R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 360

Transcript: The Briefing 05-15-14

The Briefing

 

 May 15, 2014

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

 

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

 

The transgender challenge will present evangelicals in this generation with a lifetime challenge. That is, it is not going to be a short-term challenge. Furthermore, it is a deeper and more urgent challenge even than the challenge of homosexuality. It is the inevitable result of a sexual liberation movement that has set loose far more than may have been even intended at the beginning. Furthermore, the transgender movement is now facilitated by medical technologies and by shifts in the worldview that weren’t even conceivable a generation ago. But they are now, and the transgender movement is now progressing in this culture with rapid speed. And it is presenting evangelicals and evangelical churches with enormous challenges and with challenges that are going to have to be faced and thought through with the full wealth of Christian conviction and very quickly.

 

One of the things that I point out when I talk about this issue to evangelical leaders is the fact that no worldview except for biblical Christianity can handle this question. One of the things that becomes very apparent, in terms of the cultural controversies over the transgender movement, is that the secular worldview can’t handle its own convictions on this issue. It can’t hold to a consistent argument. As a matter of fact, if you hold to a secular worldview, the transgender movement presents you with conflicting moral absolutes. For instance, you claim that it’s an absolute that the individual gets to decide at any moment in time what his or her gender identity is, and then you claim, on the other hand, that sexual orientation is something that is biologically or genetically fixed and something that is unchangeable. And so you have two contradictory arguments and, furthermore, in terms of any policy decisions, you have trouble on the left, the right; you have trouble in the North, South, East, and West. There is nowhere you can go where there is not trouble.

 

Just recently we looked at an example of this in terms of the prison in Harris County, Texas, there in the neighborhood of Houston. And there in that prison, which is a men’s prison, you have a special department that is isolating those who are men, at least they were born men, and they have had some kind of sexual reassignment surgery or they’re undergoing some kind of hormonal treatment or they intend to—in other words, they’re presenting themselves as women. According to the law there, they are to be treated as women. If they declare themselves to be women, they are to be called women. If they present themselves as women, they are to be given female names. They can even get new legal documentation to match their female identity, but they cannot move to a female prison. Why? Because the female prisoners in the female prison do not want them. They do not consider them women. And, furthermore, they claim that it would not be safe to have men, who are now presenting themselves as women, in a women’s prison.

 

The same kind of controversy happens in school systems all over the United States where in states like New Jersey and Massachusetts and California, either school districts or legislators or courts have moved to order that the schools have to open restrooms, locker rooms, and other single-sex facilities to teenagers who may claim that they were born with one sex, but now identify as another. And that leads to an infinite number of complications and, quite honestly, even those who are trying to serve the cause of sexual liberation, those who were sold out in support of what they considered to be the movement, aren’t certain what to do. And that’s because their worldview simply can’t sustain the kind of moral absolutes in collision that the transgender movement represents. As I often say, when you look at this issue you realize that no worldview but biblical Christianity has an adequate answer to it. When you consider worldviews such as existentialism, sexual liberationism, enlightened self-interest, radical personal autonomy, social constructivism, feminism, rational choice theory, humanism—they all fail under the weight of this challenge, as current policy debates demonstrate very clearly.

 

And one of them exploded just yesterday in Louisville, Kentucky; right here in Louisville at Atherton High School. As the headline in yesterday’s edition of the local paper, The Courier-Journal, declared: “Transgender Controversy Reopens Louisville Schools Discrimination Debate.” As The Courier-Journal reports:

 

A Jefferson County high school finds itself embroiled in a debate over gender-identity and discrimination after complaints that a transgender student is being allowed to use the girls’ bathroom and locker room.

 

A freshman student at Atherton High School who was born male but identifies as a female received permission from Principal Thomas Aberli to use the girls’ facilities, prompting complaints from several students and “about a dozen phone calls from concerned parents.”

 

However, the issue has also bubbled over into a public meeting that will be held today here in Louisville at Atherton High School. The principal said, “I have a responsibility to ensure that all of our students and staff are treated fairly and justly.” Well no one in the world can argue with that, and if you rewind time and space about a generation, no one would consider that the issue that is now at the center of this controversy would even factor into that affirmation. He went on to say, “At the same time, I also have a responsibility to educate our community on an issue that many are not familiar with and inform them about the rights of transgender individuals.” By the way, a very clear thing to watch in rhetoric is exactly what happened in that principal’s statement. The first thing he said was this: “I have a responsibility to ensure that all of our students and staff are treated fairly and justly.” You wouldn’t think that that could be followed with any kind of conditionality, and yet his next words, as reported in the paper, were, “At the same time.” In other words, he’s in deep trouble here. He’s in trouble because of the inadequacy of a secular worldview and a secular set of policies to deal with this. Having abandoned sexual rationality, having abandoned any kind of fixed understanding of gender or sexual morality, a secular culture finds itself simply arguing with itself over what to do with this kind of claim; the claim that a 14-year-old or a freshman in high school, who was born a boy, can now claim to be a girl, and demand to use girls bathrooms and locker rooms, and that everyone else is simply going to have to deal with it. Well as this story makes clear, a lot of parents and students aren’t ready to deal with it. But as The Courier-Journal reports, one of the big issues here in Louisville is that the school system does not have an antidiscrimination policy that includes gender identity. It does include age, color, disability, marital or parental status, national origin, race, sex, sexual orientation, political opinion, affiliation or religion, but it doesn’t include gender identity, and that’s going to be a new consideration by the board, largely prompted at least in part by this controversy.

 

In response to this, another rhetorical lesson comes to us. This time by school board member Carol Haddad, who said the school board is against “any kind of harassment and discrimination.” Well the school board should certainly be against any kind of harassment. That’s clear. But when she says the school board is against any kind of discrimination, that’s insanity. I think I know what she means. She means that the school board is against any kind of discrimination that all right-minded people at this point in history appear, by poll data and political pressure, to be against, but I guarantee you the school board will continue to discriminate on the basis of sexual behavior. I can promise you that. The question is where and why.

 

The report in The Courier-Journal also points to the fact that this is a national challenge. As the paper writes, the controversy comes nearly two weeks after the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights issued guidance under its Title IX programs, extending federal civil rights protections to transgender students. Listen to the next statement in the paper’s report: “However, it doesn’t offer specific advice on the use of school facilities.” In other words, your government is now extending, through the executive branch of the government, Title IX demands for nondiscrimination to those who are claiming transgender identity. The law does not specifically do that, but this federal agency is claiming the right to do it—that is, the Department of Education and its Office for Civil Rights—and yet even as it says that it’s going to extend these nondiscrimination principles to those who are identified as transgender, it isn’t going to offer any specific advice about how schools are supposed to accomplish that. By the way, Title IX is often referred to when we’re talking about intercollegiate athletics, and that’s where most Americans probably know about it. But that points to another part of this entire controversy that many people simply haven’t consider closely, and that is the fact that the Olympics are an arena for vast transgender controversy and so are athletics, especially at the collegiate level. Why? Because is an individual who is born male, but now identifies as female, who’s playing against women or on a women’s team, is that an unfair advantage? One of the big controversies at the most recent Olympics was how to determine if someone is actually female or female enough in order to play as a female or compete as a female in the Olympics, but there again you have two conflicting principles. You can’t have the principle that only women can compete as women in the Olympics, but anyone has the right to claim to be a woman under the new understanding of the transgender revolution.

 

In a very revealing letter from the schools sent to parents earlier this week, the school declared an agenda item on the council—that’s the council meeting to be held today—will also be discussing its Policy 500 school space. “You may have read about the issue of gender identity in our school newspaper. We’ll discuss the addition of a nondiscrimination statement to our policy on the use of school space that will include gender identity.” In other words, they are announcing they want to now include gender identity in the policy. The new policy would read: “Atherton High School shall not discriminate in the use of school space on the basis of age, color, religion, disability, marital status, national origin, race, sex, sexual orientation, nor gender identity.” Well that’s very interesting, but what’s attached to the letter gets a lot more interesting.

 

In an incredible enclosure with the letter sent by the school to parents, there’s an excerpt from a book by Bowers and Lopez written in 2012 which is entitled, Which Way to the Restroom?: Respecting the Rights of Transgender Youth in the School System. Included in this excerpt is a set of definitions. As the authors say, to deal effectively with gender equality issues, a knowledge of the terminology is essential. Listen to this next statement: “Gender identity relates to a person’s inner sense of being male, female, or something on a continuum between or even beyond these two concepts.” In other words, according to this authoritative text included in the mailing from the school to parents here in Louisville, gender identity include something that could be in between male or female or, as it says, even beyond. What in the world is beyond? Well whatever it is, it has to be covered by this new nondiscrimination policy.

 

In the event this is not sufficiently confusing, the text also reads “gender identity does not equate to sexual preference or orientation. For example,”—now this is the very example given. This is from the text of the book excerpt in the mailing to parents:

 

For example, a transgirl, born as a boy by sex, who is attracted to males, is heterosexual, not gay. Transpersons can have the same spectrum of orientation as anyone else and they can be straight, gay, bisexual, or asexual.

 

In other words, in this document, mailed as an authoritative statement to the parents of students at Atherton High School here in Louisville, it is said that gender identity could include the fact that someone who is now of a different gender than the one with which that individual was born can at that stage now be gay or straight, heterosexual or homosexual or asexual or bisexual or anything in between, but everything is now reversed. At the end of the excerpt, there’s another sentence like this:

 

For example, remember that if a transgender child identifies as a male and is attracted to females, “he” is straight, not gay, and vice versa. On the other hand, a transteen may in fact be gay when they’re attracted to persons of the opposite sex.

 

But if you’re lost in that, then you’re rational and you understand the irrationality of the kind of position the worldview that is here articulated. And you have to have some level of sympathy with school administrators trying to figure a way through all this because they are confronted with competing moral absolutes. But that’s a true test of a worldview. A worldview that is rooted in truth does not have conflicting absolutes. That’s something that is very important and that’s why the Christian worldview and only the Christian worldview can sustain a rational consideration of these issues. Because when you have conflicting moral absolutes, you have a problem. But in this case, it’s perhaps important to say that you not only have a problem, you have Exhibit A of why it’s almost a sure thing that there will be a mass exodus in public schools in fairly short order.

 

Staying on the issue of education, but shifting topics, a very important article at The Atlantic by W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia focuses on how young adults succeed or fail to succeed in the college experience. He writes:

 

I find that young adults who as teens had involved fathers are significantly more likely to graduate from college, and that young adults from more privileged backgrounds are especially likely to have had an involved father in their lives as teens.

 

Wilcox is a very important researcher when it comes to America’s families and this research points to something of fundamental importance; also something that is especially important to the Christian worldview. And that is the fact that God had a purpose in giving children by His intention in the natural family both a father and a mother. And as the research cited by Brad Wilcox makes very clear:

 

A U.S. Department of Education study found that among children living with both biological parents [both the father and the mother; their biological parents in the home], those with highly involved fathers were 42 percent more likely to earn A grades and 33 percent less likely to be held back a year in school than children whose dads had low levels of involvement.

 

Now that’s a blockbuster piece of information. When you’re thinking about the role of the family and you think about what makes for success with children and then later when they’re young adults, it turns out, as Brad Wilcox makes abundantly clear, the absence of a father counts massively and the presence of an involved father is an almost incalculable asset. After all, you’re talking about an incredible difference here. Those with highly involved fathers, as teenagers, 42% more likely to earn A’s than children who lacked involved fathers.

 

In this essay, Brad Wilcox goes so far as to say:

 

In particular, the [research] suggests that when it comes to college graduation, though father involvement matters for most young adults, it seems particularly important for young adults from moderately and highly educated homes.

 

Now what does this point to? It points to something that we’ve discussed with Charles Murray on Thinking in Public and we’ve discussed on The Briefing from time to time, and that is this: the new divide on the family is largely socioeconomic and educational. Even as there have been other patterns related to demography and geography, to family origin, to race, and many other patterns, the reality is that the great marriage divide in this country is now between those who have a college education and those who do not. The most likely to marry and stay married are those with a college education. And the most likely to receive a college education and to work through the educational process to obtain it are those who come from homes where you have both biological parents in the home with both biological parents having a college education.

 

While the political class seems to be obsessing about the issue of income inequality, Brad Wilcox and other researchers are getting to the bottom line of how it happens. And you can’t take the family out of the equation. That is abundantly clear in this research. You can’t take marriage out of the equation and you can’t take the father out of the equation. If, indeed, the presence of an active father is the single biggest contributor to the fact that a young woman or a young man will complete a college education and actually graduate, there you have an irrefutable fact that simply flies in the face of those who argue that fathers are unimportant, that marriage is simply a lifestyle choice, that it doesn’t matter if children are raised in a home where their biological parents are raising them and are highly involved in their lives.

 

Bradford Wilcox in this essay suggests some ways in particular that fathers are important, both in the lives of young girls and young boys, eventually young men and young women, but he also says there’s good news about parental involvement across the board for those who have biological parents in the home and there’s good news for those who have fathers in the home. Keep in mind the fact that there are some reports indicating that something like half of America’s children will at some point between birth and the end of adolescence be without a father in the home, but for those who do have fathers and do have involved fathers, the good news is that fathers are spending more time with their children than in recent decades. According to new research, fathers have almost doubled the average amount of time they spend with their children each week from 4.2 hours in 1995 to 7.3 hours in 2011. In one sense, this is the real inequality, isn’t it? It should break our hearts. It should also lead us to understand why these problems grow ever worse. If you have an inequality, in terms of the father’s absence or presence or the father’s involvement or lack of involvement, and if it comes down to the fact that the children who have, have more and they have an abundance, they have a father whose actually spending more time with them, is more involved than in the past, spending almost twice as much time in terms of measured hours in the week than was true just in 1995, that in contrast you see the absence of that father involvement. You see the absence of the father in the home as a far larger loss than maybe we even knew to recognize.

 

Again, the Christian worldview should inform us that we knew that already. And, furthermore, we know that it’s not a sociological accident. It’s not just something that can be measured in sociological terms. It’s a theological fact. It’s a fact of creation. It’s a fact of the family and of marriage and of God’s intention that leads to human flourishing, and if you destroy that which leads to human flourishing, you end up with results in which humans don’t flourish. And in contrast, where that picture is intact, humans flourish, as this research makes abundantly clear. Christians don’t affirm the natural family because of a sociological research project. We affirm it because of the authority of Scripture, but at the same time, we do recognize that this sociological data is a part of the common grace of evidence of the fact the God’s word is true and God’s intention was good. And where God’s intention is honored, the family flourishes.

 

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.

The Briefing 05-15-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Secular worldview’s absolute values clash in Louisville school transgender controversy

Transgender controversy re-opens Louisville schools discrimination debate, Louisville Courier-Journal (Antoinette Konz)

Atherton High School to discuss transgender student’s bathroom access, WLKY (Ann Bowdan)

2) Involvement of father key factor in student success

A Key to College Success: Involved Dads, The Atlantic (Bradford Wilcox)

Coming Apart- America’s New Moral Divide: A Conversation with Charles Murray, AlbertMohler.com (Albert Mohler with Charles Murray)

Commonplaces: Evelyn Waugh the Young Atheist

Evelyn Waugh, who would become one of the best-known British writers of his age, chronicled the decline and fall of the British aristocracy in works such as Brideshead Revisited (1945). A generation of Americans now fascinated by Downton Abbey is generally unaware that literary figures like Waugh captured the end of the aristocratic age long before television had been invented.

Waugh was raised within the traditional British educational system for the upper classes. He attended Lancing College, a preparatory school for boys, as a teenager. The school, located in the English countryside in West Sussex, stated as its mission to educate boys ”based on sound principle and sound knowledge, firmly grounded in the Christian faith.”

But the Christian faith Waugh found at Lancing was tepid at best, more tradition than conviction. Waugh participated in the compulsory chapel services and served as an sacristan, or assistant in worship.

It was as a teenager at Lancing that Waugh declared himself to be an atheist. In his memoir, A Little Learning, published in 1964, Waugh recalled his loss of faith with reference to his diary entry of June 18, 1921: “In the last few weeks I have ceased to be a Christian. I have realized that for the last two terms at least I have been an atheist in all except the courage to admit it myself.” He was then 17 years old.

Looking back, Waugh recalled that his tutors assigned books that were generally subversive of faith and “we were left to suggest our solutions and encouraged to be unorthodox.” He remembered that half of his class of students “were avowed agnostics or atheists.”

In response, the school offered no help. “And no antidote was ever offered us. I do not remember ever being urged to read a book of Christian philosophy.”

Even worse, when he went to see the chaplain and laid out his doubts, the Anglican priest told him that his atheism was no problem. The young Waugh assumed, rightly enough, that an atheist would no longer be welcome to co-officiate at Christian worship.

In conclusion, Waugh writes: “Adolescent doubts are very tedious to the mature; I was generally assured that it was quite in order for an atheist to be a sacristan.”

This is a graphic and articulate description of what happens when youth are inculcated in a Christianity devoid of conviction and apologetic force. The adolescent doubts that Waugh experienced are quite natural and present an opportunity for theological growth and development. Or, as in the case of young Waugh, an opportunity for the young to believe that there are no answers to their questions.

Adult Christians who dismiss an adolescent atheist or agnostic as “very tedious”are guilty of a horrible theological and spiritual crime. As Jesus told his disciples, ”If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” [Matthew 18:6]

At some point Evelyn Waugh understood himself to be a believer in Christ (“if not genuinely devout, a particularly church-loving boy”), only to be fed doubts by those in authority. No one should be surprised that he soon declared himself to be an atheist.

Waugh would later convert to Roman Catholicism, finally finding a Christian philosophy of life after starving on a diet of liberal Anglicanism. There are lessons there, too, of course.

But the lesson of Evelyn Waugh’s final year at Lancing before going to Oxford is this — Christians must reach out to young doubters with a listening ear and a reason for our Christian hope, or wave them goodbye as they depart from the faith. Apathy, condescension and liberal theology simply will not do.

Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964), pages 141-144.

Art: Evelyn Waugh as a Young Man (age 26) by Henry Lamb, from the collection of Lord Moyne.

 

Transcript: The Briefing 05-14-14

The Briefing

 

 May 14, 2014

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

 

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

 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was established in 1861. The people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts felt that they needed an institute that would be geared toward the burgeoning industrial revolution that was then reshaping the entire nation, and MIT, as it became popularly known, became quickly one of the leading institutions of science and technology in the world. According to the institute’s current publicity, the faculty includes now at least 81 Nobel laureates. It is respected around the world for its contributions to science and technology. But it has a new claim to fame. Last Friday, the chancellor to the institute sent the student body an email in which he said that in response to recent requests concerning commencement that the consensus of the institute now was that a neutral, nonreligious invocation would be welcome and broadly appealing.

 

Now the cause of this email is itself of interest. Students have begun to appeal the fact that up until now, including through the 2013 commencement ceremonies, there had been a somewhat religious invocation. It was a rather nonspecific, nonsectarian religious prayer, but it was still a religious prayer of some sort, and that was simply too much for some students. Students initiated the demand for a change and the demand for a secular invocation. And according to this email that was sent by the chancellor of the institute to it students, a secular invocation is exactly what they demanded and is what they will now get.

 

News coverage about the change credits graduate student Aaron Scheinberg of MIT with leading the charge by means of making an argument. In his argument published online in the institute student newspaper, he said:

 

A graduation prayer is an exclusive ceremony directed toward those who believe in a god — some 40 percent of the student body, according to the 2012 survey by [the student newspapers]. The rest of graduation is broadly accessible and intended to have meaning for all students.

 

In the 2013 convocation prayer, Chaplain Bob Randolph invoked “God of Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammed” to include religious minorities.

 

Well evidently that wasn’t enough. Including, “the God of Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammed,” within the prayer didn’t make it nonsectarian enough. There was still some theistic reference and that is simply too much. Aaron Scheinberg argues that it becomes a divisive issue for the graduates and has no place at the graduation ceremony. He concluded his essay by writing:

 

The Founding Fathers wisely disconnected government from religion to keep the latter from acting as a divisive force. Likewise, graduation should be a great celebration of unity among MIT students — a celebration not just of our individual accomplishments, but also of our collaboration, commiseration, and common values. The ceremony should unite us. Every segment and speaker in it should make an effort to ensure the ceremony belongs to each and every one of us.

 

Now what I want us to note is the singularity of the offense identified here. This is not an offense that something was stated with which anyone might disagree because, after all, how possible is it that in any kind of ceremony in which there would be any kind of content in which there might be any speaker who might say anything at all, what is the chance that nothing would be spoken that would be divisive in any sense, nothing would be spoken with which no one would disagree? But that’s the standard that is held forth here, but not for the commencement speaker, not for any other portion of the commencement ceremony, but only one portion. That portion is identified as the invocation.

 

Now what’s really interesting in this is how in the world you can even envision a truly secular invocation because the invoking is supposed to be, by the very nature of its historic rootage and its terminology, it is supposed to be invoking the presence of one who was watching from afar; in other words, invoking God, invoking a deity. That does imply theism; no way around that. But that is simply too divisive, writes this student, and evidently he convinced enough of his fellow students that they demanded en masse that the invocation must go. And yet, oddly enough, the invocation’s going to stay. It’s just going to be a so-called secular invocation. Well then what or who is being invoked? The answer is it’s going to be a meaningless exercise. It is an exercise, however, that demonstrates the sterility of a totally secular culture, a secular culture that is now so allergic to any kind of even offhanded, angular, nonsectarian reference to theism that any assertion at all that an invocation might have a place in a ceremony like this is simply dismissed as divisive.

 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is rightly famous for the many technologies and industrial developments and innovations, indeed, inventions that have come from the institute since 1861 when it first opened its doors. But 2014 brings a new invention: a secular invocation. And now we can thank the technocrats at MIT for the invention of that.

 

Further evidence of what she calls the closing of the collegiate mind comes from Professor Ruth Wisse. She’s writing in an op-ed in Monday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal. Ruth Wisse is professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard University. She’s the author of several books and now she is the writer of a very feisty opinion piece at The Wall Street Journal, and one that demands our attention. She writes:

 

There was a time when people looking for intellectual debate turned away from politics to the university. Political backrooms bred slogans and bagmen; universities fostered educated discussion. But when students in the 1960s began occupying university property like the thugs of regimes America was fighting abroad, the venues gradually reversed. Open debate is now protected only in the polity: In universities, muggers prevail.

 

It’s almost as if she were writing in response to the decision taken right down the river there in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at MIT, but she’s writing about the larger problem of the closing of the collegiate mind, of the fact that on college and university campuses across America and indeed also across the world, especially in Europe, what you have is a closing of the mind, a closing of the intellectual discussion, and it’s basically being closed to any option on the right, to any conservative option, and, furthermore, to any option that has anything to do with the Christian worldview. Ruth Wisse writes:

 

Universities have not only failed to stand up to those who limit debate, they have played a part in encouraging them. The modish commitment to so-called diversity replaces the ideal of guaranteed equal treatment of individuals with guaranteed group preferences in hiring and curricular offerings.

 

She goes on to document case after case in which legitimate discussion has simply been shut down by the university and often at the instigation of students who have shouted down speakers or shutdown forums altogether. She also writes about the fact that on many of America’s leading college campuses, you can’t have a debate because the issue is considered absolutely closed. For instance, Ruth Wisse writes that just this year she was asked by a student group to participate in a debate on modern feminism, but they couldn’t find anyone to debate the other side (the other side being the pro-feminist argument). Why could they find no one to argue for feminism on the campus of Harvard University? Because there was not one faculty member who’d agree to the argument. They instead said the debate is over. There is no need for an argument. If you enter into a debate like this, you act as if it is a debatable issue, and they were unwilling even to enter into that debate. Why is the argument so often one-sided? Ruth Wisse writes:

 

Because conservative students do not take over buildings or drown others out with their shouting, instructors feel free to mock conservatives in the classroom, and administrators pay scant attention when their posters are torn down or their sensibilities offended.

 

So in other words, writes Professor Wisse, the only way you can get attention on this kind of college campus in these politicized circumstances is to do what the liberal students do: to misbehave and take over a campus building, to form a protest, or to shout down a speaker. But that’s what conservative students do not do and because they don’t do that, they’ve lost their voice. The liberals have simply taken over the entire public square not by winning the argument, but by shutting the argument down.

 

Ruth Wisse ends her column by writing:

 

In Nigeria, Islamists think nothing of seizing hundreds of schoolgirls for the crime of aspiring to an education. Here in the United States, the educated class thinks nothing of denying an honorary degree to a fearless Muslim woman who at peril of her life, and in the name of liberal democracy, has insisted on exposing such outrages to the light. The struggle for freedom is universal; would that our universities were on its side.

 

The specific instance she is referencing there is the fact that just a matter of weeks ago Brandeis University withdrew its invitation to grant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the proponent of women’s rights under Islam, an intended honorary degree at its convocation. They said that upon retrospect, after student protest brought the matter to their light, they decided that some of her statements against Islam were simply not in keeping with the values of the University. She had said nothing new. What mattered was a student protest and they were shutting down someone who was speaking on their behalf.

 

The point made by Ruth Wisse is both urgent and important. When it comes to higher education, increasingly but in a pattern that started in the 1960s, to use that that old expression, “the inmates are running the asylum.”

 

These stories should remind Christians of the fact that we should never refrain from debate; never shrink from the opportunity for debate because the Christian worldview is based upon the fact that we have confidence in truth, God’s truth, revealed truth, and that means that when an issue is up for debate, we need to enter the debate, not run from it and certainly not shut it down. Shutting down a debate is a sign of intellectual insecurity. That’s something that Christians should recognize and be very wary of on our own behalf. We should never retreat into intellectual insecurity. We’re the people who should enter the debate with confidence, knowing that in the end, the truth will out.

 

We are regularly reminded that our culture reflects us. In other words, we produce the culture, the culture then serves as something of a mirror identifying who we are, what we believe, what our values are. Douglas Coupland, writing over the weekend at The Financial Times, writes about the changes in television culture. He writes, “On April 19, 1995, I bought my first genuine adult TV set: a 27-inch Sony Trinitron.” He writes about it because it was on a date he remembers. It was the date of the Oklahoma City bombing that it was delivered to him. But he writes to indicate just how much our culture and technologies have changed since 1995. He says we still use the phrase “watch TV,” but it doesn’t mean what it used to mean. He says, “I used to watch TV back then. By that, I meant I’d go into the living room and turn on the TV set, saying, ‘Gosh, I wonder what’s on TV right now. I think I’ll run through the channels.’” He says it’s hard to imagine anyone in 2014 doing this, even, he says, his parents. “Over two decades, our collective TV viewing habits have changed so much that it’s actually quite hard to remember old-style TV viewing.” But let’s remember that old-style TV viewing for a moment. There were a limited set of channels, and the news networks and the entertainment networks and altogether even the early cable networks tended to be quite respective of the fact that, especially during family time, there would be young eyes looking at the set. And furthermore, they believed they served the public purpose and therefore had a mission that included, at least to some degree, not only informing the American people, but also reflecting the American people in terms of appropriate content. All that went away in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and beyond, and now it is gone so entirely that, like Douglas Coupland remembering his first TV set with a cathode ray tube, watching television or going to the movies now means something entirely different than it did then.

 

In that light, an article that recently appeared in USA Today by Bryan Alexander deserves our attention. His headline: “This Summer the R Stands for Raunchier.” Earlier this week, we talked about the return of “Rosemary’s Baby,” revealingly not on the big screen this time, but rather brought to us by NBC on television. Now Bryan Alexander comes back to tell us that this summer is going to be the raunchiest in any recent memory in terms of movie releases. He says comedy, smutty, silly, sleazy season has erupted. Hollywood, he tells us, is presenting fifteen R-rated yuck fests on its crucial summer slate. He says it began last week with a movie entitled “Walk of Shame,” but it’s continuing through at least fourteen other movies already announced for release, already rated R, and already intended to out-disgust every previous movie yet released. Alexander quotes Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst for the movie tracking company Rentrack, who said, “Going for the R rating goes against conventional wisdom, but when it comes to comedy, particularly in the summer, it’s the R rating that gets you street cred.”

 

So in terms of our modern American culture, if you want street cred at the summer cinema, you have to be raunchier than those who come before. It’s the R rating that gives you the street cred. Director-actor Seth MacFarlane, already known for many of these kinds of films, said, “That’s the advantage of the R ratings. To say whatever you want to say and not be constrained.” He then went on, “Comedy has to constantly be pushing the lines to be funny. It cannot be soft.” Well it appears there’s very little soft about the raunchy comedies being released to the American public this summer, but this does not just reflect Hollywood. It reflects what Hollywood tells us Americans want and even demand when they think about summer cinema. They’re not looking just for warmer weather; they’re looking for raunchier movies. And, as a matter fact, this article in USA Today makes clear that the movies likely to be the most revenue producing are those that are also the raunchiest when it comes to content.

 

One of the movies coming out this summer is entitled “Neighbors.” Director-screenwriter Nicholas Stoller says, “Audiences need a compelling reason to go to the movie theater. You need something that’s sort a shocking, something you haven’t seen or experienced before.” Well that demonstrates the kind of raunchy one-upmanship that now reflects modern Hollywood, but, let’s be very clear, that means modern Hollywood now reflects the American people. The American people want a yuck fest, according to USA Today, that is raunchier by the movie, that stretches the imagination and pushes past the boundaries. This goes back to what we talked about with “Rosemary’s Baby” where one of the most keen, insightful observers concerning the release of that new television series tells us that it’s almost impossible to desecrate anything anymore because the boundaries of desecration have almost disappeared. Virtually everything has now become so sexualized, so eroticized, even ‘pornographified’ that it’s hard to come up with any way to be raunchier than the movie that came before. That’s where Stoller’s next comment becomes particularly insightful. He says, “That’s my whole theory: a small budget and you stay under it. Even if your movie doesn’t do that well, you’ve made your money back. It just makes me a lot less nervous.” But what makes him less nervous? Being raunchy enough to guarantee at least enough ticket sales to cover the cost of making the movie.

 

Another line that is very instructive from this USA coverage is the fact that movies have to “get wild so that they get noticed.” That is an incredibly revealing statement. You have to get wild, get sexualized, get ‘pornified,’ get the R rating, and get raunchier than the movie that came before you in order to get attention. Now, again, Hollywood is very responsible for this. Every single producer, director, every single movie house that releases a movie like this, every single cinema location that features a movie like this bears moral responsibility, but so does American at large and so do any of us who cooperate with this kind of raunchy market. If we encourage these movies, if we allow our own young people to see these movies, if we facilitate in any way the success of these movies, if we even laugh at these movies, we cooperate with the ‘raunchification’ of the culture. We become a part of the problem.

 

Of course, the problem with the raunchy culture is that it often is funny. At least in a fallen world, it often brings the biggest laughs. That’s why they call these raunchy movies yuck fests: they lead to laughter. But our laughter’s also very revealing about us. As a matter of fact, humor is one of the greatest gifts God has given us, but it is also one of the most fallen of God’s gifts, one of the most corrupted. The fact is that Christians perhaps may be the last people on earth who understand that humor is itself a moral barometer. We laugh because we sometimes can’t help laughing, but why can’t we help laughing? It’s because we’ve seen something that shows the sinfulness and foibles of the human condition. Christians have plenty of evidence of this just looking in the mirror. We don’t need to add to that evidence by encouraging this kind of Hollywood production.

 

We also should be troubled by the fact that there is evidently no end. There’s no end game to this kind of debauchery. Once you start down this trail, there simply seems no way to return because if you want to sell tickets, you have to exceed every movie that came before you in this kind of notorious misbehavior. But it’s going on for now and it’s continuing for the foreseeable future. But thanks at least in part to this article in USA Today and these very explicit statements from Hollywood insiders making these movies. We can’t say we weren’t warned. Now if we become a part of the problem, we know we’re becoming a part of the problem.

 

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 05-14-14

Podcast Transcript

1) MIT’s secular invocation illustration of the sterility of totally secular culture

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT

MIT Secular Students Successfully Lead Charge for Non-Religious Invocations at Graduation, Friendly Atheist (Hemant Mehta)

Opinion: God is at your graduation, The Tech (Aaron Scheinberg)

2) Liberal student opposition to debates closing the collegiate mind

The Closing of the Collegiate Mind, Wall Street Journal (Ruth Wisse)

3) Increasingly raunchy modern Hollywood moral barometer of modern American people

My TV, Financial Times (Douglas Coupland)

Crude rules: R-rated comedies dialing it up a notch, USA Today (Bryan Alexander)

Why So Many Churches Hear So Little of the Bible

“It is well and good for the preacher to base his sermon on the Bible, but he better get to something relevant pretty quickly, or we start mentally to check out.” That stunningly clear sentence reflects one of the most amazing, tragic, and lamentable characteristics of contemporary Christianity: an impatience with the Word of God.

The sentence above comes from Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today in an essay entitled, “Yawning at the Word.” In just a few hundred words, he captures the tragedy of a church increasingly impatient with and resistant to the reading and preaching of the Bible. We may wince when we read him relate his recent experiences, but we also recognize the ring of truth.

Galli was told to cut down on the biblical references in his sermon. “You’ll lose people,” the staff member warned. In a Bible study session on creation, the teacher was requested to come back the next Sunday prepared to take questions at the expense of reading the relevant scriptural texts on the doctrine. Cutting down on the number of Bible verses “would save time and, it was strongly implied, would better hold people’s interest.”

As Galli reflected, “Anyone who’s been in the preaching and teaching business knows these are not isolated examples but represent the larger reality.”

Indeed, in many churches there is very little reading of the Bible in worship, and sermons are marked by attention to the congregation’s concerns, not by an adequate attention to the biblical text. The exposition of the Bible has given way to the concerns, real or perceived, of the listeners. The authority of the Bible is swallowed up in the imposed authority of congregational concerns.

As Mark Galli notes:

It has been said to the point of boredom that we live in a narcissistic age, where we are wont to fixate on our needs, our wants, our wishes, and our hopes—at the expense of others and certainly at the expense of God. We do not like it when a teacher uses up the whole class time presenting her material, even if it is material from the Word of God. We want to be able to ask our questions about our concerns, otherwise we feel talked down to, or we feel the class is not relevant to our lives.

And Galli continues:

It is well and good for the preacher to base his sermon on the Bible, but he better get to something relevant pretty quickly, or we start mentally to check out. Don’t spend a lot of time in the Bible, we tell our preachers, but be sure to get to personal illustrations, examples from daily life, and most importantly, an application that we can use.

The fixation on our own sense of need and interest looms as the most significant factor in this marginalization and silencing of the Word. Individually, each human being in the room is an amalgam of wants, needs, intuitions, interests, and distractions. Corporately, the congregation is a mass of expectations, desperate hopes, consuming fears, and impatient urges. All of this adds up, unless countered by the authentic reading and preaching of the Word of God, to a form of group therapy, entertainment, and wasted time—if not worse.

Galli has this situation clearly in his sights when he asserts that many congregations expect the preacher to start from some text in the Bible, but then quickly move on “to things that really interest us.” Like . . . ourselves?

One of the earliest examples of what we would call the preaching of the Bible may well be found in Nehemiah 8:1-8 (ESV):

And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses that the Lord had commanded Israel. So Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could understand what they heard, on the first day of the seventh month. And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the Book of the Law. And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that they had made for the purpose. And beside him stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right hand, and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hashbaddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people, and as he opened it all the people stood. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the Law, while the people remained in their places. They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

Ezra and his companions stood on a platform before the congregation. They read the scriptural text clearly, and then explained the meaning of the Scripture to the people. The congregation received the Word humbly, while standing. The pattern is profoundly easy to understand: the Bible was read and explained and received.

As Hughes Oliphant Old comments, “This account of the reading of the Law indicates that already at the time of the writing of this text there was a considerable amount of ceremonial framing of the public reading of Scripture. This ceremonial framing is a witness to the authority of the Bible.” The reading and exposition took place in a context of worship as the people listened to the Word of God. The point of the sermon was simple: “to make clear the reading of the Scriptures.”

In many churches, there is almost no public reading of the Word of God. Worship is filled with music, but congregations seem disinterested in listening to the reading of the Bible. We are called to sing in worship, but the congregation cannot live only on the portions of Scripture that are woven into songs and hymns. Christians need the ministry of the Word as the Bible is read before the congregation such that God’s people—young and old, rich and poor, married and unmarried, sick and well—hear it together. The sermon is to consist of the exposition of the Word of God, powerfully and faithfully read, explained, and applied. It is not enough that the sermon take a biblical text as its starting point.

How can so many of today’s churches demonstrate what can only be described as an impatience with the Word of God? The biblical formula is clear: the neglect of the Word can only lead to disaster, disobedience, and death. God rescues his church from error, preserves his church in truth, and propels his church in witness only by his Word—not by congregational self-study.

In the end, an impatience with the Word of God can be explained only by an impatience with God. We all, both individually and congregationally, neglect God’s Word to our own ruin.

As Jesus himself declared, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Mark Galli, “Yawning at the Word,” Christianity Today [online edition], posted November 5, 2009. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2... Oliphant Old,  The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, Volume 1: The Biblical Period  (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 2007).

This commentary was originally posted Friday, February 19, 2010.

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

 

The Book of Acts: Acts 1:6-11

The Book of Acts: Acts 1:6-11

 

The Book of Acts: Acts 1:6-11

The Book of Acts:  Acts 1:6-11

Transcript: The Briefing 05-13-14

The Briefing

 

 May 13, 2014

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

 

It’s Tuesday, May 13, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines blasphemy as the active insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for God; secondarily, the active claiming the attributes of deity. Either one of these definitions is enough to make very clear that blasphemy is a grave issue according to the Christian worldview. The Bible takes a very hard line on blasphemy and, of course, it roots it in the first and second commandments. Jesus Himself spoke against blasphemy. He said, “I tell you,” in Matthew 12:31, “every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven, but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.” There is that infamous unforgivable sin found in the New Testament.

 

So Christians must take blasphemy with great seriousness. That dictionary definition tells us why. If blasphemy is, as the dictionary says, any word or deed that insults or shows contempt or lack of reverence for God, we understand that this can only be understood with grave significance. We’d understand that when Jesus says there is one sin that cannot be forgiven and that is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, He Himself points to that kind of contempt and identifies it as the one sin that cannot be forgiven. But when blasphemy is discussed in a Christian context, we are discussing it explicitly in theological terms. We’re discussing why it is a sin; indeed, why Jesus says it is such a grave sin. Should it therefore be a crime? In many parts of the world today blasphemy is a crime. Throughout much of Western history, blasphemy was a crime. It is no longer a crime in Western societies. It is still a crime in many places around the world, but should it be?

 

News from Pakistan demonstrates the problem when blasphemy becomes a crime. For instance, a report from Islamabad tells us that a 26-year-old Christian was convicted in March of insulting the prophet Mohammed. He is one of four Pakistanis sentenced to death for the crime this year under the country’s draconian blasphemy laws, which increasingly target religious minorities in the mostly Muslim country. According to Annabel Symmington of The Wall Street Journal:

 

More people have been convicted under [these blasphemy laws] in the past seven years than in the first two decades since death penalty for blasphemy was enacted by conservative dictator Zia-ul-Haq in 1986. The four convictions this year are up from two in 2013.

 

But as this report makes very clear, the judicial actions against blasphemy are only the tip of the iceberg. Far more common are direct actions taken by villagers throughout Pakistan and much of the Muslim world, where people who are accused of blasphemy, now primarily Christians, are not actually charged with a crime. They’re merely accused of having blasphemed and they are murdered before they can ever get to a trial. But the death penalty is a penalty that is now routinely given to those who are accused and convicted of blasphemy in the nation of Pakistan. Human rights groups are pointing out that the law is now increasingly used without any kind of religious justification whatsoever. It’s being used to settle property disputes where, in the majority Muslim nation, Christians who find themselves on the wrong side of any kind of an argument can find themselves accused of blasphemy and then their lives in danger. Many have to flee their villages or if they do not flee quickly enough, they find themselves in grave danger. And according to human rights activists around the world, as reported by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and others, there are almost assuredly hundreds if not thousands of persons who are murdered for blasphemy within the Muslim world in the course of any given year. Ramona Bashir, director of the Christian Study Center in Pakistan, said, “Christians who have lived side-by-side with Muslims for years are now worried that if they have an argument with their Muslim neighbor that they will find themselves accused.”

 

Similar news comes from The New York Times. Waqar Gillani, reporting from Lahore in Pakistan, tells us that a Pakistani activist has been shot dead simply because that activist aided suspects who were accused of blasphemy. Rashid Rehman, a veteran Pakistani human rights activist who had received threats for defending people charged under the country’s blasphemy laws, was shot dead this past Wednesday night in his office in the southern city of Multan. Mr. Rehman’s office assistant and a visitor were seriously wounded and taken to a hospital. In an interview with the BBC’s Urdu Service last month, Mr. Rehman, who was in his mid-40s, said that defending someone accused of blasphemy was akin to walking into the jaws of death. And that’s exactly what it turned out he had done. He said:

 

There is fanaticism and intolerance in society, and such people never consider whether their accusation is right or wrong. People kill for 50 rupees. So why should anyone hesitate to kill in a blasphemy case?

 

You can see why human rights activists are so alarmed about the rise of blasphemy accusations in the Muslim world and in Pakistan in particular. And there’s a political agenda to this as well. The political agenda is Pakistani nationalism, and not only the kind of nationalism that is centered in national pride, but the kind of nationalism that is centered in the national faith, that is, Islam. Because you can’t have anti-blasphemy laws without something like the imposition of a state religion, and that’s exactly what Pakistan has had from the very beginning. And it has been accentuated in recent decades rather than mitigated. Pakistan is a far more explicitly Islamic state now than it was when it was created in the division between India and Pakistan in the late 1940s.

 

The report from Waqar Gillani also includes this paragraph:

 

In Mr. Rehman’s case, three men made death threats against him in the courtroom where he was defending Junaid Hafeez, a Muslim university lecturer accused of blasphemy. “You will not come to court next time because you will not exist anymore,” one of the men shouted. [He] described the trial as a “charade.”

 

As the headline makes clear, they made good on their threats and Mr. Raymond was killed before he could once again appear in court.

 

While just about everyone in the West is outraged at this kind of human rights abuse, Christians should be particularly concerned because even as we weigh the importance of blasphemy as a sin, we also must understand the limitations of putting blasphemy into the law. Indeed, it’s not just a limitation; it is a refutation of religious liberty. And furthermore, it is also a refutation, at least in terms of the way blasphemy laws are generally applied, to the logic of the gospel of Jesus Christ. You’ll recall that Jesus used that word blasphemy. He said, “Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven, but not the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.” So what was that blasphemy? Well as the Christian tradition has understood from the beginning, the unforgivable sin is the sin of refusing the gospel, of refusing the good news of what God has done for us in Christ, of refusing the acknowledgment that one is a sinner and of the need for a Savior—that Savior Jesus Christ. And thus, even as Jesus used the term blasphemy, after all He took it with gave seriousness, He made very clear that God is not a God who takes blasphemy as the final word unless that blasphemy is the final word, and in that case, it is the unforgivable sin. It is the one sin that will not be forgiven. In other words, from the Christian worldview perspective, one who has committed grotesque blasphemy, one who has said the worst and most vile things about God can still be forgiven that sin because the only blasphemy that is not forgiven is the final blasphemy of refusing the gospel, of refusing the grace of God demonstrated to us in Jesus Christ. And so from a Christian perspective, blasphemy laws are a problem because they refute the gospel. And secondarily, they are a problem because they refute human rights.

 

Furthermore, one final point. Christianity is not an honor religion; Islam is. Those who kill in the name of Islam do so because they are believing themselves to be upholding the honor of the Koran, of Allah, or, more precisely, usually of Mohammed the prophet. But Christians follow a Savior who was despised and rejected of men, who turned the other cheek, who would not return insult for insult, and who forfeited His own honor for our salvation. He has called His own disciples to do the same. He makes that very clear in the Sermon on the Mount. The problem with blasphemy laws is that they are a blasphemy against the gospel of Jesus Christ. And even as they are correctly identified as human rights abuses, they are also deep theological abuses, and Christians should understand first of all the blasphemy of anti-blasphemy laws.

 

Back in the United States, we continue to learn a great deal about our nation as a mission field, and perhaps nothing is more interesting in that regard than a recent report—a massive research report—issued last week by the Pew Research Centers on Hispanics and Latinos and their spiritual direction here in the United States. Now in the background of this, of course, is the fact that the Hispanic population is now the second largest population in the United States. So even as the US turns towards a no majority nation and an all minority nation, at this point the largest minority following those who are white Americans are Hispanics, and they represent a growing sector of the American population and they have tended to be overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

 

But as this Pew study makes very clear, the binding authority of Catholicism in America’s Hispanic population is decreasing and it is decreasing fast. As Miriam Jordan reports for The Wall Street Journal, Hispanics in the United States are going from Catholic to evangelical Christian and from Catholic to religiously unaffiliated, according to this new Pew Research Center study. Since the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States has seen Hispanics, many of them arrivals in a massive immigration wave, help bolster its shrinking ranks. But last week Pew reported that there is a religious churning in the fastest-growing population group, which is now the second largest population in the US. The share of Hispanics who are Catholic likely has been in decline for at least the past few decades, according to Pew.

 

Now what’s really interesting in this report is where those who are following this kind of research indicate that Hispanics are going. You’ll notice two things were said in that Wall Street Journal article. The first is that there is a significant shift in terms of Hispanics in the United States away from Catholicism and towards evangelicalism, but when you look at the data more closely, it is clear that it’s not evangelicalism in general. That is the target where so many of these Hispanics are going. It is rather in particular charismatic evangelicalism, and precisely it is often the health and wealth gospel, the prosperity gospel, that is attracting many Hispanics in the United States and drawing them away from Catholicism.

 

The second thing that has become clear is that secularization is impacting the Hispanic population in the United States because, as the Pew study also makes clear, what is happening amongst many Catholics, especially younger Catholics, is that they no longer believe the truth claims of the Christian faith in general or of the Catholic Church in particular and they’re beginning to fall away from them; beliefs including the virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the Trinity—you go down the list. Secularization is clearly having an impact in younger Hispanics in the United States. This was noted by Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the United States conference of Catholic Bishops. She told The New York Times:

 

Everyone, including Hispanics and especially young ones, can fall prey to what has become a new American problem: religious relativism, where perhaps inspired by exciting music or arousing preacher, you move from your parents’ church to another to no church at all. It’s scary to consider that religious relativism may be the greatest threat that exists to the increasingly important Hispanic Catholic community.

 

Now I go to her statement because it’s actually more revealing than may first appear because this spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says that it’s secularization that’s behind this, a view of the relativity of truth, and yet she says the first thing that this leads to is people leaving the church of their parentage and going to another church, a church of their choice. But that’s actually a contradictory statement because secularization would not lead persons to leave their church to go to another church; it would lead persons to leave their church and go to no church at all. Instead, what she’s talking about here is the fact that in the United States, many Hispanics for the very first time are in the context of religious pluralism and they are also in the context of religious liberty, and for the first time, it is a matter of choice. It’s a matter of choice to identify with one faith or another faith or no faith at all. And the significant response of many younger Hispanics is to choose something other than the faith of their parents. That’s not exactly an indication of secularization. It is an indication of modernity, of the possibility of choice.

 

The second thing we need to note in her comment is that when she says the relativistic understanding of truth leads persons eventually to no faith at all, well that’s absolutely true and that leads to the question: where are they getting this? Other research has indicated that one of the main reasons that Hispanics leave Catholicism for evangelicalism is that they want more, not less understanding of truth. In other words, it is a relativistic application of the doctrine of the church in the Catholic context that often leads many Hispanics to want to know more clearly what the Bible says and then to understand exactly what God would have them to do and how God would have them to live.

 

This is a very interesting phenomenon. The danger of secularization and the presence of the modern context of consumer choice: it’s all around us. It affects every single church or denomination. But the response is not to oppose that larger culture—after all it is the culture—but rather to stand out as an alternative to that culture, as an alternative of the people of truth. And in that sense, this major report on the spiritual direction of Hispanics in America tells us not only about the mission field that North America’s becoming, but about the theological imperative that evangelicals, first of all, had better always remember.

 

Still in the United States, over the weekend, the Boy Scouts of America found themselves back in the headlines again and in the headlines of The New York Times. Front-page story: “Compromise on Gays Pleases No One, Scouts Are Learning.” Now we’ve been talking about this for a matter of years now. The Boy Scouts of America, when they made their massive shift back last year on the issue of homosexuality, took a halfway position. They took what’s basically described as a don’t-ask-don’t-tell position when it comes to boys involved in scouting, but they took an absolute position against gay men serving as scoutmasters, gay adults serving as leaders in the scouting organization. So as they succumbed and bowed to cultural pressure on the issue of including gay scouts, they refused to do so when it came to gay scout leaders, and many in the media have noted that this largely is because of legal complications if not moral concerns.

 

But where are the scouts now? Well they find themselves in no man’s land. And as I said when they changed their position and were even contemplating it, their compromise would please no one. And as we’ve pointed out in recent weeks with recent developments, this compromise pleases no one. And now the headline in the New York Times: “Compromise on Gays Pleases No One, Scouts Are Learning.” Well if they’re learning, it’s a very late lesson. They should have known this from the beginning. They were warned at the beginning, and from the beginning, their compromised position has been in trouble. As Kirk Johnson of The New York Times reports:

 

After long, anxious debate, the Boy Scouts’ national board voted a year ago to allow openly gay youths to participate in scouting, while continuing to exclude gay leaders age 18 and over. It was promoted as a compromise intended to offer the organization time to figure out how to proceed. Instead, it has brought the Scouts only more ire from all directions and produced a house divided.

 

The awkwardness of the compromise — don’t-ask-don’t-tell silence on the one hand, and a supposedly welcoming embrace on the other, with an 18th birthday dividing the two — has emboldened gay scouts like Pascal to step forward with passionate editorials and online petitions.

 

The policy has also divided the parents of scouts with the majority of parents, as the Boy Scouts of America has acknowledged, indicating that they preferred the previous policy, the policy that excluded openly gay individuals, whether as scouts or scout leaders. But there are also parents on the other side who are now calling upon gifts and financial support to come to local troops rather than the Boy Scouts of America because they did not take the full step of including gay scouting leaders as well. The current policy related to all persons involved in Boy Scouts is that they must not “deliberately inject homosexuality into scouting.” But as The New York Times article says, “What it means to ‘deliberately inject’ homosexuality into scouting is another question opened by the new policy.” But as this article makes very clear, at least some gay scouts want to be far more out in terms of their gay identity than the Boy Scouts of America current policy appears to allow for.

 

One section of this article in The New York Times makes the problem abundantly clear:

 

What hangs over the Boy Scouts in all its discussions about leaders — how to pick, train and monitor them — is the specter of the past, when some sexual predators were able to use scouting to gain access to victims. Mr. Smith, the Scouts spokesman, said the organization makes “no connection between the sexual abuse, or victimization of a child, and homosexuality.” Still, there is no question that scouting’s detailed rules on “youth protection” are mostly about heading off inappropriate sexual behavior.

 

And you’ll notice the only people involved in this are men and boys; therefore, the sexual activity in question is by definition homosexual or same-sex behavior. The article goes on—and this is really interesting:

 

But the new approach since last year’s vote, with what amounts to essentially a code of silence about homosexuality, with little to no guidance in the training materials on how to incorporate gay scouts into a troop or to discourage bullying of a gay scout, sends the wrong message.

 

That was said by the mother of one gay scout. This mother said, “If you connect the dots, it’s still saying that being gay is unacceptable.” Well that makes very clear the other side of the policy. If this policy says that being gay is unacceptable, then the policy they demand is one that officially says homosexuality is acceptable.

 

The lesson for all of us is something that the Christian worldview affirms very clearly. There is no compromise on matters of this importance, and those who attempt to compromise find themselves pleasing no one. And in the case of the Boy Scouts of America, if they didn’t hear it from the rest of us, perhaps they now can’t avoid it when it’s in the headline of The New York Times.

 

Also of interest from a Christian worldview perspective is a major report that was out in The Financial Times over the weekend. It’s an article by Christopher Caldwell, a well-known analyst. He writes, “No One Trusts Washington on Climate Change.” Now my interest in this is really not about climate change. We can talk about that in a different context. My interest in this article is the point that Christopher Caldwell makes, and that is about the fact that on an issue of this complexity, we’re simply left having to trust people who supposedly know what they’re talking about regardless of the position we take. Caldwell writes about the fact that this past week the United States government released what is called the National Climate Assessment. It’s an 841-page document. It’s filled with all kinds of data, with technology, with scientific analysis, and with policy recommendations as well. The Obama Administration’s been making a big deal out of this report, thumping its 841 pages down as supposedly the conclusive argument about what must be done, what climate change is, who is causing it, and what now must be our policy answer.

 

But as Caldwell says, it’s met with a great deal of silence from the American people. As a matter fact, he cites numerous polls in which Americans rate climate change as extremely low, often coming in effectively last in their list of moral and political concerns. So Caldwell asked a very interesting question: If the White House, if the president of the United States, and if leading scientists can produce an 841-page report supposedly saying, “This is the truth, deal with it,” why is it that so many Americans—and not only Americans, but people around the world, and not only citizens, but government’s as well—basically say, “Yes, it might be true,” and then they move onto the next subject. How can that be possible? Christopher Caldwell has it exactly right when he writes that many in the policy elites assume the argument about global warming is over science. He says that’s true in the academy; it’s false among the public at large where probably 99% of those urged to form an opinion on global warming cannot verify the science independently.

 

Now let’s think about that. Ninety-nine percent, he says, of Americans can’t verify the science independently. Now is that an exaggeration? No, it’s a significant understatement because 99% of the American population would leave over 300,000 people who supposedly could independently verify the science. As a matter of fact, that’s the exaggeration. The reality is that for most of us there is no way independently to verify the science. We have no apparatus, no technology, no access whereby we can prove the case one way or another. We are dependent upon others. Caldwell acknowledges this when he writes that those included within this 99% include almost all the politicians, and let’s be clear, he says, reporters and columnists too. Their only choice—and that means our only choice—is to find a trustworthy authority on whom they can rely. He concludes by saying the evidence is clear; most Americans just don’t take any report by the federal government as the last word on a subject of this complexity. They’re willing to trust the government on some things, but not on this. After all, what does the government know? Well, this just points to an issue of what Christians would call epistemological humility. In other words, there are things we can’t know. There are things that are beyond our ability independently to verify. In this case, Christopher Caldwell says most Americans have to trust some authority. The reality is in most issues of life, the same is true for all of us.

 

The Christian worldview affirms that and that’s why one of the central mottos of the Reformation was sola Scriptura. At the end of the day, the most important issues of life can only be answered by the authority of God, and on His authority we are completely dependent. But as Christopher Caldwell makes clear, in so many other issues of life, we’re dependent upon someone else. That’s true for all of us virtually all the time. The issue is: Are we trusting the right authority? That’s the key question for all of us, especially for Christians.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember the release every weekend 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 05-13-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Blasphemy laws like those in Pakistan are an offense to God

Increasing Violence in Pakistan Surrounding Blasphemy Cases Deters Opposition, Wall Street Journal (Annabel Symmington)

Pakistani Activist Shot Dead; Aided Blasphemy Suspects, New York Times (Waqar Gillani)

2) Decline of Roman Catholicism among Latino community effect of religious pluralism

The Shifting Religious Identity of Latinos in the United States, Pew Research Center

Growing Number of Hispanics in U.S. Leave Catholic Church, Wall Street Journal (Miriam Jordan)

Even as U.S. Hispanics Lift Catholicism, Many Are Leaving the Church Behind, New York Times (Michael Paulson)

3)  Boy Scouts slow to learn that compromise position on gays pleases no one

Compromise on Gays Pleases No One, Scouts Are Learning, New York Times (Kirk Johnson)

4) Suspicion of authority undermines Washington on climate change study

No one trusts Washington on climate change, Financial Times (Christopher Caldwell)