California: where those who do not pay what things actually cost mooch off those who pay more than what things are actually worth.

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.

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This past week a couple of things again demonstrated the need to ask the question as to how the church got to where it is today. The first was the falderal over The Manhattan Declaration. The number of signers is increasing daly and is nearly at 200,000. FOX News is discussing it but as I pointed out in last week’s Crux E-Letter, this is little more than an updated version of the 1984 Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission and subsequent attempts, this being the latest incarnation with many of the same signers. William Webster wrote a fairly well done treatment on the previous attempts titled, “The ECT Accords: A Betrayal of the Gospel in the Name of Unity.” Some of the lay people who have contacted us to defend their signing have tried to suggest that this is not a religious statement but a declaration of conservatism and as such all who agree with its values can sign on. Focus on the Family’s email of November 25, 2009 addresses this head on as Jim Daly, President and CEO writes:

It is important, first off, to note that the The Manhattan Declaration is not a partisan or political statement–I shared the podium last Friday at the National Press Club with Republicans and Democrats alike. Instead, it addresses and elevates four specific areas of universal consensus. Some have referred to these as “threshold issues,” meaning they represent the foundation of our faith and the pivot point from which everything else flows. This is the bedrock. If we can’t agree on these areas of doctrine, everything else will be of reduced value. These four areas are:

The sanctity of human life.
The sanctity of marriage
The protection of religious liberty
The rejection of unjust laws

Notice, he is clear it “is not a partisan or political statement.” It is not political in nature. Instead (more…)

Joy and I were somewhere between Amarillo, TX and Fontana, CA when I opened checked my email and a friend had sent a link to a 9 ½ minutes political cartoon from 1948 titled. Make Mine Freedom. It was fortuitous because even as I opened the cartoon link Joy and I were listening to George Orwell’s novel 1984 and the description of Engsoc (English Socialism), New Speak and Double Think. Orwell was not opposed to Socialism per se; in fact he was a member of the Labor Party which was Socialist. However, he was concerned about what he saw in the future if left unchecked which would be totalitarianism. The political cartoon has a snake oil salesman selling “Ism,” which is guaranteed to give you what you want. One individual warns the others to beware and taste it before they buy it and what they discovered in their taste test was that “Ism” leads to totalitarianism. The political cartoon and Orwell’s book were both done in 1948. Both shared the same “Future Sight” of what happens with extreme government intrusion. Both were challenging their audiences to beware of the consequences of their decisions.

Most of us get involved with a variety of things without considering the end result, or what Scripture (more…)

In my last post, I made a fairly controversial claim:

I contend that Christians need to rethink the assumption that government is a morally neutral instrument for inculcating values. I don’t think it is . . . It may be that civic virtue is admirable in itself but there is a danger that some non-Christians will settle for civic virtue instead of redemption. That leaves us with little more than better behaved unredeemed sinners.

So that is a significant reason for us to think twice about using political tools to accomplish Christian ends. As always I speak for no one but myself. This isn’t MCO’s position just my own. But I can hear some of you right now. “But what if the role of Christians in politics isn’t to make Christians but to preserve something, namely a society where the Gospel can bear fruit? This is the reason we fight against porn, homosexuality, and gay marriage. This is the reason we boycott television shows and call our congressman. We are salt as well as light and that means we should preserve our country from corrupting influences as part of our Christian duty. This is especially true for the children.”

This sentiment is, I think, precisely what has aligned Christians with the conservative movement. Conservatism seeks to conserve (more…)

 In the last Crux, Don Veinot mentioned a discussion he and I are having about Christianity and political involvement.

Over the last few weeks several have contacted me asking if Christians should be involved with politics and if so to what degree. Jonathan Miles and I have been involved in a similar discussion ourselves and are thinking about writing a book on the question.

I thought I would take this opportunity to open up that discussion to you dear readers. Don and I have been having a brotherly tete-a-tete for a few months now. We agree on some things and perhaps disagree on others–all firmly within Christian charity and in the spirit of Christian liberty. In what follows I want to highlight some of the questions Don and I have been wrestling with and also to explain why we think the question of Christians and Political Involvement isn’t something to be settled by appeals to doctrine but really is a matter of conscience (However, unlike the about face the Watchtower made about organ transplants–our “matter of conscience” isn’t clever way of changing our position.)  However, it should be noted that what is contained in this post is totally my own attempts to work out my faith (and by extension my politics) with fear and trembling. The reader should not assume that just because Don allows this post, that he agrees with it or that it is the “official” MOCI position on this issue.

So without further ado, let’s plunge into the discussion: (more…)

But you seem to fear lest all men become righteous, and you no longer have any to punish. ( Justin Martyr’ The First Apology of Justin The Anti-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; T&T Clark/Eerdmans, 1989 pg 166)

For the first time since we began MCOI we have been in a position to comment on what is happening in politics. For years many running for office stayed from religion and created a sort of Grand Canyon separation. This past election brought them back together as liberals asserted they too are religious and Barack Obama appeals to the WWJD or “What would Jesus Do?” question. There is very little in Obama’s life, worldview or political positions which would indicate that he is a Christian in any biblical or historical Christian sense. In fact, there is an increase in at least a verbal persecution of those who hold to a historical/grammatical understanding of Scripture. This is not a new situation and in fact Christians in the first three centuries suffered not only misrepresentation and verbal persecution but martyrdom at the hands of the government.

Over the last few weeks several have contacted me asking if Christians should be involved with politics and if so to what degree. Jonathan Miles and I have been involved in a similar discussion ourselves and are thinking about writing a book on the question. In the process of all of this came the revelation that ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which has received 53 millions dollars in Federal Funding (yours and my dollars) and is scheduled to received billions from the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 advises some “clients” how to cover up and even gain federal funding for prostitution and operating an under age prostitution ring. The third ACORN office in two weeks, this one in New York City, has been exposed on BIGGOVERNMENT.COM (more…)

I remember as a youth being told that there are two subjects to avoid discussing, politics and religion. On some occasions I recall hearing that “religion and politics don’t mix.” I was an atheist and my mother often insisted that it didn’t really matter who one voted for, the fix was in and all politicians are the same anyway. So, neither religion nor politics were high on my radar screen of interests. That began to change in the mid-1970s. I became persuaded that God exists; Christianity is true and was “born again.” Two years later Jimmy Carter was elected the 39th president of the United States. Somewhere near the end of his presidency I began to be interested in political discussion. Over the years since then I have realized why some prefer not to discuss religion or politics. They become very emotional issues which in many cases, for lack of a good argument, are simply reduced to name calling. This seems to me especially pronounced today. I am not sure if it is or if I am just more aware of it. The sides are fairly clearly drawn. One side sees the current administration as evil trying to change the United States into a Socialist state and the other side views their opposition as knuckle dragging, gun toting country cousins that are too in-bred. As Marcia Segelstein points out in her article Republicans are evil, it is rare that liberals know what Conversatives believe or why we beleive it. They would almost never read a conservative column, author or sit down and talk through ideas with a conservative.

A recent L.A. Times “Opinion” article Calls to boycott Obama’s speech to kids offer a disturbing lesson in paranoia by Tim Rutten is a fairly good example of substituting name calling for reasoned debate and (more…)