Article VI Blog

…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.

Posted in Reading List, The Way Forward | 1 Comment » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

…he said paraphrasing Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend.  That song phrase popped to mind when Instapundit linked to this Tweet and responses:

Every Republican media manager should take note of what BuzzFeed just did to Rubio. Fool me twice….

He is referring to a new deal at Buzzfeed called “Buzzfeed Brews” – the inaugural installation being Rubio with Ben Smith.

I think that tweet is good advise for more than just Republican media managers.  Those of religiously-motivated political action, which is something that Rubio might be considered, need to come up with some new media strategies – and fast.  Particularly as the battles regarding same-sex marriage, and other related issues move from red- to white- hot.  In the media, the die has successfully been cast that religiosity = bigotry and any discussion is going to begin with “Prove you are not a bigot.”

I have always found it instructive that Christ did not play Pontius Pilate’s game when on trial.  When Pilate asked him, “Are you King of the Jews?”  Christ simply responded, “So you say.”  Jesus refused to let the Roman prelate frame the discussion about who he was and what he was about.  Maybe Jesus was more media savvy than we realized.

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As the Boy Scouts begin their meetings to decide, among other things, if they are going to change their rules on homosexuality, I think it is reasonable to come to understand what is really at stake.  This MSNBC article makes it fairly plain.

The Boy Scouts of America announcement last week that it may eliminate the exclusion of gays from membership at the national level, leaving the decision to its local units, has drawn a harsh backlash from some of the organization’s more religious conservative members, who are “gravely distressed,” even as more liberal churches hailed the move.

With more than two-thirds of Scouting groups affiliated with religious bodies, faith plays a large role in the private youth organization.

And so the “battle lines” are drawn.  It’s the reasonable, loving pro-gay forces against the repressive, Luddite forces of religion.  Make no mistake.  The forces of homosexual normalization have the religious community squarely in its sights.  What makes me sad is that people of faith are not mean to homosexuals, they simply view homosexual practice as aberrant and immoral.  It is the nature of Christianity in all its expressions to understand that  we are all engaged in sinful behavior of one sort or the other.  But it is in fact religion’s job to help us overcome that behavior.

But that is not the game the LGBT community is choosing to play here.  In their view, if we do not accept their behavior, then we do not accept them.  The responses to such are trite – “Is it ‘unaccepting’ to allow a child to stick their hand in a fire?” and so forth.  We have good arguments, but our opponents choose not to listen to them.

Perhaps we bear some responsibility for those deaf ears.  We have at times set the LGBT community outside the community of “common” sinners, as if lepers.  In this we were wrong, but the answer is not to change our definition of sin – the answer is to do as Jesus and the apostles did.  Make company of the “leper,” while still seeking to heal them.

But we must also protect our institutions.  Have you ever wondered what constitutes an institution?  Some, business corporations for example, are pure money machines.  It is the acquisition of wealth that is their reason to exist.  But some institutions exist for other reasons.  University, for example, exists to preserve and advance knowledge.  For them money is but a means to that end.  At least it should be, though I fear that for many the money now drives the mission instead of the other way around.

Scouting is an institution of a different type.  Like service clubs such as the Rotary or the Jaycees, it is an institution deigned to promote character in its participants.  Often religiously tinged, though rarely overtly of a religion, such institutions exist to create and reinforce good character across religious and cultural lines.  They are first and foremost American institutions.  Not of the government but designed to reinforce the character that is typically viewed as necessary for good citizenship.

When you mess with the character and morality standards of such an institution, you mess with the very basis of the nation.  Yes, the institution will continue to survive in some sense, but it will be something very different than what it was conceived to be.  You could say that in the moth, the caterpillar still lives, but does it really?  Is it not now so fundamentally changed that you must declare the caterpillar dead?  So it has been with churches that have made the move that the BSA now contemplates – so it will be with the BSA.

Yes, some troops will still resemble the “old” Boy Scouts, at least for now.  But such changes are a form of institutional entropy.  They drive ever forward and once the energy barrier has been overcome, the entropy inevitably spreads.

A friend commented to me that many, if not most, of the commercials during last night’s Twilight Zone of a Super Bowl were an indication that we are in a true age of cultural depravity.  Perhaps what constitutes “depravity” is subject to individual interpretation, but freedom means we can create pockets where our view is preserved.  But our opposition on these matters seems determined not to allow us such pockets.  If they would allow us such freedom they would simply form their own institution similar to Scouts, but no, they must change the Scouts.

Freedom is not what this fight is about.  They wish to transform us at our very core and are willing to eliminate our freedom if that is what it takes.

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

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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This speaks volumes:

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign quietly donated nearly $90,000 to the Red Cross in late November,

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Karl Rove in this morning’s WSJ:

Many are arguing these days that President Obama has forged a new majority coalition of women, minorities, young people and upscale cultural liberals so large and durable that he can do what no president has done before—pursue a very liberal agenda without serious opposition or defections from his own party. Demography is destiny, this argument holds, and it is irrevocably on the side of Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party.

Demography as destiny certainly seems the principle behind he current push on immigration.  It is almost naked in its efforts to capture a voting bloc.  But as Rove concludes:

Demography isn’t destiny because nothing is permanent in politics…

So, what changes things?  Well Hugh Hewitt is on to something in his push to link immigration reform with school choice and education reform.  More here:

Third, as Arthur Brooks has repeatedly argued, conservatives have to be for the poor –really be for them—if we want to make the best case, which is the moral case, for free enterprise.

A grudging acceptance of immigration reform does nothing to communicate the reality of the conservative hope for immigrants. Putting the education of the newly regularized immigrants at the heart of the GOP response to immigration reform puts a moral response at the center of the conservative contribution to the debate.

Hewitt’s point is vitally important.  Education and social morality changes, and this is a smart way to lead that change.  And yet I am uncertain of the potential for success of these endeavors.  For one thing, as Daniel Henninger pointed out this morning, Obama is playing for serious keeps:

Marcuse called this “the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions.” That, clearly, is what President Obama—across his first term, the presidential campaign and now—has been doing to anyone who won’t line up behind his progressivism. Delegitimize their ideas and opinions.

A Marcusian world of political intolerance became a reality on U.S. campuses. With relentless pushing from the president, why couldn’t it happen in American political life? Welcome to the Thunderdome.

I am concerned that we are playing subtle long term strategies while Obama seeks to obliterate us.  I am worried that we do not have the protection of the English Channel while Obama blitzkriegs his way through the nation.  Can we marshal our forces before they are overrun and conscripted?

But I also have deeper concerns.  Moral and cultural change must precede political change.  And while education is one institution to produce such, religion is the other.  Hewitt is rightly promoting a way to try and recover one of those institutions, but what about religion?  Can it recover?

There remains serious infighting amongst religious groups.  The argument about who is and who is not a “Christian” continues unabated – in some cases exacerbated by the results of the last election when it should have been truncated by it.

The majority of churches today, particularly Evangelical megachurches which are the growing edge of faith at the moment, focus on TV show like worship services and do not build the sorts of infrastructures (schools, community centers, etc.) that can truly affect culture.  I worry that if Hewitt’s goal of vouchers for normalizing immigrants comes to pass there will not be the necessary capacity in educational alternatives to public schooling to put those vouchers to use.  And if there is such capacity, I wonder what the quality will be.

When busing was ordered in the south, private schools sprang up like weeds.  Because the best teachers wanted out of the public schools as well, these private schools tended to be pretty good.  I wonder if that will be the case should this come to pass.  With the teachers unions being as strong as they are will the best educators want to make the move?  Moreover, will the private schools be able to compete in salary and benefits?

These are questions that need to be answered now and in conjunction with efforts like Hewitt’s.  Churches should be forming educational committees right this minute and beginning to explore the possibilities.  The massive facilities that have come to exist around the megachurch phenomena need to be put to this use, and it won’t be easy.  You can bet your bottom dollar the teachers unions will make licensing and permitting for such private endeavors as hard as possible.  If they do not already exist, regulations will rapidly come out that will make the overhead of such an operation huge.  BIG money will be needed.

BIG money takes time to accumulate and in this situation, continued flow of money will be needed – that’s even harder to set up.

And that may very well mean that we have to set aside our theological differences to pool our resources to get the job done.  The Roman Catholics, and to some extent the Lutherans have well developed educational systems.  The Mormons have well-developed supplemental education.  There’s some great shortcuts.  Do we have the wherewithal to take them, or will we be too busy decrying their theological impurity?

We’re in Thunderdome folks.  I, for one, want to leave.

Posted in Political Strategy, Social/Religious Trends, The Way Forward | Comment on this post » |  Print this post |  Email This Post