I did. And he has been an influence, something of an historic role model, and of course also a conversation partner of sorts, ever since I was that 13-year-old writing that history paper. But of course to raise Winston Churchill is to raise a couple of questions. One is, is there any validity to the great man theory of history. The second is how should Christians evaluate secular leaders – someone of the scale of Winston Churchill? But I’m out of time for today, so I’ll have to talk about that next week on The Briefing. I’ll meet you then.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.
The Briefing 01-30-15
1) Legal win for Trinity Western Law school dodges choice between religious and erotic liberty
Nova Scotia’s top court upholds Trinity Western accreditation, The Globe and Mail (Andrea Woo)
Trinity Western law students OK to practise in Nova Scotia, CBC News (Blair Rhodes)
2) White House shift on Taliban terminology review danger of misleading euphemisms
White House Labels Taliban ‘Armed Insurgency,’ Not Terrorists, Wall Street Journal (Byron Tau)
3) Stunning viewership of Super Bowl represent human desire for spectacle
Super Bowl’s evolution “stunning to everybody”, The Olympian (Craig Hill and Darrin Beene)
5 Ways This Year’s Super Bowl Ads Will Be Like No Other, TIME (Brad Tuttle)
4) 50th Anniversary of Churchill’s funeral reminder of historic significance of the man
Winston Churchill, Wikipedia
January 29, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 01-29-15
The Briefing
January 29, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Thursday, January 29, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Opposition to sex-selective abortion ban absolute marginalization of baby for sake of choice
In the end when you look at the worldview clash over the question of the sanctity of human life there are really not a myriad of positions. There are really two positions; both of them at their essence are somewhat absolutist. To say somewhat absolutist is to point to the problem. They actually are absolutist in some sense, the somewhat comes as people try to find some middle ground where no middle ground actually, for long, exist.
Evidence of that comes from Birmingham, England and Pam Lowe, a professor at Aston University in that British city, has written an article entitled If Abortion Is A Choice Then Sex Selection Abortion Should Remain Legal. This is one of those issues that really presses the point; it really makes the case very clear. Because here we have a professor arguing that making sex selection abortions illegal implies – now get this straight – that at least some abortions might be wrong, even immoral.
Now here you have the absolutism of the pro-choice, the pro-abortion, position. It’s an absolutism that says the moment you say that any abortion might be wrong, evil, or perhaps even just ill advised, you’re actually trampling on what they claim is the moral absolute. And that is a woman’s unfettered right to an abortion, to control her own body – in their language – regardless of any other circumstance, including the fact that the life within her is a human life. Writing at the journal Science 2.0, Lowe writes,
“A campaign is underway in the United Kingdom to make it illegal to abort a child based on its gender.
Proponents say they are worried about women being coerced into terminating female fetuses and that action needs to be taken to stop discrimination against baby girls.
But this is a flawed argument. [She then writes] You cannot promote gender equality by enacting laws that place restrictions on women’s bodies. Banning sex-selective abortion opens up a world in which there is such thing as a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ reason for an abortion. What’s more, it implies coercion is a reproductive health issue rather than what it actually is – an act of domestic violence.”
Two big moral issues glare at us here. The first is the sanctity of human life, that’s the biggest issue. The Christian biblical worldview affirms that the Bible is very clear about the sanctity and dignity of every single human life, at every point of development, regardless of ability or disability. To those who argue that that is an absolutist position, we eventually have to respond with intellectual honesty: it is a biblical absolute.
Matters of life and death are treated directly and honestly in Scripture, but it is also very clear that you cannot deny what life is. You cannot deny that every single human being is a creature intentionally created by the creator for His glory and with an inherent dignity and sovereignty that exists solely because every single human being is a divine creation, and furthermore, every single human being is an image bearer, bearing the very image of God. So the first moral insight we need to think about from this story is that the absolute on the other side, that a woman should have an unfettered unquestioned right to an abortion under any circumstance for any reason or no reason, finally meets its absolute expression in an article in which a professor actually says that one should not oppose sex selection abortions.
Now notice by the way that there have been many who have been arguing that this really isn’t a problem, that sex selection abortions don’t exist; if they did exist of course they would be morally wrong. That’s not the argument she’s making at all. She making the argument that of course they exist, and the fact that they do exist should have nothing to do whatsoever with the morality of abortion – under any circumstance, even if the purpose of the abortion is for the elimination of the child simply because of its gender, and that is almost always because the gender is female.
Authorities on both sides of the issue basically now agree that the number of sex selection abortions in nations such as India and China now amount to over 100 million missing girls and women. So what we have here is something we really need to understand from a worldview perspective. We have the absolutist position, the abortion-rights position in its absolutist form and an obvious question that flows from this is just how many alternative positions can there be and one genuinely be pro-choice or pro-abortion? Because the argument that Pam Lowe is making here is that the moment you suggest that any abortion may be wrong, or even ill advised, what you have is a discrimination against women that is absolutely unacceptable.
The second moral issue we need to see from this particular essay is where she tries to shift to the issue very interestingly and in a somewhat of an original form. She’s arguing that the issue of sex selection abortion, which you’ll notice she does concede is an issue, she says isn’t really an issue of abortion at all; it’s a question of domestic violence. She writes at one point in her essay,
“Categorizing abortion by acceptable or unacceptable reasons needs to be avoided.”
She then writes,
“Women being coerced into terminating a pregnancy on the basis of the foetus’s sex is a serious issue. But we need to be clear that this is not a reproductive health issue, it is domestic violence.”
Well a real problem with that is that what we have is a shifting of the moral question in a very ill advice form, indeed an intellectually dishonest form. Why? Because as people on basically both sides of the issue acknowledge in much of Asia, this is not an issue of coercion. Indeed in many cases the women themselves are aborting the babies when they find out about the gender even without telling anyone else, including their husbands. Could the issue of sex selection abortion be a domestic violence issue? Of course it could and in many cases it probably is and it needs to be addressed that way.
But we cannot allow this moral shift, we can’t allow the issue, the paramount issue, of the dignity and sanctity of human life to be shifted away as if it’s not really the consideration here; of course it is. But what we have here is undeniable evidence of what happens when you buy into the pro-abortion argument. Eventually the baby’s existence as a moral agent has to be denied; the issue of the value of the baby’s life has to be sublimated, it has to be marginalized, it can’t be a part of the discussion. Because, as you can understand, if the issue of the baby does become a part of the discussion, you then can’t hold any kind of absolutist position in terms of the pro-choice argument and if you can’t, than that entire argument begins to filter away, it begins to break up. Because, and this is where Professor Lowe is actually right, she’s right that the moment you begin to accept the fact that some abortions may be wrong, you have to face the question, ‘would not all abortions then be wrong?’
2) US government tracking cars presents challenging interface between technology and morality
The intersection of the Christian worldview and issues of technology receives too little attention, especially by Christians who are living in such a highly technological age. The responsibility falls on us to try to think these things through in terms of a biblical worldview. That’s not always easy and technologies always bring new questions even as new technologies emerge. But how about this for a headline in Tuesday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Spies on Millions of Drivers, the subhead, ‘DEA Uses License-Plate Readers to Build Database for Federal, Local Authorities.’ Well that’s a headline that tells us that the United States is spying on millions of cars, but of course the United States government isn’t primarily concerned with cars but rather with those are driving them and riding in them. And what the patterns revealed in terms of this evidence tells them.
Frankly I don’t this story is getting the attention that it deserves. Devlin Barrett writes,
“The Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists, according to current and former officials and government documents.”
According to Barrett, the primary goal of the license plate tracking programs run by the DEA – that’s the Drug Enforcement Administration – is to seize cars, cash, and other assets to combat drug trafficking. However, it’s also being used to,
“…hunt for vehicles associated with numerous other potential crimes, from kidnappings to killings to rape suspects, say people familiar with the matter.”
Of course in the background of this is the war on terror and the fact that after 9/11 2001 the government has been collecting reams of information – millions and billions of bits of information – about ordinary Americans; not Americans who are necessarily under any suspicion at all. You see the clear implication of this article is that many, many cars are being tracked and all of this data is being collected. Not just about targeted cars but about cars in general; any car that may pass through an intersection that has one of these cameras. But the technological question and the moral questions here are absolutely huge because for instance there are complaints that the government shouldn’t be collecting this data. That the data should exist in the first place and that the government can’t be trusted with this kind of data.
Now let’s just back up a moment. A good case might be made that way. Indeed, when you’re looking at this kind of news report it’s hard not to draw conjuring of the prophecies of someone like George Orwell and his book 1984 or Aldous Huxley in his prophetic novel Brave New World. It is a scary world in which, quite frankly, people are being able to track the movement of cars by the license plates that are photographed simply by going through an intersection. But let’s track this the other way. What happens if you’re missing a child and that child just might have been kidnapped and there’s at least some evidence that could track authorities to identify a vehicle? It would be rather reassuring to know that there might be data coming in that would, in real-time, tell law enforcement officials where that car might be, where it might be headed. If you are missing a child, that might be a very reassuring fact.
The very same newspaper, that is the Wall Street Journal, pointed out in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris that one of the interesting dilemmas faced by Americans is that Americans don’t want the data collected but they want the data used. That’s a very interesting quandary. Americans say they don’t trust their government to collect all this data whether by tracking the mail or telephone or email or any number of other data means, but on the other hand they do what the government to be able to identify patterns that would lead to a terrorist attack and prevent that attack. In other words, we want as that old expression used to say, to have our cake and eat it too.
Civil libertarians are up at arms even as this data continues to be collected. And by the way, it’s not clear that any court is involved in any way in supervising or in authorizing this kind of data collection. And the government appears to be continuing to do it; something that was known to Congress, in terms of these kinds of cameras close to the American border with Mexico, but wasn’t so well known, at least were told, even by Congress, when it comes to the rest of the United States. Reports are – if these reports can be trusted – that the most camera rich environment on the planet is the city of London, where if you step outside a building or even inside a public area in a building, you’re likely to be on camera somewhere. One of the other top ranks cities in terms of this kind of surveillance was New York City – you’re not surprised.
And there’s another aspect of this a many people don’t think about. There is nothing to stop a private company from placing a camera somewhere to collect this very data. In other words, if you’re driving on the highway, on public streets, and you’re going through an intersection – or for that matter just passing a piece of property – there is no promise, and there probably shouldn’t be the expectation, that someone isn’t photographing the license plate and documenting it somewhere, storing that data for some kind of use.
Another one of the quandaries that is often noted in terms of the morality of this equation is that many of the people who complain about the government collecting this data – and by the way, I think this is a rather challenging kind of moral question – these are the very same people that routinely click off permission for people to store any number of data points about them, right down to exactly what they’re saying, what they’re buying, with whom they are relating, and even what they’re having for dinner. This is one of those issues that isn’t getting enough attention and it’s not getting enough discussion because we lack the moral vocabulary, even as Christians often, to wonder how we should talk about these things, how we should think about these things.
I’m reminded of a very influential French theologian of the last generation, Jacques Ellul, who wrote about what he called the technological imperative. And he wrote about it even before the digital age. He makes a very important Christian worldview point and that is this, when a new technology arrives it comes with a set of its own imperatives. First the issue is what may we use this technology for. The second question is, and it comes very quickly, why are you not using this technology, because the technology itself insist upon its own use. This is the technological imperative.
You ask, how does that work? Well just consider some of the questions now being faced by parents when it comes to their own children and cell phones and the ability to track their children. Some people will say, ‘You know it’s wrong to track teenagers. You shouldn’t be having them so much under your thumb that you would insist upon knowing where they are at any time.’ And then if anything happens to a teenager and you didn’t do that, people will save to you, ‘why weren’t you being responsible and tracking your teenager so that you knew at every single moment where that teenager might be?’ And of course from a Christian worldview perspective the question is, ‘why would anyone want to hide?’ And yet the other question is where does human dignity come into where our every movement, thought, click on screen, and dinner menu becomes a matter of someone’s use of data collection?
On some issues the Christian worldview says this is right and this is wrong, on other issues the Christian worldview reminds us there are excruciating questions we have to struggle with and think about – questions that are actually rather contextual in some cases and complex in any case. Should Christians use some technology? Must Christians not use some technologies? Are there technologies that it’s irresponsible not to use? Are there technologies that are wrong under all circumstances? Do we live in a world of continual moral negotiation with our new digital technologies? You bet we do.
The Wall Street Journal thought this story was important to put on the front page of the newspaper but what’s missing (and we can understand why it’s missing) is what we’re supposed to do with this. Because it appears even the Wall Street Journal isn’t exactly sure; nor is Congress. And for Christians these are questions we really need to think about and we need to think about them very intently. But there is not going to be an easy answer to this, nor a quick answer, and if there were, there would be a new technology around the corner with a new set of questions.
3) Generation of young shut-ins of Japan exposes need for rich community of the church
I want to shift, finally, to a different story that appeared also in Tuesday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, this one’s just heartbreaking – very sad. The headline, The Fight to Save Japan’s Generation of Shut-Ins. It’s by Shirley Wang writing from Fukuoka, Japan. You know when you think about the term ‘shut-ins’ I think back to my childhood when shut-ins were those who were almost always elderly; they were those who at some point, in terms of their aging, had reached the point that they couldn’t get out of their homes or their nursing homes. I can remember as a child and as a teenager going as part of youth choirs to visit shut-ins and that was considered an important part of church ministry for pastors and for Christian brothers and sisters.
We don’t will hear that term used so often, but you know the number of those who are shut-ins hasn’t grown smaller, it’s actually grown larger in this age of extended lifespans. But the really interesting thing about this article in the Wall Street Journal is that it is not about the aged, not about the aged at all. It’s about something that we’ve been reading about for some time, but not with this kind of intense focus. It’s about a generation known as the hikikomori, they are a generation of young Japanese teenagers and adults who have shut themselves in and are not even leaving their rooms – much less leaving their homes. There are an estimated 500,000 to 2,000,000 hikikomori in the nation of Japan. As Wang writes,
“When the Kimura family moved here from Tokyo, their middle school-aged daughter missed her old friends. Midway into her first year in high school, she stopped going. Between 14 and 19, she barely left the house, and for one year hardly left her room, interacting only with her parents.
Now 33 and recovered, Ms. Kimura says she was ‘hikikomori.’ That’s the name of a type of social withdrawal that can be so severe, people with it don’t leave their houses for years. It’s also what those who suffer from the condition are called.”
Now one of things that emerges from this story and the research behind it is that most of the hikikomori are actually not young girls, the vast majority are young men and teenage boys. As Shirley Wang says, the hikikomori have been a household word in Japan since the 1990s and many Japanese experts call it one of the biggest social and health problems plaguing the country. As Wang writes,
“Sufferers often are men in their 20s and 30s who would be in the workforce but instead are being supported largely by their parents. Government officials worry about who will take responsibility for long-term hikikomori when their parents retire or die.”
Cultural differences come to the fore here even in this report from Japan because some of the authorities in Japan point to differences between Western parenting styles and Asian parenting styles. Western parents, according to this report, are far more eager and effective at aiming their children to the outside world – they consider that an important part of parenting. Asian parents, in particular Japanese parents, according to this article, are not so pushy with their children when it comes to the outside world and they’re reluctant often to address the problem of the hikikomori even when one is living in their own home.
There are other cultural issues that come before; the Japanese educational system is extremely difficult for many young Japanese students, especially adolescents. The sectoring off of students for university on the one hand – a very small minority – and then for the workforce on the other, raises expectations for parents and children that many of them seem to be unable to endure. But as we were talking about technology in the last segment, technology plays a role here too because many, many of the hikikomori are actually either addicted to digital technology or they find greater satisfaction, or at least a refuge, from the outside world in the digital world.
So once again we face that issue of technology but we also face an issue that is very important to the Christian worldview, and that is that we were created at social creatures. We were created in the image of God; first of all so that we can have fellowship with the creator, but we were also created as social creatures – we are not meant to live alone. That’s not a conclusion to which we came, dependent upon sociological evidence, that’s the declaration of our creator in Genesis 2; at the very beginning of the human story. And that Christian affirmation of the fact that we were meant for community and meant for communion points to our responsibility that is really twofold, first of all to make certain that we are related in the way we should be related, and secondly to make certain that we relate in the way that we should relate. That’s one of the reasons why the church is so important in Christian theology, why ecclesiology is such a core doctrine, because our church life is a preparation for eternity in the communion for which we were created. What we should have in every single local church is a repository of the kingdom, a symbol of the kind of Christian community that should emerge from the gospel congregation. A gospel congregation that understands relatedness as brothers and sisters in Christ as a Christian gospel responsibility, not just something that should be a part of the program of the church but what should be the evidence of the gospel itself, lived out in the faithfulness of Christian believers.
In so many these new stories we confront the question is not so much what’s there but what’s not there. And when I read this article, heartbreaking as it is, it appears to me that what’s not there, in a very large sense for Christians, is the church. Where the church is present, this should be, if not nonexistent, than at least very rare and directly addressed. Not merely because we see the problem as sociological, though the Japanese are right, it certainly is, but because we see this problem as deeply theological and thus our responsibility.
So once again as read many headlines and then look beyond the headline to the news article, we need to read such things and analyze such issues not just with the question ‘what’s here?’ but ‘what’s missing?’ and for many Christians the first thing we should notice is what’s missing is the gospel, and what is also missing is the Church.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
The Briefing 01-29-15
1) Opposition to sex-selective abortion absolute marginalization of baby for sake of choice
If Abortion Is A Choice Then Sex Selection Abortion Should Remain Legal, Science 2.0 (Pam Lowe)
2) US government tracking cars presents challenging interface between technology and morality
U.S. Spies on Millions of Drivers, Wall Street Journal (Devlin Barrett)
3) Generation of young shut-ins of Japan exposes need for rich community of the church
The Fight to Save Japan’s Young Shut-Ins, Wall Street Journal (Shirley S. Wang)
January 28, 2015
Transcript: The Briefing 01-28-15
The Briefing
January 28, 2015
This is a rush transcript. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
It’s Wednesday, January 28, 2015. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
1) Mormon church offers LGBT rights support in exchange for religious liberty protection
This morning’s edition of the Washington Post reports a story that is being widespread across the nation’s media and newspapers; the headline in the Post, Mormon Church Announces Support for Legal Protections for Gay People. Michelle Boorstein and Abby Ohlheiser report,
“After years of behind-the-scenes meetings between LGBT advocates and top Mormon leaders, church officials Tuesday announced for the first time general support for legislation to protect LGBT people in areas such as housing and employment – as long as accommodations are made to protect the freedom of religious people who oppose such measures.”
Almost immediately, even after yesterday, the LDS church had held a press conference making this announcement. And with the presence of some of his most high-profile leaders, people on both sides of this issue responded that the proposal appears to be rather strange; strange in construction and strange in timing. It’s an understandable kind of proposal coming at this point in America’s moral revolution. The understandable part is this: here you have a major religious body – in this case the group officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as Mormons, often shortened to the LDS church – what you have here is a major religious organization in America that is claiming it can support the movement for gay rights and for the civil rights of gays and lesbians, as is now commonly defined in terms of the moral revolution, so long as respect is given for religious liberty.
The lead paragraph in that article in this morning’s Washington Post gets right to the point when the reporters write that the church has announced general support for legislation to protect LGBT people in areas such as housing and employment, but the next words are especially crucial,
“– as long as accommodations are made to protect the freedom of religious people who oppose such measures.”
Now, once again, almost anyone who understands the scope and scale of today’s moral revolution will understand why such a proposal might be made. But if you’re looking at the landscape of America today this appears to be a proposal that comes rather too late to be genuinely helpful. And perhaps the response to the proposal yesterday helps to make that point more than anything else.
I’ve had the privilege of meeting with several top Mormon leaders; speaking at Brigham Young University and meeting with some of the very people involved in the public announcement yesterday. I was always treated with great dignity and respect, and I was given an opportunity for a very honest exchange of conviction. When I was meeting with these Mormon leaders I was able to affirm common concerns when it comes to both the protection of marriage and the protection of religious liberty. At the same time, as I made clear in both of my lectures at Brigham Young University, there is a great theological chasm between biblical Christianity and the LDS church. As I said in both of those lectures, I don’t believe we are going to heaven together, but I do believe we’re at risk of going to jail together. It’s that second concern in some sense that drove the announcement coming from the LDS church yesterday. But almost immediately it was clear that the leadership of the LGBT movement isn’t going to buy this kind of bargain.
As Fred Sainz, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign said,
“As a matter of policy, there’s no ‘there’ there. ‘The so-called religious exemption is the size of five Mack trucks.’”
He went on to say,
“It entirely neuters their proposal.”
In a way that is at least partially parallel to the situation in the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Francis the first, yesterday the LDS church made very clear there is no change in the basic doctrine of the church – a doctrine that identifies marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman and identifies all sexual activity outside of marriage as wrong and sinful. That is, again, the very position that the Roman Catholic Church now appears to be taking even as Pope Francis is declared to have a new openness to the issue; the church continues, officially to teach, in terms of its dogma, that same-sex relations are always and in every case intrinsically disordered and thus sin.
Even as that HRC spokesman said there’s no ‘there’ there, Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times this morning says, what the Mormon Church wants is freedom to discriminate. Now what I want us to note in this statement coming in the New York Times is the fact that the proposal that was made, apparently in good faith by the LDS leaders yesterday, is being rejected out of hand and what is being rejected is that there’s any credibility to their claim to support LGBT rights in any sense if they then claim a religious accommodation or exception. This is what Rosenthal had to write,
“The Mormon church is now willing, news accounts says, to support anti-discrimination legislation in the realms of housing and employment. In return, all the Mormons want are laws that ‘protect religious freedom.’
We already have that. It’s called the Bill of Rights. So what is the church really after?”
So what is the church really after? He goes on to say that the bottom line in the LDS press conference is,
“…what they want is legal permission to use their religion as an excuse to discriminate.”
What I want to note is just how far the moral revolutionaries have pushed this issue. Because what we’re looking at is the LDS church basically asking for what almost anyone in the gay-rights movement would have been ready to grant as recently as 2 to 3 years ago – certainly 5 to 10 years ago. What’s really ominous in Rosenthal’s column is where he writes, citing the Associated Press,
“Mormon leaders still want to hire and fire workers based not only on religious beliefs, but also on behavior standards known as honor codes that require gays and lesbians to remain celibate or marry someone of the opposite sex. The church [and again this is the Associated Press] also wants legal protections for religious objectors who work in government and health care, such as a physician who refuses to perform an abortion, or provide artificial insemination for a lesbian couple.”
What’s really ominous is what Andrew Rosenthal then writes; I quote his words directly,
“Substitute the word ‘black’ or ‘Jewish’ or ‘Catholic’ or, say, ‘Mormon’ for LGBT in these statements, and everyone would be outraged.”
So now you have Rosenthal drawing an absolute parallel and it’s a very ominous parallel. We also need to note that the Associated Press report that he cites points out, for instance, that there are those who have long been contending for conscience clauses for people such as physicians to allow them to exercise their conscience not to perform an abortion. The very clear implication, indeed is not an application it’s basically an outright statement in Rosenthal’s column, is that that is in a legitimate form of discrimination. And that’s where we see the collapse of the religious liberty that Rosenthal says is so well protected by the Bill of Rights.
Christians need to remember at this point that the Bill of Rights is a series of words; it is a matter of language, it is a matter of syntax and grammar. It does not have an army; it doesn’t come with its own method of enforcement. It is only as good as the society ready to protect it, and that means to protect every citizen when it comes to that Bill of Rights. What we are now witnessing is a radical acceleration of the movement to redefine religious liberty so that means almost nothing – or as Frank Bruni’s column said a couple weeks ago in the New York Times, ‘if it means something, it’s only in the pulpit, only in the home, and only in the heart. Not in the public square’
2) Gordon College fallout reveals shocking velocity of leftist history towards intolerance
No one has made this point more graphically in recent days than David French writing in the pages of National Review magazine; the title of his article is The Persecution of Gordon College. You’ll recall the fact that we’ve talked about this in weeks and months passed. Gordon College in suburban Boston, Massachusetts; it’s president simply signed a letter in his personal capacity in which he wrote to the President of the United States as President Obama was poised to issue his order on basically what is called ENDA, or the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. The President issued an Executive Order having to do with the federal government and vendors to the federal government and all of its parts.
Michael Lindsay, the President of Gordon College, wrote these words,
“We have great appreciation for your commitment to human dignity and justice, and we share those values with you. With respect to the proposed executive order, we agree that banning discrimination is a good thing. We believe that all persons are created in the divine image of the creator, and are worthy of respect and love, without exception. Even so, it still may not be possible for all sides to reach a consensus on every issue.”
Michael Lindsay’s letter, in which he was joined by many other institutional presidents, called upon the President to allow for a religious exemption in terms of these policies for colleges, universities, and others that would have genuine conscience issue when it comes to this kind of question of discrimination. The President’s Executive Order did not include that kind of clause.
This is where David French’s article is really important. French writes,
Indeed, the letter did not ask the President to halt the planned order. Instead, it merely asked for an exemption for religious institutions contracting with the federal government. An exemption that was actually [and this is what’s important] narrower in its impact than one Democrats had passed overwhelmingly through the Senate with the support of none other than Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts’ junior Senator, an undisputed champion of the left.”
How recently was that? Was it way back in 1825? No, it was back in 2013. Not exactly yet a vintage year.
French writes,
“In 2013 Warren voted for the Employment Nondiscrimination Act [that’s the ENDA legislation that the president tried to mirror], a proposed federal law that would ban sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in workplaces across the United States, encompassing tens of thousands more employers than President Obama’s planned Executive Order. Yet, ENDA contained a robust religious exemption, flatly exempting houses of worship and providing broad protections for religious employers who require employees to adhere to statements of religious orthodoxy.”
ENDA passed the Senate. It made no progress in the House, it passed the Senate in November 2013. That’s barely over a year ago. President Lindsay signed his letter eight months later. This is where what French writes is really important, as he writes,
“A lot can change in eight months. The arc of leftist social history moves quickly and it bends toward intolerance.”
So what we see are moves made against a college and its president and now a flat rejection of these exemptions – the kind of exemptions that the LDS leadership called for just yesterday – by the very people who voted for those exemptions a matter of just less than a year and a half ago. When we’re talking about the arc of history, when we’re talking about the speed of this moral revolution, Christians had better come to terms of the fact that this accelerated revolution is gaining velocity virtually day by day.
And finally as we leave the issue for today we need to know that Andrew Rosenthal’s response to the LDS statement yesterday was one that goes beyond even what the Mormon leaders were talking about when it comes to LGBT issues and religious liberty. He brings up the question of abortion by citing that Associated Press article, and immediately after he does so he rejects any such claim.
3) Shifting Middle East political scene exposes harsh reality of leaders worse than dictators
In recent days we have been talking about worldview and the governments that are the product of such worldviews. We’ve talked about the change in government that is taking place in such nations as Greece and Saudi Arabia and how to work backwards from those developments to the worldview that simply makes such regimes and governmental systems possible. But these developments also raise important issues, such as the one that Gerald Seib addresses in yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. His headline US Faces a New Mideast as Strongmen Fade. Gerald Seib’s a veteran observer of foreign affairs and he’s really onto something of worldview significance here. It gets to a big question; what is better? A strong man, an autocrat, a dictator on one hand or something else on the other?
As Gerald Seib makes clear, an honest, moral evaluation is ‘it depends on what the alternative just might be.’ He also points to the fact that the disorder that we’re now experiencing throughout the Middle East is in the aftermath of what had been very strong leadership by people who had been more often than not allies of the United States. And they had been strongmen – uniformly men – who had held power for a very long time, until recently.
For instance he cites King Hussein, ruler Jordan for 47 years. Muammar Gaddafi, the leader of Libya for 42 years. He was sometimes a friend of the United States, more times not. King Hassan, ruler of Morocco for 38 years, Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt for 30 years – one of America’s closest allies as also King Hussein of Jordan had become in his later decades. Hafez al-Assad, President of Syria for 29 years – it’s his son Basshar Assad who is now in power in Syria, very controversially so. And then finally Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq for 24 years until, of course, removed by military efforts of the United States of America and its allies.
Well you look at that list and Saddam Hussein at 24 years had the shortest term of any of these Middle Eastern leaders. The longest was King Hussein of 47 years. There’s currently still want in this alumni class who is ruling. That’s Kuwait’s 85-year-old ruler Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah. He is the latest in a line of family members, says Seib, but he’s also ill. He is indeed 85 years old, and he recently underwent surgery.
Seib then writes,
“Most of these long-lasting rulers were friends of the U.S. Some—Jordan’s King Hussein, for example—were relatively benign. Others—Hafez al Assad, Saddam Hussein—were both unsavory thugs and largely hostile to America.”
He then writes,
“But one thing they had in common is that they used their power and personal authority to quell unrest and the region’s tide of Islamic extremism.”
He also writes – there’s always an ‘on the other hand here,’
“What these rulers also did, though, was bottle up the growing political dissent and religious fervor in their lands, pushing those forces below ground, where they quietly built steam.”
Now this raises a genuinely interesting moral question. Of course, it’s also a pressing political question: what’s better? A dictator or something else? And the clear answer once again is, it depends on what that something else is. Right now, if something else is the Islamic State, most people would morally go back to a dictator who at least had some kind of basically benign rule. In other words, there’s a big difference between a strong man who no doubt puts a lot of people in jail and maybe does worse, and a group such as the Islamic State that is killing people by the thousands and beheading innocent hostages just in order to make a point.
But from a Christian biblical worldview analysis there’s no easy answer to this question. You can’t feel good about a dictator. You can’t feel good about a totalitarian rule no matter how basically benign it may be. But here’s the point: you can feel worse and rightly morally judge something to be worse that is the alternative to that totalitarianism.
This is not a new question. It was a question faced by the United States in the context of the Cold War, when one of most clear thinking political strategist was a woman by the name of Jean Kirkpatrick who later became the United States Ambassador to the United Nations under President Ronald Reagan. She wrote a book back during the Cold War entitled Dictatorships and Double Standards in which she said any honest government such as the United States must have an honest a double standard when it comes to dictators. There are the bad and there are the worse.
I know you hear me say this over and over again, but the only explanation for this kind of moral quandary is the fact that we live in a world that is fallen such that every government is in some sense . The question is which shows the devastation of the fall more graphically? Which government is more dangerous?
The kind of article offered yesterday by Gerald Seib destroys the utopian temptation, the temptation to believe that there could be out there somewhere the kind of utopian dream that would be a government free from the effects of sin. There is no such government. That’s why we have a divided government, the separation of powers by our Constitution. And that’s why when you do not have that and unite all power in a dictator you have a recipe for certain trouble. The big question of course in this very very sinful world is what could be worse than that, and the answer is evidently many things.
4) Marcus Borg, Jesus Seminary scholar, dies as ‘progressive Christian’
Finally an obituary that appeared in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times, it’s by Laurie Goodstein. Here’s the headline; Marcus Borg, liberal Christian scholar, dies at 72. As Goodstein reports,
“Marcus J. Borg, a scholar who popularized a liberal intellectual approach to Christianity with his lectures and books about Jesus as a historical figure, died on Wednesday … He was 72.”
She goes on to write,
“Professor Borg was among a group of scholars, known as the Jesus Seminar, who set off an uproar with its very public efforts to discern collectively which of Jesus’ acts and utterances could be confirmed as historically true, and which were probably myths.
His studies of the New Testament led him not toward atheism but toward a deep belief in the spiritual life and in Jesus as a teacher, healer and prophet. Professor Borg became, in essence, a leading evangelist of what is often called progressive Christianity.”
David Gibson, writing a similar obituary for Religion News Service wrote,
“Alongside scholars such as John Dominic Crossan, Borg was a leader in the Jesus Seminar, which brought a skeptical eye to the Scriptures and in particular to supernatural claims about Jesus’ miracles and his resurrection from the dead.
Like other scholars, Borg tended to view Jesus as a Jewish prophet and teacher who was a product of the religious ferment of first-century Judaism.”
And in a paragraph very similar to that of Laurie Goodstein in terms of the fact that Borg didn’t become an atheist, but a ‘progressive Christian’ to use their terminology, Gibson writes,
“But while Borg questioned the Bible, he never lost his passion for the spiritual life or his faith in God as “real and a mystery,” as he put it in his 2014 memoir, “Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most,” the last of more than 20 books he wrote.”
The obituary of Marcus Borg does bring to mind the legacy of what was known as the Jesus Seminar. It was mentioned explicitly in that New York Times obituary the group was led by man by the name of Robert Funk, and it began as a group of very leftist biblical scholars who gathered together to take a basically anti-supernatural, or nonsupernatural look to the Scriptures and in particular to the New Testament. In their most infamous process they took the four Gospels and they took them apart, basically using – and no, I’m not making this up – four different colored marbles to vote on particular statements acts and claims about Jesus to determine whether or not in their view such statements and acts were actually historically accurate. They came to the conclusion that very little of the New Testament was historically true. In particular, very little of historical content of the four Gospels. They actually published their own version of a red letter New Testament in which, since the words of Jesus they accepted were in red, there was actually very little red in their red letter New Testament.
They used four different colored marbles to vote by putting their marbles out on the table as to whether or not a statement of Jesus was ‘almost assuredly true,’ or ‘maybe true,’ or ‘maybe not true’or ‘almost assuredly not true.’ But as they make clear their own process, they began with the assumption that the Bible is simply an artifact of history. They rejected any supernatural explanation, any claim of divine inspiration, and the began with the assumption that Jesus was merely a human prophet – a Jewish prophet of the first century. And here’s no surprise; the Jesus that they came up with in their process is the Jesus that they defined when they went into that process.
Which reminds me of a statement was made about the so-called Quest for the Historical Jesus. The statement was made by Albert Schweitzer when he said those historical Questers, those who are trying to use the merely historical process to supposedly recover the historical Jesus, were people who were in effect looking down deep in a well and seeing their own reflection, and then claiming that that definition was Jesus.
But the other interesting thing about that New York Times obituary is how it says the Marcus Borg didn’t become an atheist, he retained his belief in something even as he didn’t believe that Jesus Christ was the very son of God, and even as he explicitly denied that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead.
It may well be the Marcus Borg was in no sense an atheist, but he was also in no sense an Orthodox Christian. Anyone who rejects the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is not meeting the very clear statement of the apostle Paul in Romans 10 when he says that salvation comes to the one who confesses with the lips that Jesus Christ is Lord and believes in the heart that God has raised him from the dead. A point that Paul – we believe by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit made emphatically in first Corinthians chapter 15 as well. But here you have evidence of the redefinition of Christianity into what is called ‘progressive Christianity.’ And so I simply conclude where so often I’ve had to go, quoting Gresham Machen, that great Christian scholar of the 20th century who, in the beginning of that century, pointed out the when you’re looking at liberal Christianity and biblical Christianity are not looking to variants of one religion but two very different religions. And the same is true of biblical Christianity and what is now called ‘progressive Christianity.’
Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
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