Transcript: The Briefing 10-03-14

The Briefing

 

October 3, 2014

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

 

It’s Friday, October 3, 2014.  I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

1) Rise of ISIS reveals world is not becoming less religious

The rise of the Islamic State and other terrorist groups in terms of their contemporary threat to the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, has shocked many people – but it hasn’t shocked those who’ve been watching what has been going on in the world around us. A very interesting article comes from Pankaj Mishra, writing at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, when he writes about what he calls the New Crusades. As he writes,

“The so-called “return” of religion shocks us [he put the word return in quotation marks], it is because we are too accustomed to reading its premature obituary. A range from European prophets, from Marx to Max Weber, shared the belief that democracy, economic growth, technology and mass culture would wean people away from reliance on the supernatural and usher them into a truly ‘disenchanted’ secular world. [But as Mishra writes] As the process of modernization moved from the West to the non-West, [they believed that] religion would retreat from the public into the private sphere.”

However he says,

“For much of the world’s population, however, religion has continued to provide the basic vocabulary for conversation about society, politics, law and the good life. In fact, the threatening incursions of the West and the modern world in the 19th century stimulated a reinterpretation of religious faith and identity in many Asian and African countries.”

In other words, here as Pankaj Mishra writes, whereas many Western intellectuals promised that the modern world would become more and more secular in many parts of the world, he writes that the world has actually become far more religious; where even those areas that were more secular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are more explicitly religious now, at least in terms of the thinking and what he calls the basic vocabulary of the citizens of those countries. And furthermore, when you look at his article entitled “The New Crusades,” you understand that he’s making another point as well. It’s not just that in many parts of the world that there’s been a resurgence of religious belief, he’s writing that even in the parts the world declared to be most secular many people haven’t gone along with the secular trend.

I think his article is important for several reasons; one of them is of course the fact that he uses exactly the right kind of nomenclature to explain what’s going on. As he says,

“For … [many people in]…the world … religion has continued to provide [this is very important] the basic vocabulary for conversations about society, politics, law and the good life.”

As a matter fact, you can talk about the modern secular dream in the West being the dream of coming up with a way of having those conversations with out a theological vocabulary. But as we comment again and again on The Briefing the impossibility of that task continues to shine through. It shines through when you find modern secular intellectuals forced to use the word ‘evil,’ making that kind of severe moral judgment when you have the beheading of a Western journalist. No other word will do, and yet the word ‘evil’ is resisted amongst the secular elites, precisely because it has so many theological connotations; it has an overarching theological sense about it that simply can’t be denied. And now you have this article by Pankaj Mishra coming back to say that the elites continue to be surprised by the return of religion, but the big story is it never left. I think this article by Pankaj Mishra is actually brilliant in another way as well, because as he points out – even the anti-religious secular theories of so many intellectuals in the West, they were driven with a religious fervor that these intellectuals proposed even as they claimed to the end to all religious beliefs. He writes,

“Modern nationalism itself has the symbolism and ritual of religion: a missionary belief in cultural distinctiveness, a political theology that includes declarations of independence and constitutions, and civic liturgies demanding reverence for the flag and founding fathers. Religious symbols and narratives have long permeated even the evidently secularized West.”

Well, I think any cogent analysis will indicate that secularization is real, but it’s never as even, it’s never as continuous, it’s never as pervasive, as many of intellectuals want to claim. And as he writes, even when you find rather authentically secular moments, those moments tended not to last. Just consider the claims for secularity made by the French revolutionaries and how short-term many of those pretensions turned out to be. Mishra points out that even when it comes to nationalism, the nationalism often has a theological element to it that can’t be denied. Queen Elizabeth remains, as he says, the head of the Church of England; even today, supposedly secular Germany, finances its churches and allows them to tax their members. As he says, even in the increasingly secular United States of America most political debates include explicitly religious, if not theological, elements. He then writes,

“Clearly, our faith in the miracle of secular modernization defies all evidence of the intensity, persistence and variety of religious belief in the West as well as the East. More fatefully, it hinders us from questioning whether there is such a thing as the purely secular.”

From time to time an article like this appears that simply cries out for attention. And this article by Pankaj Mishra at Bloomberg BusinessWeek certainly does, because it speaks a word of ringing truth. The word of truth that even in a secular age, you can’t suppress the religious vocabulary – it comes out again and again. As much as you might want to eradicate theology from the intellectual public square, you can’t – because you find yourself required to use words like ‘evil’ when no other word will do. It was that great Christian theologian Augustine who pointed out in the fifth century that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God – it is true that nature abhors a vacuum and there is no such thing as a theological vacuum, there is no such thing as a truly secular moment or a truly secular state. And it is important that we realize that. And it’s important that Christians understand that that is not simply a sociological reality, it is because God made us as human beings in his image and made us to know him – whether we want to know him or not.

2) Fall of Arab civilization reminder of danger of seeds of barbarism to any civilization

Next, we often talk about the achievement of society or civilization – far too many American Christians take for granted the fact that civilization just exist, it doesn’t just exist. It is the product of a worldview that is embodied in certain acts, in social trust, that builds up a society and eventuates into a civilization. And a civilization can be built and a civilization can be destroyed. That leads us to a very important article that appeared in Politico Magazine, the article is written by Hisham Melham and he writes about Arab civilization; saying that the barbarians are winning and the civilization is collapsing. In his article he writes this,

“Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. [He continued,] Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays—all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf—which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos—and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.”

Now this article, which amounts to an elegy for civilization in the Arab world, is heartbreaking – it’s tragic – it’s heartbreaking to read the words of an Arab intellectual who, looking at the Arab civilizations of the past, says they are just that – of the past. The hopes had been dashed; the barbarians are now in control. And those of us who are Christians looking at this to a biblical worldview have to understand the sheer tragedy of what he’s writing about here – it is an authentic tragedy, it is an unquestionable tragedy. And the rise of the Islamic State and so much mayhem in part to the Arab world is the demonstration of the fact that when civilization disappears, something far more ominous and dangerous appears as its replacement.

But we also need to look at this and consider the fact that the barbarians, as he says, in the Arab world were always in the gates – they were just held in check. And that’s certainly true for every single civilization. As many people – historians of old and more recently – have noted, Rome fell not just because of the barbarians outside but because of the barbarism that spread within. And the point made by this article in Politico Magazine is that the roots of the barbarian that have overtaken the Arab world came from not outside those societies but inside. And that’s where American Christians looking at this from a Christian worldview have recognize that this isn’t just about the Arab world and the demise of Arab civilization, it’s also about the fact that when the seeds of barbarism are sown in any civilization, they eventually bear fruit in the kind of lawlessness, anarchy, and collapse of civilization, we find here. We should not rest in any false assumption that there is some divine providence that protects America and Western civilization from the same kind of collapse. We look at examples of old, like the fall the Roman Empire, and we look at examples closer to hand, such as the fall of Arab civilization, and we understand that when barbarism is set loose inevitably the barbarians win. You can’t limit this to the Arab world – when barbarianism rules anywhere, the civilization dies.

3) Consent laws replace objectivity of marriage with subjective experience as basis of morality 

And next, earlier this week we talked about the moral insanity demonstrated by the fact that the governor California signed a bill that changes the law in California away from a ‘no means no’ understanding of sexual morality to a ‘yes means yes’ understanding; in other words, redefining consent. But as we discussed, consent simply can’t bear the weight of sexual morality. What you have here is the accusation that the way to respond to an epidemic of rapes happening on American college and university campuses, is to educate young people on how to have sex outside of marriage in a way that will create a safe moral environment by the category of consent. One of the things we need to point out is that from a Christian biblical worldview, there is a huge problem here before you even get to how the world you might define consent. What we’re looking at here is the proposal that you shift the moral question about sexuality away from what’s called an ontological reality to a subjective experience, or you might say away from an objective institution like marriage towards a subjective experience. Any sexual morality that ignores the objective reality of marriage as the moral norm, and tries to exchange instead a morality based on a subjective experience, is going to discover that you can never define that subjective experience. That kind of shift is not only wrong, it’s actually impossible to carry out.

We talked about the fact that even as now, you have these educational projects going on in American college and university campuses, trying to tell young men that ‘no means no’ has to give way ‘yes means yes,’ saying that they have a clear vocal or visual and unambiguous and continual consent in order to continue in a sexual conquest. You know, a further insanity demonstrated in article that appeared just days ago in Slate.com when Amanda Hess writes that a new app for the iPhone has been developed in order to indicate consent. This article by Amanda Hess goes on to try to explain how all the options in this app work. You really don’t need to know them, let me just explain this: what you have here is a classic example of insanity turned into a consumer product. Here you have an app for the iPhone, also available on Google Play, in which the biggest most consequential moral decisions of life are exchanged and minimized for ‘good to go,’ ‘yes, but..,’ ‘No thanks.’ Look at this and you recognize, here you have the institutionalization, the commercialization of this kind of moral insanity. And you’ll also notice something else; look how quick the market is to respond to this. Governor Brown signed that bill into law on Sunday night, and already you have people saying “we’ve got an app for that.”

4) Individualized preferred gender pronouns underline centrality of gender to human identity

Next, when it comes to moral insanity it’s hard to top an article by Allan Metcalf that appeared recently in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The title of the article, “What’s Your PGP?” If you don’t have a PGP, perhaps you need to know that at least some academics think you need one. It is your preferred gender pronoun. This is what Metcalf writes,

“It’s a question we didn’t have to answer in the 20th century. In fact, it’s a question that didn’t exist until recently”

Now let me just pause and say, he’s profoundly right about that. This was a question we didn’t have to answer in the 20 century or any previous century of human existence. And as he says, it’s a question that didn’t exist until recently. And the fact that it does exist is a demonstration of the moral confusion of our times. And it’s the kind of article, the kind of development that demands Christian attention. He’s talking about the fact that when you look at the now multiplication of all these initials for gay lifestyles, in fact it’s hard to come up with the adequate word for that, you have LGBTQQ2IA and as some are using the acronym “Quiltbag.” When you look at this, Metcalf says,

“Nowadays we understand that anatomy isn’t destiny; it’s your choice to be called lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning, intersex, asexual—or something else.”

And then he goes on to say,

“That’s not a mis-statement. It is your choice, we have been told. We have reached the point that regardless of anatomy, you can choose your gender identity. And you can choose to change your gender identity as often as you change your clothes.”

Which, he says, brings up a question we didn’t have before: what pronouns should others use in talking about you? And then, celebrating the revolution, he writes,

“Fortunately, it’s not a problem in direct conversation, where first- and second-person pronouns are used: I/me/mine, you/your/yours. Those are gender-neutral and all-encompassing, regardless of your gender identity.”

He says, but the problem also doesn’t exist in the third person plural when you say: they/them/their. No, the problem is in the first person other than the plural. When someone talks about the singular you, using the third person – this is where the problem comes when in the new sexual revolution you can’t say ‘him’, and you can’t say ‘her’; you can’t say ‘he’ and you can’t say ‘she.’ So what are you going to say? Well, according to this article – meant to be taken very seriously on American college and university campuses and in the society beyond – we are told you need to ask ‘what’s your PGP?’ Which stands for preferred gender pronouns.

Allan Metcalf points to a series of suggestions made at Carleton College, a Liberal college that has a sexuality and gender activism club, which suggests

“Kick things off by asking: ‘Do you have a preferred pronoun?’ Recognize that while this might make some people confused, it’s also an awesome opportunity to explain why you’re doing it, and it will really mean something to those who have been misidentified or care about the issue.”

So now you’re supposed to start every conversation on an American college or university campus, and in the society beyond, by asking: do you have a preferred pronoun? Carleton’s group, again it’s a sexuality and gender activism club, says,

“One great way to ask for preferred pronouns is to incorporate preferred pronoun into introductions, particularly in student organization meetings. So, for example, you could say, ‘Hey, I’m Schiller, I’m from Germany, I’m a super-senior, English and Philosophy double major and my preferred pronouns are he/him.’ See [says the article], wasn’t that easy? Your turn!”

Nationwide, the Gay Straight Alliances for Safe Schools explains the question is necessary.

“Could a person identify as female and also prefer he/him/his? Sure!” And as [the Carleton college group], “Don’t expect that if you ask once, you’re set forever—people’s (gender) identities can change, so check in!”

The group known as the Gay Straight Alliances for Safe Schools has put out an article entitled “What the Heck is a PGP?” and in answering it, they say this:

Some people prefer that you use gender neutral or gender inclusive pronouns when talking to or about them. In English, the most commonly used singular gender neutral pronouns are ze (sometimes spelled zie) and hir. “Ze” is the subject pronoun and is pronounced /zee/, and “hir” is the object and possessive pronoun and is pronounced /heer/. [Here] is how they are used: ‘Chris is the tallest person in class, and ze is also the fastest runner.’ ‘Tanzen is going to Hawaii over break with hir parents. I’m so jealous of hir.’”

Well, here you see absolute insanity played out as a moral mandate on American college and University campuses. And furthermore, the documents from these groups I hold in my hand is a multipage document that includes charts of exactly how you should consider alternative ways of doing this; giving every single individual on the University campus an equal right to claim a completely different set of pronouns and to demand that they be used for now – reserving the right to change at any point what those pronouns may be; as Metcalf says, as quickly as one can change your clothes. This kind of insanity is now ruling in American academic life. These rules I’m pointing out here, are not merely suggestions on some campuses, there now being legislated in terms of the speech codes that are expected to be used by all professors, administrators, and fellow students. And of course what happens on the American college and University campus never stays there, nor is it intended to. This is the launching of a further moral revolution that is intended, eventually, to show up in your local high school and eventually in your kindergarten and preschool. And pretty soon, we are told that this is the only way you can talk acceptably in public. And of course what it amounts to is a direct rebellion against the idea that human beings are made as male and female, and that these are morally significant and reality significant categories.

And it’s not just the college and University campus as we’ve said, a recent edition of the Washington Post, included under the national common, an article entitled “When no gender fits: A quest to be seen as just a person.” This is a really important article from the Christian worldview. Monica Hesse he writes, that what happens in terms of the experience of some modern individuals is that they want to identify with no gender what so ever. The article here centers on an individual known as Kelsey Beckham, who doesn’t want to be known as male or female – or for that matter anything else – but wants to be known as no gender whatsoever. Now this is a truly radical proposal, it’s radical enough to gain the attention of the Washington Post. But the writer for the Washington Post seems to think that this is probably something that ought to make common sense if only we can figure it out.

The modern secular worldview has disarmed itself from having any moral mechanism for dealing with an argument like this. If you agree that every single human being, at every single moment, has the right to determine what they are in terms of gender and sexuality, even to demand a completely new vocabulary, maybe even an individual vocabulary, you’re absolutely disarmed from being able to say “we don’t know what a person is without some concept of gender.” Now you’ll notice the biblical worldview starts with this: in the beginning and in the beginning what do we find? That God created human beings in His image. And how did he create them? Male and female, he created them. And throughout the Scripture, there is a continuous narrative rooted in creation of the fact that human beings are made is male and female and that from beginning to end – in past, present, and future – in the kingdom represented in creation and in the new kingdom yet to come, gender is still important. And it is because, at least in part, we are embodied creatures and our bodies are not merely some kind of vessel into which we have been poured or trapped, it is indeed a part of who we are made in God’s image – and for that reason, our bodies tell us something.

In reading an article like this one at the Washington Post or like the previous article at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Christians are often prompted to respond with a sense of tragedy. And it is undeniably tragic. Christians are prompted to respond with a heartfelt concern, and that is an appropriate response. But we also need to understand that behind this kind of rebellion is the affirmation of a biblical truth, and that’s almost always the case. Every time a heretic utters a heresy, accidentally, the heretic actually points to the truth; because by denying the truth, the truth is even indirectly affirmed. And that’s what you see here in this as well – in the denial of the importance of gender, in the claim that you can have a human being who claims no gender at all and rejects any gender identity whatsoever, you have the Washington Post understanding that it has to write a news story about this and try to understand it because the secular mind, being as secular as it can possibly determine itself to be, simply also lacks a category to explain how this can work. And so Christians looking at this have to recognize that it is not only an article that sounds an alarm, like so many others, it’s also an article that announces an opportunity – an opportunity to respond to this kind of confusion in a world that is increasingly scratching its head in befuddlement as to how it can even follow its own advice. The opportunity is this: to speak the word of the gospel perhaps where it isn’t expected and the word of the gospel that brings moral sense, as well as the message of salvation, a word of the gospel that tells us that indeed a part of the good news is that God knew us before we even knew ourselves and had a plan for us, even before we existed.

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