R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 329

The Briefing 01-22-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Anniversary of Roe v Wade reminder abortion still urgent issue of Christian responsibility

Roe v. Wade – Case Brief Summary, Lawnix

Roe v. Wade, Wikipedia

2) ‘Free-range’ parenting furor displays common grace of society concerned for welfare of children

Montgomery County neglect inquiry shines spotlight on ‘free-range’ parenting, Washington Post (Donna St. George and Brigid Schulte)

Why are we criminalizing childhood independence?, Washington Post (Petula Dvorak)

Parenting Advice From ‘America’s Worst Mom’, New York Times (Jane E. Brody)

Transcript: The Briefing 01-21-14

The Briefing

 

January 20, 2015

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

 

It’s Wednesday, January 21, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Supreme court  decision on beards for inmates significant defense of religious liberty 

Religious liberty for one means religious liberty for all; if rightly understood. And the Supreme Court got that point right yesterday when in a decision handed down unanimously by the court the court ruled that an inmate in a state prison had a right, as a Muslim, to grow a half inch beard.

The background of this is the fact that beards are very important to Muslim men. Not only is it a matter of cultural custom but also because it is a sign of obedience – it is a sign of masculinity, a sign of what it means to be a faithful Muslim man. If you travel in the Muslim world or if you’re in neighborhoods where you see young Muslims you’ll notice that young Muslim men and teenage boys are doing their very best to grow a beard as quickly as they can in order to be recognized by their community as being upright and faithful.

As Richard Wolf of USA Today reports,

“A Supreme Court that has extended the reach of religion into public life in recent years ruled Tuesday that spirituality can overcome even prison security concerns.”

I actually have a problem with that lead sentence; my problem was with the first words. The words are that the Supreme Court has extended the reach of religion into the public life. That’s not at all evident. It certainly wouldn’t be an uncontroversial statement. It’s an arguable point to be sure. But in the next part of the sentence he did get to the case and its importance. The court certainly did not say that the states do not have legitimate security concerns and also concerns about contraband when it comes to prisons. They did say that a regulation that prisoners were not able to grow a beard of a half inch length was an unreasonable refusal to accommodate religious conviction. As Richard Wolf reports,

“The court came down decisively on the side of a Muslim prisoner whose beard had been deemed potentially dangerous by the Arkansas Department of Correction. Growing a beard, the justices said, was a Muslim man’s religious right.”

The decision was unanimous. The majority opinion was written by Justice Samuel Alito and it includes a couple of pretty interesting statements. The Justice wrote,

“Hair on the head is a more plausible place to hide contraband than a half-inch beard, and the same is true of an inmate’s clothing and shoes. Nevertheless, the department does not require inmates to go about bald, barefoot or naked.”

Alito also wrote,

“We readily agree that (the state) has a compelling interest in staunching the flow of contraband into and within its facilities, but the argument that this interest would be seriously compromised by allowing an inmate to grow a half-inch beard is hard to take seriously.”

The Justices also rejected the argument put forth by the State that if a prisoner was allowed to grow a beard and then shave that beard, that very prisoner might be unrecognizable.

One other important note about this case, there was a concurring decision – that means that another Justice agreed with the result but wanted to write his or her own opinion in order to make it a matter of history. In this case it was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She issued, according to USA Today, a one paragraph concurrence to point out what she deemed the difference between this inmates beard,

“…and the more intrusive health insurance exemption sought and won by Hobby Lobby and other businesses”

She wrote and I quote,

“Unlike the exemption this court approved (in Hobby Lobby), accommodating petitioner’s religious belief in this case would not detrimentally affect others who do not share petitioner’s belief,”

So even though this decision was unanimous, it points out that the way the Justices got there was not unanimous. And in terms of their larger conception and understanding of religious liberty, there is no unanimity. That also demonstrates just how tenuous religious liberty may be as we look to the future and continuing challenges to one of our most cherished liberties – a liberty Christians understand that is not granted to us by our government but respected by our government because it was granted to us by our creator.

2) Pending same sex marriage decision may give political cover, not moral cover, to politicians

Monday’s edition of the New York Times had a very important front-page article entitled, Marriage Case Offers G.O.P. Political Cover. It’s important because from a worldview perspective it is very important that Christians understand that in a political context, moral issues can quickly get confused, over written, and sometimes outright transformed.

Jeremy Peters and Jonathan Martin write,

“The news Friday that the Supreme Court will rule on same-sex marriage brought elation from gays and lesbians who are hopeful the justices will grant them the constitutional protections they have long sought.

But another group also saw a possible reason to celebrate if the court does indeed rule that way: Republicans.”

Now repeatedly, thus far, on The Briefing I have pointed this out. The purpose of a political party long-term is to be in office and to stay in office and to maximize political standing. When it comes to an issue like same-sex marriage, when we’re in the midst of a moral revolution, any political party – every political party – is going to be making a judgment as to how that issue must be factored into its future. And when it comes to the Republican Party there will be no shortage of Republicans who will be very glad for the Supreme Court to take the heat on the issue of same-sex marriage one way or the other. Even though virtually everyone expects the Supreme Court one way or another, to one extent or another, to approve the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states, there are a good many Republicans who will argue against the issue but will find political cover from the Supreme Court.

Though there are some Republicans – and others we should point out – who are very brave in speaking to this issue in defense of marriage, the fact is that there are already those who are scurrying behind the announcement that was made last Friday in order to say, ‘we don’t need to deal with these issues because the Supreme Court is now going to render its decision.’

As the New York Times writes, if the Supreme Court does render that kind of decision coming in the spring it could be,

“…a decision that has the benefit of largely neutralizing a debate that a majority of Americans believe Republicans are on the wrong side of — and well ahead of the party’s 2016 presidential primaries.”

That’s an interesting little reading of the situation and it’s one that is not uncontested. But this much is clear, by the time the Republican primary season rolls around, this issue is almost assuredly going to be decided. And to add some credibility to the point that is made by the New York Times, there are a good number of people regardless of their partisan identification who have already decided to say, “it’s been settled let’s move on.”

The reporters then write,

“When the Supreme Court said it would take up the question, the reticence to wade into the debate was evident. In most corners of the party — and, notably, from those who are likely to seek the Republican presidential nomination — there was silence late last week. The desire to calibrate unremarkable and inoffensive responses shows how the debate over same-sex marriage significantly departs from other major constitutional questions on social issues like abortion and why, unlike abortion, it may not endure as an issue.”

Well at this point I want to suggest that the issue of abortion appeared to be going away in 1973 but of course it was not. And that’s because it is a deeply convictional issue and those who are deeply convictional people are not going to say this is simply going to go away because of a Supreme Court decision. The reason the pro-life movement has continued, even grown and intensified, is because there has been a growing – not a lessening – understanding of the fact that every single human being is made in God’s image and every life is precious at every point of development.

That has been bolstered by the arrival of technology such as the ultrasound, such that it is now routinely that people see their little brothers and little sisters taped as an ultrasound image on the refrigerator. That has made it much more difficult to argue that that isn’t a person; it isn’t the human being, that that life isn’t worthy of preservation. I would predict at this point that the terrain on the issue of marriage is likely to be actually very similar to that of abortion. There will be those who will almost immediately cry – as they did in 1973 – ‘the issue is settled, let’s move on.’

But even as the evidence will continue to grow about the importance of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and even as the kind of statistics are almost surely – and I say broken heartedly – going to be adding up about the breakdown of the family, my guess is there will be a renewed understanding of the importance of defending marriage as marriage. It will be like the pro-life cause, an issue oppressing back against the larger culture. And we know that in advance, but it is interesting to have the New York Times suggesting that when it comes to the partisan politics involved, you can count not only on the Democrats championing this development, you can also find Republicans finding a way to say, ‘let’s move on.’

To their credit, the reporters also indicate there are some Republicans – including some likely presidential candidates in 2016 – who aren’t suggesting this route; they are not making this argument. Indeed there are those who will be arguing for the restriction of marriage to the union of a man and a woman. The interesting thing will be how they make that argument on the other side of a likely Supreme Court case to be handed down by the end of June of this year. To go back to the headline in this case it may be that a Supreme Court decision, as expected, will give Republicans – and for that matter others – political cover, but that does not mean it will give them moral cover and that’s what Christians must keep foremost in mind.

3) Confusion over evangelical identity shown in report of growing support for same sex marriage

That leads us to an even more important story; TIME magazine’s current issue includes an article by Elizabeth Dias entitled A Change of Heart inside the Evangelical War over Gay Marriage. After opening her article with a view to development at EastLake Community Church in the Seattle area, Dias then writes,

“EastLake’s pivot [that is a pivot towards the acceptance of same-sex marriage] is a signal that change is coming to one of the last redoubts of opposition to gay marriage in America. Mainline Protestant denominations, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians, routinely ordain gay ministers and marry gay couples. Methodist ministers are breaking rank to celebrate gay weddings. The overall public has favored gay marriage for three years.”

But, she writes,

“[E]vangelical churches and their congregations typically remain opposed, though that opposition is weakening”

So it is one thing to talk about opposition to same-sex marriage weakening among Republicans, it’s a very different thing to have a change of scene to TIME magazine where the issue, according to Elizabeth Dias, is a battle over the issue of gay marriage when it comes to American evangelicals.

Elizabeth Dias goes to one of the most familiar issues in terms of this terrain and that is the age of various cohorts of evangelicals. As she reports, the older cohort of evangelical – the baby boomers and older – are overwhelmingly opposed to same-sex marriage. Whereas if you look at evangelicals – and remember that’s in terms of surveys and poll taking those who are identified as evangelicals – when you look at those who are identified as evangelicals aged 34 and younger, there is an overwhelming level of support for same-sex marriage. The cultural and moral revolution we’ve been experiencing certainly explains that generational contrast.

The report cites two young men who are activists on the issue; one is Brandon Robertson who is the head of a group known as Evangelicals for Marriage Equality, also cited in the article is Matthew Vines, author of the book “God and the Gay Christian.” Elizabeth Dias points to their efforts and to the meetings that they have held and will be holding in the future in evangelical circles, suggesting that this is a sign of what she describes as a looming civil war within evangelicalism. She also cites Gene Robinson; you’ll remember he was the first openly gay Bishop of the Episcopal Church elected back in 2003. He said that the situation in evangelicalism now reminds him of “my own Episcopal Church 30 years ago.”

She also cites Pastor Danny Cortez of New Heart Community Church outside Los Angeles; a church that declared itself a third way congregation and it was later disclosed, a church who’s pastor had actually officiated at same-sex ceremony. She points to that church acknowledging that it was disfellowshipped by the Southern Baptist Convention because of its Congregational decision. She also writes,

“Religious-minded colleges are particularly cross-pressured–by definition, they are intended to nurture a new generation in an ancient biblical heritage. Illinois’s Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater, does not recognize alumni gay marriages, but this fall it hired a celibate lesbian to work in its chaplain’s office.”

Before she ends her article Elizabeth Dias considers a great deal of the evangelical landscape, but as is the case with almost any reporter, she’s looking for what she finds and she finds what she’s looking for. To her credit she does recognize that it appears that the vast majority of American evangelicals are not joining the revolution to normalize and legalize same-sex marriage. But there can be no doubt that she’s also onto something when she points to the great generational contrast in terms of at least how pollsters are reporting evangelical views on the issue of homosexuality, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage.

And furthermore, it points to the great challenge that we as evangelicals have to deliver, not only a position paper when it comes to the issue of same-sex marriage – or more fundamentally marriage – but we actually have to bolster this with very systemic comprehensive biblical arguments. And we also have to bolster that with a very clear affirmation of consistency in our own lives and in our own marriages; even as they point that are teaching is based right out a Holy Scripture.

The bottom line of Elizabeth Dias’s article is that evangelicals who do hold to that biblical conviction that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and can only be that, are going to be bucking the cultural tide not only in terms of the larger secular culture but in many ways, pressing back against enormous pressure that’s going to be exerted by those who claim an evangelical identity. But there’s another very important issue that come shining through her article, it all comes down to how you define evangelical. If you define evangelical by those who define themselves as evangelical, you’ll find evangelicals who believe something, anything, and nothing. But if you define evangelicalism, as I believe you must, by adherence to and faithfulness to very clear doctrinal principles and convictions, then this is really a confusing article from the very conception.

Elizabeth Dias seems to understand this when she writes,

“The roots of the conflict are deeply theological. Evangelical faith prizes the Bible’s authority, and that has meant a core commitment to biblical inerrancy–the belief that the words of the Bible are without error. Genesis Chapter 1 says God created male and female for one another, and the Apostle Paul calls homosexuality a sin, inerrantists say [by the way, it’s not just inerrantists who say that, but inerrantists certainly do say that], and for groups like the Southern Baptist Convention and its 50,000 churches nationwide, that is the biblical trump card.”

By the way, it isn’t, I would argue, the biblical trump card – it’s simply that the Bible trumps every other argument or assertion.

I appreciate the fact that Elizabeth Dias quotes Russell Moore, President of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to say,

“We believe even stranger things than that, [when it comes to the definition of marriage], we believe a previously dead man is going to arrive in the sky on a horse.”

This important article to appear in TIME magazine is a signal, it’s a signal not only of a big question about the future of evangelicalism, it is furthermore and more importantly, a huge signal about the question mark about Christian faithfulness in this generation; faithfulness that by any estimation is going to be costly. And even as the issue of evangelical definition has been controversial in the past, it’s going to grow only more controversial. Because when it comes to an issue like same-sex marriage and the authority of Scripture, there is no way to argue that we can simply redefined evangelical to accommodate what are clearly non-evangelical beliefs.

Before leaving the article, there are a couple of other very important things to note. One of them is this, as I have argued repeatedly and in the response that I, along with other colleagues, offered to Matthew Vines’ book “God and the Gay Christian”, the issue of the interpretation of Scripture, or the revision of the interpretation of Scripture, to allow for the normalization of homosexuality flows in terms of patterns of thought upon the same kind of interpretive techniques that are required in order to relatives the teachings of Scripture on the issue of gender; on what it means to be a man and a woman and of the issues of men and women in the church.

Elizabeth Dias writes,

“And there is another, just as fundamental, obstacle. So far no Christian tradition has been able to embrace the LGBT community without first changing its views about women.”

I appreciate that sentence, it affirm something that I have been arguing for years on this program and elsewhere. There is no way that a church can get to the normalization of homosexuality, in terms of what will be required with relativizing Scripture, before doing that first on the issue of gender. But there’s another argument attached to this that Elizabeth Dias doesn’t reference at all and that is that the churches that have gone so far as to relativize the Bible’s understanding of gender in order to meet the feminist revolution, they have very few defenses not to join the new revolution as well.

Oh, and that final observation about this article; it tells us that TIME magazine felt that the article was important. And Elizabeth Dias gets right to the point; it’s important in terms of the view of the editors of TIME magazine because when it comes to this moral revolution, there are now very few outliers, very few circles of resistance, to the normalization of homosexuality. And for reasons that the editors and this reporter evidently found interesting, one of those very last readouts, in terms of the language used by the reporter, is that of evangelical Christianity. Chalk this up at as one more article in the major mainstream media to announce to us all the revolution that we face and the challenges that are inevitable.

4) Digital age presents massive challenge to all who wish to educate rising generation

Finally, as a note about the cultural change we are all experiencing and how it affects the young – our own children and teenagers – consider an article that appeared about schools and teaching in the Washington Post Sunday’s edition. It’s by David Osborne and it is about a school in St. Paul, Minnesota where the teachers have a great deal to say about what happens in the school. But one of the teachers in this article makes a truly interesting statement about the challenge of teaching in a digital age; not only a digital age, but in what we might call the postmodern confusion of American childhood and adolescence.

She writes about the challenge with these words,

“We’re competing against Xbox 360, and over-scheduled days with soccer practices and very dynamic lives,”

This teacher, Kartal Jaquette, runs the Denver Green School. She says,

“Are you almost as interesting as a video game? Are you getting almost as much attention as a soccer coach might? Is it as much fun? Because if not, they’re going to tune you out.”

And when she speaks about ‘they,’ she is speaking about our children and teenagers. If you’re not as exciting as an Xbox 360, if you’re not getting the kind of attention that a soccer coach demands, if you’re teaching and influence doesn’t appear to add up to fun, then she says, they’re going to tune you out.

Of course one lesson we need to draw from this is that we need to help our children to pay attention and understand the importance of things when they’re not as exciting as an Xbox 360, when they don’t have the commanding attention of a soccer coach, and when they can’t be defined exactly as fun – even as we help them to understand learning as fun. But this article really isn’t just about the challenges faced by teachers; it’s about the challenges faced by parent. And not only parents but pastors. This is the challenge we all face, we might as well face it squarely.

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 01-21-15

Podcast Transcript

1) Supreme court  decision on beards for inmates significant defense of religious liberty 

Supreme Court upholds religious rights of prisoners, USA Today (Richard Wolf)

2) Pending same sex marriage decision may give political cover, not moral cover, to politicians

Gay Marriage Case Offers G.O.P. Political Cover, New York Times (Jeremy W. Peters and Jonathan Martin)

3) Confusion over evangelical identity shown in report of growing support for same sex marriage

Inside the Evangelical Fight Over Gay Marriage, TIME (Elizabeth Dias)

4) Digital age presents massive challenge to all who wish to educate rising generation

To improve schools, let teachers run them, Washington Post (David Osborne)

Transcript: The Briefing 01-20-15

The Briefing

 

January 20, 2015

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

 

It’s Tuesday, January 20, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) President’s State of the Union valuable learning opportunity for families

Today the most important political event is likely to be the President of the United States delivering what is known as the State of the Union address. There’s actually a constitutional requirement that the President annually report to Congress on the state of the union. But the Constitution was never clear that it had to be in the form of an address delivered by the President in person. And furthermore, this hasn’t always even been the case; President Thomas Jefferson delivered his State of the Union report in writing to Congress – he did not appear in person.

But then came big developments and those developments have to do with retail politics and the politics of theater. First came radio, and after radio came television, and ever since the state of the union address has been an invaluable part of America’s political furniture. No White House would let a state of the union address go without maximizing its potential to the fullest. In terms of recent Presidents perhaps no one was more invested in the State of the Union addresses than President Ronald Reagan; who turned every one of his State of the Union addresses into a moment of rather high political theatre. And of course, as a former actor, Pres. Reagan knew how to make the most of a theatrical moment.

Presidents who followed him tried to do the same; including Pres. Bill Clinton and most recently Pres. Barack Obama. But when Pres. Obama gets up tonight at the dais of the House of Representatives, he will not be saying much –at least in so far as we know that he’s not already said. And that’s because the White House, in terms of the 2015 State of the Union address, has tried a rather unorthodox way of setting up the President’s goals and points.

Over the last couple of weeks the White House and the President have been announcing what he’s going to talk about in his address. It is, as I said, a rather innovative approach to the State of the Union. But in theater-speak, the President runs the risk of stepping on his own lines; having nothing basically of surprise to say and thus most political observers are estimating that very low ratings will be the count tonight when it comes to Americans watching the President live.

I want to suggest however that informed Christians, intelligent Christians, seeking to understand the times would do very well to watch the State of the Union address – and if possible to do so with children; it is an excellent opportunity to have a live civics lesson right in the family room.

A couple of things to think about while you’re watching the State of the Union address. First is the pageantry. American civil government constitutionally is still barely over 200 years old and yet the American Constitution is the longest surviving written Constitution of any government in human history. And the American constitutional way of government comes with a separation of powers that is made very clear by the fact – and notice this tonight as you’re watching – the President of the United States will appear before Congress in the chamber of the House of Representatives as a guest. He will be invited to address a joint session of Congress with the House and the Senate seating together. Of course you’ll understand they’re meeting in the House chamber because the Senate chamber, as it is limited to 100 members, is actually too small for a joint session.

So as you’ll be looking at the very familiar settings of the chamber of the United States House of Representatives in the capital, you’ll notice that the President is going to be standing there, standing there as a guest representing the separation of powers. And you’ll also note that there is a formality to the occasion that is newsworthy of American attention. As the president is announced by the doorkeeper of the house, and then as he makes his way down the aisle, as he greets people from both parties, making his way to the dais. Non-constitutional features, that is they’re not unconstitutional, they’re just not mandated in any way by the Constitution, include the fact that the President will have the First Lady in attendance in the balcony and – Pres. Reagan again pioneered this – very specific guests will be invited to have very high visibility sitting with the First Lady.

In terms of what the President is expected to talk about tonight, there are three points that the White House has been pretty clear about. One is the need for increased revenue. That will mean higher taxes from someone and the White House has been indicating that means from some of the most wealthy members of society; including an expanded tax on capital gains. Secondly the President is expected to talk about the promise of a middle-class tax cut – of course that has to be paid for by someone else, and it’s going be very interesting to see exactly how the math adds up in terms of the President’s presentation.

But the third issue is likely also to get a lot of attention and that is the President suggesting that the first two years of college at a community college to be considered as normal, if not normative, for American young people as high school graduation. Thus he’s calling for a free two-year period at an American community college.

This is likely to be very controversial, and as much of higher education is one of the best commodities America offers, it’s not clear that this has a very certain political future. That’s because of the fact that even if you really want to help the most disadvantaged people reach the pinnacle of college education, it’s not at all clear that this is the way to get there. Furthermore it would require not only vast billions of dollars in spending by the federal government but also by the states. Since the states are already hard-pressed – almost every single one of the 50 states – when it comes to meeting their own budget obligations of the present, it’s going to be pretty hard to see how the President’s proposal is going to get any immediate traction.

It will however start a national debate; that is the power of the Presidency above all – to control, at least in terms of initiatives, a lot of what the country will be talking about. And there will be talk back – that’s another thing to notice – this is not a constitutional issue, this is a modern media policy. There will be an official Republican response. If the President is a Republican, there is an official Democratic response. And in this case the Republican response is going to be given by Senator Joni Ernst; the Senator newly elected from the state of Iowa.

So my encouragement to Christian families tonight is get a copy of the U.S. Constitution and help your children to understand the relevant sections and what it means. Help them to understand the worldview behind the separation of powers. Help them to understand that when the President of the United States is speaking there in the House of Representatives, it really is important that he’s speaking as an invited guest – not as an emperor. Help them to understand the drama of politics and why that really does matter and yet how it can matter for a very short time; and help them to understand the actual policies being proposed. In terms not only of the President’s statements but also of the Republican response. And then think about what it would mean to have an intelligent conversation about these things with your own children. That may be in contrast to a rather unintelligent conversation in much of the rest of the country.

2) Plans for Davos retreat for wealthy upended by world events, again

Something else is going to be happening tonight and it is the opening of the world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland and most likely you’re not going to be there and neither am I. That’s because this most illustrative of executive retreats is likely to attract only the top one percent of the 1% as it is the rich and the famous gathering together to discuss the world’s problems and how they can cure them.

Davos, Switzerland was made famous in Thomas Mann’s novel from the 19th century, The Magic Mountain but it’s famous now because of its magic ethos – and that is the attraction of powerful people and very wealthy people to gather together to discuss how together they can solve the world’s problems. Of course even as USA Today deserves very important credit for a news story, indeed a trio of new stories, run on the issue recently, USA Today points out that even as the group is meeting in Davos, Switzerland that the most elite of the elite, world headline tend to end up in the meeting virtually every single year.

It was expected that this year the big topic was going to be Ebola, then the big topic was going to be currency fluctuation, and now the big topic is likely to be the terrorist attacks in Paris. David Callaway of USA Today writes,

“More than 2,500 of the world’s great, good, and well, lucky, will descend on the snowy resort town …with the usual future of the world at stake.”

He also writes about the political leaders who will be there with the rich and famous. He writes,

“As the 40 or so global leaders sweep through town from event to event with their security details, the money brigade will huddle for coffee or [wine] in the private dining rooms and suites of Davos’ faded five-star hotels. Alive in gilded glory once more they hum, if only for a week, their elite status long since eclipsed by nearby St. Moritz.”

The big celebrity talk of Davos upfront is Bono’s likely nonappearance because he still recovering from a bicycle accident. The grand old men of Davos right now are Bill Gates and Eric Schmitt from America’s hyper digital elite. Callaway writes,

“If tradition holds, a major news event will occur midweek to swing attention from the official proceedings, and stranding leaders in icy captivity with a global media seeking comment. A Brazilian currency crisis such as last year. Or maybe a new Russian aggression. A market meltdown perhaps.”

It could be just about anything including a very controversial looming election in the nation of Greece. Callaway concludes,

“It’s 2015′s coming out party for the 1 percent. On top of the world, though in less control than ever.”

This comes out as international media were reporting over last weekend that the top 1%, and furthermore not only within the 1% the very highest percentage of the 1%, may soon own more than half of the world’s wealth; which is to say that one percent may soon own more than the 99% put together.

From a worldview perspective that is a haunting reality in terms of that kind of income inequality. But it doesn’t actually point just to the future as much is it points back towards the past – a rather futile past. Those who care for democratic values have to be very concerned about the weakening if not the disappearance of the middle class in many nations including a threatened middle-class in the United States. However, that’s not the concern of the elite in Davos, these are the people who rail against climate change and fly to this meeting on their Gulfstream 5’s. These are the people complaining about income inequality but they’re the people at the very top of the 1%. So they will meet in Davos for a few days to talk about the world’s problems and then, back to biblical parables, they’ll go back to building bigger barns.

3) Shock of elites over success of ‘American Sniper’ confirms deep worldview divide 

Meanwhile on talking about the elite and the separation in worldview of not only the global but the American elite, some people in the heartland, this is a complex situation but one thing is abundantly clear, when it comes to the products of Hollywood and the stories Hollywood tells, the people on the two coasts and the people amongst the cultural elites are greatly separated from the people in the main who are buying the tickets and going to the theaters. The greatest example of that is the surprise – at least the surprise to Hollywood – of the blockbuster weekend experienced by the movie “American Sniper”.

Just over the weekend it was expected to sell about $105.2 million in tickets in North America – that’s over a four-day holiday weekend; that is blockbuster status and more. This is a film that may, in terms of its eventual international income, exceed now $1 billion in ticket sales or product sales. That’s massive. Brooks Barnes of the New York Times reports,

“Hollywood is prone to superlatives, but this one is truly jaw dropping: ‘American Sniper,’ which arrived in wide release on Friday, is expected to sell about $105.2 million in tickets in North America over the four-day holiday weekend.”

Barnes went on to write,

“While America’s coastal intelligentsia busied itself with chatter over little-seen art dramas like ‘Boyhood’ and ‘Birdman,’ everyday Americans showed up en masse for a patriotic, pro-family picture that played more like a summer superhero blockbuster than an R-rated war drama with six Oscar nominations.”

The movie started out in a very small release at the end of 2014 and it got very tepid reviews from Hollywood insiders. There was no expectation the movie would be this kind of a blockbuster. It’s directed by Clint Eastwood who is actually the second director chosen for the project. This is actually the movie version of the book by Chris Kyle, an American sniper who served in Iraq for several tours and was considered to have been one of most deadly snipers in American history. I have not seen the movie but several critics on both sides of the controversy suggest that Eastwood does a fairly good job of telling the story in terms of its nuance; it is gray area and not just black and white.

There is no doubt that the form of warfare that was faced by American forces in cities in Iraq was different than anything that had been seen, at least in decades. And the use of snipers on both sides was something that was simply a feature of the warfare in the cities of Iraq from the very beginning. And furthermore, in much of the Middle East and other parts of the world, it still is. According to his own book and the portrayal in the movie Chris Kyle was a pretty complex figure just in of himself. Indeed many of the opponents of the movie have been releasing things that he said that were downright difficult to take.

But on the other hand, millions of people went to see the movie because of the patriotism that it demonstrates of the military context that it portrays. And of the fact that Chris Kyle is demonstrated as having a very basic faith in God, as reflected in the fact that he carried his Bible with him onto the battlefield and very clearly struggled with some of the moral quandaries of the war in which he found himself such an important combatant. I raise the issue in particular today while we are talking about the elites meeting in Davos just to show how difficult it is to speak about the divide between the worldview of the cultural elites and the remainder of America. That flyover country between the two coasts, well they’re the folks who turned out for this movie by the millions. And the New York Times recognized that.

Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution at Warner Bros which released “American sniper” said and I quote,

“Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico — all absolutely massive, [discussing the ticket sales]”

The difference in worldview is not one that is always analyzed in a sophisticated way, but it often is apparent in the crudest form. For instance, Michael Moore, the director very famous as a part of the American left, put out a tweet on the weekend the movie was released that included the words,

“We were taught snipers were cowards. Snipers aren’t heroes and invaders are worse.”

About five hours later Michael Moore tweeted,

“But if you’re on the roof of your home defending it from invaders who come 7K miles, you’re not a sniper, you are brave, you are a neighbor”

Oddly enough later Michael Moore said he was shocked that anyone drew a connection between his tweets and the “American Sniper” movie. I haven’t seen the movie and I’m in no position to offer a review of it, but what I can see is the media’s shock that the movie was a blockbuster success; and furthermore, not only the shock of many in Hollywood, but the actual disappointment.

New York Times theater critic Pauline Kale famously said back in the 1960s that Richard Nixon couldn’t have been elected President because no one she knew voted for him. We can all very easily live in our own bubble and that bubble can become an echo chamber of those with whom we agree. It is very telling that Hollywood itself is expressing shock that one of its products is actually selling in the heartland. I think you can count on the fact that “American Sniper” is not going to be showing in those posh hotel suites in Davos, Switzerland tonight.

4) Rise of new ‘artistic’ pornography magazines exemplifies sin’s ability to repackage itself

Finally, we’re talking about the culture and its products. Another article from the New York Times also should have our attention, this one appeared in yesterday’s edition; the headline, As Old Pornographic Magazines Ebb, Newer Entries to Genre Tilt Artistic. Well, buckle your seatbelts. It turns out that the old mainstays of adult male pornography – that is Penthouse and Playboy – have been doing very poorly in terms of their print runs. As Ravi Somaiya writes,

“Pornography used to mean Playboy or Penthouse or another of the hundreds of glossy magazines kept on high shelves and purchased furtively.

In the not too distant past, Playboy and Penthouse each sold five million or more copies a month, and were so much a part of the culture that in 1986 a federal judge ruled that denying blind people a Braille version of Playboy violated their First Amendment rights.”

But Somaiya then writes,

“But traditional pornographic magazines have been hit hard, falling victim to boundless quantities of nudity online and rapidly declining print sales. Last summer, Larry Flynt, the founder of Hustler, acknowledged that the print version of his magazine was not going to be around much longer.”

So here’s the lesson from a Christian worldview. Sin finds a way to repackage and remarket itself and in terms of pornography, the new marketing angle is, ‘it’s not photography, it is art.’ The problem is that’s not a new argument at all. That’s exactly the argument that Hugh Hefner made, as historians have carefully noted, back in the late 1950s and in the 1960s when he tried to argue that his pornographic magazine playboy was actually for highbrow gentlemen. Somaiya writes,

“Though they remain focused on the naked body, these relatively new magazines are seeking to move sex in print periodicals from under the mattress up onto the coffee table. In stark contrast to online pornography, with much of it free, these niche publications sell for a premium — often more than $20 — to thousands of people, or tens of thousands, rather than millions.”

The magazine goes into some complex detail about exactly the approach undertaken by these magazines; I’m going to spare you those details. But it’s enough to make very clear that there is, as the scripture says, nothing new under the sun when it comes to human sinfulness and human deviousness; maybe even human self-deception. Because in this case you have people who seem to be saying with a straight face that this is really about art, not about sex; it’s not about pornography. On the other hand they then try to sell their product as exactly what it is; that is a pornographic product. The fundamental reality is that if they do not have an adequate amount of sex in their periodical, it’s not going to sell because in contrary to all the claims made in the 1960s about playboy, people aren’t buying it for the articles.

This report in the New York Times comes out as scientists and others are releasing new reams of data demonstrating the damaging effects of photography on American culture, on American marriages, on American young people – especially young men – and on the culture as a whole. But in terms of our own society in a fallen world, we’re looking at even new and repackaged ways to sell what amounts to nothing more than the distortion of sexuality through pornography.

Ravi Somaiya seems to understand this. He he writes about a bookstore in the West Village in Manhattan and its manager. He writes,

“Now, instead of stealth buyers seeking only nudity, Mr. Imran said, the store gets unapologetic browsers of magazines like Adult and Treats, a similar publication based in Los Angeles. Mr. Imran said he believed that his customers bought these titles not for the naked women, but for their artistic sensibility.”

Then, however, he ended his statement with this, that also ends the article,

“’Mostly,’ he said, pointing toward a stack of the newer kind of magazines, ‘they buy these ones for the photography.’”

The obvious retort to that is, ‘obviously.’ It is important for us to understand from a biblical worldview that sin often represents itself in a new guise. It may repackage itself. One of the things to watch in the language is how sin repackages itself by euphemism; its first of all considered adultery, than it’s an extramarital affair, then it’s simply extramarital sex.

When it comes to pornography since the 1960s and 70s, America has witnessed a continuing process of what the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called defining deviancy down. But it certainly appears the somewhere along the way someone’s going to be honest about why these magazines are selling and even the man who said his customers buy them for their artistic sensibility said they tend to buy the magazines, he says, for the photography.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 01-20-15

Podcast Transcript

1) President’s State of the Union valuable learning opportunity for families

State of the Union 2015: Will there be any surprises?, Politico (Kendall Breitman)

Do we even need a State of the Union address anymore?, Washington Post (Philip Bump)

2) Plans for Davos retreat for wealthy upended by world events, again

Davos, summit conference for the 1%, USA Today (David Callaway)

Davos arrives as world on verge of nervous breakdown, USA Today (Kim Hjelmgaard)

5 things to know about World Economic Forum in Davos, USA Today (Donna Leinwand Leger)

New Oxfam report says half of global wealth held by the 1%, The Guardian (Larry Elliott)

3) Shock of elites over success of ‘American Sniper’ confirms deep worldview divide 

‘Sniper’ Rules Weekend Box Office, New York Times (Brooks Barnes)

Seth Rogen, Michael Moore ignite ‘Sniper’ debate, USA Today (Kelly Lawler)

4) Rise of new ‘artistic’ pornography magazines exemplifies sin’s ability to repackage itself

 As Playboy and Penthouse Fade, Newer Magazines Tilt Artistic, New York Times (Ravi Somaiya)

 

The Briefing 01-19-15

1) Supreme Court takes up same-sex marriage cases in political climate friendly to the issue

 Supreme Court to Decide Marriage Rights for Gay Couples Nationwide, New York Times (Adam Liptak)

Taking Up Gay Marriage, but on Its Own Terms, New York Times (Adam Liptak)

A pre-decision guide to a post-decision world of gay marriage, Washington Post (Dale Carpenter)

2) Virginia Governor McAuliffe moves to define marriage without reference to a husband or wife

Putting spice in marriage, Washington Times (Editorial Board)

3) Pope sees limit to free expression for sake of freedom from being offended

Pope Francis sees limits to free speech, Associated Press (Nicole Winfield and Teresa Cerojano)

4) Potential 2016 presidential nominees display narrow pedigree of US politics

No freshness in our 2016 presidential contest, Washington Post (Dana Milbank)

Transcript: The Briefing 01-16-15

The Briefing

 

January 16, 2015

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

 

It’s Friday, January 16, 2015.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

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

Today was to have been the first day of a new practice at Duke University but in a sudden and unexpected reversal, yesterday the University announced that it would not be featuring a weekly Friday afternoon call to prayer by Muslims. A call to prayer that was to have been issued from the universities chapel bell tower; a call to worship that was to have been – in the words of a university press release – moderately amplified throughout the campus.

As Jonathan Drew reports for the Associated Press, and I quote,

“Days after announcing that a Muslim call to prayer would echo from its historic chapel tower, Duke University changed course,”

It did indeed change course and in short order. After all, the practice was to have begun this very afternoon. But as Jonathan Drew reports,

“Instead, Muslims will gather for their call to prayer in a grassy area near the 210-foot gothic tower before heading into a room in Duke Chapel for their weekly prayer service. [As he notes,] The university had previously said a moderately amplified call to prayer would be read by members of the Muslim Students Association from the tower for about three minutes each Friday.”

But as the report indicates,

“Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations, said it would [now] be up to the students if they want to use some sort of amplification.”

Schoenfeld also said,

“There was considerable traffic and conversation and even a little bit of confusion, both within the campus and certainly outside…The purposes and goals and even the facts had been so mischaracterized as to turn it into a divisive situation, not a unifying situation.”

Well, credit goes to Duke University for reversing course on this very unwise decision. As I noted yesterday on The Briefing the real issue here is that Muslim students were given a religious accommodation that clearly wasn’t available to other students – including evangelical Christians. It was clear that a great deal of outside controversy had influenced the decision of the University administrators. But there also must be the question of exactly how the faculty and the larger community in Duke had also responding. Internal news reports are rather sparse when it comes to that kind of reportage.

But there’s another very important thing to note here. As I said yesterday, Duke University has become something of a symbol of the secularization of the American University. Secularization leaves that vacuum that something’s going to fill. And as we noted so many times on The Briefing, in much of the world that vacuum is being filled by a resurgent Islam. But what we also need to note is that that kind of secularism is an unstable project. It’s hard even for administrators committed to this kind of secularization to know exactly what they should do. After all, they’re looking at a campus that has basically marginalized theology from much of the last several decades. How does it handle a resurgent theology now? How does it handle the religious pluralism that it has not only come to accept, but openly celebrates?

I’m sure the story isn’t over and I’m also sure that international headlines in recent days have made this announcement from Duke University particularly ill-timed. It may not go away forever, but I’ll give the administrators at Duke University this much, they saw disaster staring them in the face and at least they did something about it.

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

Next, there are some really interesting and deeply revealing developments on the issue of marijuana. First came a news story during the Christmas holidays that made the front pages of the New York Times. The headline was an attention getter, Pot Pie, Redefined? Chefs Start to Experiment With Cannabis. The article is by Kim Severson. As she reports,

“…cooking with cannabis [or marijuana] is emerging as a legitimate and very lucrative culinary pursuit.”

She goes on to say,

“In Colorado, which has issued more than 160 edible marijuana licenses, skilled line cooks are leaving respected restaurants to take more lucrative jobs infusing cannabis into food and drinks. In Washington, one of four states that allow recreational marijuana sales, a large cannabis bakery dedicated to affluent customers with good palates will soon open in Seattle.”

It’s a really interesting story and the most interesting part of the story is the bottom line. It turns out that cannabis doesn’t taste good – it’s very hard to work it into the kind of elite edibles that these kind of headline grabbing chefs are accustomed to trying to cook. In other words, there trying to come up with some way to make cannabis go elite and mainstream even though it becomes the very first kind of culinary commodity that chefs are actually trying to mask rather than to accentuate; which indicates of course it’s really about the hallucinogenic effect, it’s not about the culinary value.

Severson gets to this. She writes,

“Major New York publishing houses and noted cookbook authors are pondering marijuana projects, and chefs on both coasts and in food-forward countries like Denmark have been staging underground meals with modern twists like compressed watermelon, smoked cheese and marijuana-oil vinaigrette.”

The article cites Ken Albala, Director of the Food Studies Program at the University of the Pacific in San Francisco, who said,

“It really won’t be long until it becomes part of haute cuisine and part of respectable culinary culture, instead of just an illegal doobie in the backyard,”

Now recall the fact that on The Briefing a few weeks ago I cited a very important investigative report done by USA Today that indicated that in states like Colorado which have recently legalized so-called recreational marijuana, the state government agencies are not even competent to keep up with basic safety concerns when it comes to edibles, contaminants and molds, anything that might be found in these edible substances. But this isn’t doing much to slow down those who are trying their very best to mainstream marijuana in the culture.

But as this news article makes very clear, this project faces two big obstacles:

“First, it’s hard to control how high people get when they eat marijuana. And second, [this one is really important to note] it really doesn’t taste that good.”

That’s a rather amazing admission. It turns out that marijuana really doesn’t taste good at all and that’s presenting a real challenge to the chefs who are trying to legitimize and normalize marijuana in the culture.

Ruth Reichl who was the former editor of Gourmet magazine, also a former food critic for the New York Times said,

“I am sure someone is going to grow some that is actually delicious and we’ll all learn about it,”

Adam Gomolin said,

“Cuisine is a product of people who cook and the ideologies they bring into the kitchen and what they are able to do with the instruments they have on hand,”

Gomolin is a lawyer; he’s also an amateur chef. He’s identified in the paper as one who helped found the crowd-funded publishing company Inkshares. That’s important because his company is planning to publish a cookbook known as “Herb: Mastering the Art of Cooking with Cannabis,” a project the paper says that has attracted the cookbook author Michael Ruhlman. Ruhlman, a well-known cookbook author, said that cannabis cooking will only become mainstream “when you can give it to someone and not make them a complete idiot.” Evidently that’s something of a challenge.

Interestingly Severson tells us that this new supposedly mainstream cookbook is actually a second edition of what was previously known as “The Stoner’s Cookbook” and that’s a website, by the way, that has more than 5 million page views a month. That site’s chief executive Matt Gray predicts that legal marijuana will be worth $10.2 billion in five years. He suggests that edible marijuana could be about 40 percent of that total.

One of the greatest values of this article is that it makes very clear that people aren’t eating marijuana for the taste – far from it. The chefs are finding the taste of marijuana to be a major stumbling block, a major obstacle, in terms of their cookbook. Severson says that cooking with marijuana require something like the skill of the scientist to draw and to control the substances such as THC – that’s the hallucinogenic in marijuana – as she said, which alters one’s mood and physical sensations. In her words, to get a consistent controllable affect marijuana’s best heated and combined with fats like butter, olive oil, or cream. But it can also work she says, albeit less must effectively, as a seasoning. That’s a really interesting twist though isn’t it? Because it will be the first seasoning added to food not to make food taste better – which it won’t, it will make it taste worse according to this article – but it’s all about the effects, at least that’s the honest admission this article.

One chef cited in the article Grant Achatz, who is a Chicago chef, who “made his reputation with experimental cooking” said,

“From my very limited experience with edibles, the flavor is pretty awful,”

One of the other issues that is honestly addressed in this article is the health consequence; the difficulty of knowing how much marijuana to put into an edible and, furthermore, controlling how much anyone may eat of that particular substance. The value of that article is just in the sheer weirdness of the fact the chefs are trying to legitimize and normalize marijuana even though they’re facing a very significant hurdle in that the having overcome its taste. In other words, this really isn’t about taste at all, which you would think is a very odd situation for prestigious chefs to find themselves in, much less to put themselves in.

Continuing on the marijuana issue, the Wall Street Journal reported in its weekend edition last weekend that Colorado is finding that the supposed tax windfall for marijuana isn’t adding up as its supporters had predicted it would – big surprise there. The article by Dan Frosch also includes this statement,

“Several Colorado doctors recently reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that local hospitals had seen an uptick in patients who became sick from ingesting too much marijuana, particularly children.”

Note carefully those last two words, “particularly children.” Here’s another interesting paragraph from the story,

“In some ways, however, marijuana has been woven into everyday life in Colorado, as more than 200 highly regulated retail businesses sell their wares around the state. State lawmakers and economists say pot is indeed contributing to Colorado’s economy, spurring tourism and the conversion of blighted warehouses into marijuana grow-houses. ”

An interesting statistic emerges from the story: 50% of all the marijuana sold in the city of Denver is estimated to be sold to tourists from outside the state. That figure skyrockets to 90% in the state’s resort areas – demonstrating the fact that as many neighboring states had feared, Colorado’s becoming a magnet for marijuana tourism.

On Tuesday of this week the New York Times had another important story on the issue of marijuana; the headline from the business page, Ethical Questions of Investing in Pot. Andrew Ross Sorkin reports,

“Last week, the venture capital firm run by Peter Thiel — a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, SpaceX and Spotify — invested millions of dollars in a marijuana company. The investment, in a firm called Privateer Holdings — which owns Leafly, an online database of marijuana information, and the cannabis brand Marley Natural, named after Bob Marley — was heralded as a watershed moment for the fledgling cannabis industry, accompanied by positive headlines like the one in The Los Angeles Times: ‘Venture capital firm gives marijuana industry a shot of credibility.’ In Silicon Valley, the deal was greeted as the latest disruptive change-the-world investment.”

Bur Sorkin goes on to say,

“But the injection of venture capital money into the cannabis industry will put pressure on some emerging fault lines.”

Now the so-called fault lines that Sorkin is talking about have to do with matters both legal and moral; legal in the sense that many of the financial transactions normal to business are actually forbidden to the marijuana industry by federal law. Second, just to point to another very important issue, federal law prohibits the possession or the use of marijuana – flat, period. How in the world can major investors put their money into something the federal government considers a crime even in terms of mere possession?

The moral aspects are also very important and interesting in this story because as it turns out many, especially on the left, pushing for a very clear model of social issues investing aren’t sure what to do with an issue like marijuana after they’ve been going after the tobacco industry for so long. It’s a convoluted issue, it’s not simple. Nothing in terms of this kind of complex capitalism is. But Sorkin’s onto something when he points out that a major venture-capital firm putting big time millions of dollars into marijuana is a very clear signal, a clear signal not only legally and morally but culturally. Perhaps in the end that’s even more important.

One of the interesting aspects of these stories put together is that it is clear that are elite culture leaders are doing their very best to grant legitimacy to marijuana. They’re doing their very best to make marijuana culturally cool. And amongst the elites, it certainly already is. But there’s a huge news story here when a major venture-capital firm puts this kind of capital into a marijuana industry. And it is of course similarly big news when you have culinary experts trying their very best to come up with attractive edibles even as they admit that marijuana simply doesn’t have a good taste – indeed it has a taste that they have to mask or try to overcome.

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

Before leaving the issue of marijuana it’s important to look to a development that has to do with Colorado and its neighbors. As Jack Healy reported for the New York Times,

“Two heartland states filed the first major court challenge to marijuana legalization on Thursday, saying that Colorado’s growing array of state-regulated recreational marijuana shops was piping marijuana into neighboring states and should be shut down.”

As Healy reports,

“The lawsuit was brought by attorneys general in Nebraska and Oklahoma, and asks the United States Supreme Court to strike down key parts of a 2012 voter-approved measure that legalized marijuana in Colorado for adult use and created a new system of stores, taxes and regulations surrounding retail marijuana.”

Now as it turns out, marijuana is not only illegal under federal law but it’s illegal in the states neighboring Colorado. And these states in particular, Nebraska and Oklahoma, have decided simply to sue because Colorado has “created a dangerous gap in the federal drug control system.”

The suit filed by the two Attorneys General states,

“Marijuana flows from this gap into neighboring states, draining their treasuries, and placing stress on their criminal justice systems.”

As Healy also reports,

“The lawsuit, which was brought by Nebraska’s attorney general, Jon Bruning, and Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt [who I should note is a member of the Board of Trustees of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary], accused Colorado officials of participating in a ‘scheme’ that cultivates, packages and distributes marijuana in direct violation of controlled-substances laws while ‘ignoring every objective embodied in the federal drug control regulation.’”

The importance of this news story points to the fact that this lawsuit by the two attorneys general points to the fact that we have a great legal and moral conflict in this nation on the issue of marijuana. We have some states – most particularly here in the state of Colorado – that has legalized what the federal government criminalizes. Furthermore this new story points to another dilemma, as it turns out what happens in Colorado doesn’t stay in Colorado. The legalization and normalization of marijuana is one of the great moral revolutionary changes of our time; parallel only to the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Recent sociological analyses have demonstrated that these two issues have expanded and progressed with the velocity rather unprecedented in terms of moral change. Of the two there’s no doubt that the issue of the redefinition of marriage is the more important. At the same time the issue of marijuana is decidedly not unimportant. And more than anything else, it is incredibly revealing – as these new stories have made abundantly clear.

Finally, as we often note, every once in a while a news story comes across that really demonstrates the contours of the age and the direction of the culture. Julie Turkewitz  reporting, once again, for the New York Times wrote an article recently entitled, After a Spa Day, Looking Years Younger (O.K., They’re Only 7). Turkewitz begins her storytelling about a girl who was experiencing a day at the spa with her closest friends: manicures, hairdos, makeup and some gossip. She then goes on to say,

“The spa industry has begun to target children in a big way, going way beyond mother-daughter manicures. Adult spas are adding separate menus of services for girls, usually ages 4 to 14. In most major cities, there are now dedicated day spas for children, offering a range of massages, facials and other treatments for girls (and sometimes boys) too young to have had their first pimple.”

Paige, the girl who is cited in the article said,

“I feel like the best princess in the world,”

She celebrated her seventh birthday at Sweet and Sassy; identified in the article as,

“…a national chain of spas that boasts that its cosmetologists are specially trained to work with children.”

After the beauty treatments, Turkewitz says,

“Paige and her guests walked down a red carpet and disappeared into a hot pink limousine, which took the squealing children on a spin around the parking lot. One 6-year-old guest documented the revelry in a series of selfies.

Now let’s just pause for a moment to realize what this news article that made the front page of the New York Times is telling us. It is telling us that we’ve become a culture in which a good number of people evidently think it makes sense to take a four-year-old or a seven-year-old girl for a day at the spa. There are some really spectacular quotes in this article. One woman when Lynne McNees, identified as the president of the spa’s association said,

“It’s very similar to taking little kids to the dentist. Let’s get them early, and get those really good habits.”

And what are those really good habits? Turkewitz reports,

“These sanctuaries of luxury proudly pamper their charges, wrapping them in custom-size robes, suggesting oil rubs for heels worn rough by barefoot play, and lifting clients onto massage tables when they are too small to do it themselves. On the high end, the ‘kids’ treatments’ menu at the Beverly Wilshire spa in Beverly Hills, Calif., charges $50 for a 15-minute ‘princess facial,’”

Frankly I have to side with the child psychologists identified as Madeline Levine who called the child’s spa, “the worst idea ever.”

More wisdom on the issue came from a sociologist identified as Christine Carter, the author of the book “Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents.” She said,

“What are we coming to? Spas for our children?”

According to Turkewitz this sociologist cautioned parents against sending their offspring to places where they are told – and this isn’t a joke,

“We’re going to treat you like a Kardashian.”

I want to credit Julie Turkewitz of the New York Times for some really brilliant writing in this piece. When she concludes the article she takes us to a place where two girls, very young, are experiencing just the kind of spa services and massages she describes in the article. Then we read,

“Nearby, Ken and Jen Brown raved about the manicure given to their toddler, Faith, 3, as a birthday treat. As Faith scooted her diapered rear out of her seat, Mr. Brown, 41, explained that they had arranged for her to take a ride in the spa’s limousine.

And after that?

‘Well,’ he said somewhat sheepishly, ‘we want to get her potty trained.’”

That’s the way Turkewitz ended her article. And I think I’ll let that statement now speak for itself.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.

The Briefing 01-16-15

Podcast Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript: The Briefing 01-15-15

The Briefing

 

January 15, 2015

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He then says bluntly,

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

He then concludes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She goes on to say,

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

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

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

Then comes the bombshell paragraph,

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at AlbertMohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College just go to boyecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 01-15-15

Podcast Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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