Article VI Blog

Remember last week when I excoriated Al Mohler?  Well, fortunately some hardcore Protestants “get it.”  Carl Trueman shows us how the seriously Reformed should write about their Catholic brethren.

Some may wonder what the point of reflecting on Rome is for a Protestant.  At least threefold,I would respond.  First, Protestants benefit from a conservative papacy: on public square issues such as abortion, marriage and religious freedom, the RCC has a higher profile and more power – financial, legal, institutional – than any Protestant group.  We all benefit from the cultural and legal power of the RCC in these areas.  Second, your neighbours probably do not distinguish between Christian groups.  A sleazy, morally corrupt RCC is like a sleazy, morally corrupt televangelist ministry: we are all marked with the same brush in the public eye and our task of evangelism becomes that much harder.  Third, RC authors often offer more penetrating insights into secular culture than their evangelical equivalents.  Comparing George Weigel to Rob Bell in such circumstances is akin to comparing Michelangelo to Thomas Kinkade.

And then there is this story.  These stories have become a dime-a-dozen:

A Florida professor and high-ranking member of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party recently instructed his students to take out a piece of paper, write “JESUS” on it, then put it on the floor and stomp on it….

[...]

Apparently the exercise is a suggestion in the textbook, “Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach, 5th Edition,” and the school would not say if Poole would face disciplinary action, WPEC reports.

I have but one comment, “What the &^% is ‘intercultural communication’ and how does it rate a textbook, let alone the 5th edition of one?”  That sounds like one of the courses I took to pad my hours – you know like “Underwater Basket Weaving 101.”  Can you expect a professor that teaches something like that to do anything serious?  Oh and by the way, I thought the purpose of college was to teach us to use our words and reason, not thrown childish tantrums and stomp on stuff.  This was nonsense long before it was religiously offensive.

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…And None Of It Seems Good

Took them a while to talk it over, but it sounds like the Catholic Bishops came to the same conclusion we did regarding Obama’s “compromise” on the HHS mandate.  This an oter actions by the administration caused Congressman J Randy Forbes to pen an op-ed for the Washington Times and say:

The tide has turned, and we have begun to see the emergence of a state-created orthodoxy. It deems support for traditional marriage unacceptable. It discredits those who believe that life begins at conception. It disfavors their faith — held for centuries by their predecessors — and creates a regulatory framework to prevent them from fully participating in the public square.

When the government says, “You can believe whatever you want, but you will be penalized if you exercise those beliefs,” we have entered dangerous territory.

I agree, and more it is a clear violation of church and state.  That “barrier was designed to preserve religion, but it has become a very one way thing.  Government continual intrudes on religion, as the HHS mandate clearly demonstrates, but it religion has to be kept in its box when it comes to forces acting in reverse.

Take for example this Dan Merica piece at the CNN Belief Blog on Presidents and the use of religious language.  It is essentially apologia for Obama participating in the National Prayer Breakfast, as if that needs apologetic.  On the one hand, religious expression is treated as mere tiechnique:

Religious and presidential scholars told CNN that while some critics may question whether events like the prayer breakfast blur the line between separation of church and state, the use of religious language helps presidents connect with the people they were elected to lead.

But some of the experts “get it”

“The fact that a president alludes to biblical passages or quotes the Bible or overt expression of religious faith, is par for the course,” Smith [Prof at George Mason U] concluded. “It can be both a public ministry of healing and a personal expression of faith that however bad things are now, they are part of a large plan that ultimately is better.”

I think that encapsulates it pretty well.  The disconnect between Obama’s religious rhetoric and his administrations actions make plain that is rhetoric is mere technique.  But the best of the presidency  has used religiosity as a source of hope that they then passed on to the nation.  Hope is certainly something I could use a bit more of right now.

The technique we see in Obama is truly troubling.  He only gets away with it because of media bias. And that bias is everywhere.  It has even crept into sports reporting.  Hugh Hewitt’s interview with the reporter that did the SI hit piece on Christianity and football is fascinating.  The guy had some points about football, but so completely misunderstood Christianity and misunderstood how the Christian individual participates in football, that his good points just got lost in the noise.

But lets go back to hope.  Here is a link to John J Miller’s NRO Interview with Jonathon Last on his new book, “What To Expect When No One’s Expecting.”  I have not had time to watch the Miller interview, but I did hear Last interviewed by Dennis Prager and Last has a startling conclusion.  Of course, the book is about declining birth rates.  Last found that the highest birth rates were amongst the religious.  He pointed to statistics that having a child makes couples demonstrably unhappier and more financially burdened and concluded that only a frame of reference that included something larger than self, which is something only religion can provide, is the only thing that can motivate reproduction.  He went out of his way to say it was not a matter of theological formulation, but simply the understanding that there is more than our individual wants and desires.

That is something this blog has contended for a long time.

Turns out hope is a major ingredient of the American success recipe and religion is the best source of hope.  But we cannot sell the false hope that we so often see these days – the hope that WE are good – that’s just more individualism.  We have to sell the hope born of our failure that sees our salvation – for then we are truly reliant on that bigger thing.

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When enough is enough:

Holding aloft ancient flags and young children, hundreds of thousands of people converged Sunday on the Eiffel Tower to protest the French president’s plan to legalize gay marriage and thus allow same-sex couples to adopt and conceive children.

That’s the French mind you – the French.  The article only quotes native French, which I find fascinating.  Serious Christian French are pretty hard to find.  I’d love to know how much of the crowd was Islamic.  But I think my basic point is it is pretty hard to make the case that such protests in Paris are religiously motivated.  Heterosexual monogamy is one of the chief cornerstones of western civilization.  The pro same-sex marriage crowd has trivialized something deeply fundamental.  This could get interesting.

When you have Richard Land and Jim Wallis on the same side of an issue, you have to know something very interesting is afoot.  Coverage from CNN and Christianity Today.  From CT:

More than 150 evangelical leaders have renewed their calls for comprehensive immigration reform by signing on to the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), a relatively new initiative that unites, among others, unlikely partners such as Sojourners and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. According to CNN, a new video launched today will serve as the campaign’s “first concerted push on immigration, with the goal of getting meaningful immigration reform through Congress in 2013.”

I am grateful to see Christians of every political stripe united, on anything.  What this really is an effort to bring compassion to the debate and compassion is a good thing.  But this is an enormously complex issue involving not just immigration, but things like national defense and simply making sure that the law is respected.  I agree, illegals that have been here and been productive members of our society are worthy of compassion, and perhaps salvation from the ultimate consequences of their actions.  But all consequences?  I am not so sure.  By the way, no matter how carefully the laws and regulations are drafted, much injustice will occur because in the end it justice is administered by people in a most frustrating bureaucratic setting.  If justice is the goal, the best thing Christians can do is make sure good, sound Christian people of intellect, compassion and good judgement are in the positions where the decisions are being made.  Both in the drafting of the laws and regulations and in their administration.

Meanwhile, back in Europe:

British Airways violated the article of the European Convention on Human Rights that guarantees freedom of religion when it stopped employee Nadia Eweida from wearing her cross openly, the court said….

In its ruling, the court weighed Eweida’s desire to show her religious belief against the airline’s wish to project a certain corporate image….

However, the court found that three other British Christians who argued they’d been unfairly dismissed from their jobs had not been subjected to religious discrimination.

They are nurse Shirley Chaplin, who also wanted to wear a cross at work, registrar Lilian Ladele, who declined to register gay civil partnerships, and Gary MacFarlane, a relationship counselor who did not want to give sex therapy to same-sex couples.

In the case of Chaplin, the court ruled that the concerns of hospital managers for health and safety outweighed the nurse’s desire to wear a cross visibly in the workplace.

The cases of the registrar and the relationship counselor had been fairly considered in the national courts, the court said.

“Fascinating Captain.”  The article does not present enough of the legal technicalities to form an opinion on the last two cases, and health and safety concerns are real.  I have personally had to admonish people on the wearing of lose jewelery in machine settings.  In the nurse’s case there are other concerns like lifting patients, cleanliness, etc.  However, when I have done so, I have encouraged the employee to find a more safety suitable means of religious expression.  Be curious about this case…

Food for thought:

One of the most important lessons President Barack Obama and his minions must learn as they bask in political success is that humiliation follows hubris – sometimes quickly.

I am wondering if that is not the lesson for we conservative Republicans.  I think it is clear we assumed the nation was with us and it was not.  We took for granted that which we need to earn.  Isn;t that a form of hubris?

Finally, Dan Gilgoff reflects on editing CNN’s belief blog:

3.) Religion reporting shouldn’t be an inside game. “We believe that understanding the role of faith in today’s world isn’t optional or nice to know,” we wrote in our inaugural Belief Blog post, in May 2010. “It’s need to know.” That was true again for many of 2012’s biggest stories, for which understanding forces of faith and faithlessness were crucial to understanding the nominees for president, reactions to July’s deadly Aurora, Colorado, shooting and Whitney Houston’s funeral. You don’t have to be religious to think religion stories matter; you just have to be curious about the way the world works. I believe that more now than I did when we launched the Belief Blog.

4.) The news media isn’t anti-religion. You hear that from some religious people, particularly those on the political right. Truth is, news organizations such as CNN are fascinated by religion because it yields stories brimming with meaning, controversy and powerful characters. But the religion beat can scare off reporters because it can be so daunting (if you’re a non-Mormon, try wrapping your mind around the Mormon practice of posthumous proxy baptism in time to meet a 5 o’clock deadline). And yet so many CNN Belief stories were born when CNNers across the organization asked basic questions such as, “Will the Catholic presidential candidates don ashes for an Ash Wednesday debate?” and “Why don’t we explain why some American Muslim women wear the hijab?” Many other religion stories came from CNNers who volunteered ideas from their own religious subcultures. CNN forces working against religion coverage? I never encountered any.

“Not an inside game,” and yet the questions that he praises in the very next point are questions that would only be asked by outsiders and for which insiders have ready answers.  I’m a outsider to Mormonism, but I do not find proxy baptism that hard to understand.  It is controversial only in an cross-religious aspect and then only when people of other faiths fail to understand that it is something substantively different than baptism is in other faiths.  (For most Christians, baptism ushers someone into the faith, for Mormons, posthumous proxy baptism invites others to the faith – big, big difference.)  There I did it in one parenthetical sentence.

The problem is that the perspective that Gilgoff is upholding here is one that treats religious folk as fundamentally different, even “weird.”  It objectifies the religious as odd specimens for study rather than as people with a different, but worthy, perspective.

To bring this full circle, I think much of the animus towards the religious community felt by the LGBT community is because they have been objectified rather than humanized.  That is a sin of the religious community.  However, the corrective is not to return the favor.

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The president of Fuller Theological Seminary took to Patheos to declare:

Mitt Romney may not have fared well in his campaign for the presidency, but his candidacy was a step forward for Mormon-evangelical relations. The two groups have been hostile to each other for the past century and a half, with constant insults being traded back and forth.

When some of us in the scholarly community initiated an evangelical-Mormon dialogue a dozen years ago, we ran into some opposition, particularly on the evangelical side. As a leader in that dialogue, I have received many angry emails from fellow evangelicals who see me as a “compromiser” of the faith. But those expressions of protest have not been as numerous during the recent campaign season.

[...]

For many evangelicals, Mormonism has now been “de-demonized.” This may be “the Mormon Moment” many of us have been waiting for: a new willingness on the part of evangelicals and Mormons to engage in a careful, and mutually respectful, theological discussion about matters of eternal importance.

Dick Mouw is a good man and theologian, but I am not sure he is reading the political tea leaves very well.  “De-demonized” is probably a good word choice, but that still does not get all the way to accepted.  There is mounting evidence that Mitt Romney was shunned by a significant portion of the Christian community.  A move from demonization to shunned is probably a good one on  the theological level.  Shunning is a common technique of theological corrective within a community of faith, and this may mark a move of Mormons into the community of faith.

However, the political stage is not an appropriate place for such a shunning to take place.  The cost to the greater community is too dear.  (see Nathaniel Hawthorne) As a measure consider, what Eric Metaxis had to say in the CNN belief Blog this weekend just past:

Later in my speech, I talked specifically about the idea of loving our enemies. I said this was the test of real faith. Speaking to my fellow pro-lifers, I said that those of us who believe the unborn to be human beings must love those on the other side of that issue. I also said that those of us with a traditionally biblical view of sexuality are sometimes demonized as bigots, but we must love even those who call us bigots. I cited Wilberforce and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as two men who took seriously God’s command to love their enemies in the midst of the most serious political battles of their day.  They honored God in how they fought, and he honored them.

At the end of the breakfast the president told me he would read my book on Bonhoeffer, and Vice President Biden took my picture with the president. No kidding. It was an extraordinary day and I’m not telling the half of it.

But the reason I’m writing now is that during the past election I was disappointed to see the president’s campaign utterly abandoning these ideals of treating your opponents as you yourself would wish to be treated. Good people with principled and profound convictions about when life begins were cynically demonized as “enemies of women.”  Americans who had worked hard to build businesses, and who had given millions to charity and to the government, were denounced as fat-cats who weren’t “paying their fair share” and whose wealth was ill-gotten gain.

These scorched-earth tactics were not presidential, much less Christian, and because the president openly professes a Christian faith, I feel I must speak about this.

HOW we do things often matters more than what we actually do.  Metaxis is very right here and the reverberations throughout our nation, its culture and the community of faith can already be felt.  It’s not good.  The community of faith must keep a close eye on itself to make sure it does not fall into this trap.

And speaking of self-examination, Talking Points Memo is basically a Democrat tip sheet.  I found this fascinating:

In perfect Buzzfeed fashion Andrew Kaczynski put together a list of “15 People Who Just Saw Mitt Romney” and reported it on Twitter. As the phenomenon has grown though it’s become clear that at least a decent number of these people couldn’t possibly have actually seen Romney. I saw Romney at a midnight 7/11 in Tampa. I saw him at a Hooters in Boise. I saw him working on a fishing boat outside of Delacroix. I saw him shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Part of what gets my attention about these photos — and perhaps others are the same way — is that Romney seems a lot more normal in his political afterlife than he did before November 7th.

Whoa!  The press worked overtime to make Romney look “abnormal” during the campaign and now that they do not need to….  I don’t know what is more stunning – the fact that some parts of the media feel they can declare normalcy based on political desire or that so many people cannot see that the people that bring them information may have an agenda and that they need to receive the information accordingly.

I had a long conversation with friends last week in which they were busy telling me how unconnected Romney was.  I asked them why they thought that and they started talking about CNN.  To which I responded “there you go.”  Their response was to tell me how belligerent Fox was.  MY response was maybe they needed to work harder to get their info, that the truth might be between the two.  That, of course, would take too much time and energy.

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David French notes how much Gd talk there was in public debate in history.  Sadly, it’s true, but it was also a time in history when MOST Americans were concerned about what God thought on a subject.  That is not true today.  I would say that concern is a prerequisite to such debate returning to the public sphere.

Check the vote count again.  Romney lost, but he did pretty doggone good.

How to make an alum wince in pain.  It may not explain their NCAA performance, but it does tend to take the shine off the appearance.

Mormon persecution continues in Russia.  One must wonder about echoes elsewhere…?

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We noted yesterday that there seems to be some evidence of a Mormon problem in the results of the election just past.  Others seem to think it is conclusive.  Franklin Graham went at it obtusely yesterday on CBN:

David Brody: What is your message to folks who are wondering what just happened, and it looks like they feel a semi hit them?

Rev. Franklin Graham: We know that from of the statistics that I’ve heard that the majority of Christians in this country just did not vote for whatever reason. The vast majority of evangelicals did not go to the polls.

Graham: God is in control, and if Christians are upset, they need to be upset at themselves. We need to do a better job of getting our people – the Church – to vote. Now, I’m not trying to tell you how to vote, you can vote, but vote, my goodness, and vote for candidates that stand for Biblical values.

Now, statistically, Graham is talking about something different than we are.  We are looking at anti-Mormon bias in those that did turn out, while Graham is looking at a lack of turn out by Christians generally.  Both Brody, and MSNBC, point out that self-identified Christian turnout was higher this time than in 2008.  That does not mean Graham does not have a point.  Given the issues that confronted the electorate (HHS mandate) it should have been a record turn out.  It is only guess work as to why it was not such a record, but there is one factor I can think of in addition to anti-Mormon bias.

Opposition to Obama has pretty routinely been denounced as rooted in racism for a while now.  I am sure people are just tired of it and did not want to have to cast a vote that could get them labelled as racist.  In other words, the charge even if baseless, has an effect.  Some might accuse us of doing the same vis-a-vis Mormonism.  I hope not, we have tried pretty hard to limit ourselves to cases where there was actual bias.  This is why we are pursuing the path we looked at yesterday – there is some evidence and not just speculation.

When it comes to speculation, one could easily speculate about the role anti-Mormon bias may have played in the sentiments described in articles like this one:

And on the subject of blame, I am hearing undercurrents from a lot of places of “Obama cheated.”  I hate to break it to you, but there is cheating in every election.  Given the superior performance of Obama’s IT system, it is very possible that there was significant cheating, as such a system would serve to both mask and aid such efforts.  That does not mean we cheat to win, that would be going against the principles that define us as conservatives, especially Christian conservatives.  But it does mean that we have to be smart enough to beat the cheaters, and if we are not, that is our fault.

The election ended when Romney conceded – most graciously.  I think we are far better off concentrating on 1) thanking Governor Romney for his extraordinary effort and energy and his wonderful representation of our party and ideals, and 2) working on where we go from here.

Speaking of which, I said at a presentation I did Thursday that I thought the Religious Right was spent as a political force.  By that, I mean Evangelicals.  They are still numerous and the votes matter very significantly.  But this election showed that they just cannot organize themselves.  As this WaPo piece points out:

Some pundits have declared the death of the Christian Right, and there is evidence to back up their analyses. The once-dominant Christian Coalition is essentially bankrupt, Focus on the Family is now focusing on the family ministry, not politics, and the Rev. Pat Robertson, once the biggest voice of the movement, has recently called for legalization of marijuana and excused Gen. David Petraeus’s affair. Once leading figures as the former Rev. Jerry Falwell have passed away, and James Dobson is off the air. The movement lacks a powerful organizational structure and it has no leading spokesperson.

The piece goes on to claim that they will “resurrect” themselves in a (surprise, surprise) more liberal form.  Resurrection is possible, but not in a more liberal form.  Consider this piece from Christianity Today.  It is by Andy Crouch and discusses ways for Christians to re-engage.  Interestingly, and not surprisingly to this observer, it is based on Roman Catholic thought.  The long history of Catholicism and its myriad political involvements over the millenia (a period to which no other Christian organization can lay claim) give it the strong intellectual base for such engagement.  When you couple that with the hierarchical structural advantages it has, and shares with the LDS – that is where I see the future.  As we sai a while ago, Evangelicals need to take the backseat.  We are much better followers than we are leaders.

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