R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 353

Transcript: The Briefing 08-20-14

The Briefing

 

August 20, 2014

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

It’s Wednesday, August 20, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Response to ‘Purge’ hoax reveals fear of humans that law might be removed

“In five seconds you will experience anarchy” – those are the opening words to the theatrical trailer for this summer’s movie known as The Purge: Anarchy. Last summer the movie was known as The Purge, and taken together these two movies have now entered American popular culture, even if they were not blockbusters at the box office. And recently, both of these movies had gained attention – especially in cities such as Louisville, Kentucky – because the cultural phenomena that appears to have erupted in social media. Last Friday night many people in Louisville were quite concerned because a teenager sparked a crisis in the city by announcing that there would be a purge in Louisville on Friday night. What is it you ask? Well as USA Today explains,

 

The horror movie, released [this summer, that is The Purge: Anarchy], creates a world in which the government lifts every law for a 12-hour period, making all crimes — including murder — legal… [as well as]…suspending all emergency services.

 

What we’re looking at here is a movie that depicts a dystopian – that is the opposite of a utopia. If a utopia is a perfect world, a dystopia is a perfectly awful, evil, deadly, world.  And you can’t really conceive, in terms of the moral imagination, anything that would be more dark and deadly than the world that is described in either the movie The Purge or The Purge: Anarchy.  Anarchy is actually the right word for this, because that is the moral state of the absence of law or legal authority. What’s really interesting from all this is what the movie and the response to the movie and the cultural phenomena now in social media, what it tells us about the utility of the gift of law, what it tells us about the goodness of the fact that God created us in His image as moral beings and the goodness of the fact that God has given us the gift of the moral law. Without the moral law, we simply don’t have any measure of what is right and wrong – there is no structure of conscience in the universe, there is no moral sense of gravity, there is no restraint upon human evil.

 

The threat in the larger culture that USA Today is writing about, the threat in Metropolitan areas from Texas to Colorado to beyond is that there would be something that would mimic The Purge, in terms of their own community. Frankly, the actual fear is that some kind of false information sparked on social media will lead some people into the very set of conditions that these movies demonstrate – a murderous and deadly set of conditions which people operate without any law and society itself breaks down. Where law enforcement is suspended and even crimes, up to murder, are simply not matters of legal or moral consequence. But of course the very fact that these movies are gaining popular attention, even some conversation in the larger culture, tells us that these are issues that immediately spark human fears and no little amount of human imagination. It is a part of the human imagination to just wonder what it would be like if we were in a world without legal authority and without the restraint of law. In fact, most people, most human beings, at some point in their development have thought that they might even have wished for an escape from the moral law and from the reality of moral responsibility. But the more you think about it, the more dystopian this actually appears to be. The more deadly and dangerous we understand a world would be if laws removed.

 

Of course, Christians, armed with knowledge that is given to us by God’s revelation in Scripture, are already warned of the effects; as the Old Testament tell us, when every man does what is right in his own sight. We remember, for instance, the bedlam estate of moral anarchy that God judged in terms of bringing the flood, giving the entire Noah narrative its moral sense of meaning. We need to understand that from the biblical perspective, the great fear is not that the law would be given but that the law might be forgotten, or even that it might be removed. Many Christians, evangelical Christians in particular, are fully aware of the fact that the law is a positive reality – even as we often speak of it in the negative, reminding ourselves, as the Scripture makes abundantly clear, that we are saved by grace and not by the law. As a matter fact, wherever you find a clear understanding of Reformation doctrine – making the gospel crystal-clear – what you find is a clear distinction between grace and law. But we also need to understand that grace can’t possibly appear to be grace unless to get to the laws is understood within its context. This is the point that the apostle Paul makes emphatically in Romans 7, where he himself asked the question: if the law kills me and slays me by his negative judgment is it then evil? And the apostle Paul says, by no means, it certainly is not evil. It is God’s gift to tell me the accurate diagnosis of my problem – which is that I am a lawbreaker, I am a sinner, and to point me towards the only salvation from that peril and that is: the redemption that is accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

In evangelical theology, the laws have been spoken of as having at least three uses. One of the uses is to show us our need for the Gospel, the other use is to restrain human evil, and the third use is for instruction to godliness and faithfulness in the Christian life. Now, when we look at the Gospel, we come to understand what it means to be saved by grace and not of works – not to be saved by the law and not to confuse the Gospel with moralism. Far too many evangelical Christians end up speaking disparagingly of the law, in such a way that the movie The Purge actually brings to our attention. The dystopia of The Purge and its successor movie The Purge: Anarchy, the fact that you have law enforcement officials and the writers of USA Today concerned that there may be actual attempts to mimic The Purge, all these things are very clear indicators of the goodness of the law and how thankful we should be for the gift of the law. How concerned we should be, as Americans now seem to be intuitively concerned, about what happened if the law were to be suspended and legal authority were to disappear. And these two movies appear to be dystopian and scary precisely because they are at least indicators of what would happen if the law were removed and if legal authority were to disappear.

 

It’s hard to believe that there’s much of a serious threat of Americans actually trying to mimic this movie in any wide scale approach, but one thing is clear: this conversation helps us to understand why the law is such a gift, and why the restraining power of the law in human society is so absolutely necessary. If the movies, known as The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy are in any sense entertaining, it is because it is not only fascinating but horrifying to imagine a world in which the law has simply been suspended; in which there is no moral accountability. And even worse it’s possible to conceive a world in which there is no moral conscience, there is no binding sense of moral knowledge that is a source of the restraint against evil that is so necessary in human society.

 

Christians looking at the controversy over these movies need to recognize that a basic theological point is being made, a point that is central to the Christian worldview. The understanding that the world we live in is dangerous enough because of sin and its consequences in God’s judgment upon human iniquity. But it will be far worse if God did not love us so much that he gave us, as one of his gift to humanity, the moral knowledge that is part of being made in His image and the restraint of the law that is given to us in order that we might not kill each other, and rob from each other, and do everything that will be imaginable, even without the knowledge of the evil that is thereby done.

2) Confusion from legal marijuana indicate importance of law as moral teacher

But oddly enough, even as there’s a lot of cultural conversation about those two movies, there’s even more conversation about a more lasting and troubling issue – and that is what is known as legal marijuana. In this case as well, what we see is a testimony to the necessity of law, not only to the existence of law, but to the law rightly reflecting what leads to human happiness, to human order, and to human flourishing. For instance, looking again to USA Today a major article appeared on the front page entitled, “Colorado Aims to Produce More Legal Pot.” This is one of those headlines that even just a couple of years ago would’ve made no sense whatsoever, but it makes a rather awkward since now. And as USA Today reports, here’s the problem for the state of Colorado: Colorado legalized recreational marijuana and intends not only to make it available, but to make money off of it – in terms of revenue to the state. So in order to regulate this newly legalized marijuana trade, it has come up with ways whereby there are authorized growers and authorized distributors, in order to sell marijuana to people who would otherwise legally be able to buy it, in order that the state may gain some tax revenue.

 

But here’s the reality, there aren’t enough people growing marijuana through these legal channels for Colorado to get the income that it thinks it needs. Colorado’s actually battling now a black market in marijuana, which is the very thing they promise to be eradicated, if only legal marijuana were to be made available. But it turns out that is not enough marijuana being sold through these legal channels for Colorado to get the tax income that it promised itself and its citizens. As Katie Kuntz of USA Today reports,

 

As a result, Colorado state regulators are trying to increase the amount of marijuana produced and sold by legal retailers.

 

Ron Kammerzell, identified as Colorado’s deputy senior director for enforcement for the state Department of Revenue said,

 

Right now, we are pretty significantly under what should be produced

 

Now remember, this is the Department of Revenue, this is about tax income. Here you have an official, the Colorado government, saying ‘we’re selling marijuana but we’re not selling enough of it, we need to sell more, and in order to sell more, we need to grow.’ So what we see here is a parable of what happens when you tamper with the law without understanding the consequences.

 

Some of those consequences are made quite clear in an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 14, the writers were William J. Bennett and Robert A. White. Bill Bennett is well-known as the first drug czar, he was the first director of the National Drug Control Policy and was so under President George H.W. Bush; Mr. White’s an attorney at Princeton, New Jersey. As they write, “Legal Pot Is a Public Health Menace.” A couple of paragraphs in their article make the issue very, very clear. As they write,

 

In the journal Current Addiction Reports found that regular pot use (defined as once a week) among teenagers and young adults led to cognitive decline, poor attention and memory, and actually decreased IQ. On Aug. 9 [that’s just a matter of less than two weeks ago], the American Psychological Association reported that at its annual convention the ramifications of marijuana legalization [and as this article in the Wall Street Journal indicated] Krista Lisdahl, director of the imaging and neuropsychology lab at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, saying: “It needs to be emphasized that regular cannabis use, which we consider once a week, is not safe and may result in addiction and neurocognitive damage, especially in youth.

 

Bennett and White then say,

 

Here’s the truth. The marijuana of today is simply not the same drug it was in the 1960s, ’70s, or ’80s, much less the 1930s. It is often at least five times stronger, with the levels of the psychoactive ingredient averaging about 15% in the marijuana at dispensaries found in the states that have legalized pot for “medicinal” or, in the case of Colorado, recreational use. Oftentimes the level of that chemical, known as THC, is 20% or higher.

 

That is a radical multiple of the marijuana that was available in the 1960s and 70s. Bennett and White conclude,

 

There are two conversations about marijuana taking place in this country: One, we fear, is based on an obsolete perception of marijuana as a relatively harmless, low-THC product. The other takes seriously the science of the new marijuana and its effect on teens, whose adulthood will be marred by the irreversible damage of their brains when young.

 

They say,

 

Supporters of marijuana legalization insist that times are changing and policy should too. But they are the ones stuck in the past—and charting a dangerous future for too many Americans.

 

But add to those two articles, yet another that testifies to the importance of the law and to getting the law right, and making sure that the law teaches the right things.

 

Writing on August 18, in the New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope reports that one of the big problems that parents and educators, especially in states where marijuana has been legalized, are now facing is the fact that what they’re saying to their kids doesn’t match what their actually saying to themselves – and the kids know it. Tara Parker-Pope reports,

 

These are confusing times for middle and high school students, who for most of their young lives have been lectured about the perils of substance abuse, particularly marijuana. Now it seems that the adults in their lives have done an about-face.

 

 

And that’s exactly what has taken place. In state after state, you might say around dinner table after dinner table, parents are now acknowledging that they’re using what had previously been illegal, and which they are now saying is prohibited for their own children. Tim Ryan, an anti-drug educator who works with middle school and high school students said about these kids,

 

They are growing up in a generation where marijuana used to be bad, and maybe now it’s not bad

 

Meanwhile, the New York Times itself has been arguing over the last several weeks for the legalization of marijuana. And in its own reporting, in this story, it indicates the acknowledgment of just how dangerous marijuana use can be for teenagers and adolescence. It turns out the many of today’s adults, even parents, are confusing their own children and teenagers about what’s right and wrong because, here’s the point, they’re confusing their own kids of a right and wrong because of their contortions with the law.

 

The fact fundamental to both of these stories is very important. Having to do with the movies known as The Purge and having to do with the confusion faced by so many people, especially young, people over the issue of marijuana. The Purge movies remind us of how important the law is and what a gift the law is to restrain evil. The law makes civilization possible, and makes moral meaning possible – you take away the law and you take away the lawgiver and you have nothing left but moral anarchy. And the story about the legalization of marijuana and these new complications in states like Colorado, well they point to the fact that it is not only important to have the law but to get the law right – because the law is a teacher, it is a profoundly important moral teacher, and when you mess with the law, you mess with the morality. And there are a lot of confused teenagers in Colorado who are trying to figure out the confusion that they have just received from their own parents.

3) Sexual identity revolution recipe for moral anarchy

Finally, another testimony to moral confusion – this one of an even darker variety – Allen Metcalf for writing in the Lingua Franca column of the Chronicle of Higher Education tells us what we supposedly have learned in the last several years and what remains to be learned over issues of gender and sexual orientation and all the rest. He writes in the column,

 

It continues to be an education. Back in the late 20th century, we learned (as we had kind of known all along) that people were not simply male or female, but heterosexual or homosexual. The latter we learned to designate as gay, as opposed to straight. And then we learned to separate homosexuals by gender as gay or lesbian. So far, so good.

 

 

That’s a rather powerful paragraph when you consider the fact that what he’s stating there as what we learned is exactly what many people in the society around us think we did learn. But he is actually just getting ready to make his big argument. As he continues,

But then, as we investigated sexuality and gender identity more thoroughly, other types made themselves known. [And he says we learned] There were bisexuals, [he goes on to define that] …[then we learn that there were] transsexuals.

 

He says,

 

This gave us four types of exceptions from the older categories of heterosexual male and heterosexual female

 

By the time he says we reached the early point in 21st century we had not only heterosexual males and heterosexual females, but lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals… so in other words as that point the initials LGBT began to make sense.

 

A convenient abbreviation [he says] a convenient abbreviation to help us remember them all. (And [he says] we learned that transgender might be a better term than transsexual

 

 

So, these are things he says, we’ve been learning. But Metcalf’s recounting isn’t incomplete – not by a long – because as he suggests, we’re now learning more and more. What are we learning? Well he says for instance, we are learning there are intersex people who are neither male or female he defines that as a separate category of conversation, by the way, and then he says we add to those the asexual’s because even though they are just 1% of the population, and even though they say they don’t care about sex, they have to be counted as a new sexual minority – as well to be added to the alphabet soup. He then goes on and says,

 

And so, putting it all together, we get the abbreviation LGBTQQ2IA. Not so easy to remember. So someone came up with an alternative, the anagram Quiltbag.

 

The definition found in one gay dictionary he cites is this,

 

It stands for Queer/Questioning, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender/Transsexual, Bisexual, Allied/Asexual, Gay/Genderqueer. It is meant [says this definition] to be a more inclusive term than GLBT/LGBT and to be more pronounceable (and memorable) than some of the other variations or extensions on the LGBT abbreviation.

 

And folks, I’m not making this up.

 

Metcalfe, who writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is speaking to the academic community, goes on to explain the Urbandictionary has a slightly different interpretation of this. Identifying the options as,

 

Q – Queer and Questioning

U – Unidentified

I – Intersex

L – Lesbian

T – Transgender, Transexual

B – Bisexual

A – Asexual

G – Gay, Genderqueer

 

Now keep in mind that here you have an educator, writing to the other educators of America, about how to remember these things. As you think about the expanding alphabet soup, and even as he traces the development, principally heterosexual male and heterosexual female to LGBT, and then on to – well, I won’t even repeat all the rest – he makes very clear that these options are hardly the last word. He says,

 

As gender-studies research continues, and discussion proliferates, other variations are likely to emerge.

 

Write that down as an almost certain understatement. He concludes, and this is really important to hear:

 

So young people nowadays have choices to make that they didn’t face before. And it’s not a once-for-all choice; they can question and redefine themselves at any time. They even need to let others know the pronouns by which they should be addressed. I’ll discuss these next week.

 

So let’s stay tuned for that article, adding to the confusion of that incredible alphabet soup he recited and yet with a straight face here you have an educator saying this makes moral sense. And furthermore, you have someone straightforwardly arguing that these are things we have learned, as if this is some kind of set of objective truth that have been placed before us. But he actually pull the rug out of his own argument by making very clear, this isn’t an objective reality at all – this is simply a socially constructed reality in which sex and gender are considered to be endlessly plastic.  In which, as he says,

 

Young people nowadays have to face choices they didn’t face before.

 

Well those choices are actually forced upon them by these sexual revolutionaries. And then he points to the truly revolutionary character of their assessment when he says,

 

And it’s not a once-for-all choice; they can question and redefine themselves at any time.

 

That’s a recipe for exactly the kind of moral anarchy we began talking about on the program today. And you’ll notice, that is not just something depicted in movies, it’s not just something discussed by legislators, it’s not something driven by intellectuals with an ideological agenda, and they make that agenda clear in articles such as this, published in this week’s edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Keep in mind all this is not just about an intellectual debate, it’s about a battle for hearts and minds

 

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 boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

The Briefing 08-20-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Response to ‘Purge’ hoax reveals fear of humans that law might be removed

Social media ‘Purge’ campaigns spark fear of bloody copycats, USA Today (Lindsay Deutch, Kelsey Pape and Ryan Haarer)

‘Louisville Purge’ takes toll, Louisville Courier-Journal (James Bruggers)

2) Confusion from legal marijuana indicate importance of law as moral teacher

Colorado aims to produce more legal pot, USA Today (Katie Kuntz)

Legal Pot Is a Public Health Menace, Wall Street Journal (William Bennett and Robert A White)

Legal Marijuana for Parents, but Not Their Kids, New York Times (Tara Parker-Pope)

3) Sexual identity revolution recipe for moral anarchy

LGBTQQ2IA, Chronicle of Higher Education (Allen Metcalf)

Transcript: The Briefing 08-19-14

The Briefing

 

August 19, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, August 19, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Spread of Ebola aided by lack of cultural understanding of Western medical practice

Laurie Garrett, one of the world’s foremost specialists on infectious diseases has written an ominous story for Foreign Policy magazine, one of the most influential journals of the foreign policy establishment. The headline ought to have your attention “You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough About Ebola.” Laurie Garrett has a central concern here, and that concern is this: people in the West seem to believe that a disease like Ebola can be kept at a safe remove from the United States of America. And yet as she writes – even at this point, it has been rather localized, in terms of West Africa – all it has to do is get one significant population and it explodes. And she has her bull’s-eye on one particular population and that is the city of Lagos, Nigeria. Now the disease is in Nigeria, if it should reach this city with teeming millions there is nothing, she makes clear, to keep it from an international breakout. And as she says, quite ominously and quite truthfully, there is no vaccine and there is no demonstrated treatment for this disease, there are no pharmaceuticals available, there is no magic cure.

 

If indeed the drug that was used on the two evacuated US medical missionaries was effective, it will still not be available. And as Laurie Garrett says, the kind of outbreak we should fear is not going to wait for the development of either the technology or the delivery of those pharmaceuticals. Garrett says that far too many people in the West assume that there must, be in her words, ‘magic bullets’ in some rich country’s freezers that will instantly stop the relentless spread of the Ebola virus. She writes,

 

If you think airport security guards in Los Angeles can look a traveler in the eyes and see infection, blocking that jet passenger’s entry into LA,

 

you’re living in Neverland.

 

She cites John Campbell of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former US ambassador in Nigeria who warned recently the spread of the virus inside Lagos, which has a population of 22 million people, would instantly transform the situation into a worldwide crisis – thanks to the chaos, size, density, and mobility of not only that city but dozens of others in the enormous oil-rich nation. Add to that, she says, Nigerian civil war, national elections, Boko Haram terrorists, and a countrywide doctors’ strike – all of which are not just threatened, but already real.

 

A similar warning came in the August 17 edition of the New York Times, indicating that one of the major problems right now with containing the Ebola outbreak is the lack of medical personnel – and doctors in particular. Writing for the Times, Sheri Fink points out that many Western organizations have withdrawn their medical personnel – indeed many of them simply had to because the presence of those medical personnel was a part of the problem, and it still is. In much of Nigeria and West Africa there are many people who think that Westerners are infecting Africans with the disease. Western doctors are themselves suspects in the eyes of many Africans for spreading the disease, rather than for trying to help to treat it. That was made abundantly clear just recently when in Liberia people broke into a hospital full of Ebola patients and ‘liberated’ them – putting them out in the population because they felt they had be liberated from Western oppression. The article in the New York Times makes very clear the horrifying kinds of moral questions that are now addressing the world, not only in terms of the situation on the ground in West Africa, but the situation elsewhere, where people are having to make decisions in Charlotte, North Carolina and Denver, Colorado, and in Brussels, Belgium about whether or not to send medical personnel, what kind of medical personnel to send, and whether not sending them would help – or perhaps even hurt.

Similarly, over the weekend the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article indicating that one of the major problems there in West Africa is not only the shortage of medical personnel but of medical supplies. And one of them is profoundly simple – it turns out that one of the major avenues for the transmission of this deadly disease is the absence of medical gloves. As it turns out, the headline says, “For Want of Gloves, Ebola Doctors Die.” And is not just Ebola doctors who are dying – it’s medical personnel and others are contaminating patient by patient, taking the disease to people do not even have the disease. This kind of news should set seriously minded Christians to thinking very seriously about this issue, about this plague, this disease, and the larger questions that are involved.

 

For one thing, it should set us to praying in a whole new way when we understand this threat, understanding that we should be praying for the people of West Africa. We should be praying that this disease, this contagion will be contained. We should be praying that there will not be the kind of horrifying outbreak that Laurie Garrett describes in Foreign Policy magazine. We need to pray that – not just so that the disease would not reach us, but so that those who are even right now struggling with this disease may be among the last in this contagion to have to face that horrifying news. But we also need to keep in mind some other truths that most Americans never think of, and many American Christians are included in that number.

 

For one thing, let’s think about this for a moment, modern medicine is not just an invention or a discovery – it is an achievement, it is a monumental achievement, it is an achievement that emerged only in cultures that were committed to a very common worldview. And that worldview, was not the worldview of technology and industry, but the worldview that was inherited from the Christian tradition – the biblical worldview. The biblical worldview that dignified a rational world, created by an intelligent Creator, in terms of His omnipotence and His glory, who gave us the world and told us that it was to His glory and for our good that we would come to know it – a God of an orderly universe, who created that universe such that there is an orderly repeatable pattern. Modern medicine, indeed modern science, would’ve been impossible without that fundamental worldview. And add to that worldview, another very important issue and that is the dignity of human beings, the sanctity of human life. All those things came together with many other achievements in order to bring about the revolution we know as modern medicine. Most Americans for instance never ponder the fact that it was after the establishment of this nation in 1776, that people, even in the Western world, became accustomed and settled in what is now known as germ theory. As recently as the late 18th century, most people, even most intelligent and educated people – even in cities such as Washington and Boston and London ­– believe that diseases were caused by elements in the universe, and in particular clouds and humors, believing that mist carried those diseases, and that breathing the mist would cause the disease to be obtained, and avoiding the mist or the humor would prevent the same. But as it turns out, the invention of germ theory was instrumental to the rise of modern medicine and to the rise of the kinds of habits that go along with avoiding disease –the habits of hygiene and such things as antibiotics. Those things are part of the achievement of modern medicine, not just an invention, not just a discovery, but an achievement – and an achievement that requires a certain cultural understanding.

 

The absence of that understanding, right now among much of West Africa, explains why there are people trying to break into hospitals to liberate patients from modern treatment. Why the effort to isolate people, in terms of contagion, is seen as a form of racism or oppression. And amongst people who are even claiming that what is really going on here is an effort to harvest organs from people – the disease not even being real, they claim. One of our main concerns on The Briefing is to talk about the necessary intersection between worldview and life, especially as seen in the leading issues of the news and public conversation. Ebola is something that scares people, and as Laurie Garrett makes very clear, it ought to scare us. But far more than that, for the Christian worldview perspective it ought to make us think like Christians and understand just how thankful we should be for modern medicine – not as a gift of a secular modern age, but as the inheritance of a tradition that was established on the biblical grounds. And we should also see, in contrast, that where that worldview is absent, modern medicine actually doesn’t fit. We should be thankful that it has arrived in West Africa, but we should understand that is not always well received even when it has arrived. So as we say: worldview matters, it matters what you trying to get into a hospital or to break out of one.

2) Pro-choicer criticizes abortion movement for treating abortion as a significant moral issue

Frankly, you don’t have to look very far to find a deadly and devastating effects of a faulty worldview. In recent days all you had to do was look at the opinion pages of the Washington Post. If you did, you would find an article by Janet Harris identified as the president of Upstream Analysis, a news and social media analysis firm. We are also told she was previously the communications director of Emily’s List, a political action committee supporting Democratic pro-choice women running for office. In other words she’s been an activist for abortion – and when you look at this article you’ll understand that activism in a whole new sense. Headline of her opinion pieces is this, “Stop Calling Abortion a Difficult Decision” this is one of those pieces you would almost believe had been written by a pro-lifer in order to embarrass the pro-abortion movement – but  it wasn’t, it was written by someone with vast experience advocating for abortion. Janet Harris writes, and I quote:

 

Planned Parenthood calls abortion “a difficult decision” in many of its consent forms and fact sheets. When NARAL launched a film on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade in 2013, the president of the pro-choice organization called abortion “a difficult decision” women and couples face. Lawmakers [she says] use the adjective, too. “It was a difficult, difficult decision, but it was the right one,” [that was said by] Nevada Assemblywoman, Lucy Flores…in defending her choice to have an abortion at age 16.

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a United States Senator in 2005, described the decision to have an abortion as:

 

One of the most fundamental, difficult and soul-searching decisions a woman and a family can make.

 

But then Janet Harris writes this, and these are her exact words,

 

However, when the pro-choice community frames abortion as a difficult decision, it implies that women need help deciding, which opens the door to paternalistic and demeaning “informed consent” laws. It also stigmatizes abortion and the women who need it.

 

In Janet Harris’s view, abortion is not a difficult decision – indeed she says,

 

Often, abortion isn’t a difficult decision. In my case, it sure wasn’t. When I was 18, my boyfriend, whom I was with for more than a year, frequently pressured me into having sex. At the time, I lacked the maturity and experience to exert more control over the situation. For more than 10 weeks, I progressed from obliviousness about my pregnancy to denial to wishful thinking… Once I faced reality, though [she writes], having an abortion was an obvious decision, not a difficult one. The question wasn’t “Should I or shouldn’t I?” but “How quickly can I get this over with?” [she continues,] This was in the mid-1980s, when abortion was about women having control not just over their bodies but over their destinies.

 

Explaining her own decision to have an abortion and why it was such an ‘obvious choice,’ to use her language, she writes:

 

An unwanted pregnancy would have derailed my future, making it difficult for me to finish college and have the independent, productive life that I’d envisioned.

 

So very bluntly, she tells the reader of the Washington Post that it was an easy decision, an obvious decision, for her to have an abortion – terminating the life within her, so that that unborn child would not derail her life or make it difficult for her to finish college, and have what she describes as, “the independent, productive life that I’d envisioned.”

 

Janet Harris says she understands why the advocates of the pro-life position say that abortions a difficult decision, it’s because they wish it were, they hope it is, and in many cases, she implies, they want it to be. But she says it really isn’t a difficult choice, or shouldn’t be, she says when pro-choice advocates use the difficult decision formulation, they do so so as not to demonize women. They want to make it look as if women are struggling with the great and grave moral decision – and yet she says that’s not necessary. And just when you think her article can’t grow anymore atrocious, she writes

 

But there’s a more pernicious result when pro-choice advocates use such language: It is a tacit acknowledgment that terminating a pregnancy is a moral issue requiring an ethical debate. To say that deciding to have an abortion is a “hard choice” implies a debate about whether the fetus should live, thereby endowing it with a status of being. It puts the focus on the fetus rather than the woman. As a result, the question “What kind of future would the woman have as a result of an unwanted pregnancy?” gets sacrificed. By implying that terminating a pregnancy is a moral issue, pro-choice advocates forfeit control of the discussion to anti-choice conservatives.

 

From time to time we all read things that shock us, other things that horrify us – but this is not only shocking, it’s not only horrifying, it’s also very clarifying. Because here you have a woman whose had a major post in the pro-choice movement saying that it’s about time that that side of the equation simply took the issue of a hard decision or difficult choice off the table when it comes to having abortion. And she is so straightforwardly, if horrifyingly honest, to say that she makes this argument because the moment you say it was a hard decision, or difficult choice, you bring the fetus in the equation – you give it, as she says, a status – and she profoundly believes that the fetus must not have a status in this discussion. If anything, what she does is to lay bare the entire logic of the pro-abortion movement.

 

This is exactly the arguments made by the lawyers in the Supreme Court case in 1973 known as Roe v. Wade. They were arguing the fetus doesn’t have a status, this is exactly what those were opposing – even the partial-birth abortion ban act years ago were arguing – the fetus at no stage has a status, they don’t what the fetus as a part of the equation, they don’t want the fetus appearing on the refrigerator in that image from an ultrasound, they don’t want the fetus even implied in the statement that it is a difficult choice. She also goes on to say, as you heard her to say her own words, that the statement that it is a difficult choice or a hard decision implies that there is an ethical issue involved and she doesn’t believe there is. When she concludes her article she says that the only downside to the abortion, in her view, is that it is:

 

Highly stressful, and [in her words] humiliating evidence of a failure in judgment

 

But the failure in judgment is not the judgment to get the abortion and kill the baby, but rather the decision to have the sex that produced the context of the pregnancy that now is a problem, as she sees it, of no ethical significance.

 

In recent months we’ve been confronted with so many arguments coming from the pro-abortion side, arguments with the teeth bared, with no effort to disguise the intention. We have had women who claim that what needs to happen is a public relations campaign in order to make clear that women are proud of having an abortion, rather than being embarrassed of the same. They are now saying that abortion needs to be beautified in art and presented to the public in such a way that it’s an attractive option – rather than something that is to be whispered elsewhere. And now you have this one writing in the pages of the Washington Post, one of the most influential newspapers in the United States, a newspaper that is avowedly pro-abortion, but a newspaper in which is kind of article is still rather striking when it appears in the opinion page. And article is striking – because she’s not really here criticizing the pro-life side, she’s criticizing her fellow pro-abortionists, and she’s criticizing them for accepting, and for even acknowledging that abortion is a significant moral issue – that in the lives of many women, it is a difficult decision, it is a hard choice. It wasn’t for her, she says, and it should be for those women as well. She blames the pro-choice movement adopting that language for inflicting that ethical difficulty upon women, who otherwise would understand, as she did, that the fetus has no status at all and that there is no ethical issue here and the only question is how quickly she can get it done. ]

The culture of death generally hides behind euphemisms, false arguments, and equivocations. It’s really an acknowledgment of what the logic of abortion always is, when you have a woman who has had this kind of experience in the pro-choice, pro-abortion movement, criticize her own movement for suggesting that abortion might be a difficult choice, a hard decision, an ethical issue.

3) Anxiety in parenting reveals heart desires of parents

With Labor Day looming before us, most American schoolchildren are either already in school or soon to be headed that way, and as is usually the case with the back-to-school season, the media are giving a lot of attention to the back-to-school issues and there’s a flurry of articles having to do everything from the quality of schooling to school board and political issues, to questions about what children should wear, and what they should eat – but one most interesting dimensions of the conversation this year is a flurry of articles and analyses suggesting that parents are over-parenting, and that this is a problem for American schoolchildren. And there is also the acknowledgement that something’s wrong, not just with the curriculum but with the kids.

 

Writing the Wall Street Journal, Adam Price, a psychologist who practices in Newark City, New Jersey, writes about what he calls “The Underchallenged ‘Lazy Teenager’,” as he says the problem of lazy teenager is probably as old as humanity. However, American parents in the current generation seem to have forgotten how to deal with it. Simply wringing their hands as they are often very concerned about their lazy teenagers – and, as he says the major problem here is, the indolence of adolescent males, the laziness of adolescent boys. He’s not writing about the high achievers, whether boys or girls, trying to get into Harvard or Yale, he’s writing about some boys who are not achieving. He says,

 

They are the ones who make time for television, videogames, social media and friends, but not for school. Many do the minimum required to get by, flying under the radar of official “trouble” while causing their parents plenty of grief and consternation

 

He says,

 

My psychology practice is filled with middle- and high-school-age boys who cannot seem to achieve their “potential.”

 

Interestingly, Adam Price says one of the problems is parents are often a very poor judge of potential of their own kids, and sometimes they hold up the potential that is too high – leading their boys to believe, if I can’t meet that, I’ll  simply go into a shell and not do anything. But that’s not the main problem, he says far too many parents, when it comes to teenage boys, are telling them that they’re smarter than they are, that they’re doing better academically than they are, or they try to cushion the blow when the young man simply doesn’t do as well as he should have done. He also writes, not only should parent stop telling them how smart they are when they’re not actually performing in any smart way, but they should also stop doing the dishes for him.

 

Children are not helped when parents take care of household chores because the children are “too busy” with homework, sports and other activities. Treating them like royalty whose only job is to bring honor to the family gives them an unrealistic message about life—that they are special. Seeing a parent take out the garbage does not inspire a teenager to rush, with gratitude, to his studies. Rather, he draws the conclusion: “I am above all of that drudgery.” Successful people tend to be those who are willing and able to do things that they really don’t want to do [says Dr. Price]

 

Next, he says, don’t let the boy off easily. He cites clinical psychologist Wendy Mogul, who’s written

 

That it is easier for parents to feed, shelter and clothe their children than it is for them to set effective limits. But not enforcing consequences for the indolent teenage boy reinforces the notion, yet again, that he is special, and that the rules of the world do not apply to him.

 

Then he says,

 

Don’t make him shine for you. In a culture where teenagers scramble to amass credentials and gain admission to the best colleges…being considered average or even a little above has become unacceptable. But by overlooking the good in the quest for the perfect, parents saddle children with unrealistic expectations. A college counselor I know [he says] likes to say that a good college is one that fits your kid, not one whose name adds class to your car’s rear window.

 

Coming from a secular source, there is still an incredible amount of wisdom there and one that most parents can recognize as being a wisdom deeper than even a secular psychologist understands. But also buttressing his argument is an article that appeared in yesterday’s edition of USA Today, the article by Michelle Healy is entitled “Parent-Reported Cases of Disability in Children Rise” and here’s what’s really interesting: it turns out that there has been a vast explosion of parent reported cases of disability in children, but not where they were expected, amongst those who are more impoverished, but amongst those where it was expected at all – those were the richest. It turns out that America’s most affluent and wealthiest parents believe that their children are somehow broken – marked by some kind of disability. As Healy writes,

 

Disability due to any physical condition, such as asthma and breathing conditions, hearing problems, and bone or joint problems, declined by 12% during the decade, while cases related to any neurodevelopmental or mental-health condition, such as [you know it] attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning disabilities or emotional problems, increased by 21%.

 

And these wealthy parents are showing up with their children, and especially their teenagers, in the offices of doctors and psychologists and others, saying my child has a mental disability, has some kind of learning disability, needs some kind of drug, because otherwise you will be performing at the very top of the academic ranks and every major Ivy League college university will be seeking him for admission. Healy reports of the study that came out in the Journal Pediatrics yesterday indicated that amongst children living in affluent homes in the United States in the decades from 2001 to 2011, children in those affluent homes had a 28% increase in learning disability diagnoses.

 

The pediatricians looking at the at this report acknowledge that there is probably something going on here in terms the reality of some of these learning disabilities – but they say they can’t explain two things. Number one, this vast increase – some of that has to be simply an increase of parents worry, rather than any reality in the children and the second thing it can’t explain is why it’s happening mostly amongst the affluent, rather than amongst the impoverished – where at least these kinds of realities, if found, would be understood in terms of the context. No, the pediatricians are also noting something else and that is this: America’s parents, especially those parents amongst the elites and the parents who are most affluent, those parents have been believed that every one of their children must be like those parodied in the community of Lake Wobegon – they  have to be above average, and not just slightly above average but tremendously above average.  And what we have here is a set of very unmatched expectations of the part of many parents – who simply believe that their own self-esteem will rise or fall on whether their children are recognized by the larger world as being exceptional. Well every child’s exceptional, but not in the sense that is implied by this anxiety. The reality is, what we see in parenting is a mirror of ourselves, and what we see in parenting as we said yesterday in that international review, is what reveals a worldview in a culture and what reveals the heart of the parent as well.

 

It’s interesting that from secular sources there are now so many saying that American parents are over-parenting, over serving, over indulging kids – very arresting article here in terms of the indolent teenager,  but it is also really interesting that the same parents are turning around and saying if my child doesn’t get into Harvard or Yale, doesn’t gain all the approval of the world, and isn’t recognized as exceptional, it must be because of something like a learning disability – something I can blame or something for which there must be a pill. But in reality, most of our kids are average, most of the world’s average, and the glory of God is seen in the glory of average people.

 

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 boycecollege.com.

 

This morning at 10 o’clock (EST) I’ll be delivering the address at the annual opening convocation ceremony for Boyce College and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Following history and tradition of the Christian church through the centuries, we will be gathering together in order to consecrate ourselves before God for the academic year to come; praying for the Lord’s blessing. But there is a major message on my heart I want to share with the faculty and students at the seminary and the college, and you invited to watch as well. You can watch the streaming video at www.sbts.edu/live. The video will also be posted shortly thereafter.

 

I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

Do You Understand What You Are Reading? – The Christian Faith and the Call to Teach

Fall 2014 Convocation address given by Dr Mohler at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Alumni Chapel

The Briefing 08-19-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Spread of Ebola aided by lack of cultural understanding of Western medical practice

You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough About Ebola, Foreign Policy (Laurie Garrett)

With Aid Doctors Gone, Ebola Fight Grows Harder, New York Times (Sheri Fink)

Ebola Virus: For Want of Gloves, Doctors Die, Wall Street Journal (Drew Henshaw)

2) Pro-choicer criticizes abortion movement for treating abortion as a significant moral issue

Stop calling abortion a ‘difficult decision’, Washington Post (Janet Harris)

3) Anxiety in parenting reveals heart desires of parents

The Underchallenged ‘Lazy Teenager’, Wall Street Journal (Adam Price)

Parent-reported cases of disability in children rise, USA Today (Michelle Healy)

Transcript: The Briefing 08-18-14

The Briefing

 

August 18, 2014

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

It’s Monday, August 18, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

We all know that the world is a dangerous place, and one of the signs of the particular danger of our context is the fact that a group can all the sudden emerge into our consciousness that we didn’t know about just a matter of weeks or months before. And yet it can now be a potent factor, landing almost every day in the headlines of the nation’s newspapers and having attention from all over the world. That’s certainly the group that is known variously as ISIS and ISIL – either the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In any case, it has to do with the group that used to be Al Qaeda in Iraq, that is now radicalized far beyond what Al Qaeda was already recognized to be – in terms of its terroristic threats and its actual potential. But what we are looking at now is a state of affairs in the world in which it appears that chaos, rather than order, threatens to break out at almost every turn. Journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign-Policy run articles suggesting that what we’re seeing is a return to tribalism and the decline of the nation-state.

 

That runs human history backward, so far as most of us in the West are concerned. Those of us who are citizens of the United States, or other modern Western nations, are generally unfamiliar with just how recent in terms of human history the nation-state actually is. And before the nation-state, they were various levels of either autocracy or chaos, battling empires or the absolute lawlessness that affected so many parts of the world. And there was the belief, at least to the end of the 19th century and certainly throughout the 20th century, that the rise of the nation-state would bring order out of all that chaos. The nation of Iraq as a matter of fact, is itself a classic example – it was created artificially as a nation-state, but the constituent parts of that nation were never unified, in any sense, other than what was forced by politics and military action. The Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites and a Christian minority all represented different understandings of exactly what the nation might be. And as current events make abundantly clear, any holding together Iraq as a nation is by force rather, at least at present, than by persuasion.

 

But the return of tribalism on the world stage should be something that rings with the familiar to Christians. All you have to do is think back to the narrative of the first book of the Bible. When we think about the Table of the Nations, found in Genesis 11, and what we find there is reference to families, clans, tribes, and nations. The nations identified in Genesis 11 aren’t modern nation-states, they are collections or groups of tribes. And what we see taking place in so much of the world today is that the nation-state that was believed to be the shape the future, actually has very little to do with what’s actually going on on the ground in much of the world – Iraq is a central example.

 

But on Friday of last week, Americans were informed by our own national intelligence agencies that the threat of a group such as ISIS and ISIL is not now limited to the Middle East, to the Levant, Syria, or most crucially right now, Iraq. Rather, as our own intelligence agencies have informed us now ISIS forms a threat to the United States. As Siobhan Gorman, Tamer El-Ghobasy, and Nour Malas of the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday,

 

[The groups] made in recent months by the group calling itself the Islamic State have bolstered its long-term ambitions to attack the West, including the U.S., and the group has become such a potent force that traditional counterterrorism tactics aren’t sufficient, U.S. intelligence officials said on Thursday.

 

The three reporters continue to write,

Officials painted a bleak assessment of the threat posed by a group that was largely counted out just four years ago, when it was known as al Qaeda in Iraq. Since then, it has staged an extraordinary comeback, particularly in the past year. The forces that fueled its resurgence are also the factors that will make it so difficult to defeat.

Citing intelligence agencies in Washington.

There are several ways to look at this news, all of them negative. One of them has to do with the fact that according to the very intelligence agencies who are cited in this report, almost every single one of the current leaders of ISIS was once in American custody. We once had them in custody, but then we set them loose and when we set them loose, they began to coalesce around an even more radical terroristic plot than even what would have been undertaken by Al Qaeda in Iraq.

 

Concerning an attack on the United States, the intelligence agencies said

 

It has pitched itself as the true successor to Osama bin Laden. The full implication of that is that it intends to focus on the West.

 

As The Wall Street Journal summarized,

 

While its focus on gaining territory has translated into local attacks, those moves are a means to the longer-term goal of attacking America and the West.

 

An unusually thoughtful understanding of exactly what we face was published over the weekend in the pages of National Review Online in a column written by Jonah Goldberg entitled ‘The West Gaza.’ As the subtitle of the article declares, “no one in the West wants a long struggle with jihad-ism – the problem is the enemy always gets a vote.” This has been the great problem that has plagued the Western tradition in terms of politics and foreign policy. In the West, there been successive attempts to tryto create a world peace – the League of Nations, before that the Congress of Nations, after that the United Nations and what we see time and time again is that lawlessness breaks out, even when the powers that be declare that they have established order. But Jonah Goldberg is making a very important point here, and one that Christians should well understand. Even when you declare peace, that doesn’t mean that there is peace –as the Scripture records, there is shame that comes to those who cry “peace, peace” when there is no peace.

 

Goldberg points back to the 9/11 attacks in 2001and points out that almost immediately those attacks were followed by a discussion that was flavored by the kind of understanding of the world that was offered by Samuel Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations, and the same kind of analysis offered by experts such as Bernard Lewis when he spoke of the problem with Islam. In both counts what we were looking at is the claim made by very credible academics, who understand the world and have a theory of the world, that what you’re looking at in the current conflict between Islam and the modern West is not something that is either new or resolvable.

 

And this is where Christians who understand the importance of conviction and worldview understand that if you have two peoples who are opposed by ideologies that are absolutely irreconcilable, and when one of these considers violence and appropriate means for furthering its ends, there is no way that the group that is not committed to violence can be completely non-violent because violence is inflicted upon them. This is why the Christian tradition in the West has offered what has been known as Just War Theory, often mentioned on this program. That’s the theory was developed all the way back in the fourth and fifth centuries in the Christian tradition in the attempt to understand when force is justified and must be used. That is not a question that is even asked in the Muslim world – there is no Muslim theory of Just War, because in the Muslim view any armed effort, any aggression, that ends up with a gain for Islam is just simply because of that fact.

 

It is Islam that divides the world into two different spheres: the world of Islam and the world of war – obviously implying from the very beginning of the Muslim experience that those who are in the world of Islam must enter the world of war in order to see Islam expanded to that territory as well.

 

Goldberg’s point in raising the ‘clash of civilizations’ model is to point to the fact that so many people on the left are embarrassed by any commitment to American or Western civilization to the point that they rejected there is any clash of civilizations – some go so far as to argue that there is no possibility of a clash of civilizations, believing that all peoples everywhere are basically the same, wanting the same thing, operating out of the same kind of worldview. Christians know that isn’t true. Furthermore, just about any sane analysis of the world reveals it isn’t true at all. Goldberg concludes his column with these sentences,

 

Pentagon officials told NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski that they see the Islamic State as a “10- to 20-year challenge.” I hope that’s pessimistic. But it’s simply realistic that the ideological agenda driving these jihadis will present a challenge for far longer than that.

 

Finally, he writes,

 

No one in the West wants a generational struggle with jihadism any more than Israel wants perpetual war with Hamas in Gaza. The problem is the enemy always gets a vote. It just may be that the Middle East will become the West’s Gaza. And, so far, nobody has a good answer for what to do about it.

 

Those last words are also important, no one, nobody, has a good answer for what to do about it.

 

And that leads me to an exceedingly important front-page story in yesterday’s edition of the New York Times – the headline, As World Boils, Fingers Point Obama’s Way. It written by Peter Baker and it is a very evenhanded article. It points to the fact that the chaos in the world is being blamed, at least in part, on the income of the Oval Office, the president of the United States. And Baker’s exactly right, in one sense that simply goes with the office, and in another sense presidents are themselves responsible for much of that misapprehension, because presidents build up the aura of their office so much that it seems as if the President speaking as President the United States can have an invincible will that should be inviolate just about anywhere on the planet. Baker cites people on both sides of the political spectrum, as you would expect in a piece such as this. On the right he cites Will C. Inboden, a former national security aide to President George W. Bush, and executive director of the William P. Clements Jr. Center on History, Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Texas. I should mention that Professor Inboden was my host for a public lecture at the Johnson School there just a matter of months ago. Will Inboden said

 

I certainly do not think President Obama is responsible for all of the world crises that have taken place during his time in office, [but he went on to say] but he is responsible for actions and attitudes he took that have contributed to some of those crises — and he is also responsible for how he responds, or fails to respond.

 

On the other side, Baker cites Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and a former deputy Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, he said what makes this period different is the diffusion of power from states to non-state forces – what we were just talking about in terms of the rise of the tribes – the rapid spread of technology in the rise of Islamic extremism. Talbott said,

 

We have an overall contagion of diffusion which makes it much harder to advance the cause of regional and global governance.

 

That is the kind of language, by the way, that’s rather common in the foreign-policy establishment the means basically we are in big trouble. Baker then says,

 

Some Democrats said Mr. Obama’s challenge has not necessarily been his approach to these crises, but his ability to explain and sell it.

 

And that raises a very important issue that should interest anyone interested in the way ideas form, and Christians at an even deeper level. Every leader on the world scene, or anyone who seeks to have an influence or understanding of what’s going on in the world, has to have what specialist in foreign policy have called for decades now a theory of the world. A theory of the world is a basic theory, not just of how geography works, but more importantly how foreign policy works.

 

What is the dynamic that leads nations to seek their way in the world – why are certain alliances steadfast while others break apart, why do things happen as they do in the world and what should we expect?  Is the natural state of the world peace or is it violence? Should we be surprised when order falls into the disorder? Or should we be surprised when disorder is arranged into order? Those are fundamental issues of worldview and this is where Christians have to understand some very important principles.

 

Part of President Obama’s problem is that he rejects the responsibility to have a theory of the world. He has basically said this even in some of his most important public addresses. In one sense it seems he trying to repudiate the very idea of a theory of the world – suggesting that such a theory is what got the United States into war in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, which he judges to be entirely negative. I would argue that the main problem with President Obama’s foreign policy is that he actually doesn’t have one. That’s not to say that he does it make decisions and he hasn’t cast policies – it is to say in his rejection of a theory of the world he doesn’t even make clear what he expects to take place. Is he surprised when someone shoots or when they hold fire? It’s not at all evident.  Does he believe that democracy is a goal of all peoples or does he believe that it’s a cultural achievement – explained only by certain ideological commitments and certain kinds of understandings even of what it means to be human being? Where in the world does he ground a concern for human rights? Is it in some international consensus or is it in a deeper commitment – as Christians would voice – to the fact that every single human being, in every point of development, is equally made in the image of God.

 

One symptom of the way the world has been working of late is that it seems that on The Briefing on Mondays we tend to look at foreign policy issues simple because they demand that kind of attention. And that’s because it seems that almost every weekend brings a new sense of disorder in the world and new set of headlines about ominous developments on the world scene. But rather than just take the headlines and take each one in turn, we need to step back a bit and understand that we too have a responsibility to develop a theory of the world. We do not sit the Oval Office, we do not establish international policy, but it is our responsibility as intelligent Christians to develop an understanding of why we believe the world is as it is, and why we believe people act as they do, and why we believe wars and armed insurgencies occur and what we should do to confront them. How do we understand terrorism? What we do to answer a terroristic threat?  We should be at least comforted in part by the fact that Christians have been trying to think about this for centuries and have developed a very robust and substantial understanding of Just War Theory and other aspects of the morality and, for that matter, the theology of armed conflict, war, and violence.

 

But the Christian worldview based in an understanding of human sinfulness, and the fact that sinfulness is often set loose in terms of the world scene, also lead us to understand why Jonah Goldberg ends his column with a very insightful comment that no one seems to know what to do. Because Christians understand something, that it seems almost no foreign policy establishment understands – there is a good reason why these problems are intractable – it is because these problems are not waiting for a mere human solution, these problems not waiting for just the right diplomatic moment and just the right diplomatic insight, these problems are waiting for the Prince of Peace.

 

That is to say that Christians have an eschatological understanding of foreign policy – even as we have an eschatological understanding of every aspect of life. But having that understanding, and the fact that that understanding gives us and grounds us in hope, that doesn’t mean that we do not have a responsibility – and certainly that those in political office do not have a responsibility to act and act as wisely and helpfully as is possible, even in a fallen world, because the Christian worldview also honors something else – and that is even a gradualist gain, even a partial victory. The holding back of violence and aggression and evil, in any context, at any time, is itself a good thing. But the Christian worldview reminds us it’s not going to hold.

 

When I look at situation like this I think of the fact that when asked whether I’m optimistic or pessimistic, I have to say I’m neither – Christians have no right to be either optimistic or pessimistic, because both of those are false humanistic understandings. Rather, I live in hope. Perhaps a better way of expressing this was given voice by Lesslie Newbigin, the late theologian and missiologist who when asked, “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?” said, “I’m not an optimist and I’m not a pessimist – Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.”

 

Finally on a lighter note, but one that also points to the importance of worldview and to cultural distinctions around the world, National Public Radio ran a story over the weekend on how American parenting styles just don’t match some of those found elsewhere in the world. They mention several, for example, in Norway parents have kids nap outside, even in subzero temperatures – it turns out that this is in the preschool program where children take naps outdoors and even when it is subzero they still take their naps outdoors. Secondly, Vietnamese mothers train their babies to urinate on command by age 9 months, when they’re out of diapers. Now as you would see if you read this article, the mechanism for doing that might be considered just a bit extreme. More akin to training a dog than training infant. But as NPR points out their babies are out of diapers at age 9 months. Third, people in some tribes in Kenya avoid looking their babies in the eye because they don’t their babies to feel powerful by having a kind of eye contact – so they just avoid looking their baby in the eye – they will look at each other, but not directly. Compare that to American parents who will stare into the eyes of their newborn all day long.

 

Four, Danish parents leave their kids on the curb while they go shopping. They just leave the stroller with the children or the babies in it outside the store, go in and assume they will be there when they come out. – just try the United States!

 

In the Polynesian islands, children take care of children. Babysitting is considered something that is appropriate for children as young as elementary school age when it comes their younger siblings.

 

Six, Japanese parents let their kids go out by themselves, and by going out by themselves this means that children as young as four are often found riding by themselves on the subway in Tokyo – four-year-olds.

 

And finally, in Spain kids stay up very, very late – it’s because people in Spain then have dinner very, very late. They want children be a part of the conversation so they let them stay up very, very late – sometimes even until 10 or 11 o’clock at night. The Spanish consider the American tradition of putting children to bed rather early to be cruel – meaning that American parents don’t want their children involved in family life.

 

Well listening to The Briefing today you may decide that you’re very glad that you weren’t potty trained in Vietnam, that you didn’t have to take naps outside in Norway, that you weren’t left out on the curb in Denmark, nor left on the subway alone in Japan – but I’m going to guess the kids listen to The Briefing today would wish that their parents ,when it came to bed time, were a bit more Spanish. Worldview matters, culture matters, it all matters.

 

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 boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

 

I Still Do – FamilyLife Conference Chicago 2014

The Briefing 08-18-14

1) Prominence of ISIS shows declaring peace does make peace

Iraq Crisis: Islamic State Now Threat to West, Says U.S., Wall Street Journal (Siobhan Gorman, Tamer El-Ghobasy, and Nour Malas)

The West’s Gaza, National Review (Jonah Goldberg)

2) Criticisms of Obama reminder that even Christians need to formulate ‘theory of the world’

As World Boils, Fingers Point Obama’s Way, New York Times (Peter Baker)

3) Worldview and culture affect parenting, too

Global Parenting Habits That Haven’t Caught On In The U.S., NPR (Emily Lodish)

 

 

Transcript: The Briefing 08-14-14

The Briefing

 

August 14, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, August 14, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

A judge in Tennessee has become the first, since the Windsor decision was handed down by the US Supreme Court in May 2013, to buck the trend and support his state’s ban on same-sex marriage. In this case state circuit court Judge Russell Simmons Junior found that Tennessee’s ban on recognizing gay marriages does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. His decision since it was handed down in a state circuit court in Tennessee did not gain national attention until the middle of this week. But as the new source, The Hill, based in Washington DC stated:

The judge’s decision stands in contrast to the dozens of state federal appeals court decisions that have struck down bans on gay marriage since the Windsor Supreme Court case in 2013. That ruling struck down a portion of the Federal Defense of Marriage Act.

But Judge Simmons said it did not apply to the Tennessee case. Looking at the judge’s decision in Tennessee he stated that the Windsor decision had to do with the Defense of Marriage Act, but he correctly noted that nowhere in the majority opinion in that case does it state that every state in the union must recognize a right to same-sex marriage. In his decision the judge wrote:

The Windsor case is concerned with the definition of marriage only as it applies to federal laws and does not give an opinion concerning whether one state must accept as valid a same-sex marriage allowed in another state.

That was the key issue at stake in the suit before him. He added:

The Supreme Court does not go the final step and find that a state that defines marriages as a union of one man and one woman is unconstitutional.

That is exactly the case. The majority opinion in the Windsor decision written by Judge Anthony Kennedy did no such thing. It did not find that there was a coast-to-coast federal right to same-sex marriage and that all 50 states must accept it. But as Justice Scalia said in his dissent, he did everything but make that declaration. And that’s why, according to at least some counts, there have been 30 cases against same-sex marriage bans in the states since the Windsor Decision. This is the first that is at least known of the national level to have run the other way.

 

There is more important material in the decision handed down by Judge Simmons. For example, he applied what is known in the law as a rational basis test to the same-sex marriage ban in Tennessee, asking the question as to whether the government had the right and was acting on a  rational basis to enact this legislation. In his ruling the judge declared that the state of Tennessee did have a reasonable and rational basis for adopting legislation. In his words:

There is nothing irrational about limiting the institution of marriage for the purpose for which it was created, by embracing its traditional definition. To conclude otherwise is to impose one’s own view of what a state ought to do on the subject to same-sex marriage.

He also said:

Marriage simply cannot be divorced from its traditional procreative purposes. The promotion of family continuity and stability is certainly a legitimate state interest.

Christians looking at this judge’s reasoning would recognize the very logical case that the judges made. A case based upon a rational objective understanding of what marriage is. Tying marriage not only to its historical structure but also to its recognized functions: procreation and the raising of children. And also the fact that as that stable, unifying institution of society, marriage rationally deserves the kind of protection that the state of Tennessee offered through this ban on same-sex marriage. Now to be sure, even as this judge stands upon millennia of human wisdom and a long tradition of American jurisprudence, not to mention common sense, it places him in direct conflict with the majority opinion of the federal courts especially since the Windsor decision. And there is every reason to believe, given the way the court to been ruling, that this judge’s opinion may well be reversed perhaps even in short order.

But this much is true –  this judge has acted in a way that honors his calling and his convictions. And he has also ruled in a way that is consistent with the long trajectory of jurisprudence in the United States. By the way, writing in response to this judge’s decision is Slate.com, a proponent of same-sex marriage, Mark Joseph Stern, writes:

Perhaps it’s best then that a split on the gay marriage question is finally emerging within the judiciary. The more judges buck the courts clear command in Windsor, the sooner the justices can settle this issue once and for all.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of Windsor Lawrence Romer: Three Crucial Gay-rights Decisions,  once famously wrote:

Liberty finds no refuge in the jurisprudence of doubt.

Stern then wrote:

As Simmons’ ruling illustrates,  it’s high time for the court to clear away the doubt concerning gay marriage and secure liberty for gay people across the country.

Stearns’ logic is wrong on the big picture but it’s right on at least one count, and that’s this: Judge Simmons’ ruling and a ruling that is expected from the sixth US circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, shortly, may set the stage for the Supreme Court of the United States to settle this issue. As the court may think once for all.

While we’re dealing with the issue of court decisions as USA Today reports that yesterday, the Arizona Court of Appeals recognized transgender marriage. Recognizing that an individual well-known in the popular media as “the pregnant man” going by the name Thomas Beatie could get his marriage performed in Hawaii dissolved in an Arizona court. As Michael Kiefer of the Arizona Republic reported:

Beatie, age 40, was born female. But in 1997 he, according to this article, began testing to determine his psychological gender and in 2002 underwent the first of his gender reassignment surgeries. Under Hawaiian law he was able to have his birth certificate amended and legally be recognized as male. Subsequently, he married.

Follow the next sentence very closely. Because his wife was unable to conceive children and because Beatie still had female reproductive organs, he was artificially inseminated and became pregnant. Then as the Arizona Republic recognizes, he hit the talk show and tabloid circuit as the so-called “pregnant man.” Posing for photographs and for television cameras showing a prominent beard and a very pregnant torso.

Even before we get to the court case that was ruled upon in Arizona yesterday, we need to understand that this particular case demonstrates the insanity of the transgender argument and contemporary sexual theories. Here is an individual who was born as a woman and underwent some kind of sexual reassignment surgery or surgeries in the plural as reported here but still has a woman’s reproductive organs. Married to another woman, this woman became pregnant and had a child, later two other children, a total of three. In keeping with the insanity of the sexual liberationists and current legal theory, this individual is able to be legally recognized as a man demanding to go by man’s name and at the same time also to become pregnant three times and bear children. We need to recognize that even as the media labeled this individual “the pregnant man,” by any rational understanding, this individual is not a man at all. To put the matter plainly, men do not have female reproductive organs and cannot bear children.

As the Arizona Republic picks up the story the so-called “pregnant man” with his wife moved to Arizona. When their marriage fell apart, Beatie wanted to marry another woman. They petition for an uncontested divorce. In March of 2013, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Douglas Gerlach ruled that Beatie’s marriage was between two females because Beatie had given birth. Same-sex marriage is illegal in Arizona, thus this judge ruled Arizona could not grant the couple a divorce. Pointing to the insanity of the current situation, this judge in Arizona ruled that the situation in the current marriage was “between a female and a person capable of giving birth who later did so.” Or you might say between a female and another female. But because the judge couldn’t say the marriage was between two females he had to write that it was between a female and a “person capable of giving birth who later did so.”

Yesterday, the appellate court reversed Judge Gerlach’s decision, ruling that Arizona law permits people who have had gender reassignment to alter their birth certificates and legally change gender. In fact according to the appellate court’s decision, Arizona’s law on the matter is more liberal than Hawaii’s in what evidence must be presented to amend the birth certificate. Thus the appellate court ruled that Beatie and the person known as the wife in that relationship can now obtain a divorce.

While we’re on this issue pointing to the insanity of our moral revolutionaries, Mary Hasson writing for The Federalist, has contributed an article entitled “Back-to-school When Mr. Reuter becomes Ms. Reuter.” As she explains:

Queer Theory has arrived in public schools for the ten and under set.

In the academic world the leading edge of sexual insanity is indeed known as Queer Theory. And is Mary Hasson writes:

In the Washington DC area, back-to-school sales are underway and summer is about done. Parents inboxes and mailboxes filled with newsy, get ready for another great year letters and long shopping lists of supplies and the PTA and the school principal.

But she goes on to write:

The families of Janney elementary school, a highly rated DC elementary school in the affluent northwest quadrant of the city, recently received a different sort of back-to-school notice.

Provided for her by a confidential source, Janney’s principal, Nora Lycknell, announced in a July 17 email to the Janney community that the school’s writing inclusion teacher the former Mr. Robert Reuter had declared himself transgender and would now be known as Ms. Rebecca Reuter. “Ms. Reuter to our students,” she wrote. Principle Lycknell described end of year meetings in which Mr. Reuter, as he was known then, bravely to use her word “shared his powerful and personal story and his plan to transition to a new gender identity.” Hasson then writes:

The principle’s email informs parents that teacher Reuter’s announcement gave rise to wise wanderings and months of thought and planning in consultation with a wide scope of educators, experts, and partners about how the school community should put its values of equity, inclusion, and carrying in the practice.

Principal Lycknell wrote:

All children and adults in Janney’s community need to know that they will be embraced regardless of their subtle and explicit identities.

Remember, we’re talking about elementary school students here. As Hasson correctly notes, this principal’s email is a case study in how activists are foisting ideological conformity on America’s schoolchildren, reeducating them in gender and sexuality according to Queer Theory. As she writes, current LGBT campaigns advocate relentlessly and aggressively on behalf of transgender individuals portraying them is perfectly normal people whose gender identities just don’t happen to match their “assigned sex” at birth.

I also have a copy of the email the Principal Lycknell sent to the entire so-called Janney community, and it is almost unbelievable. As a matter of fact, if you had looked at a memo like this just a matter of a couple of years ago, you would be certain that it was made up, but this is not fiction. It is fact and an all too tragic fact that. As I hold in my hand a copy of the email sent by the principal to the school’s so-called community, she writes about the language of gender transition and she acknowledges that the key terms she defines were “sourced from the human rights campaign’s welcoming schools project.” That by the way, is a recipe for radical disaster.

Gender is defined as this “refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.” Gender, according to this definition, “varies between cultures and over time there is a broad variation and how individuals experience and express gender.” Notice that gender here is described as being “merely, indeed totally, socially constructed” nothing is here about biology; nothing is here about an objective reality. Gender identity is defined as “how one feels inside. One’s internal deeply felt sense of being girl, woman, boy, man, somewhere between, or outside those categories.” So here we are talking about the acknowledgment that this could go even outside the categories of male/female, boy/girl, male/woman.

In another section of her email she writes to parents about how they should educate their children. She writes:

You’re the experts on your children and you have every reason to trust this expertise as you introduce this conversation.

Now notice that she says that they are “experts on their children,” not experts on the issue of gender. As a matter fact, she presumes to inform the parents about what they are to say to their children about gender. She suggests that the parents must educate themselves. Take time, she writes, to grow your own understanding and to explore the resources provided. “Everyone will enter this conversation,” she writes, “at a different place.”

She suggests that the parents rehearse what they’re going to say to their children:

Just as we practice in front of a mirror before a big speech or prepare for a marathon with a series of long runs, so it is important to rehearse this conversation before engaging in the real thing.

Remember again, the real thing here is a conversation with children between the ages of approximately five and eleven. This teacher covered matters in the curriculum that involved two successive years, which means that at least some of the returning students will now have an individual known as Ms. Reuter who last year was Mr. Reuter. Explaining how this is going to be handled, the principal writes:

In the first weeks of school, we will host formal conversations with our fifth and third graders to reintroduce Ms. Reuter. The former representing her students from the previous school year and the latter representing her students for the coming school year. In addition our rising sixth-graders will be the invited to the Janney campus, should they and their families wish to participate in a similar discussion.

In her article “The Federalist,” Mary Hasson writes that the ever helpful principle tells parents she is more than happy to connect families to the gender identity experts that the schools brought on board. These experts she told parents “are ready to address any question without judgment.”

But that’s absolutely ludicrous. The principal has already made the judgments clear in her email. Hasson also writes:

But the deck is stacked against Janney’s parents or staff who might be looking for unbiased, sensible advice or for guidance that respects Judeo-Christian moral traditions.

Licknall omits from her email some particularly salient information. She and the recommended experts are personally and professionally invested in LBGT causes. The principal is a lesbian who married her partner in a Canadian ceremony in 2008. Her designated experts include Hadiah Tribble, a lesbian activist, Diana Bruce a “Shirov of the Movement” award winner given to a DC lesbian, bisexual and transgender woman who advances the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender cause, and another so-called expert recommended by the principal in this official communication is a social worker known as Michael Giordano, who self identifies as a “cis gender, kink, and poly aware therapist with an interest in leather. I’ll simply leave it at that.

Hasson, on the other hand, has done some background investigation  on Michael Giordano and she reveals that he is to use her words “a gender identity specialist who deserve special attention.” Parents ought to know,” she writes, “that he thinks that ‘queer is indeed the new cool.’ He also believes morality is subjective and that folks who are transgender, bisexual, lesbian, or gay, or others,” in his words, “trying to accept their interest in polyamory,” and I am not even mention the next part, are in his words, “good moral people.” In fact, she writes:

He states ‘their gender identity sexual orientation patterns of love or sexual desires have nothing to do with morality they just are.

Mary Husson goes on to write:

Giordano is indeed a recognized expert. He is scheduled to speak at next week’s Sexual Freedom Summit, a national event that promotes sexual freedom as “one of the highest human aspirations and the foundation of all human rights, the cornerstone for all our civil liberties, source and prerequisite for much if not all that motivates human beings.”

That conference, you should know, is supported by organizations including the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The transgender challenge, Christians must recognize, is the ultimate realization of the totality of the sexual revolution, not only destroying previous codes of sexual morality that have been central not only to Western civilization but to the long trajectory of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But what we are looking at now is the total rejection of the entire pattern of human beings. The pattern of male and female. The rejection of any objective reality of sex and gender as man and woman. This will require not only a long and very subversive email from principals to parents, it will also require turning the entire civilization upside down.

Mary Hasson points to a very fundamental reality, in conclusion, and that is this:

It is unlikely that children are going to immediately buy into this. It’s going to take some very sophisticated brain tampering to get them to accept what they’re going to be told. Some kid, perhaps even the majority of children, when told that the individual for them who used to be Mr. Reuter is now Ms. Reuter is simply going to think, and perhaps even to say, “no he is not.”

Perhaps the real story watch now is what happens to that child and any set of parents who will not go along with the revolution.

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 boycecollege.com. I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

Transcript: The Briefing 08-15-14

The Briefing

 

August 15, 2014

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

It’s Friday, August 15, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Explosive growth of Islam in US indicator of vast change in Christian mission field

There’s a building boom in the United States, specifically, a boom in the building of mosques.  Two different stories in The Wall Street Journal this morning point to the explosive growth of Islam in the United States.  The first story is located in Anchorage, Alaska where Tamara Audi writes

On the edge of this northern outpost an unfamiliar sight is emerging: twin minarets. Alaska’s small but growing Muslim community is building the state’s first newly constructed mosque. “This is our future,” said Osama Obeidi, one of the Muslim-Americans leading the building effort for the Islamic Community Center of Anchorage. “We have second-generation Alaskans now, and new people coming all the time. We need a place to call home.”

As Audi explains, the new mosque to be built in Anchorage is a 15,000 square feet building which is expected to be joined by a community center and a Sunday school building shortly.  As Audi writes

The mosque is perhaps the clearest sign yet that Islam in the U.S. is rapidly pushing beyond traditional population centers such as Detroit and Los Angeles. As the number of American Muslims grows through both immigration and higher-than-average birthrates, domes and minarets are sprouting in areas as varied as the eastern mountains of Kentucky and Louisiana’s parishes

The Wall Street Journal also explains that the building boom of mosques in the United States is due to the growth of Muslims who have been born here rather than those who emigrated from other countries.  In one very important paragraph in the article Audi writes

The Muslim population in the U.S. is expected to more than double by 2030, to 6.2 million, according to a 2011 Pew Research Center study. By then, Muslims are expected to represent 1.7% of the U.S. population, making them as numerous as American Jews or Episcopalians today

That’s a stunning statistic, and one that Christians ought to keep very much in mind.  We’re talking about here an explosive growth of Islam, not in the terms of growing into the tens of millions in the United States, but as this article makes very clear, citing the pew study, if there are indeed 6.2 million Muslims in the United States in 2030, that will be more numerous than American Jews or Episcopalians today.  As a matter fact, given the fact that Episcopalians are in such decline in terms of membership, it’s likely that the Muslims in 2030 will vastly outnumber the Episcopalians.

Recently, the Hartford Institute for Religion Research indicated that there’s been a 74% increase in the number of Muslim congregations established between the years 2000 and 2011.   That’s an increase to 2106 Muslim congregations in the United States, up from 1209 in the year 2000.

In a second article, also found in today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, the same reporter Tamara Audi reports that as Muslims are building so many of these new mosque they’re facing one problem: they don’t have enough religious leaders, enough trained leaders for their communities.  The leaders are called imams, and as Audi makes very clear, the number of imams has been vastly outstripped by the number of buildings, and the number of Muslim congregations.  One of the problems here is differing expectations, she explains, between imams, in terms of what’s expected of them in the larger Islamic world, and what Americans expect.  As it turns out, American Muslims tend to have expectations of their imams that are at least partly shaped by the expectations of many Christian congregations for their pastors.  They are looking for a youth director, a marriage counselor; they’re looking for someone other than one who merely leads in prayers, as is the central duty of an imam.

There are a couple of interesting and clever notes about this new mosque to be built in Anchorage, Alaska.  For one thing, the floor is going to be heated, something that might come in handy given the fact that Muslim prayers are done on the floor.  The second thing is that the Muslim congregation there in Anchorage had to make a special appeal the Muslim experts and scholars worldwide because during the month of Ramadan, Muslims are supposed to fast from sunrise until sunset, and as you know, at some points during the year, Alaska has very little night at all.  Meaning, there’s almost no time to eat and the only time that would be available is in the dead middle of the night.  Muslim scholars around the world advised the congregation that they could fast from sunrise to sunset according to the time of sunrise and sunset in Mecca rather than in Anchorage.

Christians looking at these reports had to recognize that were looking at here is a vast change in our own mission field.  Furthermore, even as Christians are aware of the great battle for hearts and minds and souls, we’re aware of the great conflict of worldviews.  For most of the last century it appeared that the great worldview collision would be between Christianity and either Marxist communism or modern secularism, but as this report makes very clear, not only in the United States but in many other parts of the world the great competitor worldview is not secularism, nor is it now the passing ghost of communism, it is instead the resurgent form of Islam.  Looking at this challenge, Christians should have two very important observations, indeed convictions.  The first is to remind ourselves that religious liberty is not just a convenience, it is a conviction, and that means that we have to apply religious liberty to our Muslim neighbors as much as we claim it for ourselves.  Some Christians are regrettably turn to trying to prevent, by zoning regulations or other mechanisms, the building of these mosques.  That is a terrible mistake, and not only is it wrong, it also is an act the can turn very quickly on Christian congregations, as well.  The second, and more important observation that Christians should make, the conviction that we should affirm, is that this reminds us of the imperative of the Great Commission and when we look at our own mission field here in the United States of America, and given this little glimpse into our own state of Alaska.  We have an incredible responsibility to our neighbors, to all of our neighbors, and that includes our Muslim neighbors, to be people of the gospel.  That means not only a people who live by the gospel, but who reach out to our neighbors with the gospel.

The great conflict of worldviews is not just a conflict of ideas and ideologies, it is so; not just a conflict of theology and doctrine, it certainly is so.  It is most fundamentally a battle for hearts and souls.  A battle with eternity at stake, and that’s why Christians, looking at stories like this appearing in today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, should respond not with fear, but with an understanding of the challenge that has been placed before us.  A challenge to reach out to people made in God’s image,  here in the United States who are identified as Muslims, who as we know desperately, desperately need the gospel.

2) Closure of massive Atlantic City casino parable of the empty promises of gambling

Well, in terms of changes on the American landscape, contrast that building boom in mosque and the picture that new mosque being built in Anchorage, with a new story that appeared in The New York Times this week.   The headline is this, “Revel, Atlantic City’s Newest and Largest Casino is Closing.” Charles Bagli reports that Atlantic City’s ailing casino industry is losing, not only a player, but its biggest player.

Revel Casino Hotel, the newest and largest casino in town, will shut down in September, putting more than 3,000 employees out of work, the owner announced on Tuesday after failing to find a buyer for the hulking blue-glass tower on the boardwalk.

And, it is hulking.  It was a $2.4 billion project as a casino and a hotel.  It opened just two and a half years ago.  It is a 57 story building, a massive complex, one the most expensive casinos ever built anywhere in the world, and furthermore, as The New York Times reports it’s not only closing, it’s going to join two other boardwalk casinos that are also scheduled to close in coming weeks.  As the Times summarizes

The loss of three casinos in the next few weeks would leave Atlantic City with eight casinos, and an industry that has been battered by competition from smaller casinos that have opened in Pennsylvania since 2006.

One kitchen steward at the casino said that “it’s a gloomy time for Atlantic City.”  Even gambling industry executives suggest that the casino should never have been built, but of course it was built, and now is going to stand as an empty 57 story, $2.4 billion parable.  A parable to the emptiness of all the promises of gambling, any form of gambling – in this case, casino gambling.

But, just one day before that story appeared in The New York Times, the same paper had a front-page story entitled “Albany Doubling Down as Casino Boom Fades.”  In this case, Charles Bagli is one of the reporters joined by Jessica McKinley, and as they explain New York State is charging headlong into the casino business with for full-service gambling resorts expected be approved this fall and open as early as next year, and talk of a torrent of new revenue, thousands of new jobs, and a powerful economic jumpstart for long depressed upstate communities.   The main supporter of this new effort to expand gambling, to massively expand gambling in the state of New York, is none other than the states Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is largely staked his reputation, and his pledge for economic expansion, on the single issue of expanding casino gambling.

To its credit, The New York Times is very dubious about the proposal, as the reporters write:

analysts, economists and casino operators warn that the industry is already suffering the effects of fierce competition, if not saturation

They go on to say:

The longstanding image of gambling as a no-doubt winner for state governments has quietly gone the way of a bettor’s bankroll after too many hours at the tables.

They look specifically at the actual case the governor made for expanding casino gambling, and they wrote

The Cuomo administration had similarly projected sanguine estimates last year of employment growth from the new casinos: nearly 3,000 permanent jobs, and an additional 6,700 temporary jobs in construction, estimates based on seven casinos in Pennsylvania, including six of the state’s largest, along with the most successful casino in Maryland.

They then write:

Curiously, all seven of the Pennsylvania casinos saw declines in slot machine revenue over the past year.

About the new casinos, Geoff Freeman, identified as chief executive of the American Gaming Association said:

“The shiny new objects attract all of us as customers…  “The question is what happens when the ‘Grand Opening’ sign is taken down.”

Well, keep that in mind when you remember that 57 story shiny object, now to be empty, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

All of this is explained in a major article in The Atlantic by David Frum, who argues that the best way to wreck a local economy is to build casinos.  Just to take one measure of economic value, what about the value of properties close to the casinos?  As Frum reports:

The impact of casinos on neighboring property values is “unambiguously negative,” according to the economists at the National Association of Realtors.

There is every good reason to understand why that would be the case.  Furthermore, as Frum writes:

People who live close to a casino are twice as likely to become problem gamblers as people who live more than 10 miles away. As casinos have become more prevalent, so has problem gambling: in some states, the evidence suggests a tripling or even quadrupling of the number of problem gamblers.

If you put this all together, then a couple of things to come immediately clear.  In the first place, the Christian worldview has been very clear and consistent about the sinfulness of gambling and about the fact that the entire gambling industry basically turns the Christian economic ethic upside down.  It turns the work ethic upside down, the savings ethic upside down.  It turns the benevolence ethic upside down, and furthermore, it violates one of most basic Christian principles, and that his love of neighbor.  To do one to others as we would do unto ourselves would lead us to understand that we would not inflict, either the danger, the potential or the reality, of gambling upon our neighbors.

3) Secularism clearly linked with normalization of same sex marriage

This week the Morning Mix column of The Washington Post ran a story with the headline “LGBT (that’s lesbian gay bisexual transgender) Americans are Less Likely to be Religious.”  As Weber writes:

Americans who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender are not quite feeling the whole religion thing as much as other Americans.

He cites a new Gallup poll that revealed that almost half of all LGBT adults are not religious, compared to just 30% of non-LGBT adults would report the same. Only 24% of LGBT adults identify as ‘highly religious’ defined in this case as meaning they regularly attend religious services and say religion marks an important part of their day-to-day lives. In terms of the larger population; 41% identify themselves as highly religious. This is also something is understandable from a Christian worldview for any number of reasons, individually and corporately. At the individual level there may be any number of reasons why in LGBT individual would not attend church, or at least regularly, and that might have a great deal to do with what the church or synagogue (because this isn’t just a Christian sample) or a mosque might teach about homosexuality and same-sex relationships. There may be other factors at the individual level as well but when it comes to the corporate level, the worldview level, there’s a lot more to be considered.

For instance almost everyone who looks at the revolution in sexual morality and in particular at the normalization of homosexual behavior has only been made possible by the lessening of religious morality and its binding hold on the culture. Furthermore, sociologists would describe this – as you know – as the process of secularization. It is a more secularized society in almost every single case worldwide that moves towards a greater acceptance of homosexuality. Those societies that are not secular are resolutely opposed to normalizing homosexual behavior

A similar issue was addressed in a recent article at the Public Discourse by Mark Regnerus, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s undertaken a major report in which he demonstrates that “churchgoing Christians who support same-sex marriage are also more likely to think pornography, cohabitation, hookups, adultery, polyamory, and abortion are acceptable”. He goes on to say, “it’s reasonable to expect continued change in more permissive directions.”

Regnerus’s research is thorough and it’s very interesting. He makes clear that when those who identify themselves as Christians (and this is dealing with individuals), when individual Christians say that they’ve come to the place of the endorsed same-sex marriage, it’s usually not only same-sex marriage that they endorse. As his research makes very clear, those who make such an affirmation also tend to be much more likely to affirm other things that the Christian moral tradition and Scripture have clearly condemned. Again his list includes “pornography, cohabitation, hookups, adultery, polyamory, and abortion.”

Regnerus is a very capable researcher and a very insightful analyst and he points to some issues of urgent Christian. In the first place he makes very clear that the great moral shift towards the affirmation of homosexuality and same-sex relationships also requires a tremendous amount of readjustment in terms of the total worldview – the total theological worldview, as well. Beyond that he also points to the fact that the chronology is important. As he suggests it is unlikely the individuals first come to affirm same-sex relationships and behaviors, and then go back and adjust the other moral issues.

He affirms (quite rightly I think) that the adjustments on the other issues in all likelihood almost assuredly preceded the shift on homosexuality. As he writes;

More likely the sexual morality of many churchgoing Christians shifted years ago, and the acceptance of same-sex marriage as licit Christian action follow significant change rather than prompts it.

In his article Regnerus writes,

At a glance, there is a pretty obvious fissure between Christians who do and do not oppose same-sex marriage. More than seven times as many of the latter think pornography is OK. Three times as many back cohabiting as a good idea, six times as many are OK with no-strings-attached sex, five times as many think adultery could be permissible, thirteen times as many have no issue with polyamorous relationships, and six times as many support abortion rights.

Here, once again, we face proof positive of the importance of worldview and also of another factor we need to keep in mind. Human beings tend to move towards consistency in worldview. We don’t live very well with an inherent inconsistency, certainly on moral issues. If we have someone who shifts the worldview on an issue of sexual morality on one count there is almost an assurance that over time the other questions a sexual morality will shift as well. This new research makes that point emphatically clear.

Furthermore an even more basic affirmation is this; once one abandons the clear teachings of Scripture on one question, there is almost an assurance that that trajectory be continued on other questions. Certainly on the related questions.

Regerus makes one final fascinating observation and that is this; if you look at the positions on so many these issues amongst those who identify as Christians but affirm the normalization of homosexual relationships and behaviors he says when you actually end up with is a pattern that basically matches the larger secular society. In other words, once you reach this point your worldview basically looks like the secular worldview. And once you abandon the authority of Scripture you lose all defenses against falling into the inevitable secular mind

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