Article VI Blog

Yahoo News:

The Obama administration is announcing a broader opt-out for religious nonprofits that object to providing health insurance that covers birth control.

The administration is allowing religious nonprofits to offer coverage that does not include contraception. In such a case, a third-party issuer will handle all business related to providing birth-control coverage for women, according to a source familiar with the changes who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Religious groups had said the old birth-control coverage rule violated their religious beliefs. Many filed lawsuits or said they would simply not comply.

What about for profits that have a religious conscience?!  As a business owner sounds like I am still without my religious freedom.

Yet another in Obama’s ever lengthening list of non-concession “concessions.”

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It is already infamous.  In the instant media age, it took seconds for Hillary Clinton’s utterance of “What difference does it make?” to rocket around the nation.  I think any thought she may have had of 2016 should now be set aside.  This clip, carefully crafted into ad after ad after ad will just kill her.  In case you missed it, here’s the transcription:

“The fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest? Or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”

I am putting the video up here to, just so you get the full impact.  The first thought that went to through my mind was, “It makes a difference because it goes directly to the competency of the administration in which you serve.” The second thought was how utterly oxymoronic her continuing statement about trying to keep it from ever happening again was.  Seems to me that know precisely what happened is a key part to stopping something from ever happening again.

The best take down I have seen so far is Jim Geraghty’s.  He winds his way through several reactions to the testimony and then draws a line to film making  (“Superman Returns” of all films, certainly catching my attention.) and then concludes this way:

When we look at how our government has responded to the night of September 11 in Benghazi, Libya, we see there are truly no standards any more.

If the decision making before, during, and after the Benghazi attack is insufficient to get anyone fired, what decision in government will ever warrant that consequence? If Democrats on Capitol Hill can’t take off their partisan blinders for one day to attempt to hold people accountable for decision-making that resulted in American deaths at the hands of extremists, and then lying to the public about it, then when will they ever? If Hillary Clinton can exclaim that it doesn’t matter that the administration spent five days talking about a video when the video had nothing to do with it, and everyone on her side applauds, why should she or anyone else ever respond to an accusation with anything but audacious defiance?

This is it, folks. This is the government we have, and the lack of a public outcry about Benghazi ensures this is the government we will have for the foreseeable future.

I think that is spot on, and I think it is illustrative of so much that we have been noting of the cultural changes that were reflected in the votes cast last November.  Clinton’s “What difference does it make?” sounds as if the job of SOS is hers by divine right and that the rest of us, including Congress, are here to help her do her job better, not decide if she is meeting the standards of the job.  It is completely reflective of that cartoon we put up a couple of weeks ago.

The more I think about it, the more I think that explains a lot of the so-called “low information” votes that gave us Obama redux.  The voters did not feel it was their place to determine if he was doing the job well – it was simply his job.

From a purely sociological viewpoint, religion serves to maintain standards.  When your government is a cultural mirror, as is the case in any democracy, religion and education are the institutions that maintain the cultural standards.   Well, we all know what has happened with education and religion is rapidly joining the pile.  From ordination of practicing homosexuals to same sex marriage to the “prosperity gospel” to a simply lack of emphasis on sin and its consequences and an over emphasis on “Jesus loves you just as you are,” churches everywhere no longer maintain standards.  They hide them away.

Or, churches engage in misdirection.  They point to Roe v Wade and say, “See – government is undermining us.”  Well, dear religious friends, when the church started the government did a bit more than merely “undermine” Christianity – it actively persecuted and executed Christians.   Not to mention that fact that as hedonistic as we have become we are pikers in that category compared to the Romans of Christ’s time.  And yet, within 400 years, the empire that had once persecuted them was officially Christian.

The current state of affairs is symptomatic of a church that has much bigger problems than poor political action.  Maybe if we took care of those bigger issues, the political action will follow?

Posted in Analyzing 2012, Religious Freedom, Social/Religious Trends, The Way Forward | 1 Comment » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

This morning’s email newsletter from the NYTimes contained an “Op-Doc” (Opinion Documentary?) that led one to this video.  (There is no capability to embed, you’ll have to follow the link.)  It was presented with this written introduction:

The American evangelical movement in Africa does valuable work in helping the poor. But as you’ll see in this Op-Doc video, some of their efforts and money feed a dangerous ideology that seeks to demonize L.G.B.T. people and intensifies religious rhetoric until it results in violence. It is important for American congregations to hold their churches accountable for what their money does in Africa.

This is pure propaganda that fails to makes its case, but its effects and conclusions remain frightening.  It deals almost entirely in anecdote, citing but a single statistic. (Uganda is 85% Christian.)  It strings together a series of unrelated facts, leaving out one extraordinarily important fact, to build a case that Evangelicals are try to pass laws in Uganda to kill homosexuals.  What are the facts it presents?

1. Lots of American Evangelicals give money to African mission, and some specifically target Uganda.  No surprise there, Africa is the poorest continent, of course, Evangelicals give money to help them.
2. Christianity identifies homosexual practice as aberrant and sinful.  Again, this is not news.  Nor, and this is vital, is it a rejection of the individual that feels homosexual impulses.  It simply asks those with such impulses to control them, as those of us with other sinful impulses are asked to control ours.
3. Because Uganda is 85% Christian, “God’s law often becomes government policy.”  Uganda is a democracy, more or less – no African democracy functions really well, and as such it will tend to reflect the opinion of the majority.  As the continued liberalization and falling church statistics in this democracy demonstrate.  But that is a far cry from the theocratic accusation this video makes – it is simply democracy at work.
4. A bill was introduced in the Ugandan Parliament that that provided for the death penalty for serial homosexual practice.  OK, that’s a bit overboard, but not as unreasonable as it sounds if you have the missing facts.  The piece does not in a superimposed written admission toward the end, but not spoken out loud, that the bill in its current form has removed the death penalty provisions.
5. They then attempt to help us conclude that Evangelicals in America and Uganda seek to kill homosexuals, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not.

Now, I trust when it is laid out that way without the stirring music, passionate voice over, and impactful images that absolute absence of a causal relationship between these facts is obvious.

Its the missing fact that is really troubling to me.  AIDS remains a virulent and massive killer in Africa.  Uganda is one of only two nations on that continent where AIDS is on the rise.  Now, while AIDS can be transmitted heterosexually, it remains primarily and overwhelmingly transmitted by homosexual contact.  Further, while advanced and extraordinarily expensive medical treatment has greatly eased the AIDS issues in this nation and Western Europe, such is often not available in Africa.  In a nation with the AIDS issues Uganda has, it could be argued that homosexual practice is an assault with intent to kill.  Under such circumstances, a discussion of extraordinary penalty, rightly rejected by the democratic process, is not so out of bounds.

What is truly troubling is that in all this there are very real issues for Christians in Uganda and Evangelicals in America to face.  How do we teach about the dangers, both moral and health related, of homosexual practice while keeping the conversation “in bounds?” How do American Evangelicals give their money which is much needed, and insure that it is not used wrongly?  I could go on.

But reason is not the goal of this film maker.  The condemnation of Christianity, and especially American Evangelicals seems to be the sole purpose of this video.

Let the record show that it is not the conservative Christian forces that are escalating the culture war.

Posted in Analyzing 2012, News Media Bias, Religion and Race, Religious Freedom, Social/Religious Trends, The Way Forward | 1 Comment » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

Yesterday, Hugh Hewitt opened his show with an interview with this blog’s old “friend” Al Mohler on the anniversary of Roe v Wade.  This was the opening exchange:

HH: I wanted to try and prompt pastors this weekend, even if they haven’t already thought about it, to step back and talk to their congregation about it.   What was the significance of those numbers and this anniversary Dr. Mohler?

AM: Well, when you consider the fact that you’re talking about 55 million unborn people have been aborted in American since Roe v Wade, and you are talking about single judicial decision that quite literally changed the entire landscape of America.  And lead to a revolution in terms of our moral life that goes far beyond what most people can imagine.    It’s not only about abortion, but about an entire set of issues that flow from it.  But the bottom line is that abortion on demand is still the law of the land forty years after Roe v Wade.

I can think of little that better encapsulate where the church has gone wrong in terms of what its influence is and how to use it.  Simply put, no court decision can lead to a “moral revolution.” That is just sophistry.  Making something legal does not make it moral.  If the church did its job very well and all Americans were practicing Christians, abortions would not happen, even if Roe v Wade were still the law of the land.  Roe v Wade does not make people make decisions to have abortions.

In this statement, Mohler is saying it is the government’s job to establish morality.  It is not.  The government reflects the morality of the nation.  The church is the institution that should be establishing the morality of the nation.  The fact that this much abortion happens speaks as badly about the church as it does about the courts.

Now, there are lots of reasons why Roe v Wade is really bad law.  It should be opposed and it should be overturned.  But the moral issue is something different.

If Christianity is to regain is cultural place and influence it must admit its mistakes and failings in order to learn from them and not to repeat them.  This is a big one, and a good place to start.  While herightfully  decries the decision, Mohler must also make plain the failings of Christianity in American that lead to the decision.  How did we come to a point where so many people wanted abortion legalized?  How did we come to the point that something so shameful could be legitimized?  Something broke down in the American people, something it was the church’s job to build and maintain, not government’s.

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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.

Posted in Analyzing 2012, Political Strategy, Reading List, Religious Freedom | 2 Comments » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

In cooperation with Mitt Romney Central and Evangelicals for Mitt, John and I are posting the following, authored by Mitt Romney Central’s Paul Johnson:

“Many Americans will be headed to some form of worship service in this final weekend before the election. In the United States, the freedom to worship is a fundamental right, enshrined in the First Amendment to our Constitution. Obviously not all of us agree on who should win on Tuesday. But, as we head to church, synagogue, temple or mosque, and as we reflect on the historical importance of what’s happening in our country next week, we here at MittRomneyCentral invite you to make the outcome of the election the subject of prayer and, if it’s part of your religious tradition, fasting.

“As Article VI blog, Evangelicals for Mitt, and Mitt Romney Central we’ve asked before for your prayerful support of Governor and Mrs. Romney. Those past calls for prayer were made on behalf of Evangelicals, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Presbyterians and members of many other religions. Today the call for prayer comes from a friend of MittRomneyCentral who is a devout Catholic, Art Grant (who, notably, has a member of his faith on both major tickets).

“Our past calls for prayer were on the eve of the convention and the debates. At those times we took pains to make clear we were not praying for a victory, but that Mitt and Ann be favored as they carried incredible burdens. We called for prayers that they be able to communicate effectively and with extraordinary capacity. We called for prayers that the American people would be open to their message and have clear minds to make an informed decision when election day came. We believe those prayers were answered. Ann shone in her convention speech and Mitt’s debate performances were spectacular. Days of obfuscation on the part of Mitt’s opponents followed, but in those moments, Americans saw who Mitt Romney is, and what Mitt and Ann Romney stand for.

“Today Art goes beyond what we’ve asked before and asks that we pray that Mitt win. With election day upon us, the time for the American people to decide is now, and we join with him. The authors of this website believe it is appropriate to work toward, and even pray for, causes we feel are worthy. Not all agree. While we will strenuously defend the rights of all people, even those who disagree with us, to do vote their conscience and solicit the help of the deity they choose, we obviously believe it would be best for Mitt to emerge victor on Tuesday, and that the country will be better off under his leadership, and so we claim this privilege for ourselves as well. If you don’t agree, everyone can join us in praying that Americans making up their minds will be influenced by the truth of the arguments made and not be swayed by falsehoods; that voters will be inspired; that voters will feel the weight of their responsibility and seek to understand the issues at stake; and that people will understand both major candidates, what they stand for, and where they would lead this country. And if you agree with us Mitt Romney is the right choice, we invite you to exercise your First Amendment rights and fast and pray for him, that God attend his and our efforts, and that, in the best interest of the country, he be elected as the 45th President of the United States this coming Tuesday.

“From Art Grant:

‘If ever there was a time for prayer it is now. No matter your faith, the future of this great nation is at stake and it is time to take a collective moment, close our eyes, get down on our knees, and pray to God that Governor Romney wins this election on Tuesday. This is a call to every citizen who has even a glimmer of understanding of what this unprecedented, unique idea of a country called America is all about, who understands the founding principles that have guided us to this point in our history. For in our own Pledge of Allegiance we proclaim:

‘“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”’

‘A belief in God has been a part of this country since the beginning, and people from all walks of life, all nations, and all faiths have proven through our relatively short history that if you have faith, work hard, and lead an honest life, you will have the opportunity to be a success in America. Governor Romney not only understands this, he has lived it himself! It is this OPPORTUNITY that is the most unique and precious thing about living in this country, and must be preserved. We succeed as a nation because we can succeed as individuals, as families, as communities, cities, and states. And so we pray, as one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, that Governor Romney can prevail on Tuesday.’”

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