R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 366

Transcript: The Briefing 04-17-14

The Briefing

 

 April 17, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, April 17, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Yesterday’s edition of The New York Times includes an article with this headline: “PET Scans Offer Clues on Vegetative States.” Denise Grady, the reporter for the story, writes:

 

People with severe brain injuries sometimes emerge from a coma awake but unresponsive, leaving families with painful questions. Are they aware? Can they think and feel? Do they have any chance of recovery?

 

As you well know, the controversy over persons diagnosed as being in persistent vegetative states is not just a matter of an ideological controversy, but of real-life medical decisions and often life-and-death medical decisions. All you have to do is think back to the national controversy over the infamous case of Terri Schiavo, knowing that in that case you had her husband wanting her feeding tube to be removed and her parents insisting that it should be continued, and the debate was over she was actually dead or not and whether or not life-giving sustenance could be removed from her. The courts eventually ruled that it could be removed and it was and she died. But now, contravening many of the claims made by those who argued for the removal of life-giving sustenance from those in a persistent vegetative state or diagnosed as such, comes this article.

 

A new study has found that PET scans [that’s a positron emission tomography scan] may help answer these wrenching questions. It found that a significant number of people labeled vegetative had received an incorrect diagnosis and actually had some degree of consciousness and the potential to improve.

 

That one sentence throws on its head many of the claims that had been made by those who argued for ending sustenance and treatment of those diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state or PVS. For years now, we’ve heard the claim that people that were in this diagnosis had no chance whatsoever of any kind of recovery and had no level of consciousness, but now this PET scan—and the PET scan, by the way, is a form of radioactive imaging that includes a three-dimensional image in color—it is demonstrating that there is at least in many of these patients some level of consciousness and a very real potential for improvement.

 

Dr. Steven Laureys, an author of the new study—he’s director of the Coma Science Group at the University of Liège in Belgium. He said, “I think these patients are kind of neglected by both medicine and society. Many of them don’t even see a medical doctor or a specialist for years. So I think it’s very important to ask the question, are they conscious?” How many people are we talking about? The New York Times reports that in United States alone there are 100,000 to 300,000 people thought to be minimally conscious; an additional 25,000 are vegetative. Now just think about that. A town of 25,000 people would be a fairly significant county-seat town. A population of 100,000 to 300,000 is a large metropolitan area. In other words, we’re talking about a significant number of Americans being diagnosed right now—today—as either in a persistent vegetative state or in minimal consciousness. Many have been arguing for removing life-giving sustenance, feeding tubes, and similar kinds of resources for these people identified as being in a minimally conscious or vegetative state. They have claimed, over against many who have argued on behalf of the sanctity of human life, that these persons are not conscious and that there is no hope of any kind of recovery of consciousness or other kind of recovery. But what we have now is proof positive coming from Belgium that those claims were wrong, and, yet, we need to recognize they were deadly wrong. In other words, there are people who are now dead because decisions were made based upon a very different understanding of those who are in a persistent vegetative state.

 

From a Christian worldview perspective, what this demonstrates more than anything else is the fact that science actually cannot define us. In other words, what defines us is the fact that every single human being is made in God’s image, and until the point of natural death, every single human being has to be treated as one who was indeed made in the image of God and every single human life, regardless of the point in the continuum of development or the assessment of capabilities and capacities, is equally deserving of protection; the sanctity equally intact and to be respected.

 

So the news that arrived yesterday, courtesy of The New York Times and other major media, the news that was released by the University of Liège in Belgium, this comes as good news for those who have been arguing on behalf of those identified as being minimally conscious or in a vegetative state. But it comes too late to save many, and, frankly, it does not conclude the debate even in this country because there are those—and you watch—there are those who will now say, well, even if there is a capacity to recover or even if there is a minimal consciousness, it’s not enough. You see, when you engage in an argument that bases the worthiness and the sanctity of any human life based upon any kind of criteria that can be negotiated, we’ll continue to negotiate it. And those who say, okay, this report makes us move the markers, we’ll just move the markers minimally. You either believe in the sanctity of every single human life or you do not, and if you do not, you serve the culture of death—perhaps incrementally, but you serve the culture of death all the same.

 

A testimony to the importance of marriage and family came out yesterday. It was released at Politico magazine. The authors are Stanley Greenberg and Erica Seifert. Stanley Greenberg is one of the nation’s most prominent Democratic pollsters. The headline of the article is, “Why Unmarried Women Are Key to 2014.” Now before looking at the argument, we need to understand that we already knew that unmarried women are a crucial swing vote; sometimes a determinative swing vote. The most recent evidence of this was last year’s election for the governor of Virginia, where was discovered that the actual swing constituency in that election was unmarried women. If you took unmarried women out of the population of voters and you left in just married women, Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s then attorney general who was running as the Republican candidate for governor, would’ve won by a sizable margin, but indeed he lost by a smaller margin because the number of those who were unmarried women voting for his Democratic challenger was rather overwhelming. Stanley Greenberg and Erica Seifert, writing in this article, say:

 

Marital status is one of the strongest predictors of whether a person will vote and for which party, which is why so many progressives and Democrats are paying attention now.A majority of American households are now unmarried.

 

That’s a very important statistic. In other words, right now, if you take all American households, the majority of those households are not households marked by a man and a woman living together in the bounds and bonds of matrimony. They go on to write, “Marriage is now politicized. Nearly 60% of those who call themselves Republicans are married”—a very important statistic to keep in mind—“and three-quarters of conservative Republicans are married. By contrast, two-thirds of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and Democrats for Congress in 2012; two-thirds of unmarried women voted for Terry McAuliffe for Virginia governor in 2013.” There’s that Virginia race coming up again.

 

The authors also point out that in the 2012 presidential election, nearly a quarter of all of the voters were unmarried, but not just that, they were unmarried women. That is the cause of the article by Greenberg and Seifert that appeared earlier this week. These writers are now pointing to a poll undertaken for National Public Radio (that’s NPR) that was conducted jointly by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic. They argue:

 

The Democrats were ahead by 1 point in the generic congressional ballot, but unmarried women gave Democrats 58 percent of their votes. That sounds high, but it is nearly 10 points below what we would see in a presidential-year election, suggesting that Democrats have some work to do.

So these two authors, both prominent Democratic pollsters, are arguing to the Democratic Party, “You better pay more attention to unmarried women if you want to win in the fall.”

 

They then write:

 

What unmarried women (widows, never-marrieds and divorcées) share—and what makes them lean so heavily for Democrats—is being on their own, vulnerable economically, at a time when jobs that pay enough to live on are very scarce.

Well we can turn this around and say that, oddly enough, what we have here is a massive testimony to the importance of marriage not just politically, but in every other dimension of life. In other words, the fact that these women are not married is, according to these pollsters, what makes them vulnerable, what puts them in a disadvantaged position. It is, they write to the Democratic Party, the vulnerability of these women, their sense of being disadvantaged that leads them to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. But from a Christian worldview perspective, we need to turn that around and say, what a pointer this is to the importance of marriage. What an indication and affirmation this is of God’s goodness to us in giving us the gift of marriage. In other words, what makes women feel far less vulnerable and puts them in a far stronger position? It’s being within the institution of marriage, and the voting polls simply show the results over and over again. Just to take that Virginia race as one example: married women voted overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate; single, unmarried women voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate. In other words, it’s not just that people disagree on issues. It’s not just that we have a very vigorous conversation about issues described as being in the culture war. It’s that the issue of marriage, which is itself at the center of our cultural controversies, is also at the center of determining why people believe as they believe, live as they live, and vote as they vote. In other words, what we have revealed to us in the Scriptures about the importance and the centrality of marriage actually comes out in a very odd way: in argument written by Democratic pollsters to the Democratic Party of why women who are unmarried overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But the real message to all of us is about the importance of marriage; a far more profound point than any pollster or political party can understand.

 

Given the fact that so many states are considering or accomplishing the legalization of marijuana, so-called recreational use of marijuana, given the fact that the American people seem to be changing their opinion on this issue, given the fact that this is playing into the larger moral revolution as following the issue of same-sex marriage as an indicator of the secularization of the American culture, it’s interesting to note that The Boston Globe is now out with a report that verifies something that has been a concern for some time. As Kay Lazar reports for The Boston Globe:

 

Young adults who occasionally smoke marijuana show abnormalities in two key areas of their brain related to emotion, motivation, and decision making, raising concerns that they could be damaging their developing minds at a critical time, according to a new study by Boston researchers.

 

The researchers were studying a group of young adults, age 18 to 25, and many of them were students at Boston University. In other words, you have a very privileged selection of young people whose brains were considered here. Half the group said they use marijuana at least once a week; the other twenty had not used the drug in the past year, and they also reported using it at least less than five times in their entire life. Among the group that did smoke, the median use was about six joints per week, but what it revealed, in terms of this study, is that the nucleus accumbens, that is, a part of the brain, was larger in marijuana users compared to non-users and its alteration was directly related to how much the person smoked marijuana. The nucleus accumbens is a hub in the brain that is involved with decision-making and emotiveness, that is, the seed of emotions. One of the lead researchers in this project said that this kind of evidence may point to the fact that the brain is actually forming new connections that will encourage further drug use; in other words, “a sort of drug learning process.” In other words, at the point at which young brains are developing, here is medical evidence that the brains are actually being affected by marijuana in order to rewire the brain to need or desire marijuana, teaching the brain to want marijuana. This study did not address whether the brain changes are permanent, but it does indicate that the brain changes are real.

 

Stuart Gitlow, the president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, told The Boston Globe that the study provides “much-needed hard evidence of brain changes that appear to match the changes in cognitive skills—thinking and reasoning—that other researchers have demonstrated in marijuana studies.” He said, “We’ve known that people who use marijuana when they’re younger tend to have cognitive abnormalities, but this gives us direct evidence.” In other words, what was already known and very well documented, and, for that matter, cited even in the legislative debate in states like Colorado, was that the use of marijuana by teenagers and young adults affects their cognitive abilities. That’s not news. That’s been well documented; it’s well-known. But now you have biological evidence that indicates what is actually happening in the brains, and these two centers of the brain that show this kind of abnormality after the use of marijuana are also now suspected of making the individual user, the smoker of marijuana, desire the marijuana itself; in other words, a kind of self-replicating circle of addictive behavior. Stuart Gitlow—again, he’s the president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine—said, “It’s fairly reasonable to draw the conclusion now that marijuana does alter the structure of the brain.”

 

The Washington Post, reporting on the same research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, indicates that even casual marijuana smokers are showing significant abnormalities in these two regions of the brain. Hans Breiter, one of the researchers of the report, said, “Some of these people only use marijuana to get high once or twice a week.” He went on to say, “People think a little recreational use shouldn’t cause a problem, if someone’s doing OK with work or school. Our data directly says this is not the case.” He went on to say, “This study raises a strong challenge to the idea that casual marijuana use isn’t associated with bad consequences.”

 

Now what we have here from a Christian worldview perspective is something that we should expect to see. What we have here is verification that the kind of moral judgment that comes naturally in the use of something that would affect the brain cognitively is also likely to bring about biological consequences and changes as well. But, furthermore, from a Christian worldview perspective, there’s another very important point here and, that is, that this kind of scientific data will have a limited effect on those who want to argue to the contrary. That’s something to watch. One of the things we talk about regularly on The Briefing is what theologians refer to as the noetic effects of the fall, that is, the fact that the fall affects the way we think. The effects of the fall explain why our memory is faulty, why our reasoning can be mis-wired, why we sometimes convince ourselves of things that are patently untrue because we desire them to be true. All kinds of things are evidence of the noetic effects of the fall, but one of those effects is also this: sometimes when we want to make an argument, we’re actually impervious to the evidence against it. And that’s exactly what we should expect to follow this. In other words, there was already ample evidence when the legislature in Colorado was considering the legalization of recreational marijuana. There was already adequate evidence of the fact that there were cognitive effects to the use of marijuana, especially among young people. There were already warnings that marijuana was especially dangerous to young brains. That’s why the legislature in Colorado and the governor put into effect a law that they said would prohibit young people from getting a hold of marijuana. But that came after other evidence that indicated that already in the state of Colorado, before they adopted that legislation, the first cigarette smoked by most teenagers and young adults in Colorado wasn’t made of tobacco, but of marijuana. In other words, what they were already arguing was contradicted by the evidence that was already available. Now here’s more evidence, a deeper level of evidence, but you can count on this: those who are determined to argue for the legalization of marijuana will not be fazed by this evidence, but it does pileup. That’s what happens with the truth: it piles up to judge us when we think we’re judging the truth.

 

Finally, an article coming from Great Britain that gives us evidence of the sad secularization of culture and its effects. Newsdesk reports that:

 

At one church, the only thing being worshipped is beer—at another, gleaming cars are on sale. Increasingly, it seems, a different kind of conversion is taking place at Britain’s churches.

 

In other words, what’s happening at Great Britain is the acceleration of secularization to the point that the Church of England and other denominations are finding themselves hard-pressed as to get rid of some of the property fast enough because congregations simply aren’t meeting in these old church buildings. As Newsdesk reports:

 

Thanks to a steady decline in religion and the high costs of maintaining these historic buildings, a rising number of churches are being given new lives that may have horrified their founders.

 

Well, as a matter fact, that should horrify us now. Many of these churches are being turned into things like nightclubs; others are being turned into car dealerships. They are all symbolic of the fact that Christianity has long been in eclipse in the United Kingdom, and they are also pointing to the results of secularization when it proceeds in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom.

 

One of the interesting aspects of this article by Newsdesk is that the policy for getting rid of these buildings varies by denomination and church. The dominant Church of England has “strict rules on conversions,” meaning a building can only be sold if a committee approves its future use after a lengthy process. Jeremy Tipping, manager of the Church of England’s Closed Churches Team—now just imagine the denomination that has to have something called a Closed Churches Team. He said, “Churches can’t be used for sex shops, gambling premises, and things like that.” So, in other words, the Church of England has standards about what can happen to its buildings after they are no longer Church of England churches. But the report goes on to say that a wide range of other church occupants has been given the nod by the Church of England’s Closed Churches Team, including a climbing center in the center of Manchester, a circus school in Bristol, where trapezes are now hanging from the rafters, a supermarket, a library, and a Sikh temple. But it’s hard to see how some of these uses can be disguised in any way as appropriate for the use of a closed church, but, then again, what is the appropriate use of a closed church? The tragedy is the closing of the church not so much in the disuse of a building, but in the loss of Christian witness and proclamation that it had once taken place within that building.

 

One haunting sentence in this report states, “The Church of England knocked down nearly 500 churches between 1969 and 2011.” That’s more than 500 churches knocked down. While more than 1,000 were then consecrated and sold or rented out, bringing in a much-needed 47 million pounds (that’s about $77 million) to the Church of England. In other words, in order to save themselves, they’ve been selling their property and selling their church buildings.

 

The secularization of the culture brings vast consequences. The most important of them certainly isn’t the fate of church buildings, but when you think about the importance of an architectural skyline and you think about what used to be said with many churches and steeples dotting the skylines and when you consider what is happening in many of those buildings now, it’s a very haunting reminder of the fact that secularization has consequences; consequences that go far beyond the skyline of a British village.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember 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.

Transcript: The Briefing 04-18-14

The Briefing

 

 April 17, 2014

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

 

It’s Thursday, April 17, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Yesterday’s edition of The New York Times includes an article with this headline: “PET Scans Offer Clues on Vegetative States.” Denise Grady, the reporter for the story, writes:

 

People with severe brain injuries sometimes emerge from a coma awake but unresponsive, leaving families with painful questions. Are they aware? Can they think and feel? Do they have any chance of recovery?

 

As you well know, the controversy over persons diagnosed as being in persistent vegetative states is not just a matter of an ideological controversy, but of real-life medical decisions and often life-and-death medical decisions. All you have to do is think back to the national controversy over the infamous case of Terri Schiavo, knowing that in that case you had her husband wanting her feeding tube to be removed and her parents insisting that it should be continued, and the debate was over she was actually dead or not and whether or not life-giving sustenance could be removed from her. The courts eventually ruled that it could be removed and it was and she died. But now, contravening many of the claims made by those who argued for the removal of life-giving sustenance from those in a persistent vegetative state or diagnosed as such, comes this article.

 

A new study has found that PET scans [that’s a positron emission tomography scan] may help answer these wrenching questions. It found that a significant number of people labeled vegetative had received an incorrect diagnosis and actually had some degree of consciousness and the potential to improve.

 

That one sentence throws on its head many of the claims that had been made by those who argued for ending sustenance and treatment of those diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state or PVS. For years now, we’ve heard the claim that people that were in this diagnosis had no chance whatsoever of any kind of recovery and had no level of consciousness, but now this PET scan—and the PET scan, by the way, is a form of radioactive imaging that includes a three-dimensional image in color—it is demonstrating that there is at least in many of these patients some level of consciousness and a very real potential for improvement.

 

Dr. Steven Laureys, an author of the new study—he’s director of the Coma Science Group at the University of Liège in Belgium. He said, “I think these patients are kind of neglected by both medicine and society. Many of them don’t even see a medical doctor or a specialist for years. So I think it’s very important to ask the question, are they conscious?” How many people are we talking about? The New York Times reports that in United States alone there are 100,000 to 300,000 people thought to be minimally conscious; an additional 25,000 are vegetative. Now just think about that. A town of 25,000 people would be a fairly significant county-seat town. A population of 100,000 to 300,000 is a large metropolitan area. In other words, we’re talking about a significant number of Americans being diagnosed right now—today—as either in a persistent vegetative state or in minimal consciousness. Many have been arguing for removing life-giving sustenance, feeding tubes, and similar kinds of resources for these people identified as being in a minimally conscious or vegetative state. They have claimed, over against many who have argued on behalf of the sanctity of human life, that these persons are not conscious and that there is no hope of any kind of recovery of consciousness or other kind of recovery. But what we have now is proof positive coming from Belgium that those claims were wrong, and, yet, we need to recognize they were deadly wrong. In other words, there are people who are now dead because decisions were made based upon a very different understanding of those who are in a persistent vegetative state.

 

From a Christian worldview perspective, what this demonstrates more than anything else is the fact that science actually cannot define us. In other words, what defines us is the fact that every single human being is made in God’s image, and until the point of natural death, every single human being has to be treated as one who was indeed made in the image of God and every single human life, regardless of the point in the continuum of development or the assessment of capabilities and capacities, is equally deserving of protection; the sanctity equally intact and to be respected.

 

So the news that arrived yesterday, courtesy of The New York Times and other major media, the news that was released by the University of Liège in Belgium, this comes as good news for those who have been arguing on behalf of those identified as being minimally conscious or in a vegetative state. But it comes too late to save many, and, frankly, it does not conclude the debate even in this country because there are those—and you watch—there are those who will now say, well, even if there is a capacity to recover or even if there is a minimal consciousness, it’s not enough. You see, when you engage in an argument that bases the worthiness and the sanctity of any human life based upon any kind of criteria that can be negotiated, we’ll continue to negotiate it. And those who say, okay, this report makes us move the markers, we’ll just move the markers minimally. You either believe in the sanctity of every single human life or you do not, and if you do not, you serve the culture of death—perhaps incrementally, but you serve the culture of death all the same.

 

A testimony to the importance of marriage and family came out yesterday. It was released at Politico magazine. The authors are Stanley Greenberg and Erica Seifert. Stanley Greenberg is one of the nation’s most prominent Democratic pollsters. The headline of the article is, “Why Unmarried Women Are Key to 2014.” Now before looking at the argument, we need to understand that we already knew that unmarried women are a crucial swing vote; sometimes a determinative swing vote. The most recent evidence of this was last year’s election for the governor of Virginia, where was discovered that the actual swing constituency in that election was unmarried women. If you took unmarried women out of the population of voters and you left in just married women, Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s then attorney general who was running as the Republican candidate for governor, would’ve won by a sizable margin, but indeed he lost by a smaller margin because the number of those who were unmarried women voting for his Democratic challenger was rather overwhelming. Stanley Greenberg and Erica Seifert, writing in this article, say:

 

Marital status is one of the strongest predictors of whether a person will vote and for which party, which is why so many progressives and Democrats are paying attention now.A majority of American households are now unmarried.

 

That’s a very important statistic. In other words, right now, if you take all American households, the majority of those households are not households marked by a man and a woman living together in the bounds and bonds of matrimony. They go on to write, “Marriage is now politicized. Nearly 60% of those who call themselves Republicans are married”—a very important statistic to keep in mind—“and three-quarters of conservative Republicans are married. By contrast, two-thirds of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and Democrats for Congress in 2012; two-thirds of unmarried women voted for Terry McAuliffe for Virginia governor in 2013.” There’s that Virginia race coming up again.

 

The authors also point out that in the 2012 presidential election, nearly a quarter of all of the voters were unmarried, but not just that, they were unmarried women. That is the cause of the article by Greenberg and Seifert that appeared earlier this week. These writers are now pointing to a poll undertaken for National Public Radio (that’s NPR) that was conducted jointly by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic. They argue:

 

The Democrats were ahead by 1 point in the generic congressional ballot, but unmarried women gave Democrats 58 percent of their votes. That sounds high, but it is nearly 10 points below what we would see in a presidential-year election, suggesting that Democrats have some work to do.

So these two authors, both prominent Democratic pollsters, are arguing to the Democratic Party, “You better pay more attention to unmarried women if you want to win in the fall.”

 

They then write:

 

What unmarried women (widows, never-marrieds and divorcées) share—and what makes them lean so heavily for Democrats—is being on their own, vulnerable economically, at a time when jobs that pay enough to live on are very scarce.

Well we can turn this around and say that, oddly enough, what we have here is a massive testimony to the importance of marriage not just politically, but in every other dimension of life. In other words, the fact that these women are not married is, according to these pollsters, what makes them vulnerable, what puts them in a disadvantaged position. It is, they write to the Democratic Party, the vulnerability of these women, their sense of being disadvantaged that leads them to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. But from a Christian worldview perspective, we need to turn that around and say, what a pointer this is to the importance of marriage. What an indication and affirmation this is of God’s goodness to us in giving us the gift of marriage. In other words, what makes women feel far less vulnerable and puts them in a far stronger position? It’s being within the institution of marriage, and the voting polls simply show the results over and over again. Just to take that Virginia race as one example: married women voted overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate; single, unmarried women voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate. In other words, it’s not just that people disagree on issues. It’s not just that we have a very vigorous conversation about issues described as being in the culture war. It’s that the issue of marriage, which is itself at the center of our cultural controversies, is also at the center of determining why people believe as they believe, live as they live, and vote as they vote. In other words, what we have revealed to us in the Scriptures about the importance and the centrality of marriage actually comes out in a very odd way: in argument written by Democratic pollsters to the Democratic Party of why women who are unmarried overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But the real message to all of us is about the importance of marriage; a far more profound point than any pollster or political party can understand.

 

Given the fact that so many states are considering or accomplishing the legalization of marijuana, so-called recreational use of marijuana, given the fact that the American people seem to be changing their opinion on this issue, given the fact that this is playing into the larger moral revolution as following the issue of same-sex marriage as an indicator of the secularization of the American culture, it’s interesting to note that The Boston Globe is now out with a report that verifies something that has been a concern for some time. As Kay Lazar reports for The Boston Globe:

 

Young adults who occasionally smoke marijuana show abnormalities in two key areas of their brain related to emotion, motivation, and decision making, raising concerns that they could be damaging their developing minds at a critical time, according to a new study by Boston researchers.

 

The researchers were studying a group of young adults, age 18 to 25, and many of them were students at Boston University. In other words, you have a very privileged selection of young people whose brains were considered here. Half the group said they use marijuana at least once a week; the other twenty had not used the drug in the past year, and they also reported using it at least less than five times in their entire life. Among the group that did smoke, the median use was about six joints per week, but what it revealed, in terms of this study, is that the nucleus accumbens, that is, a part of the brain, was larger in marijuana users compared to non-users and its alteration was directly related to how much the person smoked marijuana. The nucleus accumbens is a hub in the brain that is involved with decision-making and emotiveness, that is, the seed of emotions. One of the lead researchers in this project said that this kind of evidence may point to the fact that the brain is actually forming new connections that will encourage further drug use; in other words, “a sort of drug learning process.” In other words, at the point at which young brains are developing, here is medical evidence that the brains are actually being affected by marijuana in order to rewire the brain to need or desire marijuana, teaching the brain to want marijuana. This study did not address whether the brain changes are permanent, but it does indicate that the brain changes are real.

 

Stuart Gitlow, the president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, told The Boston Globe that the study provides “much-needed hard evidence of brain changes that appear to match the changes in cognitive skills—thinking and reasoning—that other researchers have demonstrated in marijuana studies.” He said, “We’ve known that people who use marijuana when they’re younger tend to have cognitive abnormalities, but this gives us direct evidence.” In other words, what was already known and very well documented, and, for that matter, cited even in the legislative debate in states like Colorado, was that the use of marijuana by teenagers and young adults affects their cognitive abilities. That’s not news. That’s been well documented; it’s well-known. But now you have biological evidence that indicates what is actually happening in the brains, and these two centers of the brain that show this kind of abnormality after the use of marijuana are also now suspected of making the individual user, the smoker of marijuana, desire the marijuana itself; in other words, a kind of self-replicating circle of addictive behavior. Stuart Gitlow—again, he’s the president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine—said, “It’s fairly reasonable to draw the conclusion now that marijuana does alter the structure of the brain.”

 

The Washington Post, reporting on the same research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, indicates that even casual marijuana smokers are showing significant abnormalities in these two regions of the brain. Hans Breiter, one of the researchers of the report, said, “Some of these people only use marijuana to get high once or twice a week.” He went on to say, “People think a little recreational use shouldn’t cause a problem, if someone’s doing OK with work or school. Our data directly says this is not the case.” He went on to say, “This study raises a strong challenge to the idea that casual marijuana use isn’t associated with bad consequences.”

 

Now what we have here from a Christian worldview perspective is something that we should expect to see. What we have here is verification that the kind of moral judgment that comes naturally in the use of something that would affect the brain cognitively is also likely to bring about biological consequences and changes as well. But, furthermore, from a Christian worldview perspective, there’s another very important point here and, that is, that this kind of scientific data will have a limited effect on those who want to argue to the contrary. That’s something to watch. One of the things we talk about regularly on The Briefing is what theologians refer to as the noetic effects of the fall, that is, the fact that the fall affects the way we think. The effects of the fall explain why our memory is faulty, why our reasoning can be mis-wired, why we sometimes convince ourselves of things that are patently untrue because we desire them to be true. All kinds of things are evidence of the noetic effects of the fall, but one of those effects is also this: sometimes when we want to make an argument, we’re actually impervious to the evidence against it. And that’s exactly what we should expect to follow this. In other words, there was already ample evidence when the legislature in Colorado was considering the legalization of recreational marijuana. There was already adequate evidence of the fact that there were cognitive effects to the use of marijuana, especially among young people. There were already warnings that marijuana was especially dangerous to young brains. That’s why the legislature in Colorado and the governor put into effect a law that they said would prohibit young people from getting a hold of marijuana. But that came after other evidence that indicated that already in the state of Colorado, before they adopted that legislation, the first cigarette smoked by most teenagers and young adults in Colorado wasn’t made of tobacco, but of marijuana. In other words, what they were already arguing was contradicted by the evidence that was already available. Now here’s more evidence, a deeper level of evidence, but you can count on this: those who are determined to argue for the legalization of marijuana will not be fazed by this evidence, but it does pileup. That’s what happens with the truth: it piles up to judge us when we think we’re judging the truth.

 

Finally, an article coming from Great Britain that gives us evidence of the sad secularization of culture and its effects. Newsdesk reports that:

 

At one church, the only thing being worshipped is beer—at another, gleaming cars are on sale. Increasingly, it seems, a different kind of conversion is taking place at Britain’s churches.

 

In other words, what’s happening at Great Britain is the acceleration of secularization to the point that the Church of England and other denominations are finding themselves hard-pressed as to get rid of some of the property fast enough because congregations simply aren’t meeting in these old church buildings. As Newsdesk reports:

 

Thanks to a steady decline in religion and the high costs of maintaining these historic buildings, a rising number of churches are being given new lives that may have horrified their founders.

 

Well, as a matter fact, that should horrify us now. Many of these churches are being turned into things like nightclubs; others are being turned into car dealerships. They are all symbolic of the fact that Christianity has long been in eclipse in the United Kingdom, and they are also pointing to the results of secularization when it proceeds in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom.

 

One of the interesting aspects of this article by Newsdesk is that the policy for getting rid of these buildings varies by denomination and church. The dominant Church of England has “strict rules on conversions,” meaning a building can only be sold if a committee approves its future use after a lengthy process. Jeremy Tipping, manager of the Church of England’s Closed Churches Team—now just imagine the denomination that has to have something called a Closed Churches Team. He said, “Churches can’t be used for sex shops, gambling premises, and things like that.” So, in other words, the Church of England has standards about what can happen to its buildings after they are no longer Church of England churches. But the report goes on to say that a wide range of other church occupants has been given the nod by the Church of England’s Closed Churches Team, including a climbing center in the center of Manchester, a circus school in Bristol, where trapezes are now hanging from the rafters, a supermarket, a library, and a Sikh temple. But it’s hard to see how some of these uses can be disguised in any way as appropriate for the use of a closed church, but, then again, what is the appropriate use of a closed church? The tragedy is the closing of the church not so much in the disuse of a building, but in the loss of Christian witness and proclamation that it had once taken place within that building.

 

One haunting sentence in this report states, “The Church of England knocked down nearly 500 churches between 1969 and 2011.” That’s more than 500 churches knocked down. While more than 1,000 were then consecrated and sold or rented out, bringing in a much-needed 47 million pounds (that’s about $77 million) to the Church of England. In other words, in order to save themselves, they’ve been selling their property and selling their church buildings.

 

The secularization of the culture brings vast consequences. The most important of them certainly isn’t the fate of church buildings, but when you think about the importance of an architectural skyline and you think about what used to be said with many churches and steeples dotting the skylines and when you consider what is happening in many of those buildings now, it’s a very haunting reminder of the fact that secularization has consequences; consequences that go far beyond the skyline of a British village.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember 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 04-17-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Scan technology proof positive many claims to remove life support were deadly wrong

PET Scans Offer Clues on Vegetative States, New York Times (Denise Grady)

2) Women’s marital status one of strongest predictors of how they will vote

Why Unmarried Women Are the Key to 2014, Politico (Stanley Greenberg and Erica Seifert)

3) Study finds that even casual marijuana use causes cognitive abnormalities in the brain

Study finds brain changes in young marijuana users, Boston Globe (Kay Lazar)

Even casually smoking marijuana can change your brain, study says, Washington Post (Terrence McCoy)

4) Church of England selling off church buildings for tragic uses

Pubs, Flats, Supermarkets: Britain’s Churches Reborn, Newsdesk

California Baptist University Chapel Address

Transcript: The Briefing 04-16-14

The Briefing

 

 April 16, 2014

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

 

It’s Wednesday, April 16, 2014. I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

 

Does a blood moon tell us that the return of the Lord is near? There’s a great deal of Christian conversation about this and it does not reflect well on us. As Sarah Pulliam Bailey for Religion News Service reports, “In the wee hours of Tuesday [that’s yesterday] morning, the moon slid into Earth’s shadow, casting a reddish hue on the moon.” That’s called a blood moon, and it occurs when there is a total eclipse of the moon, when the moon slides into the shadow of the earth, and around the penumbra of the earth, the sun is reflected onto the moon and it shines red. Why does it shine red? For the very same reason that a sunset appears in hues of red: it is the reflected image of the light of the sun, and, yet, it is something that is now consuming a great deal of the attention of at least some Christians and some Christian teachers. As Sarah Pulliam Bailey reports:

 

There are about two lunar eclipses per year, according to NASA, but what’s unusual this time around is that there will be four blood moons within 18 months

 

Now this has happened before; it will happen again. As a matter of fact, it’s going to happen several times between now and the year 2100, but this tetrad, it occurring in the year 2014 and 15, and all of these red moons occurring during Jewish holidays, well this has sent a lot of Christians into speculation about the return of the Lord. Why? Because the blood moon is found in the Scripture, or at least they claim that the blood moon is found in the Scripture. There certainly is a statement in Scripture that the moon shall be turned into blood and this is tied to apocalyptic expectation connected to the Day of Judgment that is yet to come and to the return of the Lord Jesus Christ. In Acts chapter 2, verse 20, we read the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and notable day of the Lord. Remember that is Peter preaching on the day of Pentecost. And that refers back to Joel chapter 2, verse 31, in which the Prophet Joel declared, “The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord.”

 

So how should Christians think about this? Should we consider the fact that the blood moon, as is identified in terms of total lunar eclipse, is the moon being turned into blood that is part and parcel of biblical prophecy connected with apocalyptic expectation? Well, if we’re supposed to make that connection, that connection’s been made hundreds and hundreds of times since the time of Christ, and that’s the problem. And, yet, as Bailey reports:

 

A string of books have been published surrounding the event, with authors referring to a Bible passage that refers to the moon turning into blood.

 

Recent books capitalizing on the event include “Blood Moons: Decoding the Imminent Heavenly Signs” by Washington state author Mark Biltz; “Blood Moons Rising: Bible Prophecy, Israel, and the Four Blood Moons” by Oklahoma pastor Mark Hitchcock; and “Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change” by Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee.

 

Hagee’s book, by the way, has the most attention of all. It is now number four on the New York Times best-seller list in the section identified as advice or how to. It’s number 80 on USA Today’s best-seller list, and it has spent 152 days in Amazon’s top 100 books. Somebody’s buying these books and that means somebody’s buying the argument.

 

But, as I said, this does not reflect well on us. The Bible does not tell us that we are to spend our time with our eyes on the sky, trying to determine the time when the Lord Jesus Christ will return. Instead, the Lord Himself said when He returns, He expects to find us not looking up at the sky, simply waiting for His return, not involved in all kinds of apocalyptic expectation, but rather doing what the Lord commanded us to do: being active in witnessing in missions; being active in faithful discipleship, following the Lord Jesus Christ; being active in the affairs of life that are commanded as the Scripture tells us how we are to live in this world.

 

In his book, Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change, John Hagee argues that every time there is a tetrad, that is, four of these eclipses within a very close proximity of time, and when those eclipses take place within the timeframe of the Jewish religious holidays, something major happens to Israel. He points back to 1492, when he says the Jews were expelled from Spain and Columbus discovered America. In 1948, the modern state of Israel was born, and in 1967, Israel won the Six-Day War and recaptured Jerusalem. Well, looking at those dates, indeed, major events in at least Jewish history if not the nation of Israel, you can look at that and say, well, there must be something to that argument, until you look back and you recognize that these tetrads, at least as they took place in regard to at least some of the Jewish religious holidays, well, they took place so many times that there are more occasions in which blood moons took place and nothing happened than blood moons took place and something happened. But the reality is that this kind of speculation has to do probably more with astrology than it has to do with the Bible. The Bible simply gives us some very important pictures of the Day of Judgment and the pictures of anticipation and the eminence of the Lord’s return. It does not tell us that we are to figure out heavenly signs in order to understand the timetable for the return of the Lord. “When you see these signs, the Bible says, lift of your head and rejoice, your redemption draws nigh,” Hagee said in a sermon, and that was reported in the San Antonio Express-News.

 

As related to the blood moons, Hagee also said, “I believe that the heavens are God’s billboard and that He has been sending signals to planet Earth, but we have just not been picking them up.” Well here’s what we’re supposed to pick up: the Bible. And we’re supposed to look to the Bible as our sufficient revelation that tells us everything we need to know about the return of the Lord and what we are to be found doing when the Lord returns according to His own timetable. And, by the way, when you’re thinking about these tetrads and the Jewish religious holidays, also understand that Christians can make way too much of the Jewish religious holidays. They are simply not the timetable that we are instructed to follow. And, furthermore, in terms of these tetrads, eight sets of them are expected between now and the year 2100. NASA reports that the most unique thing about the upcoming tetrad—and remember that the first of these blood moons has already taken place; that was yesterday—is that they are visible from all or parts of the United States. That’s hardly an importance to biblical prophecy.

 

John Hagee points to the blood moons taking place in this tetrad—and, by the way, they are to take place on the dates of April 15 (that was yesterday), then October 8, and April 4 and April 28 of next year. Hagee says that this tetrad indicates that in this timeline, the rapture will occur, Christians will be taken into heaven, Israel will go to war in a great battle called Armageddon, and Jesus will return to Earth. According to Religion News Service, Hagee is going to the airwaves with his message as well as to the best-seller list.

 

So, in terms of the Christian worldview and the full authority of Scripture, what should Christians think about this? Well, what we should understand is that there will be heavenly signs when the Lord returns. As a matter fact, we are told that the sun and the moon will actually disappear because in the new heaven and the new earth, the Father and the Son will be our lights. We also come to understand that there are signs that are sent in terms of the heavens that we should note going all the way back to that star that declared the birth of the Christ child in Bethlehem. But we are not told that as Christians we’re supposed to be paying attention to the stars or paying attention to the planets or paying attention to the moon. As a matter of fact, we are supposed to be paying attention to the word and we’re supposed to understand that God has revealed all things in His words. We don’t need the heavens as a billboard in which God is speaking to us because God has told us that He speaks to us in His word, and the sufficiency of Scripture is undermined by this kind of Christian speculation. Instead, we ought to understand that what the Lord has told us to do is to know that that Day of Judgment is coming, and as the Lord says in John chapter 9, “We must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day. Night is coming that no man can work.” In other words, we are to be found busy in well doing; doing what Christ has commissioned His church to do, knowing that the day of judgment and the return of the Lord is near, and praying, as the book of Revelation instructs us to pray, “Even so, Lord, come quickly.”

 

Big news came out of India yesterday indicating that that nation’s top court had issued “a landmark verdict recognizing transgender rights as human rights, saying people can identify themselves as a third gender on official documents.” This reported by the Associated Press from New Delhi. What makes this story particularly interesting is that this verdict by India’s High Court has nothing to do with gay or homosexual people, but only with transgender people and it’s expected that there may be three million transgendered persons in the massive population of India. As the associated press reports:

 

The Supreme Court directed the federal and state governments to include transgendered people in all welfare programs for the poor, including education, health care and jobs to help them overcome social and economic challenges. Previously, transgendered Indians could only identify themselves as male or female in all official documents.

 

Now they’re all kinds of complexities in this. Perhaps one of the biggest issues of perplexity is exactly what the Indian High Court means with this, since that same High Court has upheld laws against behavior in terms of same-sex relationships, and it doesn’t have any applicability, in terms of this new ruling, to gay or homosexual people. Instead, it simply creates a third gender or a third sex known as transgender. It’s really interesting that in its ruling the court said, “The spirit of the Indian Constitution is to provide equal opportunity to every citizen to grow and attain their potential, irrespective of caste, religion, or gender.” Now, again, what makes this very interesting is that when this issue is taken up by at least most courts and in most cultures it is tied to the larger issue of the normalization of homosexuality, in terms of same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage. Indeed, however, in India, those things are not even on the political horizon, and yet the Indian High Court has decided to address this issue of a third gender. The Supreme Court specified in its ruling, says the Associated Press, that it would apply only to transgender people, not to gays, lesbians, or bisexuals. The court also ordered the government to put in place public awareness campaigns to lessen the social stigma against transgender people.

 

Perhaps the most important insight from this particular news coming from India is that every single culture, even those that have largely resisted the normalization of homosexuality, are being drawn into this global confusion over the issue of gender. The particular ruling by the Indian High Court indicates that that nation is struggling with the issue of gender, which has been largely associated with the larger questions about the revolution in human sexuality, without trying to enter into that total revolution and to put all issues of human sexuality on the table. And, yet, as those who are pushing for the normalization of homosexuality in India understand, this decision greatly helps their case because if indeed there is a third gender known as transgender, then there could also be multiple ways of expressing human sexuality outside the current laws of the nation of India; perhaps even outside of this court’s moral imagination at the present. In other words, the bottom line in this story from India is that the global world is now very much being confused about the issue of gender even as those issues were first raised in the modern industrialized countries. We are now exporting so many of these confusions to other countries and, furthermore, we are sharing confusion built upon confusion. This High Court case in India is hardly going to settle the issue. As almost everyone in India understands, it has now opened an entire door for future litigation. In other words, they’re about to experience what the Western world has experienced for the last several years.

 

But this news coming from India, also points to something very distinctive about the Christian worldview because when you look at this controversy in the global context, we come to understand that it is the Christian worldview based in Scripture that alone explains why gender is a part of the goodness of God’s creation rather than being a social construct or a biological reality that is simply imposed upon human creatures. That is a huge issue of worldview significance and it points to the uniqueness of Christianity and of the biblical worldview. Because, after all, if we understand the Scripture and we accept biblical authority, then we have no right to come up with a new category of gender because the Creator Himself has told us that for His glory and for our good He has created human beings as male and female. And so when Christians think about the transgender issue, uniquely among all the belief systems of the world, we think of it with the biblical accountability and with an understanding that gender is not ours to transform as we might wish. The Indian High Court might declare that there is a new third gender, but that doesn’t make it so; it just makes it a legal reality. Christians committed to the full authority of Scripture may be the last people on earth to know that we have no right to declare a new gender.

 

Back in the United States, very troubling news in the state of Colorado. The Colorado Senate is considering Senate Bill 175. Let me read to you the preface of that bill. Again, it’s Senate Bill 175 in the state of Colorado.

 

The bill prohibits a state or local policy that denies or interferes with an individual’s reproductive health care decisions or a state or local policy regarding reproductive health care that is inconsistent with, or that denies or interferes with accessed information based on, current evidence-based scientific data and medical consensus.

 

When you think about a moral and legal revolution, you can hardly come up with language that is more revolutionary than what is included in that preamble or preface to Colorado Senate Bill 175. Again, it is a blanket statement. It says that the bill prohibits a state or local policy—and here’s the wording—“that denies or interferes with an individual’s reproductive health care decisions.” That is a massive and all-encompassing category. Just imagine the moral and legal realities included within an individual’s reproductive health care decisions. Immediately, the issue here is with reference to abortion, but the actual impact of an individual’s reproductive health care decisions will be far ranging beyond the issue of abortion. This would eventually and virtually put every kind of restriction upon abortion under any circumstances completely outside of the range of the law. It would place Colorado in the position of saying that there can be no legal restraint of any kind upon an individual’s reproductive health care decisions. By the way, that would extend to something like human cloning. That language taken by itself has no limitations on it whatsoever.

 

At the end of this preface, the law states that all of the laws of Colorado related to an individual’s reproductive health care decisions, or any access to information concerning those decisions, must be based on current evidence-based scientific data and medical consensus. Well that’s a hugely problematic statement as well. Furthermore, what does it mean to cite evidence-based scientific data? Anyone who understands science understands that at many points in the scientific process there are competing bodies of data, not to mention competing interpretive theories about what the data mean. Furthermore, medical consensus?—well that’s like saying scientific consensus. A consensus is something that might exist at any one point in time, but that consensus is hardly a stable or enduring reality. Furthermore, the law doesn’t state who would have the authority to decide what is evidence-based scientific data or what is the medical consensus. This would place the state of Colorado in a radically new position, and that’s why those who are in the pro-choice and pro-abortion movements celebrate this as the most positive legislation they have seen in many decades.

 

As the Colorado Springs Gazette reports, the bill “essentially guarantees that state or local policies will not interfere with a woman’s decisions about reproductive issues such as abortion and contraception. It also prevents future restrictions on reproductive choice”—and here are the keywords—“not based on scientific evidence and medical consensus,” but, again, there is no mechanism in the law for anyone to determine what that scientific evidence is or what the medical consensus might be. Perhaps more than anything else this Senate bill in Colorado points to the great worldview divide on the issue the sanctity of human life, and you’ll notice that there really is no middle ground. Even though most Americans find themselves in some kind of muddled middle, what this law indicates is that there is no legitimate moral posture in the middle because you either believe that every single human being at every point of development is made in God’s image and thus has a sanctity of life, a life that must be defended, or you believe that an unborn human life has no value whatsoever and no status that would deserve any protection. This bill insists on that latter interpretation. This bill offers no middle ground. This bill, as a matter of fact, is the most aggressively pro-choice, pro-abortion bill in America in a very long time, and if it passes in Colorado, you can count on this, it will be coming to a state legislature very near you.

 

One final thought about Senate Bill 175 there in Colorado. There is a sense that we are experiencing a significant cultural shift to the left, in terms of morality, in terms of worldview. The bill that is now proposed in Colorado is only plausible if there is that kind of a shift, and we’re going to have to watch this development very, very closely because it will tell us a great deal not only about the state of Colorado and the issue of abortion, but will tell us a great deal about the moral state of United States of America and whether or not we are experiencing a vast moral shift that includes not only the issue of human sexuality and the issue of marriage, but also the issue of the sanctity of human life. It’s a chilling thought to believe that it might be true, but the evidence is it just might be true and we’ll have to face that reality and deal with.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember 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 04-16-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Fervor over “blood moon” does not reflect well on Christians

‘Blood moon’ sets off apocalyptic debate among some Christians, Religion News Service (Sarah Pulliam Bailey)

2) India’s recognition of 3rd gender reflects global confusion over sexuality

India’s Top Court Recognizes Third Gender Category, Associated Press (Nirmala George)

3) Revolutionary Colorado Senate Bill 175 won’t stop with outlawing any restrictions on abortion

Anti-personhood bill sparks CO abortion debate, KUSA (Brandon Rittiman)

Reproductive health bill SB175 faces scrutiny after Denver’s archbishop asks Colorado to oppose it 7News Denver (Marshall Zelinger)

Coming this fall in the Senate races: Big fights over Personhood, Washington Post (Greg Sargent)

Emotions over anti-abortion campaign and SB 175 clash during Saturday Mass at Planned Parenthood, Colorado Springs Gazette (Garrison Wells)

 

Transcript: The Briefing 04-15-14

The Briefing

 

 April 15, 2014

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

 

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

 

We still live in a world that is horribly distorted by hate, and sometimes that hatred leads to horrible violence. That took place on Sunday afternoon in Overland Park, Kansas, when a man entered a Jewish assisted-living facility and a Jewish community center and opened fire, eventually killing three people. In a remarkable understatement, the police chief of Overland Park, Kansas, John Douglass, said, “We are investigating this as a hate crime.” Why is that an understatement? Well, as The New York Times reports, the man who was arrested, Frazier Glenn Miller, a 73-year-old there in Missouri, also known as F. Glenn Miller, he is identified as the founder and grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. As much as we would like to think that the Ku Klux Klan and other organized hate groups are a part of the American past rather than the American present, an event like this erupts into our national consciousness and reminds us that living near to us, even perhaps next door to us, are people who are driven by a hatred that we can’t see until becomes fully evident. But in the case of a man who was known as the founder and grand dragon of a unit of the Ku Klux Klan, we’re looking at someone for whom it is virtually impossible to believe that this was not a hate crime; a crime that was instigated and intended in order to kill people and do harm to those who were defined by their religious beliefs—in this case their Jewish beliefs. The long time anti-Semitism of the Ku Klux Klan is well documented, but in a remarkable twist that points to the twisted rationality of a hate crime, the reality is that at least two of the three people who were killed on Sunday were not even Jewish; they were identified as being members of a Christian family.

 

One of the things that troubles us in this is the reality that there is a murderousness that is hidden in the human heart that we cannot see until it erupts, and that was certainly the case there in Overland Park, Kansas. Even as this man was known to law enforcement authorities as the founder and grand dragon of a unit the Ku Klux Klan, he was evidently not considered sufficiently dangerous that someone was watching him. Even as he was living in the community and had the freedom to negotiate that community, he eventually used that freedom in order to go to this Jewish community center and this Jewish assisted-living facility in order to do murderous harm. And as those three deaths indicate in Overland Park, Kansas, he did murderous harm.

 

The horrible reality for all of us is that we cannot read the human heart, even human hearts of those who are around us. The reality is that even our own hearts are, at least to some degree, a mystery to us, but when we see this kind of evidence of our inability to read human intentions, we recognize just how dangerous it is to live amongst fellow human beings. That’s just a part of the reality of our earthly existence. We live in a community in which there are people who are capable of doing horrible things. We should be very thankful that God has put limitations and He has put constraints upon human evil such that more of these murderous attacks and similar kinds of crimes do not happen. But the reality is that there are some persons who reach some kind of breaking point in which the evil in them comes out with an intentionality that leads to an eventuality, to a reality like the murderous attacks that took place in Overland Park, Kansas.

 

And, yet, we also realize the fact that today represents the one-year anniversary of the murderous attacks by the Tsarnaev brothers at the Boston Marathon in Boston, Massachusetts. You’ll recall that it was one year ago today that three people were killed, including one young child, and over 250 were injured when those two brothers—and we have to use the word alleged, given our legal context—when these two brothers are alleged to have placed canisters, including pressure cookers that were filled with murderous objects, and then explosives with the bombs then detonating and doing horrible damage. Many of those amongst the 250 who were injured have endured horrifying lower body injuries that have led to multiple amputations. The city of Boston is now a magnet for the kind of rehabilitative medicine that is necessary after the kind of attacks that have generally been limited to theaters of war.

 

On the one-year anniversary of the attacks at the Boston Marathon, Tamara Audi has written a report for The Wall Street Journal indicating that American mosques, including the mosque there in the Boston area where the Tsarnaev brothers frequented, that these mosques are trying to do their best to preach an anti-extremism message and also to recognize people who might be on the breaking point of this kind of violence. Tamara Audi’s article is very interesting because, as she relates:

 

In the months before the Boston Marathon attack, the elder Tsarnaev brother, Tamerlan, began to embrace radical Islam. He occasionally attended a Boston-area mosque, where worshipers remembered two outbursts.

 

On one occasion, during Friday prayers around Thanksgiving 2012, Mr. Tsarnaev challenged a speaker who told members that American holidays such as Thanksgiving and July 4 could be celebrated just as the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.

 

In January 2013, months before the bombing, he shouted at a speaker who compared Martin Luther King Jr. to Muhammad, calling him a “hypocrite.”

 

Afterward, mosque leaders gave him an ultimatum, saying that if he ever interrupted Friday service again he would be expelled.

 

 

And, yet, they did not understand that he was on the brink of a horrifying and murderous violence. Well, perhaps, none of us could have recognized the violence that was about to break out in Overland Park, Kansas, and in Boston, Massachusetts, in these incidents one year separated in time, but this much is clear: there was abundant evidence to know that the Tsarvaev brothers were becoming very active in extremist circles, and there was plenty of evidence that this man in Kansas City had actually already been identified as someone who was motivated by a deep and abiding anti-Semitism down to the fact that he was the founder and grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. In other words, sometimes when we say we didn’t know, the evidence comes back to us that perhaps we should have known, and that relates to the fact that sometimes we have to acknowledge we are simply incompetent to read those around us, even when they announce their hatred without announcing their intention.

 

Shifting the scene to Great Britain, it has just been two weeks since Britain has had legal same-sex marriage and you’ll recall that the legislation there adopted by Parliament specifically ordered that the Church of England may not perform same-sex ceremonies on the evening before the Saturday morning reality of legal same-sex marriage in Great Britain. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said that his church would then cease all public efforts to dissuade Parliament in terms of the legalization of same-sex marriage. But the issue of same-sex marriage is now threatening to split the Church of England into two or, at least, to split apart, and, furthermore, it has become the most explosive issue in the worldwide Anglican Communion. It was action taken by the American church, that is, the Episcopal Church US, that first started the conflagration of this controversy. That was back over a decade ago when the Episcopal Church moved to ordain an openly gay man as a bishop of the church. Later, you had a pushback from the Global South and now you have the Church of England moving towards an open debate on the issue of same-sex marriage and the larger issue of homosexuality. And something happened just in the last couple days that is going to make that an even more explosive debate. As The Telegraph, a major British newspaper reports, a priest has become the first in Britain to defy the Church of England’s ban on gay clergy marrying, and he’s not only a priest, he is a canon of the church. A canon is a priest who has had a leadership responsibility in one of the nation’s cathedrals. Those who are pressing for the Church of England to adopt a positive policy related to same-sex marriage have predicted that this priest will be the first of many gay clergy to marry. Just in recent days, a bishop of the church has declared that many of his episcopal colleagues, that is, many of his fellow bishops, are themselves gay and living in openly gay relationships with same-sex partners. He has called on them to come out of the closet, so to speak, and to get married in defiance of the church’s ban.

 

In another very interesting article in the telegraph, Damian Thompson was reporting that what is now going to happen is likely not only a fissure in the church, but an outright rebellion. In the article, Damian Thompson suggests that this first gay marriage of a clergyman in the Church of England is going to be followed by many more, and then, he says, once several defy their bishop and get married, the Diocese of London faces a public relations as well as a legal nightmare. Furthermore, he points to a certain inconsistency in the Church of England. He says, “This is a church, after all, that enjoins celibacy on gay priests, but not gay laity; a compromise that I can’t see surviving for much longer.”

 

Even though I differ profoundly with Damian Thompson about what should happen, I think I’m in agreement with them about what will happen, and that is the church will find it impossible not to ordain to gay priests, and at least part of that is because of their inconsistency in allowing for openly gay laity within the Church of England. But that’s the kind of compromise the Church of England is known for and, of course, the Church of England goes all the way back to the reign of Henry VIII, who established the church, at least in part, in order that he could get his divorce in order to marry his second wife. In other words, the Anglican Communion has been stuck in a certain form of compromise for its entire existence. And in terms of inconsistencies, consider this sentence in Damian Thompson’s essay, “To be clear, it is now perfectly legal for Church of England clergy to marry their gay partners. It’s only illegal for the established church to stage any same-sex wedding services itself.” That is the kind of a compromise that simply can’t stand any rational investigation. It’s a compromise that isn’t established upon any rational moral principle. It’s the kind of compromise that points to what happens when you abandon truth and make everything merely a matter of process and procedure and a secular analysis of equity. That’s exactly what’s going on in England, and that’s exactly where the Church in England finds itself now headed.

 

And that leads us back to an article that appeared last Friday in The New York Times. The headline in the article by Ben Fenwick and Michael Paulson is this: “Anglican Leader, Under Fire for Remarks, Urges Caution on Same-Sex Marriage.” A very revealing article indeed. As they write:

 

The archbishop of Canterbury, under fire for appearing to link expanded gay rights in the United States to violence against Christians in Africa, said on Thursday that he is advocating for a slow and deliberative response to same-sex marriage, mindful of the global implications.

 

The archbishop had appeared the week before in a radio interview in which he responded to a question about why the church did not allow its clergy members to perform same-sex marriages in England, even as the nation has made those marriages legal. He said:

 

I have stood by gravesides in Africa of a group of Christians who had been attacked because of something that had happened in America. We have to listen to that.”

 

In other words, the archbishop seemed to say that the reason the Church of England wasn’t moving towards the approval of same-sex marriage was because it could lead to violence against Christians in Africa. That is not an insane or illogical proposition, at least in terms of the likely result in Africa, but as he was challenged on it, the Anglican leader backtracked a bit—that’s why The New York Times ran this article—and he said:

 

I think we need to be aware of the realities on the ground, in our own countries and around the world, and to take those into account when we’re moving forward

 

It’s very interesting, by the way, that the Archbishop used those words “moving forward.” In other words, he seems to abandon any moral case against same-sex marriage by suggesting that the moral direction forward is toward the legalization of same-sex marriage. He also said this: “It doesn’t mean you necessarily do something other than you feel is the right thing to do, but you’re aware of the need perhaps to do it in a different way.” That is the language of absolute moral and biblical and theological equivocation. That is the word of someone who is not going to stand on principle, but is saying that if you’re determined you’re going to defy the law of the church, if you’re going to defy the authority of Scripture, if you’re going to defy the tradition and teaching of the church, then at least be careful how you do it. As if understanding the weakness of the archbishop’s statements, even from a secular worldview, The New York Times commented:

 

Archbishop Welby has been struggling to balance competing attitudes toward homosexuality in the worldwide Anglican Communion of which he is the spiritual leader.

 

Well this isn’t an example of stellar spiritual leadership; certainly not if that leadership is defined in terms of simply holding the Anglican Communion together. And that is an impossible task because you have the Global South that is going to stand firm on a biblical understanding of human sexuality and you have the churches of the North, including his own church now engaged in this debate and the American Episcopal Church already completely capitulating to the normalization of homosexuality, those are two positions that cannot be maintained within any sane or responsible church body.

 

At the conclusion of the article in The New York Times, we read that Archbishop Welby has said that “the Church of England has begun a two-year process of talking about same-sex marriage.” Well when you start a two-year process to talk about something, that means you’re not closing the door on anything on the basis of biblical authority. And in case your instincts are that this is going to lead to the normalization of homosexuality, you can be assured that the archbishop’s words that followed are going to give you ample evidence. He said:

 

We are not going simply to jump to a conclusion. We have to make sure that we hear the voice of the L.G.B.T. communities, which themselves in many parts of the world, including our own countries, suffer a great deal, and we also need to hear very carefully the voices of other members of the church, of other faiths, of ecumenical partners, so that it is a genuine process of listening, and in listening to each other, to listen to the voice of God.

 

What’s missing from that? The very fact that the Christian churches has stood for 2,000 years on the fact that we don’t have to wait for God to speak on this issue; that He has spoken; that He spoken clearly in Scripture; and that the church has had no problem through two millennia of understanding exactly what God has said in Scripture. If you’re inviting these other voices into the room, you’re inviting these other voices to cloud, to confuse, and eventually to cloak what God has said in Scripture. That’s exactly where this process will lead and you can count on it.

 

Meanwhile, just in case you need this rather painful reminder, today is Tax Day in the United States; the day when individual tax returns are due to the Internal Revenue Service. Laura Sanders, writing for The Wall Street Journal, asked the question, “Where do your tax dollars go?” And it’s a very interesting analysis; something that I think would shock most American citizens. For instance, if you take $100 of your tax bill and you asked the question, “Where has that $100 gone or where will it go?” Well here’s the analysis. Of that $100 paid in 2013 taxes, $23.68 will go to the Pentagon, that is, to defense and military benefits. That’s almost $25 out of your $100. Then $23.39 will go to Social Security. So you put together the Pentagon and Social Security, that’s almost $50 of your $100 paid in taxes. And then comes healthcare at $22.23. Again, over $20 of your $100 tax bill is given to healthcare. And that’s just in 2013; that number is certain to go up in years to come. So if you add those three things together, in terms of your $100 paid in taxes, you paid $100, but you paid $23.68 to the Pentagon, you paid $23.39 to Social Security, you paid $22.23 to healthcare—that’s $69.30. So of your $100, you paid $69.30 just to cover those three issues. And, by the way, we’re not paying for them; that’s just paying the current expenses. We’re not paying the real expenses of Social Security or of healthcare. But then where’s the rest of it going? Six dollars and forty-one cents to national interest; $4.02 to veterans benefits; $2.65 to transportation; $2.65 to civilian federal retirement; $2.43 to refundable tax credits; $2.39 to food stamps; $2 to unemployment insurance; $1.53 to supplemental security income; $1.35 to housing assistance; $1.32 to education; $.97 to foreign aid; $.85 to agriculture; and $2.13 to just about everything else. I think most Americans might perhaps be most surprised to know of that $100 paid in taxes that only $.97 goes to foreign aid. But on the other side of the equation, they would almost certainly be surprised to know that almost $70 of their $100 paid in taxes goes entirely to the defense and military benefits, Social Security, and healthcare.

 

What should Christians think of this? Well one thing we should certainly think is that government has the right to tax us, at least in terms of necessary services. Jesus made this very clear when He was asked a question about taxes, and He made a very profound point when He said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and under God what is God’s.” That isn’t really a lesson about taxation as much as it is about the distinction between the claims of God and the claims of Caesar. Jesus says if Caesar has put his image on the coin, if he wants it so badly, let him have it, but the point is that God has put His stamp on us. He has made us in His image, and Caesar has no right to our soul. Only God has the right to demand that. But Jesus did validate the fact that there is a responsibility to pay taxes, but that does not mean that any level of taxation is rational or right. And that’s where Christians need to enter into the discussion about whether or not we have a sane, responsible, just, and righteous system of taxation.

 

And, as giving evidence to the reality that question, The New York Times ran a very important article asking the question: Just what is the tax bite, in terms of the nation’s financial system? And that was ranked with other nations of the world. For instance, the total tax wedge in 2013 was the highest in the nation of Belgium, where 55.8% of all personal income is taxed. That’s right; over half—55.8%. In Germany, it’s almost 50%; that’s 49.3%. You go down to Sweden: 42.9%. Slovenia: 42.3%. Greece: 41.5%. And then you jump all the way down to the United States at 31.3%. Then you go down to Chile at 7.0% or New Zealand at 16.9%. What’s really interesting is that all of these various tax schemes reveal deep worldview considerations: considerations about the role of government, considerations about the moral dynamic of an economy, considerations about just how much should be redistributed from one citizen to others. It’s a very interesting set of questions and more than anyone can consider in one simple understanding. It is also more than the United States government is evidently willing to take on because at this point, our national government is merely saying we need more. And most of you don’t need any reminder of that on April 15th of any given year.

 

On this April the 15th, one sad realization is that there is little room or ground in our current national debate for a responsible, sane discussion about taxation. That’s a hard pill to swallow, especially on April 15th, but that’s reality. And as we know, reality is a very hard thing to escape. Well, I won’t tell you, “Happy Tax Day,” but I will thank you for listening to The Briefing.

 

Remember Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Remember to 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 where you will find a very important article I posted yesterday entitled “It’s Back—‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’ and the State of Modern Scholarship.” I discussed this issue on last Friday’s edition of The Briefing. You’ll find a full analysis at 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 04-15-14

1) Jewish Center Murders and Boston Bombing anniversary remind of the evil in human hearts

Man with history of anti-Semitism jailed in fatal shooting of three at Johnson County Jewish centers, Kansas City Star (LAURA BAUER, DAVE HELLING and BRIAN BURNES)

Man Kills 3 at Jewish Centers in Kansas City Suburb, New York Times (Emma G. Fitzsimmons)

Mosques Given New Message, Wall Street Journal (Tamara Audi)

2) Anglican inconsistencies and compromise on same-sex marriage cannot stand

Gay Anglican priest marries his boyfriend.  He’ll be the first of many, The Telegraph (Damian Thompson)

Church of England faces ‘crisis’ as gay priest weds, The Telegraph (Eward Malnick)

Gay Priest Marries in Church of England, The American Conservative (Rod Dreher)

Anglican Leader, Under Fire for Remarks, Urges Caution on Same-Sex Marriage, New York Times (BEN FENWICK and MICHAEL PAULSON)

3) Where do your tax dollars go? You may be surprised.

As Tax Day Nears, Where Does Your Money Go?, Wall Street Journal (Laura Sanders)

Taxes Creep Higher, New York Times

Transcript: The Briefing 04-14-14

The Briefing

 

 April 14, 2014

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

 

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

 

The big news in the United States over the weekend was the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. As Michael Shear of The New York Times reported, Kathleen Sebelius resigned “ending a stormy five-year tenure marred by the disastrous rollout of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act.” Now when the lead paragraph in The New York Times describes your departure as having been tied to a “disastrous rollout of a major legislative achievement,” this is how you can expect historians will remember your legacy. Shear continued to report, Mr. Obama accepted Ms. Sebelius’s resignation, and then on Friday morning nominated Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to replace her.  He then reported:

 

The departure comes as the Obama administration tries to move beyond its early stumbles in carrying out the law, convince a still-skeptical public of its lasting benefits, and help Democratic incumbents, who face blistering attack ads after supporting the legislation.

 

And he’s helping them, supposedly, to “survive the midterm elections” in the fall.

 

But what makes this really interesting, from a Christian worldview perspective, is what this tells us about leadership on the one hand, and what it tells us about this legislative matter on the other. Kathleen Sebelius comes, on the one hand, the fall person for the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare, but as virtually every major newspaper and news sources indicated, her resignation came after an excruciatingly long period in which she bore a good deal of responsibility for this disastrous rollout. Leadership always comes with major responsibilities. That’s what leaders do. Leadership in a public context with this kind of massive responsibility comes with even closer scrutiny. One of the big questions that has hovered around Kathleen Sibelius ever since she took this job is the extent to which she would become the administration’s front person for the Affordable Care Act. It’s an interesting question when you consider the fact that the legislation is most often name for the president. It’s often called ObamaCare. But Kathleen Sebelius was the leader. She was the manager that had responsibility for the rollout of this major legislation; legislation that by the intention of the administration covers one-seventh of the entire American economy.

 

And the disastrous rollout was nothing less than disastrous. It still is disastrous, and that’s why many people are pointing to Sylvia Mathews Burwell, currently the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the nominee that President Obama announced for the position to succeed Kathleen Sebelius, as someone who is primarily known as a manager, not having any particular expertise in the field of healthcare. Kathleen Sebelius was the opposite: a great interest in healthcare, but no ability in terms of managing this kind of massive program.

 

Foreign Affairs magazine, looking at the issue of the ObamaCare rollout, pointed out that the Obama Administration itself is woefully short on management talent. The president himself has demonstrated very little attention or attentiveness to management. As a matter fact, as Foreign Affairs points out, the largest management skill that he had ever demonstrated was managing thirty people, roughly, who worked in a senatorial office before he became the chief executive officer of the United States of America, the president of the United States. So from a leadership perspective, there are huge lessons to be learned here. Responsibility follows that kind of title, that kind of role. When you’re the Secretary of Health and Human Services, you do bear responsibility for what happens in your department. And that is a massive department, and its failure was absolutely massive. But there are other elements to this that are also very important. One of those has to do with the fact that Kathleen Sebelius, as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is also responsible for the disastrous policies that are related to ObamaCare. And here I am not speaking about the policies directly related to the health insurance issue, in terms of the coverage, but rather the items that are included within the coverage, the infamous contraception mandate.

 

One of the things in retrospect that comes to our mind is why in the world the Obama Administration would’ve adopted this kind of draconian policy that was sure to bring all kinds of opposition. It could’ve accomplished the same thing, the same end, making sure that all women have access to free contraceptive through ObamaCare, by a means other than requiring employers, including Christian and other religious employers, to violate their consciences in so doing. But the Obama Administration led by Kathleen Sebelius in this lead role has defended the very way that it put that contraception mandate together, even as this has placed the administration in the embarrassing position, you would think, of being sued by everyone from Hobby Lobby to the Little Sisters of the Poor. But Kathleen Sebelius will also have that on her record as she leaves office as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

 

The Wall Street Journal points to a very important issue in its Review and Outlook Editorial Page over the weekend. It says that the United States Senate must look very, very closely at Sylvia Mathews Burwell as the proposed new Secretary for Health and Human Services. She was confirmed by the United States Senate by a vote of 96 to 0 last April when she became the White House budget director. That tells you that she has at least the ability to garner a great deal of support from within the United States Senate, but when it comes to this role, she’s taking on a responsibility that is on the front lines of every major cultural controversy you can think of in terms of America’s political life right now, and this is going to place her appropriately under much greater scrutiny. She received 96 votes for and none against her confirmation last April. I think it is a safe prediction to say she’s going to have a much more difficult time being confirmed as this position is now the issue before the Senate. But you can count on the fact that this is why the founders of our Constitution gave the United States Senate the role of advice and consent on this kind of presidential appointment. Regardless of the president, regardless of the composition of the Senate, the Senate has a constitutional responsibility to offer both advice and consent. This is going to be a very lively conversation. You can count on it.

 

A hugely interesting article appeared in yesterday’s edition of The New York Times. It was a large piece by Adam Grant, who is a Professor of Management and Psychology at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s the author of a book entitled, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success. He asked the very interesting question: How can parents raise moral children? That’s an important question, an especially important question for Christian parents. The article is devoid of a Christian worldview, and that becomes a very important point, but there is a great deal of material here for our thinking. Adam Grant writes:

 

What does it take to be a good parent? We know some of the tricks for teaching kids to become high achievers. [But] although some parents live vicariously through their children’s accomplishments, success is not the No. 1 priority for most parents. We’re much more concerned about our children becoming kind, compassionate and helpful.

 

Now at that point, I simply want to say I want to agree with Adam Grant on that assessment; I’m not sure if I can agree with him. I think that if many parents were asked what they really want for their children and if we’re looking not just at what they say, but what they do, how they treat their children and how they reward them, I think there’s every indication that for a good many parents raising a moral child would take a decidedly second-place to raising a successful child.

 

But let’s consider for a moment that he’s right; that what most parents want to do is to raise a moral child—nd he’s looking at morality in terms of certain moral assets, including such things as generosity. He writes, “When people in 50 countries were asked to report their guiding principles in life, the value that mattered most was not achievement, but caring.” And, yet, he writes, despite this significance, it turns out that most parents seem to be somewhat confused about how we can actually raise our children to be generous and otherwise moral. He asked a very interesting question: Are some children simply good-natured or not? In other words, are they simply made that way and born that way? Here’s where his research gets really interesting from a worldview perspective. He writes, “Genetic twin studies suggest that anywhere from a quarter to more than half of our propensity to be giving and caring is inherited.” Now let’s just pause for a moment. That’s a genetic argument. In other words, he’s arguing that our genes have at least 50% to do—that’s what he says here—have to do with whether or not we are generous people.

 

Now this is evidence of the naturalistic fallacy that is very much in the driver’s seat of so much of our contemporary conversation and is right now the dominant worldview that is taking the form of the authority within the larger academic community. The idea is that we are essentially biological creatures, and that our biology determines our thinking and our consciousness as well. This leads to host of issues, including how in the world you can hold someone responsible if decision-making and morality are simply biological products, but in this case, Professor Grant says that approximately 50% of whether or not a child will be a moral person is determined by genetics.

 

Now Christians have to reject that kind of mathematical formula. We would not reject the argument that our genes have a great deal to do with who we would become, but we also recognize that genes are limited in terms of the kind of impact they can have on character and personality, and especially when it comes to the issues of morality. But Professor Grant goes on, arguing that if half is tied to this kind of genetic background, then, as he says, that leaves a lot of room for nurture. And the evidence on how parents raise kind and compassionate children, he says, flies in the face of what many of even the most well-intentioned parents do in praising good behavior, responding to bad behavior, and communicating their values. There follows a very interesting and long essay in which he argues that by the time most children are two, they have at least some kind of rudimentary morality. They understand that being generous is, at least in the eyes of most parents, a good thing. He then asked the question, “Should be praise them? Should we reward them?” He argues, based on the evidence of his scientific studies, that children, even at those youngest ages of two and then perhaps five, when they show generosity, they should be praised, but they should not be rewarded. In other words, you don’t want to give them rewards for just baseline moral behavior. He then writes:

 

Many parents believe it’s important to compliment the behavior, not the child — that way, the child learns to repeat the behavior. Indeed, I know one couple who are careful to say, “That was such a helpful thing to do,” instead of, “You’re a helpful person.”

 

But then he points out most children can’t separate those two things. Most children at very young ages can’t separate, “You’re a bad person,” from, “You did a bad thing,” or, “You’re a good person,” or, “You did a good thing.” They see themselves as unitary holes. And, by the way, that’s something that in one sense is a reality we should not outgrow. But as children reach older ages when analytical thinking takes place and they become more complex moral creatures, he says that you should certainly praise the behavior and you should also, when a child makes a bad moral decision, you should try to parent them such that they feel guilt but not shame. A very interesting category distinction from a secular worldview. He quotes research by June Price Tangney, a psychologist, in arguing that “shame is the feeling that I am a bad person; whereas guilt is the feeling that I have done a bad thing.” He continues:

 

Shame is a negative judgment about the core self, which is devastating: Shame makes children feel small and worthless, and they respond either by lashing out at the target or escaping the situation altogether. In contrast, guilt is a negative judgment about an action, which can be repaired by good behavior. When children feel guilt, they tend to experience remorse and regret, empathize with the person they have harmed, and aim to make it right.

 

If we want our children to care about others, we need to teach them to feel guilt, he says, rather than shame when they misbehave. That’s a very interesting dichotomy: shame on the one hand, and guilt on the other.

 

From a Christian worldview perspective, we need to note that this is the kind of distinction that the secular worldview has been working at for the better part of a century. And it goes back to exactly what Professor Grant is arguing here; that a child who misbehaves is not a bad person—this doesn’t say anything about the child’s core self, to use his language—but, rather, it is merely evidence of a behavior, a bad behavior. But what this worldview can’t explain is why a supposedly good person would do any kind of bad thing. Bad actions turnout by this worldview to be nothing more than barely disguised accidents that tend to happen to a moral person. And that’s a problem because the reality is that whether we’re thinking about our children or ourselves, we know that the reason we do bad things is because of something that is in us right at the core. Of course, the Christian worldview explains this. It explains that we are sinners and that sin has corrupted every part of who we are. It doesn’t mean that sin has destroyed the image of God within us; to the contrary, we must be very thankful that even as it has corrupted the image of God, it hasn’t destroyed it, but we also need to understand that the problem, the problem that we know within ourselves, isn’t merely that we do bad things, but rather that those bad things come out of a heart that is anything but purely good. That’s why for Christians the indispensable category is sin, and that’s why as Christian parents, we have to lead our children to understand that things aren’t bad merely because they break some kind of human moral code, nor are they merely bad because they make us feel bad when we do them. They’re bad because they grieve the heart of God, they violate His law, they fall short of His glory. And this comes down to that indispensable word to the Christian worldview which is sin, and sin, as it turns out, is also the category offered to us by God’s revelation in Scripture to explain the link between what we do and who we are. That’s why it’s very important that as children grow older within Christian homes parented by Christian parents, when the Christian worldview is what animates and drives what we hope to communicate to our children, the key insight comes when that child comes to the understanding that is virtually the opposite of what Professor Grant hopes for. In other words, we have to hope that our children come to understand not only that they sin, but that they are sinners. That’s a very crucial biblical category. We need salvation—the salvation that comes only to us by the atonement encompassed by Christ—not because we merely do bad things and sin, but because we are sinners. We are sinners by disposition. As David says in the Psalms, it was in sin that his mother conceived him. Sin wasn’t something that happened to him; sin is something that he is.

 

And this is why from a Christian worldview perspective, when a Christian parent answers the question, how to raise a moral child, we have to deal with that category of sin, and we have to understand that this should lead to a child that understands that shame is something that is always associated with sin, but because of the grace and mercy of God extended to us in Christ, that shame can be translated into the knowledge of our salvation and the forgiveness of sins, and the issue of guilt, while somewhat lexically, that is, in terms of vocabulary, distinguishable from shame, guilt is the immediate response we have which is not merely an emotional response. It is also a response that tells us that we are judged, and that’s why from a secular perspective, the word guilt is really a big problem. As a matter fact, most secular psychologies try to overcome both shame and guilt by suggesting that one somehow behave better and, furthermore, come to understand that inside we’re really not bad; we’re really good. The problem with that is that it flies right in the face not only of the biblical reality, but of common sense. As G.K.Chesterton said a long time ago, the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine is original sin. As he says, if you can understand anything you meet in humanity or you see in the mirror, the one necessary category is the one thing alone that explains who you are and that is original sin. But the other problem with the merely secular understanding of guilt is that it acts like it’s merely an emotional disposition or a social response. The guilt is actually from the biblical worldview, an objective reality. Guilt is something that is real because it points to a real transgression of a real law and it points to a real judgment that is coming. In that sense, the healthy response to guilt and shame is to turn to the grace and mercy of God extended to us in Christ, and apart from that atonement, there is no rescue. Guilt and shame cry out to us we are sinners in need of a Savior, and, thus, the good news of the gospel is infinitely good and it’s infinitely necessary. And that’s why this very interesting article by Adam Grant in the pages of The New York Times about how to raise moral children may indeed help some secular parents to understand how to raise children who are at least to some degree better behaved.

 

But it won’t get to the heart of the problem, and this also points to the fact that hell will be filled with many moral people, at least in terms of the human understanding of morality. The problem here is that being moral in this sense simply isn’t enough. The gospel isn’t moralism. That’s an article I published at albertmohler.com last week. The gospel isn’t moralism and moralism isn’t the gospel, and only the gospel explains how by the grace and mercy of God we can actually be in the right and proper gospel sense moral people and raise moral children. The article by Adam Grant is not to be disparaged and disregarded as simply offering no wisdom whatsoever. It does offer an invaluable window into the secular thinking and the limitations of that thinking when it comes to an issue as basic as raising our children and a question as basic as guilt and shame.

 

Finally, a brilliant article—and we’ve come to expect this kind of insight from Naomi Schaefer Riley. She writes that “extended families are like gold to working moms.” Working moms have been so much in the news in the last several months, especially in the last several days. She writes in the pages of The New York Post:

 

The minds of working mothers are a constant jumble of responsibilities, each demanding our attention at the same time. You know who doesn’t live in this same state of constant frenzy? People who live near their extended families — people who can call grandma when things get too much.

 

It’s a very, very interesting article, and, by the way, it doesn’t apply just to working moms, that is, those who work outside the household, but the working moms who are working inside the household. Because it comes down to the basic fact that we have lost a great deal of wisdom, a great deal of support, a great deal of health, and a great deal of helpfulness when we have become so socially isolated and we have disrupted the natural family and divided it away from the extended family because the natural family naturally produces an extended family. When I think back to my childhood, I realize just how much I received from four grandparents who loved me and who actually helped to parent me. I was at home in their homes almost as much as I was in the home of my own parents, and to know my parents was to know their parents. And their parents loved me and cared for me. My two grandfathers were like, well, additional fathers to me, and especially my father’s father who played such a big role in my life, and never at the expense of my father, but as an extension of my father. And I think immediately to what Naomi Schaefer Riley is writing about here. The loss of extended families, the distance of so many grandparents from their grandchildren, explains why so many moms—and you might add to that dads—are frazzled and frenzied. Because, as it turns out, God’s plan was not merely for us to be a natural family, but for natural families to live in situation with other natural families, and, where possible, and not disrupted by all the things that happen to us these days, you have extended family close by. I realize that full well as I think about the fact that my wife and I raised our children further than we would’ve liked from their grandparents. We would’ve liked for them to have been close. We feel the loss that they were not. The call of God took us over 1,000 miles away from where the grandparents lived when our children were young, but we do feel that loss and we do celebrate the gain when you can have families and extended families living in close proximity.

 

But this raises a further issue when it comes to the Christian church. The church is after all a family of families, and the church is made up of those who are family to each other even beyond the bounds and the boundaries of the natural family. The church should be, in the representation of its life as a local congregation, an extended family of sorts, and so a Christian response to this very insightful article by Naomi Schaefer Riley might well be that wherever God calls Christian families to be, our churches should become, in so far as possible, extended families. That’s a sweet thought and an important thought when we think about all the stresses and strains of everyday life and the needs of our own families. There’s a real loss in the loss of the extended family and there’s real wisdom in the knowledge of what benefits come when extended families live in proximity.

 

Thanks for listening to The Briefing. Remember Ask Anything: Weekend Edition. Last Saturday, a new edition was released; more will come, including this Saturday. Just call with your question in your voice. Just call 877-505-2058. That’s 877-505-2058. Let me just tell you, we have thus far received over 300 questions; we’re working through them. We’ll try to get to yours as soon as we can. 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 04-14-14

Podcast Transcript

1) Kathleen Sebelius Resigns – With leadership comes responsibility

Sebelius Resigns After Troubles Over Health Site, New York Times (Michael Shear)

The Key to Successful Tech Management, Foreign Affairs (Clay Shirky)

Advice and ObamaCare Consent, Wall Street Journal (Editorial)

Sebelius and Accountability, Wall Street Journal (Editorial)

2) Raising “moral kids” from a secular worldview ignores the true problem: Sin

Raising a Moral Child, New York Times (Adam Grant)

Moralism is Not the Gospel (But Many Christians Think it Is), AlbertMohler.com (R. Albert Mohler, Jr.)

3) The great blessing of extended family and the importance of the local church

Extended families are like gold for working moms, New York Post (Naomi Schaefer Riley)