R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 334

The Briefing 12-11-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Recognition of evangelical Ebola fighters example of truth and power of the gospel

The Ebola fighters are Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’, The Washington Post (Jena McGregor)

The Choice, TIME (Nancy Gibbs)

2) Timing of LGBT civil rights bill example of velocity of cultural revolution

Rights Bill Sought for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Americans, New York Times (Sheryl Gay Stolberg)

A Comprehensive LGBT Nondiscrimination Bill Is Coming, Time (Katy Steinmetz)

3) Defense of religious liberty for the irreligious important Christian duty

In Seven States, Atheists Push to End Largely Forgotten Ban, New York Times (Laurie Goodstein)

4) Scholarly conference takes sabbatical, hoping to help replenish the earth

Setting Aside a Scholarly Get-Together, for the Planet’s Sake, New York Times (Mark Oppenheimer)

Transcript: The Briefing 12-10-14

The Briefing

 

December 10, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, December 10, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) CIA torture report fails to provide recommendations in response to brutalities

A long anticipated and already controversial report was released yesterday by a Senate committee and the report is controversial not only because of what it contains but of how it originated and why and when it was released. The report is being described in the media as a partisan report because the report was undertaken in terms of an investigation by the Democratic majority in the Senate intelligence committee. It was prepared by this same majority and released by that majority. And so we’re looking at a report that originated in a partisan controversy but is pointing to some genuinely serious moral issues that no American would hope to evade.

The front page story in the Washington Post reads, “Senate Report on CIA Program Details Brutality and Dishonesty.” Greg Miller, Adam Goldman, and Julie Tate writing for the Post tell us,

“An exhaustive five-year Senate investigation of the CIA’s secret interrogations of terrorism suspects renders a strikingly bleak verdict on a program launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, describing levels of brutality, dishonesty and seemingly arbitrary violence that at times brought even agency employees to moments of anguish.”

The controversy over the report preceded its release yesterday. It has to do with what are described as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used in the war on terror; particularly by American defense and intelligence agencies singled out in this report, the Central Intelligence Agency or the CIA. And yet the report as it was released yesterday tells us that what was taking place on the war on terror, in terms of these enhanced interrogation techniques, and were techniques and approaches that are well described as torture. And this is led to the greatest controversy over the report. Were these actions undertaken in the name of the American people and were they necessary? Were they in any sense moral? Does any civilized nation employ these kinds of enhanced interrogation techniques no matter what is at stake?

The reality is that this report that was released yesterday is only part of the larger report, most of which is still considered highly classified. As a matter fact the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is over 6,000 pages long – only about 500 pages were released yesterday. These are highly redacted, that is to say chosen pages, and they were chosen by the Democratic majority on the committee because the Republicans on the committee distance themselves from the process and from the report because they saw it as an attempt to libel the CIA from the very beginning. And one of the chief criticisms being made about this report is that it simply isn’t fair in terms of how it came about or how the study was conducted. For instance, the most controversial element of all in this has to do with the fact that the report, the entire investigation, is drawn entirely from documentary evidence provided by the CIA – there was no conversation, no interview, there was no testimony from any living person in the course of this investigation. Senate authorities themselves have suggested that this is unprecedented. In other words what we had was a Senate Intelligence Committee, Democratic majority, deciding to interrogate the CIA without any conversation or any testimony, without any explanation from a human being, about what the documentary evidence meant – or now means.

From a Christian worldview perspective it’s hard to separate the issues out in terms of this massive issue. There is no doubt that the most significant issue that faces us is the issue of the techniques themselves; well described in terms of some of the material in this report as torture. Were these things undertaken on behalf of the American people? The answer from the documentary evidence is, it appears almost assuredly so. Were at least some of the techniques employed here actually torture? For that definition I simply turn to someone who has the most credibility of any member the United States Senate in dealing with that issue and I would suggest that that is Republican Senator John McCain. He was himself a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, he was imprisoned in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, and he was himself tortured.

Senator McCain who took to the Senate floor yesterday afternoon shortly after the release of the report distance himself from the report but even more importantly he said that what took place in terms of at least some of these techniques was torture. And he made the very direct argument that the American government and the American people should never put up with any kind of torture technique being employed by American personnel and in the name of the American people. McCain’s point, and again I would simply argue that he has the credibility – if not the solitary credibility in the United States Senate to speak most effectively to this – Senator McCain said the problem with torture is that first of all it is immoral. Secondly, it doesn’t work.

But at least some even in the Democratic majority and in the Senate staff of that majority indicated that even as this kind of enhanced interrogation technique was sometimes slipping into torture and even though it is both wrong and unproductive in terms of intelligence, according to the report, there are times at which virtually everyone at the time agreed that it was necessary and at the time agreed that it was at least in some sense productive.

Michael Gerson, a columnist for the Washington Post with experience within the Bush administration – he was on the chief speechwriter for former President George W. Bush –  he described the release of the report as, “an act of exceptional recklessness.” Gerson, very well known as an evangelical Christian who has written about his experience as a Christian in government in the midst of this crisis, Gerson writes about the fact that the American people and the American military have been involved in the war on terror in terms of new ground, in terms of military experience. Fighting in what has been described as asymmetrical warfare in which the need for this intelligence was often dramatic and immediate. Furthermore, he writes,

“The U.S. response in the war against terrorism has been dramatically more selective and focused on combatants. Even so, the CIA is often forced to operate at the edge of the United States’ acceptable response — currently with drone strikes and a variety of activities to degrade and dismantle the Islamic State. The avoidance of ‘boots on the ground’ in the Middle East has placed an additional burden on intelligence services to work with (often flawed) allies, target enemies and strike from afar. Political leaders, once again, urge intelligence officials to do what is necessary.”

In this sense, Christians should pay particular attention to Michael Gerson’s argument. He is arguing that the politicians, in a fallen world such as ours, facing the kind of asymmetrical warfare represented by the war on terror, often turn to intelligence agencies and defense forces and say, ‘do whatever is necessary, just get the job done,’ them in the aftermath they turn back and launch an investigation in order to distance themselves in the very actions they precipitated and approved of at the time. Writing about Senator Dianne Feinstein, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who is behind the report and its release yesterday, Gerson writes,

“Dianne Feinstein, the outgoing chair of the committee, was thought to be more responsible. But her legacy is a massive dump of intelligence details useful to the enemy in a time of war. And she knows the likely results. Secretary of State John Kerry expressed the concerns of allies about increased violence. A National Intelligence Council report warned of threats to embassies, installations and individuals, and explored how partners would react to the disclosure.

He then writes,

“Tension with the CIA? Simple stubbornness? The main reason, I suspect, is different. Democrats who approved of enhanced interrogation at the time (such as Feinstein) must now construct an elaborate fantasy world in which they were not knowledgeable and supportive. They postulate a new reality in which they were innocent and deceived — requiring a conspiracy from three former CIA directors, three former deputy directors and hundreds of others.”

Perhaps the most authoritative word against the report came from a former Democratic senator and a former member of the same committee who has now openly questioned the motives and the actions of his former Democratic colleagues.

Writing for USA Today Senator Bob Kerrey, that is former Senator Bob Kerrey, says that this is a partisan report that fails America. He begins his article writing,

“I regret having to write a piece that is critical of the Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Most of them are former colleagues and friends. I hope they will remain friends after reading this.”

He also writes about the war on terror that the United States now faces and says,

“I also do not have to wait to know we are fighting a war that is different than any in our country’s past. The enemy does not have an easy to identify and analyze military. In the war against global jihadism, human intelligence and interrogation have become more important, and I worry that the partisan nature of this report could make this kind of collection more difficult.”

He then writes, and this is very important,

“I do not need to read the report to know that the Democratic staff alone wrote it. The Republicans checked out early when they determined that their counterparts started out with the premise that the CIA was guilty and then worked to prove it”

Senator Kerrey, again remember a former Democratic member not only of the Senate but of this select committee, then wrote,

“When Congress created the intelligence committees in the 1970′s, the purpose was for people’s representatives to stand above the fray and render balanced judgments about this most sensitive aspect of national security. This committee departed from that high road and slipped into the same partisan mode that marks most of what happens on Capitol Hill these days.”

One of Senator Kerrey’s main concerns in this report is that the fact that the committee did not talk to anyone from the CIA, they didn’t garner no testimony, had no conversation with anyone, conducted no interviews, means that they were simply drawing inferences from documentary material; documenting material that was supplied by the CIA for an investigation about the CIA, often dealing with materials that can only be interpreted and understood by the CIA.

Furthermore, the report that was released yesterday to the public represent something like 10 to 15% of a report that is thousands of pages long. So the American people are being sent a report that is highly redacted, highly chosen, and highly partisan. Does that mean therefore that we should reject everything that it addresses? From the Christian worldview perspective, assuredly not. It is very important we place this report in the partisan context out of which it has emerged. It is even more importantly that we place the support within the Christian worldview context that is our primary consideration and that raises the ultimate moral question. Is torture ever justified? And the answer to that must be almost assuredly no. No policy should ever justify the use of torture under any circumstance for any reason. But as Augustine, that great church father of the fifth century helped us to understand, in a fallen world even policies often fall apart in light of horrifying challenges. Sometimes that which is not policy, in which no policy should ever allow, happens because it simply is required by the circumstances in terms of an even more horrifying evil.

The worst part, in terms of the release of the report yesterday in the name of the American people, is that the American people, even after the release of this report, are simply unable to draw any rational conclusions about what actually took place in Afghanistan and Iraq and even more dangerously, we are unable to draw any policy recommendations about what should be done in the future. And that Senator Kerrey says, is the ultimate failure of this report. If it indeed documented everything it claims to have documented, why are there no recommendations? It is sheer cowardice for United States Senate Committee to release a report it says is this important that includes absolutely no policy recommendations about what to do in response. It has to make you wonder once again just how much credibility and confidence the committee itself has in its own report.

This is not the main issue I intended to discuss on The Briefing today and it is a horrifying issue, it simply staggers the Christian moral imagination sometimes to come to a realization in a fallen world of the things that are done on our behalf by those who are acting for our aid. But from a Christian worldview perspective we must understand there is no Christian rationale for the use of torture under any circumstances imaginable. But Christians must also be very candid and honest to say that we can conceive that there just might be circumstances in something like the war on terror in which one horrifyingly, even immoral thing, may be outweighed by an even more horrifying more immoral reality and that leads us to the final consideration which is it is very dangerous for any of us to either wash our hands as if we have no responsibility in this that is done in our name, nor to pose as if we do not know, as even the Democratic majority that released this report from that Senate committee yesterday must know and even will privately concede, these things happened in our name and at the time even some of the people who are now releasing this report in trying to distance himself from these procedures approved of them at the time.

Let’s remember that it was a Republican member of the Senate, Sen. John McCain, who nonetheless took to the floor yesterday in the Senate in order to clear in unequivocal terms with the credibility that only he possesses that the use of torture under any circumstances is immoral and wrong. That requires no partisan analysis and simply affirms what Christians must always understand; that is, when we pray that prayer ‘Even so Lord, come quickly,’ it’s because we know and we cannot not know that horrifying things are done in our name for our protection even by our own country.

2) Article notes rising denial of liberty by same sex marriage advocates

Next, a major British newsmagazine, the Spectator has run an important article with the headline “Gay Marriage and the Death of Freedom.” The subtitle of the article; “Rather than striking a blow for individual liberties, the dogma of gay marriage is stifling them.” It’s written by journalist Brendan O’Neill. He speaks about the theme of at least some in the effort to promote same-sex marriage under the banner of freedom to marry. He then writes,

“I hate to rain on this fabulous parade, but there’s a massive problem with this happy-clappy rallying cry. And it’s this: everywhere gay marriage has been introduced it has battered freedom, not boosted it. Debate has been chilled, dissenters harried, critics tear-gassed. Love and marriage might go together like horse and carriage, but freedom and gay marriage certainly do not. The double-thinking ‘freedom to marry’ has done more to power the elbow of the state than it has to expand the liberty of men and women.
There are awkward questions the ‘freedom to marry’ folks just can’t answer. Like: if gay marriage is a liberal cause, how come it’s been attended by authoritarianism wherever it’s been introduced?”

This is a pretty straightforward article. Its language is rather unusually candid and it’s right to the point. O’Neill writes,

“Consider France. Hundreds of thousands of French people — or ‘bigots’, as the gay-marriage lobby brands anyone who disagrees with it — marched against the legalisation of gay marriage in 2013. And they were beaten and tear-gassed by riot cops. Parisians in t-shirts celebrating traditional marriage were arrested for holding ‘unauthorised protests’. In the words of Parisian writer John Laughland, critics of gay marriage were turned into ‘ideological enemies’ of the French state. It’s a funny expansion of freedom that so violently pummels the right to protest.”

Or, he says, consider America (and rumor this is written by an Australian writing for a British newsmagazine).

“Consider America. The authorities there haven’t had to whip out their truncheons because non-state mobs have policed the opponents of gay marriage on their behalf. In the words of the author Damon Linker, a supporter of gay marriage, Americans who raise even a peep of criticism of gay marriage face ‘ostracism from public life’. We saw this with the medieval hounding of Brendan Eich out of his job at Mozilla after it was revealed that — oh, the humanity! — he isn’t a massive fan of gays getting married. Linker says the gay-marriage brigade has created a menacing climate, where the aim seems to be to ‘stamp out rival visions’. Americans who fail to bow at the altar of same-sex hitching, from wedding photographers to cake-makers, are harassed and boycotted and sometimes put out of business. The ‘freedom to marry’ clearly trumps the freedom of conscience.”

O’Neill then considers similar situations in Great Britain and elsewhere. Then he writes,

“Twenty-five years ago, American thinker Christopher Lasch argued that ‘progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order’.”

That’s a profoundly important sentence from a profoundly important thinker, Christopher Lasch. O’Neill then says,

“Bingo! There’s no better description of gay marriage.”

Let me repeat Christopher Lasch’s words; he said that’ progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.’ In this case a new moral order represented most importantly by the legalization of same-sex marriage. O’Neill then writes,

“There’s no better description of gay marriage. Here, too, progressive-sounding rhetoric is really the dolling-up of our atomised, risk-averse societies’ growing disdain for those deep relationships in which families and communities traditionally socialised the next generation, mostly away from the prying eyes of the state. This is why the gay-marriage campaign is so contradictorily illiberal, so hostile to dissent, and so attractive to petty-authoritarian politicians: because it isn’t about expanding liberty at all; it’s about unilaterally overhauling the moral outlook of the traditionalist sections of society and elevating the commitment-phobic, passion-lite, short-termist values of the chattering classes instead.”

It’s simply important at this point to say that Brendan O’Neill has the situation clearly in view. This is not a movement towards greater human liberty but less human liberty, and it is because of something Brendan O’Neill does not actually acknowledge – perhaps because he doesn’t know it. That is something that is known to Christians operating out of the Christian worldview, and that is this: there can be no true liberty at the expense of a genuine morality. There can be no expansion of liberty at the cost of the destruction of the institutions that make human society possible. The intentional, willful destruction of marriage – of the traditional patterns and institutions of child rearing, indeed of the family – the marginalization of these very important institutions at the heart and center of human existence will come not with an expansion of true human liberty but with the loss of so most important and precious liberties known to us.

The Christian worldview affirms not only that it will happen, but why that must happen. And it is simply because if you reject the very structures of creation that God is given, you cannot possibly expand true liberty in any honest sense.

2) Article notes rising denial of liberty by same sex marriage advocates

But finally we turn to the same issue as it is continuing to illuminate the deep theological and worldview divisions in American religion. The Kentucky Baptist Convention here in the state recently earned sneering headlines in the secular press for having dis-fellowshipped –  that is withdrawn fellowship – from a local congregation here in Louisville. The church with the Crescent Hill Baptist Church very close here to Southern Seminary and in previous times close in more ways than mere proximity. The action undertaken by the Kentucky Baptist Convention was in light of its convictions upholding the biblical understanding of human sexuality. And yet it came at the expense of an enormous outrage from the secular press, and from even at least one government agency here in Kentucky. But it came after the Crescent Hill congregation had determined that it was going to be ‘open and affirming’ of those in homosexual behaviors and homosexual relationships.

Sunday’s edition of the Louisville newspaper, the Courier-Journal included a major article by Tina Ward-Pugh. It’s identified as a special to the Courier-Journal. She spent 12 years as an elected official in the Louisville Metro Council and yet the article in the newspaper doesn’t have to do with her role as a public official, but rather with the fact that she and her partner Laura Hodges-Ryan were married in a ceremony Crescent Hill Baptist Church on November 29. A close look at the article indicates that they were legally married in the state of Maryland some time ago. They were legally married there because Kentucky did not then nor now have legal same-sex marriage.

Tina Ward-Pugh then writes,

“Considering the fact, however, that it took centuries for the church, and in particular Baptists, to even begin acknowledging that the love between two people of the same sex is to be embraced, how wonderfully radical is it then that a Baptist church would actually fully bless that love through the ceremony of marriage.”

And that took place, she says, on November 29. Later in her article she writes,

“As we were growing to understand ourselves and our love, our community, our world and our church were also growing in their understanding that we are all God’s people. And make no mistake, during that time of growth, the church, by its not progressing in more fully understanding God, has alienated many of its own believers and countless more who wouldn’t even give her consideration because the pain of rejection was simply too great to bear. We were two of those people. And there were others at Crescent Hill Baptist Church on Saturday who continue to feel alienated by the church’s infantile understanding of God. It is our hope that the church’s embrace of our relationship will serve as a measure of hope for others.”

Tina Ward-Pugh writes of what she calls her own awakening to the legitimacy of same-sex behaviors and same-sex relationships. She writes,

“I regard my “awakening” during grad school as life-saving in a number of ways. And while I came to more fully understand God’s love for me regarding my sexuality, it was the revelation of how the world — and the church — treated girls and women as second-class citizens that has shaped my life since then,”

The woman who officiated at the ceremony was the Rev. Dr. Johanna W.H. van Wijk-Bos, identified as a longtime professor at the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary and a friend of the couple.

There are some stories it very close to home, and in this case this one’s exceedingly close to home, because this church is very close to the campus of Southern Seminary and for many years had one of the closest relationships between the school and a congregation imaginable. Bob Allen writes about this in particular about Tina Ward-Pugh in an article for Baptist News Global that appeared yesterday, in which he writes,

“A Southern Baptist Theological Seminary alumna who went on to become the first openly gay elected official in Louisville, Ky., walked the aisle Nov. 29 with her partner of more than 15 years in a wedding ceremony at Crescent Hill Baptist Church, a congregation recently kicked out of the Kentucky Baptist Convention for welcoming and affirming LGBT members.”

Tina Ward-Pugh is identified in the article correctly is a 1991 Master of Social Work graduate of Southern Seminary. She says, according to the article to her awakening a better sexuality occurred after she graduated from Belmont University and came to Southern Seminary, where she says she enrolled and graduated in the period she identifies as ‘BF.’ That means ‘Before the Fall,’ that is, before the conservative realignment of this institution.

In a video testimonial from 2012, according to Baptist News Global she said,

“What I quickly understood about God in the professors that I had and their relationship with God and understanding was radically different from what one typically hears, especially now, in Southern Baptist circles and other more conservative circles about issues of sexuality,”

As I said, this new story hits very close to home – after all the description here of ‘Before the Fall’ relates to my personal leadership here at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and of the conservative redirection of the school over the last now 22 years. And there can be no doubt that people on opposite sides of this controversy will see what took place here at Southern Seminary as either the best or the worst thing imaginable. But those who supported the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention and the conservative recovery of Southern Seminary did so precisely out of the fear that what was being taught here back then would result in exactly what we read about in the headlines now. There’s is a particular responsibility that falls to evangelicals in general, to Southern Baptists specifically, and in this case most importantly, to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary to be very honest about the fact that the issues at stake are just this stark and just this urgent.

To follow the logic of what was taught back then is to result in the headlines we read even now. And the only way to avoid that was to change fundamentally what was being taught within the institution’s life. Once again, if you’re the other side of this controversy you see that entire process as the fall of the institution. Thus the language of Tina Ward-Pugh. On the other hand, those who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, and in the importance of upholding the faith once for all delivered to the saints understand that avoiding those headlines in our own churches and in our schools now was worth whatever price had to be paid for the recovery of these institutions a generation ago.

But these headlines also remind us of the issues are not over, the controversy has not ended and the challenge continues. So when evangelical Christians, Southern Baptists and others in this generation wonder what’s at stake, well just look at headlines like this to remind us all too painfully what’s at stake.

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 tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 12-10-14

1) CIA torture report fails to provide recommendations in response to brutalities

Senate report on CIA program details brutality, dishonesty, Washington Post (Greg Miller, Adam Goldman, and Julie Tate)

Releasing the Feinstein report is an act of exceptional recklessness, Washington Post (Michael Gerson)

Partisan torture report fails America, USA Today (Bob Kerrey)

2) Article notes rising denial of liberty by same sex marriage advocates

Gay marriage and the death of freedom, The Spectator (Brendan O’Neill)

3) Former SBC church performs same sex ceremony; revealing importance of theology

Wedding marks a journey for couple, church, Louisville Courier-Journal (Tine Ward-Pugh)

Kentucky human-rights head commends Crescent Hill, Baptist News-Global (Bob Allen)

Letter | Crescent Hill Baptist, Louisville Courier-Journal (George W. Stinson)

Transcript: The Briefing 12-09-14

The Briefing

 

December 9, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, December 9, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Rise of young Western Islamists result of disillusionment with secular worldview

Those who rule the worldview and the narrative of the rising generation eventually rule the future. Keep that in mind when you consider the headlines now coming out of Canada. Here’s one from one of Canada’s major newspapers, the National Post; the headline, “John Maguire and ISIS Fighter from Ottawa Appears on Video Warning Canada of Attacks ‘Where it Hurts you the Most’.” Stewart Bell reporting for the National Post tells us that,

“ISIS attempted to incite further attacks against Canadians…, issuing a propaganda video in which an Ottawa extremist scolded the government for joining the international military coalition fighting the terrorist group.”

The video’s about six minutes long and in the video this former Canadian, still a Canadian citizen, said that Canadians would be indiscriminately targeted, that Muslims were obliged to either to join ISIS or to follow the example of the terrorist group who struck in Ottawa just a matter of weeks ago.

The young man, known as John Maguire, said to his fellow Muslims there in Canada,

“You either pack your bags, or prepare your explosive devices. You either purchase your airline ticket, or you sharpen your knife,”

The young man identifies himself on the video as Abu Anwar al-Canadi, but former friends have recognized him as John Maguire – a dropout from the University of Ottawa who converted to Islam and became radicalized. Last year at some point he vanished, now to appear in this ISIS video.

As the National Post reports,

“[Maguire] looking gaunt and sounding alien to those who knew him in Canada …. Read from a script [apparently] The camera shots appeared to be staged to show ruined buildings and a mosque dome in the background.”

The Post goes on to say the video is a part of a propaganda push by ISIS that appears  to be designed to attract recruits and use the threat of terrorism to deter the US-led air campaign that has killed hundreds of fighters and, according to military officials, stalled the group’s advance.

One of the most interesting comments in the story comes from Professor Amarnath Amarasingam of the Dalhousie University Resilience Research Centre there in Canada. He said,

“It follows quite closely to the theme of a variety of videos aimed at Western audiences, like the video aimed at French Muslims a few weeks ago,”

The professor went on to say,

“The interrelated themes are of course ones of religious obligation: if a caliphate has been established and Muslims have been persecuted by the state you are living in, you are required to leave the state you are living in. The risk of staying is hellfire. Maguire’s video is similar to the video aimed at French Muslims, asking a simple question: what are you waiting for?”

You’ll recall that back in October Canada was roiled by the fact that at least two separate killings of Canadian force members had taken place; one in Québec, one in Ottawa – both by men who had converted to Islam and joined the Islamic radicalism movement. But the video by John Maguire – again he’s not identified by that name but rather by an Islamic name in the video – is different in that he is clearly seeking to identify with young Canadians – in particular, young Canadian Muslims. He says,

“I was one of you. I was a typical Canadian. I grew up on the hockey rink and spent my teenage years on stage playing guitar. [He said] I had no criminal record. I was a bright student and maintained a strong GPA in university. So how could one of your people end up in my place? And why is it that your own people are the ones turning against you at home? The answer is [says the young man] that we have accepted the true call of the prophets and messengers of God.”

A quick look at the video tells you a great deal of the story. The young man appears, whether he is known by his Islamic name or by the Canadian named John Maguire, as clearly very young. Indeed given the fact that one of the obligations of young Muslim men is to grow a beard, it’s clear that this young man’s having difficulty growing a full beard. But even more haunting is a photograph that appears in the National Post coverage of John Maguire as a young boy – perhaps aged 12 to 13. He appears just like any other normal Canadian boy, and that’s exactly what he’s trying now to use as the point of argument in his recruitment video. He says, ‘I was just like one of you but something changed.’

The something that is changed, according to his logic, is that you now have the Western nations, by his own logic, that are involved in this conflict with Islam. And his logic is very clear: Canadian Muslims, whether they are born into a Muslim tradition or whether they convert, have an obligation greater than their obligation to Canada – that is their obligation to Islam. And that obligation to Islam means that they must now see Canada as an enemy even if they are Canadian citizens. And the radicalization is made very clear when he asked the question, ‘what are you waiting for?’ in order for these young Canadians with him to join the radicalistic movement and to join in killing Canadians.

But this story is not limited to Canada. As a matter fact, Saturday’s edition of the New York Times had a story with the headline, “Britain Puts 2 in Prison after Return from Syria.” In this case, it’s about two young men who are both 22 years old, who had left United Kingdom, had gone to Syria or the other parts in the Middle East, had been engaged in terrorist activities with extremist groups, and then came back to the United Kingdom. Once they arrive back in the UK their own families assisted police in placing them under arrest. They were both sentenced to 12 years in prison for their participation in terrorism.

But as the New York Times article makes abundantly clear, the big concern in the United Kingdom is not just over these two but about the ones who have not returned home and have not been arrested – perhaps not even identified. There is no doubt that there is something now of a steady stream of very young Britons going to joining group such as ISIS.

And it’s not just Canada and United Kingdom; the New York Times also last week had a major new story on France – the headline in this article, “A French Town Reels after Teenage Girl Vanishes, Apparently to Join Jihadists.”  We talked about this on The Briefing as there had been various media reports of teenage girls and young women, primarily we should note teenage girls who had been leaving France and Britain in order to joining the Islamic movement as jihadi wives. As the Times reported last week,

“Experts say that the problem appears most severe in France, which has a large Muslim population from the Middle East and North Africa and where more than a hundred families,”

Now listen to that again,

“…more than a hundred famlies have been talking to experts to help them cope with their daughters’ growing radicalization.”

But American should find no confidence in the fact that these headlines have been from Canada and the UK and France because the same pattern is happening here. American intelligence officials have also indicated that there are a number of young Americans who are going to join these extremist groups. At this point it appears that most are young American men – teenage boys and young men – and most of them are converts to Islam, although some also come from enduring Islamic families. But the one thing common to all these media reports, whether it’s Canada or the United States or the United Kingdom or France, is the big question ‘why?’ ‘How could this be happening?’

Just recall the fact that we’re living in the 21st century, in the year 2014 in which the forces of modernity are supposed to a produced a new secular society in which at least in terms of these nations – Canada, the United States, Britain, and France – there shouldn’t be the kind of radicalized religious worldview that these young people are now joining and not only joining but being mobilized by in terms of becoming extremist, terrorist, even murderers. We need to recognize that when a picture of someone like John Maguire shows up in the national press, whether in Canada or in one of these other Western nations, this leads secular authorities to an absolute point of perplexity. How is it that our own children – remember that picture that appears in the National Post of John Maguire as a young boy – how can our own children turn into converts to Islam who then see the United States, France, the UK, or Canada, as an enemy.

At this point Christians thinking from a biblical worldview simply have an explanation the secular world does not have – and even if it heard it, it could not understand it based on its own first principles on the secular worldview. The Christian worldview makes very clear that human beings are not biological accidents but rather we are creatures, we are creatures made by the creator and we are made by the creator in his own image. Thus, amongst all the other artifacts of creation, all the other creatures, we are the only creature that is built with a moral conscience, that is made in the image of God, that is given the capacity to know him and is given a drive for stewardship and dominion that is made very clear and averse such as Genesis 1:28. But Christians operating out of a biblical worldview understand that the problem, in terms of understanding this, is at the very basis of understanding what it means to be human because the modern secular naturalistic understanding of the human as something of a biological accident simply can’t explain someone like John Maguire. Furthermore, the Christian worldview begins with the understanding that the human being is a creature, a creature unique amongst all the other parts of God’s creation in that the human creature is the only creature made in God’s image – thus given a moral capacity, a moral consciousness. Made in the image of God such that we alone are able to know the creator and we alone are morally accountable to Him. And then building on this we come to understand that God made the human creature desperate for a sense of meaning, desperate for a sense of purpose, desperate for a sense of mission. And the secular world simply shows itself to be incompetent and empty and sterile in producing the kind of meaning and mission and purpose that will invigorate a young generation.

In one sense, what we’re seeing in terms of these young radical converts to Islam is the fact that they have looked at the modern, sterile, consumer pop culture of the West and they have said that’s not worth living, it’s for is not worth dying for. Desperate for a search for passion and purpose and meaning, even mission, they are found that in Islam and thus they have become converts and with the zeal of converts they are now speaking to their fellow young Westerners saying, let’s just use the words of John Maguire, ‘what are you waiting for?’

The secular who are looking at this just wants to ask the obvious question, ‘what’s gone wrong?’ but they are unprepared for the answer. What’s gone wrong is the sterility of a modern secular Western worldview that simply doesn’t offer, in the long run, any lasting sense of purpose or mission or meaning. It’s not offering a credible alternative to that which is presented to many young people in the West by a resurgent Islam. And this is where Christian churches, Christian parents, Christians just observing the headlines, have to realize that a very deep an essential theological point is being driven home – tragically enough – in these headlines. We are made for purpose and we are made for mission and we know it. Whoever supplies the coming generation with that sense of mission, that sense of purpose, with the narrative of that kind of mission, is going to rule the future. With the explicit rejection of the Christian worldview and with the explicit embrace of a sterile secularism, the modern West is finding itself unable to mobilize its own young to defend themselves against this kind of resurgent worldview. So when you see the teenagers sitting at your dinner table, or sitting in the pew next to you at church, when you look in and see the youth group at your church, when you look in and see high school students talking on the street corner, just realize what you’re actually watching – you’re watching the future taking shape. Whatever narrative rules their hearts is going to rule the future and if Christians need any further impetus towards the education of our young in the truth and the gospel, and the absolute preaching of the gospel to our own young people, not just as an isolated set of truth but as a comprehensive worldview that comes with mission and purpose and passion, than just consider the story of John Maguire and ask why it’s not your own young person who is appearing in that video.

According to the secular press, these stories are a wake-up call for the security agencies of the Western world. But in a far more fundamental way these articles, these headlines, are wake-up call for the Christian church and for Christian parents. It’s one thing for secular analysts to be scratching their heads asking the question, ‘how did this happen?’ it’s another thing for all of us to watch those videos and listen to John Maguire ask the question posed to his fellow young Muslims in the West, ‘what you waiting for?’ I can only wonder if that question shouldn’t be pointed back at America’s Christian parents and Christian churches, ‘what are you waiting for?’

2) Former Muslim points to integral nature of Islamic theology to Islamist terrorism

Next I turn to a very important column in a related issue that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, in this case by popular author and columnist Thomas L Friedman; his headline, “How ISIS Drives Muslims from Islam.” He’s making the point that at least some, especially westernized Muslims, are looking at the picture of Islam presented by ISIS – the Islamic state – and they’re saying they want nothing to do with it – that’s good news. But Tom Friedman’s article leads us ask the question what’s going on here and how does this picture differ from the picture of John Maguire.

Thomas Friedman writes,

“On Nov. 24, BBC.com published a piece on what was trending on Twitter. It began: ‘A growing social media conversation in Arabic is calling for the implementation of Shariah, or Islamic law, to be abandoned. Discussing religious law is a sensitive topic in many Muslim countries. But on Twitter, a hashtag which translates as ‘why we reject implementing Shariah’ has been used 5,000 times in 24 hours. The conversation is mainly taking place in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The debate is about whether religious law is suitable for the needs of Arab countries and modern legal systems.’”

One of the most interesting aspects of Tom Friedman’s article is that he goes to some of the critics of Sharia law, some of the critics of Islamic extremism from within the world of Islam, he writes about Ismail Mohamed, an Egyptian he says,

“on a mission to create freedom of conscience there, started a program called ‘Black Ducks’ to offer a space where agnostic and atheist Arabs can speak freely about their right to choose what they believe and resist coercion and misogyny from religious authorities. He is part of a growing Arab Atheists Network.

Well let’s just pause for a moment and point to the obvious, and that is that there will be a fundamental misrepresentation of the picture here if we are lead to believe that there is a large growing group of atheists in the Muslim world or that they would be tolerated in any sense whatsoever. Anyone who has ever spent any time in the Islamic world would know that is fundamentally untrue, dangerously so.

Tom Friedman basically acknowledges this when he says the conversations taking place not in the public square per se but in social media, on the Internet where there is a degree of anonymity. But my reason for looking at this article is not to look to the first individual cited, but rather the second, known as Brother Rachid, a Moroccan who created his own YouTube network to deliver his message of tolerance and expose examples of intolerance within the Muslim faith community. By the way he’s identified as a man who was born into a Muslim family but converted to Christianity. But the primary interest of this section of Tom Friedman’s article is that this individual’s message is being directed not primarily at fellow Christians or his former fellow Muslims but rather at President Barack Obama, because he says President Obama is aiding and abetting Muslim extremism by refusing to deal with the fact that it is Islamic.

Now again, what makes this important is primarily that it is appeared in a column written by Tom Friedman in the New York Times. In this case the man known as Brother Rachid writes, and I quote,

“Dear Mr. President [speaking to President Obama], I must tell you that you are wrong about ISIL. You said ISIL speaks for no religion. I am a former Muslim. My dad is an imam. I have spent more than 20 years studying Islam. … I can tell you with confidence that ISIL speaks for Islam. … ISIL’s 10,000 members are all Muslims. … They come from different countries and have one common denominator: Islam. They are following Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in every detail. … They have called for a caliphate, which is a central doctrine in Sunni Islam.”

He continues,

“I ask you, Mr. President, to stop being politically correct — to call things by their names. ISIL, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al Shabab in Somalia, the Taliban, and their sister brand names, are all made in Islam. Unless the Muslim world deals with Islam and separates religion from state, we will never end this cycle. … If Islam is not the problem, then why is it there are millions of Christians in the Middle East and yet none of them has ever blown up himself to become a martyr, even though they live under the same economic and political circumstances and even worse? … Mr. President, if you really want to fight terrorism, then fight it at the roots. How many Saudi sheikhs are preaching hatred? How many Islamic channels are indoctrinating people and teaching them violence from the Quran and the hadith? … How many Islamic schools are producing generations of teachers and students who believe in jihad and martyrdom and fighting the infidels?”

Again the stunning thing about this column is that has appeared in the New York Times, the stunning thing about these comments is that the appeared in this kind of article. The stunning thing about this young man’s point is that he is claiming that theology actually matters and the issue in terms of Islamic terrorism can’t be removed from Islamic theology. That’s something Christians once again understand, we understand that theology always matters, it always matters especially when you have a situation in which there is an explicit theological identity that is quite obviously the common denominator here. That’s the point made explicitly by Brother Rachid, it’s the point that is being explicitly denied by those in the Western media the he says have become the enablers of Islamic terrorism. Brother Rachid’s point is well understood by Christians, he’s exactly right, you can’t possibly come to understand Islamic terrorism if you won’t deal with it as an issue of Islam. We can appreciate that kind of theological and worldview candor in the pages of the New York Times.

3) Zuckerberg’s mission to connect world to Facebook pale replacement for gospel

But finally, this concern for mission and purpose in life takes me to the current cover story of this weeks’ Time magazine. It’s about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, it’s entitled, “Half the World is Not Enough.” It talks about Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to get every human being on the earth online. The article is by Lev Grossman. This is the second cover story he’s done on Mark Zuckerberg and he talks about Zuckerberg’s plan for the future. He looks back over the first decade of Facebook noting that it grew like crazy. It has now grown to 1.35 billion users and 8,000 employees. In other words, Facebook right now involves about one quarter of the earth’s population. But Mark Zuckerberg, that’s not enough, it’s not nearly enough.

As a matter fact when it reached 1 billion about two years ago, Zuckerberg said,

“If your mission is to connect the world, then a billion might just be bigger than any other service that had been built. But that doesn’t mean that you’re anywhere near fulfilling the actual mission.”

Notice his explicit use of the word mission. Mark Zuckerberg, this cover story makes very clear, is driven by a mission. His mission is to get every single human being on the planet connected, and connected as you are already might have guessed, to Facebook. This challenge is pretty large, the population of the Earth is about 7.2 billion, there about 2.9 billion people on the Internet, that leaves, says Grossman, 4.3 billion people who are off-line and needs to be put online.

Grossman says this is absolutely perplexing to the folks in Silicon Valley who just can’t imagine there might be people who don’t want to be online. That becomes a very clear point when Grossman writes that about 85% of all human beings on the planet right now have access to the Internet and yet billions of them are not connecting to the Internet and they’re not connecting to Facebook. Grossman says maybe it’s that these people don’t have access to the technology itself – that is they don’t have enough money for a phone and for a plan – but he says maybe they don’t know enough about the Internet or maybe they do know enough about it and just don’t care because it’s totally irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. Mark Zuckerberg, this article makes clear, can’t imagine a human being who would actually see the Internet as irrelevant to their day-to-day lives.

Grossman’s article is really interesting. As I said, it’s his second cover story on Mark Zuckerberg in the last several years. He points to the fact that Zuckerberg and his plans for Facebook basically amount to a form of digital colonialism, he calls its colonialism 2.0. He states his concern very clearly. He says,

“There’s something distasteful about the whole business: a global campaign by a bunch of Silicon Valley jillionaires to convert literally everybody into data consumers, to make sure no eyeballs anywhere go unexposed to their ads. Everybody must be integrated into the vast cultural homogeneity that is the Internet.”

He calls it World War Z(uckerberg). But most interesting aspect of the articles is where Grossman himself says that Zuckerberg operates out of a rather superficial understanding of anthropology – that is of human beings. He says the human beings are basically driven by a need to connect. Grossman writes,

“One might argue that somebody who shapes the social lives of a billion people and counting ought to have a more finely wrought sense of human nature, a deeper appreciation for what is lost when a new technology becomes part of our lives as well as what is gained.”

That would certainly be nice, he says, but those kinds of people probably don’t start companies like Facebook.

My point in raising this article is to follow up the two previous stories by indicating once again that everybody’s driven by a purpose. Mark Zuckerberg’s sense of mission appears to get every single human being on the planet onto the Internet and not only on to the Internet but also participating in Facebook. That the great need of the world as he sees it. But of course my deeper purpose is this: we come to understand that Mark Zuckerberg is driven by this purpose, he’s driven by this mission, and he’s trying to come up with every strategy imaginable to succeed in it – to fulfill it.

Christians, to the contrary, are driven by the understanding that the great need of humanity is reconciliation with God and thus the gospel of Jesus Christ. The really humbling thing for us is whether we believe our mission with the intensity that Mark Zuckerberg does when it comes to Facebook. The real question for us is if we know that our gospel is the gospel that saves, how is it the Facebook might get there first? Perhaps the most important insight Christians can draw from this article is they’ll notice the passion that drives Mark Zuckerberg with his mission for Facebook. The real question for us is, what infinitely greater passion should drive Christians when it comes to the gospel of Jesus Christ?

 

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 tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 12-09-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Rise of young Western Islamists result of disillusionment with secular worldview

ISIS fighter from Ottawa appears in video threatening Canada with attacks ‘where it hurts you the most’, National Post (Stewart Bell)

Britain Puts 2 in Prison After Return From Syria, New York Times (Stephen Castle and Melissa Eddy)

A French Town Reels After Teenage Girl Vanishes, Apparently to Join Jihadists, New York Times (Suzanne Daley and Maïa de la Baume)

2) Former Muslim points to integral nature of Islamic theology to Islamist terrorism

How ISIS Drives Muslims From Islam, New York Times (Thomas Friedman)

3) Zuckerberg’s mission to connect world to Facebook pale replacement for gospel

Inside Facebook’s Plan to Wire the World, TIME (Lev Grossman)

The Only Intelligible Explanation for the Incarnation: A. T. Robertson on the Virgin Birth of Christ

The Christmas season comes each year with the expected flurry of media attention to the biblical accounts of Christ’s conception and birth. The general thrust of the secular media is often incredulity toward the fact that so many people still believe the Bible’s accounts to be true. This year, the Pew Research Center released a report on Christmas Day indicating that almost 75% of the American people affirm belief in the virgin birth of Christ. Meanwhile, the Public Religion Research Institute found markedly lower levels of belief, with just under half affirming the historical accuracy of the biblical accounts. The PRRI research indicated that four in ten Americans believe the virgin birth to be part of a “theological story to affirm faith in Christ.”

In truth, the virgin conception of Jesus, which most respondents know as the “virgin birth,” is no latecomer to controversy and rejection. On April 11, 1823, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to John Adams in which he discussed his views concerning Jesus Christ. Jefferson was already known for his denial of miracles and other claims of supernatural intervention in history and nature. In this letter to John Adams, he predicts the collapse of all belief in the virgin birth of Christ:

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.

Theological liberals deny the virgin birth as revealed truth; Thomas Jefferson saw the gospel accounts as “artificial scaffolding”; and modern Americans increasingly see the virgin birth as part of a “theological story” about Jesus.

Back in the early decades of the twentieth century, when theological liberals such as Harry Emerson Fosdick were denying the virgin birth, Baptist New Testament scholar A. T. Robertson rose to its defense. In a little 1925 book, The Mother of Jesus, Robertson isolated the alternatives: affirm the truth of the virgin conception of Christ or abandon any claim of incarnation.

Robertson, who was among the most famous scholars of his day, taught at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1888 until 1934. He understood exactly what was at stake. The modernists, as theological liberals liked to be known, accepted a distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” They wanted to present a Jesus worthy of moral emulation, but not a supernatural Christ who was God in human flesh. In between, theological “moderates” attempted a compromise between orthodoxy and heresy, offering a Jesus who was supernatural, but not too supernatural. They were eager to reject the virgin birth but tried to hold to other facts of the incarnation. Robertson saw through both the modernists and the moderates. Neither presented a Jesus who was truly God in human flesh.

As Robertson understood, the virgin conception of Christ is both fundamental and necessary to the New Testament’s presentation of Christ.

He also saw what others try not to admit: if Jesus was not conceived by the Holy Spirit, then he had a human father. Without the virgin birth, there is no explanation for the incarnation. If Jesus had a merely human father, there is no authentic connection to the incarnational theology of Paul and John in the New Testament. All that remains is some attempt to claim that Jesus was a mere human being who had a unique divine mission, or who was uniquely God conscious, or who was somehow adopted by the Father into a form of deity. All of these are heretical Christs, and none of these can save.

The incarnation is itself supernatural in every respect. “If we believe in a real incarnation of Christ, we cannot logically object to the virgin birth on the ground of the supernatural feature in it,” Robertson insisted. Here he was targeting the “moderates,” who wanted a supernatural Jesus, but not too supernatural. They wanted to maintain a claim to the incarnation and the resurrection, but not to miracles and the virgin birth. Robertson saw their problem clearly: they were undercutting the very truths they claimed to defend. If the virgin birth is out, so is any New Testament claim of authentic incarnation.

He referred to the “common Unitarian view” that Joseph was the biological father of Jesus and responded, “If we take Joseph to be the actual father of Jesus, we are compelled to be illogical if we hold to the deity of Jesus, or consider Jesus as merely a man.”

Robertson also defended the accounts found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and tied them to incarnational affirmations in the Gospel of John and the writings of Paul. As Robertson asserted, “the whole New Testament presents Jesus Christ as the Son of God, once Incarnate, and now Risen and on the Throne of Glory with the Father.”

If the virgin birth is just part of a “theological story,” then we are not saved, for only the Incarnate God-Man can save.  President Jefferson’s Jesus leaves a moral example, but cannot save us from our sins. The Jesus of the modernists was a mere man and the Jesus of the moderates possessed some kind of deity. The Jesus of the New Testament—all of the New Testament—saves to the uttermost.

And as for the virgin birth, A. T. Robertson said it best: “The virgin birth is the only intelligible explanation of the Incarnation ever offered.” And so it is, and ever was, and always will be.

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

For more information on Southern Seminary, visit SBTS.edu and for more information on Boyce College, visit BoyceCollege.com.

A. T. Robertson, The Mother of Jesus: Her Problems and Her Glory (New York: George H. Doran, 1925).

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, April 11, 1823.

“December PRRI/RNS Religion News Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute, Tuesday, December 17, 2013.

“Most Americans Believe in Jesus’ Virgin Birth,” Pew Research Center, Wednesday, December 25, 2013.

Transcript: The Briefing 12-08-14

The Briefing

 

December 8, 2014

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

 

It’s Monday, December 8, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Democrats lose last Senate seat in South due to accelerating secular agenda

The political event of the weekend was the defeat of three-term Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who went down to a 57-43 loss to Representative Bill Cassidy in the runoff from the November 4 midterm election. In terms of congressional math, this solidifies the new Republican majority in the United States Senate but the bigger issues from a worldview and from a cultural perspective come down to what this means in terms of the region, the Democratic Party, and the future.

Mary Landrieu did serve three full terms in the United States Senate. Furthermore, she came from what amounts to political royalty in the state of Louisiana. Her brother is the current mayor of the city of New Orleans, her father was a prominent politician, and Mary Landrieu has been herself on so many ballots in Louisiana in recent cycles that, for many people, it would’ve been inconceivable, even just a couple of years ago, that she could lose an election like this. And yet she has, and she lost it rather spectacularly.

Political observers knew that she was going to lose, or at least was very likely to lose, when the Democratic Senatorial committee pulled its advertising funds out of the race even though it was the last major race standing. Political pundits will be looking at this for some time; they will do an analysis of the campaign and try to come to some political science explanation of why Mary Landrieu lost. But the New York Times actually got to the most important issues even before the election took place on Saturday and they did so giving careful attention not only to the political dimension but to the cultural and worldview issues at stake also.

But in the middle of last week Nate Cohn writing for the New York Times, even before Saturday’s election, pointed to what Mary Landrieu’s defeat would mean – it would mean that there is now no Democratic member of the United States Senate from the South; and defining it out this way means all the way from North Carolina to the state of Texas. If you draw a line between North Carolina and Texas you would not find one state that has even one Democratic member of the United States Senate. Furthermore, as he writes, the disappearance of southern Democratic conservatives means that there are very few members of the House of Representatives than Democratic Party in the same states. And furthermore, where there are Democratic members they are almost always in order defined as majority minority districts.

In his opening paragraph Cohn writes,

“After President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he reportedly told a fellow Democrat that the party had lost the South for a long time to come. It took more than a generation for old Southern loyalties to the Democrats to fade, but that vision is on the verge of being realized this weekend.”

And of course it was. And if you read the opening of Nate Cohn’s article it appears that, in terms of his analysis of this, it all comes down to race but by the time you end the article you have a very different picture. Cohn writes,

“Mary Landrieu, a Democratic senator from Louisiana, lost re-election in Saturday’s runoff election, as expected [and we insert, as she did], the Republicans vanquished the last vestige of Democratic strength in the once solidly Democratic Deep South. In a region stretching from the high plains of Texas to the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas, Republicans control not only every Senate seat, but every governor’s mansion and every state legislative body.”

Now if we just step back for a moment to get some historical perspective, Nate Cohn goes to exactly the right place, which is 1964 in that comment made by then-President Lyndon Johnson. He did say it’s rumored that Georgia Senator, Richard Russell, that the Democratic Party had lost the South for a generation because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his leadership in that vote. But a historical perspective also requires us to realize that that was fully 50 years ago. And as Nick Cohn indicates, there’s something a lot more than the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at stake here. As a matter fact, that 50 year perspective reminds us that for most of the last 50 years, and that means all the way to Saturday, at least some Democratic strength was still found in the solid South. But it began to evaporate. First in terms of presidential elections when Democratic candidates began to lose the southern states they had accounted on for many decades. And then there came another blockbuster and that was the fact that as you had the South becoming more Republican, you also had Democrats becoming far more liberal; something that Nate Cohn acknowledges in his article.

If you go back to 1964, Democrats held or controlled nearly every southern state and southern state legislature. And again to his credit, Nick Cohen indicates that the big issue here really isn’t the matter of the Civil Rights Act but rather the culture wars that have so characterized the last several decades. For instance, in his article he writes,

“Today’s national Democratic Party is as unpopular in the South today as it has ever been, in no small part because the party has embraced a more secular agenda,”

He then quotes Professor Merle Black, he’s a professor of political science at Emory University and he is well regarded in terms of his observation of politics in the South, and he said,

“It’s a completely different party than it was 20 or 30 years ago. When the Democratic Party and its candidates become more liberal on culture and religion, that’s not a party that’s advocating what these whites value or think.”

He was speaking in particular of the white voters in the South. Again while acknowledging the racial issues that are in play in politics in the north and the South, but especially in the South, he also writes, and this is very important,

“Yet nonracial factors are most of the reason for Mr. Obama’s weakness. The long-term trends are clear. Mr. Kerry, for instance, fared worse than Michael Dukakis among most white Southerners, often losing vast swaths of traditionally Democratic countryside where once-reliably Democratic voters had either died or become disillusioned by the party’s stance on cultural issues.

Pay close attention to the following statement. He writes,

“It seems hard to argue that the Democrats could have retained much support among rural, evangelical Southern voters as the party embraced liberalism on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion.”

This article is important because it does get down to the worldview issues that are being played out in terms of the political headlines. And also because Nick Cohn in this case offers a very insightful analysis of what’s really going on. He concludes the article,

“It remains to be seen whether Republicans will continue to fare so well after Mr. Obama leaves the White House. Yet a Democratic rebound seems unlikely anytime soon. With Republicans now holding the advantage of incumbency, unless the region’s religiosity dims or the Democrats relent on their full-throated embrace of cultural liberalism, it may be theirs for a generation.”

What’s really important here is the diagnosis of why the Democratic Party has loss so much support in the South. And in this case not only Merle Black but Nate Cohn himself, in terms of the analysis offered, says it comes down to the culture wars and it comes down to the great cultural controversies of the last several decades. And the two things in particular that both men mention and that is the cultural liberalism when it comes to so many social issues now embraced by the Democratic Party, and furthermore what lies even more fundamentally at stake and that is the secularism of the party, also openly embraced at great cost in the South.

For much of the last two decades or so political scientist have been talking about the Republican Party growing more conservative. And yet political scientists are now pointing to something they really hadn’t noticed and that was that the Democratic Party has become even more liberal than the Republican Party has become conservative. So what we’re looking at here in terms of the cultural, social, and worldview issues at stake is a divide that is growing so wide that you’re finding Americans who really aren’t having any kind of hard decision whatsoever when they go to an election such as the citizens of Louisiana did this past Saturday. They’re going to elect a United States Senator in a runoff election but as they understood they are also going to elect a worldview, to elect an understanding of life, to elect a basic ideological and philosophical definition of reality.

Sociologist, news media types, and political scientist may debate this election in the larger pattern for any number of years to come. But right now Nate Cohn makes a very important point, and he makes it especially for the Democratic Party – if the party continues to hold to what he calls their “full throated embrace of cultural liberalism,” those are his words, it’s likely to be doomed in the South. And furthermore, even though this is not addressed in this article, this is what is costing the Democratic Party coast-to-coast, north to south, in so many districts and in so many states.

We understand that worldview matters and it always matters and it matters supremely in something like the political decision that was made by voters in Louisiana last Saturday. But it’s also very important to note that these same issues are now lining up to frame the coming 2016 presidential election. And most observers of the Democratic Party are suggesting that the only real conflict in that party is likely to be between the left and the further left, leading us to wonder, in terms of that party, whether it’s going to become even more full throated, to use Nick Cohn’s term, in terms of its embrace of cultural liberalism.

Before leaving the article it’s just very important to note that even here in the New York Times, even in this very important article, the link between secularism – that is a secular worldview – and political and cultural liberalism is made abundantly clear – and not only by the author of the article but also by the political scientist he quoted, Merle Black. That’s an important thing for them to observe, it’s an even more important thing for Christians to observe.

2) Unraveling of UVA rape story reveals importance of truth in confronting tragedy of rape 

Speaking of the culture, the big controversy over the weekend has to do with the magazine cover story that appears now to be falling apart but the controversy is only growing hotter. And this controversy is one that Christians have to watch with many different dimensions of concern. The article headline in the New York Times on Saturday was, “Report of Rape at a Fraternity Begins to Fray.” The article is by Richard Pérez-Peña and Ravi Somaiya, it’s datelined Charlottesville, Virginia and the reporters write,

“An account of sexual assault in Rolling Stone magazine that shook the University of Virginia and horrified readers showed signs of crumbling on Friday as the magazine admitted to doubts about its report of a premeditated gang rape at a fraternity party and the fraternity issued its first rebuttal of some details.”

The reporters go on to say that,

“Rolling Stone’s backpedaling came after … days of critiques that questioned aspects of its article about a woman who asked to be called Jackie, and concessions by campus activists against sexual assault that they had doubts about some parts of her account.”

On Friday Rolling Stone magazine published a note to readers from its managing editor, Will Dana who stated,

 

“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.”

 

Now it’s hard to come up with an issue that is more morally significant than rape and certainly the kind of premeditated organized rape that was described in the Rolling Stone article. But before we go any further we need to place this in the context of the ongoing controversy about sexual morality and especially the issue of rape on America’s college and University campuses. There have been outlandish claims made of late, including the claim now often repeated in the media, that one out of five young women is raped during the college experience. Now I say that’s outlandish because I don’t believe virtually anyone, even those repeating it, believe it to be true. That’s not to say that rape is not a crisis and that it is not altogether to pervasive, it’s not to say that it’s not an institutional responsibility, it is to say that the truth really matters and it really matters when a story like this begins to unravel.

Just to the issue bluntly, by the way, in the one out of five claims, I don’t believe that America’s parents would actually send their daughters to colleges and universities if they for a second believed that kind of claim. Nor, I would add, would law enforcement officials allow such a crime ridden environment to continue – not with those kinds of numbers. The numbers are assuredly horrifying but it’s also horrifying when the truth is treated so superficially. And that gets to the heart of the controversy that erupted in such a hot and very important way over the weekend because as it turned out Rolling Stone magazine has had to admit, in terms of successive clarifications, that it didn’t fact check the story, that it allowed the woman named Jackie in the story – acknowledging that’s a pseudonym – to tell the story and then to ask the reporter, who it also turns out, was looking for the story, not to fact check and not to talk to those that she had accused of raping her. Rolling Stone now admits that that was a problem. Now, recall that on Friday when it released its clarification it stated, and I want to repeat the words,

“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account,”

Notice the next words very carefully,

“…and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.”

Keep those words in mind as you hear that late last night Rolling Stone issued another clarification and this time not blaming the young women at the heart of the story, but rather taking responsibility, saying,

“These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie. We apologize to anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to investigate the events of that evening.”

Frederic Frommer, reporting for the Associated Press on Rolling Stone’s clarification of last night, suggests quite openly that the magazine issued the second clarification because it got so much heat for the first one. And, as he says here, the magazine struck some critics as “blaming the victim.” That’s some of the new language of the new sexual morality and it’s laden with all kinds of moral importance.

That term ‘blaming the victim’ first emerged out of conversations in the aftermath of the so-called Moynihan Report on race from the 1960s when as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then working as a domestic policy advisor in the Nixon White House, pointed to spiraling pathologies in the nation’s African-American communities – even documenting the truth –  but Moynihan, in tremendous controversy, even though he later became a very liberal Democratic Senator from New York (indeed he held the seat was later taken by Hillary Rodham Clinton) –  Moynihan, it was accused, had blamed the victims even by documenting the kinds of pathologies that he did in the report that later, at least popularly, bore his name. But in this case the use of the language ‘blaming the victim’ is being put into the larger context of what is being described as a rape culture in America’s college and University campuses. The most distressing part of the controversy over the weekend however is the fact that, at least for some people, the truth itself no longer really matters – what they really care about is what they claim is the larger truth that these kind of sexual assaults do happen.

Without going into the details of the story and the now described discrepancies, these things are frankly too graphic for this discussion, the reality is that the story indeed is falling apart. Indeed it’s falling apart spectacularly so much so that Rolling Stone magazine has had to basically retract the story in a large sense by offering these two successive clarifications. Furthermore, even the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, other major media sources, are beginning to look at the story and note that it was, in its essence, irresponsible journalism from the start.

The reporter for Rolling Stone was Sabrina Rubin Erdely. She is described, in terms of the media, as a veteran reporter on these kinds of stories. However, as the editors of the Wall Street Journal noted also on Saturday, and I quote,

“The larger problem, however, is that Ms. Erderly was, by her own admission, looking for a story to fit a pre-existing narrative—in this case, the supposed epidemic of sexual assault at elite universities, along with the presumed indifference of those schools to the problem. As the Washington Post noted in an admiring profile of Ms. Erdely, she interviewed students at several elite universities before alighting on UVA [that’s the University of Virgina] ‘a public school, Southern and genteel.’”

In other words, say the editors,

“Ms. Erdely did not construct a story based on facts, but went looking for facts to fit her theory. She appears to have been looking for a story to fit the current popular liberal belief that sexual assault is pervasive and pervasively covered-up.”

Looking at the national media coverage, it is really interesting to see how difficult the New York Times, the Washington Post, and so many other newspapers have found covering this story and the fact that it’s falling apart – because the very accusations made against the University of Virginia are now, they feared, to be made against themselves in terms of how they handle the story; even if the story does fall apart, as it now apparently, very clearly, is.

The same obvious difficulty in handling the story is clear in the current issue of Time magazine this week where Eliza Gray has a multi-page article in the center the magazine entitled “Fraternity Row.” And Time, even after at least the first clarification from Rolling Stone magazine, says that the story is still important even if the original Rolling Stone story turns out not to be true.

But by almost any measure the most interesting and alarming response to this controversy has come in the pages of the Washington Post by Zerlina Maxwell, identified as a political analyst, speaker, lawyer, and writer. According to the Post, she typically writes about national politics and cultural issues including domestic violence, sexual assault, and gender inequality. She then writes these very chilling words, and I quote,

“In last month’s deep and damning Rolling Stone report about sexual assault at the University of Virginia, a reporter told the story of ‘Jackie,’ who said she was gang raped at a fraternity party and then essentially ignored by the administration. It helped dramatize what happens when the claims of victims are not taken seriously.”

Maxwell then continues. She writes,

“Now the narrative appears to be falling apart: Her rapist wasn’t in the frat that she says he was a member of; the house held no party on the night of the assault; and other details are wobbly [that’s Maxwell’s word]. Many people (not least U-Va. administrators) will be tempted to see this as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is ‘innocent until proven guilty.’

She then writes, stunningly enough,

“In important ways, this is wrong. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

Now there have been any number of very important legal controversies in America, not only over the last 200 years but even you could save the last 200 days, and yet nothing that I ever seen in all my observation of these discussions comes even close to this article that appeared under the name of the Washington Post in which a lawyer, writing as a columnist for the newspaper, says that the presumption of innocence is something we can now do without as Americans.

Just to make sure that her point is heard in its clarity, she writes and I quote again,

“Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

And, as she makes clear in her article, this means even if the rape didn’t happen and if the rapist is innocent. She acknowledges that the falsely accused rapist could face difficulties. She writes,

“The accused would have a rough period. He might be suspended from his job; friends might defriend him on Facebook.”

But again, and remembers Zerlina Maxwell is a lawyer after all, as well as a columnist for the Washington Post, she also writes in her argument,

“…is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system.”

Where, evidently, truth is just too expensive to use in this kind of controversy.

Hats off to Hanna Rosin, another very veteran writer on these affairs writing at Slate.com for saying the problem is found at Rolling Stone; its journalistic failures in this case. But she says she’s not buying the argument that the truth doesn’t matter. Rosin writes,

“One thing I heard several times when trying to do re-reporting [she means of this story] myself: Many people had doubts about the details in the story, but didn’t really care, as long as it was effecting change at UVA. I don’t agree.”

She goes on to say,

“I still hope we can salvage some good from this episode, even if Jackie’s story proves false. Perhaps one thing we should look at is how we treat victims of sexual violence so differently than other victims, and whether that serves them.”

Now the most important thing about Hannah Rosin’s article is that she suggests that this new hyper ideological concern about rape really isn’t helping the victims of rape – the real victims of rape. Furthermore she says, the media is showing a lower standard of evidentiary interest when it comes to rape accusations over against other accusations. And once again she says, that’s not going to serve rape victims well in the long run.

From a biblical worldview perspective, as I said at the beginning, it’s hard to come up of anything more morally significant than rape. It is one of the vilest crimes addressed not only in the law but also in the Scripture. Christians must also be on the front lines of making very clear that rape must be opposed in every way possible and it must also be said that Christian should be on the front lines of calling for every legitimate instance of rape to be investigated and documented, and for every rapist to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But there are two additional observations that have to be made here. One of the most profound is that offer by Hannah Rosin writing at Slate.com – it does not serve the real victims well to have this kind of approach taken when stories fall apart. Those who are arguing that the truth really doesn’t matter actually devalue every actual rate that is taken place and make it easier for rape to go unreported and unprosecuted. And of course Christians looking at this have to understand that as we’re living in this culture, that for a long time was described as being postmodern, one of the main facets of the culture, at least on the part of some, especially on the cultural left, is the truth itself doesn’t exist – everything is a matter of interpretation and every truth claims is just social construction.

But you know it’s really interesting that the story began to fall apart not because of ideology but because of facts and the lack of facts – the discrepancy of claims became so important that even Rolling Stone magazine, one of the brand names of the cultural left, had to issue a clarification and then another clarification. And Hannah Rosin’s right, you can count on further clarifications to come.

But the last observation about this story, important as it is, comes down to the fact that Christians also understand the impossibility of creating any stable ethic that will protect human flourishing and human dignity if the entire understanding of the integrity of sexual morality is redefined in the wake of the new sexual revolution. If indeed you come down to the issue that the only thing that really matters in terms of the morality of sex is consent, then you’ll be involved in a constant debate over what might constitute rape, and you’ll come up with a constant debate about how anyone might prevent having young people get engaged in all kinds of abuses sexual relationships once they are told to have sex – just to have safe sex, and make sure you have consent.

The vast majority of controversies – legal, political, moral, and otherwise – over what’s happening in terms of the sexualized culture of American college and university campuses and we must acknowledge the very real problem of rape, much it is simply lost in the fog of trying to create an artificial sexual morality on the other side of having abandoned the only sexual morality that works. But the closing comment simply has to be where we began: the issue in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end is truth. And if Christians ever lose sight of that, we’ve lost sight of everything.

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 tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

 

 

The Briefing 12-08-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Democrats lose last Senate seat in South due to accelerating secular agenda

Dems’ final insult: Landrieu crushed, Politico (James Hohmann)

The Democrats’ Southern Problem Reaches a New Depth, New York Times (Nate Cohn)

Demise of the Southern Democrat Is Now Nearly Complete, New York Times (Nate Cohn)

2) Unraveling of UVA rape story reveals importance of truth in confronting tragedy of rape 

Rolling Stone Cites Doubts on Its Story of University of Virginia Rape, New York Times (Richard Pérez-Peña and Ravi Somaiya)

A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA, Rolling Stone (Sabrina Rubin Erdely)

Rolling Stone Now Doubts Victim in UVA Rape Allegation, NBC29

A Note to Our Readers, Rolling Stone (Will Dana)

Rolling Stone Clarifies Its Apology on UVA Story, Associated Press (Frederic J. Frommer)

Like a Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal (Editorial Board)

Crisis on Fraternity Row, TIME (Eliza Gray)

No matter what Jackie said, we should generally believe rape claims, Washington Post (Zerlina Maxwell)

Blame Rolling Stone, Slate (Hanna Rosin)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 12-05-14

The Briefing

 

December5, 2014

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

 

It’s Friday, December 5, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) New Minnesota state athletic policy portrays velocity of transgender revolution

Yesterday we discussed the decision pending by the Minnesota State High School League Board concerning the issue of transgender athletes in high school athletics. And now, as of yesterday, the state of Minnesota has a new policy for high school athletics and it is exactly what we talked about yesterday. It is a policy that effectively means the end of boys and girls sports in that state.

As Paul Klauda reports of Minneapolis Star Tribune,

“The Minnesota State High School League board approved a new policy for transgender students [yesterday] morning that will begin with the 2015-16 school year. Criteria for determining eligibility of transgender students for high school sports teams would be applied in an appeal process that would be overseen by the high school league. Appeals would be heard by an independent hearing officer.”

As the news article makes very clear, this policy that was adopted yesterday by the league is one that basically involved input from only one side of the equation – even though there was massive public outcry about the draft policy, no one who was opposed to the policy was deeply involved in the drafting process. Instead, as we documented yesterday, the drafting process was inherently dependent upon ideological advocates for absolute transgender inclusion and furthermore, for the transgender agenda.

The vote yesterday in Minnesota wasn’t close, 18 of the 20 members of the league’s board voted yes – only one is identified as saying no, that’s Emmett Keenan, who is athletics director at the St. Cloud Cathedral. Governor appointed board member Paul McDonald participating in his first board meeting abstained. So 18 voted yes, one voted no, one abstained.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune also indicates that two days ago, on Wednesday, the boarded considered a different policy that would’ve allowed for a local option school district by school district but that was turned down because of the fear that it would eventually lead to chaos in terms of state athletics. One of the interesting aspects of this article is something new and that is that evidently the school districts, or at least representatives of those districts, didn’t want the question to arrive at their decision-making. They wanted to defer to someone else even that someone else was the school league and in this case the league voted.

One change that was made between Wednesday and the vote yesterday is that an exemption for religious schools was written into the policy. That’s very important, at least in terms of understanding the rights of Christian schools to remain Christian, but at the same time the previous exemption language proposed had included all nonpublic schools, now only religious schools are to be exempted from the policy. But remember this policy, and it is a policy now beginning in the 2015-16 school year, says that a student has to be recognized for inclusion on sports teams and locker rooms, in terms of bathrooms or on school trips, has to be recognized for the gender identity with which the student identifies.

As Stella Morabito noted in The Federalist earlier this week, that effectively means the end of boys and girls sports in the state of Minnesota. And the important thing for all of us is that this is not limited to Minnesota. If anything, what we’re noticing right now in states like Minnesota is that those who are pushing these agendas are pushing them to such warp speed that they’re trying to get states in the heartland of America such as Minnesota to adopt these policies so as to make it a coast-to-coast reality as quickly as possible. And, as Morabito noted, before America’s parents can become involved and organized in trying to block this kind of development. Furthermore this kind of action taken by an official state body is simply an indication of what is also happening in terms of the courts where those pushing for the transgender revolution are also going into litigation where necessary in order to push that agenda.

Now when we look at this from a Christian perspective, once again, we’re looking at a rebellion against creation that is deeper even then same-sex relationships and something like same-sex marriage as it’s called. We’re looking at a rejection of the very notion that what it means to be human is to be male or female and to have that assigned by the creator your for His glory and for our good. This is a much deeper and more subversive pushback in terms of the biblical worldview than even, and this is something that’s hard to say and yet it is true, even the advent of same-sex marriage.

The day before the league made its decision, and that is on Wednesday, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis ran a pro and con column of articles in which the argument was debated in the public square. Writing for the policy were Alison Yocom and Martha Burton, identified as writing on behalf of the group Transforming Families Minnesota, they wrote that transgender students deserve inclusion and that this policy is not only right but fair because it recognizes that without this kind of policy transgender athletes won’t be able to participate in high school athletics in the gender with which they identify. But they also make an astounding statement. They talk about a policy that was adopted by the NCAA in terms of a different context. In that policy, Dr. Nick Gorton, identified in this article, had stated,

“Transgender student-athletes fall within the spectrum of physical traits found in athletes of their transitioned gender, allowing them to compete fairly and equitably.”

But to that we simply have to say, saying it so certainly doesn’t make it so – I don’t think anyone with the slightest amount of common sense or knowledge of adolescence can say that the physical traits of someone born a boy and the physical traits of someone born a girl are the same when it comes to issues like muscle mass or even weight or strength or any number of other issues. That’s why common sense has for generations, indeed far more than that, for centuries and millennia, indicated that there ought to be an appropriate distinction between boys’ and girls’ sports. And that’s why, despite the adoption of this policy, will continue to be the expectation of most parents, and I think that’s an understatement, coast-to-coast in America right now. The statement nonetheless is put forward with a straight face that there is a spectrum of physical traits that are found in transgender student athletes that are again I quote, “found in athletes of their transition to gender, allowing them to compete fairly and equitably.”

In the con article published alongside the pro article, attorney John Hagan Junior responded making just that point. He writes,

“Imagine the following scenario. An adolescent… [boy]… declares: ‘I always have had a feminine self-image. I never told anyone, because of society’s expectations, but I’m revealing it now. My long hair is evidence of my sincerity and my feminine self-expression.’”

Hagan then writes,

“The High School League’s pending policy would compel the school to let this boy play power forward on the girls’ basketball team, regardless of safety considerations…. If the school resisted, it would promptly be faced with a lawsuit under the ‘will be eligible’ clause [of the new policy].”

“The language isn’t inadvertent. The pending policy is a redraft. The public challenged an original rendition early this fall, when some 10,000 e-mails were sent to the league. The redraft supposedly was to be prepared by a ‘task force’ representing multiple viewpoints on the issue. But opponents of the original draft … have been shut out of the process. The redraft, with its insidious language, was prepared by transgender activists and the bureaucracy of the league.”

Once again we face the velocity of the sexual and moral revolution that we are now facing. We’re looking at a velocity that is simply unprecedented in terms of human experience. And when we come to the transgender revolution, we’re talking about looking at a moral, a cultural, a societal, ethical, revolution that will simply wash away virtually every single norm previously known to men and women, to humanity, in times past.

And as Time magazine reports just days ago, reporter Katy Steinmetz writes,

“In one short paragraph of a 34-page memo released on Dec. 1, the Department of Education,”

Now, let me just insert, that’s the United States Department of Education,

“…articulated a clear stance on gender identity, saying transgender students in public schools should be enrolled in single-sex classes that align with how they live their lives day-to-day.”

Here again you see the revolution, this time being put forward by the Department of Education. And to Time magazine’s credit, they noted that this was a simple one short paragraph in a 34 page memo that was released by the Department of education and evidently most people in this country missed it. According to the memo,

“Under Title IX, a school must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity in all aspects of the planning, implementation, enrollment, operation, and evaluation of single-sex classes.”

Now the background of that is of course the fact that there is a resurgence of interest in single-sex classrooms – predominantly in terms of boys only classrooms because it is being increasingly recognized, and this is just common sense, that there is a characteristic learning style of boys that often breaks down in the presence of girls.

The Time magazine article makes very clear that the issue we’re talking about, the revolution we’re observing isn’t limited to Minnesota, not hardly. This is a United States Department of Education policy intended to take immediate effect for all public schools in all 50 states. And again, this largely escaped public notice.

2) Social science fails to recognize value  of gender distinctions in classroom

According to Time magazine that memorandum from the Department of Education was handed down on December 1 – that is on Monday – which makes it more than slightly ironic that on that very same day, on the first of its national pages, the New York Times ran an article, again the same day, December 1, with a headline “Old Tactic Gets New Use: Public Schools Separate Girls and Boys.”

Reporter Mokoto Rich goes to my hometown of Pompano Beach, Florida, that’s where I went to high school, and looks at the fact that in some public school classrooms in that Florida town, educators are deciding to go back to single-sex classes because they tend to work better for both boys and girls. And the context, as the reporter makes very clear, isn’t that of some kind of experimentation undertaken at the leisure of educators, it is rather an innovation that is being done in the name of expediency and in emergency because so many boys in this Florida school district are falling behind; failing to progress in school, falling behind, and eventually failing to graduate and go on to college.

Mokoto Rich also points out in this article, and to the credit of the New York Times, it’s a really good article, the issue of teaching students in single-sex classes – that is girls only and boys only – is very popular with parents, it’s very popular with teachers, it’s not popular, as Rich writes, with social scientists. A very interesting paragraph, Rich writes,

“The theory is generally held in low regard,”

That is the theory that children do better in single-sex classroom. Again,

“The theory is generally held in low regard by social scientists.”

It’s a very interesting paragraph because that one sentence tells you who’s really driving the force in terms of education in so many not only educational discussions but educational classrooms is neither parents more teachers but social scientists. And what are the concerns brought forward by social scientists? Well here’s a paragraph from Riches article,

“Critics say that there is little evidence of substantial differences in brain development between boys and girls and that dividing children by gender can reinforce entrenched stereotypes.”

Now you’ll notice that has nothing to do with education, that has to do with social science – or what is called social science. The claim here is that you reduce the issue to the brain development of boys and girls. That’s simply something that parents don’t have the option to do, nor for that matter probably very much interest. They’re interested in what boys are actually doing in the classroom and whether their learning. And now you have a citation by scientists that there is no basis for any advantage of separating boys and girls in the educational context because their brains actually operate basically alike. But I’m pretty sure it’s the second half of that sentence that is really driving the equation. I go back and read that,

“…that dividing children by gender can reinforce entrenched stereotypes.”

That goes back to the gender revolution and the ideologues who are telling us that any notion of a distinction between boys and girls is simply a socially constructed patriarchal and intolerant remnant from an ancient prejudicial past.

Rebecca Bigler, a psychologist at the University of Texas, said that segregating by sex or any social category increases prejudice based on stereotype. She said,

“You say there’s a problem with sexism and instead of addressing the sexism, you just remove one sex.”

Well you’ll notice the article actually has a problem with boys not learning. The presenting issue here wasn’t sexism but the social ideologues will turn every issue into the issue of their primary, if not solitary, if not exclusive, ideological concern.

The article also makes clear that a lot of the educators actually involved in teaching these children and a lot of the parents see a big difference in terms of having boys and girls in separate classrooms. For instance, one of the teachers writing about having a classroom of boys says, if you let them play at learning in terms of competition, especially with something like math, the boys revel in it and tend to learn. They do not do so well if the educational context isn’t made into something that’s competitive. The competition brings out the very best in them. That doesn’t work the same way in a classroom full of girls.

One of the principal cited in the articles is Angela Brown, the principal at the Dillard School, that’s also in Pompano Beach, said,

“…boys in single-sex classes had better attendance than those in coeducational classes as well as better scores on state reading and math tests. But the biggest improvement was a decline in disciplinary infractions and bullying.”

So in another words, behavior also improved, especially in this case, among boys when the boys were studying just with each other.

“Boys are trying to impress girls, and girls are trying to impress boys… [we’ve] have removed that variable out of the way.”

What we’re looking here at the distinction between the way that educators and parents look at the question and those who are identified in this article as social scientists; in many cases, driven more by a sociological ideology than by anything that is rightfully called science. But the last word on this issue has to be given to the children. One of the boys cited in the article is Jaheim Jones, he’s age 8, he says he prefers “a girl free zone at school because girls are ‘bossy.’” Meanwhile nine-year-old Shenilla Johnson, a girl who is a third grader at Charles Drew elementary said she likes an all-girls class. She says it’s better, because boys “annoy you,” without them, she says, “we get to learn new things.” So for the worldview wisdom in this article here’s your choice between the social scientists and between an eight-year-old and nine-year-old who seem to know the difference between being a girl and a boy.

3)  Report on rise of ‘gender-benders’ displays blind agenda of transgender movement

A final example of how we have to talk about this issue and why we can’t escape it comes from National Public Radio, in the last day of November they ran an article entitled “For These Millennials, Gender Norms Have Gone Out Of Style.” Lidia Jean Kott writing that when it comes to the millennial generation they decided to let all the distinctions between male and female go. She says the millennials say they find traditional notions of gender too confining, even ill-fitting. They are challenging, she says, the idea that men must dress a certain way and women another. And their rewriting the rules and refashioning clothes so they can dress and accessorize in whatever way feels right to them.

She then goes to social science research and says,

“More than two-thirds of people ages 14 to 34 agree that gender does not have to define a person in the way that it used to, according to a 2013 study conducted by the Intelligence Group, a consumer insights company. And 6 in 10 say that men and women do not need to conform to traditional gender roles or behaviors anymore.”

She comes up with a couple of millennials who fit this description of the gender benders and writes as if they are illustrating the trend of the generation as a whole; in fact, that the entire point of the article – from the headline to its introduction.

The article cites Caitlin Ryan, a clinical social worker at San Francisco State University, she study sexual orientation and gender identity in youth, she says the millennials are defined gender expectations,

“This generation views gender as a mark of self-expression — they view it as a way of displaying their full sense of self,”

Kott then writes,

“But for some millennials, expressing their gender in a way that feels right is less about finding one article of clothing, or a set style, and more about fluidity.”

She’s suggesting here that these Millennials are bending all the gender rules and adopting a fluidity when it comes to gender roles and gender self-expression. Given the headline, the introduction, and the first dozen or so paragraphs of these news articles, you would think that this must be the wave of the future until you reach the end of the article.

At the end of the article the entire case gets given away and it’s given away by Suzanna Walters who is director the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University. In response to the claim that the Millennials are just wholesale bending the gender rules, she comes back and says, most Millennials don’t push gender boundaries at all. As a matter fact, she cited in the article,

“It’s a real minority. And it gets played up in the media more than everyday life. The vast majority of people still obey gender roles,”

And then she says what is so obviously true, and what makes the article itself an indication of the confusion of the culture where you’d think the reporter would be clarifying. The clarification comes at the very end of the article by this professor at Northeastern University who basically refutes everything who came before. And what’s the evidence that she brings? She’s not citing a consumers study; she’s not citing social science research. She says, and I quote,

“Just walk down the street.”

More than anything else, I cite this article because it points out that there are those who are trying to create the impression in the culture that everyone is bending the rules and that this is just the way the entire culture is operating; this is the direction entire culture is going. But the best reputation of this is perhaps sometimes not an argument, just an observation. But as this professor says, it’s just not so – all you have to do is walk down the street; young men are dressing like young men, young women are dressing like young women, and they don’t seem to be operating in a fashion that can we well described as either revolutionary, or for that matter to use the word in this article, fluid.

4) DNA pioneers minimized human identity to pure biology

Finally yesterday’s edition of the New York Times as the first article in its New York section ran an article entitled “Scientist Seeks Redemption By Selling Nobel Prize.” Perhaps you didn’t know the Nobel Prize could be sold – well the prize itself can’t be sold, but the memorabilia of the prize, including the metal, can be. This is the first time, according to the Times, that a living laureate has sold the award and it’s being sold by scientist James D. Watson; who was awarded the Nobel Prize for science in 1962 with scientist Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.

The three received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery almost a decade earlier of the double helix structure of DNA; that revealed how genetic traits are transmitted through heredity. As the time says,

“This has become the foundation of the now booming field of genomics, which has revolutionized the treatment of disease.”

Well let’s just say at this point one thing needs to be said and that is it has not yet revolutionized treatment of disease, but it may one day.

But remember the headline was that the scientist is seeking redemption by selling the Nobel Prize. It’s a very convoluted article but the bottom line of it is that James Watson has been in very hot water in recent years for statements he made that were inherently racist. And those racist statements basically put him in a bad position. He himself said that he had disappeared in terms of public life, now he says he wants to sell his Nobel Prize – hopefully for several million dollars – and give some of that away; only some of it in order to atone for his misdeeds and reenter polite public conversation.

Watson is now 86 years old; according to the Times he has expressed regret for his statement made back in 2007. He said quote,

“I can’t undo that. I do wish that I had been more careful in speaking about things I’m not expert in.”

That comment for which he got into so much trouble was a statement that there is a real hereditary racial disparity when it comes to IQ. The article by Anemona Hartocollis  in the New York Times raises a host of moral issues. The most important one is this: can you actually gain redemption by selling your Nobel Prize and thus by giving away some of the proceeds in order to make your words go away? It’s a dubious proposition and the New York Times seems to present it in this news article as just that. But that’s not the main reason I brought it up. In terms of worldview significance, this man, nor his partner in his research, Francis Crick, because when it comes to James Watson and Francis Crick we’re actually talking about two people, who in the 20th century perhaps represented more than anyone else the redefinition of the human being in entirely materialistic form. Something that now forms so much of the modern secular worldview.

By the time Watson and Cricket concluded their research they basically made the point in public and in scientific journals that the human being is nothing more than a collection of molecules in genetic information; that the human being is basically just stuff. And they understood this quite straightforwardly as a rejection of the biblical and Christian worldview when it came to the understanding of humanity. It also reminded me of something which enables me to acknowledge a debt, as The Briefing comes to an end today, and that debt is to Francis Schaeffer.

His book, The God Who Is There was the 383rd book I bought for my personal library and I know that because at that point I was writing the number in the series it was bought in the front of the book. I bought it when I was a 17-year-old and it was Francis Schaeffer, one of most influential apologists and evangelical thinkers of the 20 century, who introduced me to James Watson and Francis Crick and to what it meant for this new secular understanding of humanity to replace the biblical understanding of what it means to be human. In this book The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer wrote, and I quote,

“The historic Christian position is that man’s dilemma has a moral cause. God, being non-determined, created man as a non-determined person. “

What Schaeffer is rejecting here is the modern secular determinism that is either by the social Darwinians or coming by biological determinism or by behavioral such as BS Skinner. Schaeffer then writes,

“This is a difficult idea to anyone thinking in 20th century terms because most 20th century thinking sees man as determined. He is held determined either by chemical factors”

That was held by the Marquis de Sade and, as he said, by Dr. Francis Crick, and by extension also Dr. James Watson.

“…or by psychological factors as Freud and others have suggested”

In either case, or as a result of the fusion of these two, man is considered to be programmed. If this is the case Schaeffer wrote,

“…then man is not the tremendous thing the Bible says he is, made in the image of God as a personality who can make a free first choice. Because God created a true universe outside of himself (not as an extension of his essence), there’s a true history which exists. Man as created in God’s image is therefore a significant man and a significant history, who could choose to obey the commandment of God and love him or revolt against Him.”

So Francis Schaeffer was rejecting this kind of determinism and reductionism by saying the human being is a man in full or a woman in full, a human being, a man or a woman, made in God’s image and answerable to him – not just a jumble of molecules and genetic information: a man, not a machine.

Francis Schaeffer published this book back in 1968 and now the headlines of the New York Times yesterday tell us the same story is ongoing, the same conflict endures. The conflict between the modern secular worldview and the biblical worldview is permanent and will be so until Jesus comes. But as The Briefing comes to a close, this allows me to thank Francis Schaeffer, who now has been with the Lord for two decades, for helping me to learn, even as a teenager, how to think as a Christian.

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

 

 

 

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