Article VI Blog

By now, everybody knows about the NSA/Verizon data thing.  Hugh Hewitt is not sure it is such a big deal.  Hewitt is expert at such matters have served an important role in obtaining such data during his tenure in the DOJ in the Reagan administration.  I will agree that it is not a big deal from the standpoint of violation of privacy or the “government snooping on Americans.”

But this is a big deal.

Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, all the way back to 2007/2008.  Do we remember the left wing furor over the Patriot Act?  The legislation under which the subpoena in question was obtained.  Do we remember this particular Straw Man being set up by then Candidate Obama who used it repeatedly to paint the Bush administration, and by extension Republicans inclusive of Candidate McCain, as power-mad tin-pots bent on using data obtained in this fashion to invade our homes and our most private  thoughts and deeds?

Apparently, like Guantanamo Bay – that was just campaign rhetoric.  But this is also different than Gitmo.  Gitmo was portrayed as a violation of human rights, but it was still abstract – out there.  The Patriot Act Straw Man was a threat to our individual and personal liberties.  He terrified some people to the core with this idea.

But now that he is in charge, it is not such a bad idea at all.

And that is why this is a big deal.  Apparently there is no gap between campaign rhetoric and governing reality that this administration finds too large.  From my perspective, we cannot trust a single word they are saying.  Even Nixon, in the end, had more honor than that.

But what remained of Nixon’s honor was, and in some corners is still, continually besmirched by a hostile and rabid press.  This administration does not suffer from such a disadvantage:

The New York Times edited its damning editorial condemning the Obama administration for collecting phone call data from Americans to make it less stinging shortly after the editorial was published online Thursday afternoon.

The editorial originally declared that the Obama “administration has lost all credibility” as a result of the recently revealed news that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been secretly collecting call data from American users of Verizon under the authority of the Patriot Act.

But hours later the stinging sentence had been modified to read the Obama “administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.” [Emphasis added]

Apparently, the NY Times is willing to flush their veracity down the toilet in solidarity with any remaining trust between this administration and the American people.  For once in recent memory, the Old Grey Lady had it right the first time.

This administration has completely eroded the trust between itself and the people – at least the ones that are paying attention.  What I find problematic is that the course of the administration and the lapdog press is such that it is also rapidly eroding the trust between the people and the office.

If this continues, we are going to need more than a great candidate with a crack political team in 2016.  We are going to need an individual of extraordinary character.  Not just a good president, but a paragon.  The work that will confront the next president is extraordinary.

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At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf responds to a Matt Lewis column with this opening:

In The Week, columnist Matt Lewis, a conservative who is regularly willing to criticize the right, explains why, despite his occasional frustrations, he isn’t tempted to defect. “I am repelled by the Left’s worldview, which implicitly argues that morality is subjective,” he states. “This is a natural outcome of a rejection of the numinous, but it’s an idea that has consequences. When there are no moral absolutes, we make policy decisions based on efficiency instead of compassion. Or we make decisions based on our own individualistic needs, not on what is right or good.”

Given his beliefs, I’d never urge Lewis to defect to the left for all sorts of reasons. But I don’t think the one he’s offered is what should hold him. The left encompasses a lot of people who believe in God, while the right has its atheists. I don’t think that there is any single world view that encompasses the whole left. And even if we presumed for the sake of simplicity that it makes sense to talk about “the” world views of the left and right, I don’t think the left embraces moral subjectivity any more than the American right, despite the fact that so many conservatives insist otherwise. How common is moral subjectivity on the left, according to Lewis? It is unclear, perhaps understandably, since he was constrained by writing at column length for print.

Pending clarification, let’s set the left aside and talk about the American right. To what moral absolutes does it subscribe in practice? Certainly some of the ones that are shared by the whole political spectrum. Slavery is wrong. So is rape. And genocide. Surely we can all agree that, on those significant questions, that neither the American left nor the American right are non-absolutists.

Friedersdorf then goes on to pick on the supposed “hypocrisies” of the right.  The use of torture in the gathering on information on terrorism being his biggest bug-a-boo, but along the way he also discusses immigration, Gitmo and arms control.  Then he says this:

In what moral absolute was their position grounded?

In other words, “How can we preach compassion when we engage in torture or deport the oppressed?”  There are three things at play here that need to be noted.

First, there is a difference between something being absolute and something being universal.  We must always act in compassion, that’s absolute.  But that does not mean we act compassionately to everyone, that’s universal.  Unfortunately, life presents us with situations where to act compassionately towards some we will be required to act harshly with others.  It is an unavoidable reality.  If a man is standing poised to kill another man, killing the threatening killer is, in fact, quite compassionate towards the intended victim, even if it is extraordinarily cruel towards the actor.  Someone is going to die in this situation, compassion cannot be judged solely on the fact that someone is killed.  Compassion is exercised in the choice of who dies and how.  Morality may be rooted in absolutes, but that does not make it simple, by any stretch.

The second thing at play here is the where the moral absolutes are rooted.  We cannot argue religion in public anymore, but there was a time we could invoke God.  However, even then, it was not good to argue theology in the public square.  Once we are discussing the complexities of applying our absolutes, the discussion will become theological very rapidly.  Theology, even amongst protestant Christians, is far more diverse today than it ever was at the time when the invocation of religion in the public square was more common.  In fact, there are some schools of theology that have grown not out of the religion in question, but purposefully to develop religious apologia for a political or social issue previously considered anathema to the religion in question.   For example, the last couple of decades have seen scores of theological arguments attempting to make homosexual practice acceptable; something Judeo-Christian thought as rejected as wrong throughout its history.

Because of the confusion between absolute and universal, the gate-keeping functions inside religion have failed to sort the wheat from the chaff in these arguments and all are deemed valid.  How is a public, largely not trained in how to think about these things, to judge what is a good application of the absolutes and what is not?  Are we to now argue theology publicly?  The result of this dilemma has been the sort of dogmatic approach that leads to the perceptions of hypocrisy that Friedersdorf presents.

The bottom line cause of all of this, and the third factor at play, was mentioned in that last paragraph.  It is the failure of the gate-keeping functions inside religion.  This failure has come as a) religion itself has become more personal that societal/cultural, and b) rather than fight inside the church, groups split off and form smaller groups that lack the critical mass to form the institutions needed to perform the function effectively.

Frankly, in today’s world, there is validity to what Friedersdorf has to say.  It should not be so, but that is a failure that can be laid squarely at the door of the faithful.  We continue to work on our series telling the 2012 election story.  Unlike the 2008 story, the 2012 is not themed so much in politics as it is in the failure of the religious to do and be all that they are supposed to do and be.  Thus that series will lead to a series on where Evangelicalism has failed.  Thus we will leave this third factor at this point and allow the deeper discussion to come at a later time.

We are not the hypocrites Friedersdorf wants us, or paints us, to be.  However, we have to be a lot smarter about our faith and its application in the public square if we do not want to appear as such.

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“When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.”

– GK Chesterton

I have little doubt that when the Obama fanboys that call themselves journalists at Newsweek cooked up this “cover” (Why a purely digital outlet needs a cover is a bit of a mystery to me.) they thought they were being sardonic.  I; however, think their Freudian slip is showing.

There are atheists in this world, probably always will be.  There will always be people that disdain religion.  So be it.  What is so deeply troubling is the utter lack of respect, and recognition of the goodness of religious people involved in this.  They continually complain about how we Christians want to implement “theocracy” and compare us to the Taliban and fail utterly to note that a magazine cover like that in an Islamic nation would result in riots, bombings, and other assorted mayhem.  In other words they take our “tolerance” of them for granted while they feel  completely free to “tolerate” almost nothing from us.  Who, precisely, is the “theocrat” here?

Equally troubling to me is Obama’s inability to say something like, “I am uncomfortable with language and images of myself that invoke the Almighty.”  He is a bit too comfortable in his demigod skin.

The problem is this is really our fault.  We have allowed the media to co-opt our identity.  Quoted Terry Mattingly, responding to a Rick Warren interview in this past week:

“I know what the word ‘evangelical’ is supposed to mean,” said Warren, 58, leader of the 20,000-member Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., with its many branch congregations and ministries. “I mean, I know what the word ‘evangelical’ used to mean.”

The problem, he said, is that many Americans no longer link “evangelical” with a set of traditional doctrines, such as evangelistic efforts to reach the lost, the defense of biblical authority, projects to help the needy and the conviction that salvation is found through faith in Jesus Christ, alone.

Somewhere during the George W. Bush years the word “evangelical” — a term used in church history — got “co-opted into being a political term,” said Warren, in a recent telephone interview.

How could something like this happen?  As I think things through, I keep returning again and again to the idea that we have quit leading culture and started following it.  The Deseret News carried a story this last week about how universities are growing not through academics, but through “improving the student experience.”  I know that every solicitation for funds that I have received from my alma mater in the last few years has focused on things like the “student center” and improvements to the fieldhouse.  These things are not unworthy, but they are not the purpose of the university.  Again we see a culture defining and shaping institution chasing a constituency rather than creating one.

Does leadership exist any more?  Do we any longer attempt to shape people, or do we merely cater to them in an effort to capture their…money…vote…allegiance?

I think that truly defines, in a nutshell, the outcome of the last election.  Mitt Romney came and ran to lead the nation through a crisis.  Barack Obama came to cater the marketplace.  We know who won the election, but one is forced to wonder if the nation as a whole won much of anything.  Not because Obama is a bad man (he is not) or because he is a bad president (most assuredly) but because it seems any desire or effort to be better has left the building.  We no longer want to be better, we just want.

But without efforts to better ourselves, all we get is vapor.  Dennis Prager wrote in NRO last week about godless attempts to offer comfort in the wake of Newtown:

“The dead do not suffer” is atheism’s consolation to the parents of murdered children? This sentiment can provide some consolation — though still nothing comparable to the affirmation of an afterlife — to those who lose a loved one who had been suffering from a debilitating disease. But it not only offers the parents of Sandy Hook no consolation, it actually (unintentionally) insults them: Were these children suffering before their lives were taken? Would they have suffered if they had lived on? Moreover, it is the parents who are suffering, so the fact that their child isn’t suffering while decomposing in the grave is of no relevance. And, most germane to our subject, this atheist message offers no consolation at all when compared with the religious message that we humans are not just matter, but possess eternal souls.

“The Second Coming” is shorthand to all those of Christian faith for the return of Jesus to finally complete the job of remaking the world.  That is to say making us not just better, but perfect as we were created to be.  This Newsweek cover reflects the fact that apparently the nation (or at least the Newsweek reading portion of the nation) does not want that.  Apparently they just want and if Barack Obama is willing to give, then they have their “second coming.”

That is a pretty sorry excuse for a second coming.

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