R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 358

The Briefing 05-27-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Isla Vista shootings reminder of inability to read a person’s mind or heart

Video Rant, Then Deadly Rampage in California Town, New York Times (Ian Lovett and Adam Nagourney)

Parents’ Nightmare: Futile Race to Stop Killings, New York Times (Adam Nagourney)

Even in a State With Restrictive Laws, Gunman Amassed Weapons and Ammunition, New York Times (Jennifer Medina)

2) Murder not due to failure of policy, but of any structure to prevent murderous intent

3 Shot Dead at Brussels Jewish Museum, New York Times (Andrew Higgins)

Suspects in China Market Attack Are Identified, New York Times (Andrew Jacobs)

3) EU Parliament promise of prosperity undermining support among Europeans

As Europe Votes, Rightist Leads Campaign Against the EU Itself, Wall Street Journal (Gabriele Parussini)

Crisis of the Eurocrats, New York Times (Paul Krugman)

Ten Books for Eager Reading — The 2014 Summer Reading List

G. K. Chesterton once wisely remarked that “there is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.” It may be true that readers can be divided into these two categories — those who are eager to read a book and those who just want a book to read. These two types of readers experience a book and the art of reading very differently. My summer reading list is for the first sort of reader. These are books that are both interesting and intelligent. They belong in an intelligent reader’s list of reading for the summer season.

This list reflects the kind of reading choices I make for a season like summer, when I can devote some time to reading that is not dedicated to some larger writing or research project. There is also an unapologetic tilt toward a reading list for men in this list. These are books that are likely to keep a man reading, and with Father’s Day close at hand, perhaps some readers will decide to honor dad with a book or two.

One last note: Several of these books are thoughtful accounts of battle, military history, and modern espionage. They will be profitably read through the lens of an intelligent Christian worldview, though the books themselves are often not written from such a worldview. The world needs more careful Christian readers, who can read honestly, reflectively, thoughtfully, eagerly, and well.

 

1. Tim Townsend, Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis (Morrow, 2014).

The Nuremberg Trials were intended to bring those most responsible for the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust before a court of civilized justice. Adolf Hitler and some of the most senior Nazis escaped the court of human justice, but than 20 senior leaders of Nazi Germany stood trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The most significant trials were held between November of 1945 and the following October. In the end, twelve death sentences were handed down against those who were found most responsible for crimes against humanity. By the time of the hangings, Martin Bormann was already dead. Hermann Goring had committed suicide just hours before the executions.

But a largely unknown story within that well-known account concerns Rev. Henry Gerecke, a U.S. Army chaplain assigned to the prisoners throughout the trial, and eventually to the condemned. The Missouri-Synod Lutheran minister found himself face to face with those who had plotted the extermination of 6 million Jews and had brought the world to the horrors of a global war. Henry Gerecke also faced the deepest theological and pastoral questions imaginable. Ultimately, he had to determine just how much he believed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Every Christian reader will face the same questions in this gripping account by Tim Townsend, a former religion reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Excerpt:

“For Gerecke, the decision to accept the assignment wasn’t easy. He wondered how a preacher from St. Louis could make any impression on the disciples of Adolf Hitler. Would his considerable faith in the core principles of Christianity sustain him as he ministered to monsters? During his months stationed in Munich after the war, Gerecke had taken several trips to Dachau. He’d seen the raw aftermath of the Holocaust. He’d touched the inside of the camp’s walls, and his hands had come away smeared with blood. The U.S. Army was asking one of its chaplains to kneel down with the architects of the Holocaust and calm their spirits as they answered for their crimes in front of the world. With those images of Dachau fresh in his memory, Gerecke had to decide if he could share his faith, the thing he held most dear in life, with the men who had given the orders to construct such a place.”

2. Steven Parissien, The Life of the Automobile: The Complete History of the Motor Car (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

“Complete” histories rarely ever are, but this history of the motor car is sweeping in scope and rich in details. Parissien fills in the gaps and corrects many falsehoods about the history of the automobile. One of the most significant aspects of his book us the attention given to the history of the motor car outside the United States. The book is filled with narrative, biography, mechanics, and terriffic anecdotes — such as the fact that at Henry Ford’s funeral, the hearse was a Packard. “Someone had clearly blundered.” Likewise, disaster was averted when in 1965 Rolls Royce changed the name of its new model from the “Silver Mist” to the “Silver Shadow.” As Parissien explains, “Rolls discovered that Mist was German for manure.” Good call to change that name. Parissien also traces the larger-than-life personalities who made the automobile what it is today, including the tinkerers, the visionaries, the technicians, and the “money men” who turned an invention into a way of life.

Excerpt:

“Henry Ford left his vast automotive empire to be administered by the Ford Motor Company’s board , then still dominated by the Ford family. Notoriously frugal and miserly, Henry also left his heirs a cash windfall of $26.5 million, which he had kept hidden for decades in a private bank account. Yet in his pockets on the day he died were found not the prized possessions of the world’s most famous industrial magnate, but, as historian Robert Lacey has observed, ‘the paraphernalia of a little boy;’ a comb, a penknife, and a simple Jew’s harp.”

3. Steven Pressfield, The Lion’s Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War (Sentinel, Penguin Group, 2014).

The choice Israel faced in 1967 was clear — fight and win or cease to exist as a nation. A confederation of Arab nations had decided to eliminate Israel and the small Jewish nation was vastly outnumbered, outgunned, and out equipped. Europe had basically abandoned Israel, and the nation faced the very real possibility of extinction. Against all odds, and with Arab troops, planes, and tanks massed for attack right on Israel’s borders, the Israeli Defense Forces launched an audacious surprise attack. What followed was six days of total war, ending in a massive and comprehensive victory for Israel. The tiny nation, threatened with annihilation, vanquished its enemies in a series of battles, mostly on the ground, that reminded the Jewish people of the victory of David over Goliath. Steven Pressfield, a veteran novelist, provides an absolutely riveting first-hand account of the war. The book is a unique experiment in “hybrid history,” based on first-person accounts and documentary records. The most authoritative account of the Six Day War is Six Days of War by Michael Oren, a man who was raised as an American boy in the United States, but would later become Israel’s ambassador to the United States. I highly recommend Oren’s book as well. The Lion’s Gate now joins that volume as a front-row account — and this makes for spellbinding reading.

Excerpt:

“The state of Israel is the size of New Jersey. The combined landmass of its twenty Arab enemy states is more than a million square miles larger than the rest of the United States. In 1967, the population of Israel was 2.7 million. Many were immigrants recently evicted from Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East. These newcomers possessed few skills that could be used in the defense of the nation. Most could not even speak Hebrew. The state of Israel existed within a sea of 122 million Arabs, outnumbered by more than forty to one.”

 

4. Winston Groom, The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight  (National Geographic, 2013).

Winston Groom is best known as the author of Forest Gump, but he is also an accomplished writer of non-fiction. The Aviators is a prime example. While much attention has been given to the achievements of the Wright brothers and the early pioneers of flight, it was the next generation that made aviation what it is today. The three great American pioneers of that era were Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, and Charles Lindburgh. While Lindburgh is known to most historically aware Americans, Rickenbacker and Doolittle are less so. Groom gives this trio the attention they deserve, but his greatest accomplishment is the way he weaves the stories into one narrative of the transformation of aviation from a fascinating invention to a mainstay of American life. There is a lot more to this story than most Americans imagine, and World War II lands in the middle of the narrative. This is a riveting tale, well told.

Excerpt:

“When Eddie was thirteen his father died. Newspaper accounts say William Rickenbacher succumbed several weeks after being struck on the head by a blunt instrument during a fight with a fellow worker at a construction site in Columbus. The night of the funeral Eddie couldn’t sleep and went into the kitchen, where he found his mother with her head in her hands, crying. Sitting beside his mother (in his father’s chair, he suddenly realized), Eddie promised that he would abandon his wild behavior and be a burden to her no longer. True to his word, next morning instead of going to school he went out and found a job. He would have been in the seventh grade, but instead Eddie Rickenbacher found employment in the twelve-hour night shift of the Federal Glass Company, marching freshly blown glass tumblers to the tempering ovens for three dollars and fifty cents a week. Working twelve hours a shift six days a week was not only disagreeable for a thirteen-year-old but also deadly. One night he quit mid-shift, but by seven the same morning he had found another job in a steel-casting company for twice the pay. Three months later he found work capping bottles a brewery, while setting pins at a bowling alley on the side. In time, the hops used in brewing gave him headaches, and so his next employment found Eddie working in a stone yard. After a few months of cutting marble he became so proficient that he cut a limestone for his own father’s grave, an accomplishment that he remained proud of all his life.”

5. Michael Korda, Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee (HarperCollins, 2014).

Robert E. Lee is among the few figures of history for whom the words life and legacy are completely intertwined. Biographies of such figures generally fall into one of two categories — hagiography or revisionism. Few seem able to land between these two extremes. This is what makes Michael Korda’s massive new biography of Robert E. Lee so promising. Korda is a British military historian, and he writes as one who has extensive Continental experience as well. He was a participant in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Thus, he was not born with Robert E. Lee looming as an historical figure.. He currently resides in America, however, and he has already written major biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight David Eisenhower. With Clouds of Glory, he adds Robert E. Lee to that list.

Excerpt:

“It seldom happens in history that one man comes not only to embody but to glorify a defeated cause. More exceptionally still, Robert E. Lee would become a national, not just a Southern hero: A U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarine of the George Washington class would be named after him; his face would appear on a U.S. thirty-cent postage stamp. A U.S. Army tank (the M3 Less, very popular with the British Army in the Western Desert of North Africa in 1941 and 1942) would be named after him; and his American citizenship would be posthumously restored to him by President Gerald Ford in 1975. It is hard to think of any other general who had fought against his own country being so completely reintegrated into national life, or so universally admired even by those who have little or no sympathy toward the cause for which he fought. This process began almost immediately after the surrender.”

6. Phillip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (HarperOne, 2014).

This year marks the century mark for the start of the great conflagration that reshaped the world as we know it today, World War I. The anniversary has unleashed a torrent of books, but this one stands out for the uniqueness of its approach. Phillip Jenkins, a well-established historian, puts the war into its religious context, demonstrating the fact that secular histories miss much of the story. Jenkins, who teaches at Baylor University, points to the profoundly unsecular nature of the world in 1914. The European nations considered themselves Christian in identity and their cause to be the Christian cause. Add the various influences of national Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Muslim faith of the Ottoman Empire and you find a recipe for holy war — and this is precisely the story that Phillip Jenkins tell so well.

Excerpt:

“Religious themes resonated powerfully with ordinary people. The war took place in a world in which religious faith was still the norm, even in advanced and industrialized nations, and even more so in mainly rural and peasant societies. Religious language and assumptions were omnipresent, on the home front and at the front lines, as part of the air that people breathed. All those religious interpretations, all that willingness to believe tales of angels and apparitions, did not spring into life overnight in August 1914. Rather, they were deeply embedded in prewar culture, to a degree that must challenge familiar assumptions about the impact of the Enlightenment and scientific ideas on ordinary Europeans. And the experience of war greatly intensified perceptions of the religious dimension, in an age when death was such a familiar fact, when so mush effort was devoted to analyzing the vagaries of providence and fate.”

7. Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (Crown Publishers, 2014).

The world of spies and espionage has been a staple of fiction for centuries now. The real word inhabited by spies is something often very different. Kai Bird takes us into that world in The Good Spy, his telling of the story of Robert Ames — and his introduction to the dark world of modern espionage. Kai Bird is in a unique position to write this book. As a boy, he knew Robert Ames as one of his father’s coworkers at the U.S. Consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He thought that Bob Ames was a foreign service officer, like his own father. Later, he found out that Ames was an American spy. But Robert Ames was not just any spy, he was a crucial link between the U.S. and the Arab world as the age of terror began. Ames. along with 62 others, was killed in the suicide bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983. he left behind a wife and six young children. His story is the story of modern spycraft, the story of the emergence of Islamic terrorism, and the morality tale that emerges when the horrible but necessary work of spies comes to light. This book is not for those looking for a romantic spy tale. That belongs on the fiction shelf. This book is for those who want to know the story of Robert Ames, a man who really did his best to be The Good Spy.

Excerpt:

“Eleven-year-old Kevin had a hard time comprehending what was happening. He walked downstairs to the family’s small study and sat in his father’s rocking chair. He sat there for the longest time, just rocking back and forth. Unconsciously, as he rocked, he gripped one handle so tightly that his thumbnail wore a deep groove into the wood. One of the children had called their mother at the phone number she’d left for them. When Yvonne got the call, she knew. She rushed home and walked into the house in tears. She remembers little. it was all a blur…. The children were devastated–and also shocked to learn that their father had worked for the CIA and not the State Department. They felt both a sense of wonder and disbelief. Their father had lied to them all these years–but at the same time they felt a certain pride in what they were beginning to learn about what he’d done.”

 

8. John C. McManus, The Dead and Those About to Die — D-Day: The Big Red One at Omaha Beach (NAL Caliber, Penguin Group, 2014).

June 6, 2014 marks the 70th anniversary of D-Day. While the memories of World War I and the Civil War recede into the nation’s corporate memory, thousands of veterans of D-Day are alive today. Most are age 90 or more, and few are likely to be alive to be honored on the 80th anniversary. Their stories deserve to be told, for they lived and fought through what remains the largest amphibious invasion ever undertaken. History and destiny hinged on that single day. At the center of that epic day’s battle, and the days that followed, was The Big Red One, the U.S. Army’s First Infantry Division. That division’s story on D-Day and what followed is told by John C. McManus in The Dead and Those About to Die. The book’s title comes from Colonel George Taylor, who commanded the division’s lead assault regiment. He told his men to move and to get off Omaha beach: “Only two kinds of people are going to be on this beach,” he shouted, ” the dead and those about to die.”

Excerpt:

“Thus, every Big Red One soldier who was at Omaha beach paid for that valuable soil in one fashion or another–some with their lives, some with physical wounds, some with the loss of legs, arms, eyes, or the infliction of some other disability, some with their mental or emotional well-being, many simply with the survivor’s guilt that comes from living while close comrades did not. Many like [Captain Joe] Dawson, searched for meaning in the midst of such unspeakable tragedy. ‘This war has been unbelievable personal,’ he wrote to his family a few weeks after D-Day. ‘What little satisfaction gained from it has bee the belief that it as all worthwhile. and that this was shared by all our loved ones and those who represent our nation in society and government alike.’ Though the victory at Omaha beach was staggering in its cost, Dawson and the thousands of other survivors could take solace in the fact that it was among the most significant of World War II. Don Whitehead succinctly wrote that it ‘turned the key that unlocked the door to victory in Europe.‘”

9. James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

James Webb served as a U.S. Marine officer before joining the Reagan administration as Assistant Secretary of Defense. He later served as Secretary of the Navy. In 2006, he was elected to the Unites States Senate. Elected as a Democrat, he chose to serve only one term in office. I Heard My Country Calling is a memoir, and a powerful example of that literary form. This tale of patriotism and service to country begins with Webb as a young boy, revering, loving, and fearing his Air Force officer father (akin to Pat Conroy’s depiction of his Navy officer father in The Great Santini) Webb was drawn to military service himself, eventually graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy and becoming a Marine Corps officer. he writes of his boyhood on military bases, of his time as a boy in England, and, most importantly, of his experience as an officer in the Vietnam War. His account of the American withdrawal from that war is heartbreaking, but his elevation of service to country is very moving. One key insight gained from this memoir is the distance between the Americans who grow up in a military family and those who do not. Reading this book will at least erase a small bit of that distance.

Excerpt:

“On Saturday mornings we would have military-style inspections, standing at parade rest in front of our chests of drawers, our bedroom so filled with beds that it was difficult to maneuver around them, much less create a semblance of military order. When my dad walked into the room we were supposed to snap into the position of attention and report the room ready for inspection. Sometimes, not ready for the drill, my socks not yet rolled or my underwear not yet folded in the drawer, I would begin to argue as he walked into the room. ‘Dad–’ ‘Come to attention when you talk to me,’ he would say officiously, checking our the arrangement of socks and underwear in the dresser drawer. ‘And don’t call me Dad. I’m Captain Webb. And you’re a corporal.‘”

10. Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Knopf, 2014).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is experiencing something of a renaissance in interest and influence in recent years. A biography by Eric Metaxas reached the best-seller lists and various other projects have drawn ample attention. Charles Marsh, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, now arrives with Strange Glory, a massive and important biography of Bonhoeffer. Serious readers will welcome this book. Of all the books on this list, this one is likely to have the most lasting influence. It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive or substantial biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer arriving in this generation. Marsh, who also directs the Project on Lived Theology at the university, has written a compelling account of one of the twentieth century’s most compelling figures. It is not to be missed. Bonhoeffer was a man of contradictions. He was a man of tremendous personal courage and moral force. His defiance of Naziism cost him his life. Offered continued safety in America, he insisted on returning to his people. He was also prophet of a Christian ecclesiology that was hammered out in the crucible of horrifying times. It is no wonder that so many Christians, especially young Christians, find him so fascinating and admirable. But Bonhoeffer was also the architect of what he called a “religionless Christianity.” He was part neo-orthodox, part Protestant liberal, part simple biblicist — and there are many other parts to be discovered. Marsh does not try to make Bonhoeffer appear more orthodox and evangelical than he surely was. Nor does he present him as any less courageous than he surely was. This is a complex book about a complex man. It is an important contribution to both history and theology. It is also a narrative of remarkable power.

Excerpt:

“Was Bonhoeffer overthinking what should be a direct ethical mandate–destroying an evil regime to stop a genocide? As a Lutheran pastor, Bonhoeffer would have to navigate perilous (or at least, unfamiliar) theological terrain in order to reach the conclusion that permitted tyrrannicide. In the face of Hitler’s atrocities, the way of nonviolence would itself bring an inevitable guilt, for allowing injustices to be ‘uncontested’ was to allow the loss of innocent life. And so sin–whether through action or inaction–was a certainty. In this connection it was useful to remember Luther’s understanding of the working of grace. Humankind, despite its best efforts, was inevitable engulfed by sin, from which Christ’s death on the cross offered the only redemption. It was for this reason–not out of perversity, as many Catholic critics would claim–that the father of the Reformation had reasoned that the Christian must sometimes ‘sin boldly.’ His counsel was not an incitement to wantonness but rather a heightened awareness that only Christ saves. Bonhoeffer did not try to resolve the paradox by assuming moral innocence, but accepted the paradox by incurring the guilt born out of responsible action.”

Enjoy summer reading that matters — and please share your own favorites with me.

I am always glad to hear from readers. Just write me at mail@albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/albertmohler

 

Ask Anything: Weekend Edition 05-24-14

1) Should single Christians adopt?

2) Do multi-site or multiple service churches conform to a New Testament view of the church?

3) How should a Christian go about getting to know a political candidate? 

 

Transcript: The Briefing 05-23-14

The Briefing

 

 May 23, 2014

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

 

It’s Friday, May 23, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Sometimes an article is not what it appears to be about or, furthermore, it’s not even about what the reporters think it’s about. Evidence of that came yesterday in the front page of The New York Times. Jeremy Alford and Erik Eckholm co-authored a report entitled “With New Bill, Abortion Limits Grow in the South.” The dateline is from Baton Rouge, where the Louisiana legislature on Wednesday passed a bill that, according to the reporters, could force three of the state’s five abortion clinics to close. That’s big news. It made the front page of The New York Times not just because of what is happening in Louisiana, but because other states in the region have already adopted similar laws. As they write, the action of Louisiana echoes rules passed in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, and they say it raises the possibility of drastically reduced access to abortion across a broad swath of the South.

 

Now this raises an important issue, according to these reporters: “At what point is access to abortion so limited that it violates the right to the procedure guaranteed by the United States Supreme Court in 1973 in Roe v. Wade?” Now this is a very interesting question. On its face, the question appears to be this: Back in 1973, the United States Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision, even though it was a divided court, a divided decision, still it’s the law of the land according to the United States Supreme Court. And that decision held that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first trimester of pregnancy; less of a right in the second trimester of pregnancy; and no fundamental right in the third trimester of pregnancy. But the left, especially those who are ardently in support of abortion rights (and that’s most of the cultural left in this country), ardently opposes any restriction on abortion for any reason under any circumstances. That is reflected in this article that made the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.

 

But there’s something else in this article that is of utmost importance and it’s not what the reporters intended. You see, the big argument behind their question there is the fact that there must be a crisis if women are having a difficult time getting to an abortion clinic. They write later in the article about the fact that some women might have to drive 300 miles to get to an abortionist, to find a medical facility where abortions are offered. But doesn’t that raise a more important question, a more fundamental question? Why is access to abortion so rare? How can it be that the entire state of Louisiana has only five abortion clinics? After all, this says that the new law could force three of the state’s five abortion clinics to close. It is also reported that Mississippi has now just one functioning abortion clinic; something very similar to that in Alabama. How can that be? If there is such support for abortion and such demand for abortion, why aren’t there more abortion clinics? Why aren’t there more medical facilities offering abortion? The answer to that is even more instructive than anything that is addressed in this article. The answer is this: most doctors do not want to perform abortions. The reality is that even in the medical community, abortionists are looked down upon with medical condescension and professional distaste. It is true that even though many people argue for a woman’s constitutional right to abortion, even most doctors don’t want to have anything to do with the process, anything to do with the termination of unborn life.

 

Now I think there are some fundamental reasons why this is so. Doctors go into the profession to heal, not to hurt. They go into the profession to save lives, not to take lives. They go into the profession for reasons that are actually fundamentally contradicted by the entire reality and process of an abortion; of willfully, intentionally, terminating the innocent life within a mother; ending a pregnancy by terminating life. It must be an enormous contradiction in the medical mind. How do you work most of your life and train for so many years to learn how to heal only to use that knowledge and those skills to destroy rather than to save?

 

The interesting thing is what isn’t in this article. What isn’t here, on the front page of The New York Times and in the continuation of the story inside the paper, is an acknowledgment of the fact that if these abortion clinics are so few, that should say something. If, indeed, most doctors don’t want to have anything to do with the entire practice of abortion, that says something and it’s said loudly. And perhaps when you realize this, we come to understand why the ardent pro-choice, pro-abortion left is so insistent on opposing any restriction on abortion for any reason at any time. It’s because if there ever is an acknowledgment of what abortion is, if, indeed, there ever is an honest cultural conversation about what is involved in an abortion and how many doctors don’t want to have anything to do with it, well the pro-abortion side is likely to discover that closing three out of five abortion clinics in Louisiana really isn’t their problem. It’s the fact that if most doctors were left to their own devices, there wouldn’t be any abortion clinics at all. I would welcome an investigation on that question by The New York Times or any other major American newspaper.

 

Several issues of importance related to the family and, thus, very central to the Christian worldview appeared in recent days. One of them was an article by Thomas Sowell, a well-known economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He wrote an article about the fact that the escape from poverty is closer than people think and many people want to think. He’s very clear about the fact that the destruction of the family has been the most injurious thing to Americans when it comes to creating poverty and all the pathologies that go with it. And over against those who say that it’s simply blaming the victim to point to this reality, Thomas Sowell says the only way to help a victim is to actually get to something that helps, and that’s why he believes that addressing the family situation is vital. He writes:

 

Where there is no father in the home, as too often is the case, adolescent boys may choose as models irresponsible people in the world of entertainment or even in the world of crime.

 

Then there are the messiahs with a message. The most popular of these messages seems to be that all your problems are due to other people — people who the messiahs will help fight, in exchange for your loyalty, your money or your votes.

 

He continues:

 

Some of the well-meaning people think that promoting young people’s “self-esteem” and being “nonjudgmental” is the way to go. Some even make excuses for them, either explicitly or implicitly, by using such words as “troubled youths” or “at risk” young people.

 

He concludes:

 

There are no magic solutions, at least none that I know of. Common sense, common decency, work and honesty are about all I can come up with.

 

Let me just pause there to say, can you imagine how refreshing and commonsensical, how fundamentally right that kind of sentence is. Where he says, “There are no magic solutions,” his response would be, “Common sense, common, decency, work and honesty.” Rare things to see affirmed in the mainstream media. He continued:

 

These things are not fancy or new or politically correct. But they have a better track record than much of what we are doing today.

 

Sowell writes for the Creator’s Syndicate, a syndicated columnist. This article appeared in the Investor’s Business Daily.

 

Meanwhile, just one day prior to the appearance of Sowell’s article, in The New York Times, Charles M. Blow wrote an article entitled “Poverty Is Not a State of Mind,” and he argues directly with the very point that Thomas Sowell made in this column and in others of Sowell’s recent columns. Thomas Sowell says you simply have to return to the fact that without the family you end up with these pathologies. It’s a simple matter of demonstrated truth, Sowell makes clear. The truth is that where you find the family intact, you find wholeness and the absence of these pathologies, at least in terms of the main. Where you find the family is lacking, then you find more and more of these pathologies and, as Sowell says, you can deny that all you want, but honesty doesn’t help anyone.

 

Meanwhile Charles Blow comes back to make the argument in a refreshingly candid way from the other side. He says that when conservatives in particular point to the family as the most important economic unit, they do so trying to argue basically for traditional marriage. Charles Blow cites former Florida Governor Jeb Bush who said, “A loving family taking care of their children in a traditional marriage will create the chance to break out of poverty far better than any of the government programs that we can create.” In response to that, Blow writes:

 

My qualm with the statement is the insistence on a “traditional marriage.” Loving families, of any formation, can suffice. While it is true that two adults in a home can provide twice the time, attention and income for a family, those adults needn’t necessarily be in a traditional marriage. Yes, marriage can have a sustaining and fortifying effect on a union and a family, but following that argument, we should be rushing headlong to extend it to all who desire it. In some cases, even parents living apart can offer a nurturing environment for children if they prioritize parenting when it comes to their time and money. Not all parents have to reside together to provide together.

 

This is what he’s writing. He then says:

 

There are many ways to be a loving family and to provide what children need. All forms of marriage are valid and valuable, as well as other ways of constructing a family.

 

Now I think the scariest thing about this column is that I’m fairly certain that Charles M. Blow believes every word he writes. I think he has convinced himself that it doesn’t matter what kind of marriage you have, it doesn’t matter what kind of family you have. He goes beyond the demand for the recognition of same-sex marriage and even says that marriages in which the parents aren’t living together, or, for that matter, non-marriages in which the parents are living together, can be just as helpful for children as when there are two parents in the home. Again, he says:

 

There are many ways to be a loving family and to provide what children need. All forms of marriage are valid and valuable, as well as other ways of constructing a family.

 

Well I don’t think Charles Blow is going to make an argument for those who are practicing polygamy in the American Southwest. As a matter of fact, I find it very hard to believe that he will actually support and endorse that. But he’s the one who, in the pages of The New York Times—prime real estate for any kind of media analysis—he’s the one who says there are many ways to be a loving family, and then he says, “All forms of marriage are valid and valuable.” Well seriously? You see, one of the problems we have in the current debate over the family is that most people often times don’t even mean what they say, especially that’s true on the left where many people make arguments I think they believe are absolutely politically correct, but in terms of the way they live their lives, they’re actually more conservative than what they affirm in public. And that’s one of the reasons why you look at recent data such as that coming from Charles Murray at the American Enterprise Institute and you come to understand that secular liberals on the left say one thing about the family, but they actual practice a far more conservative understanding of what it means to be a family. But then we have the mirror problem on the right where there are so many social conservatives who claim to say all the right things about the family, in public they affirm all the right things about the family, and yet in their own family lives they fall woefully short of their own commitments and supposed convictions.

 

The reality is that hypocrisy appears both on the right and the left, but what concerns me about this column is that I don’t think there’s any real hypocrisy here at all. I think Charles Blow has convinced himself of exactly what he’s writing, except for that part about all forms of marriage being equal. I don’t think he actually means that, but what he means to assert is that it’s wrong for social conservatives, or for anyone else for that matter, to point to the family situation and say, “You’re going to have to fix that if you’re going to fix poverty.” But that’s where Thomas Sowell is so refreshing in rejoinder.

 

Honesty is honesty, after all, and dishonesty doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t help to deny the obvious. And in one sense, that’s exactly what Charles Blow did just one day after Thomas Sowell’s column ran in competing newspapers. But, of course, it’s not just competing newspapers we’re talking about here. It’s competing worldviews. And these two articles make that abundantly clear.

 

Meanwhile, yesterday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal had not one, but two really important articles on the family and the intersection of the family and economics. And let’s remind ourselves, sometimes economic realities point to what people don’t want otherwise to affirm; that is, the importance of the family. And only those who operate from a biblical worldview understanding of the family know why these things are essentially necessarily so. But it is interesting that even secular people who don’t say the right things about marriage, when they look at the data, have to at least face the facts, in terms of the inflexible centrality of the family to human life. And furthermore, even some issues related to gender are far more inflexible than social liberals want to believe, even those who have convinced themselves that gender is nothing more than a social construct, even those who believe that social policies can basically eliminate the differences between the genders. For instance, a report coming from Stockholm, Sweden, in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal by Christina Zander says that even Scandinavia has a continuing gender gap when it comes to corporate chief executive officers. As she writes:

 

The view at the top of companies in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Iceland [those are five of the most gender-progressive nations on the planet] illustrates how an abundance of policies aimed at closing Scandinavia’s corporate gender gap, including board quotas, are still falling short of putting women in the coveted CEO job.

 

The article quotes Karen Frøsig, who is the head of a major bank in Denmark. She’s also one of the very rare female CEOs of a public company in Scandinavia. She said, “At the executive level the cork is still in the bottle.” Zander goes on to report:

 

For nearly half a century, Nordic nations have pioneered efforts to close the gender gap. In Norway, 40% of board members must be women [that’s by a legal dictate], while Finland enforces softer director quotas. Each of these countries offers generous daycare benefits. Parental-leave laws are designed to distribute child-raising responsibilities between mom and dad.

 

And yet, as Christina Zander writes from Stockholm, it isn’t working. It isn’t working, as this article makes clear, because women still continue to bear most of the responsibility for child-rearing. And as the article continues later on, you have Jenny Wahlberg, a 41-year-old mother of three who has lived both in Sweden and abroad. She says, “It isn’t possible to combine a full-time career, not to mention a management position, with picking up your kids from day care.” Now notice something; those words, “while picking up your children from day care.” So in other words, even when you have the state offering free, excellent (by their definition) childcare, you have women who say, “Well that’s not enough because the children still at some point have to be picked up from childcare.” And as this woman says, it’s usually the mom who picks them up. Zander continues, “The need to leave work early to pick up the kids from day care is a major reason women turn down positions requiring long hours at the office.”

 

One gender equality researcher in Sweden said:

 

If you look at the number of women who put in more than 60 hours a week, they’re reflected quite well in the proportion of female managers.

 

Well that’s a very interesting statement. It’s extremely honest because what it states is this: if you take all the executives willing at that level to work 60 hours or more a week, there is no gender imbalance. No the gender imbalance comes prior to that, in terms of the number of people willing to work 60 hours or more a week. Sofia Falk, another businesswoman quoted in the article, said:

 

“Women, unlike men, include children when planning their careers.” Instead of offering more money or a company car, she said, the type of management incentives needed are an assistant or private child care, grocery shopping, shared management positions or technical solutions to be able to work from home.

 

Well that’s very interesting too, but, again, what’s most interesting is what really isn’t in the article and that’s the question of this: Are there not many women who would actually prefer to do their own grocery shopping? Are there not women who would actually prefer, even many of these executive women, to have their profession conformed to their child experience rather than to have their mothering conformed to their profession? That’s a very interesting question. It’s not a question that is directly addressed in this article. Why? Because even a newspaper like The Wall Street Journal, operating in a basically very secular world, would find it almost impossible to asked that question honestly. They would be treated as absolutely being condescending to women by even asking the question. But from a Christian worldview perspective, it isn’t condescending to ask a question that is rooted in an understanding of respect.

 

I said there was a second article in The Wall Street Journal. Right under that article is one that says “Study on Pay Finds a Daddy Bonus.” This one isn’t datelined from Scandinavia, but rather from the United States. Jackie Bischof writes, “Want a bigger paycheck? Having kids might be the ticket, but only if you’re a man.” The reporter cites a recent study by the City University of New York that found that men with children earned higher median personal incomes than any other population group in the city of New York, and that includes men without children and women with or without children. The report is entitled “The Mommy Tax and the Daddy Bonus.” The data were drawn from U.S. Census Bureau reports between 1990 and 2010, adjusted for inflation to 2013. Justine Calcagno, a social psychologist and Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center said, “It’s sometimes called ‘the daddy premium.’ We  just consistently see men with children earning higher personal incomes than all other groups.” So in other words, they didn’t look at any reason why it might be so, they simply looked at the data and they looked at who was making the most money, and those making the most money, out of all the possible combinations and permutations, is a man with children, known to be with children. This is where the article gets somewhat revealing, but only somewhat. Jackie Bischof writes, “A number of factors might be behind the findings, including sex discrimination in workplaces and gender discrimination in occupations.” Well they might be issues, but are they likely issues?

 

The article continues by pointing to social psychology, where we are told there are theories that favorable stereotypes about men with children might come into play. As Bischoff writes, these would lead to a more positive evaluation of male employees and, as a result, better compensation. Calcagno, the researcher quoted in the report, said:

 

There are some social psychologists who [describe] certain stereotypes about men with children—that they’re more warm, that they’re more devoted—all these sort of positive factors we attribute to dads. That may be one reason why employers are biasing in terms of their pay.

 

But that’s not at all even sustained in the article. There is no evidence that employers are biasing in favor of pay. In other words, that’s simply an extrapolation from the data. They’re not asking more fundamental questions. Well not until the very last line of the article where we read this:

 

Ms. Calcagno said she now plans to study the same data on a national level. She also expects to examine data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to see [now wait for this] if factors such as the number of hours worked have an impact on the findings.

 

So in other words, the most basic question that comes immediately to any thinking person was a question that wasn’t even addressed in the story and was addressed only in the last line of the article. What makes that even more insane is that that second article appears on the printed page immediately under the first. In other words, it’s as if the paper’s having a debate with itself: the first article informing the second of the most important question that wasn’t even asked. Oh, of course, it was asked in the very last sentence. Those who don’t read to the very last sentence would actually have a very misleading picture of the entire report and its meaning.

 

But let’s go back to the fact that there might be bias. Why would there be bias towards a man who has children? Well it is because, after all, it’s not just a stereotype that men with children are more responsible and mature. Men with children will also tell you that as soon as they have children, they’re more responsible and more mature.

 

But that takes us back to where we started with Thomas Sowell, where we are reminded that reality may be a difficult subject, but it’s even more difficult to avoid. Christian thinking reminds us that these things are not accidents. They are evidence of the fact that, even in a world at rebellion against the family, the strength of the family still shines through. Sometimes in sociological analysis; sometimes in economic reports; most of the time, I’m glad to say, in actual families. And the glory in that truth is not the glory of the family, but the glory of the Creator who loved us and gave us marriage and the family as two of His most precious gifts.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. 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 on Monday for The Briefing.

The Briefing 05-23-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Pro-choice advocates threatened by limitations on abortion due to distastefulness of abortion

With New Bill, Abortion Limits Spread in South, New York Times (Jeremy Alford and Erik Eckholm)

2) Family reality key factor in economic poverty

Poor Too Often Led The Wrong Way To Escape Poverty, Investor’s Business Daily (Thomas Sowell)

Poverty Is Not a State of Mind, New York Times (Charles M. Blow)

3) Gender roles revealed by economic realities to be more inflexible despite social efforts

Even Scandinavia Has a CEO Gender Gap, Wall Street Journal (Christina Zander)

Study on Pay Finds a ‘Daddy Bonus’, Wall Street Journal (Jackie Bischof)

Transcript: The Briefing 05-22-14

The Briefing

 

 May 22, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, May 22, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Hirings and firings of teachers in religious schools have been garnering headlines of late. The latest comes from California. The Riverside California Press Enterprise reports that a school in Corona, California, is now in the center of controversy because four years ago it fired several employees, including four teachers for teachings that violated the religious beliefs of the school. As David Olson, the reporter for the paper, tells us:

 

Four years after Corona’s Crossroads Christian Schools fired 11 employees for their religious beliefs, legal experts disagree as to whether the dismissals violated the law.

 

In May 2013, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [or EEOC] found “reasonable cause to believe” that the conservative evangelical Christian school violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by dismissing the four teachers, most of whom are Catholic.

 

But as the newspaper makes very clear, the EEOC opted not to file a lawsuit against the school. It offered at least two of the teachers who had filed the complaint the opportunity to sue the school, but they chose not to do so. Now the school finds itself back in the headlines because of a controversy over whether or not the school was justified, legally justified, in firing the teachers and whether or not a similar school in a similar situation would be within its rights to do the same.

 

The charge by the EEOC that, in the words of the agency, there was a reasonable cause to believe that the school had violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is a huge issue for any Christian school. This is precisely the kind of news story that should have the attention of anyone interested in the integrity of Christian education. As David Olson writes, even as the two teachers decided not to sue, the issue is now back in the public eye and, as he says, the case pits the religious freedom of the school against the religious freedom of the employees. The school, by the way, has 863 students. It ranges from kindergarten to the 12th grade. It belongs to the Crossroads Christian Church. That church is an evangelical congregation and it has had policies in place that all who teach within the school must be also those who are evangelicals and hold to evangelical doctrine. But four years ago, discovering that it had several Roman Catholic teachers and others who were not evangelical on the faculty or staff, they were eliminated. Eleven total employees were eliminated, including four teachers. Officials with the school said that as a ministry of their church, the school should expose students only to beliefs that are in line with the beliefs of the church. Church officials also said the school had long had rules requiring employees to adhere to certain religious beliefs and practices—but listen carefully to the next words in this report—“but did not strictly enforce the rules until the 2009-2010 school year.”

 

So here we have a problem. We have a school that is established by, owned and operated by a Christian church, an evangelical congregation. It has 863 students, a fairly large teaching staff, faculty and administrators to run a school of that kind of magnitude, and over a period of time, it evidently did not apply its own hiring policies. Instead, it hired persons who were non-evangelicals. It then at some point—evidently leading up to the 2009-2010 academic year—it decided that that was not wise, that was not a good stewardship of the church’s identity and mission and that of the school as well. And so these employees were terminated. Those fired employees and the school found themselves at the center of a controversy and, as this most recent headline makes clear, the controversy hasn’t gone away. The reason this is now in the news in California is because legal experts are back at the argument, arguing as to whether or not the school was within its rights to fire these employees. The arguments are coming fast and furiously. On one side are secularist arguments saying that it is the religious liberty of employees that should count, not of the school. On the other hand, you have those who are saying no, the school as a confessional school, as a Christian school has a right to hire teachers and only teachers who hold to the same beliefs—evangelical Christian beliefs. There are also those who are saying that this church and the school found themselves in this mess because they hired people who took the jobs in good faith only effectively to change the rules at a later point. But the reality is the major issue here. The issue of most central debate is whether or not the school was within its rights to fire these employees and whether now the school is within its rights to hire only those teachers who will clearly teach in accordance with the church’s doctrine.

 

This is where the most important legal analysis then enters the picture, and that comes courtesy of the United States Supreme Court in the case known as Hosanna-Mount Tabor that was handed down by the court in 2012. In that case, the Supreme Court of the United States stated clearly, emphatically, unquestionably that a Christian school has a right to hire only Christian teachers and to higher or to fire according to its own theological beliefs without interference from the state, interference from the government. That’s why Alan Reinach, who is the executive director of the church state council of the Pacific Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, a lawyer who was sought as counsel by some of those who were terminated by the school, said that it was not the church that aired in this decision, but the EEOC. As he said, religious institutions have a right to dismiss employees because of their religious beliefs even if the employee’s duties are secular in nature. He said, by the way, that he’s a strong believer in the separation of church and state, and allowing religious institutions to hire and fire people based on religious beliefs strengthens that separation. He said, “One of the most basic functions of any faith is transmitting their faith to the next generation. If the state can tell you who to hire and fire, they can tell you what to teach.” That is an emphatically important point. It bears repeating. The attorney said, again, “One of the most basic functions of any faith is transmitting that faith to the next generation.” The next line is incredibly vital: “If the state can tell you who to hire and fire, they can tell you what to teach.” That is absolutely true and that is the bottom-line issue in this account.

 

But on the other side of the argument, the paper cited Erwin Chemerinsky. I’ve cited him often on The Briefing because of his influential nature as one of America’s primary legal theorist. He’s a man of the left and he is the dean of the University of California Irvine’s law school. He said that though religious schools can impose certain religious belief requirements on ministers and those who teach Bible classes, they can’t do so on those who hold secular positions. Now is he right or is he wrong? Well he’s at least partly right and the way that he’s partly right should have our attention emphatically. It is this: if you have a Christian school that holds that there are certain subjects that are religious subjects and other subjects that are secular subjects, then you fall right into the trap—that school falls right into the trap that Erwin Chemerinsky has set. If you say that these disciplines are secular, then you can’t hire or fire on a theological or doctrinal basis. But that’s where it’s so important that Christians remember (evangelical Christians in particular) that we don’t hold merely to certain doctrines; we are committed to a total worldview. Thus, anything that is taught within a Christian institution is to be taught on a theological basis, an explicitly Christian-worldview basis. That’s not just a matter of constitutional law; far more importantly, it’s a matter of Christian integrity.

 

But sometimes a story like this functions as a wake-up call for all Christian schools. If you intend to be a Christian school, then you had better hire and fire on a Christian basis. You’d better protect the integrity of your school and what is taught in your school by hiring and firing on the basis of a very clear doctrinal and theological worldview statement. And you also better be very careful. You can’t discriminate in your teaching between areas that are theological and areas that are not, areas in which the Christian worldview applies and areas in which the Christian worldview does not because if you do so, you’re setting yourself up for a constitutional crisis. But far more than that, it’s a theological crisis. The Christian worldview lays claim upon every intellectual and academic discipline bar none. When we forget that, we truly are in trouble.

 

And speaking of being in trouble, one Christian college finds itself in trouble, if trouble means finding yourself in controversy on the front page of The New York Times. Yesterday’s edition of The New York Times had a front-page story with the headline “College is Torn: Can Darwin and Eden Coexist?” The reporter is Alan Binder. The dateline is Dayton, Tennessee. Some of you will remember immediately that Dayton, Tennessee, was the town in that state where in 1925 the infamous Scopes trial over the issue of evolution and the teaching of evolution in the public schools took place. The school is Bryan College and it’s named for none other than William Jennings Bryan, the man who argued the case against evolution in the Scopes trial.

 

Many Americans living today do not remember the importance of William Jennings Bryan. He held the Democratic nomination to be president of the United States in 1896, in 1900, and in 1908. In 1896 and in 1900, he was defeated for the presidency by William McKinley. In the year 1908, he was defeated by William Howard Taft. He was also the Secretary of State for Woodrow Wilson until he resigned shortly before World War I because his pacifism ran into conflict with the increasing militarism of the American president. He was one of the major figures on the world stage and one of the most famous names in America. His name was given to a college; a college that was established in Dayton, Tennessee, explicitly in order to combat evolution. But as Binder reports:

 

William Jennings Bryan earned a permanent place in American history nearly nine decades ago in the Scopes trial, when he stood in a courtroom here and successfully prosecuted a teacher who broke the law by teaching evolution in a public school.

 

He goes on to say:

 

The continuing debate at Bryan College and beyond is a reminder of how divisive the issues of the Scopes trial still are, even splitting an institution whose motto is “Christ Above All.”

 

Here’s what he reports:

 

Since Bryan College’s founding in 1930, its statement of belief, which professors have to sign as part of their employment contracts, included a 41-word section summing up the institution’s conservative views on creation and evolution, including the statement: “The origin of man was by fiat of God.” But in February [of this year], college officials decided that professors had to agree to an additional clarification declaring that Adam and Eve “are historical persons created by God in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life-forms.”

 

Now who in the world would be surprised that the trustees and administration of Bryan College of all places would expect that of those who would teach within the institution? But as Binder reports, this has led to a firestorm of controversy within the school and also within the larger constituency. He reports:

 

For administrators and many members of the governing board at Bryan, the new language is a buffer against what they see as a marked erosion of Christian values and beliefs across the country. But for critics, the clarification amounts to an assault on personal religious views, as well as on the college’s history and sense of community.

 

But a closer look at this story reveals that there are links between this controversy and the one in Corona, California, and frankly, the controversy that surrounds any school that intends to make very clear it will hold itself and will hold its professors or its teachers to a very clear statement of doctrine. But there’s something else in this story that we need to watch very carefully. Those who are arguing against this more detailed doctrinal statement are saying that, after all, it is more detailed than the one they had a sign in the past and they’re saying that’s not fair, and that there is now an increased binding of their intelligence and their conscience in terms of their role as teachers. And that is true. The question is: is it justified? And I would argue that emphatically it is.

 

This is one of the great principles of historical theology. You don’t have to require things until you have to require them. In other words, looking through the early centuries of the Christian church, you see that the creeds and confessions get longer. Why do they get longer? Because heretics are denying more doctrines and more principles of doctrine that have to be refuted and have to be corrected. Just to give you an example. When the Baptist Faith and Message was adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1925, it didn’t mention homosexuality. It didn’t mention homosexuality when it was revised in 1963, but it did when it was revised in the year 2000. Why? Because now it is a controversy. Now the issue has to be clarified. No one teaching in any Christian institution should be surprised that over time there are additional affirmations that must be made. Binder cites William Ringenberg, the author of a book on the history of Protestant colleges in the United States. He said, “The struggle for Christian colleges is to try to define how a Christian college is different from a Christian church. Is one different from the other?” The obvious answer to his question is yes, they are different from one another, but not in the respect that is implied here. They are not different in terms of holding to certain definite doctrines. They are not different in terms of having to be confessional and very clear about those doctrines if they intend for those doctrines to be perpetuated into the future.

 

The article ends with Dr. Ringenberg saying that there’s a constant tension in Christian institutions between a freedom of debate and doctrinal standards. Such debates often take place, he said, as the colleges try to fine tune the balance of faith and education. He said, “Soon enough, the two of them will clash if you’re serious about academics and serious about having a biblical view of Christianity.” That is emphatically true and, of course, the big question is this: When that collision takes place, which wins? If it is not decided upfront that the theological integrity of the institution is paramount, then I guarantee you that whatever is claimed as the latest cause of academic freedom will win and the truth will lose and the academic integrity of the school will be lost. The reality is that no school can serve two masters. You can’t serve a secular ideal of academic freedom and the Christian mandate of theological integrity. Sooner or later every institution will have to make its choice.

 

Meanwhile back in Washington, President Obama and his administration are at the center of an expanding controversy over the Veteran’s Administration. It starts in Phoenix, Arizona, where several veterans died on the waiting list for medical treatment at the VA hospital there. The accusation is not just that these were mishandled and leading of course to the deaths of these veterans, but also that this is an expanding situation that may include as many as 26 different VA hospitals. And the scandal, however, is directed at the Obama Administration because the press and others with knowledge of the situation claim that the president and his administration were warned about this problem years ago and did nothing. This is leading to a controversy that has led several, including the editorial board of The New York Times, to say that this is a genuine scandal that has landed explosively right in the lap of the president of the United States, who yesterday held a press conference in order to discuss these issues. He made very clear that he was outraged. How do we know that? Because he said he was outraged. He said:

 

When I hear allegations of misconduct, any misconduct, whether its allegations of VA staff covering up long wait times or cooking the books, I will not stand for it, not as commander-in-chief, but also not as an American. None of us should. So if these allegations prove to be true, it’s dishonorable. It’s disgraceful and I will not tolerate it. Period. I know that people are angry and want swift reckoning. I sympathize with that, but we have to let the investigators do their job and get to the bottom of what happened.

 

Well observers going all the way from John Stuart to the editorial board of The New York Times and the editorial board of several other major liberal newspapers as well have made very clear they’re not buying the argument. One of the most interesting aspects of this story is something that every leader had better note with grave concern and, furthermore, Christians with particular concern. You can’t say you’re outraged and be believable if you do not appear to be outraged and if your actions do not indicate that you’re outraged. The president of the United States says he’s outraged, and yet he said it in just the way he says just about anything. President Obama, you may remember, came into office promising a rather cool personality, but cool doesn’t work when you’re outraged. The American people expect to see a president outraged over something this outrageous and then respond in a way that matches that outrage. The president thus far has not demonstrated outrage; he’s simply declared it. And furthermore, he has kept his Veteran’s Administration secretary in office, even as the leaders of his own party are calling for the secretary’s resignation.

 

I’ll let others worry about the politics of the situation. This is certainly something that the president’s going to have to handle and handle quite quickly if it doesn’t explode into an even larger scandal. But my main interest is the leadership dimension here. There’s a key issue of leadership that’s demonstrated when you see the response to a president who says he’s outraged, but doesn’t appear to be believable in terms of that outrage. I’m not questioning the president’s heart. I’m simply stating that we should all learn something here. When you’re outraged and should be outraged, people need to see you act in a way that’s commensurate with the outrage. Merely saying I’m outraged doesn’t solve the problem.

 

Finally, just two days ago on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, I landed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. And even as I landed, I all the sudden recognized that was the one-year anniversary of the horrible F-5 tornado that hit a suburb of Oklahoma City last year, the suburb of Moore. You may remember that that tornado, ranked among the strongest ever recorded, wreaked a path of destruction across Oklahoma that left 25 dead, including seven young students at the Plaza Towers Elementary School there in Moore, Oklahoma. So I landed on Tuesday in that proud city one year to the date after that horrifying disaster. I didn’t see disaster and catastrophe when I looked at the city, but that doesn’t mean that the catastrophe is not still there live in the hearts of the people who lost so much and witnessed so much. It’s a reminder to us that when something like this grabs the headlines and soon passes that it doesn’t pass for the people who lived there. So when we think about those who lost so much in Moore, Oklahoma, and pray for them with that in mind, let’s remember there are so many others, once in the headlines but now gone, who still need our concern and our prayers.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. 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 05-22-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Corona school’s right to hold doctrinal standard a matter of integrity of Christian education

CORONA: Questions linger about Christian school’s firings over religion, Press Enterprise (David Olson)

2) Detailed doctrinal statement required by Bryan College over creation entirely justified

Bryan College Is Torn: Can Darwin and Eden Coexist?, New York Times (Alan Blinder)

3) VA scandal in Washington presents lesson in leadership: actions should match words

Troubles With Veterans’ Health Care, New York Times (Editorial Board)

Obama on VA allegations: ‘It is disgraceful, and I will not tolerate it’, Washington Times (Ben Wolfgang)

Why the VA Scandal Is the Real Outrage, Slate (John Dickerson)

4) Anniversary of F5 tornado in Oklahoma;  headlines don’t fade for those who lived them

Moore residents, officials gather to mark anniversary of May 20, 2013, tornado, The Oklahoman (Silas Allen)

No shelter from the storm, The Oklahoman (Juliana Keeping)

Transcript: The Briefing 05-21-14

The Briefing

 

 May 21, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, May 21, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Yesterday, a federal district court judge in Pennsylvania struck down that state’s constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. That came just one day after another federal district court judge did the same thing in the state of Oregon. Thus, in two successive days, first the state of Oregon became the 18th state in the union to have legal same-sex marriage and then Pennsylvania became the 19th. But there are a couple of very important issues related to these two developments. The first is this: though only 19 of the 50 states currently have legal same-sex marriage, it is certainly true that a majority of Americans now live in those states that have legal same-sex marriage. The geographic distribution of the population is uneven and given the size, the population size, of several of the states that have legal same-sex marriage at this point, it is without doubt that a majority of Americans now live where access to same-sex marriage is available.

 

The second issue is this: with the state of Pennsylvania now joining the rest of the Northeast, there is not one single state in the northeastern United States that does not have legal same-sex marriage. The state of Pennsylvania was for the last several months the holdout, but now that is the case no more. Another thing to note with both of these decisions is that these federal district court judges issued no stays of their decisions until the respective states can appeal. In other words, this is now going to become the law in these two states. In Oregon it happened immediately. As the decision was announced on Monday, a significant number of county clerks began to issue same-sex marriage certificates, and same-sex marriage ceremonies began within minutes. That will not be the case in Philadelphia. Not because the judge issued a stay, but simply because the state of Pennsylvania requires a three-day waiting period after a marriage license is issued before the ceremony can take place.

 

There were other similarities between the decisions handed down in the two states and the political context of the two states. Both of them have fairly large homosexual populations and the gay activist community has had a significant amount of influence especially in the Metropolitan areas of the two states. This is certainly true, especially true, in the case of Portland, Oregon. Portland is a famously leftist city and it has been in the situation of wanting to have legal same-sex marriage for some time. As a matter of fact, some may remember that back just a slight bit over ten years ago, in March of 2004, Multnomah County, that’s the county where Portland is located, attempted to issue same-sex marriage licenses in a very brief period of time before legal authorities shut it down. But ten years later, same-sex marriage is legal not only in Multnomah County, Oregon, but throughout the entire state.

 

Something else is of interest in terms of the political context. The two attorneys general of the respective states (both Democrats) indicated that they would not appeal and they would not issue any defense of their state’s constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. That’s a development that was certainly encouraged by the Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder who said that, upon the encouragement of the president of the United States, he would suggest that the attorneys general in each state should consider whether or not one should fail to uphold or to support, to defend in court, a constitutional amendment or any provision of a state constitution that the attorney general believed was unconstitutional. That is a recipe for legal anarchy, but that’s exactly what is taking place in state after state.

 

Finally, a very interesting and revealing statement came from Pennsylvania’s attorney general, that is, Attorney General Kathleen Kane. She previously had announcement she wouldn’t seek to defend the ban on same-sex marriage in court, and yet on Tuesday, she tweeted, “Today in Pennsylvania the Constitution prevailed. Inequality in any form is unacceptable and it has never stood the test of time.” Let’s just note something very carefully. This is a very un-nuanced statement. It’s a statement meant for political consumption. It’s a form of ideological triumphalism. But the attorney general of Pennsylvania can’t possibly mean what she wrote. When she says, “Inequality in any form is unacceptable,” does she means then that any romantic relationship is to have an equal status with heterosexual marriage? Of course she doesn’t mean that, but that’s exactly what she stated. And furthermore, it just may be that the logic that is set loose in terms of the legalization of same-sex marriage means that the logic that she certainly did not mean to imply may nonetheless be inevitable given the kind of revolution and morality that she, along with so many others, have helped to bring to pass. They have opened Pandora’s Box. Once opened, it is very hard to see how it can ever be closed.

 

Shifting the context to the workplace, one of the impacts of the kind of revolution and morality we are now experiencing is going to be a constriction in employment. In other words, there will be people whose moral views will preclude them from having or from holding jobs, positions for which they are trained, professions to which they had aspired, jobs for which they are otherwise well-qualified, and jobs in which they have performed very well until, all of the sudden, they find themselves on the outside of a moral revolution.

 

Now remember that the sociological category of a moral revolution means a complete reversal. In other words, this isn’t just a shift in morality. This is an absolute reversal. That which had been condemned is now celebrated. That which was celebrated is now condemned. So when you’re thinking about the kind of moral convictions that Christians have traditionally held on the basis of biblical authority and the consistent teaching of the Church, you’ll understand that holding to those moral positions was, until recently in Western societies, celebrated. Homosexual relationships and behaviors were condemned. But now in many sectors of our society and increasingly—this is the trajectory of the society as a whole—the reversal is now coming into view. Holding that homosexuality is sinful is now to be condemned and homosexual behavior and relationships are now to be celebrated and normalized. This moral reversal is just the kind of thing that we have been watching come to pass and we’re now at the point in which it is almost now fully in view.

 

Now keep that in mind when you consider two articles that appeared within 24-hours of one another in major websites and media outlets in the United States. The first was an article by Jacquelyn Smith that appeared in The Business Insider. The headline: “What to Say When the Hiring Manager Asks About Your Religion in a Job Interview.” The article is indeed interesting, and Jacquelyn Smith, an expert in terms of business hiring policy, makes very clear that it is wrong—not only wrong, it’s illegal—to ask questions of a discriminatory nature when it comes to hiring people on a religious basis in the secular workforce. And yet, as she says, it happens. She suggests that one of the reasons it happens—she even says the main reason right now that it happens—is because prospective employers want to know about your availability in terms of the weekly calendar. They want to know if there are any particular religious practices or religious holidays that might intrude upon scheduling, but even as that is wrong to ask—and, again, not wrong in terms of etiquette, but wrong according to the law—she does acknowledge that there are other issues that could well intrude into the discussion as well. There are many reasons why a prospective employer might decide to ask about one’s religious beliefs and practices because, after all, given the agenda, in terms of this revolution and morality that we are now experiencing, many employers have simply decided that the way to ensure their posture in the society and in the consumer marketplace is going to be to join the revolution and to do so wholeheartedly. Increasing numbers of corporations, including almost all of the Fortune 500 corporations, have hiring policies and nondiscrimination policies that make it very difficult for someone who holds to a biblical understanding of homosexuality to be scored high in terms of commitment to the corporate value of diversity. This comes down to the fact that many employees are now being asked not only to do what would be natural, that is, to work with persons in terms of collegiality and teamwork regardless of sexual orientation or marital status, but employees are now being demanded to celebrate sexual diversity, a diversity of sexual orientations. Things like Gay Pride Day or Gay Pride Week are now becoming major features of large corporations and, for that matter, many smaller companies as well. I know of one person who simply working at his desk discovered that the gay pride team had planted a gay pride flag on his desk. He was glad to work with persons regardless of their sexual orientation, but he could not as a biblical Christian celebrate homosexuality as a lifestyle, and for that reason he was marked down by the corporation’s diversity team. As a matter of fact, his future prospects, as his supervisor told him, became very bleak within the company.

 

I mentioned there were two articles. The first was the article by Jacquelyn Smith. The second is an article by Brynn Tannehill. Brynn Tannehill is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and she is currently the director of advocacy for SPARTA, that’s Service Members, Partners, and Allies for Respect and Tolerance for All or SPARTA. Writing in The Huffington Post, she speaks of freedom of religion in the workplace and in her view, as she makes very clear, there is limited freedom of religion in the secular workplace. Remember the example of the young man I just mentioned when she writes:

 

Private businesses most certainly can fire or punish people for expressing their sincerely held religious beliefs when it conflicts with corporate policy or civil rights laws.

 

But the main point of her article, her emphatic point, is basically this: her side has won the argument. As she writes:

 

Fundamentally, though, what social conservatives fail to understand is that they have lost the cultural war on lesbians and gays. For most Americans being rabidly anti-gay is a huge turn off. This shift in public opinion has trickled up into the business world as well.

 

Now we should note when she speaks of something being “rabidly anti-gay” (those are her words), she’s explicitly referring, for instance, to a moral judgment that homosexuality is sinful. She makes that clear in the preceding passages. As she sees it, it just makes good business sense for corporations to hire people who are on the right side of this new Cultural Revolution. She says:

 

Companies perceive appearing to support anti-gay causes, ideas or people is bad for their bottom line. They see having an inclusive workforce as good for attracting top talent.

 

About social conservatives—and she means conservative Christians—she says this:

 

Those people who rail about their right to say offensive things about lesbians and gays are becoming increasingly embarrassing.

 

And she means embarrassing to virtually everyone: embarrassing to corporations, embarrassing to the Republican Party, embarrassing to the society at large. But even as she was speaking about “rabidly anti-gay” a moment ago and here she speaks about those who “rail about their right to say offensive things about gays and lesbians,” remember she’s just simply talking about something like stating that one believes that homosexuality is sinful behavior. That is what is now considered absolutely out of line. That’s what breaks the diversity commitment of the company. That’s what places you on the wrong side of the moral revolution. And as both of these articles make abundantly clear, that’s just the kind of thing that can now get you fired or prevent you from being hired.

 

We need to face the fact that younger Christians in America are going to face a world that most of us as older adults have simply never had to face. They’re going to routinely face, for the entirety of their employment lives, the reality that they can easily be on the wrong side of a cultural controversy that can cost them their jobs, harm them in terms of their professional prospects. This is something that those who are Christians in their 60s and 70s never had to fear. Those of us in 40s and 50s are probably at least safely in the workplace, but when you think about those who are in their 20s and 30s, much less those who are youngsters and teenagers coming along, we realize that for those Christian young people there may well never be a day when they are not constantly aware of the fact that they may not get a job or may lose a job or may not even be able to enter a profession simply because they’re biblical Christians. That’s a new thing in this society and we ought not to let it pass without very sober notice.

 

We shift now to talk about the impact of popular culture in terms of American civilization. A Christian worldview perspective leads us to wonder, how is it that people shape their worldviews?  What kind of information, what kind of cultural messaging is getting to our neighbors, the people we meet in the shopping mall, or at the little league park? What is shaping the way they think? We need to recognize that for many Americans, millions of Americans—some sociologists suggest the vast majority of Americans—most of what they think is shaped by their local community and by the larger world of popular culture. They rarely enter into any kind of academic conversation. They’re not given to intellectual pursuits. Instead, they are consumers of popular culture. And America is in essence a vast cornucopia of popular culture; therefore consumer demand. It is so much around us, so pervasively surrounding us that most of us fail to recognize just what an ocean it is, an ocean in which most of us swim, the only ocean in which many Americans swim.

 

We need to recognize that it was 20 years ago this year that there was a major development in terms of American popular culture. It was 20 years ago that what we now know as reality television was born, and it was born given a certain circumstance. That circumstance occurred in June of 1994. And that circumstance was, as Vanity Fair magazine’s Lili Anolik says, a car chase watched by over a hundred million people, and in that car was O.J. Simpson. As her article says, “It all began with O.J.” The article is really interesting. It’s extremely informative in terms of how the reality television movement developed after the incident that had to do with the car chase with O.J. Simpson, the background of the brutal murder of two people that led to his sensational trial, and the fact that television began to be swept by different kinds of imitators of the basic format of what became known as reality television. Now, again, reality television should be understood as an oxymoron because if there’s one thing that television virtually never is and cannot be it is reality. But for many Americans that reality on the screen is the only reality they watch for any considerable amount of time. And reality television has had a massive impact on our society and, for the most part, a pernicious impact.

 

That’s recognized even in Vanity Fair magazine, which is the magazine of the cultural elite. Lili Anolik writes that according to one poll at the time, going back to the O.J. Simpson trial, 74% of Americans could identify Kato Kaelin, a very minor figure in the trial, when only 25% could identify the vice president of the United States, then Al Gore. In other words, 20 years ago, reality television was so much a part of American culture that three quarters of Americans could identify a minor figure in a criminal trial when only a quarter of Americans could identify the one who is second in line to be president of the United States, the then-sitting vice president.

 

But she also notes that much more was swept away in terms of the development of reality television. For instance, one of the things reality television killed were the soap operas that had dominated midday television and it dominated the lives of many midday-television viewers for well over half a century. As it turns out, reality television killed the soap opera, which also tells us a great deal. And, by the way, the soap operas were called soap operas because they were basically advertising media for selling soap to housewives who were at home and, first on radio and later on television, were available either to listen or to watch.

 

But the main point of Vanity Fair’s coverage of this 20th anniversary of reality television is to point out that American television has now gone from bad to worse. As Anolik writes:

 

In the years following the [O.J. Simpson] case, not only did the high-low blend skew more and more toward low, and not only did the bar on low drop, is still dropping, but the feelings of shame that accompanied a low binge vanished.

 

In other words, American television is now at even lower standards than it was 20 years ago when it took this plunge and, as she says, the plunge is continuing. And if there’s anything new, it’s that television producers now feel absolutely no guilt about the binge and nor do the viewers. They simply binge on this kind of television and demand more.

 

Keep this in mind as well when you consider that just this past Friday, Barbara Walters retired (again) from television. This time from the show that she pioneered, The View. But in many ways she was a pioneering woman in television at large. It was in 1964 (50 years ago) that NBC hired her as the “Today Girl.” Her first job in television was selling dog food; the brand was Alpo. But she retired at the top of her game in terms of television. She eventually became cohost of The Today Show and later was cohost of ABC Evening News. That was a brief stint and somewhat controversial, but her main impact on television was not even through The View, but through her interviews. Barbara Walters has interviewed every sitting president to the United States from Richard Nixon forward. Her interview during the Clinton controversy with Monica Lewinsky is recorded as the most-watched television event in American history.

 

But Barbara Walters should go down in history as one who, perhaps more than anyone else, blurred the lines between reality and unreality, between celebrity and the news. If O.J. Simpson is credited, in terms of starting reality television, with tanking the television culture, then Barbara Walters has to be recognized as a major figure in debasing the news. Her interviews were far more often about pandering to celebrities and often with rather salacious content. She did talk to sitting presidents of the United States, she also interviewed Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro, but many if not most of her most-watched interviews were with people who were, as Daniel Boorstin, the late librarian of Congress, said, “merely famous for being famous.” In other words, she was highly addicted to the cult of celebrity. But, of course, it wasn’t enough that she was addicted. There had to be millions of Americans watching her programs who were perhaps even more addicted. That may also explain why on her final appearance on The View she was told goodbye with appearances by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Oprah Winfrey, both of whom told her that she had changed the world. And in the oddest way, given the power of popular culture, maybe she actually did.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the weekly release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. 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’m speaking to you from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.

The Briefing 05-21-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Majority of Americans now live in states with same sex marriage after rulings in Pennsylvania and Oregon

Federal Judge Strikes Down Oregon’s Ban on Same-Sex Marriage, The New York Times (Kirk Johnson) 

Judge Strikes Down Oregon Gay Marriage Ban, Associated Press (Jonathan J. Cooper)

Judge throws out Pennsylvania’s ban on gay marriage, USA Today (John Bacon)

Judge Strikes Down Pennsylvania Ban on Gay Marriage, New York Times (Erik Eckholm)

2) Religious discrimination in workplace over same-sex marriage  will be increasingly common

What To Say When The Hiring Manager Asks About Your Religion In A Job Interview, Business Insider (Jacquelyn Smith)

Freedom of Religion in the Workplace, Huffington Post (Brynn Tannehill)

3) Reality TV turns 20 along with its pervasive cultural influence

It All Began with O. J., Vanity Fair (Lili Anolik)

4) Barbara Walters’ interviews shaped the news content Americans consume

As Barbara Walters Retires, the Big TV Interview Signs Off, Too, New York Times (Jonathan Mahler)

How Barbara Walters Changed Everything, Huffington Post (Jack Mirkinson)

Transcript: The Briefing 05-20-14

The Briefing

 

 May 20, 2014

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

 

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

 

The Bible tells us that Christians are to pray for peace; we are to strive for peace. We’re also the followers of the Prince of peace. But we’re also told that the Bible brings strong condemnation against those who cry, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. The Bible tells us that peace is not a natural state in this fallen world; that East of Eden peace is a very rare and temporary accomplishment. And furthermore, even what we call peace is not actually peace. We’re simply talking about something like a cease-fire or we’re talking about the withdrawal reduction of hostility. The peace that we long for is a peace that only God can accomplish; a peace that will be found only within His kingdom; a peace that would’ve existed in Eden, but a peace that we destroyed and denied.

 

This comes constantly to mind when we consider such things as the fact that The New York Times is reporting that Japan—the nation that renounced war in the aftermath of the Second World War—that Japan is beginning to reconsider just how un-warlike it can be. As Martin Fackler reports, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may be about to take one of his biggest steps yet to nudge Japan away from its postwar pacifism after a government advisory panel recommended last week that constitutional restrictions on the military be eased to allow Japanese forces to come to the aid of allied nations under attack. Japan bore the humiliation of the atrocities of World War II and of causing World War II in the Pacific, launching a surprise attack upon the United States and its allies on December 7, 1941. Japan was totally humiliated at the end of the Second World War and it recognized that at least a part of the cause of its military involvement was the fact that there was a fusion of militarism and nationalism and a form of national religion that came together in a very toxic mix. In response to that, Japan’s constitution—its postwar constitution, one of the marvels of the modern world—a constitution that was largely developed under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur when he was effectively the Viceroy of Japan—that constitution forbids Japan to enter into war. It renounces war and military involvement entirely.

 

Now there have been some adjustments to that over the last half-century and more. For instance, Japan has centered in the fact that there has to be some level of self-defense, and thus Japan now has self-defense forces. But Japan has largely lived under the nuclear umbrella and the defense protection of the United States of America and its allies in the Pacific, but with the Pacific world is changing, and with the fallenness of this world becoming increasingly apparent with the rise of a militaristic China, Japan is having to rethink that constitutional understanding.

 

The big debate right now in Japan is not whether or not it’s going to have to be more aggressive in terms of its self-defense, now extending that self-defense not just to the island nation, but to its allies. The big question there is not the whether but how; whether this will require a rewriting of the constitution or merely a reinterpretation of the constitution. But any way this ends up in Japan, it is ample evidence of the fact that we live in a more dangerous world than we might like to expect, a more dangerous world than the postwar constitution of Japan contemplated, and yet the very actual world that Japan is now experiencing.

 

Now keep that in mind when you consider yesterday’s headline in The New York Times: “US Charges Chinese Army Personnel with Cyberspying.” As Michael Schmidt reports, the Department of Justice said yesterday it had charged five Chinese individuals in the People’s Liberation Army in connection with stealing trade secrets from some of the largest American companies, including Westinghouse, United States Steel, and Alcoa. This is an indication that what had once been relegated to the field of espionage is now entering into average, ordinary, everyday military operations. According to the report, Schmitt writes—that report was released by the American security firm Mandia—the attacks are coming from Chinese hacking groups known to many of their victims in the United States as Comet Crew or Shanghai Group. They were based in a People’s Liberation Army building.

 

But even as you think about what it means to live in a dangerous world, a dangerous world in which American corporations are being hacked and their military secrets stolen by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, consider the fact that right now there is a huge morality play being played out in Europe where France is now prepared to sell two advanced ships to Russia, even as Russia is almost surely going to use those ships to threaten the very values that France says that it holds. As Michael Gordon of The New York Times reports:

 

In a closed-door meeting in February 2010, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates [he was then the Secretary of Defense of the United States] urged his French counterpart not to proceed with the sale of two amphibious assault ships to Russia because [in the words of the US Defense Secretary] it “would send the wrong message to Russia and to our allies in Central and East Europe.”

 

The French official, Hervé Morin, acknowledged that each of the ships — so-called Mistral-class vessels built for the French Navy to carry troops, landing craft, and helicopters — was “indeed a warship for power projection.”

 

And that was according to information that was leaked and is now public knowledge. It was leaked as a part of the WikiLeaks project.

 

But now we’re four years after that warning from the American Defense Secretary to the French in 2010. Now we have undeniable evidence of the aggressiveness of Russia. Now we have the Russian forced annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Now we have Russia destabilizing all of Ukraine and threatening Baltic States such as Latvia, and now we have undeniable evidence that Vladimir Putin has a vision of a greater Russia and he is willing to use his military in a way that has not threatened Europe since the Second World War in order to affect that vision. And now we have France ready to sell the warships to allow Vladimir Putin to do just that.

 

It was said that Vladimir Ilich Lenin, back during the time of the Russian revolution in early 20th century, said that when the time comes to hang the capitalists, the capitalists will make bids to sell the rope. It’s uncertain as to whether or not Lenin actually said that, but if he didn’t say it, it was attributed to him, and it makes sense. In other words, Vladimir Lenin was making the point that if your only concern is the profit motive, then you will sell anything to anybody regardless of the cost, regardless of the use. Christians know that even the profit motive has to be placed within a moral context, and the moral context in this case is a reminder that, in a fallen world, selling aggressive warships to an aggressive party is a moral complex that is simply wrong. It’s wrong on the face of it. It was wrong back in 2010 and it’s even undeniably more wrong in the year 2014, but the profit motive is a huge motive. Approximately 1,000 jobs in France are tied to these warships. It is a sale of approximately $1.6 billion, and Russia has told France if they get these two ships and they’re pleased with them, they are prepared to buy two more. That would be a total of at least $3.2 billion in business, and the question is, which nation would say no to that? What company would say no to that? But in a real world, in which there are real dangers, saying yes to that means complicity with Russia’s crimes against its own neighbors and its evil intentions, given its own territorial ambitions.

 

And just when you thought it might not possibly get more complex in this fallen world, along comes an article in The Financial Times of London. It reports that:

 

When a US National Reconnaisance Office satellite lifted off into the sky above Cape Canaveral on April 10 [of this year], the rocket’s ultimate destination in space and the satellite’s purpose were all kept top secret. But there is a strong possibility that the intelligence satellite will be used to monitor the behaviour of the Russian military, which when the launch took place was massed on Ukraine’s eastern border.

 

The Financial Times goes on to say:

 

That was not the mission’s only connection to Russia, however. The RD180 engines that powered the Atlas V rocket off the launch pad were built not by one of the US’s domestic aerospace companies but by Russia’s NPO Energomash, currently maker of some of the world’s most advanced rocket motors.

 

So in another words, in this fallen world of moral complexity, even as Japan is considering having to reinterpret or rewrite its constitution to defend itself, in a world in which the United States government charges China with cyber espionage against our own companies, the United States has launched a military satellite to watch the Russians, but in order to launch it, we had to use Russian motors on our rocket (the Atlas V rocket) to get this satellite into orbit.

 

The point of The Financial Times is this: if the United States wants to keep spying on Russia, it better develop its own rocket engines with which to launch the satellites to spy on the Russians. If it intends to ask the Russians to sell the rocket engines with which to launch the satellites, it better rethink the strategy. In a fallen world, there’s moral complexity every direction we turn. There is danger every way we turn, and it’s up to Christians to understand that that’s not an abnormal situation. In a fallen world, that’s what you call “normal,” and the Christian worldview says, “When you face reality, deal with it.”

 

But speaking of living in a fallen world, our second major concern of the day is Godzilla. Not the lizard; the movie. As a matter of fact, the first Godzilla movie came out in the 1950s. It was released in 1954 and most Americans have no idea that it was directed against us. It was actually Japanese propaganda against the United States. Godzilla, originally in the Japanese gojira, is the combination of the Japanese words for whale and lizard—and this is one whale of a lizard. Godzilla was supposed to be the direct result of the atomic attacks upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was supposed to be the revenge of an atomic monster, this horribly, genetically deformed creature that came back to wreak vengeance and judgment against human beings who would be so bold as to use atomic power in order to create nuclear weapons. Americans of my generation went to see the original “Godzilla” movie, laughing at their amateurish cinematography and also completely oblivious to the fact that the Japanese were making a moral judgment about us when they made the movie “Godzilla” and its many later incarnations.

 

But now Godzilla is back as a new movie and it grossed $196 million in its opening weekend worldwide—$93.2 million in the United States. That’s big bucks in the cinema world. And as The New York Times says, Godzilla is still radioactive and spoiling for a fight. In the review by A.O. Scott in The New York Times, he writes:

 

In the old days, after all, Godzilla really meant something. He was the supreme embodiment of atomic-age terrors, meting out punishment (and also offering redemption) for humankind’s technological hubris. There is still plenty of that to contend with, but the focus of global anxiety has shifted from nuclear annihilation to climate change and related problems.

 

So even as last week we talked about the new “Rosemary’s Baby” in a so-called post-desecration, postfeminist world, now we have “Godzilla” in a new climate-change world, in the world that is no longer the Cold War, but a world in which the enemy now is human beings who will not deal with the realities of climate change.

 

The director of the 2014 “Godzilla” movie, Gareth Edwards, told Time magazine, “My generation, we didn’t grow up with World War II or Vietnam or the JFK assassination. The images that are seared into our brains and part of our nightmares are things like tsunamis and Katrina.” He went on to say, “Sci-fi and fantasy have always reflected the fears of the time.” That’s a very accurate assessment. That last line is really important. And Christians, thinking of the cinema and thinking of popular culture, need to think about that. As he said, “Sci-fi and fantasy have always reflected the fears of the time.” That’s exactly right. When you look at the movies, the sci-fi and fantasy movies, of the period after World War II, then what you see is the Cold War as the background. When you see the science fiction and fantasy movies of the 1970s and 1980s, you see similar things. When you think of “Jurassic Park” by Steven Spielberg, you think of the kind of genetic manipulation and modern science and technology gone out of control. And now with Godzilla 2014, climate change is the great worry, but the human beings who won’t deal with it, they’re the great enemy.

 

But from a Christian perspective, the really interesting thing about “Godzilla” is the fact that there is a deep level of theology embedded in this fantasy movie. Science fiction not only reveals the anxieties and fears of the time, it also reveals the overarching worldview of the times and that includes what remains of a theological worldview in post-Christian America. What comes out clearly in the “Godzilla” movie is the theme of judgment and that was clear in 1954 in the original “Godzilla” movie where the judgment reaped by Godzilla was upon those human beings who dared to tamper with the atomic code, to split the atom, and to release the power of nuclear bombs. But now Godzilla’s back and the big concern is the climate. And Godzilla’s coming back as the judge, the jury, and the attempted executioner of humanity for its climate and ecological crimes.

 

Christians should be very interested to know that this theme of judgment pervades in the culture to this extent. Our culture wants to hear narratives in which there is a judgment for the wrongs that have been made and there is a sense of justice that is accomplished. A justice that, in this film, as you would well expect, is not finally brought about by Godzilla, but rather by the human beings who intervene in the movie. But the big issue here from a Christian worldview is the fact that human beings, made in God’s image, can’t get away from the incessant desire to see justice and to see judgment and to know that that judgment will happen in a way that all will see and all will understand.

 

Reviewer Lily Rothman for Time magazine says:

 

The hope is that Godzilla, even as he may crush fake humans underfoot, can help real ones stay alive. Even a monster, says [Gareth] Edwards, can make a difference.

 

The director of the film said:

 

I think that films like “Godzilla” are like the fantasy punishment for what we’ve done. The real punishment will happen if we keep going this route. Films like this help remind us not to get too complacent—and that we should really try and fix some of the things that we’ve done before it’s too late.

 

Notice all the language about judgment that is embedded in that statement by Gareth Edwards, the director of “Godzilla.” In other words, just as in 1954 Godzilla was to represent justice, so also judgment is to come in the form of Godzilla in 2014. And even as millions of Americans went to see the original Godzilla film and the many films that came thereafter without recognizing that it was propaganda from the Japanese directed against us, there will be many people who go to see this film without any understanding of the fact that the moral satisfaction that comes to them by this film is because they’re made in God’s image and because God, a just and perfectly righteous God, has put within them a desire to see justice accomplished. And here you have the statement by the very director of the film, writing from a secular perspective, to say, “I think that films like ‘Godzilla’ are like the fantasy punishment for what we’ve done. The real punishment,” he says, “will happen if we keep going this route.” Just remember what he says there. He speaks of the movie as “a fantasy punishment,” something you watch on the screen, but you know isn’t real, but he says there’s a real judgment coming and he says, speaking of climate change and ecology, if we don’t fix are ways, then that’s the way it’s going to come. Well, Mr. Edwards, you are so right and so wrong. It is going to come, but when that judgment comes, it’s not going to be something that can be portrayed in a movie theater. It’s not going to be something that is merely going to be about humanity’s ecological crimes. It’s going to be when the quick and the dead stand before the Judge of all and when all things are revealed, even those unseen and unspoken thoughts and deeds.

 

This summer a good many movies are going to be released for American entertainment, but as Christians understand, entertainment is never merely entertainment. There’s almost always more there than meets the eye, and that’s certainly the case with the release of “Godzilla.”

 

Finally, we’re indebted again to The Financial Times for a major new story the reveals more than it knows it reveals. The story is entitled “Report Finds Four Out of Five Bets on Sport are Made Illegally.” The reporter is Roger Blitz writing from London. He writes:

 

Four out of every five bets made on sport are placed illegally, leading to $140 billion being laundered each year, according to a two-year study on the scale of betting corruption.

 

So let’s just back up for minute. Someone decided that the scale of betting corruption might be so big that someone needed to do a study on it. So they spent a lot of money and spent two years trying to find out just how much betting is illegal. It turns out about 80%; four out of five bets on sport. Football and cricket are most at the risk of manipulation. As the report indicates that organizers struggle to protect events from criminals, seeking to exploit the rapid rise of online betting, which accounts for 30% of all sport’s gambling activity. In many sporting events, both individual and team sports, there are charges of outright manipulation or fixing, but regardless of whether or not that takes place (as most assuredly it does), the big picture in this story was the one that they weren’t focusing on primarily, and that is the discovery that four out of every five of these bets is made illegally in the first place, regardless of the legality of the event upon which the wager is made. Blitz reports, “80 per cent of sports betting around the world was illegal and that the number of illegal operators was impossible to estimate.” The authors of the report that led to this headline story in The Financial Times warned that regulators are failing to keep up with the rapid growth in illegal activity. Well let’s just back up and say from a Christian worldview, there’s no surprise here. The surprise is that people are surprised. How in the world can people decide to do a study on gambling, upon the gambling industry that they already know is crooked, and then come up as if they are shocked, absolutely surprised, that four out of five bets are made illegally in the first place? You’re dealing with something that is in itself inherently a moral evil, and then you add to this the fact that there are governments trying to exploit and capitalize on this moral evil. And so they try to take a moral evil and make a distinction between bets that are legal and illegal. They try to create a safe zone for this kind of very unsafe moral activity; an activity that leads many people to risk what they do not own and must not spend on the vain hope of increasing it not by means of any kind of legitimate labor or activity or investment, but rather in the vain hope of simply winning at the game odds.

 

And so you have here an exquisite example of humanity at its very most human, in all its confusions and in all of its self-deceptions. You have a headline story, based upon a report that took two years and millions of dollars to accomplish, in which the final analysis is not only is there a concern about illegal activity and legal betting–four out of five bets aren’t even legal in the first place. The shock in this, as we said, is that people are shocked by it, but evidently they are. This led to a news story and it is leading to the accusation that regulators are far behind in regulating this kind of activity. Well just try to regulate sin and see where that gets you. Every single time it will get you to a headline like this. Whatever you regulate will outpace you. Once you set sin loose, it’s a loose. You can’t create a safe zone for it, and furthermore, you can’t morally capitalize on it. Because even in trying to make it more moral, you just indicate how immoral it is.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the release of Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Call with your question in your voice to 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. 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.