“… every civil government had the right to determine whether monogamy or polygamy should be the law of social life under its jurisdiction.” 1

The Federal Courts left the final determination on monogamy vs polygamy to the states. It wasn’t a Federal issue. The question of sex and sexual partners and governmental restrictions is not limited to the United States. It surfaced overseas in 2006 when the Dutch Court OKs Pedophile Party Why did they do this? Their thinking is consistent with what we are finding in the U.S. Courts:

“It is not illegal to try democratically to change the system – which is what these people are trying to do,” said a Hague spokesperson, summarizing the ruling of Judge H. Hofius.

“They are exercising their freedoms of speech and association, and as such cannot be banned by the state.”

These stories are related. Sexual obsession has taken over the minds and hearts of many. In nations where freedoms are determined largely by mob rule, which ever mob is ruling names the freedoms and morals for the rest of the nation, this is how things operate. The tradition of one man, one women constituting marriage have largely been protected because of the influence of Judeo/Christian, particularly Christian, teaching and values. Although all are guarenteed the right to marry, different states have had different criteria regarding various points. The age of consent varies from state to state.  Can first cousins marry? In 26 states, this is legal. In the remaining states, it is not. However, in all states it is not legal to marry one’s parent, sibling, aunt or uncle, and until this decade someone of the same sex. In all states it has always been one man and one woman since the founding of the nation!

The recent ruling was clear that religious views have no place in U.S. law. It is not surprising. Culture shook off the Christian worldview in the 1960s and 70s and the hangover of Christian morality is lifting. Once the transition is made to same sex marriage there is no real reason to prevent any other form of marriage or sexual behavior. As FOX News was debating the recent ruling, one of their legal experts, Lis Wiehl said that two people who love each other, “not 13,” regardless of gender is protected under the constitution. But why not 13? Why not 25 in a complex marriage? Why not a father and his daughter or a mother and her son? Why not an 8th grade school teacher and her student? On what constitutional basis can there be an “age of consent”? After all, preteens can choose to kill their unborn why shouldn’t they have the legal right to choose to marry a 30 year old man if that is their desire? Decisions have ramifications and once this door is open, it won’t be closed. Lis Weihl, attorney Ted Olson who argued the case for the homosexual couples and others who are arguing to read the constitution in this way will bear the responsibility for the results. However, as with all good liberals, they will try to blame others for letting them get away with it and the consequences which grow out of these decisions.

So vast is biblical illiteracy inside and outside the church that Brian McLaren and other emerging church leaders claim we need to wait for 5 years for the Holy Spirit to tell us what is true about homosexuality. The confusion seems to be that unbelievers and Scripture don’t agree and AMcLaren and others are waiting for the Holy Spirit to bring unity betgween them. We have such luminaries as author Anne Rice who quit Christianity in part because she couldn’t find anything wrong with homosexuality and radio host Dr. Dean Edell who is favorable to polygamy and polyamory as well as homosexuality. Fairly recently Edell challenged his listeners to show where the Bible forbids homosexuality. Within a few minutes an evangelical called in and as he began making his case Dr. Edell simply dismissed him by saying that Jesus never said anything about this. Now, while I may not be qualified to fully address the legal or constitutional issues, I can address the ill-informed or perhaps militantly ignorant, like Dr Dean Edell and Anne Rice on this issue and challenge believers.

First, if the criteria is that Jesus must have spoken on the issue otherwise it is okay, than child molestation must be okay. Jesus, being Jewish living in Israel was living in the Roman Empire. A common practice was for an adult Roman male to have a catamite, a young boy, for the purposes of sexual gratification and Jesus never spoke to against pedophilia. This is of course, absurd.  Homosexuality and other sexual sin was addressed at least indirectly when He said in Matthew 19:4-5:

Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE, and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH’?

The passage is pregnant with meaning. He spoke this to Jews who were living in a culture (the Roman Empire) that was rampant with homosexuality and pedophilia and laid out His view of the right sexual relationship from God’s stand point. One man and one woman, united together for life. The immediate context revolved around the question of divorce. Why, they asked, if this was the case, did Moses allow divorce? Jesus didn’t hesitate. It was because of the hardness of their hearts. The proper marriage relationship is one man and one woman for life. Not only did God allow divorce but polygamy due to the hardness of mens hearts. Brian McLaren and the emerging church crowd aren’t sure if Jesus is to be believed on this issue. We must teach  within the church that sexual sin is sexual sin. We should be certain that Jesus is to be trusted regardless of what courts, authors, politicians, radio hosts and even touchy feely church leaders say. Having said that we also need to prepare and review how the believers in the first three centuries lived and challenged culture. Oddly enough, they seemed to spend little time condemning culture. The Apostle Paul wrote in 1st Corinthians 5:12:

For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church?

Christians changed the minds of the culture around them because of their holy devotion, holy living, high regard for critical thinking, ability to debate and articulate the issues, caring for those around them, adopting children who had been abandoned in attempted infanticide, honoring women. The last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate, shows us how effective they early Christians were in changing culture. He was trying to resurrect the pagan religions of Rome’s past and wrote to his pagan priest in Galatia the following:

“Why do we not notice that it is their kindness to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead, and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism [i.e., Christianity]? I believe that we ought really and truly to practice every one of these virtues. And it is not enough for you alone to practice them, but so must all the priests in Galatia, without exception…In the second place admonish them that no priest may enter a theatre or trade that is base and not respectable…in every city establish hostels in order that strangers may profit by our generosity; I do not mean for our own people only, but for others also who are in need of money…for it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg and the impious Galileans [Christians] support both their own poor and ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”

I am not saying that as citizens of the United States we shouldn’t take stands as citizens to register our concerns, vote for candidates that represent our views and support those who will represent traditional marriage in court. I am saying that we need to incorporate apologetics, discernment and actual missionary training within the walls and meetings of Christians instead of doing polls and figuring out how unbelievers think in order to better market to them, if we are to make an impact similar to that of the early Christians.

1 Perry L. Porter, “A Chronology of Federal Legislation on Polygamy,” http://www.xmission.com/~plporter/lds/chron.htm

“What you are doing speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you are saying.”

Beside privacy issues in arguing for abortion, one of the reasons cited was child abuse. An unwanted child, it was argued, increased the instance of child abuse. So, by giving women “choice” that supposedly translated to “every child a wanted child.” That this policy hasn’t dimished child abuse but perhaps has permitted its increase is a discussion for another day. In Do Humans Have Rights That Can Be Violated? I demonstrated that in American law and legislation, humanness and personhood have traditionally been two different things. Human is a statement of biology not personhood. Someone could be biologically human but not legally a person. Since they are not legally a person they have no rights or protections under the law. The one who owns them as property have rights and can pretty much do what they want with their property. According to the Prolife Action League there has been 1.3 million abortions annually since 1973 and as of May 17, 2005 that brought the number to 46 million. This becomes important for two reasons. Economic and end of life questions. A majority of the aborted would have been wage earners and tax payers. By killing off these humans there are less persons available to support the aging cry-baby boomers. As the current administration embarked on “health care reform” one of the questions was how that would impact healthcare for the elderly. Assurances were given that the healthcare would be as good as or better at a lower cost than is currently being charged. Conservatives were firm this was untrue. Now that it has passed, unread by most in the House and Senate who voted for it, we see that conservatives were right, Medicare Reform Means Some Seniors Face Benefit Cuts.

As the legislation neared passing Sarah Palin raised the issue of what she called “death panels.” As a side note, end of life issues are difficult and the majority of money spent on care of the elderly will be spent in the last few weeks of their life. It is something that needs to the thought about and discussed within the family but is it something which should be legislated by the Federal Government? Of course the ruckus that was raised caused Barack Obama and others to verbally deny that this was their view. Other times of candor demonstrates his actual views. This happened, as Stephen Mosher points out Obama to Seniors: Take Two Aspirin and Call Me When You’re Dead. Eileen F. Toplansky in Death Panels and Mom had to revisit this issue

When the health care reform bill was still in its infancy, I read with dismay about the so-called death panels. I knew that Barack Obama was a vigorous proponent of late-stage abortions, which spoke to his detached view of life. Then I discovered that since there really were no “death panels” in the bill, Congress decided to eliminate the confusing language. Of course, if these panels were not in the bill in the first place, what was being deleted?

Therefore, that nagging feeling never quite went away. And so now I read Michael D. Tanner’s piece entitled “Death Panels Were an Overblown Claim — Until Now” and my earlier suspicions have been reinvigorated. Thus, we learn that Obama’s pick for director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services “is romantic about the [British] National Health Service,” where “every year, 50,000 surgeries are cancelled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed.” Thus, rationing and death panels hover at the borders of this health care reform law. Just because the term is not used doesn’t mean the intent is not clear to anyone who can connect the dots.

Actions speak louder than words which means, what you are doing speaks so loud I can’t hear what you are saying.

From an Evangelical and, I think biblical perspective, humans are persons created in the image of God. They have intrinsic value even in their fallen state because they still have the Imago Dei (image of God). That does not mean they are saved or even in the family of God. Sin brought about a separation which can only be bridged by faith in Jesus Christ who paid for our sins and we are adopted by God and the sin separation is eliminated by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. But, State governments, the Federal Government and Supreme Court have been clear and consistent. Humanness and personhood are different things. One (humanness) is a biological statement which does not promise, secure or protect inherent rights while the other (personhood) does. I am not a prophet or the son of a prophet and I work for a non-profit organization so this is not a prophetic proclamation but an educated prediction. Those who have fought so strongly for abortion will most likely have their views and positions turned on them in coming years. Cry-baby Boomers will begin retiring very soon and, since they are the largest segment of the population with tax the system in ways we cannot imagine. The tool to the solution which will be turned to will be appealing to an already approved definition of person. Geography. Those living in nursing homes will be legally made non-persons whereas those living outside nursing homes will still be legally persons. That will make the emotional decisions of what to do with grandma a little easier. She is human but not legally a person and will be abandoned or abused in her old age. You know the line; every grandma should be a wanted grandma.

“The government of Vietnam’s desire to reap the benefits of the global economy must be matched by efforts to respect comprehensive human rights,” a bipartisan group of 19 members of Congress wrote to Clinton on July 15.

This was an interesting paragraph in the article Clinton pushes Vietnam on human rights progress. It also helped to begin crystallizing something I have been thinking about. Do humans have rights solely based on being human? Rather than simply making an assertion I decided to put the question to an organization that specializes in addressing human rights violations the Amnesty International. I emailed them and asked:

There seems to be some confusion when using the term phrase “human rights.”Do you mean by this that humans have rights based solely on being human? If a nation decides that a human is not legally a person and therefore has no rights, for only persons have rights, is that something you affirm?

The question is fairly simple and straightforward. Do humans have rights because they are human or are there some other criteria for protecting rights. Perhaps a human has no rights because they law makers used come arbitrary criteria to define personhood and then only protect the rights of those who are legally a person. In this scenario non-persons, human or not, do not have any legal rights nor are deserving of protection. I received a response back in less than 24 hours:

Thank you for your interest in Amnesty International and the work that we do.

I’m unaware of the confusion that you mention.

Human rights are those which all humans should be entitled to, regardless of legislation introduced by an individual country that may undermine any of these.

I do not understand your differentiation between people and humans, but I hope that this goes some way to answer your question.

I have spoken with others about this question recently and have watched as they also short circuited and changed the parameters of the question from “person” to “people.” There is an important distinction here. The word “people” is used interchangeably with “human” whereas “person” is a legal designation. Now, writing as an Evangelical I believe that person and human are also interchangeable. I responded back:

Thank you for your timely response and clear answer. The confusion wasn’t between “people” and “human” but between “person” and “human.” For example, in the United States when slavery was legal, no one denied that slaves were human. However, in the eyes of the law they were not “persons.” Several state legislatures and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this position (they were viewed as 3/5 persons). Therefore, even though they were human but not persons they had no rights or protections under the law. They were simply property and could be cared for and protected or beaten, sold, dismembered and even killed without legal reprisal since they were not persons and had no rights. This classification was based on the arbitrary criteria of skin color.

Currently, preborn human are legally classified as non-persons based on the arbitrary criteria of geography. They are living inside the womb vs. outside the womb. Based on this arbitrary criteria state legislatures and the U.S. Supreme Court do not extend “personhood” and the attendant legal rights and protections afforded “persons” until a geographical change occurs from inside the womb to outside the womb. Even though human, they are property and can be cared for and nurtured until the make the geographical change or they can be dismembered, burned to death with saline or even have their brains vacuumed out a few centimeters away from a full geographical change since they are property and not persons even though human. As long as this arbitrary classification stands I am not really sure on what basis someone could say that slavery was wrong or in the case of other nations, if they are abusing humans who have been legally classified as non-persons on what basis they could be charged with human rights violations. In the U.S., legally, persons have rights, humans do not.

Now I am not sure how they will respond. They may even choose to ignore this question at this point. After all, if they affirm that the law can use any arbitrary criteria to determine a legal definition of personhood which excludes certain humans from protection, there is really no basis on which to say slavery was wrong. After all, it was all legal because legally the slaves were not fully persons even though they were human. We could say that it would be wrong to own slaves in the United States today but that is only because the law has changed and eliminated the skin color criteria not because blacks are any more human than were their ancestors.

Other nations that commit so-called human rights violations may not be doing anything wrong if this arbitrary criteria stands. They may simply choose a different set of criteria but if it is arbitrary it doesn’t matter because it is the criteria their government has chosen. North Korea, Vietnam, China and others may have legally defined those who are being abused as non-persons. If that is so, what right do we as a nation have to try to force our arbitrary definition on to other nations and cultures. After all, our current arbitrary definition is, as I pointed out to Amnesty International, based on geography. A human in the womb is not a person but once they make a move of a few inches from inside the womb to outside the womb, the new location makes them legally persons and affords them protections under the law. If the arbitrary criteria above is false and humans deserve protection solely on the basis of being human that changes how we view the issue of being pro-abortion vs. anti-abortion. Dr. Seuss might say, humans are human, “No matter how small.” Preborn humans are small but human none-the-less. If humanness and personhood are interchangeable terms, then the small preborn humans deserve protection. If these are not interchangeable but one is purely legal and arbitrary (person) while the other biological, then we can no longer view slavery as having been wrong and should abandon any attempt at correcting human rights violations in other nations who have simply chosen a different set of arbitrary criteria.

I will be interested to see the response from Amnesty International if they don’t choose to ignore me.

…March 1965 sermon, “Minister and Marchers,” in which he leveled a broadside at King, his black ministerial colleagues, and the Northern clergy whose liberal theology made them fully as suspect as their politics. Although he acknowledged that “many sincere persons are participating” in the movement, he questioned “the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations. It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed.” Speaking of the role ministers should properly play, he declared that “our only purpose on this earth is to know Christ and to make him known. Believing the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving Gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else – including the fighting of communism or participating in the civil rights reform…. Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners.”(1)

As noted earlier, Falwell apologized for this talk. In part that was necessary as he was moving into the political arena himself. For forty years the Fundamental and Evangelical church had walled themselves off from the cultural interactions which shape the thinking of society:

The Scopes trial was the first “cultural workshop” that produced the social contract which exiled conservative – in the sense of Bible-believing and Christ-professing – Protestants from the nation’s public life. But it was by no means the last. Modern secular hegemony was produced over and over again during subsequent decades. In their theories, story lines, plots, and images, the nations scholars, journalists, novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers most explicitly articulated modern America as a world in which Fundamentalists figured as stigmatized outsiders. The terms of secular modernity were also written into a wide array of laws, court decisions, government policies, decrees, and regulations, codes of etiquette, customs, practices, and commonsense presuppositions that structured national public discourses.(2)

This self imposed retreat from culture was gradually seen by those who shaped the thinking of society as the defeat and even death of those who firmly believed the Bible and the morals it espoused:

The regime of secular modernity did however put a special onus on conservative Protestants, above all on those who called themselves fundamentalists, insofar as they had come to stand for religious partisanship and their exclusion was seen as essential for the survival of a secular, or “tolerant,” America. One form this exclusion took, one which testifies of the power of the regime, was the illusion, especially widespread among the nation’s intelligentsia, that conservative, Bible-believing Protestantism – that is, Fundamentalism – was unchanging, homogeneous, and gradually disappearing.(3)

The “illusion” of the “nation’s intelligentsia” would be shattered in the late 1970s as some of the fundamentalists moved from the Protective Church and began in the direction of the Political Church which would be led by Pastor Jerry Falwell. Falwell appears to be the likely candidate to unite those who would opt for political activism.

As an independent, unaffiliated fundamental Baptist preacher, Jerry Falwell during the 1970s was able to mix freely with preachers aligned with various networks, and he found many of them increasingly with one another. In his 1976 “America Back to God” crusade sermon, Falwell claimed that he was meeting monthly with some forty well-known fundamentalist preachers – among them John R. Rice, Jack Hyles, Lee Robertson, and J. Vernon McGee. Fundamentalists, or born-again believers, as he was beginning to call them, were America’s salt of the earth, its preservative, and he reckoned at the time that there were some 45-50 millions grains of salt in these United States.(4)

Recognizing that culture had gone on without the influence of Bible believing Christians there was a growing belief among these leaders that simply trying to protect their own was no longer (if it ever was) helpful. The salt and light needed to get out of the high walled Protective Church Movement and work at reversing the trend of moral breakdown. In other words, the hangover of Christian morals had largely worn off society. Falwell and other began to think that the way to reinsert morality was through political activism. The idea that they were 45-50 million strong came from George Gallup’s 1976 poll in which he reported that “34 percent of adult Americans professed to be saved, or born-again.”(5) This really began to coalesce after the first born-again president, Jimmy Carter’s interview in Playboy magazine and admission of lusting after women and committing adultery in his heart many times. Jerry Falwell followed up with a sermon “Seven Things Corrupting America” and the race to bring culture back to Christian morality was on although Falwell didn’t immediately see himself as the primary leader at that point and wasn’t altogether sure he wanted to make alliances with the Conservative Intellectual Movement.

He was first approached that year, in 1976, by a group of conservative leaders, among them Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie. They proposed Falwell create an organization that would mobilize fundamentalists and evangelicals as voters. He declined, but the idea apparently took root. He not only began to preach more openly toward such an end, he took some initial steps, joining singer Anita Bryant in her crusade against the homosexual rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida, in 1977 and 1978 and lending some support in Virginia to block the ERA amendment, and protest the White House Conferences on the Family in 1978. Finally, in the spring of 1979, after meeting again with conservative leaders, Falwell announced the formation of the Moral Majority.(6)

This alliance of the New Christian Right and the Conservative Intellectual Movement proved to be a powerful force in the nation’s politics and brought about the election of Ronald Reagan. This move split the Protective Church Movement pretty much down the middle:

…hiving off those who would forsake much of their biblical separation from the world, and allying them with conservative evangelicals who were already more at ease in the world but had lately become alarmed about its moral state and the prospect of accommodating to it. This alliance, which formed the core of the New Christian Right in the 1980s, was as much a cultural merger as it was a political pact among leaders.(7)

Oddly enough, as concerned as these leaders were with the moral decline of the nation, the thing which seems to have been the motivating force which propelled them into the political fray wasn’t:

…abortion, school prayer, and the ERA, they felt able to deal with those on a private basis. They could avoid having abortions, put their children in Christian schools, and run their families the way they wanted to, all without having to be concerned about public policy.(8)

What seems to have united them was a move by the IRS, backed by President Jimmy Carter, to remove the tax exempt status of Christian schools.

Several key figures on the Religious Right credit the 1978 IRS/Christian School battle with playing a pivotal role in bringing together conservative Christians and creating a genuine politically effective movement. Paul Weyrich emphatically asserted that “what galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”(9)

Although Francis Schaffer and C. Everett Koop had been trying to get born-again believers to practice a more integrated faith which included teaching sound doctrine, intellectual training, social involvement and a clear proclamation of the gospel it pretty much fell on deaf ears until the church’s “self interest” (a continuation of what de Toqueville had noted in the previous century), Christian Schools tax-exempt status, was in jeopardy. Suddenly churches and church leaders were very interested in politics!

1 William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, Broadway Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York, NY, 1996; 69-70
2 Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000; 74-75
3 Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000; 75
4 Susan Friend Harding, The The Book of Jerry Falwell, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000; 125, emphasis in the original
5 ibid, 126
6 ibid, 128-129
7 ibid, 129
8 William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, Broadway Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York, NY, 1996, 173
9 ibid

The four of us share a car headed for a small community college extension campus in rural Ohio, and we don’t share much else. Mark and Jacob are going to defend their positive answer to the debate’s open question, “should we endorse gay marriage?” Jonathan and I will defend the view that we shouldn’t, and as we drive I’m wondering whether any of the great debaters (Fr. Copleston and Bertrand Russell, or G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, for instance) ever shared a cab on the way to their storied debates.

We’re all friendly though, and that’s genuine because we all share something else as well, a commitment to good arguments as decisive in philosophical discourse. Whoever wins today will do so because they were careful about what they said and how much they said in support and defense of their side of the argument.

But that carefulness began long before the ride in the car. The language of the debate proposition was the subject of hours of conversation. Both sides decided to sidestep the rights questions in order to get to the thing we cared about most. Endorsing gay marriage is not about our relation to the state as citizens with certain rights, but the moral value of marriage as such.

Our test case was a recent New Jersey ballot initiative where voters shot down a proposal to make marriage a gender-neutral legal concept in New Jersey law. New Jersey already has a civil unions law, but, as one gay man I know once put it, “I want to get married, not ‘civil unioned.’” So as we drive further into rural Ohio, we’re all aware that we’re heading for a clash on the moral value of a universal human institution.

We’re warmly received by the campus organizers when we get there at lunch time, and because we’re being paid in lunch, we’re officially professionals. We eat in the space we’re about to use.

The room itself is a long rectangle, with two tables facing the crowd separated by a podium front and center. There’s seating for probably forty or so, and that only needs the front half of the room’s long space. Not bad, I’m thinking, this will be a nice intimate crowd for my first debate.

By the time we get started those seats are full, and more are being added in the back. I can see that the local LGBT alliance has set up a table with literature in the back of the room. My untrained eye puts the room’s number at upwards of eighty to a hundred people as we’re introduced by the organizers.

By nature I’m one of those that likes to walk before he runs, but as the room fills up, I’m starting to think God’s got other plans today. Somewhere in those last minutes I remember taking a moment to pray, and then all our preparation is complete. The debate begins.

As champion of the affirmative, that we should endorse gay marriage, Mark goes first. It’s clear that he’s nervous. He hasn’t had much time to rehearse. Mark was a late addition to the affirmative roster when another guy dropped out, and Mark’s only had about two days to get his arguments translated from skeletal syllogisms and basic inferences into a public statement that’s got to run the length of the affirmative fifteen minute opening statement.

He starts out well, making it clear that endorsement is about our moral attitudes rather than civil law. There are some stops and starts along the way, but he gets the affirmative side’s two big arguments out:

First, if we’re not prepared to make similar claims about not endorsing interracial marriage, then why make the negative side’s claim that we should not endorse gay marriage?

Second, we don’t distinguish between the value of male-female, male-male, or female-female friendships, so why make the negative side’s claim that we should not endorse gay marriage? Interracial marriage is valuable as marriage, and friendship does not gain or lose value as you change the pronouns. It doesn’t take Mark very long to get these points out, and after a pause while he consults the outline on his laptop screen, he decides to be done after spending a little more than ten of his allotted fifteen minutes.

It’s Jonathan’s turn. He and I have labored over this part in depth, refining it, reworking it, focusing it, and trying to make the best use of the uninterrupted constructive half of our time. Jonathan includes Mark’s point that we’re here to discuss the moral endorsement of marriage, and he takes pains to make clear that rejecting the disputed endorsement isn’t about hating gay couples or homosexuality. Nor is endorsing gay marriage a kind of tolerance or a “live and let live” approach. Endorsement is about what you personally believe about moral value.

Jon’s projecting his voice to find the people in the back of the room, and he’s driving home the point that the debate isn’t about hating versus tolerating, but about the value of marriage itself. I worry that the front of the room will think he’s yelling at them, but I remember that Jon’s got enough public speaking experience to find his own connection with the audience. He argues that just because one kind of union is valuable, it doesn’t follow that other kinds of union are also valuable, or that even if they are, the value is the same value in both cases.

Our negative case rests on our ability to prove that if gay unions are valuable in some way, it’s not merely in virtue of their resemblance to heterosexual unions. Stable monogamous cohabitation isn’t necessarily all that makes marriage valuable, and that means that it doesn’t follow from a moral endorsement of heterosexual unions that gay unions ought also to be endorsed with that term. Jonathan runs out of time, and ends his opening speech gracefully, but with some of our opening material left unsaid. The audience won’t know that, so we’re doing okay so far, and I can use it to build our case in the first rebuttal.

Then Jacob gets up to give the affirmative side’s first rebuttal. Jacob’s a smart guy, and he’s well prepared for this part because both sides exchanged their basic opening arguments two nights ago. So when he gets up to the podium, he promptly decimates our argument. . .

“What Christian critiques of the culture are truly scandalous?”

By “scandalous”, I don’t mean which ones fit the Pulitzer Prize nominated National Enquirer’s definition of scandal. I mean those aspects of our proclamation to the culture that are stumbling blocks that non-Christians simply cannot abide. Even with this clarification, I find that I must clarify again because “stumbling blocks” are usually bad things. After all Paul says,

” Let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother’s way (Romans 14:13)”

If we present a stumbling block to the world, its something we should remove not investigates. But the term “stumbling block” or in Greek “skandalon” has another meaning. It can be something that offends those it should offend. Consider Isaiah 8:14 and its description of Messiah:

. . . He will be a sanctuary; but for both houses of Israel he will be a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. And for the people of Jerusalem he will be a trap and a snare.

Messiah will offend the people of Israel because of what he does and says and especially because of what he is. As Michael Card illustrates in his song “Scandalon”

He will be the truth that will offend them one and all/A stone that makes men stumble/And a rock that makes them fall.

The purpose of this kind of scandal was to bring people to repentance. To shake them out of their complacency and their misconceptions about Messiah. Some would accept this paradigm shift because they “had ears to hear” and others would not.

Many will be broken so that He can make them whole/And many will be crushed and lose their own soul/Along the path of life there lies a stubborn Scandalon/And all who come this way must be offended/To some He is a barrier, To others He’s the way/For all should know the scandal of believing

We have written about the bad kinds of stumbling blocks but I’ve been wondering what are the good stumbling blocks that Isaiah and Michael Card are describing? What are the good stumbling blocks that we need to concentrate on?

Grace and Hell. By themselves the doctrines of Grace and Hell are odious to our society but combined to create a theology of salvation, they are formidable stumbling blocks. The concept that no amount of our own personal accomplishment (even moral accomplishment) can render us worthy of God’s grace simultaneously assaults our sense of deserving based on merit and the contemporary cult of self-esteem. Likewise the concept of eternal exile from God for not accepting that grace offends these same sentiments of desert and personal worth.

In many discussions with non-Christians I have heard honest consternation surrounding the possibility that if Jeffrey Dahmer did repent and if my good friend who volunteers at the local shelter didn’t, that Dahmer enjoys heaven and my friend endures Hell for eternity. Of course this is related to the doctrine of grace above. In short Hell assaults our sense of justice (people getting what they deserve). Dahmer “deserves” hell and good people don’t. As Rabbi Harold Kushner (of Why do Bad Things happen to Good People fame) asks How Good Do We have to Be? Rabbi Kushner is offended by the Christian answer: “Infinitely Perfect” to which we fall back on Divine Grace.

Evangelism: The philosopher Robert Nozick once said that trying to get someone to believe something whether they wanted to or not is not a good way of behaving toward them. But then Nozick admitted that any good persuasive argument has the effect of forcing us to acknowledge it or endure the charge of being irrational. Evangelism offends our sense of religious pluralism. If all religions are legitimate ways to God, then thumping for one of them is seen as arrogant. Combine that with caring for the poor, providing education, and fighting hunger in third world countries and “arrogant” becomes “manipulative” or worse “wicked.” But as Nozick recognized good reasons are coercive; they force us to confront our ill-reasoned beliefs. The persuasive act of offering those reasons is not coercive or even manipulative. (for more on this see “The Ethics of Proselytizing” in the Midwest Christian Outreach Journal.)

Sexual Ethics In the contemporary bifurcation of Jesus and Christianity where Jesus is portrayed as merely an ethical teacher (a sort of Jewish Buddha) and Christianity is portrayed as having diverged from the simple teachings of its master, the Christian preoccupation with moral absolutes such as (honesty, reverence for life, etc.) are treated with aplomb. However there is one line, when crossed, causes many non-Christians to balk, sputter, and stumble–Sex.

The contemporary world can take us admonishing people to love one another, care for the poor, and even curb our lying, cheating, stealing, and carousing. But suggest that sex is anything more than a pleasure to be enjoyed between any combination of loving individuals and our morality becomes a giant stumbling block. The same goes for the enjoyment of pornography.

I’ve been trying to figure this one out. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. One question separates ethical from unethical when it comes to personal satisfaction in the modern liberal state–”Does it harm anyone?” Sexual gratification is the ultimate harmless and gratifying activity. There simply is no secular reason to curb this gratification provided it doesn’t harm anyone. That’s a stumbling block because given the above principle, there is no distinctly sexual ethics, there is only harm and non-harm.

It occurs to me as I look back over this list, that all of these distinctly Christian stumbling blocks have been questioned by the Culture Driven Church. Grace and Hell have long been disparaged. Grace has either been watered down into universal salvation or thickened with concepts of good works. Hell has been disparaged by even venerable dons of theology. Evangelism has been abandoned in favor of a social gospel and Brian McClaren’s religous pluralism. And sexual ethics have been simply and quietly ignored in favor of discreet trysts or transformed into political debates. All of this in an effort to remove the skandalons that offend. But as Michael Card warns us:

It seems today the Scandalon offends no one at all/The image we present can be stepped over/
Could it be that we are like the others long ago
Will we ever learn that all who come must stumble.

I invite you dear reader to provide some other stumbling blocks for me to consider.

The dawning of 1940 witnessed another arousing from slumber, the Conservative Intellectual. A number of individuals were concerned at what the universities had become and were producing in terms of worldviews and philosophies. Dewey’s plan to use the universities to administer social change was in full swing and working rather well in shifting the students into collectivism and socialism. Like Japan’s attack, the signs of this attack on the mind were there for the previous four decades but were largely ignored or those who could have made a difference retreated into the foxhole of fundamentalism to watch as the non-believers self destructed. Through the 1940s the number of conservative intellectual thinkers was growing but was not well organized nor taken very seriously by those in academic power.

There is no doubt, then, that in the mid-1940s the resources for a nonliberal intellectual revival were present. Yet it would be wrong to claim that in 1945 a coherent, explicitly conservative movement was flourishing in America. So barren did the Right side of the intellectual landscape seem to many in those years that one observer actually contended in 1950 that “the American conservative has yet to discover conservatism.” And in 1950, in a famous comment, Lionel Trilling complained of the absence of conservative ballast in American intellectual life:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole Intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas. (George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, (Wilminton, Delaware: 1996) p 51)

While intellectual conservatism was in the beginning throes of awakening, Abraham Maslow was working on his motivational theory of hierarchy of needs which he began publishing in article form in 1943. It is apparent in his theory that he regarded humans as basically good but environmental causes brought them to develop in selfish ways but this could be changed if humans environmental needs were satisfied. He argued that:

An inborn “instinctoid drive” will lead them to grow into loving, unselfish adults provided they are first able to satisfy four basic levels of needs 1) physiological needs, such as food and shelter; 2) security needs; 3) belonging needs, for love and acceptance; and 4) self-esteem, which implies both actual accomplishment and recognition from others. Only after the “defiency needs” have been satisfied are human beings free to begin the potential process of self-actualization and the maximization of creative potential – “to become everything one is capable of becoming.” Of that group, he estimated that perhaps 2 percent of the population achieve the ultimate goal and become fully self-actualized – or, as he sometimes preferred to put it, “fully human.” Though Maslow never expressed it in quite those terms, fully actualized men and women were the living equivalent of religious Scripture. (Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents, Encounter Books (San, Francisco, CA; 2002) p 49)

In a very real sense, Maslow was moving psychology into the arena of being a religion and in his atheism it would become the one and only true religion. It is in fact, a religion which would work very well with the current of Darwinian thought since “self-actualizers” were more advanced than ordinary human beings and thus did not have to be constrained by cultural mores unless they found them useful in a particular circumstance.

Self-actualizers, moreover, “tend to be good animals, “at home with the earthier sides of their natures. They are spontaneous and relatively free from anxiety or guilt. “Very few of them are religious.” They can make an effort to follow conventional rules of behavior when necessary, but when they are absorbed in what they are doing, these rules are likely to be dispensed with. As highly evolved individuals living in an imperfect society, self-actualizers “resist enculturation and maintain a certain inner detachment from the culture in which they are immersed.” Indeed, “the unthinking observer might sometimes believe them to be unethical, since they can break down not only conventions but laws when the situation seems to demand it. But the every opposite is the case. They are the most ethical of people even though their ethics are not necessarily the same as those of the people around them.” (Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and our Discontents, Encounter Books (San, Francisco, CA; 2002) p 52)

So, the more evolved “self-actualized” person has high self esteem (#4 on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), has very little problem with guilt, can easily flaunt the rules which society around them holds as important and therefore would appear to the lesser evolved and unactualized to be unethical or perhaps even evil. But in this new religion of self-esteem and self-actualization, these individuals are nearly god-like.

The Neo Harold

By the late 1940s a few Christian fundamentalist came to realize that the previous two decades of an increasingly narrow brand of fundamentalism had produced a very rigid, inflexible and academically poor church. Not only hadn’t they reached the world for Christ, the Church had steadily lost influence. Eventually, as many fundamentalists publicly identified themselves with questionable issues such as opposition to new Bible translations, or became vocal supporters of racial segregation, tensions began to rise within fundamentalism. Many who originally identified with the movement either abandoned it or kept very quiet about their affiliation. The promising start fundamentalism exhibited at the beginning of the 20th century had become intellectually backward and academically ingrown as the movement steadily marginalized itself within society.

Many conservative Christians felt there were only two choices: stay where they were and endure parochialism and even paranoia, or compromise their convictions on Scripture by joining a liberal church.

In 1947 Harold Ockenga, Pastor of Park Street Church in Boston proposed a third alternative and preached a sermon titled A New Evangelicalism. His desire was to bring the Church out of the fortress mentality in which they were now trapped by recovering the spiritual dynamic of the evangelical movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even though these new evangelicals, which included the young evangelist, Billy Graham, still considered themselves fundamentalists along the lines of the original turn of the century founders of the movement. However, fundamentalist hard-liners almost immediately began accusing this group of compromise and disdainfully labeled them “neo-evangelicals.” At the same time there did appear to be an increase of religious fervor:

Of the many aspects of the recovery of tradition in the decade after Hiroshima, one of the most pervasive was the renewal of interest and belief in Christian orthodoxy. On a popular level, signs of this “return to religion” were everywhere. Some might doubt its sincerity or profundity; some might jibe at “foxhole religion”; none could doubt that religiosity, at least, had come back into favor. In 1940 fewer than 50 percent of the American people were church members; by 1955, 60 percent had joined. These years witnessed the spectacular rise of Billy Graham, the addition of “under God” to the “Pledge of Allegiance,” and the printing of “In God We Trust” on certain postage stamps. President Eisenhower unexpectedly opened his inaugural address with a prayer, joined the National Presbyterian Church (and attended it often), gave a nationally broadcast speech on the need for religious faith, and supported the American Legion’s “Back to God” Campaign…. Nor did trends abroad go unnoticed. The brilliant Christian apologetics of C.S. Lewis were becoming popular in America. And when, in 1948, C.E.M. Joad, a British philosopher and hitherto agnostic, wrote a defense of Christianity, Time was quick to take note. The horrible evils of World War II, Joad explained, had “hit me in the face…. Human progress is possible but so unlikely.” Time also quoted Joad as saying: “I see now that evil is endemic in man, and that the Christian doctrine of original sin expresses a deep and essential insight into human nature.” ( George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, (Wilminton, Delaware: 1996) 51-52)

Some of the intellectual conservatives saw the reemergence of religion as at least useful and a good antidote to totalitarianism and Marxism.

Writing in Partisan Review in 1950, Ernst van den Haag, a émigré sociologist from Mussolini’s Italy then teaching at the New School for Social Research, conceded that religious faith could not be “logically justified.” Still,

Religious sanction is required – just as the police force is – for any society which wishes to be stable without being totalitarian…

Religion is useful, even a necessary opiate – a sedative protecting us from excessive anxiety and agitation and from those who, like Marx, thrive on agitation and therefore hate the sedative would replace it by the murderer’s hashish. (George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, (Wilminton, Delaware: 1996) p 52)

And Then Along Came John

Just as many fundamentalists were climbing down into their cultural manholes and pulling the covers over their heads, seeds of radical social change were being sown. In 1933 John Dewey authored the Humanist Manifesto. In it he argued that there is no creator, no creation and no moral absolutes. This was a sharp departure from the birth certificate of the nation, the Declaration of Independence, which affirmed belief in all three. In 1934 Dewey authored a book titled, A Common Faith, in which he further argued for abortion, euthanasia, and for the aggressive teaching of these views.

Also in1934, the Teachers College of Columbia University took up the same banner as John Dewey in using education to accomplish social engineering,

The first issue of The Social Frontier, produced by Teachers College of Columbia University, urges the remaking of American society through the schools. The journal’s first editorial says that “for the American people the age of individualism in economy is closing and the age of collectivism is beginning.” This journal describes not “teachers” but “educational workers.” It says these must join “into a mighty instrument of group consensus, harmonious expression, and collective action.” Overtly urging teachers (sorry, educational workers) to indoctrinate students, the journal soon calls for a “united front” between progressives and Marxists, as the brief Popular Front Era begins.

Social Darwinism, collectivism, psychology and indoctrination of another kind was flourishing, largely unchecked by the Christian community. Many Social Darwinists believed that the human race could be perfected through genetics and selective breeding. Adolph Hitler was a Social Darwinist who loathed Christianity as a religion of the weak and hoped to help evolution produce the ideal man through “purifying the gene pool,” murdering both physical and racial “inferiors” to allow the superior Aryan “superman” to evolve. Many Americans today do not realize that Eugenics, as this “selective breeding” program is called, was not really a new idea in the 1930’s, nor was it confined to “evil Nazis” in Germany. Their full party name was National Socialist or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. They were brought together through community organizers and were the political progressives of their day. The Nazis were duly elected, not only in Germany but as America Truly is the Greatest Country in the World. Don’t Let Freedom Slip Away, in Austria as well:

I believe that I am an eyewitness to history. I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. We elected him by a landslide – 98% of the vote. I’ve never read that in any American publications. Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force. In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25% inflation and 25% bank loan interest rates.

The citizens effectively gave their leaders the power to implement their worldview and turn these ugly and evil ideas into legally sanctioned murder. However, the German Eugenicists didn’t invent these ideas they borrowed the theory from America and England, where these ideas were born.

American Feminist leader, Victoria Woodhull, who in 1872 became the first woman to be nominated for president by a political party, stated,

Thus society, while expending millions in the care of incurables and imbeciles, takes little heed of or utterly ignores those laws by the study and obedience of which such human abortions might have been prevented from cumbering society with their useless and unwelcome presence. Grecian and Roman civilizations were, it is true, deficient in the gentler virtues, the excess of which in our day is hindering the progress of the race rather than helping or ennobling it. They, by crushing out the diseased and imperfect plants in the garden of humanity, attained to a vigor and physical development, which has never been equated since. And in so doing they were entirely in accord with nature, whose mandate is inexorable, that the “fittest” only shall be permitted to live and propagate. She is a very prodigal in her waste of individual life, in order that the species be without spot of blemish.

Not so our modern civilization, which rather pets its abortions and weaklings, and complacently permits them to procreate another race of fools and pigmies as inane and useless as themselves.

Margaret Sanger, greatly honored today as the founder of Planned Parenthood, pushed the Eugenics idea even further than past adherents had. As a devout humanist and evolutionist, she advocated the elimination of “inferior” human beings, such as the poor and minorities. Their problems, in her view, weighed down society and held back the superior human stock – the wealthier and supposedly more highly evolved white race.

She bluntly defined “birth control,” a term she coined, as “the process of weeding out the unfit” aimed at “the creation of superman.” She often opined that “the most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it,” and that “all our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class.”
Sanger frequently featured racists and eugenicists in her magazine, the Birth Control Review. Contributor Lothrop Stoddard, who also served on Sanger’s board of directors, wrote in “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremecy” that “[w]e, must resolutely oppose both Asiatic permeation of white race-areas and Asiatic inundation of those non-white, but equally Asiatic regions inhabited by really inferior races.

Why Behave?

Through the early decades of the century psychology continued to grow. After all, if there was no God to whom we are accountable, as is the logical outworking of Darwinian evolution, why do we as humans do the things we do? Why behave “good” vs. “bad”? Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung and others had been making their mark. A young Abraham Mazlow had served as the first research assistant to Dr. Harry Harlow beginning in 1932. He nearly gave up on the idea of being an academic psychologist as he neared completion of his doctorate due to his perception of anti-semitism within that discipline. However, largely due to pressure from his wife, he pressed on.

By 1935 when Maslow joined Thorndike’s lab, New York City has become the new capital of psychoanalytic thought, a mecca for refugee analysts in flight from Nazism. Maslow attached himself for a while to Alfred Adler, got to know Karen Horney and Erich Fromm, and audited courses at the New School given by Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, who emphasized the importance of inspiration – the “aha!” moment. It was a heady time, and Maslow began to think that it might indeed be possible for him to synthesize an important new theory of personality. Research-oriented behavioral psychology increasingly struck him as too narrow, focusing on the most routine aspects of human behavior while neglecting the ideas and emotions that made people interesting. Freudian psychoanalysis, on the other had, was preoccupied with the abnormal, the pathological. The question Maslow wanted to pose was: “What is the nature of psychological health?”

Defining health as anything other than the absence of disease is always tricky. Defining psychological health is even more challenging. Before we can say what qualities make up the healthy personality, we must make assumptions about the meaning and purpose of life.

It seems that this burgeoning new pseudo science was having trouble recognizing that Hitler was simply acting on the views (Darwinism, Social Darwinism and Collectivism) which they themselves had accepted as being true and was an underlying theme in psychology. The attempt to be able to “fix” human beings and thus create the “good society” was a driving force. Maslow’s question about the nature of psychological health is a good one but how could that really be defined? After all, if survival and reproduction are all that really matter how could one even determine right from wrong behaviors? Is good psychological health simply a matter of what makes an individual happy or is it following the rules which society (not God) has set up, for the benefit of the whole? What is the purpose of our existence?

Maslow’s theory of personality would be a protest against the idea that there is a necessary conflict between the individual’s pursuit of happiness and the good of society as a whole. If conforming to the rules of civilization made people feel stifled and unhappy, then there was something wrong with the rules. Looking back on his work in 1968, Maslow acknowledged, “My concerns were socialistic, with American socialism… There is the Jewish tradition of the utopian and the ethical and I was pretty definitely looking for the improvement of mankind.”

So Maslow, as with other academics of that time who were the educational elite were in the process of carrying out the social engineering Dewey envisioned which would in turn bring about the “good society” in man’s evolution. Collectivism, Darwinian Evolution and psychology were having a great impact at the university and college level where the future educators, economists, attorneys, doctors, politicians, and even ministers were being trained or “indoctrinated.” Many who were financially supporting these institutions were largely unaware of the changes that were taking place under their noses and with their money in the name of “academic freedom.” Fundamentalists could offer no voice of descent as they had already abandoned this arena which so largely shaped the thinking of the future generation. With the coming of the Second World War many of the fundamentalists as well as some of the end-times cults, were fairly confident that they were in the last days as they understood the book of Revelation and the Lord would be returning any moment. Therefore, to interact with the culture with an attempt to see it turned around was almost regarded by them as fighting God’s plan. Add to that the contempt that the “fighting fundies” had toward intellectualism as it was represented within the institutions of higher learning and it is little wonder that they felt vindicated within their “safe” community. All they had to do was hold on a little longer and God would soon deliver them from this foreign “godless” world.

Now whether one holds to a pretrib, mid-trib, pre-wrath, post-trib (or what some have said a pan-trib, however it pans out is fine) should have very little bearing on how we live out the Christian faith in the day to day. We co-laborers in the ministry of Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc., do not agree on the timing of the Lord’s return. We do understand that the Scriptures teach that we are to live as though He may return today and also as though His return is a long way off (Matthew 24:42-51). But the trend of this period in history within the fundamentalist movement did not appear to be disposed in that direction. Eventually this would lead to dire circumstances within what was fast becoming a foreign culture in which they found themselves living.

I think it’s been established that the Burned-over district was a hotbed of change (and probably some hope as well). “New” was everywhere. New men, new methods, New Thought and new movements dominated the landscape. It is no accident that women’s suffrage (the right to vote), abolition, and the temperance movement spring up in New York at this time. As with any human movement, these were conglomerations of good intentions, justice, and genuine concern. However, they were also the occasions for injustice, manipulation, and the temptations of power. Listen to Lyman Beecher in a letter to his friend Nathaniel Berman (from Whitney Cross’s book):

There is nothing to which the minds of good men, when once passed the bounds of sound discretion, and launched on an ocean of feeling and experiment, may not come . . . nothing so terrible and unmanageable as the fire and whirlwind of human passion, when once kindled by misguided zeal . . . for in every church, there is wood, hay, and stubble which will be sure to take fire on the wrong side.

It should give us all pause how movements built on good intentions can be warped by our own tendencies to “crusade.” As C.S. Lewis warned, what begins as the political aspect of our faith can quickly become the most important aspect of our faith. How many Christians do you know who consider political activism their God-given calling? The danger however is that what becomes our Christian identity can soon overshadow in a way that our Christianity and our Activism trade places so that our Christianity becomes simply an aspect (albeit the most important aspect) of our political activism. Listen to Cross:

Itinerant preachers utilized the various sins of intemperance as excuses for protracted meetings, and lecturers who centered upon social rather than religious reform utilized the same techniques with much the same ideological content. From both camps [i.e. social and religious] came leaders and followers who increasingly focused on the alcoholic question as the greatest, if not the single vital one of the day. Losing sight of others, they magnified this one objective until it assumed in their minds exclusive proportions.

And that was the way of it. As one reads the history of the burned over district, a pattern emerges. In order to hasten the millennial kingdom, sins must be eradicated. Sins become issues and issues become movements. Movements become frustrated with the lack of personal influence that mere advocacy produces and government becomes the chief means of advocating change. Consider this quote again from Cross:

But the evangelicals, who had first seen the cause as one step toward the millennium and had gathered their intensity from revivalism, evolved toward direct action on the one issue alone, by whatever political methods were required to achieve it.

Time and again this is the pattern. John R. McDowall’s Magdalen society sought to rescue “fallen women and restoring them to social usefulness” but when his supporters grew impatient with results, McDowell began to publish tracts and journals calling for public and political solutions. In themselves these are not bad things but one gets the impression that the “fallen women” were abandoned in favor of more sweeping reforms in legislation. By the time the “female moral reform” movement had separated themselves from McDowall, the movement became nothing more than a publishing house for “vapid moral tracts on the preservation of innocence and campaigning for state laws to punish crimes against chastity.”

I mentioned earlier that Finney’s theology was the headwaters, but there was one other tributary that contributed to the flood out of New York–millennialism. William Miller, Adventists, and Ultraists all thought the end was coming soon. Millerites, it is said would sell all they had and climb trees to await the apocalypse. But what isn’t widely considered is what happened when the end didn’t come in 1838 and 1849 and . . . By 1850, many were disillusioned with Miller and the Ultraists. The fire of misguided passion had burned over the district in a conflagration that led to all manner of heresy including sexual cults (Oneida community of John Humphrey Noyes) and manipulation (one Presbyterian district paid its members 25 dollars to take the temperance pledge). In the wake of the endlessly tardy return of Christ, the flood divided. Those with a more spiritual bent went further into mysticism looking for a supernatural solution. A young treasure hunter named Joseph Smith would seek for supernatural vision and guidance in the midst of religious turmoil. Those of the more political and ideological bent veered pell-mell to the left.

Cross again:

“. . . having departed from the literal rendition of their religious tradition, could make a somewhat more realistic approach to the problems of this world. In their view, to , the millennium would come immediately, but it would be a Utopia built by mortal hand and brain, of earthly materials, established in the midst of contemporary society. . . Christ had died to atone for the original sin of all men. Regeneration, then, could be no Heavenly miracle, sorting the saved from the damned, but rather betokened a growth in morality which could as well be gradual as instantaneous. Such a theology might easily accord with the opinion, as orthodox doctrine did not, that evil was the consequence more of social maladjustment than of individual sin.”

What began as a philosophical worldview and reaction to some kinds of Calvinism had become a political and psychological assessment of the cause of human evil. This branch of the Burned-Over river would flow downstream and become in many respects the great influence on the Social Gospel Movement. Walter Rauschenbusch, himself born in upstate New York would pick up the stream of Utopian and Millennial in his book Christianity and the Social Crisis. Note Rauschenbusch’s warped theology of atonement leads directly to the concern for social maladjustment:

“Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A. D. 1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins.”

Rauschenbusch was heavily influenced by Charles Sheldon of In His Steps fame who was a committed Christian socialist . The timing could not have been more perfect for the rise of the Christian left. Communism claimed its first revolution in the October revolt of 1917. Rauschenbusch published Theology for the Social Gospel the same year. Marx called Christian socialist experiments “Utopian socialism” to distinguish them between “Scientific Socialism” of Marxism-Leninism, but the movements had much in common–especially the emphasis on the social evils of society brought about by class warfare and poverty rather than the depraved human heart. Marx was right when he wrote in the Communist Manifesto that there was a specter haunting the landscape not only of Europe but America. It was the specter of an ideology that began with Ultraism and found its flourishing in the Culture-Driven Social Gospel and Communism. Don has already wrote of the 20th century fascination with Communism and now I think we see that the tributaries of that fascination can be followed back to the world-view first cultivated in the Burned-Over district.

Take the U. of C. at Berkeley, for example. That’s the school that shows off its coolness on its web site’s home page with a photo of students doing high-level math on a blackboard while wearing t-shirts (at least that’s what it displayed when I visited it). But it seems that a facility for higher math doesn’t automatically lead to an appreciation for how numbers work in the real world.

Berkeley students, apparently mindful of their publicly-funded school’s place in the ’60s Free Speech Movement, decided to speak out—loudly and violently—against the latest social injustice being perpetrated against them by our “evil capitalist culture”: i.e., the fact that they now have to pay a whole 30 percent (~$10,320) of what students at the private Stanford University, about an hour and twenty minute drive south across the San Francisco Bay, have to pay (~$34,340) for a year of college.

What an outrage!

Actually, I’m thinking here of the California taxpayers who are stuck footing the bill for upwardly-mobile, opportunistic entitlement snobs who actually believe their attitude has surplus value in the tangible world outside their own little intellectual Disneyland. They should be outraged that their toil and effort is being wasted on such an ungrateful demographic.

A still-dirt-cheap Berkeley degree is often considered an education equal in worth to what one receives at Stanford (not to mention Harvard and Yale). But what is this attitude that “the world owes me” worth to the average employer nowadays? I’m not sure, but I have a pretty good idea of what it typically costs.

Yes, this new jump in student fees is a big one for the typical Berkeley student to swallow. The new annual cost is a 32 percent increase from the ~$7,800 – $8,300 per year they had been paying up to now. I understand the students’ dismay. I sympathize with those who will no longer be able to afford a Berkeley education. But if you are in such a situation, I suggest that it is not the end of the world. I understand that California has a decent community college system. Perhaps you should check into it.

Just how long did these entitlement snobs think this gravy train was going to last? If these students are as smart as they themselves seem to believe, have they not been keeping up with their home state’s current budget crisis? Did they think they were the only ones who realized that the average starting salary of a Berkeley grad these days is $59,900, while the median family income in California is $61,154? Don’t they realize that an education that ranks with Ivy League schools and yet will only cost a total of a bit over $41,000 in student fees over four years is still an incredible bargain? One might think that the students’ response to such realities would be one of immense gratitude. One would be incredibly mistaken.

Down with the system! Nationalize all universities! Invade and occupy the banks! Stick it to the man!

If there was ever a State of Entitlement, it is California. Their students are an ominous warning that society suffers when its adults do not grasp a couple of basic truths well enough to pass them on to the next generation:

1. things are worth less to those who do not have to pay the costs, and
2. things end up costing more when those who consume them will not pay what they are worth.

By providing publicly-funded education, the state is extending a benefit to individuals with the understanding that it will also benefit the public as a whole. It is not all about the individual any more than it is all about the people as a whole. To even have to say such a thing seems absurd in light of the fact that, in the case of publicly-funded education, the people are the benefactors and the individual is the beneficiary. How dare the individual in this case assume an attitude entitlement rather than one of deep gratitude? You think you are entitled to an average starting salary of $59,900?

The Berkeley student protests are not about need. They are about greed.

HT: George Will: Liberalism is What is Killing California | RealClearPolitics.