Loving our neighbors enough to be hated by them

R.C. Sproul, Jr. reminds us that loving our neighbors does not mean surrendering to their demands, especially when what they want is the one thing no faithful Christian can give.

There is a great difference between being like a lamb before the slaughter and rolling over and showing your neck. Christians need to learn to tell the difference. We find ourselves dizzy with the swiftness by which we have lost our privilege in the culture and have become virtual pariahs. Our sitting president, while serving as president, took a position on gay “marriage” that now is not just considered unsophisticated but is on the fast track to being a hate crime. Homo-rage is all the fashion; homo-fascism is all the rage. And Christians are increasingly being herded into a cultural ghetto.

Our Hero, our Champion, calls us to a spirit of humility and grace. He commands that we love our enemy, that we pray for those who persecute us. Which helps explain why huge swaths of the evangelical church are swiftly adopting a policy of complete appeasement. We are told that homosexuals have been vilified by the church, and so we must repent. We are told that since Jesus didn’t talk about homosexuality, that we shouldn’t either. We are told that if we just love them enough they won’t fear us, when the truth is we are desperately hoping that if we love them enough we won’t have to fear them. We are surrendering not our lives but our convictions, throwing them out the door like Lot’s daughters. We are not being Jesus but betraying Jesus. We are living out the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton who told us, “What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.”

You cannot nice away the demands of the homosexual lobby because grace, forgiveness, patience, love are not what they want. Loving the sinner while hating the sin isn’t acceptable to sinners who so fully identify with their sin. They want, they demand that we approve. They want the one thing we cannot possibly give – they want us to call evil good and good evil. Until we do, we will be marginalized, pilloried and despised.

Which is just where humility, grace, and love come in. We do not measure our love of our neighbor by how much they love us, but by how willing we are to be hated by them. Sacrifice for those given over to sexual insanity is being willing to be considered insane by those given over. Loving our enemy means laying our reputations on the altar and watching them go up in smoke. It means crucifying our social standing for the sake of the truth. It is precisely because of our ambition, not our humility, that we set aside our convictions.

This conflict will not be won by laying down our arms, but by laying down our lives. Until we learn to fear God we are at the mercy of the world. Jesus promised us if we will not profess Him before men, He will not profess us before His Father (Matthew 10:32). And He calls us not merely to proclaim a benign and smiling Jesus, but to instruct the world to obey all that He commands. We will be hated and despised. And that, He promises, brings blessing (Matthew 5:10-12). Lord teach us to surrender our strategy of surrender. Teach us to love our neighbors enough to be hated by them, for Your name’s sake.

Is the ACNA "the best church for American Christianity in exile?"

Alex Wilgus makes the case for the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) as "the best church for American Christianity in exile."

Earlier today, Christian blogger Rod Dreher asked a question: What is the best church for American Christianity in exile? In light of Christianity being consistently sidelined and devalued here in America over issues of opposition to gay marriage among other controversies, he specifically asked for readers to contribute an argument for why they believe their own chosen church is the best “ark” in which to ride out the storm. And so, under these parameters, here is my argument for the ACNA as Christianity’s best hope in the new century, which (I fully agree with Rod) certainly appears to be a long, secular winter. This argument is long but I want it to be thorough enough to be convincing. I welcome dissent or correction in the comments as usual, but here it is:

The Anglican Church of North America is American Christianity’s best hope in a state of modern exile. This is because it best understands that the challenges of modern exile do not proscribe the Church’s missionary vocation, instead it encourages it. The ACNA has three things going for it that I’ll explain at length: its missional nature inherited from the Global South, its intellectual seriousness, and a strong, battle-tested respect for biblical and ecclesiastical authority in the face of doctrinal controversy.

1. Missional: The ACNA embraces grassroots expansion within the bounds of authority. The strength of American Christianity down the ages has been its “do-it-yourself” quality. From the very beginning, American religion relied on ordinary laymen and laywomen as the primary footsoldiers of advancing the Kingdom. This is why American Protestantism can trace her foundational heritage heritage to a series of revivals rather than conquests or political coups. For some scholarly work on this thesis, see Mark Noll’s The New Shape of Global Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith. This is a great strength, and it’s the reason why doomsaying about Christianity’s complete cultural marginalization, though not wrong, may be overstated in terms of actual converts. However long our exile may be, the ACNA has the materials to, not just hold out but expand in the face of it.

For instance, within the ACNA, the Greenhouse Regional Church Movement (in which I am a minister) has successfully multiplied churches in the Chicagoland area among Latinos, white urban professionals, residents of nursing homes, and apartment blocks of immigrants, while still maintaining strong ecclesiastical connections between congregations. They are currently in the process of expanding this mission to Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and even Mexico. Greenhouse takes its marching orders from the writings of Roland Allen, an Anglican missionary to China and later Africa in the early 20th Century. Allen’s book “Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?” challenged the modern notion of imperialist-informed mission work and instead advocated grassroots, local, and native-driven missionary work. His ideas, if not directly influential, proved prescient in the case of Africa which has seen the most dramatic spread of Christianity probably ever, mostly as a result of local congregations multiplying, and clergy empowering lay-ministers to go out and minister. Confounding modern Western sociological predictions that Africa would become largely Muslim as European colonies pulled out of the continent, the reverse has come to pass and Africa can almost be rightly named the first “Christian Continent.” The ACNA has not only taken notice of this massive Christian revival but has taken courage from it, sought out real relationships with the remarkable men and women of the faith involved in it, and it is gone out in their same spirit, taking African evangelists, not only as inspiring stories, but as real spiritual mentors. It is now very common for African Anglican evangelists to travel to America for the purpose of encouraging our churches here and share their wisdom. Their approach emphasizes priests raising up gifted lay-people as “catechists” (or lay-pastors) to go out and found new congregations, preach, pastor and evangelize. They encourage catechists and even some priests to be bi-vocational and versatile, founding congregations anywhere there are a harvest of converts. Through Greenhouse, we have established healthy churches in apartment blocks, nursing homes, storefronts and even, believe it or not, actual church buildings. As America secularizes, Africa is starting to evangelize it through the ACNA. Ultimately, though the ACNA is clear-eyed about the negativity toward orthodox Christianity, we do not believe that cultural marginalization will cripple our ability to evangelize and successfully convert. In fact, the shoe may be on quite the other foot. The reasons for this are addressed in the next section.

2. Intellectually solid. While the Anglican Church intentionally does not have a catechism or a magisterium, nor has it rejected hierarchy for totally decentralized autonomous congregations, instead it believes itself to be constantly contending for the true faith and building unity around it. Anglicans believe that the Church is always fighting heresy, that it is a constant conflict, and so every generation is called on to contend for the true faith. This means that Anglicans do not shy away from learning in the way that fundamentalists in certain Anabaptist traditions did. It certainly breeds a lot of discussion and debate, but it is debate of the healthy sort. In these perilous times, it is easy for the faithful to consider discussion and disagreement as fault lines and cracks of inevitable liberalization and compromise with the culture. But I believe that it is a healthy exercise of practical reason informed by faith in Christ. Oliver O’Donovan is a good guide in these matters, and he is worth reading. To my mind he occupies an intellectual place for thoughtful Anglicans quite similar to Alasdair MacIntyre does for traditional Catholics, but he sets an opposite program: full engagement with the world. Instead of retreat into “virtuous communities” and a Benedictine Option, he advocates for a frontal assault on intellectual matters instead of either closing down debates over doctrine with unerring statements ex cathedra or giving up on reasoned engagement with the broader culture in favor of separatism. Ultimately, Anglicans still believe in the ability of faith-informed reason to persuade, and you know what? I believe him. Here’s why:

Catholics and Orthodox continually point to the Episcopal Church as the reason why the Anglican Church has failed, but I actually see them as the strongest evidence of our success. Don’t mistake me, in the case of the Episcopal Church and even, lately, the Church of England, it is clear that the heretics have seized the reins of power, (i.e. money, property, and formal communion.) But the critics overlook us, the schismatics, and the brave bishops of the Global South who have sponsored us (incidentally, this is why the ACNA can rightfully say we enjoy communion with Canterbury, even if tangentially.) We have had our our tussles with modernizing heretics, and there were casualties: we lost buildings and money, but one look at the other guy will show that the Episcopalians came out the worse in terms of the one thing that makes a church a church–actual membership, which has lately plummeted to unsustainable levels. The Church of England is currently experiencing the same internal hemorrhage as it liberalizes. Though the heretics appear triumphant from the point of view of mammon and their formal connections to Canterbury, they have lost their doctrinal coherence and so have lost their parishioners, and it will be their undoing. I do not know why this fact continues to go unreported and why nobody ascribes any meaning to it. The numbers prove that, even if the culture is not on the side of the faithful church, reason is–since if one accepts what the Episcopal Church teaches, one also tacitly accepts that one has no need to go to church, except to feel the somatic tinge of nostalgia, and there are other ways to get that than communion on Sunday. I relate this recent history because I actually believe it shows the not insignificant fact that even if Christianity is losing the culture, the culture is losing the Church. And this is no small loss, because with it means that the faithful will once again be in control of the church, because it will be the only church left.

Part of the legacy of our break in communion with the Episcopal Church is that the break has refined matters of doctrine in the fires of controversy. Establishing a set doctrine or a catechism is tempting, but we can see from a cursory examination of American Catholicism (for instance) that doing so does nothing to actually confront heresy, draw it out into the open, deal with it, and move on. Though there will continue to be doctrinal controversies and debates, in the ACNA, they will not be the same as the ones in the past over gay marriage and theological liberalism. We will get to turn our practical reason to new matters, and so the fires of schism have further refined our doctrinal stances. We are as disturbed as anyone by the apparent victory of liberal sexual and theological attitudes in the culture at large, but instead of cowering away in virtuous communities, weathering the storm, we are actually sighting out Mars Hills on which to dialogue, debate, and evangelize the secular culture around us. My diocese: The Diocese of the Upper Midwest only just formed last year. We are strong, healthy and expanding. It certainly isn’t a wave as intense as that of the East African Revival, but we are not counting that out for the future. We labor in a spirit of hope, confident in our reason, and unfailing in our faith.

3. Authoritative and hierarchical: The ACNA boasts a healthy hierarchy and authority alongside its openness to reasoned debate. Just this month, we have elected our new (second) Archbishop with a very surprising and unprecedented show of unity. Stories abound from every diocese of unity and coalescence rather than splintering or fracturing. Indeed, this is how the ACNA formed (and it continues to congeal) in the first place, by gathering up the splintered pieces of the many schismatic groups from the Episcopal Church and forming them into a strong and unified Province of the Anglican Church. This has not gone uncontested, but the structures of authority and respect for the canons of the Anglican Church have won the day. The province faced its first real institutional challenge in 2011 when Anglican Mission in the Americas, another group of Anglican schismatics officially recognized by ACNA though not a part of it, broke with its Episcopal overseers in Rwanda over matters of finance. Though they were well-known friends of ACNA clergy and members, the ACNA refused to recognize them unless they proved themselves willing to submit to the authority of their Rwandan bishops. This episode could have irreparably fractured American Anglicans, but it did not. Instead, the ACNA showed itself to be committed to episcopal oversight and authority. AMiA exists today as a schismatic group officially unrecognized by ACNA or its parent bishops in Africa.

To bring this overlong argument to a close, I think that discussions over which church is the best “ark” on which to weather the storm tend to turn on which church has the strongest, most ancient, most “countercultural” sorts of rituals that will preserve the faith from the assaults of heresy. We are reflexively looking for how to build walls around our respective camps and preserve our traditions until the fields are more fruitful and our society more accepting. But this is not how the early church responded to heresy. They came out and met it. They evangelized in the face of it. When the Arians tried to seize their buildings, they locked themselves in and sang through the night. In short, they did battle. If orthodox Christianity’s cultural capital is being significantly reduced (and I believe that it is) then I think the lives of the Church Fathers would bid us become an insurgency rather than a cloister. In fact, considering the precipitous decline in membership of the liberal churches whose ideology has been blessed by the ascendant cultural forces, I think the Benedictine Option is rather the only hope for the Protestant Mainline, not the faithful. The ACNA is a church that has taken hold of its faith and its reason and gone out on a confident and hopeful mission. Part of its strength comes from its patronage by African bishops who know a thing or two about grassroots mission, and the spiritual strength of the poor (and who I can personally report are so full of the Spirit as to knock the socks off of any healthy skeptic.) It is using its priests to empower parishioners to go out and start new churches and win converts–instead of waiting for full-time priests to get the itch and take the potentially career endangering plunge into church planting. In short, it is liturgical, historically aware, intellectually serious Christianity on mission, and this has always been the hope of the faithful. May Christ the King come to reign in men’s hearts in this new century, and Satan tremble!

A few observations from a priest formerly affiliated with an ACNA sub-jurisdiction (PEARUSA) and now canonically resident in the Diocese of South Carolina, a body currently navigating through its own season of "exile" and looking at the ACNA as a possible future provincial home:

The missional ethos of ACNA is, undoubtedly, its greatest strength and its hierarchical structure under the leadership of godly men is a refreshing change from the corruption rampant in so many mainline Protestant denominations. I would contend, however, that ACNA's theological and intellectual underpinnings are still a work in progress. It will take perhaps as long as a generation for its clergy and lay members to be weaned off the vacuous theology of the old mainline tradition out of which most of them came.

That caveat aside, I am optimistic that, under newly elected Archbishop Foley Beach, the ACNA will begin to look more like a province than a mere polyglot of various Anglican traditions. Former Archbishop Robert Duncan did a noteworthy job of holding the various factions together during the formative years. It falls to his successor to lead those factions to the next level of ecclesiastical unity and, perhaps, to draw in other parties from the far flung Anglican Diaspora so as to make the ACNA a truly transformative presence in the midst of a culture so tragically saturated by godless secularization.

Same sex marriage dissidents: The always insightful Mollie Hemingway at her always insightful best

Underneath the stale ideological pushing and shoving involved in the recent Brendan Eich/Mozilla debacle is a far more substantive issue that really strikes at the heart of a civilized society. Eich's problem is not that he is, to use the oft repeated cliche, "on the wrong side of history" when it comes to the "evolution" of marriage. Rather, he is, like every normal thinking person before him over the last, say, six thousand years, simply right about an institution at the heart of human civilization. There are some things, like the complementarity of men and women, which simply cannot be changed no matter how strong the winds of cultural relativism blow.

The always insightful Mollie Hemingway is at her always insightful best in her latest article for The Federalist. . .

OK. We probably already understand relationships have value, right? Assuming we’re not sociopaths, we do. So what is the difference between marriage and other relationships? There’s no question marriage has been treated dramatically differently than other relationships by governments and society. Why? Is it that it features a more vibrant or emotional connection? Or is there some feature that is a difference in kind – that marks it out as something that ought to be socially structured? We usually don’t want government in our other relationships, right? So why is marriage singled out throughout all time and human history as a different type of recognized relationship?

Well, what singled it out was that sex was involved. Sex. Knocking boots. The bump and grind. Dancing in the sheets. Making the beast with two backs. Doing the cha-cha. And so on and so forth. And why does that matter? Well, there’s precisely one bodily system for which each of us only has half of the system. It’s the one that involves sex between one man and one woman. It’s with respect to that system that the unit is the mated pair. In that system, it’s not just a relationship that is the union of minds, wills or important friendships. It’s the literal union of bodies. In sexual congress, in intercourse between a man and a woman, you are literally coordinated to a single bodily end.

In every other respect we as humans act as individual organisms except when it comes to intercourse between men and women — then we work together as one flesh. Coordination toward that end — even when procreation is not achieved — makes the unity here. This is what marriage law was about. Not two friends building a house together. Or two people doing other sexual activities together. It was about the sexual union of men and women and a refusal to lie about what that union and that union alone produces: the propagation of humanity. This is the only way to make sense of marriage laws throughout all time and human history. Believing in this truth is not something that is wrong, and should be a firing offense. It’s not something that’s wrong, but should be protected speech. It’s actually something that’s right. It’s right regardless of how many people say otherwise. If you doubt the truth of this reality, consider your own existence, which we know is due to one man and one woman getting together. Consider the significance of what this means for all of humanity, that we all share this.

Now if one wants to change marriage laws to reflect something else, that’s obviously something that one can aim to do. We’ve seen the rapid, frequently unthinking embrace of that change in recent years, described one year ago in the humanist and libertarian magazine Spiked as “a case study in conformism” that should terrify “anyone who values diversity of thought and tolerance of dissent.”

Perhaps there should have been a bit of a burden of proof on those who wanted to change the institution — something beyond crying “Bigot!” in a crowded theater. Perhaps advocates of the change should have explained at some point, I don’t know, what singles out marriage as unique from other relationships under this new definition. What is marriage? That’s a good question to answer, particularly if you want to radically alter the one limiting factor that is present throughout all history. Once we get an answer for what this new marriage definition is, perhaps our media and other elites could spend some time thinking about the consequences of that change. Does it in any way affect the right of children to be raised by their own mother and father? Have we forgotten why that’s an important norm? Either way, does it change the likelihood that children will be raised by their own mother and father? Does it by definition make that an impossibility for whatever children are raised by same-sex couples? Do we no longer believe that children should be raised by their own mother and father? Did we forget to think about children in this debate, pretending that it’s only about adults? In any case, is this something that doesn’t matter if males and females are interchangeable? Is it really true that there are no significant differences between mothers and fathers? Really? Are we sure we need to accept that lie? Are we sure we want to?

. . . and it only gets better, so please keep reading.

What would Jesus do? He would change water into wine!

I have noted before the limits of the "What would Jesus do?" principle. It will do as an elementary principle, but it will never do as the basis for a well rounded Christology. It invests too much in Jesus as a moral example and not enough in him as Savior and Lord.

Kirsten Powers is a new Christian and, her faith having not come to full maturity, she can be excused for asking the ridiculous question, "Would Jesus bake a cake for a gay couple?" and offering an equally ridiculous answer. Skye Jethani and Jonathan Merritt, however, do not get off so lightly. They should know better, but apparently don't.

Now, I am not going to waste anyone's time considering the pro's and con's of Christians baking cakes for "gay weddings." That is a superficial issue so sadly illustrative of the superficial times in which we live. Bringing Jesus into the discussion, in the hypothetical manner in which the above mentioned authors have, only adds to the superficiality.

Jesus was a carpenter, so the question of whether or not he would bake a cake is irrelevant to the discussion. What we do know about Jesus and weddings, however, is pretty clear from Scripture.

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.

(John 2:1-11 ESV)

Previously, I wrote concerning this passage:

The church’s message about salvation has often been one-dimensional focusing, in some circles, on this particular aspect while, in other circles, on that particular aspect. The result, quite predictably, is a superficial “gospel” that is more death than life.

Today’s Gospel reading reminds us that salvation is not merely redemption and healing—on a superficial level—but restoration to fullness of life or, as Eugene Peterson has put it, “Life, life, and more life.”

Throughout John’s Gospel, salvation is synonymous with life. Jesus says in John 10:10, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” What he does at the wedding in Cana illustrates this profoundly. No one is sick, no one is hungry, and the people hosting the wedding are certainly not destitute. Yet, Jesus acts anyway, invigorating a feast that was about to die before its time with new, vibrant, abundant life.

It is crucial that the church today proclaim, in both word and deed, the entirety of the Gospel message of salvation as fullness of life. Our culture today devalues life. The life of the unborn, of the elderly, of the disabled all seem to become more expendable as they become more inconvenient. I saw an article the other day about two twins in Belgium who were already deaf and going blind. They decided to euthanize themselves because they couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing each other anymore. Wickedness masquerades as compassion when the culture of death reigns.

The Jesus we encounter in the Gospels is not merely some moral teacher whose example we seek to emulate when faced with an ethical dilemma. He is God incarnate, the Word made flesh, the Lord of creation who comes to transform us out of death into new and unending life.

So let us be done with all this superficial talk about Jesus and wedding cakes. Jesus is not interested in baking cakes. He is interested in changing water into wine!

Repeating the mistake of Eve

Talbot Davis, in a recent guest post at Juicy Ecumenism, reminds us again of just how intolerant the apostles of "tolerance" and "diversity" are. Along the way, however, in explaining why virulent revisionists object to Eddie Fox receiving an award from Candler School of Theology, he makes a statement that is illustrative of a much larger problem.

It’s because Eddie Fox stands with 2,000 years of Christian teaching in affirming celibacy in singleness and faithfulness in heterosexual marriage. Meaning: he believes that homosexual intercourse is not God’s design for humanity.

The first mistake Eve made in the Garden of Eden was to give an incorrect answer to the serpent's inquiry. "Did God actually say to you, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?'" the serpent asks. Eve's response, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die,’" (cf. Genesis 3:1-3) is an unnecessary expansion of God's command. God said nothing about not touching the tree, only about not eating from it. By adding to God's Word, Eve set herself (and Adam) up for the Fall. They were not tripped up because God had placed upon them an unreasonable expectation, but because they made a simple command complicated.

The ever-crafty serpent, in the present-day guise of smooth-talking revisionists, has tricked us again into complicating the simple. For 2,000 years, the basic Christian teaching on sexual morality could be summed up simply as chastity and faithfulness. Note, however, the qualifications and clarifications employed in the above statement which water down this simple truth.

"Celibacy in singleness" is a redundancy. "Celibacy" is merely the state of being unmarried. There is nothing particularly virtuous or un-virtuous about it. A celibate person is single person, but not necessarily a chaste person.

"Faithfulness in heterosexual marriage" is an exercise in self-contradiction. "Heterosexual," like "homosexual," is a term coined to describe a form of sexual deviance, that is, a form of sexual intercourse outside of marriage. Neither term was ever intended to be used as a qualifier for one type of "marriage" or another. "Marriage" is the union of one man and one woman. It cannot be anything else. Arguments to the contrary betray a basic ignorance of the laws of nature.

When the church succumbs in this way to the serpent's crafty scheme, she is repeating the mistake of Eve. She is taking a simple command of God, which is intended to bring perfect freedom, and perverting it into a cumbersome regulation which makes the church, in the eyes of a world enslaved by the serpent's deception, the enemy of freedom.

Eric Teetsel: Winning the marriage debate in a culture amusing itself to death

A very helpful article, posted at Public Discourse:

Here’s what we must not do: sacrifice our principles. Better to lose a thousand elections than win in sycophantic appeals to the lowest common denominator. Christians, at least, can rely on the long view of God’s redemptive story. We have already read the final page of human history; we know how the story ends. How utterly meaningless is the next election cycle viewed from this perspective?

Until that final chapter comes to pass, the responsibility is ours to be active in the present. And since we aren’t about to gain a slew of celebrity endorsements, we have to make ourselves and our ideas as attractive to the “persuadables” as possible. Forget beating the entrenched opposition. When we debate in the public square and in social media, our goal should be to win those silent observers whose commitments are shallow and subject to change.

This week, the Supreme Court will issue decisions in two cases involving the meaning and purpose of marriage. Whatever the results, our work to rebuild a culture of marriage and family will continue. Restoration will require that we better brand ourselves and make our case more attractive.

In a 1972 article in Philosophy & Rhetoric, Wayne Brockriede describes the art of communication in terms of sexual conduct. Like sex, argument occurs between human beings who bring their whole selves to the conversation, including personal histories and philosophical presuppositions (whether they know it or not). And, as in sex, participants in conversation can be considerate of these facts and lovingly negotiate them as part of the act, or manipulate them to personal advantage, or ignore them completely and carry on without regard for the others’ welfare at all. The first is arguing as a lover; the second as a seducer; the third as a rapist.

Too often, conservatives—including me—fall into the third category with our derision and condemnation. Not only is this unbecoming of people aspiring to virtue, it is ineffective in winning others to our cause.

Arguing as a lover is better. It frees us to acknowledge our personal faults and the faults in our arguments while remaining committed to our position and allowing our interlocutor to save face in the majority of instances in which our case is superior. As we woo the person across from us (and—remember—the audience watching from home) we are funny, self-effacing, merciful, and confident.

Winning the affections of the audience also means using sources of authority that appeal to them. This is not a new idea; it goes back as far as Aristotle. In contemporary culture, the Constitution is not considered authoritative. Though it pains me to say it, few people care about what the founding fathers said. (Those who do are already interning at the Heritage Foundation.)

I know what you’re thinking. “But the Federalist Papers are important!” Indeed, they are, and there’s a time and a place for discussing them. But when we lead with them and rely solely on such works, we fail. The current generation is more interested in doers. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a phenomenal thinker and writer, but if not for his actions he would not be the iconic leader we consider him today. Thanks in part to writers such as Eric Metaxas, the lives of William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer provide us with examples of conservative men of conviction whose values were reflected in their actions.

Each of us ought to be part of the recovery of a marriage and family culture. The work of academics and policy advocates is vital, but artists, musicians, pastors, teachers, and all the rest have a contribution to make. The most compelling source of authority in any argument is your own life. Your conversation partner wants to know how your values have changed the way you live, and whether yours is a life worth emulating. Do I want to be that kind of person? If you can tell your own story, you will win.

C.S. Lewis is sounding eerily prophetic

From The Abolition of Man, this quote from C.S. Lewis sounds eerily prophetic.

And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive”, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity”. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Richard Fernandez elaborates:

A British soldier was decapitated a few hundred yards from a UK Army base by two men with large knives saying: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.” The men were shot when police responded 20 minutes later. The photo above shows a scene:

This is the dramatic moment a woman appears to remonstrate with a man carrying a knife following a brutal attack in Woolwich. 

The two alleged attackers are thought to have waited around for 20 minutes until Metropolitan Police officers arrived and then tried to attack them — but were swiftly shot by armed policemen, including a woman.

“Remonstrate.” Now there’s a word to conjure with. The Telegraph describes the behavior of the onlookers — the attackers asked the crowd to take their photo, which they apparently did:

“There was only a few people at first then traffic began to build up because people were getting out of their cars to shout at them they were taking no notice, they were standing there, I think they were proud of what they were doing. 

“When they dumped the body in the road, these two black guys had the opportunity to hurt other people if they wanted to because there were brave women with the dead guy on the floor, they were shielding and covering him. The attackers with the knives were standing over these women. 

“The guy with the gun, the tall guy with the beanie cap on, even a bus had pulled up — he was going over to the bus and asking people to take his photo.”

Then the killers allowed only women to come forward to succor the dead or dying man:

He said: “My friend and her mum were walking up the hill and the mum came straight to the victim. 

She asked the black guys can I help him? And one of them said he was already dead but she could go. 

Then one of them said ‘No man is coming near this body, only women’.” 

“She was so brave, she didn’t care what happened to her — she knelt down by his side and comforted him. 

She held his hand and put her other hand on his chest. I think she might have been praying. 

My friend (the woman’s daughter) was crying her eyes out. The victim was wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt.” 

Mr. Tallant said the two men were walking up to people with cameras so they could be seen and filmed. 

He said: “They wanted people to know who they were.”

The women came forward. Children in nearby schools were locked down by their teachers.

This incident illustrates, if nothing else, the endpoint of the social engineering of the West. It has been remarkably effective.

From a certain point of view, the British crowd behaved perfectly and this is the way “they” all want us to behave. The populace sheltered in place, didn’t do anything rash, talked to the perpetrators as people. They waited for the police to come and the hospital helicopter to take the corpse away. Some will doubtless get counseling to overcome their shattering experience.

And then they will congratulate themselves on how tough British society is; resilience and all that. The more caring will leave some flowers by a railing and hold a few candle vigils for healing and peace, until these wither and blow away and the news cycle washes up a new object of attention.

The attackers knew they were actors in a drama — as keenly watched in their communities as on the BBC. And in that other audience they were asking: “How will the locals behave?” We know now. And that other audience may derive an entirely different lesson from this tableau: “See? Only their women act like men. They follow orders. They are nothing anymore — these Westerners. They are a civilization whose core has been destroyed.”

Monstrous evil (and that may be too mild a description)

Marie Freyre, R.I.P.

If you have any questions about the kind of unspeakable evil that can be committed in the name of "protection" and "welfare" by a callous, out-of-control, bureaucratic nanny state, you need to read this heartbreaking story published Tuesday in the Tampa Bay Times.

Even after Marie Freyre died alone in a nursing home 250 miles from the family in North Tampa that loved her, Marie's mother had to fight to bring her home.

In March 2011, state child protection investigators took 14-year-old Marie from her mother, Doris Freyre, claiming Doris' own disabilities made it almost impossible for her to care for Marie, who suffered from seizures and severe cerebral palsy. But a Tampa judge signed an order that Marie be returned to her mother, with in-home nursing care around the clock.

Florida health care administrators refused to pay for it, although in-home care can be demonstrably cheaper than care in an institution. Child welfare workers ignored the order completely.

Two months later, Marie was strapped into an ambulance for a five-hour trip to a Miami Gardens nursing home, as her mother begged futilely to go with her.

Marie died 12 hours after she arrived.

"Since the state of Florida took custody of my daughter, I would like the state of Florida to bring me back my daughter," Freyre, 59, said at a May 9 court hearing, 12 days after her daughter died.

"They kidnapped my daughter. She was murdered," said Freyre. "And I want my daughter back."

Want more details? Grab a box of Kleenex before reading further.

Doris Freyre — who worked at a family store in Puerto Rico before becoming disabled herself— cared for her daughter well for 14 years, and Marie had suffered no seizures in recent years, records show.

"Doris spent every day of 14 years of her life giving everything she had to Marie, guaranteeing that Marie lived as healthy and wonderful a life as God allowed her," said the family's Tampa lawyer, Peter Brudny.

But in March 2011, one of the family's in-home nurses reported several concerns about Doris Freyre's parenting of Marie to the Department of Children and Families, setting in motion a disastrous chain of events. Hillsborough Circuit Judge Vivian Corvo began a hearing on the case on March 30, 2011, by praising Freyre for her care of her daughter.

Corvo wanted to help Freyre — not punish her. The greatest challenge was Freyre's own health: Freyre suffers from six herniated discs, as well as carpal tunnel syndrome in her wrists.

"The doctor told me to do surgery," Freyre said in court. "I told him no, because I have to take care of my daughter."

Freyre had asked the Agency for Health Care Administration to provide her with 24-hour nursing aides. As it stood, Freyre had a gap between midnight and 7 a.m. where she needed help to reposition Marie and change her diapers. "It's not easy," Freyre told the judge. "I'm human."

But AHCA administrators refused to pay for the additional hours. Corvo wanted to know why. "This is a nonverbal child, with all of these issues," the judge said. "Why would this mother not qualify for 24-hour care?"

From the beginning, state child protection administrators wanted to send Marie to a nursing home. Freyre's attorney suggested such a move could kill her.

"With this type of child, when you institutionalize them," attorney Steve Zucker said, "they never do well. And I'm very concerned."

"Can the (state) do better than this?" he asked the judge.

At the end of the hearing, Corvo required child welfare administrators to do better. She wrote an order that Marie be returned to her mother, with additional nursing care through the night.

It was an order the state simply ignored.

Records show state child welfare workers disregarded Corvo's order that Hillsborough Kids, which was under contract with the DCF, pay for the extra nursing hours while caseworkers looked into additional dollars from Medicaid.

Two weeks later, the state Attorney General's Office and Hillsborough Kids appeared before a different judge, Emily Peacock. AHCA, which runs Medicaid, had refused again to pay for 24-hour care, a lawyer said. With no permanent solution in sight, the state said, a nursing home was the only option.

"The best placement for the child right now is a … nursing home where she can get that 24-hour supervision and care that she needs," said Angeline Attila, an assistant attorney general.

The new judge, who never asked why the state ignored a prior judge's order, agreed — though she granted Freyre the right to visit with her daughter all she wanted. But even that kindness proved meaningless.

A DCF review of Marie's death said the only nursing home willing to take her was Florida Club Care Center in Miami Gardens.

At first, the state Attorney General's Office, which was representing Hillsborough Kids, asked that the long trip be delayed so lawyers could seek permission from a judge to move Marie.

But they were under significant pressure to get Marie out of Tampa General Hospital, where she was placed after child protection workers took her into state care. Records show the hospital complained bitterly that it was losing money on her care. A hospital social worker, records say, "was adamant about the child leaving the hospital today."

So, at 11:30 a.m. April 25, 2011, workers at Tampa General Hospital loaded the teen onto a stretcher in a private ambulance — as her mother and grandfather begged them to stop. Even as caseworkers were packing Marie's belongings, her grandfather was frantically filing hand-written emergency motions in court to delay the trip, Brudny said.

Doris Freyre, case notes say, "stated that no one knows my child like me," and that Marie's dislocated hip would cause her great pain if she were strapped to a stretcher for hours. She added: "If something happens to my daughter I am holding all of you responsible for it."

Freyre had no car — and the private ambulance refused to allow her to join Marie — so Marie made the trip to Miami-Dade County alone.

Records show the two ambulance workers refused to take Marie's seizure drugs with them; under the company's policy, they were not allowed to administer medications in any case. According to a report detailing Tampa General Hospital's care of Marie, the hospital neglected to ensure she was properly hydrated before she left. During her five-hour ambulance ride, she was given no water or food.

A September 2011 investigation by AHCA of how Tampa General discharged Marie to the nursing home faulted the hospital for a number of violations, including failing to ensure the child had enough fluids and was properly medicated. The hospital's lack of "concern" for Marie, the report said, left her "in danger."

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services placed the hospital under the status of "Immediate Jeopardy" following the review, the highest penalty under federal health regulations, said an AHCA spokeswoman. The following October, the federal agency removed the designation after Tampa General implemented a corrective action plan. AHCA also is seeking to fine the hospital $5,000 in the case, and a hearing is scheduled for Jan. 14.

Marie arrived in Miami Gardens the way she left Tampa: screaming. AHCA records for the next 12 hours mention only four notations in the nursing home file, and two of them document Marie "screaming."

By 5:40 a.m. April 27, 2011, Marie was described as having "labored" breathing. Five minutes later, she was unresponsive. The AHCA investigation concluded she had been given none of her life-sustaining anti-seizure drugs, required three times each day.

Marie was pronounced dead at 6:54 a.m. Cause of death: heart attack.

Two weeks later, on May 9, 2011, Doris Freyre appeared one last time before a judge in Tampa — Peacock, who declared herself "terribly sorry" for Freyre's loss.

"I don't accept your excuse," the mother replied. Freyre said she was in court to get her daughter's body back from the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's Office. With no trust left for state officials, Freyre was seeking a private autopsy.

"It's the mother's position that the (state) had the child removed without proper authorization," said her attorney, Laguerra Champagne. "She objected to the child being physically removed from Hillsborough County and transported to Miami. No court hearing was held and, unfortunately, we're here today, dealing with a dead child instead of a living child."

Attila, the prosecutor who, weeks earlier, had fought so hard to get Marie to the nursing home, no longer wanted to discuss the matter. She told Peacock that a child welfare judge had no "jurisdiction" over a dead child and prosecutors would file a court motion saying so.

"Not to seem insensitive; I understand the mother is quite frustrated and I understand that she's grieving," Attila said, "but the information that she's providing to the court is moot at this point in time."

Despite Attila's protestations, Freyre had the last word.

"I had her for 14 years — cared (for) and loved her," Freyre said. "And you have her … in prison, in the hospital, without going out in the sun, without being with other people, in prison.

"Then, in (12) hours, you took her down to Miami and she died," Freyre added. "And I want the truth of this to come out. I want justice."

Oh, and then there's this little post-script:

Marie's body remained in storage for nine months while the medical examiner's office completed its autopsy, and Freyre held a memorial with no body.

Words fail me, so I'll let Mark Shea take it from here.

Monstrous evil was done here by faceless bureaucrats who preferred that a mother be torn from her child and that child die rather than their bean counting be interefered with. Monstrous evil. In a civilized country, this gravely wronged mother would be awarded hundreds of millions in damages and the bureaucrats who ordered this selfish cruelty would be jailed for the rest of their natural lives. If you are a lawyer living in Florida, I hope you contact this mother and, together with her, embark on extracting from the state in justice many times the pittance it would not pay out in mercy. A bureaucracy has no soul and deserves no mercy from God or man when it fails this egregiously. May the monsters who made this choice find mercy from God for their miserable souls. May the budget and the system find only pitiless retribution. And may this mother find solace from Christ crucified and her daughter find eternal light and peace in his embrace. Mother Mary, pray for every human being involved in this tragedy.

Elizabeth Scalia adds:

I hope this mother owns Florida when this is over.

Indeed, but even that would not be sufficient compensation for the life of her beloved daughter.

Kyrie Eleison.

Dirty old man engaged -- again

Oh, isn't this lovely? Hugh Hefner, the quintessential dirty old man, is engaged --again-- to a woman young enough to be his great granddaughter.

Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris are reportedly headed down the aisle once again — though technically they'd be hitting it for the first time, after she pulled the runaway-bride thing on him five days before their planned wedding in June 2011.

The 86-year-old and the 26-year-old are allegedly engaged again and aiming to say their vows on New Year's Eve, sources told TMZ over the weekend. Apparently time apart from Hef taught Harris to be more independent, something she thought she needed, the sources said.

The ceremony is supposed to be a small one, with close friends and family only. That's in contrast to the 300-person extravaganza that was planned last time around.

Tim Fountain reminds us that our society's downhill moral slide did not begin when a bunch of homosexuals started demanding their "rights." It began when unapologetically heterosexual smut peddlers like Hugh Hefner were allowed to become respectable.

Something to think about

This is so wrong in so many ways

Evangelicals have been slow learners when it comes to engaging, redeeming, and transforming the culture. Progress has been made in recent years, but this advertisement for an upcoming book by Craig Groeschel suggests a giant step backward. Andy Crouch, author of the groundbreaking book Culture Making, is particularly disappointed, as well he should be. This is so wrong in so many ways.

The image of praying hands encased in latex gloves is, well, gruesome to say the least. The caption, "Deliver us from culture," is an obvious play on the petition in the Lord's Prayer, "Deliver us from evil," implying that "culture" is inherently "evil" and presumably irredeemable. Once again, reminiscent of the hoopla surrounding Rob Bell's theologically underwhelming treatise on hell, it appears the Christian book buying community is being baited by a deliberately provocative publicity campaign. If past history is any indication, we are in for a major letdown.

Hayes on the folly of Christian outrage

Is it counter-productive for Christians to express outrage at every perceived insult? Christopher B. Hays proposes an alternative approach.

A thought experiment: Imagine if every Christian leader who was invited to comment on the next Dan Brown book simply said, "Why are you calling about this? You know his books are fictional, they're boring to anyone informed, and they're kind of poorly written." No facts, no offense taken—no story.

While many Christians crave the catharsis of rebuttal, a passage from Proverbs balances this sentiment against the wisdom of stoical restraint: "Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes" (26:4-5). In this eternal struggle, I believe some Christian intellectuals have strayed too far to the side of answering.

Catapulting the wrong people to fame and fortune is only part of the problem. It would be naïve to think that we could purify our culture by keeping mum on a few scandal-mongering books and movies. By overreacting when some hack misrepresents the biblical story, however, we send the message that the misrepresentation is more surprising and controversial than the genuine article.

In a recent survey published in USA Today, less than one-third of Americans between ages 18 and 29 reported having read the Bible—ever. The mistaken impression that the Bible is safe, boring, and slavishly in thrall to cultural norms probably accounts for much of this indifference.

Another thought experiment: Imagine if a journalist called a Christian leader to ask about Brown's latest Rome-based conspiracy theory, and the leader said, "That's a pretty tame theory. The Bible's own conspiracy theory is much wilder. It says that God is plotting to overthrow every worldly power and establish his own rule once and for all. And the entire Christian church is in on it." The magnitude of God's plan hardly needs exaggeration: This is the God who, when it came time to pick teams, chose an old man, then a tiny nation, then the youngest son of Jesse, and ultimately the life of a commoner from Bethlehem—and with this roster undertook vanquishing the mightiest empires of the world.

To be clear, I am not saying that we should not look for religious meaning in surprising places. Even ostensibly irreligious works of art are transformed when viewed through a Christian lens. They can be savored for the fresh and unexpected ways in which they reveal God's truth.
Nor do I aim to silence genuine criticisms of the church or preclude taking seriously how non-Christians perceive the world. But not every insult is serious.

What I am saying is much simpler: Let's be more circumspect about what we pluck from the roiling waters of culture and bring to the world's attention.

Where is Socrates when you need him?

Victor Davis Hanson offers a much needed critique of the "new sophists" who are polluting our culture with their pearls of wisdom on everything from climate to economics to the U.S. Constitution.

In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous “really wise guys” made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts of having “proved” the most amazing “thinkery” that belied common sense.

We are living in a new age of sophism — but without a modern Socrates to remind the public just how silly our highly credentialed and privileged new rhetoricians can be.

Take California, which is struggling with a near-record wet and snowy winter. Flooding spreads in the lowlands; snow piles up in the Sierras.

In February 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, pontificated without evidence that California farms would dry up and blow away, because 90 percent of the annual Sierra snowpack would disappear. Yet long-term studies of the central Sierra snowpack show average snow levels unchanged over the last 90 years. Many California farms are drying up — but from government’s, not nature’s, irrigation cutoffs.

England is freezing and snowy. But that’s odd, since global-warming experts assured us that the end of English snow was on the horizon. Australia is now flooding — despite predictions that impending new droughts meant it could not sustain its present population. The New York Times just published an op-ed assuring the public that the current record cold and snow is proof of global warming. In theory, they could be, but one wonders: What, then, would record winter heat and drought prove?

In response to these unexpected symptoms of blizzards and deluges, climate physicians offer changing diagnoses. “Climate change” has superseded “global warming.” After these radically cold winters, the next replacement appears to be “climate chaos.” Yet if next December is neither too hot nor too cold, expect to hear about the doldrum dangers of “climate calm.”

In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration — Peter Orszag, Larry Summers, and Christina Romer — assured us that record trillion-plus budget defects were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent unemployment. For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an additional $3 trillion in national debt. All three have quietly returned to either academia or Wall Street.

There is also a new generation of young sophistic bloggers who offer their wisdom from the New York–Washington corridor. They usually have degrees from one or more of America’s elite colleges and navigate an upscale urban landscape. One, the Washington Post’s 26-year-old Ezra Klein, recently scoffed on MSNBC that a bothersome U.S. Constitution was “written more than 100 years ago” and has “no binding power on anything.”

One constant here is equating wisdom with a certificate of graduation from a prestigious school. If, in the fashion of the sophist Protagoras, someone writes that record cold proves record heat, or that record borrowing and printing of money will create jobs and sustained economic growth, or that a 223-year-old Constitution is 100 years old and largely irrelevant, then credibility can be claimed only in the title or the credentials — but not the logic — of the writer.

Dovetailing with my observation from a few days ago, these "new sophists" appear to be the prime beneficiaries of a hyper-sensitive society's inability to laugh at ridiculous ideas. Where is Socrates when you need him?

Stuff we already knew: Hugh Hefner is a dirty old man

For most decent folk, it shouldn't take his engagement to a woman 60 years his junior to prove that Hugh Hefner is a dirty old man. The 84-year-old pornography king has been inflicting his smut on the public for well over a half century now. But the veneer of a life of sexual paradise for the harem of playmates in the infamous Playboy Mansion is finally being exposed by a few disgruntled former residents, who describe a place more akin to Collinwood than to Xanadu.

One by one they have revealed what life was like behind the glittering façade of the Playboy Mansion. According to them, it disguises a grubby world where some girls feel they are no ­better than prostitutes, paid pocket money by an octogenarian obsessive who funds plastic ­surgery to turn them into his physical ideal, and yet must still take huge amounts of Viagra to manage sex with them.

The portrait of Hefner painted by Izabella St James is deeply unappealing. A pretty blonde law graduate, she was 26 when she met him in a Hollywood nightclub in 2002. Soon, he invited her to move in with him and seven other official ‘girlfriends’.

Hefner likes to have anywhere between three and 15 girlfriends at any one time. One of the group will be chosen to be Girlfriend No 1. She will share Hefner’s bedroom at all times, while the others are merely visitors.

For Izabella, the Playboy Mansion was far from the glamorous pleasure palace she had imagined.

‘Each ­bedroom had mismatched, random pieces of furniture,’ she recalls in her autobiography Bunny Tales. ‘It was as if someone had gone to a charity shop and bought the basics for each room.

‘Although we all did our best to decorate our rooms and make them homely, the mattresses on our beds were ­disgusting — old, worn and stained. The sheets were past their best, too.

‘Eventually I persuaded Hef to pay for a new mattress and bed linen — but I had to turn in every single receipt before I was reimbursed.

‘Hef also eventually permitted us to have the rooms painted and recarpeted. But for some reason he insisted on creamy, white-coloured carpets. He liked the girlfriends’ rooms to look very girly, all white carpet and pink walls.

‘It looked great at first, but with two dogs (most of the girlfriends had pets that lived in their rooms — I had two pugs), butlers delivering food, dirty shoes and occasional spillages, the carpet was grey and stained in a matter of months.’

She adds: ‘But then Hef was used to dirty carpets. The one in his bedroom had not been changed for years, and things became significantly worse when Holly Madison moved into his room with him as Girlfriend No. 1 soon after I moved in, bringing her two dogs.

‘They weren’t house-trained and would just do their business on the bedroom carpet. Late at night, or in the early hours of the morning — if any of us visited Hef’s bedroom — we’d almost always end up standing in dog mess.

‘Everything in the Mansion felt old and stale, and Archie the house dog would regularly relieve himself on the hallway curtains, adding a powerful whiff of urine to the general scent of decay.’

Many girls, it seems, endured these living conditions for the chance of becoming a centrefold in Playboy ­magazine — an invaluable career boost for any glamour model.

Others admitted that they stayed only for the ­cosmetic surgery to which Hefner treated them as a birthday present, keeping a running account with a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.

But St James — with big university debts — was more interested in the weekly pocket money which Hefner paid all his girlfriends. ‘Every Friday morning we had to go to Hef’s room, wait while he picked up all the dog poo off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance: a thousand dollars counted out in crisp hundred-dollar bills from a safe in one of his bookcases,’ she says.

‘We all hated this process. Hef would always use the occasion to bring up anything he wasn’t happy about in the relationship. Most of the complaints were about the lack of harmony among the girlfriends — or your lack of sexual participation in the “parties” he held in his bedroom.

‘If we’d been out of town for any reason and missed one of the official “going out” nights [When Hefner liked to parade his girls at nightclubs] he wouldn’t want to give us the allowance. He used it as a weapon.’

The allowance was also withdrawn if there was any infringement of the strict rules imposed by Hefner on all his girlfriends.

‘Little did I realise that by moving into the mansion I was losing all the freedom I associated with the Playboy lifestyle,’ says St James.

Keep in mind (and this should go without saying) that these are the observations of a woman who, at least at one point in her life, was willing to subject herself to the very degradation she now deplores. Be that as it may, however, such revelations are hardly surprising. No matter how respectable the facade he has maintained for years, Hugh Hefner has never been anything more than a common, garden variety pervert whose "philosophy" has taken a most unfortunate toll on American culture and, doubtlessly, on the lives of many young women whom he lured into his web of deceit and debauchery.

H/T to MCJ.

Russell Moore on the "Other Moore" and Hypocrisy

This one will hit you right between the eyes . . . or at least it should.

Yes, Michael Moore is a hypocrite. But aren’t we all. And shouldn’t his hypocrisy remind us to take up the plank in our own eye, and start giving away some money, some stuff, from our homes and, more importantly, from our affections.

This is, as the Scriptures repeatedly emphasize, not a simple thing to do. And the Bible nowhere calls us to a kind of mechanistic legalism to put a hedge around the temptation of Mammonism. But it’s awfully hard to see our captivity to wealth when the poorest among us is richer, by world standards, than the rich young ruler would have been, richer than Nebuchadnezzar in all his glory.

American Christians are starting to awaken somewhat to what our fat affluence has done to our supposedly counter-cultural gospel. One can only imagine that, as we speak, some evangelical trinket-maker is designing wall decorations that say “Money is the root of all kinds of evil” to sell to us, as “reminders.”

I hope I’m able to see a love of Mammon more and more clearly in my own life, and not just in the other Moore’s situation. The issue isn’t capitalism vs. socialism, and it certainly isn’t Michael Moore’s hypocritical antics.

After all, a “serve two masters” hypocrisy is much worse when one of those masters is supposed to be Jesus.

CMR's "Fatal Four"

Creative Minority Report puts a new twist on the "March Madness" phenomenon. After a hard fought tournament, the "Fatal Four" are:

Barack Obama, the most pro-abortion president ever, the man who suggested that preventing infanticide was an undue burden, the man who made reversing Mexico City and ESCR policies top priorities was a clear favorite for the final four and he made it.

The American Civil Liberties Union is conducting a determined and long-term campaign to remove every trace of Christianity from America's government, schools, public property, and public discourse. They are clearly one of the most destructive forces in the culture.

Oprah Winfrey. Oprah runs a cult disguised as a television show. Oprah's brand of celebrity is particularly dangerous as she presents a very reasonable and charitable face to the world while championing everything but truth.

Voice Of The Faithful is out to destroy, as if it were possible, the Church. Using the defense of victims of abuse as their launching pad, they champion every kind of dissent possible while still claiming to be Catholic. For this they have earned their top showing.

Next Up. The Championship Game.

No matter who wins, we all lose.

An Unreasonable Debate

"Reasonable people can disagree." That is the catch phrase for dialogue between conflicting parties in our post-modern society. The underlying assumption is, of course, that two or more parties in a given dispute have equally "reasonable" arguments and that the free exchange of ideas will ultimately lead to a resolution acceptable to all involved. But in a day and age when the lines between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil are so clearly drawn, it is becoming increasingly clear that this underlying assumption is fallacious.

When did it become "reasonable," for instance, to argue that the barbaric practice of partial birth abortion--in which the skull of an almost born child is crushed and its brains sucked out--ought to be an acceptable, legal medical procedure? Well, the slippery slope to that kind of logic began when abortion itself was domesticated, using the "reasonable" language of "freedom of choice" to mask the ugly fact that an abortion always involved the taking of a human life. A civil society which values the dignity and sanctity of human life should never have allowed the terms of the debate to be defined by persons making an utterly unreasonable argument. Yet, that is precisely what American society has allowed to happen.

Those who hold the most unreasonable position are being permitted to define what is "reasonable." This has forced the most reasonable among us to conform to rules of engagement in which we must accept the reasonableness of an argument that, from our perspective, is not only unreasonable but utterly contrary to the very foundation of civil society. In other words, to engage their unreasonable opponent, reasonable people must themselves become unreasonable in order to appear reasonable within the context of the ongoing debate.

If this sounds confusing, that is the whole point. Whether the issue is abortion or any number of other moral and cultural issues, the debate itself has become unreasonable and counter-productive. The fringe has become the mainstream and the mainstream has become the fringe, yet the "debate" continues as though it were a simple disagreement between "reasonable people."

If the present war against radical Islamic terrorism requires razor sharp moral clarity to draw the distinctions between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil, the same should be no less appropriate for the Culture War for the heart and soul of American society. Niceties aside, we can no longer pretend that there is anything "reasonable" in the arguments for moral relativism, especially on issues as essential as the sanctity of human life, sexuality, and marriage. As revisionists and secularists continue to try to chip away at the moral fabric of our society, it is only reasonable to call their arguments what they really are: wrong, false, and, at their root, a most nefarious form of evil.